Deep Frieze

Since its launch in 2012, the Frieze New York art fair, which takes place this year from May 14 through May 17 on Randall’s Island, has revived and reinterpreted oddball classics like Food, the quirky restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo run by artists during the ’70s, and Al’s Grand Hotel, a bed-and-performance piece that the artist Allen Ruppersberg briefly operated in Los Angeles in 1971. This time around, Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani commissioned an homage to Flux-Labyrinth, a winding obstacle course first realized in Berlin in 1976. Beyond that, Samara Golden will go beneath the fair to install a subterranean sculptural environment, and Allyson Vieira heads outside to erect a column from bales of recycled plastic. Pia Camil will hand out capes to visitors, and Korakrit Arunanondchai will plant denim-upholstered massage chairs among the booths—because buying blue-chip art can be surprisingly stressful. Meanwhile, the performance artist Aki Sasamoto will create a sort of labyrinth of her own: The mazy warren of rooms she is installing is a choose-your-own-adventure that doubles as a personality test. Every step of the way, visitors are presented with divergent options—for example, you enter via doors marked by either coffee or tea. Each choice, the artist says, is a matter of taste, which might be a sly dig at collectors who bum-rush the booths. “Buried under the humor, there’s a kind of antagonism,” Sasamoto says.