Art Basel Miami Beach.

Danilowicz, Nathan

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH

Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami FL December 6 * 9, 2007

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What's good about Miami, one can argue, is that it invents its own folklore. Over the last six years, local collectors, curators, dealers, critics, and other art groupies have exponentially--and at times hastily--worked to champion the "Magic City" as one of America's premiere creative cauldrons. Thus, with so many satellite fairs and events now happening the same week as Art Basel Miami Beach, it becomes difficult to assess what is or is not really happening around town, art- or otherwise. Even more daunting is trying to get a sense of what's up the rest of the year. Last December, flying under the radar of most out-of-towners, and offering a welcome break from the major fairs, two independent shows shed some light on the local scene: "The Expanded Painting Show," curated by Nina Arias and Paco Barragan (Miami Design District, December 1-9, 2007), and "Miami Contemporary Artists: Creating A Scene," curated by Gean Moreno (The Freedom Tower, November 28, 2007 - January 8, 2008).

Both shows feature a number of artists strong enough to offer a better picture of what Miami is capable of. "Expanded Painting" highlights two dozen or so emerging international artists, almost a third of which are from Miami. According to the show's curators, "Expanded painting has to be understood as the relationship and interaction of painting with other media ... and on any kind of support ..., as here is where the creativity and future of painting resides." But what this argument for heterogeneity fails to take into account is the increasingly globalized art market, which by and large gives established artists an annual deadline to finish their "consignments," while tending to assimilate the remainder into a homogeneous group.

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Ironically, the best works in "Expanded Painting" are those that tend not to tread too far from the path of conventional painting. Examples include Victory Over the Sun (2007), Gavin Perry's black-and-gold, Cartesian/Kubrickian "Star Gate" hanging on silver wallpaper, ready to be gift-wrapped, and Jacin Giordano's bittersweet, yarny "painting" Who's Afraid of Joseph Albers, Knot? (2007), made with bits of glued-on paint--these are nothing if not wild (Oscar, that is). There's a sculpture by Gean Moreno, Black Zodiac (2006), representing bric-a-brac de-skilling at its glitterbest. Pepe Mar's Flouncy Flouncy (2007) is a Sesame Street-like monster of a painting, but it pales in comparison with his meticulous paper sculptures (not shown here). Also present is Diego Singh's painting-sculpture combo Drastic Pursuit (2007), which looks remarkably like what would happen if Dan Flavin crossed light sabers with a Sith Lord. In the end, the curators took a fresh approach in mixing Miami artists with artists from other places--a break from the town's usual navel-gazing, and proof that they can stand up alongside an international roster.

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By contrast, Moreno's "Miami Contemporary Artists" deploys the exhibition context to demonstrate various scenes in flux. Just as Wilde's timeless essay on the decay of lying is just a disguised way of flushing out the truth, so is Moreno's presentation deliberately over-staged, teetering on the edge of a conventional white cube affair, with DIY pretensions. According to Moreno, the show tries to contest "the transactional nature of the gallery system--and the institutions that feed on it--and the premium it places on self-sufficient objects for a temporary zone that is much more invested in production and context-building."

Perhaps the most compelling segment of the show was organized by two local alternative spaces, The House and Twenty Twenty Projects. The two entities collaborated by inviting artist Daniel Newman to curate "Rats." In Newman's words, "I decided to expound on my initial RATS idea to include works chewed by cockroaches, gnawed by rabbits, attacked by termites, stained by sausage juice, stolen off streets, purchased in thrift stores, or otherwise found at random intervals." Included here is Daniel Arsham's S.O.M. Proposal (2004), which was decimated by vermin during storage at a private collection. It turns out that the little guys liked the egg-based gouache so much that Arsham had to re-make the painting. The chewed-up work and the new version were hung side by side.

Additional works dealing with decay and process were interspersed throughout the show, including Manny Prieres's black-and-anti-freeze-yellow mural Zombi 2 (2007), featuring palm trees and the undead--an accurate depiction of what Miami's Wynwood Arts District looks like after dark. Notable among the forty-or-so artists here are Frances Trombly, Michelle Weinberg, Naomi Fisher, TM Sisters, Beatriz Monteavaro, and the now-established Hernan Bas. Identifying overarching styles between these artists and those exhibited in "Expanded Painting" would not be a stretch. This prevailing Miami aesthetic could be described as a form of chromatic-abstract assemblage painting, tempered by occasional daydream narrativity.

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"Miami Contemporary Artists" is a large show, but not quite as ambitious as Julie Davidow and Paul Clemence's vanity book of the same name, which appeared just in time for Basel Miami. Moreno was approached by the editors to do a show concurrent with the book, but he literally ended up "Creating A Scene." Moreno's view of the region is very different from Davidow and Clemence's, leading him, as he says, "to draw a much more complex picture--and much more accurate--of the local art scene, one that is attuned to the way things feel 'on the ground,' outside of the limited nexus of galleries, collector's spaces and institutions that have come to characterize the city for outsiders." The book, by contrast, seems a rote encyclopedic survey at best.

The tallest tale about the Miami scene is that it is still growing and about to come into its own. This notion is mindlessly repeated in trashy fashion magazine, newspapers, and blogs. The truth is that the Miami scene in not burgeoning at all, but stretched to the very limit of its potential. Back on terra firma, Basel Miami now seems a parody of what it once was. One day the pony show will stumble, and that's just fine. But it's only because a number of Miami artists have already been savvy enough to take advantage of the attention Basel has brought them by establishing relations with dealers in centers like New York, Los Angeles, and Paris.