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The best thing I heard at Frieze Art Fair this year was, “Daddy that would look great on our wall!” The father in question looked up, noted it, and moved on to a higher purpose. The worst thing I saw was my own reflection, caught off guard, my tired eyes reflected back at me from Hirst’s beetle and butterfly-covered mirror at the White Cube Gallery. Fortunately for me I had a fresh pair of eyes with me – racing ahead with enthusiasm was my five-year-old son.
Our first stop was the Berlin Esther Schipper Gallery with Pierre Huyghe’s carbon fibre and plastic film flying sculpture suspended over their desk. Inside their white cubicle were two square tanks each containing a rock at the bottom and another suspended. The lime green shirt of my son split into three as he darted behind them and exclaimed “there is a creature!” Something I had failed to register on the barren sandy floor of each piece.
Next we stopped at the Marian Goodman Gallery, due to open in London in 2014, with a row of highly coveted Kentridge sculptures along its supporting wall, already sold out. My son was already off, propelled by the glint of gold on Elmgreen and Dragset’s rocking horse at Victoria Miro and then before I knew it had his hand sunk into a block of concrete in the gallery opposite where the artist’s impression had invited him to do the same. We were chastised and I had to explain that whilst all of these pieces were indeed for sale, we were not allowed to touch.
Behind them was the Marianne Boesky Gallery only showing Ricky Manne’s jaggged oil paintings inspired by a corrupted videotape of his mother. What will my son’s memory of me be? At this point, perhaps from all the stimulation, hunger took over so we stopped for Polenta chips. Not wanting to sit still he jumped off and headed into the back of the fair. Walking past a certain installation with detritus scattered around its centre he announced “That’s not art – that’s a can of coke” much to the amusement of those around.
Then he found Ian Cheng at the Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club from Miami. Grabbing a pair of kinetic binoculars from the white sofa he immersed himself in the virtual landscape of Cheng’s imagination. The artist was enchanted by his intuitive and enthusiastic response – his movements mirrored in the screens behind him – giving us a complete view of the artistic intention. A mother passed and stopped. She was concerned about the screen dependence of this generation and initiated the do we don’t we conversation with the artist who was frankly bored by its obviousness.
You can’t avoid it – so you might as well embrace it and educate them to use it sensibly. From there someone suggested we go to the Temple of Play, past the paintball machine making art on the go. There we met the most emotionally intelligent person I have ever come across, Katriona Beales who instantly connected with my five-year old and sat with him on the floor demonstrating how the emotibox works. On the first panel my son made a “poorly face”, on the second a “cross face” and on the third he created a crying man with a cascade of blue square tears.
Far from being concerned Katriona was delighted with his ability to express a range of emotions – while all I could think about was the conversation we had had on the train that morning. “I was not brave when Pici died mummy, I cried so much,” he had said. “But you needed to cry, we all cried, just because you cry it does not mean that you are not brave.” Sitting there on the floor with him I had a brief encounter with the essence of true expression and wondered whether that is what we are responding to in great art.
Before leaving my son wanted to return to his favourite gallery, with the two square tanks. Darting between them he ran back to me suddenly exclaiming “Mummy the rocks are not held up with anything! That is REAL art!” And he was right, it was. “Can we buy it? Pleeeeeeease?”
by Nico Kos Earle
Photos by Nico Kos Earle