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When Art Basel launched in 1970, it was modeled on a trade fair with ticketed access to an indoor exhibition space, and the size and scale of the artworks were commensurate.Such a contained affair can be difficult to imagine today, when the shows spill far beyond the halls with programming that has transformed sites from the Miami Beach shoreline to Hong Kong skyscrapers. While larger-scale sculptures, such as one of Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe cycle works, were displayed outside the Rundhofhalle as early as 1974, it wasn’t until 2004 that the Public sector was established, giving visitors the chance to see artworks on Messeplatz, the public square in front of the halls, without purchasing tickets to the show. Following this initiative in Basel, public art also began to play a role at Art Basel Miami Beach and Hong Kong, where works have occupied iconic buildings and even trams.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Do We Dream Under the Same Sky, a communal kitchen and dining area, was staged on Messeplatz in 2015. Beneath a bamboo structure, visitors conversed over curry made with ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown away. The Thai artist, who has been organizing culinary pop-ups since the early 1990s, was present to cook and serve the food; many participants not only ate but also cleaned their dishes in this display of social and communal exchange.
While some public projects have created intimate experiences, others have addressed entire cities. In 2015, during the third edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong, Cao Fei lit up the city’s skyline with her video work Same Old, Brand New. The five-minute animation took over the facade of the International Commerce Centre – at 484 meters, Hong Kong’s tallest building. Images from retro arcade games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders flashed bright white across the tower, looping markers of collective memories for millions.
Just as Fei's work rebooted old technologies, ME3M 4 Miami unplugged fast-changing ones: Ryan McNamara’s Performa-produced performance, held during Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2014, transposed the architecture of the Internet into the Miami Grand Theater. Audience members, uprooted from their viewing spots every few minutes, caught glimpses of diverse choreographies backed by fast-shifting soundtracks. Part information overload, part play on FOMO, McNamara’s contemporary ballet captured the choreography of being online.
In 2018, the Public sector, which featured outdoor sculptures in Miami Beach, was replaced by large-scale performances at the new Miami Beach Convention Center’s Grand Ballroom, which has since hosted Meridians. Inaugurating the space was Autorreconstrucción: To Insist, to Insist, to Insist (2018), a collaboration between Abraham Cruzvillegas and choreographer Bárbara Foulkes. Dancers circled around suspended sculptures made of found objects, their bodies connected to these works by cables. Each gesture gradually dismantled the assemblages, simultaneously destroying and creating new structures across the cavernous space.
Public works shown during Art Basel often debut elsewhere – Autorreconstrucción, for example, originally premiered at La Pista in Mexico City in 2017 – and for Art Basel Hong Kong 2017, Kingsley Ng reprised his 2016 piece Twenty-Five Minutes Older. With this work, Ng invites people to ride two public trams he had repurposed as camera obscuras. Passengers see reversed, projected images of the city during their journey. Ngchose extracts from a novella by famed writer and editor Liu Yichang for riders to hear while passing along the northern edge of Hong Kong Island. The resulting experience explored the passage of time via past and present geographies of the city.
Art in unexpected places was also a key element of the Art Basel Cities Week in Buenos Aires in 2018. The city hosted the multi-venue exhibition ‘Hopscotch (Rayuela)’, which included Maurizio Cattelan’s Eternity: a pop-up cemetery for the living in a section of the Bosques de Palermo. Cattelan invited more than 200 local artists to invoke their favorite dreams or worst nightmares by designing and building tombstones and gravestones for anyone – friends or foes, family members or celebrities – so long as they were alive. The final site invited visitors to walk among whimsically sculpted tributes to the living.
Cecilia Alemani, the curator behind ‘Hopscotch (Rayuela)’, also brought Alexandra Pirici’s Aggregate (2017–19) to Art Basel, first as part of Cities in 2018 and then to Basel, where it took place during the 2019 show. Described as a ‘performative environment’, Aggregate filled a pavilion on Messeplatz designed by Andrei Dinu with more than 60 dancers moving as a collective body. Each individual action abstracted one of Pirici’s references, which ranged from Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word poem Whitey on the Moon (1970) to the undulations of eel colonies. At four hours long, Pirici’s project represents a specific commitment to live experiences – and the range of programming that has become an integral part of every Art Basel show.
Top image: View of Ryan McNamara's ME3M 4 Miami at the Miami Grand Theater during Art Basel Miami Beach 2014.