Attack of the 50-Foot Artworks: At Art Basel`s Unlimited

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Attack of the 50-Foot Artworks: At Art Basel's
Unlimited, Great Art Hides in the Shadows of Giants
By Andrew M. Goldstein
June 19, 2015
The entryway to the curated Unlimited section at Art Basel 2015
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Unlimited is the name of the exhibition in Art Basel’s vast Hall 2, and it is also a
synonym for unbounded, unrestrained, and incalculable. Its curator this year, Gianni
Jetzer, has embraced this concept with maniacal gusto—wildly proliferating the space,
which is as big as a Boeing plant, with so many towering artworks that walking in feels a
bit like entering a set piece in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. You half-sense that a giant art
dealer’s shoe is about to step on you. If you have megalophobia or polyphobia, stay away.
In this Brobdingnagian land, a display can’t just consist of a painting. It has to consist of
either THE BIGGEST PAINTING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN or—if that’s not an
option—SO MANY PAINTINGS THAT YOU JUST WANT TO EXPLODE. Do
you like drawings? HERE IS EVERY DRAWING IN THE WORLD. If a sculpture
here isn’t big, there are 50 of them. It’s all completely overwhelming. Even the lone
performance piece, by Julian von Bismarck, consists of the bearded daredevil whirling
around and around and around in a dish—a commentary on the artist as a being who
operates in a separate, more extreme reality than the rest of us.
One of the most interesting things about the exhibition, when you compare it to the
elegant and restrained display of art across the Messeplatz, is that it may be seen as
expressing in physical size and multiplicity the staggering monetary values at play in the
fair and the art market overall. The dollar figures are humongous enough (the total value
of art at Art Basel has been estimated at roughly $3 billion) to engender feelings of the
sublime; at Unlimited, the art is gamely trying to imitate the scale of the money. Jetzer, a talented curator, may be playing with this effect. Among the displays are a few
installations that surprise and delight as much as they intimidate: Robert Irwin’s row of
black cubes painted on transparent white scrims, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski’s room made
out of paintings that churn with feverish male panic about women’s bodies, and Martin
Boyce’s post-apocalyptic vacation spot consisting of beach chairs and neon-light palm
trees. Ryan McGinley’s room of young, fit naked people photographed being happy and
sexy against bright colors is pretty much irresistible. Zhang Enli’s adumbral maze of
painted cardboard boxes is smart, spooky, and ingeniously thrifty in its choice of
material.
Because Jetzer is merciful, he also provides a scattering of darkened spaces where viewers
can seek shelter from the gigantomachia being waged outside. Here, one finds the best
works of the show. One of them, a new piece called Happy Soul by Sanya Kantarovsky, is
among the most exciting pieces this writer has seen all year. The artist, already a splendid
painter of floppy-footed, cartoonish men in existential extremis, has taken a huge leap
forward here. He presents a single painting of a naked male figure against a white
background, which soon becomes flooded with inventive animations and video
projections.
A spotlight follows a butterfly as it flaps to alight on the figure's shoulder; a magician's
white-gloved hands emerge to caress the painting; a cascade of blank canvases crashes
down around it; figures stalk, sullenly, in front of it. The thumping soundtrack and
immersive multimedia experience recalls Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue and Jordan
Wolfson’s Raspberry Poser, and Kantarovsky's piece takes its place alongside these
shamanic feats that seize the viewer.
Among the other standouts to be found in these darkened art caves is Darren Bader’s
first foray into video animation—a loopy, sci-fi cartoon following the artists’s inimitable
absurd yet trenchant logic (in one sequence, a football stadium is put in a ziploc bag and
sent into outer space.) Also here is Ólafur Elíasson’s transportingly simple installation of
a single metal ring that rotates in the middle of the room as a projector illuminates it,
throwing off bands of light that slowly envelop the chamber’s occupants, and Oliver
Payne’s crisp and hip meditation on doubling and originality (with identical settings
showing identical video games played differently).
Below is a good-sized smattering of artworks from the show, followed by more stills
from Kantarovsky's Happy Soul.
Julian von Bismark’s Egocentric System (2015)
OPAVIVARÁ!’s Formosa Decelerator (2014)
Héctor Zamora’s OG-107 Scenery (2012)