ART BASEL, BASEL
WEDNESDAY 4
DAY 2

 

At 10 I go and have breakfast at the Rosental Garage – a one-time garage and car dealer’s not far from the exhibition centre where Chiara and her team have rigged up the temporary editorial unit of Uovo, the international art magazine based in Turin.

There I also meet up with Daniele Balice (he runs a gallery in Paris), the critics and curators Luca Cerizza and Francesco Stocchi and Palo Zani of Milan’s Galleria Zero, one of my favourites.

A temporary installation has been set up – a fountain made from materials found in situ earmarked for destruction before the end of the event.

Francesca trails me with her camera and TV equipment.

Massimo Torrigiani and Paolo Zani

I make a date with Paolo Zani to go and visit him later at his stand.

He’s keen on artist-scientists, experiments, useful (and useless) machines, the arithmetic and symmetry of the imagination – if you will meeting-points between the highly childish and the highly serious.

Zani’s is one of the most attractive stands of the whole kermesse; it’s the least muscular stuck in a show of strength where people compete for who has the stand that costs the most (in dollars) such as the one with samples of the Damien Hirst diamonds and Raqib Shaw’s luxury paitings and the hellish stand belonging to the White Cube in London.

A pantheist pagan altar, dance and death like.

I tour the second floor and am struck, don’t ask me why, by a painting by Mickalene Thomas, the thirty-year-old Afro-american from the Bronx who will be staging her first personal exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York next autumn.

If I were a collector and investor, I’d buy.

At 3 I go and hear Paul D. Miller, alias Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid who presents Sound Unbound – Sampling Digital Music and Culture (MIT Press), a book on object-sound for which he asked for contributions and text from everyone from Brian Eno to Bruce Sterling.

Straight afterwards it’s my turn but my conversation companion has got held up in Berlin: I sit down on the stage, apologise to everyone and give out some copies of Rodeo.

I then go and see the public yoga session organized by the Y8 boys right in front of the exhibition centre entrance in the Dan Graham glass structure.

Dinner at Christian Rattemeyer’s home with Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, the event’s art director, Malcolm MacLaren who has a video installation here at Art Basel and his wife Young Kim… It’s getting late and

I drop by the Kunsthalle Bar for a final glass.