Footie For You, Piccies For Me (Basel Landschaft)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Basel Landschaft
Date:	20/06/04 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the world's largest and most important art fair

Disadvantages: a tad pricy

More than 1 million sports fans are expected for this month´s European football championship in Portugal, I´m sure most members can understand them and many may even envy them.

I´m not going to say anything derogatory about football (so you can abstain from saying something derogatory about my hobby), let me just declare that I?d watch a match only if you paid me a considerable sum; I spend my money on art, preferably the contemporary variety. I don´t buy it, though, I would if I could, but unfortunately I can´t afford my taste, so I travel to where art is exhibited and look at it.

I´ve just come back from the annual Art Fair in Basel, a city in Switzerland on the border with Germany, which is definitely worth a visit itself, but I have no time and energy left to do any sightseeing when I go to the fair. It´s the world´s most important and largest marketplace for contemporary art and classic works of the 20th and 21st century, this year it´s held for the 35th time (16th to 21st June, 11 am to 7 pm), the crème de la crème of the international gallery scene (270 this year) exhibit paintings, drawings, etchings, sculptures, installations, photography, performance, video and digital art by over 1 500 artists. Some 50 000 visitors are expected, art collectors, museum professionals, artists and art enthusiasts (Yours truly!) who take the fair as a temporary museum and only gawk at the prices.

A yellow dot marks the artefacts which are cheaper(!) than 5 000 Euro (3 300 GBP), but there aren´t many, on the ground floor where the more established galleries have their stalls prices are rarely shown at all, they´re ´on demand´ and mostly consist of five or six, in some cases even seven figures.

I always go to Basel by train and get off at the German station Badischer Bahnhof (Basel has two train stati
ons), the passengers go from the German platform into the Swiss station hall, this year for the first time passing Police! Soldiers! Passport control! From the station it´s five minutes on foot to the fair. The entrance fee is 30 Swiss Francs (13. 10 GBP)/ reduced 15, a high price indeed, but then everything is expensive in Switzerland and the aim of the fair is to make money, not to make people happy.

The square building is open in the middle, the round place is occupied by the tables, chairs and umbrellas of the two cafès there. Every year I start with the plan to first walk along the outer walls looking into the stalls there and then move methodically inwards with a cafè as my final destination when I´m hungry, thirsty and foot lame, but to no avail. Most galleries occupy the same space every year so I know that I?ll find the Gallery Orangerie Reinz from Cologne, Germany at the beginning of my tour. They have quite a large stall with walls dividing the space into several ´rooms´ thus creating a homey feeling (one of the very, very expensive galleries even has a roof over its stall and expensive furniture standing around). It´s easy to imagine one of the Picassos, Miròs, Dalìs, Braques et al on the walls of one´s sitting-room. (If only! Your house may cost less than one of the pictures!)

Already in this stall I can lose my sense of time, but I must move on! It doesn´t take me long until I divert from my chosen path, if an artefact catches my eye I go and have a close look, maybe then I hear a noise from an installation nearby and so on and so forth, soon I find myself drifting and meandering through the passages. One can get a map for the fair, but it only shows the names of the galleries, not the names of the artists they exhibit, it doesn´t help much if you don´t know who works
with whom.

I´d never say an artefact was good or bad, ´de gustibus not est disputandum´ as the Romans knew, there´s no arguing about taste. I overheard a woman telling her partner enthusiastically, ´I so love this!´ and turned round to look at the thingy I´d just passed, I found nothing lovable in it, but maybe she wouldn´t understand me if I told her what I´d steal on the spot if there weren´t security probs.

A newspaper critique stated that there was nothing avantgardistic on the ground floor, that in fact the whole fair was rather non-experimental, well, if you´ve never been to an exhibition of modern and contemporary art you may disagree, if you´ve seen many you may agree. I´m somewhere between these two poles, to be sure Andy Warhol and the other American pop artists or, say, Christo certainly don´t lure any well-informed art buff from behind the oven any more (as the Germans say), one looks at them and greets them like old acquaintances, but art not being my main occupation I´ve discovered and got to know and included into my own imaginary museum many names and artefacts I´d never have encountered otherwise and each new visit adds more. I remember vividly the year when I saw Keith Haring´s pictures for the first time! (This year I didn´t see anything by him, obviously he doesn´t sell at the moment)

My pace is getting slower and slower and I know it´s high time for a refreshment in the Café Boulevard in the courtyard. A friend of mine once confessed that she looked forward to her annual trip to the Art Fair in Basel also because of the tasty warm tarts they sell there, either spicy with spinach or cheese or sweet with plums or berries on a kind of pudding. Hmmm, yummy! I live in a town with 50 000 inhabitants, so I also relish in people watching in my lunch break, intelligent faces, trendy hairsty
les and clothes and a Babylonian language mixture, German, English, French and Italian prevail, but there are also galleries from Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Iceland (to name a few countries).

Back to the art! This year another building of the fair has been included for the new section ´Arts Unlimited´(unlimited dimension-wise). Let me describe some works that have left an impression: There is ´A Morir´ (´til death) by Argentinian born Miguel Angel Rios (from a leaflet): ´A popular Mexican game involving spinning tops rapidly rotating on a grid is the focal point for Rios´ fascinating video installation. The buzzing action kicks off with one spinning top, increases to a multitude battling for space, and ends when the last one standing finally collapses. Shot in black and white at varying camera angles and screened in three sizes on three large walls of a room with surround sound ´A Morir´ is a metaphor for territorial battles and the endless fight for survival in the overcrowded cities of Latin and South America.´

Then I saw a triptych (traditionally a work consisting of three painted or carved panels that are hinged together) on a wall, here each part is a video screen displaying the colourful explosions of bombs hitting targets in water or on land in rapid succession accompanied by deafening noise, the weird thing is that the performance is of aesthetic beauty ? the effects of the bombing are not shown!

A contrast to this attack on the senses is Richard Serra?s ´Blade Runner´, a sheet or rather a wall of rusted steel 15.75 feet high, 51.20 feet long, 2 inches thick and weighing 32 tons. It is slightly curved and stands upright perfectly balanced without any support, brilliant, fascinating! Naturally such an artefact is nothing for your front garden, hopefully a city coun
cil will buy it and put it on a public place. Serra, an American born in 1939, is a minimalist sculptor working nearly exclusively with gigantic sheets of rusted iron, I´ve already seen some of his works in other exhibitions, the last I saw was in Naples in front of a classicist building, it looked good there.

Ah, I could go on for quite some time and describe the ´Cinema on Wheels´ for example, but I´m not sure you´d stay with me, I doubt that you´ve got my attention span. Normally I can stay I a museum for two hours before I have enough, but I stay at the Basel Art Fair for four or five hours! The train ride lasts three hours one way, I can´t just look around and return home again, that would be silly. In the end I drag along my feet in a trance like state wallowing in colours, shapes and sounds. How much have I seen when I finally leave? Maybe two thirds.

I look forward to the 36th Art Fair next year!

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