EVERY October at the annual Frieze Art Fair in London's Regent's Park, art world types gather and pretend to be studiously examining the thousands of works on show. The truth is, though, that while they may have one eye on the art, the other is more engaged in celebrity spotting.
It's a great piece of sport and one of the compensatory pleasures for spending a few days cooped up in a large tent that is half Museum of Modern Art and half the worst-lit branch of Morrison's ever.
In my experience, it's a revelation. Gwyneth Paltrow? Far more golden and glowing than her pallid yoga image suggests. Kirsten Dunst? Unremarkable: just like that pretty student in the flat upstairs. Princess Michael of Kent? An amazing piece of work, with the steeliest gaze and sternest make-up you've ever seen.
A couple of years ago Italian artist Lara Favaretto raised the stakes even higher. Invited to take part in the fair in 2007, she sent an invitation of her own, to Her Majesty the Queen.
Sadly the Queen didn't come, though her office did send a rather neat letter of refusal, which Favaretto pinned to a tree within the tent. It was a sad little relic, like a performance in which the main player never took to the stage, all that energy and anticipation resulting in absolutely nothing.
It was a tactic typical of the artist, whose work often involves a huge amount of effort for a negligible or diminishing return. This year, she returned the city of Venice to its watery origins by creating an artful swamp in the Giardino delle Vergini for the Biennale. She filled it full of objects, but all we could see was the lumpy brown surface. Favaretto's art can be playful or plain daft but it is often, simultaneously, a bit sad.
For her first major museum show in this country, at Glasgow's Tramway, Favaretto has eschewed conceptual trickery for sheer visual spectacle, without losing the melancholic tone.
What she has done is to turn the entire gallery into what looks like a giant car wash; that is without the cars or the soapy liquid. Around the walls are a series of those spinning brushes that you find in automated car washes. Each is mounted against an iron plate. In an unpredictable sequence, the brushes turn, there's a faint hum of motors, a rush of air and a hiss as plastic filament hits metal. The movement creates an indelible mark, gradually eroding the iron. By the end of the show the brushes will be stubby and tattered, the iron plates worn and exhausted.
Tramway is a monumental space and, at times, a rather lofty mausoleum for more subtle work on show there. It's a place which deals better with a shout than a whisper. In the past year or so the gallery has been turning itself around to reflect the heritage of major commissions and important solo projects that use its dimensions to advantage, and Favaretto's work fits firmly into that.
Any clinical description of her art doesn't do credit to its Alice in Wonderland qualities: the colours range from shocking pink to every shade of white; one particularly dumpy black brush takes on the Halloween quality of a bad-tempered witch. Originally many of these pieces featured in a massive installation called Couples and when you read the human names the artist has given the components, you realise the apparent similarity to bodies is not entirely coincidental.
In the centre of the space are a series of square blocks that at first look like densely packed coal or the minimalist sculptures of an artist such as Donald Judd. Get up close and you find they are made of confetti, dense black shapes peppered with only a smattering of pastel.
Over the sequence of the show the air currents (and the forbidden hands of those little children who evade parental restraint) will cause the cubes to collapse into their component parts. I've seen the show three times since it opened and those cubes are slowly collapsing: all that effort and energy turning to nothing. One might similarly expend huge amounts of intellectual energy, tracing Favaretto's brushes back to the godfather of contemporary art, Marcel Duchamp and his so-called "Bachelor Machines", those automata that feature in his masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, produced between 1915 and 1923.
Like Duchamp's Bachelors, Favaretto's car-wash components are whirling dervishes of pent-up desire that will eventually exhaust themselves. At the same time she manages to infuse this art history with a distinctly suburban ennui. A series of bickering couples and family groups rub awkwardly against each other, physically and emotionally wearing each other out. When life is like this, what else is there to do on a Sunday afternoon but wash the car?
But, thankfully, you wouldn't need to have the faintest inkling of art history to enjoy this show. One of the tricks that the rejuvenated Tramway needs to pull off is to bring the families who already use its cafe and garden through the gallery entrance. This is art that works in both the most complex and the simplest of terms. When I visited this week I counted five buggies and one toddler among the enthusiastic visitors.
Until 13 December.
This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009
