Those thinking that pain is a decidedly pre-Contemporary issue would do well to take a spin around Liste. The Swiss fair took us to the depths of violent depravity, with knives-a-plenty, and lots of guttural screaming.
This is present no more so than at Dutch gallery Jeanine Hofland, the hellish screeching of an albeit rather funny Catherine Biocca video work setting the tone for all-out horror. The source of this screaming? A vulgar and roughly sketched human form whose foot is repeatedly stabbed by a firmly clutched knife. Towards the back of the booth, a similar floor-set video shows a finger being nibbled on by a piranha, while the artist’s simple scratchy paintings imaginatively serialise the many possible ways there are to die; Elephant’s favourite was a depiction of the split second before an accidental dive down a manhole.
Los Angeles’s Overduin & Co. have a broad display of silverware too, their booth is lined with the not-so-subtle kinfe-work of US artist Erika Vogt. Here knives are cartoonish and free of consequences, surrounded by graphic forms that remove them one step from their inherent bloodshed.
Real Fine Arts, coming to Liste from New York, are hosting a Sam Pulitzer work that is at once manic and quite adorable. Non-opening With Miserable Accents’s many coloured pencil pieces depict dead-eyed bears and human-ish creatures amongst a sea of knives, pills and cigarettes (the later two of which are par for the course at such demanding fairs).
Michael Linares’s delicate sculptures play with a softer sense of sharpness at San Juan’s Galería Agustina Ferreyra, where a line of smallish rocks sit covered in fine needles on the floor. No bare feet around here please.
And where, you may ask, is the antidote to all this suffering? Well, Liz Craft’s graphic sculpture at Truth and Consequences seems to be enjoying himself amidst the surrounding ultra-violence, these art world types find their kicks in the strangest of places…
Liste runs until 19 June 2016, at Burgweg 15, 4058 Basel
