The Black Market at Frieze

My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. —Isaiah 56:7

 

But you have made it a den of thieves —Jeremiah 7:11

 

I’ve never been comfortable at art fairs, either as an exhibitor or as a visitor. Mainly I find the manic energy created by the presence of so many dealers in such a small space discombobulating—like being in a clown car before the door opens. Very secondarily, I am depressed by how art fairs deform studio practice by their stress on conventional objects and group shows. And thirdly, I am disoriented by the scale of money exchanged in what can be described at least in part as a Ponzi scheme.

Many people say they agree with me, but since we are ruled by the god of convenience—and it at least seems convenient to see all that stuff in one place—it will take something like mandatory body-cavity searches at airport security to keep art people from descending on the next climate-controlled convention center that sends up the bat signal.

I was a soft target for Stephanie Syjuco’s Copystand: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone at the Frieze art fair last month in London. Syjuco hired a team of artists to scout the show and knock off works they liked using cheap materials that could then be sold at low, Low, LOW! prices. Both the production and sales were done at the booth in plain sight. There was an overwhelming sense of play, and it was a congenial palliation from the high-stakes commercial intensity of the other booths. I worked there myself for a few hours, doing my best to knock off a real art dealer, and it was fun.

Syjuco is maybe 5’2” and 100 pounds of intellectual mischief and boundless good will. For years she has made crude versions of high-end design objects out of cheap craft materials that don’t do what they’re supposed to do but resonate with her personally. In her recent Counterfeit Crochet Project, she got more ambitious, farmed out the work and created an alternative distribution system for it by selling the knock-offs through the internet. That’s like mixing Ray Johnson, the father of mail art, an alternative distribution system for the transmission of avant garde ideas, with Sherrie Levine, the maker of glorious fakes.

With Frieze as the backdrop, Copystand laid bare the mechanisms of the black market for luxury goods with an intense clarity and inscribed itself in the tradition of paranoid investigations of originality and authenticity that run through 20^th century art. As a performance, the celebration of cheap copies there in the temple of fine things played at times like a dry as dust passion play of Jesus and the money changers and it was fun to see the international media rush up to get the story.

Because Copystand’s focus on trade-show art as a luxury good seems to strip away its pretense of being avant garde and special, you would think Frieze would do what most other galleries and fairs do when presented with a black market: lock it outside. But Frieze’s decision to place it into the fair context shows how the art world’s capacity for introspection distinguishes it from other kinds of retail. Imagine Gorgio Armani inviting in Jeremy Romani to knock off his clothes and show them on a runway next to his during fashion week.

The art world has long looked at fakes to tell it truths it couldn’t figure out for itself. Richard Pettibone, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine are just a few of the truth tellers in that tradition. Syjuco’s extended this tradition from the object to the distribution system itself.

More cynically, as art fairs mature and fight for market share they have to package themselves not just as sales for collectors but as a larger cultural experience. Museum tie-ins and big-name lecturers like Dave Hickey who like to complain about fairs are common sights. I caught Sylvere Lotringer present a talk about the future of theory in art in which he referred at one point to the fair outside the lecture hall as “problematic.” Like the blob that is capitalism, the fairs keep finding new ways to absorb the voices of counter logic and critique. That usually means giving them approval, jobs and money. Just ask Andrea Fraser.

That’s just a footnote to the success of Syjuco’s project. The pure nerve required to plunk Copystand down in the heart of the so-called real market distinguishes Syjuco as a singular artist. It wasn’t like she had to deal with a lot of negativity. Art collectors are used to laughing at themselves… all the way to the Banksey. But Syjuco was bound to piss some people off, whether they said so or not. In the Guardian, when asked about Syjuco’s project, Gavin Brown of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise said, "I have no reaction. And that is a reaction in itself. My reaction is flat."

Well mine wasn’t. Nor was the reaction of the ubiquitous crowd that teemed around the edge of Syjuco’s booth throughout the show.