7 Great Things I Saw at Frieze and Frieze Masters
By Laura van Straaten
If you’re a mere art lover and not a collector, big art fairs can sometimes make you feel out of sorts. In other words: unwelcome and out of your league. One way to remedy that is to treat them like a museum where you go to look and to learn, rather than to buy. That wasn’t hard to do with London’s contemporary fair, Frieze, and its sister fair Frieze Masters (which features work made before 2000), both of which were last week. Frieze’s organizers make a concerted effort to encourage galleries to go all-out with bespoke booths that promote interactivity — and specially curated sections aimed to provoke or to delight. Here are T’s top picks.
6. Dogg Days, of Yore
In the Solo section of Frieze Masters, the gallery Venus Over Manhattan proffered a selection of works by John Dogg, a name art-world insiders who popped by the booth during the vernissage immediately recognized as a pseudonym of the artist Richard Prince. Collaborating with the late gallerist Colin De Land, Prince used the name Dogg for a body of work in the 1980s that exalts the vernacular of American car culture. The presentation at Frieze Masters is of commonplace car parts like wheels, mounted in wooden and Plexiglas boxes, as well as enameled tire cases. According to the gallery, working as Dogg permitted Prince to try on themes that would become paramount to his practice later in his career: car culture, signage, labor and appropriation.