The answer is blowin’ in the wind
That surfside structure between the W hotel and the bar Free Spirits that resembles the skeleton of a beached whale is, in fact, the Beijing-based artist Sun Xun’s commission for the luxury Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet. Reconstruction of the Universe (2016) is an impressive installation-cum-dance floor featuring bamboo and a 3D film meticulously animated with woodcuts by a team of 100. (The awls they used to make the film are jammed, perhaps cathartically, in one of the structure’s columns.) Sun visited Miami just once in the year-and-a-half since he received the commission; he finds the city “boring”, but says the work was still a product of its location. “You get here, you get a feeling and you start thinking,” he said in an interview. “You talk with the sky, with the trees, with the ocean, with the beach. Soon you will get somewhere very important. You will get an answer. They will tell you what you should do.”
Feel the Burn(ing Man) at Art Basel
There are striking similarities between Art Basel in Miami Beach and the Burning Man festival in the Nevadan desert: both take place in exotic locales, both involve bouncing around various “camps” and participants are expected to be freaked out by some kind of titillating performance or installation. The long-time Burning Man artist Laura Kimpton made her Miami debut last year at the SLS Hotel. “We really activated the space like it’s never been activated before,” said her manager, Elizabeth “Bettie-June” Scarborough. (Kimpton will make her debut at the Venice Biennale next year as a representative of Burning Man, showing a 16ft-tall bust of a topless woman with the head of a monkey.) This year, the artist’s work is being shown in five spots around Miami, most prominently in the Magic City sculpture park. Kimpton says she strives to remind us all of our animal nature, which is why she was happy to be able to burn one of her sculptures—however briefly—in Miami last year. Sadly, pyrotechnics are not planned for 2016.
Not so Standard?
Even in supposedly chill Miami, gallery dinners too often consist of rubbery chicken and long conversations with the dullest collectors on Earth. But Los Angeles’s MAMA gallery out-chilled even the most chill of Miami vibes, with an evening picnic at the Standard hotel in honour of the artist Jordan Sullivan, who is soon to open a show at the gallery. Guests sat on AstroTurf and debated which meditation app is the best (Headspace is largely hype, apparently; those in the know use Insight or Calm) before dining on food prepared by the LA restaurant Alma. Later, a performer gave a rendition of the Animals’ 1960s classic House of the Rising Sun, performed on a saxophone and garter belt-strapped synthesiser. Was all this very strange, even for Miami? Alma’s Ashleigh Parsons said that at 7pm the night before, the couple next to her in the hotel’s hammam were thrown out for having sex in one of the bathtubs. “But you know,” she said, “if you’re day-drinking, 7pm is really like 2am.”
Koons: undressed to impress
There are all sorts of racy works in Desire (until 4 December), a show at the Moore building in the Design District, co-organised by the dealer Larry Gagosian and the art-world stalwart Jeffrey Deitch. Diana Widmaier-Picasso, the granddaughter of the Spanish artist, has brought together works by more than 50 artists that explore “Modern and contemporary approaches to eroticism in art”. More prudish visitors might be shocked by Richard Prince’s Spiritual America (1983), a highly provocative image showing a ten-year-old Brooke Shields naked and heavily made up. (Tate Modern withdrew the piece from an exhibition in 2009.) A visitor to the private view was also taken aback by Jeff Koons’s physique, as seen in his 1991 sculpture Dirty—Jeff on Top (1991). The piece, on loan from a private German collection, shows the athletic artist having sex with his ex-wife, La Cicciolina. And Koons’s virile appendage certainly got the crowds talking at the VIP preview, with one guest overheard exclaiming: “That is one mighty fine wiener he’s got there.”
Anti-anti-Trump
The art collective T.Rutt ran into a spot of bother with its anti-Trump art earlier this month, when the Red Dot art fair in Miami changed its mind about displaying works by the group that poke fun at the president-elect. The artists David Gleeson and Mary Mihelic, who make up the collective, have criss-crossed the country in a reclaimed Trump campaign bus emblazoned with T.Rump. T.Rutt’s other potent piece, Flag desecration artwork (2016), incorporates the infamous leaked comments made by Trump, including the highly inflammatory statement: “Grab ‘em by the pussy”. According to Hyperallergic, Eric Smith, the president of the Redwood media group, which runs Red Dot, said he “had decided to pass on both the bus display and flag”. But the artists have headed to Miami anyway, parking the bus in a courtyard at NW 24th Street at the intersection with North Miami Avenue, with the flag on show around the corner at Conception Art Fair. Let’s hope The Donald doesn’t pop in to Art Basel in Miami Beach any time soon.