Evan Moffitt at Aspen Artwork Week 2023

DEEP IN AN ABANDONED SILVER MINE, the top of a fox is roasting on a spit. Or at the very least, an animation of 1 by the artist Matt Copson, laser-projected onto the roughly hewn stone partitions. We’ve been led right here on a hard-hat tour by Daniel Merritt, director of curatorial affairs on the Aspen Artwork Museum, which commissioned Obituary, 2023, Copson’s newest immersive work. He tells us it was impressed by a British youngsters’s cartoon, however the creepy, cryptic messages that mild up and disappear all through the cave really feel decidedly extra Twin Peaks. “If it’s punishment you’re after, I hope to fulfill” flashes one, and I discover the girl behind me struggling to traverse the ground in heels. Throughout from an authentic signal labeled “EXPLOSIVES,” which had been used right here in 1894 to take away the biggest silver nugget ever found, seems a quote from Evelyn Waugh: “Dying at all times appeared like a terrific alternative . . . there isn’t any different observe which so intensifies residing.”

Exterior Smuggler Mine, company are starting to assemble for dinner. Varied meats—not fox—are being grilled. It’s the uncommon menu of the week that won’t characteristic seafood. (All you really want to know to know Aspen is that just about each restaurant serves uncooked fish, flown in every day from so far as the Mediterranean.) Hans Ulrich Obrist is right here, sipping from a can of Liquid Dying. Artist Nairy Baghramian, whose solo exhibition takes over two flooring of the Aspen Artwork Museum, seems to be comfortable in cowboy boots and Calvin Klein denim. The museum’s director, Nicola Lees, wearing silver disco pants as shiny as polished ore, is chatting with artist Doug Aitken and native collector Amnon Rodan. She assumed her function in March 2020, simply days earlier than the world shut down, and so with this Aspen Artwork Week—a calendar of talks, performances, and assortment excursions culminating within the museum’s gala, often called Artwork Crush—it appears like her imaginative and prescient for the establishment has lastly hit its stride. The temper is clubby and convivial, even after a lightning storm erupts over the Roaring Fork Valley.

Clouds move shortly and gossip travels even sooner on this place the place the air is skinny. (One factor that doesn’t move shortly at 8,000 ft elevation: a hangover.) A buddy tells me that Lees’s predecessor, Heidi Zuckerman, was tarnished by a scandal by which her dad and mom had been found to have evaded taxes by making a shell firm for his or her Woody Creek properties and appointing their cats to its board (I think about far stranger issues are hidden behind the fir-lined driveways of the world’s multimillion-dollar properties). That mentioned, Zuckerman was an adept fundraiser, and financed the development of the museum’s elegant Shigeru Ban–designed constructing, which opened in 2014. Lees has taken a distinct tack. “Former administrators catered to collectors when the museum was broke,” Richard Edwards, cofounder of Baldwin Gallery, tells me “Nicola is leaning into her community of artists and curators to carry tougher content material to the museum. Not everyone understands it, however that’s good for the discourse.” We’re strolling by way of Baldwin’s exhibits by Inka Essenhigh and Matthew Ronay which, whereas not precisely difficult, are mesmerizingly surreal. Over espresso the following day, Lees provides: “I’ve been very clear from the start that I wished to take the establishment into the unknown.”

There might hardly be a greater illustration of the unknown than a Thursday night time efficiency by the Puerto Rican collective Poncili Creación which leaves some front-row attendees moist. Earlier than it begins within the rolling hills behind the Bauhaus-era Aspen Institute, company get sauced on boozy ice cream sundaes at a reception hosted by Frieze Artwork Truthful. Merritt, stuffed with smiles for somebody shepherding donors all week, gestures from the terrace to the leafy canyon and notes, “This place may be very mushroom-friendly.” As soon as we settle atop blankets on the inexperienced, Aspen Artwork Museum curator Simone Krug takes the mic and asks us all, on behalf of a round-faced, snout-nosed creature named Mr. Tree, to set free an existential scream. (One girl continues for about 5 minutes, properly previous our cue, to which I say: I hear you.) The following forty-five minutes are delightfully unhinged, as performers disguised in shapeshifting, bendable masks grunt and tumble throughout the slope and even splash round in a stream at our ft. Lees’s canine Lutz barks at them in alarm. Midway by way of, a gaggle from one other occasion attempt to cross the stage however cease lifeless in confusion or terror. A couple of particular person on my blanket says: We actually ought to have taken these mushrooms. Afterwards, Poncili invitations us to “a bizarre afterparty in a gazebo over there.” I don’t attend.

The following morning, a gaggle of visiting curators and artwork sellers collect for a hike. Sohrab Mohebbi, director of New York’s SculptureCenter, continues to be giddy from the night time. Karma founder Brendan Dugan and Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi maintain up the rear as we cross a wood footbridge over a waterfall. Olivier Babin, founding father of Clearing Gallery, muses that beavers would make glorious artwork handlers. “They’d in all probability unionize and ask for extra wooden chips,” he jokes. We finish on the museum, the place Baghramian is in dialog with Lees and Obrist. The speak shares its tongue-in-cheek title, “Coude a Coude” (Elbow to Elbow), with the work she’s donated to the Artwork Crush public sale, and opens with what Obrist calls a “new Proustian questionnaire.” Baghramian, smiling mischievously, dodges most of its canned interrogatives. All of it feels in spirit along with her unruly sculptures on show downstairs, works whose obscure resemblance to inner organs and bodily secretions—intestines, bones, boogers—makes their placement on the margins or corners of gallery partitions really feel like a puckish affront to the establishment. “The criticality of establishments is to be protected,” she says. “You aren’t right here to be liked.” (A honest statement, it feels barely ironic for somebody as beloved as Baghramian, whose presence in Aspen has drawn a dozen self-professed groupies. “We go to all of her openings,” notes Performa curator Charles Aubin.)

That night time, the tent in Buttermilk Meadow, themed “Disco within the Woods,” has been crammed with towering mushroom sculptures with mirror-ball testicles. Chablis and goodwill are freely flowing. In the course of the reside public sale, works by Charles Gaines, Peter Halley, Carmen Herrera, and others promote over their estimates, netting the museum $3.8 million. Baghramian takes the gala stage to just accept an honoree trophy designed by Gaetano Pesce. Quoting Lawrence Weiner, she tells the gang, “Don’t overlook to celebration.”

— Evan Moffitt