Barry X Ball + LG: At The Cutting Edge Of Frieze LA

Frieze LA swept into Santa Monica last week with a Covid-defying enthusiasm that had artists, collectors and gallerists greeting each other like long-lost friends amidst crowds and food lines that made one think you could have been in the VIP area of Coachella. It was fun, it was exciting, and my head spun from the good, great and engaging art presented from artists from LA to Seoul, South Korea.

Frieze distinguishes itself from other art fairs by mixing prestige galleries with up and coming and international galleries, by doing a modest amount of original curation and programming (and by being partly owned by Endeavor thereby guaranteeing Hollywood collectors’ presence). On the days I attended the foot traffic was enviable and the galleries I queried were delighted not just by the number of people who stopped by their booths but by the volume of sales which were healthy for local and visiting galleries.

As to trends… it is clear how much collecting contemporary Art has become a status-rich ecosystem and how global the market is with emerging artists from Africa and Asia garnering growing attention and how many artists are using yarn and fabric as part of their artistic practice.

At the cutting edge of technology and Art, LG electronics, the South Korean chaebol (conglomerate) had a particularly innovative installation at Frieze LA, featuring Digital and NFT work by artist Barry X Ball, whose sculpture sit at the intersection of traditional sculpture and technology. Ball’s NFT which can be seen on any recent LG OLED TV via their LG ART LAB art represents a new frontier in creating virtual sculptures totally independent of actual objects.

Ball was born in Pasadena, raised in Glendora by strict fundamentalist Christians. As Ball told Populist in a recent interview, “We weren’t allowed to have religious depictions when I was younger, there were no sculptures in the churches that I went to, they were plain white sheetrock boxes.” He attended Pomona College where he first studied Art History and, soon enough, Art took the place of religion in his life. After Pomona, he headed to NYC where he worked as a bicycle messenger to support himself while working on his art.

Ball’s early works were influenced by artists who were minimalists and conceptual artists often creating monochrome works. He taught himself to be a woodworker. There was an intellectual rigor and discipline in Ball’s artistic practice that resonated with his childhood fundamentalism. Over time, the supports for the paintings he made became part of the work which, in turn, led to making sculptural works inspired by Italian striped Gothic Architecture.

However, in 1988, when he was 33 years old, a friend who worked at Apple gave Ball his first computer. As part of a program called AppleSeed, Ball was given software for artists to play with. He began to conceive of a new way of making classical sculpture. Ball then went to Seward Johnson’s New Jersey Art Center which was the prime fabrication facility for bronze casting and had recently added a stone division.

Ball realized that without learning how to carve marble and stone by hand, he could create figurative sculpture through the use of precise machine tools. Over time, Ball has incorporated 3D scanning, virtual modeling, rapid prototyping, computer-controlled milling, to create works which are then subject to hours upon hours of polishing and detail finishing work.

At the same time, Ball immersed himself in geology, learning about the properties of various stone and rock matter to reveal in his work their true natures. At the same time, Ball did a deep dive into the work of other artists in the hope of taking what they did further. In a sense Ball has manufactured his way through art history from Renaissance works to Modernist. He does so thanks to a large studio in Brooklyn, with a team of assistants, and precision tools and technology to execute his vision.

So, for example, Ball has investigated the drawings and sketches for sculptures of the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. On display at the LG space (“The LG Lounge”) at Frieze LA was a table top sculpture of Ball’s inspired by Boccioni in 24 Karat plating. It was a thing of beauty conveying the dynamism of Boccioni’s intent in a contemporary formed that gleamed as a totem of Modernism.

Working with Boccioni’s sketches and paintings was facilitated by one of Boccioni’s major collectors, Laura Mattioli, who is also a supporter of Ball’s. Almost a decade ago, Mattioli commissioned Ball to do a portrait of Pope John Paul II.

Ball conceived of doing the portrait in metal which Ball describes as “conceptually is different than Stone.” As Ball explained, “The main division of sculpture [is] between Additive and Reductive.” Using metal is a departure from either insofar as Ball is using the empty volume framed by the metal, the empty space at the sculpture’s core, to conjure the Pope “from the inside out.”

And although Ball is not finished fabricating the John Paul II sculpture he had so much digital information from his scans and plans, that at LG’s invitation he used these to create a completely digital, virtual work of art, in a series of NFT Editions (built on the Hedera network), available via LG Art Lab, an app available on recent LG TVs that is an NFT art platform. LG is already in conversation with several other contemporary artists and is hoping to make LG Art Lab, and one’s LG TV as the place to display Digital Art.

Ball undertook the digital project with his usual dedication to reaching the highest possible standards technology can afford. Ball engaged the Academy Award winning VFX Creative Studio The Mill for the production as well as a top sound and music production company for the original soundtrack.

At the LG Lounge, Ball’s NFTs were displayed on a variety of TV monitors including their new 97 inch screen, as well as their LG OLED Object Collection Posé model (which can go vertical to display Art).

What you see when looking at Ball’s NFT on the LG monitors is a 39-second kinetic visual work in which metal bars move across the screen in balletic fashion (not unlike Kubrick’s rendering of space in 2001). The series appears in four variations based on different metals–black steel, gold, copper and silver. The metal bands are incredibly detailed and realistic looking – although entirely digital one can see the puckers divots and scratches of real metal as well as the way it shimmers and glistens – and in some of the NFTs, the revolving metal resolves in its rotation so that we finally glimpse the face of Pope John Paul. It is beautiful, stunning, haunting.

At Frieze LA, Ball was happy with the results. “The process was wonderful. The collaborators were some of the nicest people.” However, it was both very expensive and Ball wasn’t sure about having 39 seconds to tell a story. “The art world and video is this funny relationship,” Ball said.

It may be funny, but LG is onto something. So many people have these large screen TVs in their homes, hanging in the place where in a prior generation an Artwork might have hung. NFTs or public domain artworks may not be the ultimate screensaver, but Frieze LA demonstrated a great appetite for Art. Who knows, some of it may one day turn up on your home TV screen.