We visited a couple more Frieze openings this week! One being Chris Burden's very pristine, very meticulously executed show ‘Measured’ at Gagosian. Ever since learning about Burden’s work we’ve been big fans, especially the the early work where he caused himself pretty serious physical damage and did the whole does-what-it-says-on-the-tin labelling. Since Burden is sadly no longer with us, here we see the type of work he was making towards the end of his career, installations and sculptures. There’s always a weird feeling when you walk into Gagosian’s Britannia street gallery...perhaps it’s that nothing can ever be as spectacular as the interior of the building itself; massively tall ceilings and totally blank walls. Therefore, when you’re presented with a porshe counterweighted with a meteorite, or a crane truck painted to show its weight-lifting ability, it’s strangely unimpressive. Even so, Burden played such an important part in the birth of performance art, and it's definitely worth taking the time to see these artworks on display, even if it’s just to marvel at how well the cars have been restored.
Another opening we went to was a project by Ryan Gander and Jonathan P. Watts titled ‘The Annotated Reader’. The final product is a 281 page crowdsourced document, where contributors were invited to select the one piece of writing they would want to keep them company if they’d missed the last train somewhere, and asked to annotate their text with notes, thoughts, feelings, drawings and more. The amazingly layered results are arranged on the gallery walls to be collected and taken away in paper form, or available as a PDF from a vending machine. One of our favourites was Andy Holden’s page; he had selected a page where Charlie Brown is attempting to make a birdhouse but is worried about his poor craftsman skills. He then goes on to say that it's going alright - very much how artists produce work. Very knowing/funny.
Frieze was particularly dull this year; only a couple of things that really stood out as being really great and the rest was very same-y/missable. Something very clever (almost frustratingly so since it’s something we would love to have made) was a separate room within the Stephen Friedman Gallery room. It was a work by David Shrigley which consisted shrigley’s vocal imitation of extractor fans and a series of mock extractor hoods. A continuation of him demonstrating his uncanny ability to play with the mundane nature of banal objects and scenarios.
We also visited Sunday Art Fair which is could be described as the “poor man’s Frieze” but nonetheless we still managed to find a great work which we really loved! It came in the form of a trick shot video by Josep Maynou. We’re unsure of whether these are all by the artist or just a collection of videos they’ve sourced from the internet. Either way, was a fun contrast to all the mediocre wall based work.
