COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HIGH ART
This afternoon in the Frieze auditorium, Bard’s Tom Eccles introduced a new project by the LUMA foundation, a studio, residency, and Frank Gehry designed center, which will be accompanied by a summer festival in Arles, France. One of the aims in Arles, Eccles said, is to “rethink” and “reinvent” the exhibition process “for the twenty-first century,” though how or why it wasn’t quite clear. He has been working on it with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who gave a two minute speech on the importance of archiving in the exhibition process, before introducing Rachel Rose, winner of the 2015 Frieze Artist’s Award. Rose talked us through and showed a clip of a video she shot in Connecticut, called A Minute Ago, about the anxiety of global warming, which shatters the peacefulness of Phillip Johnson’s Glass House with footage of natural disaster. She will create an installation at Frieze London, in October, as part of her award.
Eccles then introduced Tony Oursler by way of an introduction of Oursler’s grandfather, Fulton Oursler who was a journalist, magician, aid to Harry Houdini, friend of Arthur Conan Doyle’s, and a founding member of alcoholics anonymous. In Arles, Oursler will present an exhibition of images and objects collected over his lifetime called “Imponderable,” opening July 6th, and described as “an extensive research project that investigates a remarkable trove of more than 2,500 photographs, publications and unique objects, tracking a social, spiritual and intellectual history dating back to the early 18th century.”
Oursler referred to his show as a “deep media project,” and flicked through images from his archive, which resembled a kind of offline Tumblr, or a curiosity cabinet of phantasmagoria, film history, and photojournalism. He then showed a trailer from a 45-minute film he has made, which resembled a meta-b grade horror film, with shots of Kim Gordon on guitar, and what looked like Lena Dunham as an 18th century medium. All in all, one of the less-weird moments of the day at Frieze.