Gabriel Coxhead
www.bassmuseum.org
As regular readers of contemporary will
already know, Art Basel Miami Beach was one of the economic victims of the
events following September 11. Fortunately, from the point of view of those
who had already booked tickets, the special week of museum openings, gallery
private views, warehouse exhibitions, artists’ talks and performances, tours
of private collections, and art world parties that was meant to coincide
with the new fair went ahead as planned.
Also fortunately, a few of the exhibitions were really excellent. The Vito
Acconci retrospective at the Miami Museum of Art, which focused on the
artist’s and the Acconci Studio’s post-seventies output, managed to permeate
the conceptual membrane that separates the realms of art, design and
architecture. In a vacant building in the trendy Design District, the group
show Humid – the city’s riposte to Freeze, perhaps – presented a current
generation of Miami artists. But if Humid was an attempt to define the scene
or aesthetic of young Miami art, the inclusion of a few international
artists – Nick Relph and Oliver Payne from London, for example – was enough
to expand the context, and any sense of a Miami sensibility was subsumed by
the style of young, global conceptualism.
The exhibition globe>miami<island, at the recently refurbished Bass Museum
in Miami Beach, was similar to both the Acconci retrospective and Humid: it
blurred the conceptual categories in which art resides and attempted a local
focus. The broadness of intent of globe>miami<
island – to exhibit artists whose work bore ‘some relationship to Miami’ –
was matched by the sheer volume of art on display; ninety works by over
sixty artists. A few names were familiar: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who was
represented by one of his silver-plated linked rings; or Janine Antoni,
whose Saddle (2000) – rawhide dried in the shape of the artist on all fours
– made a recent Art in America cover. Most of the artists, however, were
relatively unknown.
The nature of each artist’s ‘relationship to Miami’ varied. Some artists
were born there. Some moved there. Some studied there. Some – like
Gonzalez-Torres – simply spent time there, perhaps for the city’s infamous
gay scene. Most obviously, there were pieces that were rooted in the
physical environment of the region. Bhakti Baxter referenced native botany
by arranging hundreds of twigs from the Poinciana tree – indigenous to
Florida – as if they were sprouting from the museum itself. Naomi Fisher’s
You Can’t Fight Mutha Nature series (1997-1998) consisted of posed
photographs of female erotic encounters in, and with, tropical flora. In
Untitled (Red Skirt), for instance, the reaching tendrils of a plant shoot
under and up a woman’s skirt – the notion of man’s rape of nature, reversed
and regendered.
A strategy more in evidence was the exploration of Miami’s culture. The work
of José Bedia, born in Havana and living in Miami, was reminiscent of David
Hammons’ work, both in its funky look and appropriation of found objects,
and also in its reference to folk beliefs and customs. To Bomb My Own People
(2001), a site-specific installation, consisted of a massive, sharply cut,
wooden slab that jutted out at right angles from the wall. Fastened with
loops of chain like rigging, it carried echoes of the makeshift rafts that
are used to smuggle desperate Cubans into Florida. Covering this raft-like
structure were various packaged foods – soft drinks, hot sauces, biscuits,
sweets – all of which were named after various deities from the
African-derived Cuban religious tradition of Santeria. On the wall behind
the platform was painted a vast, dark, scribbled diagram; presumably also of
mystical significance.
Such Africanist beliefs also provide the context in which to read The Power
of Legba (2001), a sculpture by Charo Oquet, a Dominican artist resident in
Miami. Spilling from the base of a huge, tapering, mountain-shaped
structure, garish and multi-coloured, were hundreds of naked dolls and
stuffed toys, while on the summit was perched a stuffed cockerel; an animal
used in many traditional African-American rituals. Both Oquet’s invocation
of Legba – one of several New World names for a Yoruba god, the divine
trickster – and Bedia’s raft-altar functioned as kinds of vessel. Their
works navigated cultural crossings and transported the viewer between
different worlds, different ways of using material objects to achieve some
kind of transcendence; from Africa to the Americas, from religion to
commerce.
Other pieces displayed an interest in popular art forms. With his Musical
Marionettes (1985-2001), Pablo Cano assembled musicians and dancers of
different sizes from scrap metal and bits of rubbish. This piece was
concerned more with ingenuity of construction and delight in craft than with
concept, and successfully blurred the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘naive’
art.
Though invested with a more overtly political agenda, Elian in Wonderland
(1972-2001), by César Trasobares, also destabilised any self-contained
notion of ‘art’. Like some parallel version of Jeremy Deller’s archiving of
British folk art, the installation was the result of almost thirty years
spent collecting hundreds of objects from Miami’s large right-wing, Cuban
ex-pat community. This period culminated in what was the focus of the
collection: the furore surrounding the repatriation of Elian Gonzalez.
Amongst the wall-pinned photographs of protesters, anti-communist banners,
and T-shirts proclaiming Janet Reno’s thralldom to Castro, were cabinets
containing home-made crucifixes, ugly Clinton caricature dolls, and
mutilated Action-Man figures dressed in Nazi uniforms with Stars-and-Stripes
patches. Trasobares’s curatorial project negotiated a fine line between
appreciation for these cultural artefacts and censure of the lunatic
sentiments behind them.
Rather than trying to locate the essence of a Miami aesthetic, globe>miami<island
represented the city as a nodal point through which different discourses –
ethnic, gendered, sexual, political and artistic – constantly flow. The
jumbled, salon-like display of works refuted the very notion of a grand or
fixed interpretation, but rather allowed viewers to pick their own way
through the exhibition, to create their own narratives.
It would have been interesting to see how a show like this would have
compared to an international art fair. Probably, globe>miami<island would
have come off as a funky salon-des-refusés, a reminder that there is a vast
amount of good and thought-provoking art that barely registers on the global
contemporary scene.
globe>miami<island was at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, 13 December – 3 February 2002.