“I thought Frieze was a magazine,” says my boyfriend, who is a sensible man and therefore does not work in the arts. I think about trying to explain Frieze week and realise that there is simply no way to describe it with anything resembling dignity: I am going to spend the next five days of my life being a professional reprobate.
Monday 13th October
On the concrete floor of the ICA’s entrance is a single, unexplainable shrimp. I smoke next to it like we’re sharing a break.
I’ve just come from Harlesden High Street’s pop-up with Setareh – our choices were another pop-up at 14 Cavendish or a film screening at the ICA. “14 Cavendish has free food, ICA has free booze,” says Harlesden’s founder Jonny Tanna, who I lambasted in a write-up of London Gallery Weekend last year and has since become one of my favourite art-friends. We exchange the look of two people who know their priorities. “ICA it is.”
Inside, I have a very pleasant conversation with a Frenchwoman about the horrors of our respective nation’s bureaucracies. “She was nice!” I beam, a little condescendingly, at Jonny after she leaves. “It’s always so good to talk to non-art people.”
“That was the director of Frieze, Vic.” I feel a sudden and vicious kinship towards the shrimp.
Tuesday 14th October
I start my day at PAD, which has taken over the entirety of Mayfair’s Berkley Square. There’s art-world rich, and then there’s design-world wealthy: I count 17 Birkins, 11 Chanels and 3 Christie’s tote bags. The only time I’m brave enough to ask the price of a floor lamp I am quoted a number that could buy a lesser Hirst. And yet, I enjoy it immensely: not to get too Michael Fried about it, but there is something refreshing about seeing beautiful things treated as echt Objects, the dinge-an-sich, as Kant would say. A lot of these works I would hate immensely if they were dropped in the middle of David Zwirner and a 2,000-word press release. However, because they are being treated for what they are – skillfully crafted pieces intended to be interacted with rather than be thought about – they make more sense. These works are expensive, as opposed to valuable, because they require an amount of time and talent and material to make that is far, far more easily measured than in contemporary art. It’s an important reminder at this point in the week that form, when freed from the burden of meaning, can still seduce entirely on its own terms.
Next is Minor Attractions, which transforms the Mandrake’s modestly-sized five-star hotel rooms into gallery spaces, sometimes two per room. I, unaware of the delicate etiquette of such things, use one of the hotel bathrooms for its intended purpose. A gallerist catches me on the way out and very politely explains that the en suites are, in fact, part of the exhibition spaces. The shrimp, who has followed me here, bows at yet another lapse in dignity.
#pissgate aside, there are some gorgeous works throughout the hotel: Kristina Õllek’s salt-injected sculptures for Kojo, Eva Dixon’s space-woman mounts for Split Riviera, Madeleine Ruggi’s rubber jungle for Palmer Gallery, Ana Sofia Esteva’s lingual glass-blowing for Banda Municipal, Nick Rose and Jake Vanden Berge’s sutured paintings for Public Notice, Nayan Patel’s text-based collages for NEVEN, Maite de Orbe’s multimedia presentation for miłość, Adam Stamp’s re-appropriated menus for spiritualvessel (this is the room I peed in im sorry im so sorry im so sorry).
To return to PAD and Fried’s concepts of objecthood, it’s astonishing how different works behave when they’re dragged out of the white cube and dropped into a domestic, liminal setting; they have to compete with bedsheets, mirrors, minibar lighting, the soft tyranny of houseplants and home décor. You notice what survives contact with real life and what doesn’t; another reminder of just how much of contemporary art depends on the moral authority of the white wall and the tasteful 50lx Erco flood. Deprived of their usual sanctified habitat, we are left with works that thrive, very successfully in Minor Attraction’s case, in a kind of accidental honesty.
I finish up the evening at Plaster magazine’s party for Keith Coventry’s store takeover and Kristy Chan’s exhibition, which ends at Trisha’s in Soho. A photograph of me snogging writer and poet Sonny Essendine ends up on the front page, but I also spend a big chunk of my evening chatting to Trisha herself – about art, about London, about whether Ava Gardner’s comments about Sinatra’s nineteen pounds had any weight to them. Trisha is honest, kind, funny. So are a lot of the other people here. The shrimp is quiet.
Wednesday 15th October
I am kindly invited by God Save The Scene (ran by Elizabeth Dimitroff and Livvy Bryant) to a dinner at Saatchi Yates, a gallery that I have written repeatedly and rather unkindly about in the past. I am seated next to a breathtakingly beautiful man.
“What do you think of the [current Marina Abramović] show?” he asks.
“Oh, predictably awful.” I reply, far too cheerfully, far too honestly. “I’ve never liked a single show here!”
He pauses. Takes a sip of wine. Looks at me, damn him, kindly.
“Arthur [Yates] is my brother.”
The shrimp sighs; I bludgeon her over the head with more alcohol until she’s quiet (kindly provided by Goodbye Horses, London’s only wine bar). We end up at Hollywood Superstar Review’s show at the Notting Hill Arts Club, where I spend the rest of the night doing what everyone at Frieze eventually does: chainsmoking, bitching (sorry, “gossiping”, no, sorry, “networking”), and asking people for narcotics in roughly equal measure.
Thursday 16th October
I host a Q&A session at Dash the Henge bookstore in Camberwell for rockstar-cum-author Kieran Saint Leonard, where we chat about magic, sex, cocaine. Henry Maguire opens the evening with a serendipitously appropriate extract from his debut novel Ammoniac in which an aspiring contemporary artist can’t figure out why her video work of her receiving cunnilingus from another woman while she paints a bowl of fruits is doing so much better than all her other works. The shrimp purrs.
After this, I wrestle my way into the Gathering + Société party, an event that thinks itself so exclusive that they glue stickers onto my phone camera like Berghain. At the bar I overhear somebody slating my Substack, which I don’t mind, and the size of my nose, which I do, and think about throwing a glass of overpriced Riesling at them Real Housewives style. Brian Sewell got things thrown at him all the time; perhaps it’s time for critics to take the offensive.
I call my godmother in tears on the bus home and she tells me, very firmly, that there are people dying in Gaza and I need to get a goddamn grip. And that my nose is very sexy. She is correct on both counts, of course.
The shrimp, unburdened by the anchors of Substack readership or Eurocentric beauty standards, pats me on the shoulder with one small, forgiving claw.
Friday 17th October
I finally make it to the actual fair. My companion is Pierre d’Alancaisez of Verdurin, who is even meaner than I am and once warned me to “not become one of those art girls who writes about the art world” (advice lovingly ignored). We walk around for exactly five hours, collate some fantastic overheards (“I see Stephen Freidman has gone non-binary”, “even bad artists die”, “if you’re enjoying the art you haven’t paid enough”) and have a very nice time talking about, well, art.
In terms of the thing this is all ostensibly meant to be about, two trends emerge. The first is full-scale figurative works – Zanele Muholi for Southern Guild, Patrick Goddard for Seventeen, Kira Freije for The Approach, Alex Margo Arden for Ginny on Frederick, Enrique López Llamas for LLANO, Simon Lehner for Edel Assanti – five-to-six-foot tall sculptures of people and animals gesturing at embodiment as some final, defensible site of truth. I’m assuming this is subconsciously a response to our rising concerns about AI and the perceived loss of human involvement in the creative act. We may be losing life in our art, these works are saying, but we can still put the human form, the bodily self, back into the artistic Object on a recognisable, realistic and representational scale. I don’t think this is necessarily the most effective response to the looming threat of mechanisation (the artworks that feel most alive aren’t those depicting the body but those built by it; the markmaking of the still-life sketches at 56 Henry, for example). The answer to a lack of humanity isn’t more neo-Cartesian figuration, but more human ability: craftsmanship, care, skill, labour, put-your-pussy-in-ness. PAD, of all places, ends up proving this over Frieze, the rich are afforded the difference between art that looks human and art that feels human.
The second trend I notice is text as texture: Lucia Pescador at Apalazzogallery (God, what a booth, five stars), Liu Ren at Don Gallery, Marlon Mullen and Peter Gallo for Adams and Ollman, San Keum Koh for Baton, João Louro for Galeria Vera Cortês, Henni Alftan for Sprüth Magers, Kenturah Davis for Stephen Freidman all use script as fabric. I’m less sure of what this is saying; perhaps a subliminal reaction to the fact that most language we see today, if not on a screen, functions primarily as an anchor to our aesthetic landscape (advertising on the tube, graffiti on the bus, a Baudrillardian translation of urban signage and semiotics). Maybe the two are connected, maybe I am so gobsmacked by the fact I’ve just paid 27 fucking pounds for a single glass of Ruinart that over-intellectualising an overall rather nondescript fair is the only thing left to do. I steal the glass as both souvenir and act of kleptomaniac resistance (it later shatters in my bag, which probably means something important and devastating, as all art does).
I return to the Mandrake to answer emails and smoke a million cigarettes and run into U-Haul Gallery, freshly imported from New York. The pair, Jack Chase and James Sundquist, have just discovered the fascist charms of English bureaucracy, having originally set up their exhibition – Vladimir Umanetz’s ‘Tina Turner Meets Kurt Gödel’, displayed on the inside of a u-haul truck – on the crossroads outside Frieze, and were promptly reported to the police by a concerned resident of Regent’s Crescent. Bienvenue à Starmer’s Britain, mes amis.
My next stop is the Somerset House Annual General Meeting. I stay for the length of exactly one Whitebox Margarita (delicious; potent) and one performance (dull; frantic) that involves discussing the words here, there, inside, outside with your neighbour (the only other smoker in the courtyard; hot). I am convinced there is good performance art in London. It’s just not here.
Finally, The Toe Rag launch party back at the ICA. The shrimp on the floor of the entrance is gone. Outside Frieze I ran into some of the distributors, who cheerfully told me that as a Sagittarius I should be wearing leather underwear this season. The rest of the evening (d)evolves along much the same line. I adore the team (founder Sophie Barshall wears a glorious latex outfit by Monique Fei, editor Noah Perez lost his favourite jumper at the Notting Hill Arts club on Wednesday), I love the magazine, I hate Sam Kriss, I miss my shrimp.
According to my camera roll and bank account I spend the rest of the night mourning her at the Soho Theatre, followed by Thai food, followed by the Groucho with Tom Willis of Soho Reading Series and Olivia Allen of British Vogue, followed by what appears to be another one million cigarettes with the working girls outside my local on Jamaica Road. Presumably art was mentioned at some point.
Saturday 18th October
I am so disgustingly, animalistically hungover at the Palmer Gallery breakfast that I nearly throw up, which is a shame as it slightly impedes my enjoyment of their sumptuously good Andy Holden and the Grubby Mitts show, ‘Love in the Misanthropocene’. This is not only my favourite show of Frieze, but possibly of the year: a record album as art installation that proves once and for all that post-internet art can be and is good. I burst into tears in front of a projection of a music video for a song whose chorus asks “well well, what’s this? If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions,” because that’s what this entire week has been: one long katzenjammer of a consequence.
My fragile predicament is unhelped by an invitation to writer/artist/chef Jago Rackman’s GREED, a conceptually fantastic affair that unfortunately involves a lot of foodsmells. I barricade myself in the bathroom for ten minutes, take care of my nervous system like a woodland creature preparing the barrow it intends to die beneath, and promise my reflection for the hundredth time this week that I’m going to stop drinking. And smoking. And working in the arts.
By now both my body and soul have given up so I retire to the countryside, like a hysterical Victorian gentlewoman, to be fed something other than tequila and GAIL’s sandwiches by a 6’3” Shropshireman. Said Shropshireman picks me up from the station and I collapse into a shivering mess. “I should have been an accountant.” I snivel pathetically. “Me too.” says my boyfriend, who has to be up at 6 am to actually contribute to society.
I am not breaking new ground by saying that Frieze and everything attached to it is all very silly and fun and up its own arse, that there is no grand message to be gained from watching rich people contribute to a cultural and economic model-system on the verge of collapse, or indeed from reading about 26-year-old art critics getting drunk. But there is a small dignity to this uselessness: the reminder that artistic honesty is often tiny and humiliating, bodily mortification may be forgiven into minded entertainment, and kindness occasionally takes the shape of a small crustacean on a foyer floor. 🦐
