Brussels is a city hosting many eclectic art
festivals that tend to celebrate everything from
vampire movies to street performers: in the sort of
venues that put posters up with masking tape,
balance projection screens on top of breeze-blocks
and ensure the beer wont run out. However, once a
year Hilton suites are booked, champagne chilled
and red carpets given a final tweak because
Artbrussels, the annual international art fair,
jets into town. This year the 23rd
edition of Artbrussels took place from
the15th
-18th
April in two large exhibition halls. It featured
130 galleries from 21 countries and received an
estimated 32,000 visiting professionals, collectors
and art lovers.
Predictably, there were many galleries showing off
classic collections with big price tags, embossed
business cards and frozen smiles. These galleries
also featured much legendary installation and
performance art: either fetishised as large framed
stills or prostituted in some other form of
commercial event ‘documentation’. Mattieu Laurette,
a lifestyle artist who eats and lives by constantly
cashing in customer satisfaction guarantee
money-back offers, was presented in a solo show
(Deweer Art Gallery, Belgium): a pantomime of a
plinth-based, life-sized wax figure pushing a
shopping trolley (version 2).
Also typically for an art fair there was lots of
photography and artwork in editions. I recommend
the small, unframed travel photographs by artist
Fleur Boonman (Analix Forever Gallery, Genéve),
perhaps disproportionately attractive because of
their honesty surrounded by so much artistic
wacky-tackiness. She simply photographs and films
her travels. The results are colourful, beautiful
portraits of places it is hard to imagine exist,
and impossible to imagine being within.
The lingering artwork (one still haunting me days later) is by artist Piero Steinle (GIP-Contemporary, Zurich); an absurd and pathetic contribution to the tradition of Adam and Eve diptychs entitled ‘Paradise Birds.’ This film, playing simultaneously on two monitors, features two plucked chickens: obscenely naked but displaying no distress or awareness of their condition. They inhabit a stark, blank cinematic space. Only the hen pecks at some fruit and both shit.