DEEP IN AN ABANDONED SILVER MINE, the head of a fox is roasting on a spit. Or at least, an animation of one by the artist Matt Copson, laser-projected onto the roughly hewn stone walls. We’ve been led here on a hard-hat tour by Daniel Merritt, director of curatorial affairs at the Aspen Art Museum, which commissioned Obituary, 2023, Copson’s latest immersive work. He tells us it was inspired by a British children’s cartoon, but the creepy, cryptic messages that light up and disappear throughout the cave feel decidedly more Twin Peaks. “If it’s punishment you’re after, I hope to satisfy” flashes one, and I notice the woman behind me struggling to traverse the floor in heels. Across from an original sign labeled “EXPLOSIVES,” which were used here in 1894 to remove the largest silver nugget ever discovered, appears a quote from Evelyn Waugh: “Death always sounded like a great opportunity . . . there is no other practice which so intensifies living.”
Outside Smuggler Mine, guests are beginning to gather for dinner. Various meats—not fox—are being grilled. It’s the rare menu of the week that will not feature seafood. (All you really need to know to understand Aspen is that nearly every restaurant serves raw fish, flown in daily from as far as the Mediterranean.) Hans Ulrich Obrist is here, sipping from a can of Liquid Death. Artist Nairy Baghramian, whose solo exhibition takes over two floors of the Aspen Art Museum, looks at ease in cowboy boots and Calvin Klein denim. The museum’s director, Nicola Lees, dressed in silver disco pants as shiny as polished ore, is chatting with artist Doug Aitken and local collector Amnon Rodan. She assumed her role in March 2020, just days before the world shut down, and so with this Aspen Art Week—a calendar of talks, performances, and collection tours culminating in the museum’s gala, known as Art Crush—it feels like her vision for the institution has finally hit its stride. The mood is clubby and convivial, even after a lightning storm erupts over the Roaring Fork Valley.
Clouds pass quickly and gossip travels even faster in this place where the air is thin. (One thing that doesn’t pass quickly at 8,000 feet elevation: a hangover.) A friend tells me that the parents of Lees’s predecessor, Heidi Zuckerman, were discovered to have evaded taxes by creating a shell company for their Woody Creek properties and appointing their cats to its board (I imagine far stranger things are hidden behind the fir-lined driveways of the area’s multimillion-dollar homes). That said, Zuckerman was an adept fundraiser, and financed the construction of the museum’s elegant Shigeru Ban–designed building, which opened in 2014. Lees has taken a different tack. “Former directors catered to collectors when the museum was broke,” Richard Edwards, cofounder of Baldwin Gallery, tells me “Nicola is leaning into her network of artists and curators to bring more challenging content to the museum. Not everybody understands it, but that’s good for the discourse.” We’re walking through Baldwin’s shows by Inka Essenhigh and Matthew Ronay which, while not exactly challenging, are mesmerizingly surreal. Over coffee the next day, Lees adds: “I’ve been very clear from the beginning that I wanted to take the institution into the unknown.”
There could hardly be a better illustration of the unknown than a Thursday night performance by the Puerto Rican collective Poncili Creación which leaves some front-row attendees wet. Before it begins in the rolling hills behind the Bauhaus-era Aspen Institute, guests get sauced on boozy ice cream sundaes at a reception hosted by Frieze Art Fair. Merritt, full of smiles for someone shepherding donors all week, gestures from the terrace to the leafy canyon and notes, “This place is very mushroom-friendly.” Once we settle atop blankets on the green, Aspen Art Museum curator Simone Krug takes the mic and asks us all, on behalf of a round-faced, snout-nosed creature named Mr. Tree, to let out an existential scream. (One woman continues for about five minutes, well past our cue, to which I say: I hear you.) The next forty-five minutes are delightfully unhinged, as performers disguised in shapeshifting, bendable masks grunt and tumble across the slope and even splash around in a stream at our feet. Lees’s dog Lutz barks at them in alarm. Halfway through, a group from another event try to cross the stage but stop dead in confusion or terror. More than one person on my blanket says: We really should have taken those mushrooms. Afterwards, Poncili invites us to “a weird afterparty in a gazebo over there.” I do not attend.
The next morning, a group of visiting curators and art dealers gather for a hike. Sohrab Mohebbi, director of New York’s SculptureCenter, is still giddy from the night. Karma founder Brendan Dugan and Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi hold up the rear as we cross a wooden footbridge over a waterfall. Olivier Babin, founder of Clearing Gallery, muses that beavers would make excellent art handlers. “They would probably unionize and ask for more wood chips,” he jokes. We end at the museum, where Baghramian is in conversation with Lees and Obrist. The talk shares its tongue-in-cheek title, “Coude a Coude” (Elbow to Elbow), with the work she’s donated to the Art Crush auction, and opens with what Obrist calls a “new Proustian questionnaire.” Baghramian, smiling mischievously, dodges most of its canned interrogatives. It all feels in spirit with her unruly sculptures on display downstairs, works whose vague resemblance to internal organs and bodily secretions—intestines, bones, boogers—makes their placement at the margins or corners of gallery walls feel like a puckish affront to the institution. “The criticality of institutions is to be protected,” she says. “You are not here to be loved.” (A sincere observation, it feels slightly ironic for someone as beloved as Baghramian, whose presence in Aspen has drawn a dozen self-professed groupies. “We go to all of her openings,” notes Performa curator Charles Aubin.)
That night, the tent in Buttermilk Meadow, themed “Disco in the Woods,” has been filled with towering mushroom sculptures with mirror-ball testicles. Chablis and goodwill are freely flowing. During the live auction, works by Charles Gaines, Peter Halley, Carmen Herrera, and others sell over their estimates, netting the museum $3.8 million. Baghramian takes the gala stage to accept an honoree trophy designed by Gaetano Pesce. Quoting Lawrence Weiner, she tells the crowd, “Don’t forget to party.”
