“IT’S IMPORTANT that people keep the world dirty,” said dealer Olivier Babin last Thursday as he scanned a dark dance floor covered in broken glass. Many were soaked in sweat. A group of men stripped off their shirts. Lean bodies pressed against each other. There had been just one invitation to this party, a red-and-black animated GIF that eight galleries (Isabella Bortolozzi, Greene Naftali, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Mathew, Real Fine Art, dépendance, 47 Canal, High Art) had e-mailed to a select group. Galcher Lustwerk, Bianca Heuser, and Spencer Sweeney were set to DJ, though Sweeney, wearing a vintage NASA baseball cap, sat it out. (The Plaza Dance Club near the Messeplatz, where the party was held, wouldn’t allow him to install his turntables.) Those sweaty bodies mouthed all the words to Drake and Crystal Waters and Lil’ Kim and, around 4 AM, Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch,” and as the night and then the morning wore on, the mirrored walls began to moisten with condensed perspiration.
A cleaner sort of party: a Dieter Roth bar erected at Les Trois Rois for the run of Art Basel. In this opulent setting, the original structure seemed like something from the Pirates of the Caribbean, or an advertisement for Hauser & Wirth. David Zwirner and Larry Gagosian were less than pleased, I heard; they host dinners there too. Every night, there was a red carpet, velvet rope, and bouncers in slick black suits. A Saudi socialite had a birthday party. Mark Ronson was flown in to DJ. Leonardo DiCaprio, Christie’s Loic Gouzer, and the Mugrabis drank cocktails on its white-tented terrace.
There’s a myth that people who work in art begin their lives as misfits and eventually make a world with one another. It’s an idea that feels increasingly at odds with reality. But on Tuesday, the second day of Art Basel, I met Bunny Rogers. She wore a purple ribbon in her hair. Her work brushes against and exaggerates our youthful affects and obsessions. With the Berlin gallery Société at Art Basel Statements, she debuted stones and medallions engraved with cartoon-like images and Carson McCullers poems, mining basic cultural tropes to render a portrait of the present. People came and went, often noting that, along with Avery Singer’s monochromatic paintings that cash in on digital exhaustion and bohemian nostalgia, Rogers’s was the best work at the fair.
“I didn’t think anyone I knew would come,” she whispered outside her packed dinner that night, which spilled from Schnabel restaurant onto a narrow cobblestone street. A waiter tripped and a wineglass shattered. “Make a wish,” Rogers said, reaching for my hand and closing her disarming blue eyes.
“What did you wish for?” someone asked.
“Not to be panicked,” she answered.
“Me too,” chimed another.
Several dinners (kurimanzutto and Chantal Crousel, Clearing and Essex Street, Standard [Oslo]) and many hours later, artist Anicka Yi and adviser Eleanor Cayre followed dealers Daniel Buchholz, Peter Currie, Amy Greenspon, Bianca Heuser, and Daniel Wichelhaus across an old stone bridge. The river was black and the moon half there. People were drunk and alive, eager to arrive at a tiny bar with an inconspicuous back door that led through a kitchen, down a staircase, and to a dungeonesque dance floor, sweaty and fiery as hell. (A party, we were later told, for the French tattoo magazine Sang Bleu.)
Rogers materialized out of the crowd and placed her hands over Yi’s shoulders. “I love your work so much,” she said. Yi kissed her on the cheek. Yi’s show “7,070,430K of Digital Spit” at the Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Elena Filipovic, was on everyone’s lips—an exhibition about forgetting, as if memory is something that must be lost. That same night, hundreds had attended a book launch for a limited-edition catalogue. Yi instructs that it be burned after reading. “Imagine the ashes,” said one as we watched people swim in the Rhine. “The air would be black with soot.”
The next evening there was a dinner at Restaurant zum Goldenen Fass to celebrate Avery Singer. Her immersive painting environment for Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler at Art Statements took as much from the Rockefeller Dining Room as the Room of Chiaroscuro and Gallery of Tapestries in the Vatican. Singer told me that she began with the banal—a rabbit, a vape, some numbers: “It gave me the ability not to have confines, to expand into the world.” She spent four months making the panels. It was a uniquely intimate evening, and when Amadeo Kraupa-Tuskany stood in the room surrounded by flickering candlelight, his toast felt less like a speech than a story. “Every one of you has been in some way a part of this. We are so lucky to have you.”
“It’s so crowded you can barely move,” a collector had said minutes after Monday’s 11 AM opening for the twentieth edition of Liste, in the familiar former brewery on Burgweg. We were on the third floor, inside a room that included Real Fine Arts, Mathew, and High Art, the last debuting tanks by Max Hooper Schneider, green neon and fauna submerged in dark water—Pierre Huyghe gone Pop. (Schneider is Huyghe’s studio assistant.) Collectors and advisers buzzed around the artist, who leaned against a wall drinking beer in a leather jacket and dark sunglasses. Past the balcony, one could find Sam Pulitzer’s careful drawings of apocalyptic scenes, eggs, and rabbits at Mexico City’s Gaga. Two floors below, Derya Demir of Galeri NON Istanbul sold a group of eager collectors on earthy textiles by Günes Terkol, while around the corner Supportico Lopez showed a screen by Charlie Billingham, fat Marie Antoinette–like characters splashing wine, roiling in flesh. Crib-like wooden cages and doll-size houses lit in purple LEDs were positioned in an adjacent dark room, microcosms of angst and desire—Calvin Marcus at Clearing.
The stairwell was a social obstacle course, but well worth the run knowing you could find Mickey Schubert on the ground floor, showing Benedicte Gyldenstierne Sehested, who brought similar work to that which had featured in his unnerving exhibition in Berlin earlier this spring, dolls that owe as much to Cindy Sherman as they do to Hans Bellmer. Dublin’s Mother’s Tankstation had winsome wool works embroidered with glass seed beads by Australian artist Alasdair McLuckie, and Pentti Monkkonen won new fans with his Dandelion Lamps at the Geneva-based gallery Truth and Consequences. Descending further into the inferno, works by the artistic/curatorial/editorial collective DIS were on sale for the first time at Project Native Informant in the basement. Dealer Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja shared that all five editions of their installation from “Surround Audience,” the recent New Museum Triennial, had sold.
Later that night, the restaurant Birseckerhof was overrun by galleries celebrating Art Unlimited artists John Knight, Wu Tsang, Ed Atkins, Helen Marten, and Leigh Ledare. Seating went to the wind and everyone moved from chair to chair, even stepping over tables to kiss each other hello. “To Art Basel!” a group on a banquette yelled, raising glasses of red wine into the air. I slipped out and made my way to the other side of the river for a more formal fete hosted by Massimo De Carlo and Michele Maccarone for Nate Lowman, Tony Lewis, and John Armleder. Lowman wore sweatpants. Peter Brant wore a suit. It looked new. “I’ve noticed his wardrobe has gotten quite nice since Rob Pruitt sold all his clothes,” said a friend.
“So often today the subject and the spectacle get mixed up, and you can’t tell which is which,” John Knight said at Art Unlimited, noting the conviction in installations by Atkins, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Flavin. He ran his hand across one of the works in his Worldebt, a project from 1994 that includes 165 slightly oversize credit cards printed with an image of the IMF and World Bank’s member nations (Angola, Chad, Mauritania, Qatar, the US). Instead of an account number there is a telephone number for a fraud and corruption hotline. Outside, Knight exhibited posters on the convention center walls mimicking Apple’s spotless advertisements for the iPhone—the design seamless, obsessively clean.
“The problem is when artists make work that wants to be spectacular and vulgar,” Knight said as he turned to leave, “but take that quality as an end in itself.”
