10 December 7-13, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | music | cafe | culture | Night+Day | News | letters | coNteNts | sically get to pretend to be another artist in a sense, and if you don’t even like what the artists are doing, it’s not my fault because it’s their work, not mine,” Bas says, laughing. While his irascible, make-believe artists may achieve varying levels of success with their art, Bas quickly gained a reputation as an iconoclast. After graduating from the New World School of the Arts and drop- ping out after a semester at Cooper Union in New York, he and some high-school friends, including fel- low artists Naomi Fisher and Alejan- dro Cardenas, organized a group show at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, “The Fashion Issue,” riffing on the then-ascendant South Beach model- ing industry. From there, he went into stranger, queerer directions. Draw- ing from idyllic childhood adven- tures exploring the woods of Ocala and reading pulp sci-fi and super- natural fiction, he began exploring lost innocence and the travails of coming to terms with one’s sexual preference as a young, gay male. Local tastemakers like the Rubells and de la Cruzes adored his work. Hernan’s Merit and the Nouveau Sissies, at Snitzer Gallery, explored summer-camp longings and real- izations. In 2002, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, then-director Bonnie Clearwater offered him a show where he put on “It’s Super Nat- ural,” which was full of Hardy Boys-type adventure scenarios. In On the Jagged Shores, an exemplary work from the show now in the Rubell Museum, a lad searches a dark and spooky cliffside with a flash- light, failing to notice the ghostly rendezvous in the surrounding caves. Shifting into a mode that channeled the 19th-cen- tury romantic and decadent movements, Bas soon began to accompany his 2D works with ambitious video and installation work. Black-and-white video work Fragile Moments took inspiration from Moby Dick, while 2004’s The Aesthete’s Toy combined an elaborate altar featuring candles and a golden turtle shell with a video of a man with his arms fondling his back, mimicking a make-out session. Snitzer re- calls one installation from “It’s Super Natural” de- signed to resemble a boys’ wooden-plank clubhouse with a “No Girls Allowed” sign. A viewer could gaze through a peephole, similar to Duchamp’s “Étant donnés,” and see the apartment of an adult gay man. “My memory is that he never flinched, he never stopped, he never didn’t continue to evolve,” Snitzer says. In 2004, Bas landed a slot in the Whitney Bien- nial, which opened many doors. He’s since been em- braced by the art world, showing at blue-chip galleries like Victoria Miro, Perrotin, and Lehmann Maupin. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirschhorn in D.C., and other pres- tigious institutions around the world. His last mu- seum show was in Malaga, Spain; before that was in Seoul and Shanghai. In a sense, “The Conceptualists” marks some- thing of a homecoming for Bas, who hasn’t had a full-fledged museum show of new work since the MOCA presentation in 2002. Snitzer, who’s known Bas for more than two decades, considers “The Con- ceptualists” a major achievement. “It’s spectacular, and the scope of it — 35 major works. Every single work in that show, there’s no filler. It’s extraordinary for a 46-year-old artist,” he says. “And to put it in an international focus during Art Week serves the community well.” Bas, born in Miami to Cuban immigrants, may be one of the most prominent artists to emerge from the city. But he doesn’t really sense that people asso- ciate him with the city or even clock him as Latino. “If I go anywhere else in the world or different parts of the country, especially if they haven’t met me be- fore and don’t know me that well, they think I’m Dutch,” he says. (The artist is listed on a Wikipedia page of famous people named Bas, between an Ital- ian organist and a French gymnast.) Bas’ family has strong roots in Miami, going back to their flight from Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. “My grandfather was mili- tary in Cuba, and they ran in the night, basically,” he says. He was the only Spanish-speaking kid in his class during the brief time his family lived in Ocala. When he began making art after his family moved back to the city, he ended up reacting against the typical aesthetic conventions found in Miami. “Growing up here, I had the complete opposite reaction of not wanting to be tropical landscapes, not wanting to do what’s surrounding me. I was more attracted to Southern Gothic — creepy swamps and deep, dark woods — as imagery because that was romantic to me. It was like, I wanted to be Peter Doig; I didn’t want to be José Bedia.” Still, he finds it funny that so few have begged to consider why someone of his background would make art the way he does. “A lot of people think I’m from Europe or some- thing like they don’t even think I’m American or nonetheless Cuban. So it’s always funny to me,” Bas reflects. “Almost any press you read of mine, there’s no mention of me even being of Latin descent. It’s very strange. It’s just totally overlooked, maybe be- cause they want to talk about being gay instead of Latin, like that’s more interesting to them. That’s fine; that’s part of the story, too.” “Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists.” Monday, Decem- ber 4, through May 5, 2024, at the Bass, 2100 Collins Ave., Miami Beach; 305-673-7530; thebass.org. Tickets cost $8 to $15; free for members, Miami Beach resi- dents, and children 6 and under. [email protected] get lost SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ INVITES YOU TO FIND YOURSELF IN A MAZE ON MIAMI BEACH. | BY CAROLINA DEL BUSTO I magine setting foot in a sand-covered maze on the shore of Miami Beach. Tall panels prevent you from seeing too far. Should you turn right or left? Left. Defi- nitely left — right? Which way is out? Oh god, why did I walk in here? And, boom, just as you start to feel like you’re making your way through, you find a clearing. It’s the nucleus. At the center is a large reflec- tive monolith. You stand there, staring at your- self in this mirror-like piece, and, woah, is it trippy. And also reflective. And all those thoughts you had wandering through the laby- rinth come rushing back tenfold. That’s the point of Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuriz’s installation titled Maze: Journey Through the Algorithmic Self. He wants you to stop, think, and be curious. Commissioned by Faena Art, the larger-than-life installation will sit on the sands behind the Faena Hotel Miami Beach and is open to the public beginning Tues- day, December 5. Errazuriz created the loopy labyrinth with the help of two artificial intelligence platforms, Midjourney and DALLE2. While the conversation around art and AI continues to rage on — they’re even talking about it at Harvard — it’s not really a new con- cept for some artists. A prominent and prolific artist himself, Er- razuriz has been incorporating technology into his art practice for decades. “I think it’s key to always stay up to date with technology, especially in an era where artificial intelligence will disrupt every aspect of human life,” he tells New Times. He anecdotally tells the story of being a young artist with little to no money in his bank account. “I wouldn’t even want to look at my bank account or know how much money I had left,” he says. Similarly to the rise of AI in the art world — and society at large — Errazuriz be- lieves “people don’t want to look at some- >> p 14 With his installation Maze: Journey Through the Algorithmic Self, Sebastian Errazuriz brings up the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence. Photo by Silvia Ros/Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London Faena Art and Sebastian Errazuriz Studio photo Right: Hernan Bas, Conceptual artist #19 (A child of the ’80s, he places his Polaroid self-portraits in a familiar spot whenever he’s feeling lost), 2023 Bas from p 9
