Art of the Week: Big Night Down the Drain

Georg Baselitz, "Big Night Down the Drain" (1962).
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A young boy taking a pee. A rather familiar and weird young boy taking a pee. Hitler. Shall I say more? Georg Baselitz creates a humorously perfect example of an anti-hero in Hitler's mind. The minute immature boy appears to have no control of the situation. A night down the drain is nothing more, nothing less than a ruined night. All that he done, he believed it was for a greater heroic purpose until he was left with nothing, no power over what he made. All that was left was a tiny man with no integrity. Hitler was that man.

The artist was born in the small country-side town of Baselitz, Germany during the Second World War, and though not recalling the proper war, he has seen the suffering of the homeless people who surrounded him. Georg Baselitz uses the collective memory of Germany's event to produce artworks with darkly humoured motifs.

Art Fairs : Explained

What is an art fair? How is it different from the biennale? How do art fairs work? What should I look for in an art fair? What fairs should I attend? Five simple questions which I will try to explain as briefly as possible.

The year is starting, and that means that there are plenty of fairs all around the world to go on. There are probably around 40 every year... But how do we know if it is worth it to attend to one?

Armory Art Fair, 2012. New York. Click here for image URL.

What is an art fair? What is the purpose of it?

An art fair is a "platform" for galleries to join together and sell art. It is no different from a car, a boat or even a book trade show, except that its content is ART. Anyone can buy art, Private and public institutions; collectors, curators, critics, non-related art world people, and so on. It is a place to display art.

The ideas of art fairs was created as galleries wanted to compete with auction houses. Small galeries couldn't grow or sell as much as auction houses until they created an event which promoted the idea of a collective. 200 small galleries together could compete with an auction house.

How is a fair different from a biennale?

It is quite simple, really. First of all, a biennale usually involves the whole city - pavilions are spread around while an art fair has a confined space. The length of a fair is no more than a week (depends on the fair), while a biennale can occur in a few months time.

The art fair rents spaces for galleries (or even artists in some cases) to use it as their display. The dealer will most likely exhibit a varied selection of artists they represent and own works from. The point is to sell as much as they can, and it isn't necessarily true that galleries try to sell before the fair (I'll explain this better soon) During a biennale, each participating country has a pavilion in which they will try to exhibit what is the trend in their country, focusing mainly in the arts. The artworks displayed are usually a project collaboration between the curator and the artist, and essentially isn't intended for sale, though any transaction is not illegal, hence, big collectors look out to but straight from the event.

How do art fairs work? And why is everything sold in advance?

Galleries have to apply for a space in the fair with a project of their own. They will then pass through a selection pannel which most likely consists of 5 galleries as judges. The extent to which this is fair is always questionable. Once they are approved, the galleries will be given their spaces one or two days before the opening so works are put up. There is always a standard every gallery should keep in order for the fair to run smoothly and properly. Once the fair is open for the public, dealers cannot change their displays or move around pieces until the day's end so the order is not disrupted. There is always a VIP and press day, where only invited people or the ones who want to pay higher prices can come in. As the fair is over (usually a Sunday night), all dealers are expected to take their works back to their own galleries and ship pieces wherever necessary.

Usually during the preview day (the grand opening), the main collectors (VIPs) will walk around the fairs and they will be the ones to make the first purchases. The moment the fair is open to the public, it is likely that all the pieces are sold. Big galleries will probably take a stock of artworks to change overnight so they may keep on selling, but most galleries won't. If you attend an art fair where everything is sold, there are two probabilities - yes, Mr. Saatchi may have come by and bought it first, or the dealer might not have liked you enough to want to sell to you. The extent to which this last statement is true is also questionable, because as a student I have gone around fairs asking for prices and all was given to me. But don't forget to dress accordingly - it does make a bit of a difference.

Sponsors: they may or may not be related to the arts world. For example Möet & Chandon might be a sponsor simply by creating a bar and giving the champagnes, it might not, in the other hand give actual funds. They will have their own bar and their brand will be linked to a successful event where marketing is proper. Banks are really important. Every art fair, or at least the big ones, has a bank attached to their name. It is not because they are funded by the banks - actually a bank only gives 10% of the budget required to produce the fair. But banks are important because of the clients they bring. This is a great move for both the bank and the fairs because their clients will feel special. Newspapers and magazines of course are no least in comparison to the previous examples. For an art fair to be talken about is great. It is propaganda of the event - a way to bring in future clients. Important newspaper and magazines will also have a stand in the fairs where people are able to buy and subscribe directly to them. The Art Newspaper also publishes special papers for the bigger fairs. Everything is essential for the happening of this event.

Art fairs can have different focuses, and interests. For example, there are art fairs which will only exhibit African art, or Latin American art,  some which might only work with artists directly, some which will only work with secondary art market or the big and traditional fairs.

What should I look for in an art fair?

1. The art trends, both biennales and art fairs will be showing what is going on and what people are producing.

2. Your own understanding of your proper taste - it is obvious that you won't like everything, and mainly that your taste will not be the same as others. Note down what you like. You are at the fair to see and understand, and pictures are welcome. Don't just take them for you Instagram feed (its really only cool if you appreciate it, otherwise you might just seem like a poser!)

3. See how people are walking around. An art fair is obviously a place to see and be seen. People love to socialise and mingle in chique and exclusive events. See how they dress or act, you will find amazing personalities walking around: the collectors (men in casual suits and women wearing heels and large branded bags), the curators being stopped to know their opinions, the critics with their bags full of handouts (yes, some are quite obvious), and mainly the dealers with their greedy eyes, and artists of course. Most of them are quite stereotypical, its true, but there are many exceptions to these 'rules'. But nonetheless it is quite fun.

4. An interesting and emerging artist which you might even afford. There are of course million-dollar pieces, but you will most definitely find pieces under $10,000. Don't be afraid to ask for the price and look around.

Frieze Art Fair. London. Click here for image URL

What fairs should I attend?

Well really, it depends. What is your personal taste? And where in the world are you?

There are four main art fairs in the world (the order doesn't necessarily matter because their importance is equal):

1. Basel Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland

2. Frieze Art Fair (and Frieze Masters), London, UK

3. TEFAF Maastricht, Netherlands

4. Basel Art Fair Miami Beach, Miami, USA

Then each of these have satellite fairs going on. For example in the case of Frieze, there are over 5 different fairs, including The Other Art Fair, which represents artists directly instead of a gallery.

It is not important to view every single art fair there is because you will most likely go bankrupt, and you will DEFINITELY get fed up. Art fairs are really cool, and might be easy to see it all at once than search around for galleries. The art fair experience is also less intimidating that if knowing at, let's say, Gagosian's door. But it is exhausting, and you might just see the same of everything over and over.

So make sure that you check to see which ones are near to you, and vary according to your interests! The Other Art Fair was great for me to meet and talk directly to the artist. Not everything was of my personal taste but it was definitely interesting. An art book fair is usually very fun! Frieze in the other hand was spectacular and I was able to compare how galleries change their stands according to where in the world they are exhibiting (it is extremely important to know the clients).

The tickets may be quite expensive, and you should vary every year, but keep it in between 4-6 fairs a year, no need for more. Don't worry if you don't attend one either. You will have other opportunities.

Art of the Week: Anthropometry ANT 85

Yves Klein, "Anthropometry ANT 85" (1960). 155.5 x 352.5cm.
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Yves Klein has been known to be the creator of the famous YKB (Yves Klein Blue) colour. The blue is seen throughout thousands of his works, and even on his wife's "crown" when they married. Klein was interested in the idea of the void, and how the colour he developed was itself a work of art. During his life, he created a series of action-spectacle pieces where audiences would gather to see him produce a painting.

"Returning to Klein’s Action-Spectacle, it can be seen in the photograph that Klein covered the floor of d’Arquian’s salon with very large sheets of paper on which he placed buckets of YKB paint. Various naked women covered the front of their body with the blue paint and applied it more or less vigorously to the paper. The Action-Spectacle was a practical demonstration of how Klein produced his ANT (Anthropometry) series of paintings"*.

* artintelligence. "The Beginning of the End of Painting". March 2008. http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=497

Art of the Week: Venus and Mars

Sandro Botticelli, "Venus and Mars" (1485) National Gallery, London.
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Botticelli was one of the great masters of the Italian renaissance. Through exploring Roman Mythology, the painter produced a "bedroom furniture" with a seductive motif. Here, the lovers of distinct personalities lay after an encounter of sexual nature. Venus' husband, the Blacksmith God, Vulcan, was crippled from the hips down, and therefore unable to consumate their marriage. Hence, Venus found love with other man. The Goddess of Love stare blankly past the God of War, who sleeps profoundly while being disarmed by the little satyrs stealing his lance. Thus enhancing that "Love conquers War", or that "Love conquers All".

Photography and the Interpretation of the "Real" in the 19th Century

Until the invention of cameras, images were created through paintings, drawings and writing. In the case of the latter, an image could be created through its bare minimal descriptive details but nonetheless, its visualisation would not go beyond the reader’s imagination[1], and interpretation of text would vary from person to person. Image making didn’t necessarily need the subject to stand in front of its creator to be made. Its details can be modified to any extent once the artist is subjected to translate his experience into the boundaries of his own interpretation and techniques of making[2]. Photography is one of the most exact mediums to depict the visual reality of an object, a scene or a person. As precise as a painting or a drawing can be, a photograph is not only an image or an interpretation of the real, “but a material vestige of its subject that is directly stenciled off the real”[3], “like a footprint or a death mask”[4].
Though as unclear as the definition of realism might be[5], it is to be understood that its most idealistic meaning is how it depicts the real without moral grounds[6]. In other words, it implies “a concern with accurate and objective representation”[7] with no idealization towards the approach of the subject matter. Whether there is an opening for interpretation of an emotional or sentimental level, with a need to portray the issues and problems of contemporary life[8] is debatable[9]. By all means, in a visual aspect, photography can be classified as a realist medium since it reproduces exactly what is shown before the camera.

The ‘real’ shall be understood as its simplest term: the image is produced solely with what is before it, portraying only what is seen, and “representing the world as it is”[11]. There will be no study as to how a realist image shall portray a view of society, unless needed for understanding of the present day society.

Photography became a cheaper resource for family portraits after its invention, and soon it started to appeal to the masses. In contrast to commissioned portraits, photography was available for the great majority of the people. Since its invention in 1839, almost every one has been photographed[12]. A picture can be used not only to understand the physical appearance of a relative, but also to create systems of information of any given subject.[13] These can either be snapshots sequenced chronologically for personal enjoyment as well as to understand astronomy, microbiology, geology, police work, art history, etc.[14] Photography then had a role to help experience and define nature and culture, as it was a material that introduced “new methods of observation and classification”[15].

William Henry Fox Talbot, "Leaves of Orchidea" (1839). Photogenic Drawing Negative. 17.2 x 20.9 cm

Through Fox Talbot’s “photogenic drawings”, a chemical method of understanding of a shadow of an object was developed. It was a big leap to science as it understood the object in its full natural size[16]. The Literary Gazette commented on the book Pencil of Nature, as it was “nature itself” - a “valuable [material] for botanical science”[17].

“Photography’s ability to change the time period in which observations are made—slowing it down, speeding it up, freezing it, and making multiples of the same moment from different angles—gave scientists a new observational tool. Scientists could direct their observations away from real time and towards photographic time. Not only could they observe at different speeds, but they could also preserve their observations for later use and comparison.” [18]

Biology and the exact sciences were not the only fields to benefit from the creation of photography. Anthropology and Sociology's establishment as disciplines of modern science only occurred after the developments of image making with a machine [19]. In the case of anthropological sciences, pictures were produced with a concern to “visually mapping the body in order to produce objective, comparative data in debates about racial difference and human origins”[20].

Joseph Thomas Zealy, "Slave Daguerrotypes" (1850).

In the 1850’s, the Swiss-born scientist Louis Agassiz commissioned fifteen daguerreotype plates of front and side views of seven southern slaves[21] to the studio photographer Joseph Thomas Zealy. The study was based in South Carolina and had as an aim to discuss his theories of polygenesis[22] of African slaves. Agassiz asked for “photographs to be taken of a number of slaves in the hope of revealing distinct anatomical features that would prove his thesis”[23].
The pictures were taken in Zealy’s efficiently equipped studio. He used adequate lighting to enhance all features, just as he would with a society lady of the day[24]. Both women and men pose topless before the lenses so their physical structure is perceived (shown in figure 3). As uncomfortable as the situation might be for them, “their attitudes are detatched, unemotional, and workmenlike”[25].

Without regard to Agassiz’s conclusion, Zealy took the pictures under proper conditions and delivered it with an appropriate quality. The images were used with the finality of discussing racial differences as a matter of understanding human origins and anthropological matters[26].
By framing exactly what is seen, without creating a scenario for the shot, documentation of the visual world is done with precision. The understanding of the real was exponentially developed by creation of photography.
Photography eased the representation of the visual ‘real’ by being a cheaper and more accessible resource. The fast production of an image allowed people to record something more than once, and several of many things. Time passing was measured as changes of that same object occurred. Comparison between specimens and people was becoming more and more specific. And innumerous catalogues of images were formed for resources of any field. Camera-based image making has accelerated the world of research and production and created new ways of comprehending reality through disciplines of arts and science.

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[1] As a comparison to a more recent example, the work “One and Three Chairs” (1965) by Joseph Kosuth could be used. A picture of a chair, a chair, and a dictionary definition of a chair are shown one beside the other. The question behind it is whether the viewer interprets all three elements as chairs or only the physical chair could be the only valid representation. In this case, the physical chair would be the only to give the proper experience of using a chair: the image would only show its visual appearance, while the dictionary definition would describe it.

MARTINS, Maria H. P. “Filosofando” 2009. [Book] Portuguese. Moderna. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

[2] Edward Lucie-Smith, The Invented Eye - Masterpieces of Photography, 1839-1914 (New York: Paddington Press LTD - Two Continents Publishing Group, 1975).

[3] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Pam Morris, Realism, Kindle Edition, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2003), http://www.amazon.com/Realism-New-Critical-Idiom-Morris/dp/0415229391/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389112208&sr=1-1&keywords=the+new+critical+idiom+realism.

[6] Peter Childs, Modernism, 2nd ed., The New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2007).

[7] MacBook Dictionary Software Application. Definition of the word “Realism”

[8] Ibid.

[9] Terry Eagleton, “Pork Chops and Pineapples | Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2003.

[10] Lígia Ferro, “Ao encontro da sociologia visual,” Revista da Faculdade de Letras: Sociologia (2005): 373–398.

[11] Eagleton, “Pork Chops and Pineapples | Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach.”

[12] Kostas Theologou, “The Value of Memory for Society,” Intellectum (2008), http://www.intellectum.org/articles/issues/intellectum3/en/ITL03p053069_Value%20of%20Memory%20for%20Society_Kostas%20Theologou.pdf.

[13] Sontag, On Photography.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Anthony Burnett-Brown, Specimens and Marvels: The Work of William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography, First Edition (New York: Aperture, 2000).

[16] Talbot, Pencil of Nature.

[17] Burnett-Brown, Specimens and Marvels: The Work of William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography.

[18] Kelley Wilder, “Science and Photography,” Grove Art Online | Oxford Art Online (2013), http://www.oxfordartonline.com.arts.idm.oclc.org/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2229436?q=science+and+photography&search=quick&source=oao_gao&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit.

[19] Ferro, “Ao encontro da sociologia visual.”

[20] Elizabeth Edwards, “Anthropology and Photography,” Grove Art Online | Oxford Art Online (February 11, 2013), http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2229130.

[21] Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerrotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2, The University of Chicago Press | Smithsonian American Art Museum (1995): 38–61.

[22] “Polygenesis” noun [ mass noun ]1 Biology the hypothetical origination of a race or species from a number of independent stocks. 2 the hypothetical origination of language or of a surname from a number of independent sources in different places at different times. MacBook Dictionary Software Application. Definition of the word “Polygenesis”

[23] Jim Harrison, “Focusing on the Face,” Harvard Magazine, December 2000, http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/11/focusing-on-the-face.html.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerrotypes.”

[26] Sebastião Salgado is a contemporary photographer who could be compared to this specific event and example. He travelled the world to poorly explored lands to take pictures of members of different world-wide spread tribes and animals. These had as finality the simple understanding of different features and customs of people from different origins. In contrast to Louis Agassiz’s study, this was a search of the unbiased and with no racial prejudice.