The Margulies Collection at the Warehoouse, 591 NW 27th Street, Miami
de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, December 3, 2013 to October 11, 2014.  23 NE 41st Street, Miami
28 Chinese, Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, December 4, 2013 to August 1, 2014.  95 NW 29th Street, Miami

Between fairs, Miami visitors could hit the beaches, the shops… or the city’s famous private collections. This year, two of the Big Three made a perfect contrast–almost as if their founders had conspired to create differing illustrations of what high-level collecting can mean.

At the de la Cruz collection, the current exhibition immersed viewers in the punk formalism of artists like Sterling Ruby, Christopher Wool, Mark Bradford, and Rudolf Stingel, all represented by giant, top-notch works, whose ragged Ab-Exy grandeur was set off perfectly by the austere Modernism of the building. Viewers were likely to feel dazzled, and also a little wary– especially considering how closely the selections tracked a certain kind of elite-collector taste.  Like well-connected party guests, Stingel, Wool, & company impled a predictable set of likely suspects: Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker; Jacob Kassay and Mark Grotjahn,  Nate Lowman, and Seth Price. And there they were– along with a scatteriPng of less cohesive, but equally fashionable names (Thomas Houseago, Aaron Curry, Peter Doig). In the end, one’s skepticism couldn’t quite dim one’s admiration: whatever the de la Cruz’s motives, they put together a stunning representation of contemporary abstraction at its most offhanded, dour, and elegant.

By contrast, The Margulies Collection, housed in an old warehouse alongside a highway, seemed casual, a little sloppy and impulsive, but also winningly unpretentious.  Near the entrance, big single sculptures by de Kooning, Caro, and Tony Smith, were parked like trophy cars in a rundown garage. Then came a room of Kiefers. Turn the corner to find Franz West, then Jason Rhodes. Meandering up stairs and through corridors, you came across suites of taxonomic Becher-style photographs, and many rooms showing lackluster videos. If the quality was uneven, there were plenty of highlights, sometimes the more pleasurable for being unexpected: for me, these included two groups of Barbara Probst photographs, and Nina Katchadourian’s utterly winning selfies in faux-Flemish regalia. As I walked out,  Marty Margulies himself was talking to a group of visitors. I was a little stunned to hear him say, apropos of purchasing art, “It must fit. It must be cohesive.” His own collecting seemed to belie his words– but did that matter? His enthusiasm was obviously genuine, and the collection as a whole felt like an anti-museum, not a carefully curated theme-with-variations, but a sequence of crushes.

And what about the most famous of Miami’s collections, the Rubell’s? Its reputed preeminence was less visible this year, with most of the space given over to art purchased on a recent trip to China. Why does virtually all of this art look as hollow and derivative as it is spectacular? To my eye, someone like Zhu Jinshi was representative. His big gloppy paintings are handsome and enormous, painted with a calligraphic verve that suggests Kanji executed in colored stucco. But they also feel, frankly, glib and dated, like super-sized hybrids of Philip Guston and Louise Fishman. Are skeptical viewers like myself missing something? Does Western ethnocentrism, or the fevered market climate, create unconscious bias? I mistrust my own mistrust, and yet the Rubells certainly didn’t dispell it; on the contrary, every time I found myself feeling a flush of momentary excitement, I would wince to discover that the work in front of me was not new Chinese art, but an older piece from the permanent collection: a Cady Noland installation, or Charles Ray’s unforgettably lewd monument to pornographic narcissism, “Oh Charley, Charley, Charley.” If you trusted the Rubells to pick out the best of what’s being made in China, you came away feeling glum.

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The Art Miami Pavilion, Midtown | Wynwood Arts District, 3101 NE 1st Avenue

I have come to think of Art Miami as Art Basel Miami Beach’s approachable kid sister – smaller, easier to get to know, and possessing many if not all the virtues of the main fair. One can find modernist jewels there, more and more every year, in fact, while also sampling a wide range of contemporary works.

This is a vindication. Art Miami, you may recall, predates the main fair by several years. It used to be the place you’d go to see loads of Fernando Botero, scores of duplicative Latin American realists, and a smattering Miami art galleries now long-gone. When “Basel” showed up in 2002 and ate its lunch, Art Miami had to reposition itself on the calendar and find a new raison-d’etre. It foundered for a few years, but is now a mainstay of the Wynwood fairs.

1960s-era Jules Olitski is coming to market with increasing frequency, and these are always a pleasure to behold. A particularly fine one was at Antoine Helwaser Gallery (NYC), a field of red with a channel of green circles rolling through it. It was paired with an equally fine Adolph Gottleib canvas from the same era in which two planetoids, one black and ringed with pink and the other powder blue, rise over a roiling red splash.

Jerald Melberg Gallery (Charlotte, NC), in addition to presenting an in-cubicle exhibition of Robert Motherwell and showing some dependably good Wolf Kahn pastels, introduced me to the work of Lee Hall, a North Carolina native with an oeuvre of solemn, thinly painted abstractions. Lee went on to show at Betty Parsons and lead the Rhode Island School of Design; she now lives in Connecticut. Scott White Contemporary Art (La Jolla, CA) had one of the best Milton Avery paintings I’ve ever seen: a still life of potted flowers and a decanter that smoldered with chromatic intensity and snapped together compositionally like puzzle pieces. There were several excellent works by Louise Fishman at Goya Contemporary (Baltimore).

Pan American Art Projects (Miami) showed two pinball machines by Abel Barroso. Built roughly out of painted wood but nevertheless operational, after a fashion, they remarked cleverly on the trials of finding oneself in the multicultural world – one flipper is labeled “origen,” the other “destino.” Galerie Von Braunbehrens (Munich) displayed a video work by the Zurich-based artist Marck, a technical marvel in which a video of woman half-submerged in water appeared to struggle against an iron frame adhered to the screen. It was a beautiful novelty at first blush, but grew increasingly distressing and poetic as it played on and the woman made no progress at escape. In contrast was the idyllic figure-in-an-abstraction by Grace Munakata at Paul Thiebaud Gallery (San Francisco).

And now, Miami Beach calls. Not the art fairs, but the actual beach with sand and waves. The weather, which after all is why we’re all here, is perfect.

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December 4 to 8, 2013
1530 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

At the Aqua Art Fair this year I was told in so many words, or by unmistakable gesture, to fuck off by several pieces of art on display in three different rooms. I won’t go into details – the prospect of riling someone enough to write about these pieces was largely the point, I suspect – but I will say that even hostility has turned into a mannerism at this point in contemporary art history (see thumbnails, below). Maybe an aspect of the avant-garde project has always been to offend bourgeois sensibilities, but the species of bourgeoisie traipsing through the fairs is just going to skip over such lazy offenses and find other things to regard. Of which there were, aplenty.

After seeing as much art as the fairs provide, simplicity starts to look refreshing. Thus the subtly colored collagraphs by Sarah Hinckley, on display at Pele Prints, a collaborative print studio in St. Louis, were like an invitation to sit down and put your feet up. (The graceful colored loops of Joanne Freeman’s paintings at K. Imperial of San Francisco offered similar relief.) Pele’s proprietrix Amanda Verbeck hails from a program at Washington University in St. Louis that was also present at Aqua in the form of Island Press, who had a striking print on the wall by Memphis-based Greely Myatt of a pile of word- and thought-balloons, each with its own hue and pattern. Aqua started out with a program to emphasize the West Coast and has since expanded it to include the middle of the country, and it remains the go-to Miami fair for seeing all the interesting art being made there.

Gary Baseman, long known to the world of illustration (he designed the board game “Cranium”) and revered by the lowbrow set, has taken an unexpected turn. In the Shulamit Gallery (Venice, CA) space he has created a installation in which his paintings of big-eyed, sausage-nosed homunculi are hung from birch branches set upright as trees, which are embellished with faux moss to make a forest scene. It is an homage to his father, a partisan who spent three years hiding from the Nazis in the woods of Poland. The cavorting figures typical of his paintings have a new participant – a woman wearing a robe adorned with Hebrew letters and magic eyes. Baseman’s mirthful imagery always harbored a darker edge, but this is a foray into psychological and historical territory that’s unprecedented in his career.

One of the chaises longues on the second floor of the Aqua Hotel afforded a literal opportunity to put our feet up at the end of the day. The journey through insult and exhilaration had been a long one.

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The Untitled tent is a beauty, a sleek luminous airplane hangar. It doesn’t hurt that you approach from the beach, walking across long carpets laid in the sand. Inside, after a brief collector bottleneck, the space felt invitingly high and bright. Pausing to look up and around, visitors could almost literally stumble across the amazing Jacolby Satterwhite, in a brightly colored body suit, performing a kind of slow-motion break dance, and then leading us, pied-piper style further into the interior.

A first circuit and a couple of drinks left an overwhelmingly positive, and surprisingly coherent impression. The dominant mode seemed to be ingenious high-key abstract painting—rippling patterns, tweaked 3D surfaces, imagery partly camouflaged under layers of eye-candy. Some examples, chosen nearly at random: Letha Wilson’s beguiling meta-marbleizing “paintings,” in fact made of concrete and crumpled photographic prints (at Romer Young); Wendy White’s crepuscular sprayed abstractions (at Anna Kustera), Josh Marsh’s weird, floating, prismatic apple-cores—like a cross between Ivan Albright and Gorky (at Jeff Bailey), and at Zürcher, Brian Belott’s wall of small highly decorative panels, each built around a single dirty sock.

Of course, further circuits (but alas not more drinks– they were too expensive) complicated that impression: there was, for instance, some striking black-and-white photography, including Carlheinz Weinberger’s biker portraits (at Rod Blanco), and Duane Michael’s portraits of Andy Warhol (at DC Moore). But certain art world staples—stark geometry, youth culture, or for that matter, sex and politics—seemed surprisingly scarce. Subject matter was largely an oblique presence here; instead, the spirit of the event, perhaps in keeping with the fair’s own wry title, was a kind of savvy playfulness.

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