Treading water a few hundred feet offshore from Miami Beach seems an unusual way to view an art installation. On Sunday morning, at the tail end of Miami Art Week, I ventured out with the Dolphins and Rainbows open water swim group (accompanied by Olympic swimmer and ‘eco-mermaid’ Merle Liivand) to view the first of several planned underwater sculptures.
A few dozen of us are bobbing in the water trying to spot Leandro Erlich’s ‘Concrete Coral’, consisting of 22 full-size car-shaped concrete sculptures resting 20 feet below the surface. While the sea is (thankfully) calm today, visibility in the water is poor. And we keep getting pushed away by the current. After a few attempts to dive down, I finally catch a murky glimpse of grey concrete, along with a few fish.
Erlich’s sculpture is the first of several planned installations, part of an ambitious plan by REEFLINE to develop a 7-mile underwater public sculpture park, snorkel trail, and hybrid reef alongside Miami Beach. New York Times art critic Blake Gopnik recently reviewed the project, accompanied by a photo of him in scuba gear. Art installations and performances on the beach have become a standard part of Art Week programming, so it only seems natural that they would venture into the water.
On land, Art Week presents a different kind of challenge. With over a dozen major art fairs (including of course Art Basel Miami) and countless parties and events at all hours throughout the Miami area, it is a true test of endurance. I was exhausted after four days on my feet, wandering through multiple venues and cycling back and forth on the Venetian Causeway between downtown Miami and the beach. With gridlocked traffic and long lines for the much-hyped free ferries, a bicycle remained the most efficient way to get around.
This year I was intrigued by the many artists using photographic techniques in novel ways, turning images into sculpture or installation. At Scope, Untitled, and NADA, photographic images appeared printed on to a wide range of materials and surfaces – from sea shells to bubble wrap. Miami-based artist Lee Pivnik uses UV printing to fix images to squares of seashells as part of a larger mixed-media project exploring coastal ecology. Kurumi Ono buries her photographic prints underground for weeks or months, which are then displayed in their partially decaying form. And Rosie Clements manages to print onto bubble wrap, creating “squishy, tactile pixels.”
In contrast, at Art Miami, more commercially oriented, photographic work was more about glitz and glam. I’m not sure what coating a photograph with diamond dust is meant to convey, but it certainly raises the retail price of a piece. Terry O’Niell’s iconic image of Brigitte Bardot with a cigar on the set of “The Ballad of Frenchie King” in Almeria, Spain, 1971, appeared at multiple stalls and different formats (both with and without diamond dust).
The Bass Museum hosted a conversation with video installation artist Sir Isaac Julien. His ‘Ten Thousand Waves’ had its U.S. premier at The Bass fifteen years ago. Julien discussed how he drew inspiration from the history of Chinese film, including The Goddess (1934) and the films of Ang Lee, and spoke about working with Maggie Cheung and having free reign in the back lot of the Shanghai Film Studio (fellow video artist Yang Fudong helped with connections). Later the same day, Aperture hosted a meet and greet at the Betsy Hotel with Miami-based photographer Anastasia Samoylova, who was having a very busy art week. Her latest book, Atlantic Coast, revisits Bernice Abbott’s 1950s north/south road trip along US Route 1, highlighting the pace of development and environmental impact.