Freeze, Frizz, Frieze. how nice it is that the English art market is booming

On a chest of drawers, under the bed, under the living room table, backwards on a tree, knee-high in a pond - with rigidly and strange looking, in strange and spatial situations, you can see the models of 2002er photographic series by Sarah Jones, who can at Anton Kern Gallery New York still be watched http://www.antonkerngallery.com.

Link: Sarah Jones bei Anton Kern, New York [All links open in a new window to continue reading while looking them up]] http://www.antonkerngallery.com

An interview with the artist in the ever sold out English-European art magazine FRIEZE embeds the at first glance just absurd, but wonderful productions of Jones into a fabric of psychoanalytic theory and art historical reference. In particular, Jones explains the role of hair in her paintings: "I recently met a woman on the street who had long hair piled up on top of her head like a nest, and it reminded me of my new roses, which are visceral, spindly and beautiful, in bloom but slightly diseased. Hair has a resonance in the locations in which I put the people who I photograph – the edges of urban parks, or places that are unkempt – so there’sa relationship to the location and figure as an allegory; hair as nature gone slightly mad."

Jones' associations lead directly to Freud's dream interpretation, in particular its interpretation of its own dream in which a woman, Flora, APPEARS first as a beautiful, young and attractive, while afterwards she causes the image of a herbarium, which in turn goes with the flatness of plants, the loss and physicality of life. In Freud it represents accordingly the deceased mother.

Jones also refers to Klimt, the painter who actually can be judged as the painter of uncontrolled streams of hair, falling in large waves through most of its narrow images to become a picture filling ornament, as high as his female figures, rich, but not embellished as the face to openness and color differentiation.

The ornamental of Klimt's hair luxuriance also fits very well to Freud, who sees the the ornament generally intermingled with doll and model-likeness, with a special role in addition to the "blooming" woman as flora and the dead as herbarium, represented in the lifelike doll Olympia in ETA Hoffmann's story, that is read by Freud as a story about fear of castration. Blind, lifeless, ornamental - as this archtype-model of models - Jones's characters move through their environment, always blind for their situation and thus refusing any idea of fraternization, any chumming up with them in adopting the same thoughts or deeper understanding of the contents of staging. The Posing is sometimes so close to the photographies of female hysterics Charcots took as psychiatrist of the 19. century. They are of course not in prison dresses hold by the helping hand of a nurse and well staged, but their gestures are likewise unmotivated in comparison to the usual conventions about where you are in living rooms or staying outdoors.

Any self-evident "harmony" with the environment will be initially deconstructed and shown as staged. As the hair is just that - thought as a life long uncut - able to mutate from a simple warmth of the head shell into a kind of shame- and babble-blanket of the first of men - almost fur, but, as such and in any other role, dependent of being formed through human creative power as plaited and in any way of being formed and draped dependent of being draped. Haare also, führen direkt zum unprimitiven Nähen von Kleidung (naja, und dann eben zum bemalen von Leinwand usw.), indem sie sich prinzipiell als eine Art Substitut eignen könnten. Hair thus, leads directly to a not primitive sewing,well, and then just to painting on canvas, etc., because they are basically a suitable substitute.

Is therefore the claim by Sarah Jones true, that hair has a special relationship to the environment, arising from or in respect of cultural and historical roots? No matter - you might say, because much more important is that her photos can in some way be understood as optical experiments, creating an impass with the lack of motives the narrative scenes of Jones's pictures show, and thus lead to formal or internal aspects like how picturesque these photographies are or the art historian references, and, of course, how the hair merged via formal equivalences with the surrounding. Do we (at least the "girls") thus really live how we style our hair? And actually - perhaps unconscious - as we style our hair? Does it not only fit to the dress but to the current appartment, too? The author has picked up the news of Jones as an inspiration for a kind of empirical experiment, photographing herself in a more or less spontaneously absurd posing to look how her hair works with the environment (photos ahead and in the text). The result amazed with evident harmony in color and composition (this statement as an empirical observation, not as a self-compliment, cause the photos are of course quite random, perhaps the garden cuts quite chosen), which deals with the tuft of hair around the model - the same color tones, slightly nervous color distribution, a casual derangement of things in the room (the things under the chair). Do we - "we" is actually for women - provoce this picturesque harmony? Is there a secret desire, not just to make a pretty funny impression but to melt like a picture from three-dimensional spaces of action into plane ornaments, to leave the subject right behind and to object-party in silent visuality instead?

Sarah Jones, born 1959, is a representative of a very quiet post-feminism, that, as the interview shows, identifies such awareness-raising moments no longer explicitly but leaves their development to the rare case of necessity and the viewer's obsessions. If Jones speaks of roses, roses, and roses again, it's because the formal idea of their beauty is typical for Jones's pictures. The models in their role of allegory-maker, that directs them sometimes close to madness, are behind this formal claim almost marginalized - the work invites thus well to a kind of pervers voyeurism, inebriating itself at the asserted female lack of subject-hood. However, the somewhat unspectacular nature of the photos has something accidential, too, including something analytical, which is not designed to detect an allegory but to check the matter empirically - a necessary first step of self corrections (... the hair, or the harmonization of surfaces. ...?)

So far, so good. And who or what is FRIEZE? First of all a foundation - the FRIEZE FOUNDATION - the Friezes themselves declare to be European. But Wikipedia subsumes all activities under the Frieze Art Magazine, this claimed to have the fair and other projects developed. . With the help of noble sponsors even an international art award has been brought into life, the Cartier Award. Beyond this, FRIEZE is an increasingly fast out of stock english art magazine and an art fair, known at least from the fact to have given the friendly island the reputation, to be occupied by an exquisite audience, not only capable of paying for art but even interested in its strange contemporariness. So happened the unbelievable that art was sold at the Freeze Fairs.

At fairs in the German-speaking area this is - to leave auction unconsidered - just rarely the case, exceptions can be suspected to be arrange beforehand. Do at FRIEZE fair really RICH British privates buy art, perhaps the old or new owners of British castles, searching for new freshness for and against the centuries-clumsiness of marblehalls? Or the elite in Brussels? The fair is open to British galleries, which somehow seems redundant, as they are for the most part already in London. Sind sie sonst extrem schlecht beworben? Are they otherwise extremely poorly advertised? Actually surprising that the kick in this well-depleted city collapses just when all the galleries into a merge together to a fair-cluster.

Andrea Rodes writes on artefacts about the second Frieze Art Fair in London's Regent's Park 2004, in particular the local "New Rich" and thousands of Asian and Eastern European visitors - a total of about 30,000 - stormed the assembled booths on the Frieze fair. The money-based elite, to the good part, as we know, already Russian, thus inspires the art scene in general, and Asians come additionally when everything is prettily released. In the 10th of the 19. Century, when the Russian Revolution pushed the Czarist nobility to Paris and especially the romantic potential and the transfiguration of bohemians increased, as nobility had arrived post cladem, today the Russian elite in England is well linked with their wealth, and moreover willing to participate in the traditional European-style of gothical onion cuspids on the doll's house pediments of Oxford colleges. Inmitten von Rosengärten, gepflegtem Rasen und Laura Ashley Kissen diskutiert man natürlich ganz anders, empfindsamer, nur dass die Federkernpolsterung eben doch stabiler ist als so manches gemütlich erscheinende Möbelstück des 18. Surrounded by rose gardens, well-kept lawn and Laura Ashley cushions to discuss of course is very different, more sensitive, except that the spring upholstery is more stable than some look like comfortable piece of furniture of the 18th Jahrhunderts. (These sweeps are not, because of a collapse of a sensitive piece of furniture in any museum, but just for themselves.)

In short, the scene is set on very sensitive art in modern-conservative spirit, even if the spirit of the English elite maintains as necessity. Unlike Andrea Rodes we do not confuse the English tradition with Pickard-Cambridge's Greek vases, from fornication reasons partly imposed. Much more could be the conservative, voyeuristic, critical self-analysis, self-accusing and -correcting post-feminism, photography in the style of prerafaelian painting by Sarah Jones be identified as the avant-garde style, to which the Russian globalised millions want to be traded.

Frieze in London, the Frieze Magazine, the fair, the associated award in art, music and film projects, are perhaps also a British phenomenon - typical for the country, which is actually relatively tolerant and prompts his subculture and scene instead of - like some regions in Germany - getting frightened or to criminalize and sexualize everything not institutionally and politically calculable and certified. The fact that the magazine, which originall persuaded particularly by its emphasize on specificity and quality and not on a simple, commercially oriented attitude, could jump up so successful onto the purely capitalist wave, is grounded in exactly this other way to administer subculture and avant-garde. Therefore, it is not necessary to deal with illegally-aggressive advertising methods and cultivate Thatherism or its heritage like Saatchi & Saatchi, one can - at least in England - broadcast simply the self-understanding of the extraordinary. So embarrassing that the German media largely ignore the English-Frieze Peek and - thank you because of the weather - continually limit themselves on the Catholic area, Cologne and further south. But while in Basel only sixfigured artworks push huge gallery walls outward, Venice remains naturally playful and friendly unsensationell, small fairs move more and more into the excessive and meaningless, since their visitors are often just the population living around the fairs, using the exhibition to get an impression of art as such and pretty pictures. The weekly market, much cheaper, penetrates the scene .... The fair manager disavows this, of course.

The question arises whether an artist or photographer should make it: (- so this art letter, which was exceptionally not written under the aim of sexual arousal or indignation of the readers, still gets some sense -) the C-print or canvas printing (cheap offers at Ebay) and the letter-box company in London, which is cost-effective set up via the web and maintains services financially worthwhile. Because well, who or whose gallery (Berlin for example is so famous for the organisation of mergers) is approved for the Frieze Art Fair, has chances on the international art market, will perhaps even end in a Mongolian tent, an Ottinger open-air cinema and modern art museum in the middle of Mongolia set up by an asian freak, or even better (?), will be the victim of a champagne-drunken overweighted millionaire on a Russian gas-party, who simply falls on us ... on the image of course ....

To this end, we demonstrated experimentally Sarah Jones simply tracing her own premises, to create some pictures which can be bought. Suggestions and concrete indications concerning the establishment of an english-german art-group will be welcomed Email ur@arts-on.com).

Report: Dr. Ulrike Ritter

Photography: Sarah Jones (2002; von www.antonkerngallery.com) and Dr. Ulrike Ritter (Dr. U. & d.s.W.)