Art Basel stages the world's premier Modern and contemporary art fairs, staged annually in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong. A driving force in supporting the role that galleries play in nurturing the careers of their artists, Art Basel frequently expands its platforms to include the newest developments in the visual arts.

Since 1970, Art Basel’s goal has been to connect the world's premier galleries and their patrons, as well serving as a meeting point for the international artworld. Now, over forty years later, its three fairs - in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami Beach - rank as the premier shows of their kind, presenting 20th and 21st century art with a strong curatorial perspective.

Our reputation for showing high quality work has attracted leading international galleries and collectors, offering visitors the most important art from around the world.

⇨ PUBLIC OPENING HOURS
Thursday, June 15, 2017, 11am to 7pm
Friday, June 16, 2017, 11am to 7pm
Saturday, June 17, 2017, 11am to 7pm
Sunday, June 18, 2017, 11am to 7pm

Find out below, some selected artworks that will be presented during the fair, that have a connection with music.

Nick Cave’s monumental installation Speak Louder invokes one of the artist’s favorite dictums: In order to be heard, you have to speak louder. The work unites seven of Cave’s iconic Soundsuits in one powerful ensemble – under a shimmering cloak of pearlescent buttons bringing individuals together into a figurative landscape. Cave draws strong visual parallels between the collected Soundsuits and the jazz-funeral processions of New Orleans, which often feature similarly spectacular outfits and lively brass marching bands. Here the figures’ tuba-shaped heads have been silenced, the mouths sealed off with dark fabric, imbuing the work with an ominous quality. Positioned in an array, but unified as one, Speak Louder forms a dynamic chorus, emphasizing the resilience of community. It speaks somberly to our losses – and encourages us to continue fighting for a better future.

Nick Cave - Speak Louder, 2011
Installation/ mixed media including black mother of pearl buttons, embroidery floss, upholstery, metal armature
Jack Shainman Gallery / Basel 2017
Unlimited | Hall 1 | U67

A pioneer of kinetic sculpture, Jean Tinguely worked in the Dada tradition, satirizing industrial society’s overproduction of material with his complex assemblages of metal and machinery. Of his most renowned kinetic sculpture, Homage to New York (1960), Tinguely said, “it’s a sculpture, it’s a picture, it’s an accompanist, it’s a poet, it’s decoration—this machine is a situation.” He fabricated the 27-by-30-foot contraption from recycled metal scraps and designed it to self-destruct at the culmination of a half-hour performance, explaining, “the destruction is necessary because this machine is a grandiose spectacle that must live intensely.” Tragicomically, a firefighter intervened when flames burst out, so it never played out as intended during the single performance held in MoMA’s sculpture garden; however, the idea that an intensive, creative life leads to self-destruction lives on in Tinguely’s legacy.

Jean Tinguely- Radio WNYR 10, 1962
Installation/ Plexiglas panel, metal, radio, electric motor
42.1 × 42.1 × 7.1 Size (in)
Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois / Basel 2017
Galleries | Hall 2.0 | D15

Mike Kelley (b. Detroit, 1954, d. Los Angeles, 2012) is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Irreverent but deeply informed, topical yet visionary, Kelley worked in a startling array of genres and styles, including performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography, sound works, text, and sculpture. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. Starting out in the late 1970s with solo performances, image/text paintings, and gallery and site-specific installations, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials. Featuring repurposed thrift store toys, blankets, and worn stuffed animals, the Half a Man series focused Kelley’s career-long investigation of memory, trauma, and repression, predicated on what the artist described as a “shared culture of abuse.”

Throughout his career Kelley sought to understand the cultures around him from the bottom up, scouring yard sales and yearbooks for their cast-offs and leftovers. He mined popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions, which he set in relation to relentless self- and social examinations, by turns dark and delirious. With an inimitable mix of caustic skepticism and temporizing respect, he engaged the languages and assumptions of education, adolescence, crafts and DIY, holidays, pop psychology, parades and rituals, fandom, newspaper reportage, and modes of public address—producing a uniquely sustained address to the conditions and implications of the American vernacular.

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Mike Kelley - Rock Critic I, 1991
Work on Paper - Oil on paper
40.0 × 32.0 Size (in)
Blondeau & Cie / Basel 2017
Galleries | Hall 2.0 | A9

Constance DeJong (lives and works in Nyack, New York) is American artist, writer and performer having worked for over three decades on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. DeJong has always extended her prose into multiple forms of performance, audio installation, printed text, electronic objects, audio and video works. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her art of narrative with an intricate attention to content and literary form.

In 1983, DeJong composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha. She has collaborated with Tony Ourlser on numerous performance and video works including Relatives, 1990, and Fantastic Prayers, 2000, with Tony Oursler and Steven Vitiello. She published and performed SpeakChamber with Bureau in 2013 and is developing a series of narrative audio pieces housed on a suite of modified vintage radios. Her first book, Modern Love, 1977, will be re-issued in 2017 by Ugly Duckling Presse, co-published by Primary Information and she will perform material from this work at The Kitchen in Spring of 2017.

She has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally at venues such as the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis MN; The Wexner Center, Columbus OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Center for the Arts.

Constance DeJong - Bakelite RCA Victor, 2015
Other Materials- Re-engineered radio with amplitude-sensitive LEDs, audio
7.8 × 12.0 × 7.5 Size (in)
Bureau / Basel 2017
Feature | Hall 2.1 | T8

*** Note
John Sinclair (Flint, Michigan 1941) was a poet, blues and jazz historian, band manager, radio host and political activist. Sparked by the love of jazz, he took notice of the surrounding political culture that formed it. He heard Malcolm X speak, sided with the emerging antiwar movement, and had been introduced to a beatnik lifestyle. Forming a commune with like-minded friends, they brought film, music, painting, and literature to anyone in the community who was interested, presenting art as universally tangible, not an unknown entity wrapped in an academic elitist shield. Sinclair followed the lead of the Black Panther Party and created their counterpart, the White Panther Party.

MoW

Art Basel / Basel - 2017

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