TATE’S FRIEZE ACQUISITIONS UNVEILED

According to Farah Nayeri in Bloomberg, the Tate museum network, with the help of outside curators, has spent $215,000 buying six contemporary artworks from London’s Frieze Art Fair a day before its public opening. The money was raised by Outset, a charity set up in 2003 to help Tate collect new art. Jersey, 2008, is an oil painting by Hurvin Anderson, a UK-based artist of Jamaican origin. The work shows a barber shop with two empty chairs, and colored squares in the mirror that are reflections of the posters hanging on the opposite walls. Projection, 2008, is a video work by Andrea Fraser. Assemblage, 1969, by the eighty-five-year-old Czech artist Bela Kolarova, comprises rows of paper clips affixed to paper, in which the shape of a skyscraper can be detected. Photo Booth, 2008, by Lorna Simpson is a galaxylike arrangement of fifty ink drawings and fifty found black-and-white photo-booth portraits of young African-American men and boys dressed up or in uniform. >, 2008, by Tris Vonna-Michell is a reel-to-reel tape on which the artist shouts words in rapid succession. The work also includes a porcelain replica of the Cabinet art gallery where it was recorded, as well as related ink-on-paper prints. Nature Morte_, 2008, by Akram Zaatari is an eleven-minute video projection of an evening in which two Middle Eastern men get ready for military action, making tubular contraptions. One has a gas canister on the table next to him. Of the six artists, only Zaatari and Fraser previously had works in the collection, said Tate director Nicholas Serota, interviewed at the fair. Serota said Tate’s aim was to broaden its collection beyond northwest Europe and North America.