Art Basel Miami Beach features lunar craters on the sand, bar in shape of an instrument

Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros will create Guiro, an elaborately constructed, egg-shaped wooden bar model

 

By Jordan Levin | jlevin@miamiherald.com11/17/2012

A recreation of the moon’s surface and an all night art-opera film are some of the highlights of expanded performance and video offerings at this year’s fair.

This year’s fair will offer some impish and innovative performance art and interactive installations, as well as an expanded program of nightly videos on the vast outdoor projection wall of the New World Symphony’s New World Center. All the programs are free and open to the public.

Building on a longstanding association between art and alcohol, famed Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros will create Guiro, an elaborately constructed, egg-shaped wooden bar modeled on the Caribbean ribbed gourd percussion instrument for which it is named. Sponsored by Absolut vodka, the Guiro will be on the beachfront area between 21st and 22nd streets in Miami Beach, directly east of the Bass Museum, and will be a center for performances, music and activities — an art bar on the beach. Carpintero means carpenter, and the group, now based in Madrid, works with notions of craftsmanship, architecture and the way artistic ideas intersect with the society.

French art duo Kolkoz lands directly on the beach, also between 21st and 22nd streets, to recreate the 1969 lunar landing site of Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. Their footsteps are permanent. The Kolkoz installation will be gradually destroyed by three days of beach soccer tournaments between teams of artists, collectors, curators, critics and gallerists. Who will win? And how will it affect the art market?

The sculpture garden in Collins Park, in front of the Bass Museum at 2100 Collins Ave., will again host a still-undefined program of performance art, primarily on Dec. 5. It will be curated by Christine Y. Kim, a co-founder of the ingenious Los Angeles Nomadic Division LAND and an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

If you want to lie back in a garden and let the art stream over you, head to the New World Center, 500 17th St., for a host of videos and films during the evenings of Dec. 5 to 8. Some of the more intriguing-sounding are “Music, Magic & Melancholia,” a program of videos inspired by the music of Sigur Ros and Antony and the Johnsons, at 9 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5; and a final all-night art/music extravaganza — a screening of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss, a 12-hour film focused around the final aria of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, from 6 p.m. Dec. 8 until dawn Dec. 9.