Marianne A. Kinzer at Art Basel Miami Beach:
"I want to bring, rather beauty and light and not more destruction and darkness, into the world."
"Machines entertain us and kill for us."

Painting by Zeng Fanhzi

by Marianne A. KINZER
Written for the Light Millennium

I mingle with the rich and beautiful, the up-and coming at one of the many parties in Miami, between December, six and ten, 2006.  I came to see the Art Basel Miami Beach.  At the hotel Delano I mix in with the fancy crowd which gathers here every year to sell and to buy, to see and to be seen.  I walk through white curtains, which hang from high ceilings to the floor, as if walking from stage to stage.  I pass by artsy decor and squeeze myself through throngs of people standing at the turquoise blue pool, sipping champaign.

The Swiss bank UBS is the main sponsor of Art Basel Miami Beach. An UBS press statement reads: "Art is a means of sharing insight - a crucial process echoed at UBS as we share fresh financial perspectives." In Miami everything is about money, big money and glamour.  The city does not have much of an infrastructure, but everywhere new hotel and condominium high rises spring up.  My hotel on Miami beach was located next to a construction area.  A first stroll on the wooden boardwalk, lined by hotels on the right and the ocean on the left, towards the fair's main venue "Miami Beach Convention Center" convinced me that I was not the only guest here waking up to the sound of heavy machinery.

The entanglement of art and commerce, dolce vita, glamour and unrestrained consumption, wild capitalism, good humor, sunshine and ignorance, made me feel dizzy.

The amount of art at the Convention Center alone made me stumble, and soon I realized that it was impossible to see all the shows connected with "Art Basel Miami Beach", among others,

"Positions","Scope", "Pulse", "Nada".  I had come to see art, I wanted to figure out what was new, and I wondered what I would respond to. I am an artist.  I paint beautiful pictures of landscapes, coupled with environmental information.  In Miami, however, I felt drawn to darker images.  I liked the calligraphic brush strokes of the Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi at the gallery "Schanghart" (www.shanghartgallery.com) from Shanghai.  The artist, famous in China, was represented with two huge, wall size paintings.  In one of the paintings the brush strokes formed a thicket, transmitting an awkward sense of foreboding and danger. Out of the other painted thicket literally (and less interestingly) crawled danger in form of a soldier.

The gallery belonged to the section of the art fair called "Arte Nova", reserved for newcomers to Miami, showing cutting edge art. Galleries in the main section of the 200 galleries at the Convention Center carried mainly well known names of 20th century art, and some sold out at opening night; among the major sales of the first night was a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting for 5.5 million.

I focused on the smaller section of the main fair "Arte Nova". There was everything imaginable from video to drawing, from painting to photography, from sculpture to installation: anything goes.

Kei Takemura at the Japanese gallery Taka Ishii (www.takaishiigallery.com) features a wall size translucent curtain, lovingly embroidered with palm-trees and beautiful flowers, but underneath the beautiful curtain is a stalk black and white image.  I asked the artist about it.  The young fragile Japanese woman explained, that it was an enlarged photograph from an explosion on date street in Baghdad.  She chose this image from a variety of photos, because, "the date has meaning in all three religions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim," she said.

Painting by Kim Keever

"Art that mirrored my deep inner sadness about what is happening in the world."

Clearly, at the Art Basel I responded to art that points to the dark side, art that mirrored my deep inner sadness about what is happening in the world.

In the last couple of years, since I live in America,  I focused on local landscapes.  I learned about American history by studying the country's environmental history.  There is a lot to say about the destruction of the land, but there is also hope, preservation and restoration.  In my paintings I aim to transmit the positive energy I feel in restored or preserved landscapes, in order to remind people what is at stake.  I want to bring, rather beauty and light and not more destruction and darkness, into the world.  What I perceived as outstanding art at the Art Basel Miami Beach, however, was diametrically the opposite of what I produce as an artist. There is definitely a difference between art meant to shown in public opposed to art for private settings.

Another fraction of Miami Beach' cutting edge art "Positions" was on display in construction site containers on South Beach.  The containers would remain on the very same spot, where the sponsors of this particular side show, W South Beach Hotel & Residences, would build yet another luxury hotel and condominium skyscraper.

I admired an installation by Aaron Young at gallery "Harris Liebermann": White sand, taken off the beach, was flowing relentlessly from the ceiling of the container into its interior. We stood motionless in the entrance area of the container, as we heard loud bangs against its cast iron walls, adding to the agony we felt...seeing the sand pile up.

"Machines entertain us and kill for us."

Back at the main fair, I looked at all my favorite artists of the past, among others: Hans Hofman, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Antoni Tapies. I felt the joy they must have felt when engaging in their creative play with color, form and material.  Suddenly it occurred to me that, what moved them did not count more any more.  Their era seems over. Its the time of the machine: Eva Marisaldi at gallery "Michael Zink" has built little showcase-stages.  People gather around the approximately 20 by 20 inch boxes. When the curtain opened, we were greeted by little robots, who start to perform oddities and at the end bow to the audience.  We laughed and applauded as if the little machines would care.

Machines entertain us and kill for us.  Harun Farocki's video "Eye Machine" explains how war-machines work: targets are identified by computers, bombs released, targets blown up.  The film from 2001 is based on pictures of the first Iraq war.  This video, a protest again the anonymity of  modern warfare, was shown among others under the title: Surrender to Illusion: Video in a Time of War, at the Botanical garden.

Gerhard Mantz at gallery "[Dam]" (www.dam.org) constructs his idealistic landscapes on the computer.  The gallery owner told me that the artist does not use any photographic images, but makes up his landscapes from scratch with the help of the machine.  His seemingly realistic photographic images  jumped out at me, because they look different from any landscape photography I had seen before.  Mantz really crosses the lines that divide photography and painting. Kim Keever (www.secristgallery.com) found another way to construct landscape: he creates environments in fish tanks and captures them with a large format camera.  The photographs have a painterly, slightly mysterious feel.

Both of these landscape artists were shown at the side show "Pulse" held in a large tent. "Pulse" was in the "Wynwood" district, where I also found "MOCA at Goldman Warehouse".

The taxidriver who drove me there considered it a bad neighborhood, with a poor, mainly African American population.  Arriving, I found the streets vacated and dominated by colorfully painted warehouses.

Art gentrifies neighborhoods and turns them into fertile ground for more condominiums.

I came to see the show "Artificial Light" at "MOCA".  I approached the warehouse turned museum hesitatingly, I was the only person on the street and buildings looked closed on Sunday morning, the last day of the fair.

Soon I found myself in spacious rooms, filled with light sculptures, cool and liberating, even though the content of some sculptures was critical, I did not feel weighted down. Light is an ephemeral medium.

I especially liked Spencer Finch's plastic gels over fluorescent tubes. The colors are soft and arranged in stripes.  The artist used readings of a color meter from light he measured in the Catskill Mountains. -- Thereby referring to the Hudson River School,  the famous group of American painters, who stood at the crib of American Art and created the  myth of the untouched wilderness.

"Empires spin off amazing stuff in their last hours" , said Jerry Saltz, an art critique for "Village Voice" at a talk in the "Art Salon".  I agree.