It’s a balmy seventy degrees at 9:30 AM. I am part of a small crowd at the Rubells’s private museum in Miami, and we’re sipping free espresso in the back garden. A large box dripping with organic honey hangs from the ceiling. Bees gather at the base, as guests hold little designer jars of homemade yogurt underneath the stream to catch the sweetness. Video cameras flock to get a picture of Jennifer Rubell, who is also sticking her hands into the honey. Inevitably, all participants walk away sticky, licking their hands and arms as they return to moving among the art—precious works made of imitation gold leaf, giant spray-paint color fields, sloppy neon, messy paint spills, and chrome. This is the vibe of the Rubells’s 2011 curation, American Exuberance: too good to be true, racy, overripe, and darkly decadent.

Anyone lucky enough to find herself in this Caribbean beach city in December can relish the spoils of three locally competing art dynasties. These art-collecting families—de la Cruz, Margulies, and Rubell—welcome the annual flow of Art Basel, a crowd of more than 40,000 knowledgeable art tourists. All three generously open their private museums to exhibit impressive stashes. Their investment choices make careers. But also on display is a deep love and enjoyment of art.

The Rubell collection is my favorite. The family has fearless, bombastic, and politically poignant taste. Some think that the Rubells’s curations are too hard hitting or macho. What some might interpret as too much emphasis on drama, too much of the speed of commercialism and the highway, is just what I find compelling. There is something totally American and totally Miami about the Rubells’s verve. But this year’s choice of artworks is not just flashy and bold, because the flash and lack of tenderness make a sharp point—one reflecting a particular brand of American artists of this time and place. The glitz and decay of the work seem all the more powerful as we lie fallen from a state of economic and governmental grace. The gold plate is starting to flake away.

Jason Rhoades's Neon “chandeliers” are classics! Jason Rhoades, Untitled, Chandelier, 2004, detail, glass, wire, neon, Plexiglas, fabric and plastic, variable dimensions. Courtesy the Rubell Family Collection.

Entirely covered in “imitation gold leaf,” John Miller’s 2007 installation, A Refusal to Accept Limits, reads as ruins. This assembly of golden columns, arches, pedestals, and a giant obelisk are all covered with trash—toylike skulls, fruit, axes, and swords. This bright spectacle spreads before visitors as they enter the main gallery. It’s the aftermath of a party, a battle, or a feast, and make sure to note its date. This work foreshadowed the crash of yet another empire. In juxtaposition with the Rubells’s generous serving of honey to their guests, Miller’s installation provides the guiding metaphor for viewers as they pass through all twenty-eight galleries of the exhibition.

So many other works of art continue the sprawling theme of American exuberance: Sixty-four artists, spanning two decades, all make similar cries. On view are classic pieces by the super-famous: Barbara Kruger, Cady Noland, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Keith Haring, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, Jason Rhoades, and others.

Kathryn Andrews’s deflated balloons are perfect symbols for a fallen American empire. January 23, 2010, chromed steel and balloons, 66 x 56 1/2 x 10 inches. Photo by Ktauches.

In addition are new discoveries for me—voices from a younger generation. Kathryn Andrews’s deflated balloons, hanging off a chromed-steel gate, are so sad and funny. Mark Handforth’s iconic Honda (2002) is an effigy and an accident, as candles burn atop a downed motorbike on the cement floor. Michael St. John’s 6 posting is a single floating column suspended against the wall. Simple paper messages, like fucked-up memos from the corporate office, are tacked up: “Move Your A$$” and “Street of $creams.” In yet another funny simulation of an accident, Brendan Fowler plays with picture frames to mock the mundane commerce of art. He puts trite inkjet images under Plexiglas and crashes them into each other to make jumbled wall sculptures. And totally hysterical was Ryan Trecartin’s installation, Trill-ogy Comp (2009): an entire dim room converted into a corporatized California park at sunset, complete with sand, abandoned luggage, and benches that are chained to the floor. There, viewers could tune in to three hyperspiritual videos.

Brendan Fowler recreates an artful accident. Brendan Fowler, Spring 2010 – Summer 2011 (Mirror in Miami, Patty’s House 5/10/100 – 5/12/10 # 14, Andrea On The Way to Anxiety Of Photography Opening, Mirror Reflecting Black Flat 2), 201, archival inkjet prints, frames, and Plexiglas, 50 x 50 x 5 inches. Courtesy the Rubell Family Collection.

I think I detected a slightly sentimental moment somewhere in the middle of my visit with a particular juxtaposition of works (at which point I was three hours in and had seen only half the show …). A respite from all the aggression and flashing lights, this moment was like a calm, sunny island. Hannah Greely’s installation Dual replicated a dark restaurant booth that includes little landscape paintings, a wall lamp, smoky mirrors, and an old-fashioned, wall-mounted pay phone. Bracketing Greely’s centerpiece were several absolutely charming, Matisse-like landscapes by John McCallister. And in an adjacent room, Dana Schutz’s large, romantic painting, Lovers (2003), showcased a truly exuberant use of color surrounding an embracing couple …. This naïve sense of romping joy is still America, too.

John McCallister is sentimental for Matisse and a nighttime landscape. John McCallister, Darksome Almost Dawn, 2011, oil on canvas, 58 x 49 inches. Courtesy the Rubell Family Collection.

Private art collections are the bells and whistles of capitalism. Every year that I go to Miami for Art Basel, I am totally disgusted by a powerful truth: Art is big business for the people protesters call “the 1 percent.” The people who get to play are way out of my league. And yet, at the same time, my faith in art as a unique, communicative form, as a practice and a subculture, is also somehow restored. In this place of easy breezes, pink neon, and unapologetic privilege, there is no question about the validity of fine art. This bubble is well established. There is supply, demand, and plenty of product on many levels. It is through the sophisticated display of private collections, however, that one can best understand the context (and fantasy) of the fair itself.

Lalla Essaydi, Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Women Writing, 2008, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy the artist and the Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

We are pleased to present Stewart Ziff as this week’s guest writer for Our Front Porch, a series inviting guest contributors to share thoughts on local art for open discussion with you, our readers. Check BURNAWAY every Tuesday for new surprises!.

Since its inception in 1996 as a repository for the university’s art collection, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art has pursued a unique mission of bringing to Atlanta works about and by women of the African diaspora. The exhibition 15 x 15 celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the museum with a presentation of fifteen works that the museum would like to acquire. Reflecting a continuing trend of thoughtful and directed curating, these fifteen works have been symbiotically paired with fifteen works from the museum’s own collection, including works by Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. The result is an exhibition that highlights the ways in which the new acquisitions will compliment and reinforce an already strong collection.

All but two of the fifteen potential acquisitions in the show are conceptually oriented to matters of gender, race, and identity—reflecting the curatorial intent of the Museum Director, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, to support challenging work and ideas within a discourse reflective of contemporary art practice.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Spoken Softly with Mama II, 2008, embroidered silk and organza over ironing boards with photographic transfers, cast glass irons, video projections, stereo sound, audio courtesy Neil Leonard, dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist and the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami.

The center stage of the show is occupied by a large and elegant installation from 2008, Spoken Softly with Mama II, by the Cuban artist, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Projected onto a collection of materials composed of cast glass irons, video tableaux of loose pearls, and vertically suspended ironing boards covered in embroidered silk and organza, is a seamlessly integrated video of the artist’s mother and three generations of the relatives engaged in a variety of domestic chores. While the presentation is formally limited, (rows of seats direct the audience to focus strictly on the cinematic view from the front rather than encouraging a more complete, circumlocution around the installation), overall, the work offers a mesmerizing display of time that gives subtle authority to the underlying narrative of class, gender, and the monotony of repetitious work, laboring over unaffordable items of luxury.

While distinctly different in character, Lorna Simpson’s poetic collection of 21 photogravures from 1996 entitled Details pays similar attention to hands that have labored. With her signature cropped portraits that remove any immediacy of revealed personality, and moments of phrase and text that distinguish and otherwise confound readings of the image, Simpson subtly draws attention to the disquiet invoked by those less overt expressions of racism within the African American experience.

IngridMwangiRobertHutter, Chameleon, 2003, 3 C-prints (Detail), 39 1/3 x 31 1/2 inches. Image courtesy Spelman College Museum of Fine Art Collection. Purchased with support from the Friends of the Museum in honor of the 15 x 15 acquisitions initiative.

At the time of viewing the show, the Museum had commitments to secure two of the more stunning works on exhibit: Chameleon (2003), a powerful vertical triptych by the German/Kenyan collaborative IngridMwangiRobertHutter, and two large photographs by the South African Nandipha Mntambo entitled Mlwa ne Nkunzi (2008). Known for having worked together for a number of years before marrying and merging their names and biographies, IngridMwangiRobertHutter work as a single identity, exploring the interwoven, transcultural conditions of race and gender through installation, performance, video, and photography; as an entangled composite, the hybrid artist aims to suspend common notions of artistic seperateness with work that is subjectively provocative and visually arresting. In Nandipha Mntambo’s diptych, a woman dressed in Mntambo’s signature cow hides projects with forceful clarity feminine stereotypes of vulnerability and subservience. The imagery, whose strength of self presence draws attention to matters of female representation and sexuality, stylistically subverts the stereotypical representation of women encountered in commonplace fashion photography.

Nandipha Mntambo, Mlwa ne Nkunzi, 2008, diptych, archival ink on cotton rag paper, 44 x 33 inches each. Image courtesy the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

Perhaps the most conspicuous work in the show is the large and powerful, black and white self portrait by Renee Cox, Hot-en-tot. This 1994 work is based on an image of Saartjie Baartman, a nineteenth-century Khoisan woman who was exhibited throughout Europe as the spectacle of a freak show highlighting physiognomic curiosities. A nude Cox, adorned with prosthetic breasts and buttocks, stands in profile, looking out to the audience with a mood of vexation and defiance reminding the viewer of the dehumanizing consequences of colonialist empire and contemporary notions of engendered sexuality in the everyday representation of women of color. Embedded in the image are embodied metaphors recalling the displacement of slavery as well as references to female sculptural forms collected as artifacts from West Africa.

Renee Cox, Hot-en-tot, 1994. Image courtesy the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

One of the more conceptually distinguished and pictorial works in the show, Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Women Writing from 2008, is by the Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi who lived in Saudi Arabia for many years before moving to the United States. The image is from a large body of the artist’s photographs that appropriate the stylistic appearance of nineteenth-century orientalist paintings. Essaydi creates an interwoven tapestry of Islamic calligraphy, drawing on the floors, walls, and subjects of her photographs; the same patterns written across the woman’s clothes are also hennaed on their hands and faces. The text, covering every surface, consists of passages she has written reflecting on her experience as a woman growing up in the space between two cultures: the East and the West. Sensitive, poetic, and beautifully executed, this photograph, like all the works in the show, reveals a Museum with a clear intention to promote and support cutting edge work that is conceptually driven, timely, and visually engaging. Spelman College and the city of Atlanta would benefit a great deal from adding these new works to its collection.

Stewart Ziff is an associate professor of new and emerging media at Georgia State University. He is an installation artist and sculptor with an interest in perception, history, and memory.

The Spelman University Museum of Fine Art will continue to present their 15 x 15 exhibition through December 3, 2011. The museum is open from 10AM to 4PM Mondays through Fridays, and Noon to 4PM on Saturdays. There is a suggested donation of three dollars.