With the Frieze Art Fair 2011 kicking off in just a few days, it’s time to get excited – very excited. In light of this, ArtLyst reveals this year’s top 10 Frieze events:
TVF
LuckyPDF, a Peckham art collective, is planning to bring in more than fifty artists during the course of Frieze week, with the mind to produce and broadcast a series of live daily shows made at Frieze Art Fair. The guest artists will present a programme of news, performance, and talks, with the process of creation being on show for all to see in the project space studio: Frieze-goers will be able to witness events as they pan out, sitting in on open rehearsals and live recordings, viewing them throughout the fair compound on screens and wireless access points, or even at home on the Frieze Foundation website.
Live Aquatic
French artist Pierre Huyghe is putting on a play for Frieze – starred by seawater creatures! An aquarium is set to provide the stage for an aquatic performance carried out by specially-selected sea creatures. A take on the reality TV genre, we are told that, while the fishy situation is artificial, ‘the behavioral relationships between the players are real and not scripted’. The work promises to create a world of bubbling tensions that will provide a contrast to the tranquil exterior of the fair.
Sale Boat
German artist Christian Jankowski is collaborating with a luxury yacht company to create new work at this year’s Frieze Art Fair. Jankowski’s project will see him employing a boat dealer to peddle a full-size motor yacht from a conventional gallery stand, showing prospective buyers around its plush interior and providing all the necessary details. This luxury boat will be available to buy as a Christian Jankowski artwork.
Pixel This
German artist Oliver Laric has been commissioned to create stock video footage designed for free use as public domain material. His source footage will be taken from around the fair with a set of special high-resolution cameras, with Laric exploiting their slow motion and digital cinematographic features. While stock video footage is usually held in internet archives like Getty images, designed to be bought for use in corporate films and adverts, Loric hopes to cut out this middleman, using the internet to freely distribute his work. This, he believes, will prompt others to create work with his source material in an anonymous collaboration across the web, which Loric will then display in exhibitions as his own.
Evil Empire
Peles Empire (the joint-project of German artists Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff) will transform an area of the Frieze Art Fair by installing a fully-functioning bar. Through exactly recreating the bar of an existing Romanian castle sited at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, replete with its decorative furnishings, and dedicating themselves to serving drinks to Frieze-goers, Peles Empire will explore themes of reproduction, reconstruction and transformation.
Frieze 10 – 0 Arsenal
The duo of Dutch artists Bik Van der Pol are planning to create a large ‘live’ scoreboard, animated by real-time live assistants who will work tirelessly to change the text on display to spell out different idioms, quotes and maxims. This work takes its inspiration from the innovative architect Cedric Price (designer of the London Zoo Aviary), drawing from his exploration of temporality and visibility.
Why Didn’t You Tolmie?
Scottish artist Cara Tolmie is programmed to undertake a new performance for the Frieze Art Fair, constructing a postulated fictional space through the voice and narrative devices. Through movement, song, and the spoken word, Tolmie hopes to ‘map out the laws of this space within the space of the fair’, extracting narrative from only the most rudimentary of starting points through processes of multiplication and expansion.
Forget Not the Octopus’s Garden
This year Frieze are encouraging children and the young at heart, from 9-99, to explore and draw their way around the fair with the help of the Forget Me Not and Octopus’s Garden activity sheets. These activity guides have been based of the work of Pierre Huyghe and Laure Prouvost, two of the artists invited to create new artworks under the 2011 Frieze Project scheme. Prouvost’s Forget Me Not is set to prompt the younger children to spy out signs hung all about the fair, as well as looking for specific art, people, and foods. Huyghe’s Octopus’s Garden, conversely, invites all Frieze-goers to take part in four fun activities designed to prompt new ideas for thinking about and making art.
Art Apart
On Thursday 13 October @ 4.30pm, Prof. Katy Siegel, editor in Chief for the Art Journal, and Contributing Contributing Editor for Artforum, will give a talk on ‘The Luxury of Incommensurability’, exploring the way that art can simultaneously hold in suspension incompatible ideas, feelings and histories, without forcing us to choose between them. In this way, art is different from something like politics, and Siegel will argue, using the example of abstraction and representation in painting, that such incommensurability allows for liberating experiences beyond the realm of social recognition and nomenclature.
Teach First
On Saturday 15 october @ 1.30pm, German artist Franz Erhard Walther will be ‘in conversation’ with one of his former students at Hamburg’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste, artist John Bock. From the early ‘60s, Franz Erhard Walther has investigated the way in which the visual world can induce viewers to do something more than just look. As a student Walther’s, John Bock’s work creates complex installations using action, speech and everyday materials, and the two will discuss the possibilities of making art actually do things.
The latest Frieze Art Fair Resource is here
*And don’t miss the Frieze Sculpture Park, a short walk to the east of the entrance to the fair in English Gardens of Regent’s Park, and the only Frieze event free and open to the public! This year, it will present work by some of the most acclaimed international sculptors, including new works by Claudia Fontes and Thomas Houseago, as well as art by Kiki Smith and Tom Friedman. SEE OUR EXCLUIVE GLIMPSE OF THE FIRST SCULPTURE TO BE ERECTED (main picture).