The Twenty Most Titillating Works at Frieze Art Fair

Thirty years ago, Ahearn created a performance-art sculpture-portrait series using neighbors, friends, and people from the nearby methodone clinic; at this year’s Frieze, he and collaborator Rigoberto Torres resurrected the piece. Those with a serious interest in becoming a human sculpture — including this brave woman — paid $3000 for the privilege of being coated in gel and bandages and left to breathe out of straws. Ahearn was a buoyant, jovial presence during the molding process, chiming things like “Let’s hear it for Ellen!â€� as he slathered her face in goo. 

Down with hydrofracking! To raise awareness for this important environmental issue, Brown and Ruffalo set up a sausage table in front of the gallery booth, luring in fairgoers who just couldn’t resist that greasy aroma (it helped that the sausages were free). Ruffalo slathered the baguettes with mustard, while Brown — who was so chipper and open that he almost seemed ready to give us the keys to his Volvo — manned the wieners.  

At first, Ozbolt’s goofy riff on Kawara’s famous “Date Paintings,� a series of works set in the near and distant future, was sort of amusing as an art-world joke. Then it was irritating. And finally, it became oddly cerebral: Will there be anyone who cares enough about art — or at least this kind of art — to keep doing the date paintings long after Kawara is gone?

We really don’t want to read too much into this, since the artist — at least according to her gallerist — didn’t intend to make something satirical and had much loftier ambitions for her work. But in the context of a fair like Frieze, it was hard not to see her jewelry counters as a sly commentary on the commodification of art. 

There were lots of tasty snacks to be had at Frieze: a slice of wood-fired pizza from Roberta’s; a scoop of artisanal ice cream from Van Leeuwen; a pretzel from the Standard Biergarten; and an oily walnut from this woman’s crotch. That’s right, she’s a nutcracker: place the nut, pull down the leg, retrieve, eat. We noticed that many people weren’t eating their nuts, though — they were just abandoning them in the pile of greasy shells accumulating on the tabletop. (We admit we didn’t eat ours, either.)

It’s a real shame that you had to be a VIP to ride in one of Frieze’s special BMWs, where lullabies, songs, and readings by the three artists were playing on a loop (the works are downloadable from the Frieze website).

Not sure what makes this a bike, but we were definitely transfixed by the cotton-stuffed-hosiery-flesh being extruded from the latrinelike sculpture.

How many crappy bought-at-the-last-minute umbrellas do you see stuffed in trashcans the day after it rains? Callaghan immortalizes one of these specimens as a monumental sculpture — and there’s something about it that makes us feel sorrowful, nostalgic, and full of longing. 

Hakansson left these canvasses face up under a tree where starlings like to congregate, waited, then came back to retrieve them. The results: surprisingly engrossing works where the respective colors and textures of each dropping— brown, green, white, liquid, solid, somewhere in between — contribute an unexpected vibrancy to the work. We’d never have thought bird poop could be so highbrow.

Shrigley’s work can make him seem like a total misanthrope, but there was something really uplifting about this hanging sign with its contradictory expressions painted in his trademark kindergarten scrawl. One woman giddily chirped that she’d love to have it in her bedroom, perhaps as a daily reminder that state of mind really is everything.

When we first encountered this small army of water bottles stationed outside Karma International’s booth, we were tempted to add our own until we realized that they were part of a larger piece. (They also reminded us, slightly, of the urine-filled bottles you find in the street). Rosenkranz’s bottles are filled with colored silicon, and the work is a commentary on much-maligned Fiji artesian water and its allegedly untainted “source.â€� 

We can always count on Hlobo to give us something big and brilliant, not to mention something to delight the handful of youngsters roaming around the tent. The title, which means tail in Xhosa, refers to a game similar to hide-and-seek, and the work is indeed quite playful. It also reminded us of a mythical worm that’s barfed up a bunch of soft, stringy balls, which got us making up stories of our own.

Great title, great concept: Harrison’s do-it-yourself installation comes in a wooden box containing a clothelines, clothespins, and various notes inquiring as to the whereabouts of her legume.

Bacher’s installation is the ultimate fuck-you to everyone who’s ever complained that you can drag anything into a museum or gallery and call it art: For a 2008 exhibition at St. Louis’s Contemporary Art Museum, Bacher called up a local Budweiser plant, asked for two giant things of beer, dragged them into the museum, and called them art. 

Yes, that is an old beat-up copy of 1984, and yes, it is levitating above its pedestal, rotating in circles. We’re not sure what it all means, but we couldn’t stop staring at it.

Reyle’s not the only one to bring paint-by-numbers into galleryland — Trey Speegle has also worked with the idea — but the fact that he’s referencing both paint-by-numbers and Lisa Frank, gives it a whole ‘nother dimension.

Remember in Double Dare when you had to pull the flag out of the giant nose? We tried to be more highbrow about this one, but it’s honestly all we could think about.