It's All in the Installation

For all its posturing, Frieze is really just a super high end trade expo. The fair's organizers do their part to keep the surface of its facade buffed to a high gloss by stocking its cafes with gourment food (wild rice salads, organic roast beef sandwiches, bloody mary-flavored potato chips) and champagne, erecting sleek restrooms with light wood-paneled Port-O-Lets and shiny minimalist faucets, and providing chauffered BMW car service for VIPs. There's only so much Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover (the founders and directors of Frieze) can do, though. It's up to individual galleries to keep their booths from looking like sales floors at an auto dealership.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber sustained the mirage, putting up a Valentin Carron installation — effectively, two black walls — to close off its exhibition space; the staff sat at a sales table outside of the booth-within-a booth. It's wasn't until you passed through one of the openings cut in Carron's piece that you saw what else Presenhuber had brought to show, and once inside, you were insulated from the bustling global art capitalism without. (The walls, by the way, are for sale, and as of this afternoon, there was a reserve on them but no buyer.)

Salon 94 did a nice job, too, joining two exhibition alcoves by a wall filled with Lorna Simpson works on paper. To the right of the wall were photographs by Marilyn Minter and Sylvie Fleury depicting glittering eyelids and skin beaded with moisture. To the left, more Simpson (images of wigs) and Fleury (abstracted photographs of stretchy clothing fabric and a long, narrow Oriental rug anchored by pairs of heeled shoes). In short, this booth worked for me because it led you through several different spaces and was organized around a concept as opposed to serving as a repository for a bunch of different artists whose works don't relate. But know before you go. Galleries rarely, if ever, offer any wall text or discursive literature at Frieze, and when I asked for an explanation of the unifying theme here, I got a condescending answer that implied I should've been able to answer that myself. Maybe it was fairly obvious that Salon 94 was showing women artists who deal with the ways in which women portray their identities, but if the artists' work wasn't familiar to you, it woudn't be hard to mistake some of it as conceptual riffs on other topics.

And as for the galleries whose installations fared worse:

Vitamin Creative Space from Guangzhou was showing some interesting work but in an incoherent plot of fairground defined by a sort of zigzagging wall.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art resisted the temptation to squeeze as much art as could fit into its space, but the result was a wide, open lot punctuated by a couple of things on the floor and a couple on the wall that left you wandering around the middle, wondering.