If you’re feeling peckish at Frieze London, head to Canada gallery’s stand, where visitors are mesmerised by Samara Golden’s tables and chairs suspended from the wall. Scrumptious Styrofoam cakes, wine glasses and cutlery hang on their sides like a bizarre, head-spinning feast straight out of Alice in Wonderland. People are perhaps a little too keen to sample the eat-me art, with a flood of selfie-seekers swamping the stand. Canada’s Phil Grauer points out that the piece would not have been complete without some last-minute touches administered by Grauer himself. “Samara asked me to insert the wine residue in the glasses, so I mixed epoxy with pigment and placed it in the glasses,” he told us, giving the hanging breakfast, lunch and dinner an alcohol-addled, authentic feel. Bon appétit.
Hacking Hillary’s emails
Anyone curious about the contents of the emails that were hacked from Hillary Clinton’s personal server and released by WikiLeaks need look no further than the stand of Carlos/Ishikawa at Frieze London. The artist duo Lloyd Corporation have created a fully functioning—and rather grimy—internet café (selling for £9,000), where it is possible to access and trawl through almost 70,000 emails by tapping in keywords. There are recipes, flight plans, the personal details of Clinton’s key aides and campaign managers, and all manner of minutiae about the Democratic candidate’s presidential campaign. The artists are keen to stress that there are no files about the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, and one of the main revelations seems to be the sheer mundanity of many of the missives. If you type in, for example, “Trump”, the results are multiple and universally negative. No surprises there.
Naughtiest gallery puts fairgoers in the pink
One of the most photographed pieces at Frieze London is Portia Munson’s installation Pink Project: Table (1994/2016), a tide of plastic objects massed across a table on the stand of New York’s PPOW Gallery. A multi-layered comment on the colour’s cultural connotations, Munson also describes it as a “little bit of a rebellious response” to her sombre tutors at Cooper Union art school, who included Vito Acconci and Hans Haacke. She was very happy that the work was first shown in the New Museum’s Bad Girls exhibition in 1994. But Instagrammers beware: this visual overload includes not only such garishly girlie products as hair clips, toy ponies, combs, cosmetics and cleaning products, but also the darker underbelly of pink, in the form of discarded crack-cocaine phials and sex toys to service every orifice imaginable. Perhaps not quite so pretty in pink after all.
Word up
Meanwhile, still at PPOW Gallery, the feminist artist Betty Tompkins has a provocative wall-piece of her own: a series of boxed items labelled with mainly caustic terms for women. “The words are disproportionately negative,” says a gallery representative of the work Women’s Words (2016); indeed, “dirty old slapper”, “slag” and (ahem) “fanny flange” are enough to make the most hardened visitor blush. But one boy asked the question that really made everyone’s ears prick up: “Mum, what’s a quim?” Awkward.
Star quality
Celebrities are rather thin on the ground at Frieze this year (Leo, where are you when we need you?). But quality rather than quantity triumphed, with some top-notch stars gracing Frieze London and Frieze Masters this week. Among the luminaries seen perusing the art were David Attenborough (above), the activist Bianca Jagger, former Chancellor George Osborne, the Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne and the British musician Jarvis Cocker—who wouldn’t say if the fair was full of common people.