a refreshing look at South Florida arts and culture
Albert Hammond, Image: David von Becker
Love in the Afternoon
For whatever reason, the other night when I went to bed, the harmony to The Air That I Breathe (1974) by The Hollies was at my fingertips. In the dark, I tapped the rhythm on the mattress and on my pillow.
Romeo muses over his lady love Juliet just before he gets bad news in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, 1996.
Recently, through an accident of technology absent information other than my taste in general – not shuffle – Jane’s Addiction‘s Classic Girl and Radiohead‘s Talk Show Host played one after the other from the card in my car. It was like when you and your current partner (Radiohead) bump into your former flame (Jane’s Addiction) and you see why you like/d them both, but the flaws in the one make the other… You’re happy in your current situation, and now have critical insights on who you were and what that other relationship meant back in the day.
Both songs hinge on gun violence.
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John Giorno, Prefer Crying in a Limo to Laughing on a Bus, 2015, as seen at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2017 (I prefer driving my own car…)
(T)he price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James Baldwin, The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, 1961
A couple of years ago, I encountered Fredric Jameson’s idea that, too simply put, the worlds we build in science fiction are the worlds we’ve built and will thus inevitably build; science fiction doesn’t predict but rather is the blueprint for the inconceivable present and the subsequent, unavoidable future. For two years, I’ve been bothered by this idea.
Opening night private reception for the Mercantil Collection at Pinta 2017
Like PRIZM’s Mana Building showcase of African Diaspora, Pinta presents Latin American art at a Mana-developed property. And while both fairs feature very strong work, that’s were the comparisons end. At Mana Wynwood, Pinta has the resources to approximate the conditions of traditional art spaces.
Vaughn Spann, My Sweet Sunflower, 2017
PRIZM Art Fair, now in it’s fifth edition, is dedicated to showing the work of Contemporary African Diaspora artists. So, it was my pleasure to make PRIZM‘s opening my first stop this week. My buddy, Tayina who has been volunteering at the fair, raved about the work on view and she’s not wrong – many of PRIZM‘s offerings are diamonds in a rough environment.
There are a couple of things that I do as a practicing artist: I am systematically critical of my own perspective, my goals, and how what I make will ‘be’ in the world; I am leery to the point of skittishness about what ‘art’ means in Western culture and its colonies. My self-monitoring makes me keen to know how others who share my interests – in any field – manifest their perspectives and to what ends. My apprehensions around taste and access and power mean that it is near to impossible for me to have a transcendent moment in any ‘art world’ space, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to as that would mean I’d lost my bearings. And so, every opportunity I get to be with art, I take, even when it’s in a space I absolutely do not trust. Of course, my annual visit to Miami Art Week facilitates the one in the other.
Loni Johnson, Homegoing, Image via New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)
The phrase, ‘what moves at the margins’ has lingered in my mind for the last few days as I’ve thought about what makes NADA Miami different from other Miami Art Week fairs. What Moves at the Margins is the title of a collection of essays by Toni Morrison that gives readers insight into her thinking, and, for serious readers of her work, is essential. For aesthetes – and I mean that in the classical sense – New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) moves at the margins of contemporary art and its market and informs an understanding of both.
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which had looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue T-shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence.
This year, my Miami Art Week plan includes a packed calendar beginning the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5, 2017 when I’ll visit Prizm Art Fair and then head to the Art Miami/Context complex at the former Miami Herald Herald site on Biscayne Bay. I’m interested in the general energy of the fairs I’ll visit and want to focus on one outstanding – knock out, life-changing – piece at each fair.
Each December since 2007,1 my buddy Jason and I have met up for Miami Art Week. We’ve learned a lot in the past 10 years about how to ‘do’ art fairs (perimeter first, then the middle). And, although the bazaar atmosphere can be overwhelming, the week is as a chance for us to quickly take the pulse of all things aesthetic and critical. We’ve never really set an agenda. One year he’ll wander over to DesignMiami, another year I’ll make a point of going to as many boutique fairs as possible, and still other years we’ll spend more time chatting over good food than doing anything else. It’s a circus, to be sure, one that it is increasingly popular to ridicule, but it happens here in South Florida and it’s directly related to things that are important to us, so we go.
For the past two years, other than a few booths here and there at NADA, I’ve most enjoyed Art Basel’s Conversations series and their Film section.