Art Basel: Unsanitized
By: Raine Blunk
Tags: Art, Drag Queens, Queer

With this newly revitalized approach to weirdness in mind, House of Gunt covered the gallery floor in the remains of my styrofoam head and tutti-frutti sucker meal, Influenza Mueller’s cut strands of hair, Anita Shavé’s slivers of broken mirror, and TToyota Mitsubishi’s customized picnic luncheon plates. Dino Real delivered unabashed opulence like an orgasm you can’t afford. Local Honey and SSTR collaborated for some sort of backwards self-seance with a recipe of thick tears streaming from Local’s eyes into a kettle of boiling water with the alienating sound of SSTR’s voice. Sophia Park brought whip-its to highten our craving for Limited Too and pastel-themed bedroom parties, followed by Ellen Degenerate’s fanny pack in full swing on the dance floor.

Kalan did a puppet show in the street outside the gallery while I rolled on the floor to the swing of a Percocet administered to me by a rando while we were wrestling on the sidewalk over a silver spoon. James half told me, half spoke to the room about how his life had changed over the past few months. I imagined what it would be like to hear his story had I really known who he was. He sat in a black folding chair against one wall of the gallery smoking a rolled cigarette and told me about how he got diabetes and how he couldn’t easily get access to insulin since he wasn’t from Florida. I wondered what it was like to suddenly find out you have to measure some part of your biology like a hawk and consistently maintain access to proper medical care and briefly imagined the smell of his hair on my pillow the night after he slept in my bed. He didn’t have to say much.

“REVOLUTION IS PISS” bled a piece of canvas framed on the wall.

We smoked one more cigarette and James left to go to sleep.

I woke up the next morning naked on a piece of foam. Kalan told me I was beautiful. I told them they wouldn’t think that forever. Part of me hates myself for trying to be honest.

In several terrifying moments I felt like I’d only met someone like Kalan in fragments of other people. It was magnetic to the point of nausea.

Hungover, Kalan and I walked to some of the stores surrounding Space Mountain on the hunt for food. Across the street from the galleries in a line were abandoned storefronts painted light blue. I’d heard Liz say the night before that the neighboorhood was being bought up and it’d all be gone and sold soon. It reminded me of the outskirts of Savannah’s downtown where rows of empty buildings line streets that have yet to be discovered by developers or turned into cheap housing or Kate Spade stores. Soon it’ll all be equally as overrun by tourist-rich glitz like the kind in Miami creeping into Little Haiti with money from downtown. In a rainbow mumu and face paint from the night before, I carried Kalan on my back to Mimi’s fruit stand for apples and bananas.

I couldn’t tell if they made Mimi so animated or if it was always in her nature to seem so genuinely inquisitive. “Did you two come from a circus?” she laughed as she rolled giant potted palm trees out onto the painted storefront. I bit into an apple and contemplated where Mimi’s fruit and my bare ass blowing in the wind underneath my mumu would fit into the liposuctioned experience of #ABMB2014.

As an idea, the lie of Art Basel, along with my vision of Miami interpreted through hot movie scenes in South Beach, seemed to exist far from the 8000 block of NE 2nd outside of Mimi’s— it lives far behind fake velvet ropes and purse checks and hashtags and location services to tag the whitewashed walls filled with sterilized, whiteified, expensified, sexified, pieces of buy-able, solidifiable, explainable, tangible “ART.”

That idea was reinforced the next day after crashing a model’s photoshoot on the 11th street beach outside of the UNTITLED tent, taking a photo of internet socialite Nicky Ottav walking down the beach dressed like Spongebob, and spilling two Wet Willies daquiris on Dino Real’s feet while contemplating what to do with our night. Local, Eyal, Blew, and Dino promised to meet up with us at some party a mutual photographer friend had mentioned in an attempt to continue our hack into Art Basel.

In the meantime, I got a text that Kalan had been arrested with the art cart on Lincoln Street. I bit the inside of my lip for not being able to separate myself from my group to be there—what my presence would do about it, I have no idea—but it is the same feeling I got knowing Ferguson protestors were filling I-95 and I was drunk, peeing into a bathroom decorated like a tropical island. Just another BASEL-ER sucking down alcoholic juice in sterilized commercialized fun while people were on the streets getting dirty, fighting for something.