It's Easter Monday and I decide to try writing here again, oh the despair and boredom of all the other blogs I read, however fascinating they might be. I write whole ones in my head, exciting, polemical, resolving things going round in my thoughts, and then that all vanishes. I need to write another piece for Wound Magazine, the second I did I will put up here, I like writing for Wound because it seems like the most inappropriate outlet I can find right now. The space between its successfully sexual, hyper-glossy commercialism and intellectual ambition is one that I find quite comfortable, a space where it's possible to work on little negations wihtout succumbing to moralism. Actually, I'll paste it her, right now,

It's called Waiting for Frieze, and Ill start writing another entry...on something more serious

Waiting for Frieze...
Writing on Frieze for Wound, for Wound on Frieze, it sounds like saying the same thing twice, twice times the luxury edition, does it make two or is it nothing more than one? Luxury squared = luxury and nothing more, one VIP is as good as another. There is a difference. mind you. Wound does not have to try to be more interesting than Frieze, it always is. Better graphics, cleverer layout, frankly venal in its combination of art and fashion, it resurrects the scent of a long-lost sin, a sin that predates the society of the spectacle, of VIP lounges sponsored by crumbling banks and autumnally tasteful sculpture parks. Wound's sin is a sin of excess rather than simple but vulgar greed; of an excess which may be the only cure for a society such as this; excess as a fantasm rather than as something you can have. In these pages we consume very little, just an idea, a relation to excess as a mechanism of desire. Wound is not a realist magazine, but Frieze is a realist fair. Pay for Wound and excess drifts out of sight. Pay for Frieze and it hits you in the face, cluttered, conservative, predictable and struggling for a cultural density that money can never buy. Frieze is never more than too much. Writing on Frieze for Wound, then, is an import-export business, of one kind of feeling into another, and maybe not back again in the same guise, at all.

Last year, I write this waiting to set out for this year, Frieze bored me silly. Everything I liked in it had been there the year before. There are some drawings by Kentridge , things of Whiteread, conventional but beautiful and, at first glance still surprising; and load and loads of gear that I quite liked and made me swerve over for a longer look; and then the other stuff that always crops up on Waddington, high end classics that are they to make you unconfident about the present and give you a glimpse of lasting value, the whole thing interspersed with some exquisite new exercises in the use of packing tape from Thomas Hirschorn. (This year, as I swerve around all over again, he will be using transparent tape as well, and it is this that takes me aback and thrills me, rather than the over-empathetic and phatic politics of disaster. They have become too literal, too much as if he is forgetting something once felt in the vortex of his success). This jumble is the figure of Frieze's crazy and uncontrollable conservatism, and little on the fringe does more than underline this too.  Does it matter if Martha Rosler inspects the drains and services, or is she just wasting her time? Does it matter if we sit down with a brilliant group of thinkers to do a radio programme for an audience of perhaps no-one on, Cornelius Cardew? Or if Boris Groys or Judith Willimason make a 'keynote' speech? 
In the end I don't much care, because my expectations are not so high, but last year this is what I enjoyed the most. It was outside, on the road, and I noticed it as I was going home.
Just on the Inner Circle, across the the gates that lead to the Frieze pavilion, is standing a group of young people, dressed to signify art/student/Hoxton-bohemia-of-our-days, clustered against the railings. They fall somewhere between George Segal, Paul Thek and the Chapman Borthers as an idea for a sculpture. (The highlight of this year's Frieze, the Chapman's new disaster in a glass box sculpture, majestic, profound, obsessional, Bosch drained of libidinous pleasures, like Pasolini at his greatest, free from even the glimmer of art-as-redemption, out of place on White Cube's stand, which jostles yesterday's entrenched trivia with today's public - you know who I mean.) Anyway, by the kerb is standing a single man, late 30s and unutterably well dressed in cashmere and cords, brogues and a shirt that I have only seen in an Italian outlet in Montreal - certainly not in the Jermyn Street of our times, nor on the pages of Wound. He is calm under his beautifully casual hair, and gazes raptly at the sky, clutching a few leaflets agains his v-neck, just high enough to frame his silk foulard. An immense car draws up beside him, the rear door precisely positioned. A chauffeur steps out, turns around the vehicle and opens the door wide. The man has neither stirred nor changed the direction of his gaze nor aknowledged the presence of the car by even a flicker of his eyes, but even so he sits gracefully on the rear seat, the door is closed, and as he still gazes rapt at the blue sky, the car draws away. The Hoxton bohèmes see this and they are aghast. Thet have registered unspeakable wealth and entitlement worn as if it were nothing but a social grace, so engrained that the whole world turns around it. On the short width of a pavement they have gazed into the gulf, the abyss of social difference, the difference that Frieze as an art fair bridges even as it digs it ever deeper. They drift away, disconsolate, perhaps realising that not only do they have to share their world with his, but that maybe even they are getting it on his account.
This year I wonder if he lost some money in the crash. His look reminded me a bit of Robert Merril's poetry, beauty a little stifled by wealth. But I wonder to what extent his quotidian happiness might have gien rise to the terrors and destruction of military machine in the Chapman's vision. If it did, then the world is not much changed from three or four or five centuries ago, so all is well for art. Business as usual. This year I wonder if the little group came again and, if they did, what they would have felt about David Haines' wonderful drawing on show at Strina from Sao Paolo; the world circuits again, English artist, working in Amsterdam, finding a public in Brazil - where, perhaps, his manifest codes of scally sexual fascinations, spit, smelly sneakers, pissed jeans in graffitied toilets, the slimy trout gasping for oxygen, mean less, so that the strange perfume of his drawing itself can overwhelm you? If they did see it would it have withered their trendy straightness? The staggeringly beautiful and finely musceld Italian rent in the the Caprice café excited me for a moment - his v-neck even finer than Mr Merril, detailed with his hours of workout, but in the end I didn't like his brand of chewing gum. The Maître d' greeted me so sweetly that I took him for a long lost friend and was about to peck him on each cheek before caution prompted me to ask if we knoew one another. 'No', he said, 'I was trying to help you'... Still under the blow of Haines' utopia of the senses, I turned him down. Now I regret it, though the beer, for a change, was real Bud.

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