The Frieze tent being constructed. (Photo by Andrew Russeth)

Up until the announcement last spring that London’s Frieze Art Fair would be coming to New York for the first time, there were maybe five main reasons for a person to be on Randall’s Island: You are a high school student on an organized sports team—probably lacrosse or track or, perhaps, soccer—and you are utilizing the island’s athletic fields for practice; you have tickets to Electric Zoo or Cirque du Soleil; you like golf, but you do not want to leave the city to play it; you are a patient at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on the adjoining Wards Island; you are John McEnroe, it is 2010 and you are inaugurating the John McEnroe Tennis Academy at the Sportime Randall’s Island Tennis Center.

Frieze, which runs May 4-7, is now on New York’s home turf, but Randall’s Island feels a long way from Chelsea, or even the Upper East Side, even though that neighborhood is connected to the island by the Wards Island Footbridge, which is sea foam green, intriguingly Art Deco and, somewhat inconveniently for Frieze, closed for construction until later this summer.

There’s something ever so slightly off about the island. During a visit there last week, I saw high school students jogging past patients from the psychiatric center who were out for an afternoon walk accompanied by attendants. For every sign that says “Golf Center,” there’s one that says “Neurochemistry.” That attractive white brick, Roman-style building over by where the island connects to Queens? It turned out to be a sewage treatment plant. From Harlem, I walked across the RFK Bridge, which deposited me behind the driving range in a tangle of barbed-wire fencing beneath the shadow of the overpass. There were rust-covered dumpsters, old bleachers, unattached snowplows and more dumpsters. The Frieze tent, glossy and bright and snaking along the Harlem River, is located at the end of a service road. I’d come out to Randall’s Island in part to catch a glimpse of the Frieze tent while it was under construction, but also just to figure out how one gets there. I’ve lived in New York for seven years and, like a lot of New Yorkers, I’ve never had any cause to go to Randall’s Island.

I was also looking for a rat. Before going out to the island, I saw that The Art Newspaper’s website published a photograph of a giant inflatable rat, a symbol of union protests, installed at the Frieze tent’s construction site. The week before my trip, the New York District Council of Carpenters—an organization used by New York’s other major fairs, the Armory Show and the ADAA Art Show—announced a labor dispute with Frieze. The fair, so they claimed, was not using any of the local signatory contractors that employ the council. Not long after that, members of Occupy Wall Street announced a plan for a protest in front of the fair because, as Noah Fischer, one of the founders of Occupy Museums told me, “Frieze is a sort of hyper commercialized spectacle for the art economy” (the group also staged a small protest in front of the Armory Show, in March). Frieze denied that it was in a labor dispute with anyone. So what accounted for the photo of the rat?

Usually, when a New York art dealer has to cross water to get to an art fair, it’s because they’re in Basel. Or Paris, strolling along the Pont Alexandre III to the Grand Palais, for FIAC. There’s something almost more exotic about an island no one goes to in the East River with a giant asylum sitting in the middle of it.

“What we tend to do when we’re involved in a local New York fair is not going to work,” said dealer Jane Cohan, who runs the James Cohan Gallery with her husband, when I called her the day after my trip. “We tend to split our days. We figure there’s more people in New York and more people coming to the gallery and we want to be there for that. But with Frieze that’s not going to work logistically. It’s going to be a longer trip. We’ll have to come up with a different rotating system of sales associates.”

“I went out there yesterday on foot,” I said.

“Really?” she said. “Across the Triboro Bridge? That must have been an experience. I once walked across the George Washington Bridge but it was 4 in the morning and I was 17. Somehow, I don’t think a lot of our clients are going to do that.”

Chances are the Horts and Rubells of the world will probably not be walking across any bridges. Holders of the fanciest of Frieze’s VIP tickets—the one that gets you in at 11 a.m.—will have access to BMW sedans that will shuttle them from the island to wherever in Manhattan they need to go. Each car is equipped with sound installations by Martin Creed, Rick Moody and Frances Stark, which a press release from BMW boasts “will make the journey to Randall’s Island more enchanting.” (Reading this made me think of the empty vial covered in cocaine residue that I saw on the ground while walking across the bridge.) A Frieze spokesperson told me a ride from the BMW fleet will probably have to be booked in advance.

As a journalist, my own VIP card gets me in only as early as 2 p.m. Frieze will be running its own bus from the 4,5,6 train stop at 125th Street in Harlem, as well as a ferry that leaves every 15 minutes from East 35th Street. The other option is to take the M35 bus, which is basically a shuttle from Harlem. I took it on a second trip last week. With the exception of the guy sitting next to me who kept nodding off on my shoulder, it wasn’t an unpleasant ride. Still, it’s amusing to imagine Larry Gagosian—or even most art journalists—in a fit of desperation taking public transportation.

“I’m wondering at what point people will raise enough of a fuss that they’ll have to start having helicopter shuttles from Chelsea to the island,” said Alex Provan, a founder of Triple Canopy who will have a booth at Frieze. It’s the organization’s first art fair and it was given a booth for free because of its nonprofit status (as was White Columns; the Occupy Museums people weren’t aware of this when I spoke to them. One of them responded angrily, “We don’t think these small gestures work,” and then didn’t really elaborate.) Mr. Provan, whose organization doesn’t have the financial resources of a commercial gallery, said, “Hopefully most of the dealers that can afford to do Frieze can afford cab fare.”

“Helicopter,” the dealer Andrew Kreps responded quickly when I asked him how he was getting out to the island. He was joking, but I bet we can expect a lot of Frieze-related helicopter jokes in the coming weeks. I can think of more than a few art world machers who would likely consider it the most practical mode of transport, given that the island is a little too close to Teterboro to get to by private jet, never mind the lack of runway. “It’s hard to believe,” Mr. Kreps continued, “but I’ve actually been there before. For like a weird camp reunion thing. A touch football kind of deal. It’s really not that hard, I know people might think that sounds crazy. You just go up the FDR and you go over a bridge and you’re there. I know it’s intimidating, but it’s actually a pretty amazing place.”

“Do you have a car?” I asked.

“I was just gonna take a taxi,” he said. “I’m lacking a driver.”

Bridget Donahue, a director at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, reiterated this point to me when she said “I think since we’re all New Yorkers, we’re just assuming we’ll get in a yellow cab.” As far as I can tell, most cabs have less of a problem going to Randall’s Island than they do to, say, Brooklyn, so long as you agree to pay the $6.50 bridge toll. But Oliver Newton, co-owner of the gallery 47 Canal—who is one of the lucky exhibitors with his own car—conjured a truly horrifying image: “What worries me is the situation at the end of the fair, when everyone is trying to leave at once.”  Then again, that nightmare scenario may be mitigated by people like dealer James Fuentes, who lives downtown near the East River and plans to take his bike.

For now, getting on and off the island is relatively painless. On Tuesday a group of around 20 journalists got on a yellow water taxi at 35th Street with Frieze cofounders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover. Tea was served, and everyone headed for the top deck and started snapping photos of Manhattan. “I really like this trip,” Ms. Sharp said to me as we passed the Upper East Side. “It’s very seductive.” When we arrived at the construction site, security guards made us put on neon-yellow vests that said FRIEZE ART FAIR. Mine didn’t really fit over my jacket.

Last week on one of my trips out there, after scouring the art fair grounds looking to no avail for the inflatable rat, I found myself waiting at the bus stop near the parking lot (this is as good a time as any to say that the lot fits about 1,500 cars). The bus comes roughly four times an hour in the afternoon. A yellow cab with its light on pulled up instead and stopped. I looked around, hesitated slightly, and then jumped in.

“Do you take a lot of fares to Randall’s Island?” I asked the driver.

“Things happen,” he said coldly. “You take a lot of cabs from bus stations on Randall’s Island?” That was the end of that conversation. The cab back to Midtown took 20 minutes and cost $25.92, with a 20 percent tip.

As for the inflatable rat, it turns out that by the time I got there it was long gone. I found out later from a Council of Carpenters representative that the protest symbol was basically a photo-op, installed for a few hours and swiftly taken down after someone called security. There weren’t a lot of people around to see it anyway.

mmiller@observer.com

A BMW Alpina B7 at rest. (Courtesy Automotive Rhythms/Flickr)

VIPs taking rides to and from Frieze New York on Randall's Island in cars provided by BMW will encounter a special surprise inside those luxury automobiles: sound pieces by Martin Creed, Frances Stark and Rick Moody. (Plebeians, take heart: the pieces will be available for download on Frieze's site beginning May 4.) The pieces were commissioned as part of a new initiative called Frieze Sounds, organized by Cecilia Alemani.

Here's a little taste of what to expect inside the 7-Series Beamers, courtesy of Frieze's news release:

— Martin Creed "will compose a short song that doubles as a hypnotic lullaby."
— Rick Moody will create a "soundtrack" that "will take the guests on a journey where they will experience the poetic pleasure of getting lost."
— Frances Stark will offer "a narrated audio collage that combines the sound of mocking birds with a voiceover."

Frieze New York runs Friday, May 4, through Monday, May 7. VIPs will have access to the fair on Thursday, May 3.

Frances Stark, "Osservate, leggete con me," 2012. Three-channel digital video for projection, black and white with sound, 29:34 minutes. (Photo by Thomas Mueller/Gavin Brown's Enterprise)

"Are we gonna go on video?" the artist Frances Stark asked us when we caught up with her on Skype a few weeks ago. She was back in Los Angeles—she teaches at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California there—after being in New York for the opening of “Osservate, leggete con me," her show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village that runs through April 21.

"I didn't know if that was the plan," we typed back. "Your call!"

"Well let's start out this way..."

For a while, Ms. Stark, 45, was using that video feature to have sex with strangers—“camsex," it's called. She met these men on the website Chatroulette. One of her students introduced her to it. “We were in school and he said, oh but watch out there's a lot of dicks,” she said.

There are a fair number of dicks! The site skews male and young. (Give it a try.) “I was so fascinated and wanted to just be a voyeur—not of the sex but of the random people in their banal rooms,” she said.

Ms. Stark, in other words, did not set out to have camsex. But, she said, “at a certain point, I don't even remember the turning point oddly enough / but it just became like, huh, why not...” [A note on style here: since we talked via Skype, spellings have been preserved and separate messages have been noted with slashes.]

The texts from conversations with two of her online counterparts served as the script for My Best Thing (2011), an animated film that she made using free online software. Her character wears a leaf bikini; her lovers, a leaf or white underwear. A computer voice reads the dialogue, which includes talk of sex, but mostly art and politics and life. It appeared at the Venice Biennale and is now at MoMA PS1.

Ms. Stark’s show at GBE, “Osservate, leggete con me,” is comparatively understated: two video installations made of nothing but text from those conversations and some rudimentary furniture. The videos resemble cards from silent films or a Lawrence Weiner video that has become gloriously unhinged, infected somehow with Internet vernacular and a dash of obscenity or Owen Land. The main piece is broken into nine conversations with different partners. “i was encouraged/inspired to go for the repetition after I saw  kanye & jay-z on the watch the throne tour and they played, for an encore, N***s in Paris 9 times in a row!!!!!!” Ms. Stark said.

The seating for that video—a white L-shaped sofa—owes something to Kanye West as well. Ms. Stark sent over a digital file, we clicked it open and there appeared in front of us an image of Mr. West’s pristine bedroom, all whites and light tans. Not an artwork in sight.

Kanye West's bedroom.

“HELLO????” she said. “does the man have an art consultant?” “Hahahahahahahaha,” we cried, and she continued, “So this was clearly an inspiration. / actually i already knew i wanted it to be sparse.”

But to the conversations! They are tiny short stories packaged into just a few lines, which flip by, one by one, on the gallery's walls. In one, Ms. Stark’s online partner teaches her a bit of Italian: “sei una bella figa”—“you are a beautiful pussy.” That sort of thing. The economic crisis comes up. “Yes heavy situation here / in all Europe / the people are tired from this policy / we don’t have a future.” Ms. Stark: “and its even worse for the Tunisians." The unnamed man agrees, and adds, “but maybe I’m annoying you / u want see my cock? / not very big / but very hard.” End scene. On to the next conversation. ("The repetition thing...," she said. "i was very excited about that part of it because I was thinking about how it's 'always the same but always different' (what john peel said about The Fall)...") They are gripping, funny and very often moving—and they interconnect with the short video in the next room, Nothing is enough (2012), and My Best Thing. There are surprises we won't reveal here.

Many of the men are sweet, almost docile, at times. “It's a really nice portrayl of straight men,” we offered. “yes I can make them sweet!” said Ms. Stark. She edits the conversations. It also probably helps that most of the chats take place “post-coital, so to speak.”

“no honestly,” she continued, “I don't think they act like this with everybody / it's because I'm especially patient and know something about anything they bring up / whereas some 20=-somthing hotty is probably not going to have much under her ‘sleeve.’"

So, as she hinted, there is a manipulative element, a sinister streak at work, as there is in most good works of art. She is attentive to some one of her online paramours, showering them with compliments. With others she is colder. It’s no mistake that the sumptuous “Catalogue Aria” from Mozart’s Don Gionvanni loops during that video. (The work's title comes from the aria also: "Observe, read along with me.") In the song, the Don’s book of lovers—640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, more than 1,000 in Spain, etc.—is revealed to one of the women he scorned. In contrast, Ms. Stark is, at least in part, turning herself in, putting herself on display. “which is of course not so nice for my bf,” she typed. “that I'm flaunting my promiscuity...”

One loses a sense of time on Skype, and after an hour of typing away, we were in a daze, which became hazier as the conversation went on. It felt nice. "this is my preferred form of existence!" Ms. Stark declared.

"It's really pleasurable, typing away like this," we admitted.

"see! / it's even more pleasurable having orgasms in between." She added later, "to me this is a moer enhanced realm of the epistolary. ...  I don't think I could've gotten this far with this whole thing if I didn't have physical confidence, if that makes sense. ... / it's also addicting having guys say you look 15 years younger than you are, and honestly / whenever I tried to stop / for a few days / I'd feel like I was changing...like it was a real youth serum!!!!!"

However, with the work complete, she no longer participates in camsex. Her teaching schedule and various other projects are keeping her busy—she's at work now on a sound piece that will play in the BMWs that provide rides to VIPs at the Frieze New York art fair. And so she's on Skype less nowadays, though she keeps in contact with some of the men she met. “I'm having some serious withdrawl symptoms,” she said.

One of the men she has kept in touch with provided a piano piece that accompanies Nothing is enough. “just the other day he asked me if we could do it!” she said. “hahahah I was shocked!

“oh wow,” we typed.

“he's having withdrawal symptoms of some sort too. / i said, ok let's see in an hour or so” ("The hour was sort of get him to calm down," she explained.)

“hahaha”

“and I just didn't feel up for it / it's a lot of work!"

Skerrit Bwoy and Frances Stark. (Courtesy Performa)

Let us not assume that Frances Stark actually makes a hobby of seducing Italian men in their 20s over the internet, though that was the topic of her Performa commission “Put a Song in Your Thing,” which she presented on Friday night at Abrons Arts Center.

Let’s instead refer to the character Ms. Stark portrays, a frustrated artist with a love of language that seems diametrically opposed to her desire to make an opera. The character wears two outfits, a giant black dress shaped like a rotary telephone and a flesh-toned body suit. She regularly disrobes, and re-robes, aided by assistants who carefully pass the rotary disk over her head as they’re taking it off of her. Her on-stage appearances were brief, though—most of the action happened via recreated instant message conversations. These were projected with white words on a black background, onto a transparent screen that slid down over the proscenium.

The show began with a projected computer avatar wearing a fig-leaf bikini, who in a robotic voice told an old joke about a depressed man detailing his woes for a doctor. The doctor recommends that he see the great clown Pagliacci, who happens to be in town. “But doctor,” the man sobs. “I am Pagliacci.” Then the avatar shrugged.

Not long after that a documentary-style video played, featuring Ms. Stark’s character, in a telephone suit (see the image above), making a presentation in a near-empty opera house about her frustration with language, which is so extreme that even her presentation is a disaster. You get the impression that this actually happened and the video has been edited down so that it's primarily comprised of the bombing character’s “ums” and “uhs.”

“Words,” she sighs once, before resuming—“uh, uh, um, uh.

“There’s something about David Foster Wallace-" “um” “uh.”

How the character seduces the men isn’t made explicit. There may be video involved. The audience only ever saw long-distance pillow talk. The Italians’ facility with English varied and she had to explain to one what she means when she says she wants to be “stabbed.” According to the transcript, another watches her dress afterwards. She speaks about a shared love of 8½, with a third. “It is so about masturbation,” he types. She agrees.

The screen on which the words are projected remains down and we see a video of the Major Lazer hype man Skerrit Bwoy perform his signature hype move, in which he climbs a ladder on a dance floor and throws himself between a pair of spread eagle legs below. Skerrit Bwoy is the public face of Major Lazer, a band actually comprised of the DJs Switch and Diplo, and the character becomes obsessed with the soundtrack of his hyperbolic simulated sex dances. We learn this as an impossibly tall ladder is placed on the stage and Skerrit Bwoy, still behind the word screen and in shadow, pauses halfway up it to read the character's love letter to him on his phone.

All this led to the character bathing in sound at the end, music from a giant speaker that was onstage the entire time. It boomed with a bass you could feel in your clothes from the audience. The character wore the telephone costume and disrobed to sit in front of the word screen with her laptop. She then made a Powerpoint for a show very much like the one we'd just seen, her butt bobbing in the air as she typed the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” which was playing in the background. The needle scratched and a Major Lazer dubstep began as Skerrit Bwoy appeared. It was the only time the audience saw him without obscurity, and his electric yellow Mohawk seemed to light up with his eyes. To the delight of Ms. Stark's character, he began to simulate sex with her, humping her from behind. Then they gleefully rolled around together onstage, heads in each others' crotches. He pulled apart from her, to lie on the floor just below the stage with his legs spread. She leapt at him, and it was over.