A Marxist critic walks into an art fair, and walks out a collector. Last week in Marseille, I lived this one-liner. The scene was the resplendent rooftop of Friche la Belle de Mai, the postindustrial complex that hosts Art-o-rama, the city’s upstart art fair. I’d just left Zoe Williams’s Fondant—a feature-exhibition organized as part of the fair—in which a lavish bed was bathed in crepuscular light and flanked by playful, genitalia-evoking pieces of ceramic furniture. On the horizon, the Mediterranean appeared as a salty blue shard. Upon buying a drink, I was asked to pay an extra euro. Assuming it was a deposit for the decorated plastic cup in my hand, I obliged. Later, while attempting to retrieve my euro, I learned that I’d been mistaken. “You bought it,” the young bartender told me. “Bought what?” I asked. “The cup,” he replied. “It’s an artwork by Miss Williams.”
Whoever has that cup now, I hope they’re relishing a cocktail infused with the dancing flavors of polyurethane and high art. I left it behind, instead returning to Berlin with a few photographs of artworks that I found interesting—or at least curious. Art-o-rama was set in a big building crammed with artworks, presided over by impeccably friendly gallery staff capably wooing curators and critics. Despite my best efforts to evade their seductions, my sympathy was captured while visiting Grant Wahlquist Gallery of Portland, Maine, which was presenting paintings of domestic interiors by Henri Paul Broyard. There I overheard a conversation between a gallery salesman and a visitor who had plans to visit my home country. “All you have to know,” he told her, “is that Canadians are the nicest people on Earth. They can’t help it.” Suddenly Broyard’s works, which until that point had themselves seemed polite to a fault, started growing on me.
The first Art-o-rama image on my phone shows a work by Masha Silchenko, represented by the Warsaw gallery Import Export. On a small hunk of ceramic, floppy at its top edge and glazed creamy white, two human eyes stare out, one dripping a small curtain of blue glaze, like tears. Here is cool pathos pleasantly mixed with the innate warmth of earthenware. Nearby, London’s Public Gallery played the kitty card. In Nils Alix Tabeling’s painting Le Gros Chat (2023), a mother cat rolls around with her suckling brood. Rendered in wispy strokes of oil paint on linen, the feline family are beige ghosts. Only the mother’s vulva is solidly filled in—a ruby-colored punctum. Stringy material was stuffed between the linen support and its wooden frame, oddly abject, like knitting wool spun from cat hair.
More fleshy body parts seemed to be on display over at New York’s Bibeau Krueger, in sculptures from Haena Yoo. Yoo’s big wads of mysterious crimson and yellow material, frozen in resin the color of dried blood, brought to mind flayed human flesh. This association was nudged along by a small plastic object embedded in the muscly mass, a kind of business card bearing a female human silhouette and the phrase “About Health, Healing, and Wellness.” Plastic tubes, filled with what looked like synthetic blood, hung down from the objects and draped over meat hooks. A grisly, hybrid take on the themes of self-care and abjection—both have increasingly preoccupied contemporary artists in recent years—Yoo’s sculptures got under my skin in multiple senses. Convincing in their corporeality, they also felt a bit too in-the-know, a bit too of their time.
Then again, given how the stylistic landscape of contemporary art often feels like a tapestry of pastiches these days, it’s unclear what role originality should still play in adjudicating art. It’s at least plausible that a creative output divorced from a thirst for novelty might be rooted in some deeper human need. An opportunity to test out this line of argument appeared in Aidan Duffy’s presentation for South Parade, London. Among my favorite works at the fair, Duffy’s sculptures embody what could be called the urban tumbleweed aesthetic. They feature tangles of miscellaneous and decidedly down-quality materials, like what you’d get if you sent a blindfolded child into a flea market with a glue gun. In one sculpture, faux-jeweled necklaces, glossy-fuchsia textile, and purple strings attached to plastic ice cubes dangled from an armature made from wood, thin metal tubes, and green-tinted resin.
Coincidentally and ironically, my trip to Art-o-rama overlapped with my reading of Kristin Ross’s 2015 book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. To read about a defining moment in Communist history in the context of an art fair might seem perverse. As the default infrastructure for art within capitalism, the art market is a regrettable spectacle of 1 percent consumption, which we put up with in lieu of a societal model capable of showing even a modicum of respect for life on Earth. All the same, Ross’s book was an interesting lens through which to view Art-o-rama. The members of the Paris Commune’s Artistic Federation, she explains, “exhibited no concern whatsoever over what was to be counted as a work of art, nor over any aesthetic criteria for judging the worthiness of artisanal product.”1 All that mattered to them was that all people enjoyed the right to work creatively, alongside whatever other jobs they might do.
Before, I might’ve been tempted to argue that the chaotic miscellany and abundant creative pleasure at Art-o-rama reflects something specific about the money-driven nature of the art market—a buffet of artistic delights, deracinated from critical standards and context. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe there’s something worth defending in this shambolic variety-show effect, even as the market it serves has all the integrity of a disposable plastic cup.
Art-o-rama, Marseille
from August 31 to September 3, 2023
Mitch Speed is a Berlin-based writer. His study of Mark Leckey’s video artwork Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) was published by Afterall in 2019 as part of their One Work series. He has written criticism for Camera Austria, frieze, Mousse, Momus, Border Crossings, Spike, e-flux, Artforum, and others. A collection of his essays is forthcoming from Brick Press.