Art Basel

Its a late post. Been a bit busy to actually take time and develop the subject so at the end I'm just gona make a note out of it. Art Basel. Huge Art Market which gets all the arty farty society fret. The main important shows are Art Basel (galleries), Art unlimited (contemporary art), Miami Basel (furniture galleries exhibitions with sale), Swiss Awards, Liste (young Swiss art... worse event in the whole package), Volta show and other satellites. Everything for sale. As ussual.
This year I only ventured to the Art Unlimited and Swiss Awards as I had to travel the week that the whole art fair took place.

One exhibit that sensitized me was the one that I can only guess was from Bruce Conner. Four projection on floating screen (both sides projection). One side interviews with soldiers, one side with the visual reconstructed story of an "accident" in the Middle East war zone. The story attracted my attention thru the visuals, frozen characters within an ongoing environment (actors were standing still while you could see the fire burning in the background, or the blood flowing, or the wind playing with the cloth material). The quazi static pictures reminded me of our own memories, static pictures within an moving interior environmental world.


Second one was just brilliantly witty. A guy named somehow (I gave up to search on the net or on the very badly and incomplete artbasel.ch page) had send it ties to country leaders all over the world. The pretext was "tying up the relationships between USA and the country" and requested for tie in exchange of the country leader. The result was a huge collection of boxed ties and letters (some of refusal) all over the world. Was an delight to see the different form of answers and ties received.


I want to apologize for the simple fact that I can not write down the name of the artists. But I want to blame it on our illusion that google can provide us will all of the answers...