Miami on the Brink
by Steven Kaplan
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From December 4 - 8, 2002, the eyes of the art world turned to Miami for the first edition of Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB). It was organized by the same people who have presented Art Basel in Switzerland each June for the last 33 years, an event which has become an established part of the international art calendar. Miami was the culmination of their search for a warm weather winter location, a place to mount a second annual fair. Originally scheduled to premiere in December 2001, ABMB had been the subject of some controversy when it announced a year’s postponement after the events of September 11. The organizers of ABMB saw the same enviable qualities in Miami that have made it a prime destination for general tourism. Subtropical climate. White sand beaches. Water everywhere. Exotic flora and fauna. An established cultural diaspora of Jewish retirees, Cuban refugees and Latin Americans. A special relationship to New York. A central location that draws upon North and South America as well as Europe. Dramatic architecture, including a world famous Art Deco district in South Beach and the downtown skyline of I.M. Pei, Architectonica, and Bayshore Park. An infrastructure of hotels, clubs and restaurants that gives Miami its special vacation vibe. This would be as attractive to a lawn furniture convention as to a world class fair showcasing the production, display and sale of fine art. In bringing their show to town, the organizers of ABMB also took advantage of the maturation of the art scene in Miami over the past several years. Without this recent maturation, without the growth of museums, cultural institutions and a small circle of avant galleries, without a community of artists whose work transcends decorativeness and regionalism, without enthusiastic local collectors eager to promote their city, and most of all, without a growing confidence within Miami that it could now play a part in the international look and discourse of contemporary art, ABMB would feel like an artificial graft of cosmopolitanism upon a provincial and insular scene. ABMB itself was not the first large international art fair to set up in Miami. That title is held by Art Miami, which had been catering to local audiences for 13 years, and which was scheduled to open, in the very same Convention Center, from January 9 - 13, 2003, a scant month after ABMB folded its tents. Ironically, the Art Miami fair, which for years seemed second rate and provincial, was starting to show more promise, incorporating curated exhibitions and an invitational program of young galleries that were encouraged to showcase “cutting edge” work. Art Miami was growing in sophistication, along with its hometown. But just as it seemed to be hitting its stride, along came Art Basel. Whether the two fairs can coexist – or rather, whether Art Miami can survive in the long shadow of ABMB – remains to be seen. The presence of ABMB raises essential questions about Miami as an art center. The fair challenges the hegemony of Art Chicago and New York’s Armory Show. But can ABMB potentially reach the same status, the same axiomatic position in the art marketplace, as is enjoyed by its parent fair? And how would this stimulate the growth of the local scene during the remaining 51 weeks of the year? Could the presence of ABMB help shape Miami art into a serious player in the international firmament? There is no simple answer to the town/fair dichotomy, but this examination of ABMB will always keep the city and the art community that hosted it clearly in sight. At Art Basel Certainly the twelve months wait did not dim enthusiasm for the fair. ABMB brought out 160 galleries, thousands of collectors, and thirty thousand locals looking for a culture fix, plus august personages such as museum directors, stars of the international art press and academia, curators with portfolio, architects, designers, and many artists, both famous and unknown, local and international. Even Karl Lagerfeld and John Waters appeared briefly for special Art Loves Fashion and Art Loves Film sidebars. There was a lot of love in the air, and also a lot of money, which always helps the love. Sales on the whole were exceedingly brisk, helping to defray the expensive booth rentals, steep union costs, transportation and hotel accommodations that galleries had to assume. The feeding frenzy, starting with the afternoon pre-vernissage, was impressive, even fearsome. Certain booths were stripped bare, by the bachelors even, in a matter of hours. A number of galleries reported having nothing left to sell after two days. Some arranged catalogues on tables just to be able to offer a purchasable commodity. Exhibitors seemed to agree that the organization of the fair was impeccable, and this frenzy of collecting was in fact no accident. ABMB cleverly enlisted the participation of over 50 art museums throughout the world, offering VIP status and in some cases free hotel rooms to interested trustees. Similarly, UBS Paine Weber, the fair’s main sponsor, extended a special invitation to its upper echelon of private banking clients. A large pool of capital was thus assembled in Miami. They were wined, dined and given private transportation to special events. (BMW, an associate sponsor, provided the cars. They also displayed a racing car, inscribed with Jenny Holzer truisms, in the VIP Lounge). The collectors were housed in oceanfront hotels just a few blocks from the Miami Beach Convention Center, and they were encouraged to spend. Within the Convention Center, in addition to the usual spectacle of galleries airing their stables and dealing in secondary market work, there was the Art Statements section, in which 21 galleries (with reduced booth rentals) were each able to showcase a single “emerging” artist. Of particular note here were Candace Breitz, with an installation of Dallas (the soap opera) vignettes on vintage 80s TV sets at Francesca Kaufmann (Milan). It had something to do with received American culture when she was growing up in South Africa. Tim Noble + Sue Webster, at Modern Art (London), contributed another pile of junk in the middle of a dark room that, with the addition of a light source, was magically transformed into their dual silhouettes projected on the rear wall – a punky, insolent Allegory of the Cave. Jason Middlebrook showed a neo-earthwork and associated pieces at Sara Meltzer. Odili Donald Odita had paintings at Florence Lynch. Mr. (that’s right, just Mr.) set up a watercolor studio in the back room of Tonio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo), painting more of his anime influenced, slightly leering depictions of sweet young things. Mark Handforth, an English artist based in Miami, had a hard-edged installation of fluorescent lights and metal at Gavin Brown. Not actually part of Art Statements, but still essentially a one artist booth, was Paul Kasmin’s presentation of new number paintings and sculptures by Robert Indiana, the seventy-something Pop artist who will show at the NY gallery in early 2003. More thematically attuned to its Miami location was Art Positions, featuring 20 galleries who set up shop in shipping containers situated like a cabana village on a nearby beach. The containers (provided by Danzas, a Swiss logistics company that was an associate sponsor of the fair) are the same steel boxes used on freighters to carry, among other things, art. In Art Positions they were augmented with interior hanging walls, lights and air conditioning. A plank boardwalk was laid out between them on the sand, and an outdoor bar set up. The dress code in Miami is pretty laid back, even at museum openings, but here anything went. Michelle Maccarone, who used her container to project an infomercial on her artists, was spotted in a bikini. Lombard Fried featured a salon by LA artist/stylist Mark Bradford, where free hair extensions were available. Andrew Kreps, the NY dealer who is a native son of Miami, assembled a gallery group show. Also in this section were Cohan Leslie and Browne, Vedanta Gallery from Chicago, and what looked like blood on the sand, but was actually an installation of red rubber by David Burrows, at the entrance to f a projects of London. Other Fairs The presence of ABMB led four smaller fairs to open simultaneously and try to share in the marketplace. -scopeMiami took place at the Townhouse, an economy hotel just a block down the beach from Art Positions. It was the brainchild of critic/curator Robert Curcio, Ronald Sosinski of The Proposition , and Alex Hubshman and Peter Surace of Rare. Since Rare also had a container in Art Positions, the proximity proved quite handy for them, and hopefully for other ABMB attendees. The -scope thesis, that each participating gallery would showcase the work of one artist in a hotel room, had previously been presented successfully at the Gershwin Hotel in New York. In Miami, two floors of the Townhouse were occupied by 30 exhibitors, including NY dealers Caren Golden, Michael Lyonswier, Priska Juschka, Paul Rodgers, Cynthia Broan and Irene Nikolai, as well as Muller de Chiara from Berlin and Valerie Cueto from Paris. There was also a project room curated by David Hunt. Several of the -scope exhibitors were second year veterans. They had participated in last year’s FastFwd: Miami hotel fair, quickly organized to fill the vacuum left by ABMB’s no-show in December 2001. Janet Phelps, a FastFwd organizer, also returned this year with Artpoint, installed on two vacant floors of an office building off Lincoln Road, in space donated by Urban Investment Advisors that was near the Convention Center. Her exhibitors were 13 regional artist-run and non-profit spaces from the Southeast, Midwest, Southwest and Pacific Northwest. Four points of the compass; hence the fair’s name. A third fair, Contemporanea, concentrating on Latin American art, was presented in the Coconut Grove Convention Center by Gary Nader, a dealer from Coral Gables who wanted to correct what he saw as a dearth of Latin galleries at ABMB. Finally, NY artist and curator James Fuentes organized Signature Series, a program of 18 artist designed rooms at The Creek, a 50s style motel which is three blocks north of Art Positions on a bend of Indian Creek, just across from the landmark deco building the Helen Mar. As Art Positions always stayed open a bit later than the Convention Center, its beach was often a site for parties, including an opening night fireworks display that signaled the “vanishing” of Annlee, a commercial Japanese animation character purchased by artists Pierre Huyghe (the new Hugo Boss Prize winner) and Phillipe Parreno for use in art projects. This ceremony, featured on the cover of the January 2003 Artforum, was Annlee’s symbolic liberation from her contract. As her image diffused into the night sky over Miami Beach, she became, in essense, available to all. The City and the Fair Collins Park, the site of Art Positions, was no stranger to female simulacra that are available to all. Until recently, it was the most notorious strip of transvestite prostitution in Miami, a place for late night assignations on the beach and drug related switchblade murders, adjacent to a strip of XXX adult theaters on Collins Avenue. These have since been boarded up and replaced by construction sites for new hotels – like the Setai, another ABMB sponsor -- as well as clubs and family-themed restaurants. Nearby is the new home of the Miami Ballet, the current and future locations of the Miami Beach Public Library, and the newly expanded Bass Museum of Art. In a typical scenario, art serves as the stalking horse of real estate, with ABMB providing a particularly effective engine of gentrification. Cooperation between city and fair was also apparent in a program of public art works, curated by James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, and installed throughout town, although largely concentrated near the Convention Center or in the Art Positions/Public Library area six blocks away. The library rotunda was converted, by architectural refabricator/recyclers LO TEK, into a theater for video art. To view the screen from the sloped audience platform, one had to lie down on a black rubberized surface, delineated in white like a human parking space. Thomas Hirschhorn, with his latest installation, Cavemanman, still up at Barbara Gladstone in NY, was also a definite presence in Miami. His Raymond Carver Altar was installed on the library portico; he had work for sale in several booths, and was featured in a number of local private collections. Kay Rosen drolly observed the “friendly” symbiosis between fair and city in her large text banner hung on a façade opposite the library: GO MIAMI/ MI AMIGO. Was she aware of Miamigo, a local upscale gay monthly magazine with a similar name? Other public art included a whirring helicopter sculpture by local wunderkind Robert Chambers, Ghada Amer’s garden of carnivorous plants, and George Condo’s MILES DAVIS sculpture executed in shiny block letters. “The Super Bowl of the Art World” The local press reported assiduously on ABMB. The MiamiHerald, the city’s one daily, with its Spanish edition, El Nuevo Herald, was in fact a co-sponsor. It presaged the fair with a special pullout section on the Sunday before the opening, complete with maps, art listings, profiles of mega-collectors Donald and Mera Rubell and Marty Margulies, who have established warehouse museums for their art, and of gallerist Fredric Snitzer, the only Miami dealer included on the ABMB Selection Committee. Large piles of this pullout were subsequently available at the Herald’s ABMB booth. Several new articles came out each day, with advice for first time collectors, coverage of the parties, museum openings and special events, and personality profiles. (Of course, this had to share space with “Snowstorm Blankets the Northeast”, always a favorite Miami topic, and the Winona Ryder trial.) Samuel Keller, the fair director, was showcased with a front page photo that literally bisected his visage. There was even an article in the travel section on Basel, Miami’s newfound sister city. Ocean Drive, the monthly glossy that covers South Florida culture, fashion, decor and parties, published a special issue for the fair, which included a feature on Miami collectors, favorite recipes from local chefs, yet another profile of Keller, a piece on the preservation of midcentury-modern architecture on the Beach, and a feature on the seven wonders of Miami (which does not seem to include ABMB – yet). Among the many alternative newsprint weeklies, Miami New Times (their Village Voice) weighed in with extensive art listings and a six page “Art Attack” feature. After admitting that ABMB arrived “at a moment when Miami’s indigenous scene is still pre-pubescent,” the article went on to discuss local work viewable during the fair, both on the street and in galleries. Other street corner giveaways, like Antenna and Arte al Dia (with a third profile of Keller – perhaps he should run for mayor) were not left out. Street’s cover that week was a reproduction of a photographic piece by Anthony Goicolea, which floated above the following advisory: “It’s pronounced BAH-ZULL”. Perhaps the local attitude to the art invasion was best summed up by a Sun Post headline that defined the fair in Miami terms: “The Super Bowl of the Art World”. Well, if you come to play, you should bring all your equipment and a good game plan. ABMB did. They made certain that private institutions, as well as real estate interests, clubs and hotels, rose to the occasion. But the level of participation of the local art establishment, and particularly of local collectors, was truly exceptional. ABMB was punctuated not only by museum and gallery openings, but also by VIP access to a number of important, world class collections, and by a great street party in the Design District that stretched for blocks and blocks, incorporating a large number of exhibitions. Museum Openings It started two days before the ABMB vernissage with the Norton Museum in West Palm and the Palm Beach ICA in Lake Worth (both an hour and a half north by car). The ICA, directed by Michael Rush, opened The Smiths: Tony, Kiki, and Seton, curated by Gilbert Brownstone of Paris, plus a video installation by Oliver Herring. On ABMB minus one, the Museum of Contemporary Art of North Miami, directed by Bonnie Clearwater, held an opening bash for its shows. There was a Yoko Ono retrospective, organized by Japan Society, and previously shown at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and the Art Gallery of Ontario; Time Trial, a globally oriented installation by Julian LaVerdiere, with soundtrack by DJ Paul Miller; Miami, a 28 minute cityscape by Sarah Morris, set at the Homestead racetrack, the Fountainebleu hotel, and other low/high cultural icons; and Christian Marclay’s The Sounds of Christmas, which enlisted local DJs for extended turntable performances. Across the street, a strip of North Miami galleries, led by Genaro Ambrosino (who also had a booth at ABMB), held concurrent openings. Clearwater is an early and articulate proponent of Miami’s place in the international art spectrum. A former director of the Lannan Museum in Lake Worth, she has extended familiarity with the South Florida art scene. She often mounts shows that combine local talent with international stars, bridging the gap, and speaking of Miami’s unique voice in the theory and praxis of contemporary art. She has her ear to the ground and is quick to recognize new talent. A scant six months after Martin Oppel, Bhakti Baxter and Tao Rey, recent art school graduates, founded their alternative live/work/exhibition space, The House, in the wynwood section of Miami, they were given a show at MoCA. Clearwater has helped champion a local star system – artists such as Robert Chambers, Luis Gispert, Jose Bedia, Hernan Bas, Dara Friedman, Mark Handforth – who have then gone on to show throughout the world. After the MOCA event, there was a dinner at the palatial Key Biscayne home of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz. He is the Coca Cola bottler for Puerto Rico and a Budweiser distributor. The view from their backyard across the bay is fairly incredible, but somehow dwarfed by the museum-like dimensions of their home and the scope of their collection. It would seem that Rosa has an architect on call to reconfigure additions to her home, so as to accommodate and properly present new acquisitions. Isaac Julien’s double channel video, Vagabondia (2000), is presented in a separate velvet curtained mini-theater. Gabriel Orozco, obviously a favorite, had a large room with over 50 drawings, photographs, a bicycle sculpture and other compositions surrounding the centerpiece: Ping Pond Table (1998), a four-sided table tennis table with a meditative square of water in the middle. The collection is committed to art from the Latin diaspora. Jorge Pardo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jose Bedia, Ana Mendieta, Arturo Herrera and Guillermo Kuitca all have multiple pieces. Gonzalez-Torres has a 1995 billboard mounted, shrinelike, in a small courtyard. Kuitca, a hot artist among Miami collectors, has four canvases dominating a central room. But equally valued are Tracey Emin, Sarah Morris, Sigmar Polke, Peter Doig and Jim Hodges, whose object installations look particularly poignant here. Large muralistic works by Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara are given their own high ceilinged, curved walled room. The ABMB press release indicated that “many of the works in the collection have a strong spiritual content.” One is inclined to discount such claims, but in fact the cumulative emotional force of the collection, as one passes from room to room, is undeniable. The next day was the ABMB vernissage, followed by the grand reopening of the Bass Museum of Art, its original coral stone building incorporated into a new facility designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. The lynchpin of a new cultural district being created around Collins Park, the Bass opened with a retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, who simultaneously had a show up at Robert Miller Gallery in NY and whose work might have just been seen in the Miller booth at the Convention Center. Still, one can never really have too much Kusama, and the Bass show, curated in-house by Mark Ormond, was replete with dot paintings, tuberous sculptures, and some of her newer mirrored pieces. Also at the Bass were paintings by local outsider artist Purvis Young, and a net installation by NY artist Janet Eckelman in the courtyard. On subsequent days, the Miami Art Museum and Wolfsonian-FIU were given their moments in the ABMB spotlight. MAM, located in downtown Miami, and directed by Suzanne Delehanty, presided over a huge group show -- Miami Currents: Linking Collection with Community -- which combined works owned by the museum with loans from private Miami collections. The emphasis was on art of the Western Hemisphere. There were 200 works in all, by 150 artists, ranging from Warhol, Johns and Oldenberg to Damien Hirst, Gary Simmons and Shirin Neshat. Also opening at MAM was a project room by Teresita Fernandez. Within the ornately appointed seven floors of a former storage warehouse in South Beach (where, it is rumored, his mother used to keep her furs), flamboyant collector Mickey Wolfson has created a museum in his own image. Now called the Wolfsonian-FIU, to acknowledge his recent partnership with Florida International University, it is dedicated to the decorative and propaganda arts. One never knows exactly what one will find here; somehow, it always feels like walking into the film The Maltese Falcon. The ABMB audience was able to view posters from the Spanish Civil War, a show of portraits entitled From Emperors to Hoi Polloi, and a special installation by Italian designer Gaetano Pesce. Viewing the Collections Other collectors, aside from Wolfson and Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, also opened their doors for ABMB. Dennis and Debra Scholl, who divide their time between Aspen and their bayside home on Dilido Island off the Venetian Causeway, have a world class collection of photography and video, recently expanding into sculpture and drawing, that is re-hung annually by a guest curator. This year, the curator was Rochelle Steiner from the Serpentine Gallery in London. Immediately visible in the foyer was a panoramic Andreas Gursky and two Candida Hofers. In the den: a Stan Douglas multipanel piece, a Paul Pfeiffer video, and a furniture sculpture by local artist Bert Rodriguez. Various hallways were filled with photography by Rineke Dijkstra, Malerie Marder, Anna Gaskell, Naomi Fisher, Richard Billingham, Matthew Barney and Cooper (a director of the local non-profit gallery Locust Projects). The living room contained a large multipanel Olafur Eliasson photographic work plus one of his optical sculptures, a Doug Aitken panoramic view of Los Angeles, and two Dan Graham pieces. The adjoining Florida Room held Revised Negotiation Screen (2001), a green and ocher translucent room divider by Liam Gillick, and a Jason Dodge sculpture. Cityscapes in the Dining Room: two Thomas Struths and a Thomas Demand. Upstairs in the Master Bedroom were Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, John Bock, Douglas Gordon and a Janine Antoni. There was more. The Scholls own about 200 works, more than can be exhibited in their home. Their collection is scheduled to travel, as a show entitled Imperfect Innocence, first to the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore in January 2003, and then to the Palm Beach ICA in April. Ruth and Richard Shack opened their two story penthouse high above Brickell Avenue, showing off a collection that includes William Kentridge, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Jose Bedia and Willie Cole. Monica and Javier Mora welcomed guests to their house in North Miami, revealing a concentration in Latin American art, from anonymous pre-Columbian pieces through to Gego, Ernesto Neto, Gabriel Orozco and Tina Modotti, plus contemporary work from Mona Hatoum, Olafur Eliasson and Jim Hodges. Conspicuously not opening their homes to ABMB were the Rubells and Marty Margulies. They didn’t need to, after all, because they had each established museums in the Miami warehouse district to house their collections. These were open to the public during the run of the fair. I had seen these collections several times on previous trips to Miami, but since new art is always being purchased and the rooms re-hung, each new viewing provides its own rewards. The Warehouse Museums The Rubell Family Collection (RFC) was established in 1996 in a two story, 30,000 square foot former DEA drug impound on NW 29th Street near Miami Avenue. The warehouse, with its heavy concrete construction and decorative, vertically paneled façade, has become a bit of a destination, encompassing over twenty years of acquisitions by Donald and Mera Rubell, their daughter Jennifer, son Jason, and his wife Michelle. Donald is a former Upper East Side gynecologist, but the family has also done well in real estate, and currently presides over a hotel mini-empire, with the Albion and Greenview on South Beach off Lincoln Road, the Beach House up in Surfside, and a new hotel in Washington D.C. It is rumored that Mera was the first to whisper those four fateful words into Sam Keller’s ear, “Art Basel Miami Beach”, which got the whole ball rolling. Mark Coetzee, the recently appointed curator of the RFC, has done a fine job displaying the work to advantage and making interesting thematic connections. In the main room downstairs, the huge multipaneled Gilbert and George remains in place, sharing the walls with paintings by Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe. Richard Long and Carl Andre sculptures are on the floor, interestingly combined with an arc of unusual, larger-than-life gum drop sculptures by Mark Handforth. Also on the ground floor is a room with two corrugated carton house sculptures by Thomas Hirschhorn, and an unavoidable Maurizio Cattelan (a puppet of the artist lynched in its Joseph Beuys felt suit). There is also a full room of Gregor Schneider’s architectural sculptures and musings – perhaps the only room of its kind in this country -- fresh from his prizewinning 2001 Venice Biennale pavilion. A large Damien Hirst glass display case full of surgical instruments retains its position at the top of the stairs. Also still in place on the second floor is a room of early Jeff Koons vacuum cleaners, and the Cady Noland Budweiser/cyclone fence installation from the 1995 Whitney Biennial that forms an entrance to the RFC offices. A room of paintings by Cecily Brown, David Salle, Lisa Yuskavage and Chris Ofili is accented by a Jake and Dinos Chapman sculpture. There are Thomas Ruff porno photos that he took off the web and then over pixelled (these have replaced his portraits of Donald, Mera and Jason, now apparently in storage). Also a room of work by Japanese artists Yoshitomo Nara, Tomoko Suzuki, Yutaka Sone, and Takashi Murakami, the latter with a large four panel wall painting and mushroom sculptures. Paintings from Marlene Dumas, a Metro Pictures room (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley) and photography by Thomas Demand and the Bechers are also on display. The newest acquisitions, in addition to Schneider, are sculptures by Jason Meadows and Gary Webb, a video room by Anri Sala of Albania (another hit from Venice 2001), paintings by Hernan Bas, and Big Hunt, a five panel, b/w DVD projection from LA artist Catherine Sullivan, who will be showing at Metro in early 2003. Marty Margulies opened his Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in early 1999, on NW 27th Street and 5th Avenue, eight long blocks from the Rubells, and in the shadow of the I-95 superhighway. A 37,000 square foot space, it was immediately identifiable because of two Thomas Ruff portraits, blown up and reprinted on weatherproof material, that were hung on the blank façade facing the highway. They are still there, around the corner from the main entrance. An additional 10,000 feet of a contiguous warehouse was annexed last year, and further expansions are being considered. Katherine Hind is the curator of the collection. Margulies is a real estate developer, responsible for Grove Isle (where he used to live) and the Grand Bay on Key Biscayne (where he currently resides). His personal collection includes invaluable Rothkos, Stellas and a good amount of outdoor sculpture. But that is only his first collection, before he decided to concentrate on photography, video and installation, which defines the work at the Warehouse. There is an awesome quantity of art on display here, a reported 12,000 works. Rooms full of contemporary German photography: the Bechers, Gursky, Ruff, Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand. Lots of American b/w vernacular photography. Plus William Eggleston, the Andres Serrano KKK photos, and work by Fred Wilson. Recent European portraiture by Bernhard Prinz, Jitka Hanslova and Albrecht Tubke. Doug Aitken’s huge lightbox of the Los Angeles cityscape. Work by Vik Muniz, Rineke Dijkstra, Justine Kurland, and Martin Kersels. Installed on the ceiling and dominating the space is the enormous hanging teats sculpture by Ernesto Neto, last seen at the Venice Biennale. Nearby is another Neto, and two corrugated carton doll house sculptures by Hirschhorn. Other sculptures are by Sara Sze, John Bock, Antony Gormley, Marjetica Potrc, Franz West and Jason Rhoades. There is a mezzanine divided into viewing rooms for the video and film work of Vanessa Beecroft, Tony Oursler, Fischli-Weiss, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Spencer Tunick. And there is a special installation by Olafur Eliasson: the multiple mirrored corridor piece from his last show at Tonya Bonakdar in NY, remounted in an alcove created between the two abutting warehouses, open to the sky, and reached by a short flight of stairs. Craig Robins, Dacra, and Art Loves Design Craig Robins, a Miami native, is a second generation real estate developer. (His father was, reportedly, one of the powers behind the Fountainebleu hotel. You really can’t get more Miami than that.) He founded his company, Dacra, in 1987, and is currently involved in two main projects. One is Aqua, on Allison Island in North Beach, a luxury residential development going up on the site of the former St. Francis Hospital. They are still breaking ground and selling properties. Then there is Dacra’s long range interest, the Design District, twenty square blocks centering on NE 2nd Avenue and 40th Street, a neighborhood with a concentration of furniture and design showrooms as well as art galleries. Think DUMBO but shorter and with more plate glass: big, square concrete buildings, some a block wide, with multiple entrances. Dacra owns more than a few. Robins and his wife Ivelin, a former Cuban model, have assembled a large and growing collection, with the advice of his cousin David Ross (former director of the Whitney and SF MOMA, and currently heading the burgeoning art center in Beacon) and of NY dealer Jack Tilton. Nicole Eisenmann is a particular favorite, as are Guillermo Kuitca, Richard Tuttle, John Baldessari, David Hammons, Vik Muniz, Eberhard Havekost, Chris Johanson, Janine Antoni, and Cesar Trasobares. This is the Dacra collection, hanging in their main offices off Lincoln Road, which was part of the ABMB tour. Other work, by Sean Mellyn, Patty Chang, Albert Oehlen, Franz Ackermann, Kai Altoff, Carlos Alfonso and Rirkrit Tiravanija, could be viewed in various Dacra spaces around the Design District. Being able to give your collection room to breathe is one of the fringe benefits of owning lots of buildings. Craig and Ivelin were decidedly the couple of the moment, featured not only in the Ocean Drive article on local collectors, but also on the cover of the Spanish language Miami Monthly. It must be love, judging from their smoldering looks, but also from the names of two proposed streets on the Aqua blueprint: Ivelin Drive and Ivelin Way. Public art pieces by Tuttle and Kuitca are also slated for Aqua. Robins is a patron of public art as well as a collector. He had previously commissioned outdoor work by Argentine artists Rosa Marquardt and Roberto Behar, and helped raise funds for their new project in the Design District: Kids, twin 35 foot pedestals surmounted by eight foot tall figures of a boy and a girl, which rise from the courtyard of the High School of Design and Architecture, and are visible from the 195 overpass, the elevated highway that services the airport. Robins threw a couple of parties at the Aqua construction site to focus attention on the project, but his main focus during ABMB was in cooperation with their Art Loves Design party. This was the fair’s most visible valentine to the city, an extended street party that took over the neighborhood and backed traffic up all the way to the causeway. There were scores of gallery openings, special exhibitions, performances, food and drink. The main event, on the second floor of the Moore Building at 4040 NE 2nd Avenue (a Dacra property) was Inter.Play, a show of 25 artists organized by Patrick Charpenel and Silvia Karman Cubiñá, with sponsorship by Dacra, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Mexican mega-collector Eugenio Lopez of JUMEX, and others. Inter.Play was interesting both for what it was – a loosely themed group exhibition with high and low points -- and what it hoped to be – a statement of a Miami, or pan-Miami, aesthetic. International stars like Francis Alys (represented by a hermetic video in a separate room) and Daniela Rossell (photographs from the Ricas Y Famosas series depicting the excesses of nouveau riche vulgarity) were flown up from Mexico. Olav Westphalen, in town as part of the Maccarone entourage, contributed three archly semiotic signpost drawings. Paul Pfeiffer showed a small screen video (of the Ali-Liston fight, with the boxers digitally removed). Javier Cambre, an artist from Puerto Rico, now based in Brooklyn, who was in the last Whitney Biennial, contributed an intriguing wooden construction. Anthony Goicolea showed one of his schoolboys-in-distress process photographs, multiple images of himself dressed up in academy drag. Miami is a town where Spanish, rather than English, is the essential language of the street, of commerce, and of culture, so the contributions from Mexico and Latin America in Inter.Play were to be expected: Jose Dávila, Quisqueya Henriquez, C.I.G. Lang, Fernando Ortega, Pedro Reyes, and Sofia Táboas. There was also work from well known local artists. Dara Friedman contributed Wild Dog, a video of stray mutts wandering around the Miami hinterland. Luis Gispert, another alumnus of the Whitney Biennial, was using his familiar icon of girls dressed up as cheerleaders. The one in Block Watching was blonde, wore lots of bling bling, and lip synched to a car alarm. Jason Hedges showed Untitled Esthetic Experience #6 (Cocoa), a bowl of chocolate pieces that, as gather art, was reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. John Espinosa showed sculptures of quadrupeds shooting bolts of lightning into each other’s eyes. The look of the exhibition was advanced, international, cool, conceptual. Reference was made to commodity, to identity, to sexuality, to received culture, to the embrace of kitsch and the media, to the conflation of design and art, to the breaking down of barriers and labels. It was a survey show that would have been equally at home in NY. Which is not to patronize the curators, who should always be encouraged, but rather to acknowledge a growing realization that by now we all have computers, we all go online, and we can all see what sort of art is rewarded with critical discourse and curatorial attention, whether we live in NY, Miami, Chicago, Houston, San Juan, Buenos Aires or Bogota. Inter.Play adhered to that look, and as such indicated that Miami was high on the learning curve. The Galleries There was a lot to see during that very busy night of Art Loves Real Estate. Pardon: Art Loves Design. Kevin Bruk Gallery, at NE 39th Street and 1st Avenue, opened a group show of abstract painting named for a Neil Young song, Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere. It was a smart, attractive show, the kind that Bruk likes to mount, with lots of color and NY energy: paintings by Jay Davis, Fabian Marcaccio, Alex Ross, Blake Rayne, Cameron Martin and Ed Ruscha. Just next door, at Daniel Azoulay Gallery, photographer David Levinthal showed sexy Polaroids of Barbie dolls, some of them caught in flagrante delicto. A former fashion photographer, Azoulay remains committed to exploring the medium as a gallerist. Kenny Schachter of Rove brought a group show to the Jalan Jalan showroom at 3921 NE 2nd Avenue that included Lisa Ruyter, Elke Krystufek, Dan Asher, Graham Gillmore, Donald Baechler and Ilona Rich. In other words, work from his stable of artists, his personal collection, and his wife. Two doors down, Brazilian dealer Frederico Seve of NY’s Latin Collector brought his gallery program to a large temporary space, including work by Helio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Roberto Matta, Cesar Paternosto and Cecilia Vicuna. Bernice Steinbaum Gallery was once on Greene Street in SoHo. She moved down to Miami in 2000, and is now housed in a large two story building at 3550 N Miami Avenue, technically just out of the Design District. She was one of four Miami dealers with a booth at ABMB, and also had a show in the gallery by Hong Liu, a Chinese American artist from California. South of the Design District, and east of the Margulies and Rubell warehouses, is a neighborhood called wynwood, where modest one and two story homes, built in the 30s and 40s, share the streets with garages and light industry. As the name might imply, wynwood fronts on Biscayne Bay, and from certain spots one can see across to Miami Beach. It was a sleepy, rundown hamlet, ignored for years because of its proximity to Overtown, a black inner city area. Artists and galleries started moving in and a scene began, which was augmented by energy seeping down from the Design District. But speculators have been buying up property, and while artists still live and work there, the handwriting is clearly on the wall. Everyone can envision the bungalows and two story garden apartment buildings being torn down to make way for high rise condos up and down Biscayne Boulevard. Meanwhile, art still lives in wynwood. The House, at 2330 NE 4th Avenue, had a show up during ABMB called meta-, certainly a buzzword of the moment. The show included Martin Oppel, Tom Scicluna, Daniel Arsham, Jason Hedges, Natalia Benedetti, and Montana Cherney. Hedges showed a series of works on paper, each one stained by wine and then titled for the various vintages – a nice conceptual trope, combining insolence with connoisseurship. In the accompanying brochure, Arsham spoke of significance and memory, and likened the history of The House to that of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The House is three years old. Locust Projects, an artist-run, non-profit space, is located nearby at 105 NW 23rd Street, and had a show of Phil Collins, an Irish artist who showed a mural-sized photograph of a young woman raising her shirt and looking down at her breasts, a series of screen tests of young Iraqis, and a video about senior citizens in Palm Beach who accidentally pulled the lever for Pat Buchanan. Collins shows with Maccarone in NY. In the project room was another Luis Gispert video of a cheerleader, this one giving lip service to an obscene rap by the Wu-Tang Clan. One block north, Dorsch Gallery (143 and 151 NW 24th Street) had a series of shows. In the warehouse space was Lama Norlha, huge, wavy lined paintings by Robert Miller, the NY dealer who lives and works in Miami. In the one story house next door, also part of the gallery, is an installation by the two man collaborative Guerra de la Paz. Brook Dorsch bought both buildings and moved his operations to the neighborhood several years ago. He also lives in the back, and has a large yard available for outdoor installations and performances. Aside from the two gallery areas already discussed – the Design District/wynwood and the strip opposite MoCA in North Miami -- there are also spaces in Coral Gables and the southwest. Fredric Snitzer and Diana Lowenstein share a building at 3080 SW 38th Court. Snitzer teaches at the New World School of the Arts in downtown Miami, and he was showing Hernan Bas during ABMB. A graduate of New World, who has also shown at MoCA. Bas adds red paint splatters to b/w photographs of young men to simulate blood, and then cuts in alchemical symbols such as pentagrams. In the project room are biomorphic styrofoam sculptures by NY artist David Humphrey. Snitzer also represents Naomi Fisher and Jose Bedia. Next door at Lowenstein is a large room installation by Argentinian artist Mauro Machado. Both Snitzer and Lowenstein had booths at ABMB. Obviously things are not always so busy in Miami. The presence of the Art Basel fair concentrated a lot of activity, and maintained a breathless pace. But there is certainly a viable and growing scene in the museums, galleries, and alternative spaces. More and more Miami artists who have achieved international reputations choose to remain there, rather than moving to New York or Europe. There is also an influential handful of collectors, curators and museum directors who link the city with the world, buying world class art and bringing essential exhibitions to the attention of the community. And, of course, Art Basel plans to return in a year. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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