Beyond that Banana: Miami Art Week

A banana taped to an art gallery wall grabbed most of the attention in Florida, but Design Miami offered more wholesome food for thought. From a carbon-neutral booth to a sofa stuffed with leftover clothes, designers offered perspectives on the theme of water, its scarcity and overabundance.

A banana stole the show.

From VIP preview day onwards at Art Basel Miami Beach, crowds of collectors gathered to take selfies with the soft fruit taped to the wall at Perrotin Gallery. Entitled Comedian, the work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan quickly sold to three collectors for prices ranging from US$120,000 to US$150,000. Buyers received a certificate of authenticity from the artist along with “installation instructions”.

“Comedian” by Italian artist Mauricio Cattelan at Art Basel Miami Beach

Banana memes ensued. The fruit gained its own Instagram account. Various iterations of duct-taped objects circulated online. And the excitement reached new levels when, three days into the fair, a performance artist plucked the fruit from the wall and ate it, calling the artwork “delicious”.

If the banana highlights the absurdity of the contemporary art market, in which the value attributed to art is often arbitrary and divorced from craft or cost of materials (and collectors, as the piece suggests, are primates of a lower genus), Design Miami, the platform for collectible design, offered a more hopeful perspective on humans’ creative potential.

“We have been looking at issues of resources in the context of a changing planet,” says Aric Chen, who this year served as Design Miami’s first curatorial director. At the fair’s edition in Basel, Switzerland, Chen – who is also curator-at-large for M+ in Hong Kong – set as a theme “Elements Earth”, as a way to investigate the changing relationship between natural and artificial materials, waste and consumption. For the Miami edition, which ended on December 8, the theme was “Elements Water”.

“Coral Coffee Table” by William Coggin. Photo: Courtesy of Galerie Scene Ouverte

“We’re hoping to explore the poetry and phenomenology of water, but also issues of water scarcity and ocean plastics and other issues surrounding this element that is increasingly threatening and under threat,” Chen says.

Some galleries responded to the theme by exploring the beauty of marine environments. Paris’ Scène Ouverte showed “Coral Lamps” and a “Coral Coffee Table”, ceramic works by designer William Coggin that blend the fluidity of organic form with the roughness of surface textures.

New York’s R & Company debuted an installation of handmade sculptural works by Rogan Gregory, a New York-based designer known for manipulating organic materials, from marble to beach sand.

New York’s R & Company debuted an installation of handmade sculptural works by Rogan Gregory, known for manipulating organic materials.

Other designers were more explicit in their exploration of water as an environmental threat. Carpenters Workshop Gallery showed Virgil Abloh’s Aqua Alta series of “sinking” furniture featuring chairs and benches dissected at different points to appear as if they are sinking into the floor. The collection draws from the tide peaks that regularly affect Venetian life and, increasingly, life in Miami.

“Miami Beach is already experiencing flooding from king tides, what they call ‘sunny day flooding’, several times a year,” says Vincent Lee, a civil engineer at Arup. He has been working closely with local architects Shulman and Associates to advise the City of Miami Beach on how it can adapt building codes in historic districts like the Collins Waterfront.

A model used by local governments in Florida estimates the area may see sea levels rise by as much as 60cm (2 feet) by 2060. Miami Beach has already raised the elevation of local roads, and the city’s first climate-resilient building, Monad Terrace, is under construction on Biscayne Bay.

Designed by Jean Nouvel, the condominium building is raised 3.5 metres above sea level – well above the floodplain – and it includes two emergency power sources (diesel and natural gas) and a specially formulated base that developer Michael Stern describes as a “waterproof bathtub”.

Leandro Erlich, Order of Importance(2019), commissioned by Miami BeachCity, US, 2019.©Greg Lotus, courtesy Leandro ErlichStudio

Still, in a city entirely reliant on cars one has the feeling, stuck in traffic on the causeway, that it will be business as usual until it’s not. Perhaps this is why Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich’s life-size sculpture of a traffic jam on the beach resonated so strongly.

Entitled “The Order of Importance”, the series of 65 sand sculptures of cars and trucks was commissioned by the City of Miami Beach and unveiled during Art Week. The beach itself becomes an eerie tableau in which the expertly rendered vehicles appear to both distort and sink into the natural landscape. “Climate change is real,” the artist says. “But it can also be difficult to grasp.”

“Balenciaga Sofa”, stuffed with discarded items of Balenciaga fashion. Photo: Courtesy Crosby Studio

Back at Design Miami, some designers took a more hands-on approach to environmental questions. Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios collaborated with fashion label Balenciaga on an L-shaped polychromatic sofa stuffed entirely with Balenciaga discards, while Jay Sae Jung Oh, represented by Salon 94, showed her intricate works made of found or discarded objects that are meticulously wrapped in slender straps of leather.

Sustainable packaging start-up Notpla served pods of water encased in a material that combines seaweed and plants, and Studio Swine collaborated with Instagram’s @design platform to create the fair’s first carbon neutral booth.

Shaped like bubbles and made entirely of recyclable polyvinyl chloride, the lightweight booth packs down into a suitcase for transport and reuse. Studio Swine has planted 400 native trees in the Southern Carpathian Mountains in Romania, southeastern Europe, with the aim of offsetting the booth’s carbon footprint by the next Design Miami in 2020.

The question of whether designers can or should attempt to address issues presented by climate change was left open, however.

Studio Swine created a carbon neutral booth for @design. Photo by James Harris.

Chen says the theme was more “tone setting” than instructive. “It’s not about “solving” climate change,” he says, “but about expanding our thinking in a cultural way: what are the possibilities for the future?”

Alexander Groves, co-founder of Studio Swine, whose recent projects include a reimagined water tower for New York that mitigates flood surges, and a series of crafted objects made from sea plastics, sees his role differently.

“We believe there is a great opportunity in public spaces to actually work with great engineers, to not just raise awareness about sustainability, which we are all coming to realise is the greatest issue of our time and of our civilisation, but to actually do something,” Groves says.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post