Untitled Art Fairs

24 October 2022

An Interview with Wynnie Mynerva / Una entrevista con Wynnie Mynerva

By Ricky Amadour

This interview is available in both Spanish and English.

Peruvian-born, Lima-based artist Wynnie Mynerva is at the forefront of sexual expression, deconstructing gender constructs. Minerva, who is represented by LatchKey Gallery, develops site-specific installations and multi-person, participatory, action-based paintings as a form of building community. In this interview, we dive deep into the artist’s representations of the body and their views on dismantling repression associated with human sexuality.


RICKY AMADOUR: Nice to meet you. I wanted to get to know you more and ask you something straightforward. Where are you from and what was your first interest in painting and art?

WYNNIE MYNERVA: I was born in Lima, Peru. I feel it is important to mention the district where I was born, Villa El Salvador. Lima has different social strata and places of conflict, and Villa El Salvador is located on the outskirts of the city. From a very young age, I wanted to paint. I have painted and won contests since I was a child. I’ve had artistic talent since I was little, and they celebrated me for it. My family didn’t know precisely what art was, but they knew about painting more broadly. I wanted to be a painter and ended up a visual artist in a state-run public school in Lima.

RA: Your art is very personal and displays a lot of intimacy, especially with sexuality. What representations do you not see at the moment?

WM: I am interested in the representation of dissidence, the periphery, and aberrant bodies. Bodies that are not controlled, that are not consumed, that do not want to be consumed and do not allow themselves to be consumed. I think of representation as plural. I like to talk about the intimate because I fear taking someone else’s voice. In other words, I fear appropriating something, because paintings have that power. That’s one of maybe a few pros and cons. Sometimes the market can misrepresent the meaning of what one wants to say in a painting. So, in that sense, I like to talk about what is intimate so as not to talk about the other, not to speak about them from my perspective, which I ultimately think is reductive. What I articulate is a bit of life, of a society where I was born, grew up, and live in a society that, in the end, has condensed me and many people like me who come from similar circumstances. In that sense, I like to give my body to action painting, performance, and drawings to become a subject of experimentation and investigation.

RA: I am a non-binary person. I feel very comfortable viewing your work and feel like I can be part of that representation. How do you create empathy for diverse expressions?

WM: I am primarily interested in getting out of the heterosexual model. Getting away, for example, from genitals that “belong” to sexual identity and that are representative of a specific body. I was born a biological female and socialized as a biological female. When I started painting, I thought hard about how women are represented in painting and about changing the paradigm of women as consumables. Later on, when I stopped connecting with the idea of being a woman and began to identify as a non-binary person, the scope of my work expanded. I may look feminine, but I don’t have a vagina or want children; I’m not a biological woman. I recently had a relationship with a trans woman and like variety. The fluidity of concepts, of ceasing to abide by constructs, is something that interests me not only in art but in life.

RA:And how did you determine these ideas?

WM: By approaching my work through feminism, I attempted to leave behind the idea of identifying myself by my vagina to build my own vision of femininity and masculinity. But it didn’t work out. When I found out that you could be non-binary, I found myself.

RA: Is it to seek dignity?

WM: In my paintings, what I look for are social relationships. Seeing how bodies interact, become energy, become worthy vital forces. Not solely as a representation of the damaged body. It is an integral part of my work to talk about violence, but also as a gesture that dignifies the body somehow, showing power beyond the victim.

RA: You could say that your site-specific installations are celebratory events.

WM: My works, for example, are celebrations and parties. I like the idea of a party, a celebration, where the colors burst, where people live an event within the painting, which is something one may yearn for. It is not a place where someone says “poor thing,” but rather, where they can enjoy themselves. So, I feel it is in that dignity that I like to present my projects. Like an act of revenge, a feat, a triumph.

RA: I have close friends, especially in Colombia, who are along the same lines as you, including Olga Robayo from Residencia El Parche, Daniela Maldonado from La Red Communitaria Trans (The Trans Community Network), and Christian Howard Hooker from Corporación Colectivo CalleShortBus. In art, a new mentality is developing in how people represent themselves in society and how they oppose machismo, acting together against violence.

WM: There have been many particular instances of violence that made me want to touch on human trauma. For me, art is a form of therapy to talk about what continues as memory and pain. It is a constant drive. My projects, I’ve realized, are means to explore those other perspectives.

RA: Shall we say sex positivity?

WM: For example, about sex positivity. How do we use sex as a space for creativity and an ideological space? It is not only about having sex but as the general performance of our lives. We talk about the dominating and the dominated as the most basic power institutions of heterosexuality. They have moved into endless possibilities to do so, for example, from guilt or guilt in sex, or as good and evil, which is often rooted in religious tradition. For instance, in one of my exhibitions, I proposed El Jardín de las Delicias (The Garden of Earthly Delights), where people have sex inside latex bags. I wanted a garden where people could go to enjoy themselves. And the idea of having sex is a thing so common. We do it every day. Yet, it is so difficult to observe or know that it exists. The people who attended the room entered and could sense what was happening. People knew others were having sex inside the bags and had to live with that scene.

RA: And people stayed?

WM: They couldn’t get away from it because it was part of the exhibit, and I installed a big synthetic floor where visitors were invited to sit. They began to sit down, and a chimerical image occurred from one moment to another, almost dreamlike. People had their drinks and talked while they looked around at how people were having sex and at how others were reacting.

RA: You said you don’t see a difference between porn and classical art?

WM: The truth is, among erotic artists, I find no differences in the sense of image production. Both are sexual images. Let’s say there is a pictorial quality. I feel like it’s a class difference. Art puts elite or social classifying labels on us. I still can’t find a difference.

RA: How do you choose the people involved in your projects? And how can they participate?

WM: The truth is that I am constantly approached by people who want to dare to do something. By lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the baker who sells you bread. People want to live experiences. I invite them to my studio, and we talk to see if their intentions are serious. There are people from all walks of life. That also interests me in my work. The painting is like a stage, and they are like the actors; it’s super theatrical, dramatic, and I like that.

RA: Have you had confrontations from other people who don’t like what you’re doing or feel differently?

WM: Yes, during my first exhibition, El Otro Sexo (The Other Sex) which was presented in a language center. Children attended on Saturdays, so parents got together to close the presentation. It became a commotion of wanting to remove the actual sticks with their hands, and in the end, they canceled the show. It lasted less time. It has happened enough that there are people who write to me, persecute me, are disoriented because of the content I make, and threaten me, even in my artist community.

RA: What are your hopes, and how do you see the future?

WM: I feel that things are progressing very slowly. I think that my job is to try to touch the future, which I would like to enjoy, but will not see in the end. And so, for example, that’s why I had my operation, my sexual reassignment. That’s why I’ve done a lot of work that maybe, in some way, is like wanting to reach something; to touch the limits. I want people to see sexuality as a transgression, a form of taking over, accessible to play and enjoy.

Una entrevista con Wynnie Mynerva
Por Ricky Amadour

La artista Peruana radicada en Lima, representada por LatchKey Gallery, Wynnie Mynerva, está a la vanguardia de la expresión sexual, deconstruyendo construcciones de género. Mynerva desarrolla instalaciones específicas del sitio y pinturas basadas en la participación de varias personas como una forma de construir comunidad. En esta entrevista, profundizamos en las representaciones del cuerpo del artista y sus puntos de vista sobre el desmantelamiento de la represión asociada a la sexualidad humana.

RICKY AMADOUR: Mucho gusto. Quería conocerte más y preguntarte algo muy simple. ¿De dónde eres y cuál fue tu primer interés en la pintura y el arte?

WYNNIE MYNERVA: Yo nací en Lima, Perú. En Lima también siento que es importante mencionar el distrito donde nací, Villa El Salvador. Lima tiene diferentes estratos sociales, lugares de conflicto y digamos que Villa El Salvador es un lugar ubicado a la periferia o a los alrededores del centro de Lima, puede. Desde muy niña yo quería pintar. Soy de esos casos de que desde niña pintaba y ganaba concursos. Digamos un talento desde chiquita que me festejaban. No sabía exactamente lo que era el arte, pero sabía lo que era la pintura. Menos las artes visuales que son mucho más amplias. Y desde ahí me acuerdo mis honorarios de niña decían. O sea, quiero ser pintora, y terminé como artista visual en una escuela estatal pública de Lima.

RA: Siento que tu arte es muy personal y también tiene mucho de lo íntimo, especialmente con la sexualidad. ¿Cuáles representaciones que no ves en este momento?

WM: Me interesa ahora la representación de los cuerpos, la disidencia, la periferia, y cuerpos aberrantes en el buen sentido. Como los cuerpos que no están controlados, que no están consumidos, que no quieren ser consumidos y no se dejan ser consumidos. Pienso en la representación de lo plural. ¿Me gusta hablar de lo íntimo en el sentido que tengo mucho miedo tomar la voz de alguien más, no? O sea, de alguna forma, apropiarme de algo, de apropiarme de la compra o comercialización. Porque los cuadros, la pintura, tienen eso. ¿Eso es también uno de lo tal vez un algunos de los pros y los contras, no? A veces el mercado puede llegar a tergiversar el significado de lo que uno quiere decir en una pintura. Entonces, en ese sentido, me gusta hablar de lo íntimo para no hablar del otro, no para hablar desde mi propia mirada, que al fin y al cabo creo que reduce. De lo que habla es un poco de la vida, de una sociedad donde yo nací, crecí y vivo en una sociedad que al final me ha condensado y mucha gente como yo vengó para los procesos similares. En ese sentido, me gusta entregar mi cuerpo de acción en la pintura, en el performance, en dibujos, para ser un sujeto de experimentación, un sujeto de investigación.

RA: Yo soy una persona no binarie. Me siento muy cómodo cuando veo tu arte, me siento como que yo puedo ser parte de esa representación. ¿Cómo quieres crear empatía para las formas diversas en que representas?

WM: Me interesa primero salir del modelo heterosexual, como la representación, por ejemplo, de los genitales que pertenecen a una identidad sexual, que la representamos a un cuerpo específico. Yo nací como mujer biológica y me socialicé como mujer biológica. Cuando inicié mi trabajo de pintura tenía un fuerte rayo en pensar cómo la mujer se representa dentro de la pintura y cambiar ese paradigma de la mujer de consumo. Después fui ampliando ese ámbito cuando deje de conectarme con la idea de ser mujer. Me interesa ser una persona no binarie. O sea, me veo femenina, no tengo una vagina, no quiero tener hijos, no soy una mujer biológica como tal. Hace poco acabo de tener una relación con una mujer trans. Me gusta esa variedad. La fluidez de los conceptos, de dejar de estructurar los papeles, es algo que me interesa y no solamente en el arte, sino de la vida.

RA: ¿Y como te sentiste?

WM: Siento que a partir de corrientes como el feminismo, intenté dejar la idea de identificarme con mi vagina y construir mi propia idea de feminidad, masculinidad y transitar en esas vías y amplitudes. Pero no lo logré. Entonces, cuando se me presentó la idea del concepto de no binarie, me sentí totalmente dentro de elle.

RA: ¿Es para buscar una dignidad?

WM: Y en las pinturas ahora, actualmente lo que busco son relaciones sociales. Como los cuerpos interactúan, siendo energía, siendo fuerzas vitales dignas. No como una representación o solamente del cuerpo maltratado. Es una parte importante de mi trabajo hablar sobre la violencia, pero también una representación que dignifica de alguna forma, que muestra un poder más allá de la víctima.

RA: Se puede decir que tus instalaciones son eventos de festejar.

WM: Si, mis trabajos, por ejemplo, festejan, son unas fiestas. Me gusta mucho esa idea de ser una fiesta, una celebración, que los colores revienten, que la gente viva un suceso dentro de la pintura, que es algo que uno pueda añorar. No es algo que alguien diga “pobrecito”, sino más bien como elle está viviendo, elle está disfrutando. Entonces siento que es en esa dignidad, en cuál me gusta presentar mis proyectos. Como una revancha, una hazaña, pero ganada.

RA: Tengo amistades cercanas, especialmente en Colombia, que están por la misma corriente como Olga Robayo de Residencia El Parche, Daniela Maldonado de La Red Comunitaria Trans y Christian Howard Hooker de Corporación Colectivo CalleShortBus. Yo creo que entre el arte se está desarrollando una mentalidad nueva en cómo la gente se representa en sociedad y combate el machismo, para subirse todos contra la violencia.

WM: Hubo muchos episodios de violencia que me hicieron querer tocar el trauma humano. Y para mí el arte es una forma de terapia para hablar de aquello que todavía sigue como una memoria y de dolor, como una pulsión constante. Pero después, a través de mis proyectos, me di cuenta de que es un medio para explorar otras perspectivas.

RA: ¿Digamos el sexo libre?

WM: Por ejemplo, eso del sexo libre, como utilizar el sexo como un espacio de creatividad y un espacio ideológico también. No solamente se trata de tener relaciones sexuales, sino como el performance en general, de nuestras vidas. Mira, se habla de dominante y dominado como esas instituciones de poder más básicas de la heterosexualidad. Se han trasladado en un sinfín de posibilidades de hacerlo, por ejemplo, de la culpa, no la culpa en el sexo, como el bien y el mal, que es muchas veces arraigado de la tradición religiosa. Entonces siento que justo estaba pensando, últimamente hay alguna posibilidad de vivir fuera el pensamiento del bien y el mal. Por ejemplo, en una de mis exhibiciones propuse en El Jardín de las Delicias que la gente tuviera sexo dentro de la exhibición en bolsas de látex. No era sino en El Jardín de las Delicias, que en realidad lo que ella quiere es un jardín donde la gente vaya a disfrutar. Y la idea de tener sexo es una cosa tan común que lo hagas todos los días, pero tan difícil de observar o saber qué existe. La gente que asiste a la sala entraba y podía intuir lo que estaba sucediendo. Intuía que la gente sabía el sexo dentro de la bolsa y tenía que convivir con esa escena.

RA: ¿Y la gente se quedaba?

WM: No podían escapar de esa escena porque era parte de la exhibición y había puesto un piso de gran sintético donde invitaba a la gente a sentarse. Se empezaron a sentar y de un momento a otro sucedió una imagen quimérica, casi de sueños. La gente empezaba a tomar sus tragos y conversar mientras la gente miraba cómo alrededor estaba la gente teniendo sexo y los demás estaban.

RA: ¿Tú dijiste que no ves una diferencia entre la pornografía y el arte clásico?

WM: La verdad es que entre cualquier artista de arte erótico no encuentro diferencias en el sentido de producción de la imagen. Los dos son imágenes sexuales. Digamos que hay una calidad que es pictórica. Siento que es una diferencia de clases. El arte nos pone etiquetas de élite o de clases sociales. No encuentro todavía una diferencia.

RA: ¿Cómo escoges las personas que son como que participan en tus proyectos? ¿Y cómo pueden participar?

WM: La verdad es que siempre se me acerca gente qué quiere atreverse a hacer algo. Es importante, pero también al abogado, al doctor, al ingeniero, al panadero que te vende el pan, allá gente que realmente quiere vivir experiencias. Los cito a mi taller, hablamos un rato a ver si sus intenciones son serias. Y hay gente de todo, de todos los ámbitos. Eso me interesa también en mi trabajo. La pintura es como un escenario, son como los actores, súper teatral, la dramática, eso me gusta.

RA: ¿Has tenido confrontaciones de otras personas que no le gusta lo que estás haciendo o que se sienten de otra manera?

WM: Sí, la primera exhibición que yo tuve, El Otro Sexo, se presentó en un centro de idiomas y asistían niños los sábados, entonces los padres de familia se reunieron a querer cerrar la muestra. Se convirtió en un revuelo de querer sacarlas los palos con las manos y al final cancelaron la muestra. Duró menos tiempo. Ha pasado bastante que hay gente que me escribe, me persigue como gente que se desorienta, por el tipo de contenido que hago y me persigue o amenaza, o mi propio gremio artístico.

RA: ¿Cuáles son tus esperanzas y cómo vez el futuro?

WM: Yo siento que las cosas están avanzando muy lento, entonces pienso que mi trabajo tratar de tocar un poco el futuro, que me gustaría gozar, pero que no voy a ver al final. Y por eso. Por ejemplo. Por eso me hice mi operación, mi reasignación sexual. Por eso he hecho un montón de trabajos que tal vez de alguna forma es cómo querer alcanzar algo y tratar de tocar los límites. Quiero que la gente vea la sexualidad como eso, una transgresión, una forma de apropiarse, una forma de ser libre, y jugar y disfrutar en ella.

Amadour is an interdisciplinary artist who works with painting, sculpture, sound, and performance to investigate landscape, architectural forms, and our relationship as humans to built and natural environments. They received dual BA degrees in studio art and art history from the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture in 2018.

Amadour es un artista interdisciplinario que trabaja con pintura, escultura, sonido y performance para investigar el paisaje, las formas arquitectónicas y nuestra relación como seres humanos con los entornos construidos y naturales. Recibió una doble diploma en arte de estudio e historia del arte en la Escuela de Arte y Arquitectura de la UCLA en 2018.

Perez Art Museum PAMM

Untitled Art Fairs

24 October 2022

How Art Fairs and Exhibitors are Adopting Climate-Conscious Practices

By Annabel Keenan

Sustainability has become an urgent concern for collectors, dealers, artists, and institutions across the industry. While groups and individuals have been taking steps to implement sustainable practices on micro and personal levels for several years, coordinated efforts for system-wide changes have steadily gained traction since the pandemic began. Groups, collectives, campaigns, and resources have popped up across the globe, and wasteful practices have come under heavy scrutiny. As a major part of the industry, art fairs have also taken steps to address sustainability, creating pathways to environmentally conscious operations that fit the specific needs of each fair.

As temporary events that bring exhibitors and visitors from across the country and abroad, art fairs face unique challenges and roadblocks to sustainability. People and artworks travel to the fairs, resulting in emissions from flights, packing, and shipping. Materials like crates and pedestals are often custom-made, making it difficult to reuse items. Moreover, insurance companies and customs agencies may have specific requirements, such as using new materials for crates.

One of the best ways to reduce waste is to slow down and plan ahead, which is difficult based on the short period of an art fair. Shipments by sea are environmentally friendlier than those by air, but securing sea freight takes time and flexibility. Exhibitors often don’t have this flexibility, in particular those showing new works that may have just left the artist’s studio. Moreover, the goal of an art fair is ultimately to sell art, meaning the works an exhibitor brings ideally will not return with them, resulting discarded materials after the fair ends. A work that was flown in a crate or exhibited on a pedestal might end up in a collection down the road, sending unneeded items to a landfill.

Before its launch in 2012, Untitled Art took steps to weave sustainable solutions into its operations. The fair’s unique home on the sands of Miami Beach required organizers to work closely with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to comply with local regulations. Untitled has a “zero-impact presentation”, meaning when the fair is over, the beach is returned to its original state without any trash, oils, or waste spilled.

“The very nature of the fair on the sands of Miami Beach has meant we have needed to take the surrounding location and wider environmental concerns into consideration from the moment we launched,” says Jeff Lawson, founder of Untitled Art. “We work closely with the city to ensure we leave the beach exactly the way we found it and even pay fees to help maintain the beach and surrounding areas.”

Unlike other fairs that take place in permanent spaces like convention centers, Untitled relies on temporary structures. Recognizing the environmental and economical benefits of reusing materials, Untitled uses the same tent, walls, and furniture annually, with the exception of the VIP lounges that change with the fair’s needs. Untitled continually adapts to more sustainable practices. They shifted to digital passes in 2013 just one year after launching with physical passes and installed an energy efficient generator in 2021 to improve air flow and reduce carbon footprint. In 2019, the fair hosted programming and special projects related to the environment, highlighting South Florida and the Everglades in particular.

“The art industry’s impact on the environment is something I have always felt passionately about and something that has been drawing increasing attention. We know that art fairs have a real impact on the environment, whether that means VIPs flying in on private jets or waste generated from the build of the fair. We are always looking to innovate and see where we can mitigate this impact as much as possible,” says Lawson.

Other fairs are also taking notice. In 2021, Frieze launched a sustainability committee that consists of employees from all parts of its organization who share information on challenges and work together to find solutions. Part of understanding the fair’s impact requires concrete data, so Frieze has begun conducting carbon footprint audit for its fairs to learn how to make tangible, calculable changes. Seeking to cut down on the waste, Frieze encouraged its Los Angeles 2022 exhibitors to use the peer-to-peer website Barder.art, which allows users to post items for free or for sale anywhere in the world. In time for Frieze London, Barder has just launched a free shuttle within Central London in partnership with the sustainability non-profit Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) and the shipping and logistics company Queen’s.

Art Basel also announced its commitment to sustainability in June of 2022, outlining steps the fair is taking and will take to reduce its ecological impact. The fair hired a specialized consultancy to calculate its carbon footprint to better understand the myriad factors that contribute to its overall emissions. The fair has also become members of GCC and adopted the non-profit’s goals of facilitating a greener art industry, achieving near zero-waste practices, and aligning with the Paris Agreement by reducing the art world’s collective emissions by 50% by 2030.

While art fairs are working to improve their own operations, exhibitors are embarking on similar journeys to make sustainable decisions. Over the last two years, several groups and initiatives have formed that support galleries, artists, art workers, and institutions to identify areas of improvement and share resources and solutions. The aforementioned GCC launched in London in the fall of 2020 and has since expanded to Berlin, Italy, Los Angeles, and Taiwan. GCC consists of artists, institutions, businesses, and other non-profits and provides guidance, tools, and resources to reduce the sector’s climate impact. A vital service GCC provides is a free, user-friendly carbon calculator tailored for the art industry.

In New York, the worker-led initiative Galleries Commit formed in April 2020 to support climate-conscious operations and an equitable future. Its website includes a climate action database where members list useful resources, actions they’ve taken, and plans for future actions. Galleries Commit also partnered with the land conservation non-profit Art to Acres to support the permanent protection of over 200,000 acres of cloud forest in Peru, which was achieved with funds from over 40 art institutions.

In April 2021, Galleries Commit launched a sister initiative, Artists Commit, to provide artists with tools to improve their operations and hold institutions accountable to do the same. A keystone of Artists Commit is the Climate Impact Report (CIR), which examines the impact of an exhibition beyond its carbon footprint. The reports focus on: cutting emissions, eliminating waste, assisting collective action, and supporting people. Artists Commit provides a template that is easy to adapt to diverse practices and offers guidance through the process. The reports are listed publicly on the group’s website, allowing others to learn from previous examples.

London-based gallery The Approach worked with Artists Commit to conduct a CIR for their 2022 Frieze New York booth to better understand the impact of their operations and find ways to improve them in the future. They shared a booth with New York-based Simone Subal Gallery, allowing them to share resources such as lighting and furniture. With the support of Simone Subal’s team, fewer staff members from The Approach needed to fly from London, helping to reduce emissions related to international travel. The Approach also opted not to use items that could contribute to waste after the fair like pedestals and single-use objects but noted that leftover crates were likely to go unused. The gallery plans to ship artwork by sea in the future.

One of the benefits of CIRs is the transparent recognition of problems, which is useful for other galleries and for the businesses that support them, such as art fairs and shipping companies. Like many exhibitors, The Approach noted that it hoped to find a reusable option for crating its artwork. In response, companies like ROKBOX have emerged that are working to create adaptable, reusable shipping solutions. Similar climate-conscious solutions like EARTHCRATE are being explored to use recyclable materials to custom-build crates that reduce waste even if they have a limited use. Art fairs, including Untitled, also encourage exhibitors to use consolidated shipments.

Marking a concerted effort to work towards a sustainable industry aligned with the Paris Agreement, GCC and Galleries Commit joined forces in July 2021 with five other climate activist groups to form Partners for Arts Climate Targets (PACT). Along with Art to Acres, Art + Climate Action, Art/Switch, Art to Zero, and Ki Culture, the groups formed PACT to amplify their individual efforts and center on the four main pillars of reducing emissions, shifting to zero waste, achieving unified standards of sustainability, and incorporating intersectional environmentalism that includes social justice. Now joined by Artists Commit, the eight groups hail from across the globe and have diverse approaches to the common goal of a sustainable industry.

While these groups, initiatives, and climate-conscious decisions might look different, the vision is the same: a sustainable art industry. Data reporting and conversations continue to raise more questions, which will enable the industry to reevaluate operations and find sustainable solutions in the future. If artists ask galleries to commit to sustainability, galleries will in turn ask art fairs and shippers to provide climate-conscious options. The goal is to change the industry system wide so that sustainability is part of every decision from the studio to the art fair to the artwork’s final home.

Annabel Keenan is a widely published writer and editor and has contributed to several digital and print publications, including The Art Newspaper, Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and Artillery Magazine, among others. She specializes in contemporary art, market reporting, exhibition reviews and is actively promoting sustainability in the art world through her writing.

Perez Art Museum PAMM

UNTITLED ART FAIR

Untitled Art is the leading independent art fair taking place annually on the sands of Miami Beach. Guided by a mission to support the wider art ecosystem, Untitled Art offers an inclusive platform for discovering contemporary art and prioritizes collaboration in each aspect of the fair.

Participants are selected for their curatorial integrity and international reach, with several galleries coming from outside mainstream art hubs. Emerging artists, young galleries and non-profit organizations are supported through NEST, a new sector that offers subsidized booths to mitigate traditional entry barriers associated with art fair participation. The first to launch an online art fair, Untitled Art continually invests in new technologies to make contemporary art collecting more accessible to new audiences and is dedicated to advancing responsible culture by actively using its platform to amplify under-represented voices.

Through critical educational programing, Untitled Art attracts contemporary art collectors, art historians, curators and students. It also carefully considers the context in which it is held, ensuring leading galleries from Miami are represented and local institutions are engaged. As part of its efforts to reduce its environmental impact, Untitled Art works closely with the City of Miami Beach to ensure a zero-impact presentation, reusing its custom-designed tent for each edition and donating furniture to local schools. In 2022, Untitled Art will also reignite its ‘writers-in-residence’ program, to support the advancement of art criticism while cultivating the next generation of writers.

Untitled Art 2022 will take place during Miami Art Week from Tuesday November 29 through Saturday December 3, with a VIP Preview on Monday November 28. The fair coincides with Art Basel Miami Beach, held from Thursday December 1 to Saturday December 3.

Untitled Art will return to Miami Beach from Tuesday, 29 November through Saturday, 3 December 2022.

• Address:Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach, Florida
• VIP and Press Preview:Mon, 28 Nov, 1pm–8pm
• Opening Hours:Tues, 29 Nov, 11am–7pm
  Wed, 30 Nov, 11am–7pm
  Thurs, 1 Dec, 11am–7pm
  Fri, 2 Dec, 11am–7pm
  Sat, 3 Dec, 11am–7pm
• Valet:Available for $40. Located on the corner of 11th Street and Ocean Court.
• Hotels:Take advantage of special discounts with our partner hotels. You may book directly through our Travel Partner, Turon Travel.

◦ Allouche Benias
◦ Anna Erickson Presents
◦ Aperture (Nest)
◦ Artnueve
◦ Arts of Life – Circle Contemporary (Nest)
◦ Asya Geisberg Gallery
B
◦ Badr El Jundi
◦ Benrubi Gallery
◦ Bienvenu Steinberg & J
◦ Bill Arning Exhibitions
◦ bitforms gallery
◦ Bode Projects
C
◦ C O U N T Y
◦ CARL KOSTYÁL GALLERY
◦ CARVALHO PARK
◦ Casa Hoffmann (Nest)
◦ Casemore Gallery
◦ Cindy Rucker Gallery
◦ Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions, Ltd.
◦ Cob
◦ COHJU contemporary art
◦ Colector
D
◦ DANIELA ELBAHARA (Nest)
◦ Davidson Gallery
◦ De Buck Gallery
◦ Denny Dimin Gallery
◦ Diane Rosenstein Gallery
◦ Dimensions Variable (Nest)
◦ Dio Horia
◦ Double V Gallery
E
◦ Eden Airlines (Nest)
◦ Eduardo Secci
◦ El Apartamento
◦ Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Perez Art Museum PAMM

24 October 2022

Commodity, Competition, and Collaboration in the Contemporary Art Fair

By Justin Kamp

Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2021. Image courtesy of Casey Kelbaugh.

I was talking with an artist I know recently, and we got to speaking about “collaboration,” what that word means in the context of an artistic career. I tended to define the word in careerist terms: networking, shared gallery representation, the odd branded deal with, say, an app, or a clothing company. To this artist, though, “collaboration” conjured up the utopia of her time at art school: working in a shared studio space with peers, riffing on what they were producing, letting it osmose into her own work. “It’s play, and it challenges you in ways that working solo doesn’t,” this artist told me of her time spent bouncing ideas off studio-mates in school. “But most galleries don’t care for collaborative work, because artists are commodities.”

When we talk about “the art world,” what we are usually talking about is that word, commodity, along with its attendant concerns of supply and demand, value and circulation. Works that artists make become commodities in the globalized art market, the artists themselves become commodities in the institutional gauntlet of reputation-building and canonization, and their oeuvres, and indeed their entire artistic identities, get packaged into easily-digestible cuts of product. This, essentially, was the point that the artist I spoke to made: when the creation of art becomes wrangled into a career, all propensity for collaboration is strangled out of the process, because there is no such thing as collaboration between products looking to be sold— only competition.

I don’t think I’m saying anything novel here. Art as we understand it—that is, as both product and profession—has always contended with an inherent tension that the author and curator Paco Barragan has called “the dialectic mercantilization versus autonomy of art”. Before the globalized art commodity market, there was patronage by the court or the church. If you’re not selling your work as a product, you’re creating it as an advertisement, as John Berger put it, for a certain sitter’s fortune, prestige, or wealth. Money has to be made, of course. It always does.

Nowadays, that money is very often made on the international art fair circuit, which, with its flea-market format of close-proximity booths, presents perhaps the clearest encapsulation of Barragan’s notion of “mercantilized” art. Exhibitors vie for attention in a white wall version of a merchant’s bazaar, gently hawking wares to a class of collector elite. In the process, they subject the work they sell to what Elizabeth Dee called “context collapse:” stripping artistic practices of their full context and relevance in favor of selling cherry-picked samples that will best catch a passing collector’s eye. This process, as Dee points out, generally diminishes artists’ development, their gallery profits, and collector interest.

And yet, art fairs remain incredibly important to the economic survival of most galleries. According to Clare McAndrew’s Art Market Report, fairs accounted for 43 percent of all dealer sales in 2019, and while the pandemic lowered that percentage, it has quickly risen back to a high level of prominence since 2020, and looks to continue to do so. The fair as a sales method represents a general prioritizing of competition above all else, and that has trickled down to produce more surface-level interactions between individual players as well as thinner, more commodified practices. If mercantile modes dominate, then it follows that the logic of mercantilism will dominate as well.

And yet, treating craven competition as the only modality available to the art world is unproductive, even ahistorical. Traces of collaboration still persist, even within our contemporary market terrain. It was a grand spirit of economic collusion between artists, after all, that animated two of the closest historical forebears to the contemporary art fair as we know it. Paris’s Salon des Independants, for example, was started by artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the late 19th century after the official state academy would not display their work and became an important market and artistic proving ground. The 1913 Armory Show in New York, too, was put into motion by a coalition of artists known as the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), who likewise sought to extend exhibition (and sales) opportunities to artists who were operating outside the academic and institutional bounds of supposed good taste. Even the hyper-financialized, privately-owned fairs that cropped up in the mid-20th century—your Art Basels and Art Colognes, in many ways the templates for today’s international art selling experiences—exist downstream from this spirit of unity, with gallerists at the helm instead of artists.

There is a certain point, however, where neat statements on the persistence of the collaborative spirit begin to collapse. Collaboration may have given us the contemporary art fair, but the contemporary art fair has not, for the most part, furthered artistic collaboration. There is nothing resembling the Fauves’ syncretion at the 1906 Salon, for example, or the artistic explosion that resulted from Duchamp and Matisse rewiring audience’s brains at the 1913 Armory. Brute commodification, to Dee’s point, has only left room for approaches of a similar caliber. A gallerist I spoke to recently, for example, described collaboration with other galleries, especially at fairs, as a numbers game, where access to new markets or alleviated financial burdens are weighed against the opportunity cost of shared profits. He’s right, of course. But the point is that in a thoroughly mercantilized art world, even collaboration becomes a byword for more effective competition.

So, what to do? How to alleviate this pervasive suffocation of the collaborative spirit? To make room for the sort of generative crossovers that my friend, the artist, looks back on so fondly? I have a few pipe-dream suggestions: Share profits. Charge less to exhibit, so that smaller galleries can comfortably exist, and artists don’t feel obligated to compress their practice into a conveyor belt of content just to keep up. Pay writers, as Untitled has done here, to write about art, to give artists and their practice and their place in the market serious intellectual consideration and not let them flit off into an endless press cycle. But even still, these are still pleas for top-down tweaks rather than a roadmap for collaboration.

Maybe collaboration is too diffuse a word, too easily channeled into competitive modes, and I should be more precise in what I am urging: to build coalitions. It has been coalitions, after all, that have underpinned so many of the collaborative examples I have put forth in this piece. The Paris Salon and the 1913 Armory were products of artists working together, of course, but I am also reminded of the Artists Union in New York, who agitated for the federal government to include artists in the WPA’s federal patronage during the Great Depression and managed to stretch that patronage for several years through consistent demonstration and action. I am thinking, too, of their spiritual descendants, including the short-lived Art Workers Coalition (AWC), whose protests and list of 13 Demands led to more artist-conscious exhibition policies at New York museums in the late 1960’s. There’s also the Foundation for the Community of Artists, which continued the AWC’s project into the 1990’s, providing members with housing hotlines, job placement programs, group health insurance packages, and other such resources. With that history in mind, my other recommendation might seem obvious, even trite: for artists to work together anyway. Read old issues of Art Front or Art Workers News. Bounce work off each other, refute rote competition. Remember how historian Gerald Moore described those that participated in the Artists Union:

“Living in a society that by and large placed little value on their work, artists turned naturally to each other for stimulation, recognition of their achievements and affirmation of their lifestyle. It was within the milieu of the Union that artists were able to identify themselves as artists. The young men and women who came to meet and make friends, talk shop and exchange ideas were sowing the seeds of the eventual flowering of artistic activity of the late 1940’s and 1950’s during those early years. It was the Union that was the shelter and ambience to which most of the young artists of the time were drawn.”

Justin Kamp is a writer based in New York. He writes criticism, features, and fiction. His work has appeared in The Art Newspaper, CNN Styles, Artsy, Garage Magazine, and the New York Observer, among others. Follow him on Twitter, @justinkamp_ and Instagram, @justindotcomp

Perez Art Museum PAMM