艺术盛宴 | 回顾 Art Basel 的传奇历史与精彩瞬间

It’s beginning to look a lot like... Art Basel Miami Beach (2-4 December 2021). Marking its first return in two years, we look back on the most iconic, defining and controversial moments in the history of the world’s mega fair

Monster Chetwynd, Tears, Messeplatz 2020. © Art Basel

Art Basel was founded in 1970 by Basel gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt to rival its neighbouring Art Cologne. The idea was to lure a new wave of collectors and enthusiasts in the postwar consumer society, rich in time, money and new means of global communication.

But it wasn’t just rarified, deep-pocketed Europeans the fair drew in, it also attracted tyro collectors with a market of accessible editions. In its inaugural year, the Basel fair – then titled succinctly ‘Art’ – attracted 16,000 visitors. By 2019, under the stewardship of global director Marc Spiegler, the fair secured 93,000 visitors over six days, presenting 290 galleries from 35 countries.

Art Basel has spent the last 50 years redefining what an art fair means, and what an art fair can be. Whether it’s the launch of its Art Unlimited platform (which offered life beyond the booth), or anchoring itself as a global art mega-fair with annual Art Basel Miami Beach, Basel and Hong Kong events.

Beyond a marketplace for the well-heeled, a magnet for celebrities, a hotbed for lavish parties and fertile ground for people watching, Art Basel has become a cultural incubator for some of the most radical and iconic events in the history of contemporary art.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Art Basel Miami Beach 2021 (2-4 December 2021), so we take the opportunity to reflect on the unforgettable moments that have defined the fair’s history.

Monster Chetwynd played ball on Art Basel’s Messeplatz

At Art Basel 2021, British artist Monster Chetwynd made quite the entrance. Taking to the Messeplatz near the fair entry point, performers clad in glamorous, sequin-studded costumes rolled in and danced around giant transparent zorbs directed by the artist’s choreography. This extraterrestrial performance, titled Tears, was inspired by Salvador Dalí’s bejewelled crying eye timepiece and made for a poetic, absurd and jaw-dropping prologue to Art Basel’s 2021 edition.

Maurizio Cattelan’s duct tape-meets-banana drama

Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, taped to the booth wall of Perrotin gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2019. © Art Basel

In 2019, it had been a while since the art world had given its community an electric shock. Just as the dust was settling (in retrospect, the calm before an earth-rattling storm), Maurizio Cattelan took the lull as an opportunity to strike. Created in an edition of three, his Comedian consisted of a fresh – if lightly bruised – solitary banana taped to Perrotin gallery’s booth wall with a piece of metallic duct tape. It was a minimal composition – which later inspired a series of T-shirts – using a classic comedy device to comment on global trade. Or maybe not; as Cattelan put it, ‘The banana is supposed to be a banana’.

An Art Basel visitor gets a closer look at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, which was subsequently eaten by Georgian performance artist David Datuna. © Art Basel

In another dramatic plot twist, Georgian performance artist David Datuna ate the piece, calling his post-sale intervention Hungry Artist. This was not the first time Cattelan had harnessed this lucrative combination of tape, walls and organic matter. Twenty years previously, the artist adhered his gallerist, Massimo de Carlo, to his gallery wall in Milan in a web of electrical tape. De Carlo, like the banana, found himself at the complete mercy of the artist in a piece that gave new meaning to the notion of ‘bonding’.

Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist got a room, well 14 Rooms

14 Rooms, a group piece at Art Basel (Basel) 2014, featuring work by 14 international artists and organised by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist. © Art Basel

14 Rooms, to some extent, was what it said on the tin. For the live artwork, curatorial powerhouses Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist invited 14 international artists to each ‘activate’ a room, examining the relationship between space, time, and physicality. But, as one might imagine, there was a twist: each artwork’s ‘material’ was a human being.

Marina Abramović, Luminosity (1997). Part of 14 Rooms, Art Basel, 2014. Presented by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel. © Art Basel

The piece sat somewhere between theatre, sculpture and museum exhibition. The commission was of unprecedented scale for an art fair, running the full duration of Art Basel. This edition of the piece, which first premiered at Manchester International Festival as 11 Rooms, featured works by Marina Abramović, Damien Hirst, Santiago Sierra, Xu Zhen, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Otobong Nkanga, the latter three debuting new works. Each work took place within its own closed-off room, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Art Basel braved a new virtual reality

Antony Gormley, Breathing Room II, 2010. Aluminum tube 25 x 25 mm, Phosphor H15, and plastic spigots, 386 x 857 x 928 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galleria Continua. Photography: Andrea Rossetti. Installation view Art Basel Unlimited 2019. © the Artist

Before 2020, the term ‘OVR’ might have sounded more like an obscure business acronym, or possibly an obsolete file format. But when Covid-19 struck, it became a lifeline for the globally art-deprived. OVRs (or Online Viewing Rooms), came to the fore following the severe outbreak of Covid-19, which, in March 2020, had been declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organisation. In the year of its 50th anniversary, Art Basel had no option but to cancel the 2020 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. As the first major domino to fall, this sent shockwaves through the art world and left all subsequent in-person events in a frenzy of uncertainty. To keep the momentum alive, Art Basel swiftly recalibrated with its first digital-only edition, in which all galleries for the 2020 Hong Kong show were invited to participate at no cost.

Now, as many parts of the world tentatively emerge from hibernation, the art world is beginning to wonder whether OVR viewing is, at least in some capacity, here to stay. Art Basel believes so, with the recent launch of Art Basel Live, the fair is presenting a hybrid format that sees digital viewing rooms run in parallel with its in-person fairs.

Kader Attia smashed up his Arab Spring installation

Kader Attia smashes up his Arab Spring (2014) installation at Art Basel Unlimited, 2015, Galleria Continua. © Art Basel

It was a 2011 press image of looted glass vitrines in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum that inspired Kader Attia’s Arab Spring (2014). For the sculptural installation, staged at Art Basel Unlimited in 2015, Attia re-enacted the moment protesters entered the museum, destroyed its display cases, and robbed their contents during the Arab Revolutions of 2011-12.

Kader Attia, Arab Spring (2014) at Art Basel Unlimited, 2015, Galleria Continua. © Art Basel

Attia wears a dark hoodie shielding his face as he pelts bricks to shatter the vitrines – a gritty performance, filled with revolt and anger. In Arab Spring, Attia explored the legacy of colonialism, specifically French colonialism, and the contradictory notion of how a country intent on reclaiming its future would destroy what was at last becoming theirs. Attia staged the performance at the preview of Art Basel, the shattered glass and red brick debris forming the final work.

Abraham Cruzvillegas built a dance stage from trash

Abraham Cruzvillegas, ‘Autorreconstrucción: To Insist, to Insist, to Insist’ at Art Basel Miami Beach. © Art Basel

In 2018, marking Art Basel’s first free public exhibition, ‘Autorreconstrucción: To Insist, to Insist, to Insist’, by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, was part multidisciplinary installation, part ode to rubbish. The performance piece was comprised of literal trash, devised by Cruzvillegas and the Argentine choreographer Barbara Foulkes. It was installed to inaugurate the newly built 60,000 sq ft Grand Ballroom at Art Basel Miami Beach and organised with curator Philipp Kaiser and the independent New York art space The Kitchen, where the work was shown previously.

Abraham Cruzvillegas, ‘Autorreconstrucción: To Insist, to Insist, to Insist’ at Art Basel Miami Beach. © Art Basel

Autorreconstrucción, which translates as ‘self-construction’, is a concept rooted in the artist’s childhood, when his home was built with what was at hand. This experience paved the way for the artist’s signature motif: sculptural forms constructed from locally found materials. In ‘Autorreconstrucción: To Insist, to Insist, to Insist’, the constructions were activated by musicians and acrobatic dancers.

Performers swarmed inside Alexandra Pirici’s Messeplatz igloo

Alexandra Pirici, Aggregate in Messeplatz, Art Basel, Basel 2019. © Art Basel

Staged inside an igloo-like construction on Basel’s Messeplatz, Romanian artist and dancer Alexandra Pirici’s public installation Aggregate (2017-2019) had our pre-Covid-19 world written all over it. In this intense performative environment – which debuted at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in 2017 – the audience mingles with a swarm of performers, who spontaneously pick from a list of rehearsed enactments.

At any given time, performers can initiate movements that others might choose to follow. The reference points for these actions were wide-ranging: from the leap of an antelope to Michelangelo’s David, or a Depeche Mode song lyric. After hours of interaction in this improvisational environment, tension mounted within the complex audience-performer relationship.

Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler goes ear-to-ear with creative leaders

Portrait of architect David Adjaye, one of the inagural guests on Art Basel’s podcast, Intersections. Photography: Anoush Abrar

Spanning art, architecture, music, fashion, design, literature, Art Basel’s podcast, Intersections, launched in 2021, offers listeners access to the voices at the forefront of the creative industries, and all the liminal spaces in between. Presented by UBS, bi-weekly episodes are hosted by Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s global director who will invite industry-leading guests to take part in one-on-one conversations. The podcast launched on 19 July with two episodes: one featuring renowned Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, and another with producer, rapper and collector Kasseem Dean, aka Swizz Beatz. Guests in the pipeline include Lisa Spellman, Kim Gordon and Pamela Joyner. §