on Art Basel 2010

my yin and i went to Art Basel this weekend, determined to spend as little money as humanly possible. this meant that, unlike last year's excursion, we would have to pass on the convention center and the innumerable satellite events that slowly bleed patrons to death at $10 a pop – public art, metered parking and flash galleries were the order of the day:

a flash gallery on Collins Ave... recession has its privileges

but this is beside the point.

the point is that this time everything was different, and it was interesting to watch the mind constantly referring back to what happened last year. memory is a dangerous thing, and only forgetting has a greater capacity for harm:

is it live or is it Memorex?

this piece was one of my favorites because it illustrates this point precisely: magnetic tape and its false promise of fidelity. we record each moment of our lives and pretend not to notice the noise and static sprayed all over them. what if we took a moment just to be still, to listen, to be silent as Chaplin:

can we ever escape the (pop) images of our past?

for example, last year we went alone. this year, we went with friends. one posed with a giant Donnie Darko-esque bunny:

many of these photographs are hers

and the other could barely keep her pants on:

toilets and typewriters... Bukowski comes to mind

can we ever escape the images of our past?

or have our minds been colonized so thoroughly that even our attempts at commentary and satire fall victim to branding?

when does cleverness give way to banality?

can art be political?

on the side of the Days Inn South Beach

can neon educate? can argon organize? can a drop of mercury in a vacuum tube really agitate the change we need?

what is the balance between con/text?

perhaps we need hugs:

and kisses:

will this get us any closer to freedom?

in Little Haiti

are we nothing more than children in the dark? are each of us truly Alice? if we walked in a giant psychedelic world of mushrooms and bounce houses would it make any difference?

the Design District

what about a world of movies and faux trapeze? if we string one idea to another and stretch this thread as far as it will go... would these thoughts in the mind ever equal what one might call a sutra?

Collins Park at night

i think back to the first place we visited, and the sound artist who told me about Laslo Muholy-Nagy and Nam June Paik. we spent ten minutes speaking to one another, and it seems there was more art in that living moment than all the dead objects that followed.

for more on Joe Abbati click here

i had the same experience at the end of the night, as i followed a The Great Vodka River from top to bottom, from source to dispersal, one giant circle leading back upon itself.

"The Great Vodka River" by Fyodir Pavlov-Andreevich

women are dressed in white, wearing ballet shoes and singing in Russian, and my yin and i follow them up and around the exhibit. the LED lights shoot up through the holes in the metal scaffolding and reflect off the floor above. the air is thick with the smell of vodka, and the combination of the shimmering aluminum and chanting voices puts me in a trance-like state. polychromatism meets monotony, and the clanging metallic steps of people walking on the scaffolding intensifies this effect, sporadically syncing in/out with the cadence of the singing.

it is mesmerizing, and the entire trip would have been worth these 10 minutes of simultaneous remembering and forgetting.