Perhaps I was primed to go spelunking for something dark and eternal that doesn’t exist in the valley of the living at Hudson Yards. Perhaps I should embrace the glimmers of subversion in the sea of ephemeral safety at Frieze— for now. writes Vasa Speros.
Frieze returned to The Shed at Hudson Yards earlier this month for its annual New York showcase. It reemerged in a Manhattan morphing closer into the vignettes in Eric Fischl’s Sag Harbour Elegy series: polarised, disorienting, and elaborately costumed. Frieze’s opening day coincided with a series of police crackdowns against Colombia University’s pro-Palestinian student encampments; as VIPs filed into the fair in Midtown, hundreds of arrests and campus-wide closures ensued Uptown. The MET Gala, a benefit famed for its designer-clad celebrity red carpet, punctuated the fair’s closing day. This year’s dress code was themed after J. G. Ballard’s The Garden of Time, a short story about hermetic aristocrats in a Palladian villa slowly overtaken by angry masses. A bit too on the nose, no? Maybe it’s uncouth to frame a blue-chip art fair in the context of these outside events. Still, both occurred within seven kilometers of The Shed, creating a caustic urban biome outside the subdued Hudson Yards (a “Garden of Time” all its own).
Photography courtesy of Casey Kelbaugh/Frieze and CKA
Frieze itself could have benefitted from a nod to the global (or local) freneticism outside its walls, in line with the Venice Biennale’s showcases from Christoph Büchel, or Killing Architects, or Finland’s Open Group installation Repeat After Me II. Each of these works unfurled the same international undercurrent of malaise and official distrust pulsing through the city in that first week of May. Instead, the most immediately transgressive elements of the fair were the half-Greenwash, half apocalypti-chic sashes from event sponsor Life Water. They were peddled by two admittedly charming reps who let passersby take as many emerald ribbons as they pleased. I limited myself to just one which read “1 Million Species on the Brink of Extinction” in bubblegum pink lettering.
Photography courtesy of Vasa Speros
A close second point of unintentional edge was the fair’s proximity the newly re-opened Vessel and the macabre reason behind its multi-year closure. Frieze’s branding kept a thematic distance from the structure, though, dubbed by some an awkward blight on the skyline and by others, more callously, a “death shawarma.” Under closer scrutiny a selection of artists and live performances showed sparks of zeitgeist and bite. These works engaged with cartoonish abstractions or tackled subversive themes in a fair awash with safer pieces. This might signal a general fatigue among the art fair crowd for anything too out-there, too confronting, or too political. As per Holland Cotter in the New York Times, “anyone allergic to the ‘political,’ never mind the ‘activist,’ in contemporary art will find a refuge here.” I overheard one guest complain to another about “that sensitivity training I told you about” for whom that description might resonate. In any case, the event left an overall impression that Freize New York is balancing a precarious tightrope walk between subversion and safety. It is pulling its punches and shying away from taking too big a risk in a global atmosphere otherwise hungry for poignancy and reckoning with bigger stakes.
Frieze’s post-pandemic relocation to The Shed contributed to its thematic and spatial disarray. The move from its previous spot on Roosevelt Island meant trading open air and white tents for overcrowded walls and vertiginous escalators. Curators, collectors, and anyone lucky (or crafty) enough to snag one of the nearly $100 tickets flowed like cows in Temple Grandin’s Serpentine Ramps on the moving staircase, a disorientingly snug ride snaking up and down and around before filing into the three primary exhibition floors. The fair’s 200+ gallery spots were also swapped for an exclusive 68, the majority of which hold a physical presence in New York. Some galleries leaned in to the cozier atmosphere, as in White Cube’s choice to cloister colossal, foreboding pieces by Anselm Kiefer in semi-private rooms. These rooms were accessible to only the true art believers, like pilgrims tasked with reciting verses of the Koran to enter the Dome of the Rock, or acolytes of those new members-only clubs metastasizing across the city.
From top to bottom: Frieze New York 2024, photography courtesy of Casey Kelbaugh/Frieze and CKA, Perrotin booth, photography courtesy of gallery
Other galleries battled each other for wall space, which meant one 45-degree turn could pull onlookers from materially innovative Brazilian works made with mosquito nets and resin à la Vivian Caccuri’s Descompressão II at A Gentil Carioca, to a post-internet, lenticular-printed anime figurine à la MSCHF’s Muralangelo at Perrotin. These pieces represented two vectors of the thematic joust playing out across the fair. One side was grounded in and of the Earth in material and subject, often by artists from the global south in textile or sculptural pieces. The other was the otherworldly, fantastical, cartoonish unreality of the figurative and the abstract.
I found myself revisiting Perrotin’s booth a number of times to reappraise Muralangelo by MSCHF, the same collective behind the ‘Eat the Rich’ Ice cream truck, a lucrative Damien Hirst stunt, and more recently, a satanic shoe collaboration with musician Lil Nas X. Walking by the piece transfigured a (flaccid) marble David into an anime figurine with an erection. This created something like a GIF in real life, or a pulp Animorphs book cover. The work played with an internet-addled cultural memory, one in which Saint Sebastian and Saint Seiya are equal referential touchstones.
Similarly as striking was a self-portrait by Charles Hascoët titled Disquiet. In this piece the artist, disheveled and covered in rats, leers just out of frame. I was mesmerized by the way Perrotin’s gallerist weaved phrases like “discordant,” “outsider art” and “Ratatouille-inspired” in the same sentence to describe the piece. It felt as seamless and natural as the mosquito nets in the booth to our right. Other works like Shitmom (two dogs) by Tala Madani at 303 Gallery and Green Master 90 by Yuichi Hirako at The Modern Institute sliced the neat boundaries between the human and the natural world, merging human with tree with animal with feces.
From left to right: Shitmom (two dogs, Tala Madani, 2024, Charles Hascoet, Disquiet, 2024
Longstanding contemporaries like Peter Saul’s Ice Box # 3, newer works by Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, and the eye-catching and tongue-twisting Who’s Picasso-Esque Yogic Gender Binary Contortion Catastrophe? by Simon Fujiwara at Esther Schipper dissolved flimsy constructions of the self and stretched its subjects to cartoonish new forms, all in eye-meltingly vibrant color. Visually darker pieces like Matt Bollinger’s Evening DVDs with Candy at François Ghebaly depicted the stale unease of suburbia with sobering realism, but still incorporated shadowy animative figures and a duo of Garfield plushies guarding the borders of a TV like imperial Chinese lions. These works were unquestionably the least grounded in realism, but they felt the most real, and the most dutifully engaged and conversant in the language of a half-blood reality inextricable from the cartoonish and the online.
Emlgreen & Dragset, Social Media (White Poodle), 2024, photograph courtesy Casey Kelbaugh/ Frieze and CKA
One explicitly internet-y piece which garnered an inordinate amount of critical attention was Social Media (White Poodle) by Elmgreen & Dragset at Massimodecarlo. I was interested in how the piece worked logistically and in what powered the hypnotic roundabout beneath the eternally dizzy fake poodle at the edge of the piece. But these thoughts were quickly interrupted by a toddler in a Yoshitomo Nara jacket nearly jumping on it. Apparently the celebrity “art world daddies” roaming Frieze during its VIP days were replaced by real daddies and their children by the time I arrived on its final day. Massimodecarlo’s gallerist merely stretched the protective rope around Social Media a bit wider in response, which did the trick. Other art world pros treated the hordes of clumsy yet chic children encroaching on their art-laden walls about as daintily as Manhattanites treat spotted lanternflies: “It’s an artwork!” one chided as a child lunged towards a painting. “It’s a child!” his mother snapped back. The fair’s adult guests were comparatively well-behaved, with the exception of someone who asked if he could buy a particularly valuable work in a smaller size. It was reminiscent of the Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) scene when an angry Max von Sydow quips to the 80s version of a hypebeast collector that “I don’t sell my work by the yard!” In this case, though, the dealer did.
Thematically inverse cyber-satirical works like Social Media were those grounded in longstanding folk art practices whose methods and materials were as pertinent as their message. Vivian Caccuri’s Descompressão II at A Gentil Carioca wielded mosquito nets and traditional Jalisco beading to ensnare audiences in the ties between the treatment of the mosquito and the colonial subject as pest. Works by Laura Lima like Wrong Drawing, 2069 formed impossibly intricate nodes of hemp interwoven with chunks of coal. Her work played with questions of time, tradition, and postponement into the future in an era in which Brazil extends its use of coal into at least 2044 under the ‘just transition’ law.
Kukje Gallery at Frieze New York 2024, courtesy of the gallery.
At Kukje Gallery, Haegue Yang’s research project on paper cutting combined the traditional Japanese and Mexican practices into works of ornate layered cutouts. Onlookers explored the practice’s connection to the afterlife and cult spirits in explanatory blurbs beneath the art itself, a welcome peak behind the often opaque authorial curtain. Staring at each collage felt like falling into a hallucinogenic paper Rorschach, shifting between the deceptive innocence of paper crafts and the gravity of a Bardo Thodol mandala. Another standout was Karol Palczak’s work at Emalin. Instead of weaving or cutting, the artist repurposed sheet metal and planks of wood as canvases to create haunting pastoral scenes from a once multiculturally vibrant, now economically forgotten Krzywcza, Poland. The artist’s pigs serve as his subjects, evoking the aura of an animalistic, post-apocalyptic Andrew Wyeth.
From top to bottom: Vivian Caccuri, Descompressão II, 2024,
Laura Lima, Wrong Drawing, 2069, 2024. Photography courtesy of A Gentil Cariaco.
Frieze Impact Prize winner A Moment of Reflection by Gary Tyler uses quilting in muted fabrics to depict a brief moment of respite from his decades of imprisonment after a wrongful murder conviction in his teens. Collectors might snag these pieces for their visual intricacies or latticework design, but they would be remiss to ignore the well of meaning and the political pulse behind their methods.
Aside from global-fare, Frieze also featured odes to subversive New York greats like Kembra Pfahler and her mock-up CBGB flyer Isis Water at Emalin. The flyer showcased Pfahler’s band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, notorious for combining the taboo-breaking eroticism of Carolee Schneemann with the experimental musicianship of the likes of Diamanda Galas and Blixa Bargeld. The downtown dignitary’s performance character sprawls out in the flyer’s center: a jolie laide chanteuse often covered in blood and overdrawn gyaru-meets-Maila Nurmi makeup. Gladstone also exhibited a new series by SoHo titan Alex Katz bathed in hues of citrus. Katz’s knack for capturing ephemeral moments of connection, as in his Gatherings retrospective at the Guggenheim, were nixed for natural scenes spawned over the artist’s lockdown in Maine and Pennsylvania over the Covid years.
Even a feature of the city itself (sans Vessel) was extolled in a performance by Matty Davis entitled Die No Die (The High Line). Davis’s work spanned questions of ecology and urban transformation, matching lithographs of each performer’s heartbeats with massive etchings of the High Line. At-scale photos of Davis and artistic partner Chloé Cooper Jones served as a lifelike representation of the performance dotting Frieze’s second floor walls. Davis spoke to me about moving the piece from rural Arkansas to the Western greenway of New York, watching it evolving while maintaining its thematic pulse using the connective tissue of movement interlaced with physical embraces. While the performance was enthralling and Davis was abundantly approachable and gracious, I’m still not endeared to The High Line itself. After fifteen years it still feels like an unwelcome afterbirth of the Bloomberg era, at once courting some artists but criminalizing others, as confused in its identity and detached from the fabric of the city as Hudson Yards (and the Vessel, of course).
Matty Davis for Frieze New York 2024, photography courtesy of Casey Kelbaugh/Frieze and CKA.
The most fertile ground for transgression was the fair’s Focus section curated by Lumi Tan. The area offered newer galleries a comparatively affordable space to highlight a single artist in their repertoire. Here, Tao Siqi’s Possession series at Capsule Shanghai was a standout. Tao, typed as a female artist of color in the West, upended cultural mores in using the western French decadent Charles Baudelaire as inspiration for depictions of gendered submission and domination. She offers glimpses of bodies in embrace, underfoot, and in bondage in fluorescent shades of the Hippocratic temperaments: phlegmatic yellow, sanguine red, and bile green. Capsule founder Enrico Polato and Asia Director Zhiyi Zhou didn’t balk at the challenge to subvert expectations at Frieze after the feat of surviving years of strict lockdowns in China’s cultural capital: today the gallery is as lifelike as ever, recently opening a Venetian gallery in Polato’s native country to compliment the flagship in his long-time adoptive home.
Tao Siqi’s Possession series at Capsule Shangai at Frieze New York 2024, photography courtesy of gallery
Kapp Kapp was another bright spot, spotlighting the indelible Stanley Stellar’s sometimes erotic, often tranquil scenes from gay life on The Piers in late 20th century New York, just prior to the devastation of the AIDs epidemic. The series was re-printed for its first time in color and doubled as the artist’s blue-chip fair debut after decades of steady prolificity. Stellar wasn’t the only artist to garner long-awaited critical recognition at Frieze, however. Sketches by former NFL player Ernie Barnes at Andrew Kreps marked the late artist’s first instance of formal gallery representation, long after the years when Sugar Shack was simply a frame in the end titles of Good Times. Downtown darling Anna Weyant’s rising star also continued to blaze, in spite of a selection of critics who can’t seem to cut the umbilical tie between the artist and the high-profile male curators from her nascent career. Her pieces fetched some of the highest yields at auction, combining the precision of the Dutch Masters and the unease of Balthus with an oft-imperiled female subject with iPhone face.
From left to right: Stanley Stellar, Piers Roof July, 1978, Anna Weyant, The Wit of the Staircase, 2020
From Frieze’s onset I glided past the indiscernibly abstract pieces, the ones that looked like Live, Laugh, Love home décor, and the ones that jabbed at their exceedingly rich clientele through references to money or luxury goods or commercialism, as cheeky as they might have been. This may be because in the week prior to Frieze I’d spent a harrowing afternoon in the catacombs of the Capuchin Crypt in Rome on the tail end of trek to a wedding. Instead of pristine white walls and escalators, I traced lattice-work rib cages, skulls stacked in strange patterns and butterfly collarbones shaped into hour glasses on shrouded cave walls. Like the Marquis de Sade wrote of the cave in his journal, I had “never seen anything more striking.” Perhaps I was primed to go spelunking for something dark and eternal that doesn’t exist in the valley of the living at Hudson Yards. Perhaps I should embrace the glimmers of subversion in the sea of ephemeral safety at Frieze, for now. Either way, I had fun— and I got to keep my cute eschatological sash.
Vasa Speros is a New-York based writer.
