Frieze Art Fair: artistic or autistic?

Entering the huge Frieze Art Fair pavilion in Regent's Park, you hear the sound of trickling water, an installation by Pavel Bucher. This is the first clue that nature and the environment are going to feature as a noticeable theme this year. But what is surprising is the particular way in which the environment is perceived and portrayed.

There are numerous examples of actual environments that have been re-assembled into art installations. The most striking is the Icelandic exhibit of an art bar, Sirkus, taken lock, stock and barrel from Reykjavik by the gallery Kling and Bang and reassembled next to the Caprice food concession.

Sirkus is a bar run by artists that opened in 1987 and recently closed. The structure and its contents, including barman and performance artists, have been faithfully re-created and there is a long queue of fair-goers waiting to go in. The gallery claims that it has managed to create the environment of the original bar but in a different context. Nevertheless, this bar is for sale at £350,000, not including transport or VAT.

There are other examples of environments that have been similarly 'airlifted' into the fair: a rubbish dump from the Appetite Gallery in Buenos Aires, with the artists rummaging through the garbage; a man in a suit - from the Fair Gallery - standing with a sign board hung around his chest saying, 'Help me to Find a Wife'.

While these installations have a humorous side, they came across like a pack of tourist postcards, simply replicating different environments and experiences. Rather than invite you into a world of fantasy and feeling, they distance the viewer from experiencing the actual threat our environment is under. So much so, that after several turns around Frieze I began to feel I was surrounded by autistic objects in an autistic world.

In child development, autism is a normal state of mind in infancy in which pleasure is sought through bodily sensations, and objects in the external environment are used for this purpose and are not perceived as having a life of their own. It is a state of omnipotence over the environment that obliterates separation and relationship.

Autism becomes abnormal when an infant needs to defend himself against being left too much alone to cope with the hazards of the environment. This is experienced as a traumatic separation and loss. Then the infant retreats into a sealed-off world in which he tries to re-create this earlier sense of omnipotence.

It is a sensual world totally within his control. The environment is nothing more than a collection of objects, stripped of meaning except for the sensual pleasure they may give. This is why children and adults who suffer from autism are so impenetrable and so hard to relate to.

As well as the 'airlifted' installations, environmental awareness is evident at Frieze in other pieces such as a water condensation chamber constructed by the artist, Tue Greenfort, that siphons off body moisture emitted by the fair-goers into plastic water bottles; a photograph of dead skinned bears nailed to a plank from the Moscow gallery, Regina; a video of rats packed into a glass container trying to claw their way out, from another Moscow gallery, XL.

While these are all striking and in some cases repellent pieces, their conception is so concrete that they verge on the kitsch. But while it might be easy to classify them as merely ineffectual or 'bad' art, seen together they convey something more disturbing to do with a desire to possess and control the environment so that it is reduced to an object, becoming two-dimensional.

Could this be a response to our increasing awareness of the lack of control we have over our environment, and to our fear of what we have already destroyed? Or is this an 'autistic' response - an attempt to freeze time and space so that nothing can change or impinge on us or our world view?

In the midst of the many two-dimensional objects and installations at Frieze, there are notable exceptions. The piece that seemed to stand out as a true expression of the pain and isolation of an autistic world was a sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, titled Paete non dolet ('She who cannot be touched does not grieve'), from White Cube.

The sculpture, made of plaster of Paris and fabric, shows a woman draped in a wedding dress, much like a caryatid, with a tangled cluster of barbed wire in place of her head. The juxtaposition of the inviting drapes surrounding the woman's body and the barbed, impenetrable mental space portrays the painful conflict of being trapped within one's own defences to the point of becoming a lifeless object.

The sculpture was in fact removed by Saturday morning because too many people had become caught up in the barbed wire and had complained of being attacked. The paradox of autism?

Frieze continues today, Oct 20 ·