British artist Grayson Perry skipped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s lecture hall on Monday night, dressed to impress as his alter ego Claire in platform shoes and cullotes. He entertained the audience and plugged his new book, Playing to the Gallery, with stories of life in the “strange little village” that is the art world. (He’s off to the “village fête”, aka Frieze New York, this week, he said.) He revealed that he would love to have a solo show at the Met—and tried to get one in the past using “magic” and a technicolour dreamcoat, stumping up £20,000 for a silk brocade cloak decorated with details of the Met’s collections. Among the embroidery designs were the museum’s floorplan in miniature. He hoped the curators would be mesmerised. Instead, he had to make do with a show at the British Museum, which came about at a dinner attended by Neil MacGregor, the museum’s director. “We all went out for pizza,” Perry said, who was recently made a trustee of the institution.
The artist who (mostly) stays in her shell
The Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu is comfortable in her own shell. So comfortable that she’s spending most of Frieze New York splayed out on a waterbed beneath a bejewelled-porcelain turtle shell at Temnikova & Kasela Gallery (B28). Lemsalu gets through the durational performance by listening to music through headphones—R. Kelly is a particular favourite—and meditating. “It’s a really powerful state I go into; sometimes I think I could go on like that forever,” she says. But she can’t, and when she needs a break she will drop a napkin onto the floor to cue her dealer to release her. “I’ll come out, have a glass of champagne, then go back in,” she says. Lemsalu is still deciding whether she considers it a performance or a sculpture: “I think I want to be one of the materials,” she says.
Not the day of the jackal after all
Those who read the wall text for the French conceptualist Pierre Huyghe’s new installation on the Met’s rooftop may be disappointed to find that the sculpture of the Egyptian jackal-headed god Anubis is nowhere to be found. “I probably should have mentioned that,” the curator Ian Alteveer said after the press preview on Monday. Huyghe was planning to make a 3D-printed scan and cast of an Anubis sculpture in the museum’s collection, but “decided against it” at the last minute. The decision was aesthetic, not logistical, Alteveer said: “Pierre’s process is one of reduction rather than addition. He thinks about all the possibilities, puts them into motion and sees how it all gels.” The installation instead consists of a boulder and a fishtank filled with tadpole shrimp, lamprey and volcanic rock. The whole thing is elegantly understated, but we think a jackal-headed “guardian of the underworld” is always welcome.
Edward Snowden gets busted
Police nabbed a bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden just seven hours after a trio of artists illegally erected it in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park last month. But the sculpture is getting more than its day in the sun with an appearance at the Seven art fair at The Boiler (until 17 May). Magda Sawon, the co-owner of Postmasters and one of the event’s seven participating galleries, read of the sculpture’s removal and got in touch with the anonymous guerrilla artists. Soon after, the artists paid a fine and Sawon, along with Joe Amrhein of Pierogi gallery, retrieved the work from police custody. The sculpture could not be more suited for the show’s title, Anonymity, No Longer an Option, which includes work by Trevor Paglen (Metro Pictures), Suzanne Treister (PPOW), Mark Lombardi (Pierogi) and Katarzyna Kozyra (Postmasters), among others. The Snowden statue is not for sale and anyone can download scans of it at thingiverse.com to 3D-print their own. “The idea is to spread the image around,” Sawon says.
Nouvel’s next top model The starchitect Jean Nouvel takes a uniquely French approach to his design process: “I need solitude. I can only work in darkness, in bed, with a mask and earplugs. I spend three or four hours like this,” he said during a talk at the Museum of Modern Art on Monday. When the moderator, film-maker Matt Tyrnauer, asked “When does the model come in?” Nouvel, looking confused, turned to his translator, who whispered something in his ear. “Oh, that kind of model!” Nouvel said with a laugh. Perhaps this is why he needed to clarify later that the 1,000-ft tower he designed to house MoMA’s expansion and luxury condominiums, 53W53, “is not a sexual symbol”.
Art of pop
Visitors to Frieze New York may be taken aback by the unusual pairing of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and a striking Japanese holographic pop star on the stand of Barbara Seiler (B30). The duo feature in a film by the Belgian artist Cécile B. Evans called Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen. “The pop star is named Yowane Haku, and is based on Hatsune Miku, who toured last year with Lady Gaga. In the film, she appears in a commercial for her own beauty oil which will be on sale in the booth,” Evans says. (She produced the oil, by the way, in collaboration with the Studio Leigh company.) The artist knows what she is talking about; she worked at Barneys department store on the perfume counter.
The art world is full of blood-suckers
For those bored with cheese plates and crudités this week, the art publisher and gallery Where’s all-parasite dinner at the Lower East Side gallery David Lewis on Tuesday must have been a welcome relief. The three-course dinner, designed by the Ecuadorian chef Francisco Paez, included cannibal fungi (cordyceps), blood-sucking fish (lamprey) and tree-killer larvae (sago worms). The dinner celebrated the launch of the paperback publication Where 5, which includes parasite-themed essays by artist Tyler Coburn and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. As for sourcing the hard-to-find sago worms and lamprey? “We have friends in low places,” said Where’s co-founder Lucy Hunter.