Arts diary: Would you credit it? Landy’s free art is created at card companies’ expense

Towering and tottering close to 20 feet tall, it was a macabre structure of saw blades, animal skulls, porcelain arms and feet, a Humpty Dumpty, a stuffed toy bear, and other bizarre bric-a-brac.

“It’s called Credit Card Destroying Machine,” said Tom Dingle, a director at the Thomas Dane Gallery’s stand. “It does what it says on the tin really. The trade off is you give us your credit card, which we put through the shredder, and we press the red button, and it draws your free drawing. You can tell the credit card company whatever you want.”

The work is by Michael Landy, known for destroying all his possessions in an act of “creative destruction”. The cognoscenti –not including me – immediately recognised it as inspired by the work of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, and his self-destroying sculptures of the 1960s.

“It’s appropriate to have it here at the fair, destroying people’s credit cards, in the current economic credit doom that we face,” Dingle said.

It had to be done. With apologies to Visa, my credit card was eaten and spat out in little pieces on the floor with a single satisfying crunch. Bits of the sculpture jiggled and swung about as a metal arm drew something suspiciously like a clumsy Spirograph in two colours on a piece of paper. It came pre-signed by Landy.

Rumour had it that Ralph Rudoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, had offered his card, and a flying piece embedded itself in a startled woman’s leg. “I’ll leave that to RBS,” muttered a senior Scottish art luminary, who passed up the chance to have a go.

An £8m signature

The Frieze Art Fair, launched in 2003, is London’s leading contemporary art event and draws about 60,000 visitors over four days. It has 173 galleries this year, from 33 countries, including three Scottish ones, in a temporary mini-city in Regent’s Park. Simon Schama and Matt Lucas were among the celebrities spotted on the first day.

Frieze week is now a focus for openings and auctions around London, effectively creating a city-wide visual art festival; people handed out flyers at the gates this year for art happenings elsewhere.

There’s a lot of good art at Frieze but you have to look for it. This year it seemed big on splashy gimmicks. German artist Christian Jankowski, chosen by Frieze to do a site-specific project, showed an Italian Aquariva Cento speedboat. It’s on sale for €500,000 (about £436,000) as a boat, but for €625,000 (£545,000) as an art work, unaltered except for his name on it. Jankowski insists it is deeply serious, a readymade piece in the style of Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal he signed “R Mutt” in 1917. A mega-yacht is also offered, €65 million (£57m) as boat, €75m (£65m) as art.

Formative Formality

Three years ago, Hannah Robinson, founder of Glasgow’s Mary Mary gallery, took a stand at Frieze for the first time with artist Karla Black.

Black, with her flimsy, floaty sculptures of powder paint, cellophane and other domestic stuff, went on to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale, and is on the Turner Prize shortlist this year.

This year Black is with the Galerie Gisela Capitain from Cologne, Germany, showing two pieces priced at about £10,000. So who is Robinson’s new rising star? She’s very excited about Sara Barker, who left Glasgow School of Art in 2003, and is drawing growing interest from art institutions, she said.

Her work, The Formality of F, is distantly inspired by literary texts by Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. It’s an abstract rectangular structure of thin painted steel, glass and aluminium, like interlocking window frames, priced at £8,000.

Thoroughly Modern

Glasgow’s Sorcha Dallas gallery bought Alasdair Gray to Frieze, but recently closed. Glasgow’s Modern Institute is back though, with works by Scottish artists like Scott Myles and the Turner Prize nominee, Martin Boyce.

Owner Toby Webster sits at Boyce’s stylish concrete table, weighing in at 200kg, while a line of coloured metal mesh lanterns by the artist hangs overhead. The Turner Prize show opens at Baltic in Gateshead next weekend.

Changing rooms

Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery went to Frieze with high-impact pieces painted directly onto the walls of its stand. The Edinburgh-born artist Tommy Grace has done an attractive piece of intertwined newsprint, while two long columns of poetry text by the late Ian Hamilton Finlay have been hand-painted by his long-time collaborator Les Edge. Buy them, and you get the right to have them painted on the wall of your choice.