Frieze-ing in London

BUT! All is not lost. And granted, this diary entry is technically postface, but I think I can relate based on recollection. OK, let’s do it before my brain gets too fuzzy and the mists of my present begin to impinge on the mists of my past…

Below are some general ruminations, a pictorial rundown, as well as a surprising amount of San Franciscan local celebrity sightings at the Fair. Who’s reprezentin’ the Bay? We are! Let’s go, London!

In a nutshell, I presented a five-day long performative parasitic project for the Frieze Art Fair in London called “COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone.” I enlisted a team of 3-5 artists at a time to hand-make counterfeits of other artworks found within the Fair, which we then sold for incredibly discounted rates in our own gallery booth space. The production area was in full view to the public and showed the counterfeiting artists live, in action. We wound up knocking-off about forty different artworks ranging from Rirkrit Tiravanija to Philip Guston, a kind of crazy feat considering we were fabricating them under the harsh stage lights of the general public.

And let me tell you, the figures of attendance are mind-boggling: around 60,000 people came during the course of the Fair, and while I can’t claim to have interfaced with all of them, at the end of the day it sure felt like I had. Somehow I had neglected to realize the enormity of scale and that I would be doing about seven press interviews a day for the Project (NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, BBC TV, the Guardian UK, and more… OH! and don’t let me forget Lithuanian TV). This on top of acting as general project manager, art handler, art pimp (aka gallerist), and artist stroker (yes, stroking the artists makes them feel good, as does offering cookies and beer when their energy begins to flag).

And yes, we SOLD OUT all of our knock-off artworks. Take THAT, recession!

But then again, how could anyone argue with the fact that nothing in the COPYSTAND gallery booth cost over 500 GBP (about 800 dollars), with the lowest being 10 GBP ($16)? Compared to the insanely priced Ugo Rondinone sculpture (which as they were setting it up we all thought was kind of hideous looking, but then again i guess they’re supposed to hideous, right? hmmm) we were looking mighty good, almost just more than the price of lunch for your average high-end Swiss art collector. And sell to Swiss collectors we did. And Hong Kong ones. And German ones. And British ones. And there were a few Americans in there as well. For god’s sake, who wouldn’t want a nice little Francis Alys painting for only $250???

OSD readers, to sum up my time at the Fair, it was grueling and exhilarating, all wrapped up into one bundle of amazing, productive chaos. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dudes, trust me, I’m not complaining of the opportunity but the scale of it was totally unexpected and it took me a while to get my bearings on the whole thing. I was so stressed out I didn’t sleep for the first five days I was there, lying awake in my room at the Holiday Inn, dead exhausted but obsessing about all the things I had to do the next day and what I could be doing better.

By the fifth day of no sleep I remember floating on an eerie cloud of delirium at the Fair, almost having an out of body experience as I was talking into a television camera. And then the next day my mind and body did a kind of about-face and it was like I was running on pure adrenaline. I think it may have been similar to what people go through when they begin fasting: the beginning is totally all about hunger and pain and then all of a sudden it’s like –poof!– you’re just moving along it and through it and you don’t even feel it anymore. Wowwwwwwww. It was like that.

Designer Imposters: Reality Bites

Remember that cheap perfume line called “Designer Imposters” that was really popular back in the 80s? Their slogans were like, “If you love Chanel #5, you’ll love Chantal #8,” or something like that. Basically, they were conscious of their secondary knock-off status but it didn’t matter, since by incorporating it into their taglines they wound up directly addressing the desire that came with it.

For most of my time at COPYSTAND I was a hawker, sitting at the gallery desk and talking up our products like a good gallerist should. I would even fill in a potential buyer about the wonderfulness of the original work we had remade (”Artschwager is amazing — his work is so seductive and all about a kind of translation of essence onto surface. He blows my mind“) and then adding a pitch about our remake (”And our version–just look at it. While the materials are different and we have only contact paper and coroboard at our disposal, I think our surface treatment is an ingenious, sensitive parallel to the original and speaks to a modern day attempt at achieving perfect form, a kind of everyman’s striving for perfection, if you will…). Blah blah blah. It was so fun to pull from my own art history chest of phrases, and the cool thing was that I really meant everything I said. Both works were good. And both works had a relationship that I could talk about in a lucid manner and make a case for. I was pitching for both teams, earnestly and seriously.

During the first few days of the Fair word started leaking out to the other galleries that counterfeiting shenanigans were going on in my nick of the woods and they started sending out people to scope us out. Some gallerists identified themselves, and some didn’t. We had a bulletin board area by a color printer where we would print out a visual “hit list” of things we wanted to work on and it started to feel like it was a race to see what we could accomplish before the end of the event. We would walk into a gallery booth and either furtively or sometimes brazenly take digital snapshots of our chosen items, then upload them to our laptops to print out and use as source material for our remakes.

By the end of the Fair I felt like a predator, roaming the carpeted hallways hunting for a morsel that caught my attention and lending itself in some way to be creatively reworked in paper, cardboard and tape. And it was like I could feel the eyes on the back of my head as I circled, the gallerists’ thought-bubbles blurting out, “oh god, there’s that copygirl and her crew again. What now?”

A Critical Rub: Absorption vs. Subversion

OSD readers, I have a paradox to present to you for scrutiny. You could say we sold out in more ways than one. To frame it in a different way: how does the context of a “counterfeiting” space change when sanctioned by the very event it purports to critique? In other words, as a commissioned Frieze Project, COPYSTAND, was funded by an arm of the Frieze Fair itself (albeit a nonprofit, independently curated one), and fell squarely within the confines of sanctioned, and perhaps neutralizing institutional critique.

I didn’t think there was anything particularly “daring” about the project except that it attempted to directly and unapologetically show off a cold logic of capitalism: that wherever you find a market of high-end goods that are economically out of reach of a general clientele, a parallel counterfeit or black market will arise. My view is that COPYSTAND is intrinsically complicit with this logic and the only subversive possibility in it is that it lays this process out in the open, for all to see.

Frieze is considered the biggest art fair in Europe and the blue chip galleries are all in attendance, although this year about 30 galleries had declined to fork over the funds it takes to rent a booth. Word on the gallery street is that sales did better than expected, but then again most folks had lowered their prices to address mindful pocketbooks. Overall, it was an amazing experience and I think this year’s Frieze Projects curator, Neville Wakefield, did an excellent job of assembling a range of artists that directly addressed the economics and structure of the Fair itself. As he stated in his curatorial introduction:

Whether taking the form of grand architectural obstruction or finding new ways of protesting, authenticating or motivating our relationship to the objects we make, look at and buy, this year’s projects create aesthetic opportunity out of the uncertainty that has become the hallmark of our troubled times.

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A Photo Album of Memories that Light the Corners of my Mind:

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An onlooker looks vaguely suspicious of our attempts and proferments.

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The COPYSTAND version of a Jim Lambie wall work: colored paper, folded. By Jim Ricks.

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The COPYSTAND list of shame….

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Seen but not pictured: SF collector Robert Shimshak, ever sweet-smiling and dapper during the ultra-VIP preview reception; artist Jim Goldberg squeezed in a visit before his own solo London gallery opening and left me a cocktail at my booth during the (normal) VIP event; artist Jina Valentine, taking a break from her Paris residency to swing by; writer and London School of Economics freshly-enrolled MA candidate Hanif O’Neil; ex-SF artists Anna Maltz and Adam Rompel; Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff; San Francisco Art Institute curator Hou Hanru making the rounds on a buying spree for the Tate (!); Jack Hanley of aforementioned gallery; and then there was that man-about-town and ex-CCA Wattis Gallery curator and current White Columns New York director Matthew Higgs, who walked by me many times and who I saw at numerous fancy-schmancy Cartier and Deutsche Bank afterparties but for some reason didn’t say hi (what is UP with that, man? No Bay Area solidarity?). But seriously, it was so fab to see friendly faces in the middle of the hubbub 🙂

Special thanks to all participating COPYSTAND artists: Jim Ricks, Claudia Djabbari, Bear Lake, Maria Taniguchi, and Yason Banal. With special guest artist Otto von Busch, special guest gallerist Steven Wolf, guest gallerina and Girl Friday Kuniko Vroman, and guest final day assistant Gail Pickering. And thank you to Frieze Projects team Neville Wakefield, Sorrel Hirschberg, and Samara Aster. It honestly couldn’t have happened without this entire roster 🙂

G’night for now, sweet sweet readers! I am poooooooped, even a few weeks later.

(re-posted with permission from the author, original appears here)