Art Basel: Unsanitized
How a #FUCKBASEL virgin snuck into a party HuffPost claimed no one could get into, collaborated with queers in Little Haiti, and became enchanted with a (later) dong-wielding protester in the midst of a mission to de-sanitize Basel’s claim to “ART”
Out of happenstance one night in Savannah, Influenza met Michael Farley and Sophia Park in a bar where she’d been running karaoke as an extension of our drag group The House of Gunt. They were on their way from Baltimore to Miami for an installation running during Art Basel — and with a bit exposure to our haus via Influenza and our escapades to the old Pancake Palace that night, they eagerly mentioned that us queens should perform in their show Not Planet Hollywood at Zones Art Fair in Little Haiti.
A week later, Liz, our kind and overtly passionate facilitator for the show, emailed me about some friends coming through Savannah on their way to install in a gallery two doors down from Zones. After briefly scanning the websites of the two artists in need of a spot to stay for the night, I said yes.
“Get your hippie friends out of the restaurant RAINE!” yelled one of the kitchen guys as Kalan walked towards me in hand-stitched patterned leggings and a leg cast adorned with stockings and sticks and things hanging and dangling around an exposed, polished, purple big toe. James was much more stoic — a stare that wasn’t all the way there cased in a black leather jacket. He made eye contact somewhere just inside the center of your head and spoke with a relaxed and apathetic tone. We introduced ourselves and they followed me home in their car (which was packed full). We smoked weed and talked until James laid down in my bed. Kalan and I stayed up in the living room—our conversation is partially a blur outside of one quick vision of his teeth snapping together like a shark with blue eyes. As if my subconscious absorbed it all.
Fast forward three weeks, 26 emails with Liz, a carful of drag gear, an eight hour car ride, three grams of weed, one bottle of tequila, one bottle of vodka, and a 2-liter of sprite later and we’re all digging through duffle bags unpacking our costumes while Zones attendees walk by, wondering if we’re part of the installation. I got ready quickly, switching from one genderqueer getup to the next, becoming a duct-taped 8th grade punk vamp animal.
Before our set, I wanted to witness the preview for FOLDING THE BLACK FLAG, a part of Kalan and James’s work as AOS INTERNATIONALE, taking place in Space Mountain, the gallery two doors down from Zones.
It wasn’t even 10pm when I joined the not-happening and was instructed to take a paintbrush covered in thick black laquer and paint part of an American flag black while using my mind to project social issues onto it, to chew on James’ leg who was writhing around in a garbage bag for the sake of embodying the participants’ negative energies about AMERICA the institution through a chorus of squeaking balloons, to disassociate myself from the process of denormalization through the swinging of malformed rubber tubes slapping against other participants’ heads — something that seemed very… anti-media ready “Basel.”
It was overtly uncontrollable, unpredictable, and presented itself dangerous, considering the out-of-mind-set AOS INTERNATIONALE requires from participants: To be fully invested in the reality of folding layers of traumatization in American society onto one another through anarcho-ritual.
With this newly revitalized approach to weirdness in mind, House of Gunt covered the gallery floor in the remains of my styrofoam head and tutti-frutti sucker meal, Influenza Mueller’s cut strands of hair, Anita Shavé’s slivers of broken mirror, and TToyota Mitsubishi’s customized picnic luncheon plates. Dino Real delivered unabashed opulence like an orgasm you can’t afford. Local Honey and SSTR collaborated for some sort of backwards self-seance with a recipe of thick tears streaming from Local’s eyes into a kettle of boiling water with the alienating sound of SSTR’s voice. Sophia Park brought whip-its to highten our craving for Limited Too and pastel-themed bedroom parties, followed by Ellen Degenerate’s fanny pack in full swing on the dance floor.
Kalan did a puppet show in the street outside the gallery while I rolled on the floor to the swing of a Percocet administered to me by a rando while we were wrestling on the sidewalk over a silver spoon. James half told me, half spoke to the room about how his life had changed over the past few months. I imagined what it would be like to hear his story had I really known who he was. He sat in a black folding chair against one wall of the gallery smoking a rolled cigarette and told me about how he got diabetes and how he couldn’t easily get access to insulin since he wasn’t from Florida. I wondered what it was like to suddenly find out you have to measure some part of your biology like a hawk and consistently maintain access to proper medical care and briefly imagined the smell of his hair on my pillow the night after he slept in my bed. He didn’t have to say much.
“REVOLUTION IS PISS” bled a piece of canvas framed on the wall.
We smoked one more cigarette and James left to go to sleep.
I woke up the next morning naked on a piece of foam. Kalan told me I was beautiful. I told them they wouldn’t think that forever. Part of me hates myself for trying to be honest.
In several terrifying moments I felt like I’d only met someone like Kalan in fragments of other people. It was magnetic to the point of nausea.
Hungover, Kalan and I walked to some of the stores surrounding Space Mountain on the hunt for food. Across the street from the galleries in a line were abandoned storefronts painted light blue. I’d heard Liz say the night before that the neighboorhood was being bought up and it’d all be gone and sold soon. It reminded me of the outskirts of Savannah’s downtown where rows of empty buildings line streets that have yet to be discovered by developers or turned into cheap housing or Kate Spade stores. Soon it’ll all be equally as overrun by tourist-rich glitz like the kind in Miami creeping into Little Haiti with money from downtown. In a rainbow mumu and face paint from the night before, I carried Kalan on my back to Mimi’s fruit stand for apples and bananas.
I couldn’t tell if they made Mimi so animated or if it was always in her nature to seem so genuinely inquisitive. “Did you two come from a circus?” she laughed as she rolled giant potted palm trees out onto the painted storefront. I bit into an apple and contemplated where Mimi’s fruit and my bare ass blowing in the wind underneath my mumu would fit into the liposuctioned experience of #ABMB2014.
As an idea, the lie of Art Basel, along with my vision of Miami interpreted through hot movie scenes in South Beach, seemed to exist far from the 8000 block of NE 2nd outside of Mimi’s— it lives far behind fake velvet ropes and purse checks and hashtags and location services to tag the whitewashed walls filled with sterilized, whiteified, expensified, sexified, pieces of buy-able, solidifiable, explainable, tangible “ART.”
That idea was reinforced the next day after crashing a model’s photoshoot on the 11th street beach outside of the UNTITLED tent, taking a photo of internet socialite Nicky Ottav walking down the beach dressed like Spongebob, and spilling two Wet Willies daquiris on Dino Real’s feet while contemplating what to do with our night. Local, Eyal, Blew, and Dino promised to meet up with us at some party a mutual photographer friend had mentioned in an attempt to continue our hack into Art Basel.
In the meantime, I got a text that Kalan had been arrested with the art cart on Lincoln Street. I bit the inside of my lip for not being able to separate myself from my group to be there—what my presence would do about it, I have no idea—but it is the same feeling I got knowing Ferguson protestors were filling I-95 and I was drunk, peeing into a bathroom decorated like a tropical island. Just another BASEL-ER sucking down alcoholic juice in sterilized commercialized fun while people were on the streets getting dirty, fighting for something.
Driving through South Beach to The Miami EDITION: Horsemeat Disco party that Art Pulse claimed as one of “15 Art Basel in Miami Beach Parties You’ll Never Get Into” and HuffPost called one of Basel’s “25 Events You Simply Can’t Miss” was a black leather nightmare. Everyone on the street looked famous, white, rich and, for the most part, generically styled. We finally parked the car and approached the hotel, where more generic-looking expensive people gathered by the valet as Tanner exclaimed he would just “get us in” to the party by pretending to be on the list.
By some sick piece of fate, upon opening the doors to the hotel, Maxwell Turner was standing on the steps like the happenstance angel I’d imagined him to be through the internet. His angelic secret code got us in to the basement party, complete with an ice skating rink, bowling alley, three bars, lounge area, digital photo booth, dance floor, and $19 shots of Jameson.
The dance floor was full of broken glass from dropped cups and people swinging themselves to the house-disco music as we entered the dark-red-blue-flashing-lights. Immediately Blew fell to the ground, twerk-rolling against the sticky, glass-ridden floor as a crowd formed around them. The crowd was mesmerized, following this give-a-care dance unravel on the ground in their footspace like a queer slug. It wasn’t long before Blew’s naked balls were lit up under the pulsing lights with an asshole open to receive a flyer for a party someone was inserting into it.
Then came security with black suits and headsets and white LED flashlights. An audible awwww spun from the lips of the crowd as Blew was carted into a back room and later dragged 40 feet on their knees out a back door. Back to the good clean fun. Rich bitches drop a glass on the floor, someone comes along and sweeps it up for you. Weird queers trash up your party, Men in Black toss you out with the glass. I danced in front of two bored security guards and three thin female bartenders as they blocked the door behind which Blew was in a chokehold.
We regrouped again on the smoker’s patio, Blew hovering on the other side of the black tape. “I can’t believe I got kicked out,” they said as they rubbed a hand against their neck where they’d been held. Seeing a tear in Blew’s eye I asked them if I could put my cigarette out on their arm. “It’ll be the first cigarette burn on this arm in four years,” they said as they held out their wrist.
Together we snuck back into the party and danced until Blew was discovered, man-handled, and kicked out once more. We spent 20 minutes repeatedly saying goodbyes next to our car, parked in a side alley construction site. Maxine found pieces of wire with concrete attached and distributed them to us as Basel party favors.
When we got back to Steve’s, we sat in a tiny park/median on his street until six in the morning, contemplating friends in common, SSTR’s new album and our weird attraction to Honey Barbeque flavored Fritos. The sun started creeping up around the palms and we drove the car around the neighborhood in a couple circles smoking weed and getting lost to Cibo Matto’s 1996 release Maxine had discovered in “Out of the Closet” the day before.
It felt like one minute we were pulling into Miami and the next we were packing up to go home. Peacocks from the neighborhood gathered outside of Steve’s house as Liz came to say goodbye and move in another group of artists before their durational performances later that day.
From the parking lot of a McDonald’s somewhere between Miami and Jacksonville, Kalan texted that they were free again. They didn’t expect to get arrested. I sent a series of overly-obsessed emails detailing my shock and dedication to their work like Star writing to Manson in jail, only capable of imagining some portion of their entire person and finding it electrifying nonetheless.
We got home and all I could think about was going back; meanwhile, Kalan was arrested again for screaming FUCK BASEL as the police handcuffed them and another member of the not-happening in the Collector’s Lounge, mistaking the dildo in Kalan’s pocket for a weapon, drawing attention to the important point that had they been black, their altercation with police could’ve ended much differently. Even still, what a waste of tax dollars arresting the wrong people—putting a stop to the wrong momentum—the same momentum that crawls across the dance floor, ass out, waiting for the collective aww as the joker is escorted from the room—the same momentum that falls into the ocean in a fatkini behind your swimsuit photoshoot, spitting up water and ruining your good lighting.
Like AOS INTERNATIONALE informed me the night we got to Miami, setting the tone for my entire deflowering, Basel is supposed to represent something intellectually and socially valuable as the world’s premiere art festival — it should be accessible, intersectional, and conscious of the world outside the champagne glass. But that kind of consciousness for the radical (the kind of radical that changes things, not just sells them) hardly exists inside Basel itself, if it ever did.
Either way, the work of people like Kalan and others — young, broke, and often-marginalized DIY-anarchists, bylined by media as a joke for the sake of normalization will still be screaming FUCK BASEL long after the tents are down and Kalan’s face stops “trending” as the new #PRISONBAE, hoping to wake up everyone who’s buying into the $19 shots of Jame-O; the polished celebrity as a cornerstone of creativity, the gentrification and sanitization and commercialization of “ART.”
