Day 5: Sokari Douglas Camp
Across town from Frieze, at Somerset House, the first international art fair dedicated to contemporary African art, named 1:54 after the 54 countries that make up the continent, has opened its doors. Among the exhibits are three works by London-based sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp.
Douglas Camp was born in Buguma, Nigeria. At the age of eight, she moved with her family to England, but her West African roots were not forgotten and every summer she returned to her home country. Aged 21, she moved even further from her birthplace to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, before returning to London to earn her master's degree in sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Tim Lewis and Nicola Hicks were among her peers.
Douglas Camp works out of a studio in the Elephant and Castle in south London. Her art commemorates collisions of cultures: Paisley King and Queen, a steel sculpture on show at 1:54, was inspired by the celebrations that occurred across Nigeria in 1893 after the marriage of George V. Douglas Camp uses the same motif that is used in traditional Nigerian adire textiles.
Not always confined to galleries, Douglas Camp’s work can be seen across London, sometimes in the most unexpected places. Next time you take a stroll down Peckham High Street, look out for her Les Champs de la Sculpture No 2, originally commissioned to celebrate the millennium in Paris. Early next year, All The World Is Now Richer Meets The Woman Who Refused To Dance will be erected beside St Paul’s Cathedral to commemorate the abolition of slavery. “This isn’t an era we should look back on in anger,” argues the sculptor. “Those who descend from slavery should regard their heritage as a measure of strength and survival.”
In 2005, the sculptor was awarded a CBE for her work and social commentary. She still can’t quite believe it: “There are a lot of artists who can speak louder than I can, so I’m grateful that I was noticed,” she says.
1:54 closes on Sunday, don’t miss Douglas Camp and the 70 artists partaking in this African art extravaganza. 1-54.com. Written by Liam Freeman
Day 4: Jennifer Rubell
Jennifer Rubell, the American artist and niece of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell, brings a maternal touch to this year's Frieze Art Fair with her autobiographical piece Portrait of the Artist. The pristine white nude, cast from steel-reinforced fibreglass, reclines like an odalisque at the Stephen Friedman Gallery stand. The sculpture is a replica of Rubell's own eight-months-pregnant body, except it is eight metres high: the large belly, which is carved out to leave an egg-shaped void, can accommodate a fully grown adult. Spectators are able to clamber into the artwork and curl up inside as if they are the artist's unborn child.
Rubell's intention was to create a monumental gesture of unconditional motherly love. There is a feminist statement here, too: Rubell has appropriated a style and scale historically reserved for male leaders to show, she says, "an emotion that is intensely personal and un-heroic". The artist adds that watching members of the Frieze audience enter in the sculpture's womb is "tremendously satisfying" - in her eyes the enlarged form was "incomplete until the first viewer entered".
Amid the hustle of Frieze's mini-city there is something undeniably appealing about the opportunity to put your feet up in the foetal position in the name of art. Not to mention the comfort factor.
Portrait of the Artist, by Jennifer Rubell, can be viewed at Stand D3, Stephen Friedman Gallery, at Frieze London in Regent's Park until Sunday. Written by Julia Hobbs
Day 3: Judy Chicago
On a dreary London afternoon, rain pelting the London pavements, artist Judy Chicago, who hails from New Mexico’s considerably sunnier climes, is upbeat. And well she might be, she’s just returned from Frieze Masters where her Car Hood and Rearrangeable Game Board sculptures, along with preliminary drawings from her most well known work The Dinner Party are currently on display, unveiled at last night’s private view.
As an artist, Chicago is not afraid to go the extra mile in her quest to create something she feels is authentic. In 1964, fresh out of the University of California in Los Angeles, Chicago decided she wanted to learn how to spray paint, so she enrolled at an auto body school in Los Angeles where she was the only woman out of 250 pupils. “Unless you understand the process of discovery, then what is the point?” She says, “Art isn’t just about making products”.
Chicago has made a name for herself as an artist through, as she says, “Creating controversy without being controversial”. Misogyny wasn’t confined to just car manufacturing, she realised, it was rife in the art world. In 1964 she created her pivotal Car Hood series, the epitome of macho appropriation in American car culture, brandishing paintings of female genitalia in florid colours.
This was followed in 1965 with Rearrangeable Game Board, a series of multi-coloured blocks in obvious disarray. Chicago was tired of rearranging her life-like “Any good girl of that time” for her male partner. She celebrated “getting over that” with this seminal work, currently on display in the Sculpture Park.
Next year the artist will turn 75, 48 years of which she has fought to celebrate women’s achievements in the arts. “When we look at history in art it isn't the history of humankind, it’s the history of man” she says, “When you look at Michael Angelo’s murals in the Sistine Chapel it is man reaching out to man”. The work she has done to change this outlook will be celebrated alongside her birthday, when her art will be on display in various galleries simultaneously across the US, from the Brooklyn Museum to the Forest Museum in California. This is the rare chance to see the work of one of the world’s foremost feminists. judychicago.com. Written by Liam Freeman
Day 2: Pilvi Takala
It’s the stuff of satire. An artist awarded a prestigious art prize by vowing to give her winnings to a group of strangers so that they can produce the work. Even better, the strangers should be aged between eight and 12. Better still, no one has any control as to what they might do with the £7,000 given them.
Yet that's exactly what the creators of the Frieze Foundation's Emdash Award decided to do when they gave the annual prize to artist Pilvi Takala earlier this summer, thus placing one of the art fair's biggest site-specific commissions into the hands of a youth centre from Bow. The announcement may have raised a few eyebrows, but the fruit of Takala's project, The Committee, is officially unveiled this week.
Takala, a slight 32-year-old with an asymmetric blonde fringe and the softest of voices, has a certain childishness about her that perhaps lessens the surprise of her commitment to the project. Originally from Finland, Takala splits her time between Amsterdam and Istanbul, and is known for an almost guerrilla approach to art that has found her gently shaking up "normal" codes of behaviour, using secretly filmed footage, hired actors and a lot of role play. In one of her earliest works, The Trainee, she got a job at Deloitte in Helsinki, only to film herself sitting motionless at her desk for a month. In Bag Lady, she wandered around a shopping precinct in Berlin with a transparent bag laden with cash to gauge how people would treat her: with caution, it transpired.
For her, the Emdash award has been a chance to steer a group of children towards a joint enterprise that could be both empowering and outside their normal artistic experience. "Of course, if they just wanted to buy several thousand pounds' worth of balloons and fill a room with them, that would be fine," she insisted when it was suggested that eight year olds might not be the most responsible curators on earth. "Or they might decide to put all the money towards buying a piece of work and hanging it up. And that would be fine, if that's what they wanted to do. But you would hope, with a bit of encouragement in a workshop environment, and within a group, that they would realise they had more freedom."
So far, so terribly liberal arts. But there's something rather brilliant in hearing Takala's earliest interviews with the young team tasked with the project. "We couldn't buy a house or a building," explains young Kacey, "because we'd have to share it… and besides, we wouldn't have enough money." Another little boy tells her that he'll "spend the money on a holiday to Jamaica". A third suggests buying a giant skip and making a swimming pool.
So, what they did spend it on? The children will reveal all this Saturday. In the meantime, you can follow the countdown at The-committee.org. Written by Jo Ellison
Day One: Cyprien Gaillard
The nomadic French artist Cyprien Gaillard makes a well-timed debut tomorrow as his first London solo show, From Wings to Fins, opens its doors a day before the VIP launch of Frieze Art Fair. With Miuccia Prada, Phoebe Philo and François Pinault on the guestlist of friends and supporters attending this evening's private view, the unveiling is set to be much more than a warm-up act where critics and collectors are concerned. At just 33, Gaillard arrives fresh from his large-scale exhibition at MoMA's PS1 gallery in his current hometown, New York - a show that saw him fast-tracked from talented émigré to bankable favourite of the NY art establishment.
Getting up to meet me, he is anything but straight-faced - the famous birthmark that drifts over his right cheek is set within a suntanned complexion. But if the tagline "retrospective" or the attention that hangs over his conspicuously good looks had begun to get on his nerves, this latest smaller show shifts the focus back on to all-new works.
"Come and have a look at this" - he leads me, still smiling, into the semi-private attic room and taps the eyepiece of an antique telescope. I find myself on tiptoe, spying on an empty bottle of rum planted atop the neighbouring office building, almost the unwitting participant in a magician's trick.
Downstairs, Gaillard's not-so-everyday observations (spreads of retro National Geographic magazines assembled into 3D tension collages) are displayed alongside paintings by the deceased painter Morris Louis, whose stained canvasses dominate the elegant shop front of the Dover Street space. His admiration for Louis' home city of Baltimore and paint-pouring technique lay the common ground for this posthumous co-habitation: the American worked on bended knee to penetrate untreated canvases with streams of colour, while the Frenchman's fieldwork saw him crouched at road level on Baltimore's deserted streets, taking rubbings of drain covers.
This is nevertheless a Cyprien Gaillard show. "From the street you will be able to see this" - he peels the dustsheets off a life-size replica of spiked fencing used to ward off trespassers he "acquired - no, saved" from the wreckage of the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. I'm elbowed with a reminder that the original piece played a starring role in the 1971 film Get Carter, which is typical of Gaillard's talent for monkeying around the overlooked corners of the civilized world in the process of producing serious work. On another wall is a further clue to his current favourite place - a photograph of a dilapidated bench, dedicated to "BALTIMORE. The Greatest City in America". Pulling the doors closed on the old-fashioned lift, he tells me through the metal gate that he is, however, "happiest on the road", which will only add to the excitement surrounding From Wings to Fins. Catch Cyprien Gaillard while he is in town.
Cyprien Gaillard, "From Wings to Fins", October 15 to November 16, 2013 at Sprüeth Magers London, Spruethmagers.com. Written by Julia Hobbs
