There’s no escape from the art at Frieze this year—not even in the washrooms. For her Frieze Project, Julie Verhoeven has redesigned every aspect of the male and female toilets, from the lids and seats to the lavatory bowls and the insides of the urinals. “The toilets have always been my favourite spot at Frieze; they are a refuge and a place to relax. I wanted to make them womb-like but also a little bit troublesome,” she says. There’s blaring music playing while the artist patrols the (blue-carpeted) Ladies and the (pink-carpeted) Gents, dressed in flamboyant washroom-attendant regalia and “making sure that people put their seats up and wash their hands”. If she leaves her post, a life-sized cut-out of Verhoeven will act as her replacement, and for today’s VIP opening, she is also relying on help from the art collector Valeria Napoleone, who will sport a personalised apron emblazoned with the instructions “Wipe from Front to Back”. Who says patrons don’t support their artists?
No pain, no gain
Collectors in London for Frieze week might be tempted to get a tattoo while they’re in town (go out to a vernissage, get drunk, get a skin etching). Lazarides Gallery is offering some brave and reckless guinea pigs the chance to get a tattoo for free—but there’s a catch. Tattoo supremo Scott Campbell (below) is inviting participants, selected in a lottery, to place their arm through a hole in the wall. “Scott will tattoo whatever he feels inspired to do and the recipient does not get to see it until it is finished,” the gallery says. The daring sessions will take place from 7 to 9 October in an off-site space in Covent Garden’s Henrietta Street. Campbell has tattooed Courtney Love and Orlando Bloom, among other celebrities, so any individuals bearing the mystery designs will be in very glitzy company indeed.
Keep it down
One of the hot tickets at Frieze London this year is a performance piece by the Korean-American artist Christine Sun Kim, who will stage Nap Disturbance in the fair’s Live space. Kim and her fellow performers, decked out in bright, chrome-green onesies, are bound to turn heads in Regent’s Park. But there is an important and intriguing point to this project: Kim has been deaf from birth and “hears” by studying the physical reactions of those around her. Her troupe of performers will interact with various objects at the fair, from trash bins to Frieze catalogues, to determine their “sonic range”. The piece has an altogether more mundane point of reference, though, deriving from Kim’s experience of trying to keep quiet while her partner, who works night shifts, sleeps during the day.
Nunavut: the new Shoreditch? The art world loves finding trendy new locations for under-the-radar artists, so it is with much excitement that we can reveal the next must-see hotspot: Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic. A new exhibition at Canada House on Trafalgar Square (Floe Edge, until 30 November) includes works by 18 native and Inuit artists and collaborators (such as Mona Netser), who have made striking pieces from materials including sealskin and fur. “They all possess a strong connection to one of the world’s most remote and sparsely populated regions. Yet it is a region where one-quarter of all adults—4,000 people—are practising artists,” a press statement says. That beats Shoreditch any day…
Colony Room hasn’t lost its sparkle For more than six decades, until it closed in 2008, the Colony Room members’ club attracted some of the biggest names in British art to its dingy, green, first-floor room on Soho’s Dean Street. Now, many of its illustrious clientele, from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, are featured in a special Colony Room-themed exhibition at Bonhams (until 11 October). The works have been borrowed from the collection of Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. One of the club’s regulars described it as the only place where you had to wipe your feet on the way out. But many of its gutter-loving patrons also appreciated the high life and would certainly have approved of Monday night’s celebratory banquet, which was whipped up by Bonhams’ Michelin-starred chef Tom Kemble and washed down with lashings of Pol Roger. As Bacon so memorably put it: “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.”