The Guardian

Frieze art fair 2015 review – do foxes like the Bee Gees? 13 October 2015 Adrian Searle

Frieze art fair 2015 review – do foxes like the Bee Gees?

Art for animals, a giant Felix the Cat and a fake cocktail party offer respite from all the hotshot galleries flogging hideous trinkets

Party time ... Frieze’s unique cocktail party at Stephen Friedman gallery. All photographs: David Levene for the Guardian

Beginning at one end of Frieze 2015 crawling through a tunnel into a hole, and ending it

on my knees in a scale model of the entire art fair, to the sound of the Bee Gees’ How

Deep Is Your Love, rather takes the shine off the whole event.

Somewhere between these twin escapades, I saw quite a few cocks, went to a cocktail

party, hung about in bed with strangers and saw wondrous sights and terrible things.

Jeremy Herbert’s tunnel leads down, through plywood doors, then twists and turns to a

cavernous undercroft among the scaffolding that supports the big tent. You end up

standing on the trampled earth of Regent’s Park, blasted by a wind machine. Herbert is

      The Guardian

Frieze art fair 2015 review – do foxes like the Bee Gees? 13 October 2015 Adrian Searle

famous for his experimental theatre sets. His Frieze Project has nothing on Bruce

Nauman’s narrow corridors, let alone other side-swiping interventions that have taken

place at the fair over the years. This is a low in every sense. Only four people are allowed

down here at any time, so expect to queue to get your knees dirty and your hair blown

about.

At the other end of the fair, Rachel Rose’s Frieze Project is really not meant for us, but for

the animals that inhabit the park. As well as being VIP preview day, it is also the day of

the fox in her model. Later in the week she will be playing music for newts, sticklebacks

and mice, amplifying songs in ways that they can understand. Do foxes like the Bee

Gees? Down my way, they like KFC.

Was this a high or a low? Unlike Herbert’s tunnel, Rose’s crawl-thru tent is carpeted and

has music. It brings everyone down to the same level as the local fauna, though there

were none in evidence on my visit – only exotic breeds of human.

Not really meant for us ... Rachel Rose’s scale-model of Frieze is designed to be enjoyed by animals, from foxes to newts.

      The Guardian

Frieze art fair 2015 review – do foxes like the Bee Gees? 13 October 2015 Adrian Searle

Back to the willies. A schlumpy dork with his cock hanging out wears a T-shirt that says

“I’m with Stupid” on it, with an arrow pointing down to the offending article. It’s one of a

group of ribald, rumbustious drawings from the 1990s, by American artist Nicole

Eisenman. She is showing at New York’s PPOW gallery stand, alongside great

photographs by the late David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) in which he poses, in an Arthur

Rimbaud mask, on street corners, in the subway, on New York’s piers and on the beach.

Also showing works from the 70s by Carolee Schneemann and Martha Wilson, PPOW’s

stand takes a slice through the gay and feminist New York art scene. None of the artists

here were making money back then, and the world was a different place. Funny though

these drawings, photos and records of performances are, they are also full of ideas and

cocky idealism. How times change. A definite hit.

A horrible thing, or maybe a good thing ... Felix the Cat towering over Frieze-goers.

It is also a salutary corrective to some of the hotshot gallery bazaars, of which Galerie

Perrotin has the most hideous arrangement of highly crafted gewgaws. Lumpy

abstractions, what looks like a tangled bead necklace on a plinth and various other

witless figurations and objects collide around the space. The whole thing looks like a set-

designer’s idea of what a “modern” art gallery looks like. And here, it does.

      The Guardian

Frieze art fair 2015 review – do foxes like the Bee Gees? 13 October 2015 Adrian Searle

But disparate arrangements can work. Hauser & Wirth are showing all kinds of small

sculptures on a field of plinths. Everyone from Louise Bourgeois to Martin Creed,

Phyllida Barlow to Paul McCarthy is here. They make no sense except in terms of scale,

attention to detail and focus. Of course everything is eminently saleable, but it is also

funny and lovely, crafted and crumbly.

Yrrrghhh, here’s a horrible thing at Max Hetzler Gallery: a circle of all-white chairs, each

with a wine glass on the seat. On a stool in the middle of the circle a metal rod rotates,

with a little crystal suspended at each end. As it passes the glasses, the crystal taps each

one. It’s all somehow extraordinarily effete, portentous and overdone.

Another horrible thing, or maybe a good thing: a giant inflatable Felix the Cat, that

towers over the walls of Bucholz Gallery. Felix was the first ever TV broadcast image.

Why, you ask? Felix just smiles. I ask why all the time at the art fair, in a variety of

incredulous voices. Felix is too big for anyone’s living room. He’s not the sort of thing

you buy on a whim.

You can almost forget it all here ... ÅYR’s chill-out chamber comes complete with smartphone chargers.

      The Guardian

Frieze art fair 2015 review – do foxes like the Bee Gees? 13 October 2015 Adrian Searle

But the fair isn’t all about things to buy. In the Focus section, for solo representations,

two film works by Amie Siegel at Simon Preston Gallery are being premiered prior to a

museum show in Munich. Le Corbusier’s all-white Villa Savoye is projected on one wall,

while its antipodean opposite (a black copy built in Canberra) faces it. The two buildings

are shown in negative. A further doubling and reversal occurs in footage of swans on a

lake – black Australian birds and their white European relatives. The doublings continue

and proliferate. You could stay here all day.