The Art Newspaper

Pae White creates a city of dreams

The California artist has set the stage for this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach discussions, films and music

By Charlotte Burns. From Art Basel Miami Beach daily edition
Published online: 02 December 2009

“Only the bravest artist would take this on—the site is the length of an entire Miami city block,” says Creative Time director Anne Pasternak about artist Pae White’s Oceanfront project. Creative Time, the pioneering New York-based public art producer, has teamed up with Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time this year to commission a “social space” to replace the steel shipping containers at Collins Park, which formerly housed Art Positions’ emerging artists.

Miami organisers came to Creative Time with the idea of reinventing the beachfront earlier this year, and it’s been a fast-moving process: “Pae was selected in September; three weeks later we had drawings, and we started installing just weeks before the fair,” reveals Pasternak, who says that the aim was to consolidate the cultural programme. And where, she asks, better than the beach—“where people really want to be in Miami”.

“We got lots of interesting proposals, but loved Pae’s approach,” says Pasternak. The artist’s site-specific interventions use a playful touch to harness different kinds of communities. Weaving, Unsung at this year’s Venice Biennale turned the 13th-century Isolotto building into a giant birdcage, although the chirrups filling the space belonged to a fleet of bird callers, rather than their winged friends. At last year’s Folkestone Triennial, White turned her attention to the town’s canine population with Barking Rocks, a whimsical playground dedicated to Folkestone’s pooches.

Here in Miami, the playground belongs to the art world. In essence, White has created a beachfront stage where fair-goers can strut and fret, with the sound and fury supplied by Talking Heads front man David Byrne, who has been commissioned by the fair organisers to curate a special soundtrack.

“I am simply providing the stage, through a setting that has been provided to me,” says White who wanted to “play with the idea of a disposable city”. She has responded to the scale of the site, which is around 250ft long by 50ft wide, and its stark landscape—“the oceanfront area is totally open, totally empty, and the light is relentless,” the artist says—by proposing a temporary cityscape of “free-form monochromes” comprising scaffold structures covered in fabric.

It is a shifting city, which changes as the sun goes down. During the day, the Oceanfront project will resemble a mass of bright paintings—“solid coloured geometries,” as she describes them—some stretching two or three storeys high. But the “critical transition happens at dusk,” says White, when LED lights inside the structures shine through the vinyl-surfaces. The transparency of the fabric allows cityscape images to bleed through, creating the impression of “a glowing village”.

“We loved the idea of creating a daytime versus night-time experience,” says Pasternak. The artist wanted the space to be in tune with the fair’s cultural programme, which now centres around the site, and to mirror its march from dawn ‘til dusk. There are talks and panel discussions each morning, “downtime” during the midday sun, followed by films and music at night. The Oceanfront project has an on-site caterer housed in one of the old containers and “super long picnic tables where people can hang out” scattered around the site.

“My work is about teasing perspectives,” says White, and the view depends on where you are standing. The artist took inspiration from the shanty towns of Shanghai, Mumbai and Rio—“people on top of people, on top of people”—and hopes that the effect of the temporary community is “dense enough that you can walk through and get lost”.

This landscape will appeal to the voyeur. White has taken into account the surrounding high-rise hotels: “You could have multiple sets of eyes on you.” The viewer is seen, not only by other amblers within the space, but also by people looking down from the sky-high resorts, she explains. The volume of the space is such that it can hold thousands of people at any one time, all interacting with the space and each other.

“Originally my idea was to walk through a dream,” says White, who hopes the project will “lure in the community and allow it to subtly morph itself”. In the Oceanfront project she has set the stage: fair-goers and locals will provide the drama.