4: Frieze

It feels far away now. I’ve taken a break from writing here for almost a month. Short notes accumulate on my phone but I haven’t taken the time to commit them to a more considered form. London housing has been a nightmare. I spend a significant part of each day combing through spareroom.co.uk and sending messages to people. Most of the time I don’t even receive an answer. When I do, people say they’ve received hundreds of messages and they’ll be in touch. Once in a while someone offers to show me the place and it’s usually overpriced and undesirable. I look back for something to anchor me to Frieze week, where I let myself get swept up in all the excitement and carried around the commercial fray. I land on this:

I arrived late when it was all overly polite gallerists with sharky eyes and confused and insecure collectors wearing ridiculous designer clothing. The dealers doing that magnificent gaslight of pretend care and genteel condescension. The collectors compensatory flexes and flows. Thick clouds of wafting desire and exhausted pleasure centers, milked of their chemicals. Christina Sharpe had just been there. I was sorry I missed it. I’ve never seen so many small Rothkos and the Dyson sculptures felt a bit crammed in the basement. A wall text about water and resistance and a security guard who confided in me he was so tired of standing. It had been 9 hours of standing on his feet and he just wanted to go home. I wandered around trying to sense any perceptual changes in aura or weather.

The most absorbing part of the James Barnor exhibition at Serpentine for me was the interesting subjects from the early years of his beachside studio in Accra. The feeling was informal and playful, almost like a community center, with an endearingly handmade and eccentric mise-en-scene. Much of the later work charts a European influenced trajectory of unremarkable commercial work and photojournalism. The show ends bizarrely with a series of commissions of African models promoting the petrol industry and what looks like a preacher in a suit casting a spell over a group of children in school uniforms. 

I can imagine a different framing and narrative. Instead of forcing a good photographer into the great auteur conventions with a retrospective, this could have been more inclusive, conversational and generous to its subjects and more critically engaged with its historical context.

After the show I walked over to the book shop in the other gallery. The first book I noticed was a collection of pictures about Karl Largerfeld’s cat. I was working myself up into quite the mood when the kind booksellers A and D initiated a conversation that proceeded for the following hour, though many books and subjects and into dinner plans a few weeks later. 

I found myself at the Serpentine a few nights later for a talk with the pavilion architect Summaya Vally, futurist / designer Anan Jain, artist / set designer Es Devlin, MacArthur foundation CEO Andrew Morlet and Hans Ulrich Obrist. I arrived early and sat at a table reading. I was joined by an artist and antiquarian book dealer and we got into a long and pleasurable conversation about art and family. We went for dinner afterwards and she invited me to the fair the following day to see some of the illuminated manuscripts they had brought with them. 

I learned Tosh Bosco was going to do a performance that weekend and so I went back a third time in a week, but a day too early, and bumped into Hans Ulrich and his colleague who graciously invited me to an award ceremony they were hosting. As we walked over, a fashion editor for a Condé Nast publication literally jumped over a fence and joined us, breathlessly describing her art week exploits. As we arrived, a lot of pictures were taken of Hans Ulrich next to logos from European heritage brands I’ve never heard of and we stepped into a crowd of what one might describe as affluent innovators. I got into a conversation with a publisher of very small books after befriending his friend's very small dog. The winner of the design competition was a graphic designer with the ig handle @brohammed who as it turns out shares some mutual friends from New York and he invited me to a party that night with Juliana Huxtable and Kindness.