Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021
Three Word Title
In a way, that’s a good description of how we put the exhibition together. There are many interconnected parts creating multiple storylines, which I think is much more how most artists work or at least how I work. Interviews are more about answers, and art is at its most interesting when it’s opening up new and old questions.
Paul Stephens has a hard time getting past Christopher Wool’s text paintings, which came up precisely because they aren’t in Wool’s current show, See Stop Run, but his Bomb Magazine interview with the artist is still interesting.
One of the more interesting topics are the typeface-based abstract illustrations images Wool contributed to What Just Happend, Richard Hell’s 2023 book of poetry and writing. It’s one of several collaborations Wool and Hell have made, and relates to some of Wool’s ULAE prints going back almost a decade.
Yo, Bomb says See Stop Run goes until “the end of July,” the 31st, but the See Stop Run internet website says it ends the 28th. Don’t get stuck outside, ppl.
Christopher Wool by Paul Stephens [bombmagazine]
See Stop Run stops running July 28th, 2024 [seestoprun]
What Just Happened, 2023, from Winter Editions, is $20 [wintereditions]
Apkullacore
The Walters Museum of Art translates Apkallu as a “winged genius”; other museums which have wall panels from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II describe Apkallu as a “sage,” or a “genie.” These ripped, winged humanoid figures stood at the entrance of doorways in the palace, offering blessings or protection to passersby with a pine cone dipped into a small bucket of anointing liquid.
There is obviously much that can be said about Apkulla style: the feathered or fishskin cloaks; the fringed kilts; the beards, the workout, the armbands; the daggers; the horned diadems; the earrings; the rosette-covered wristbands. For starters, let’s just look at the bucket, or as Reddit is fond of calling it, the Handbag of the Gods.
Continue reading “Apkullacore”The Arc of Criticism Is Long
Max Kozloff went so hard after Maurice Tuchman’s Art & Technology show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. From “The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle” in the October 1971 issue of Artforum:
Some of the companies involved by the museum are as follows (quotes are from the Report itself): the Garrett Corporation (“has been designing high-performance jet engines for military aircraft”); General Electric (“has its own think tank, called TEMPO, which runs seminars on nuclear weapons”); Hewlett-Packard Company (“radar, guided-missile control”); Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Litton Industries (“builds submarines, amphibious assault ships, and advanced guidance and fire control systems”); Lockhead Norris Industries (“a major ordnance manufacturer since World War II”); North American Rockwell, and The Rand Corporation. In short, it is a rogue’s gallery of the violence industries. Subsidized decisively by the American government, they had grown to their present bulk through the business of slaying. The show epitomizes the fact that our most prominent visual artists had been offered an extremely direct contract to be of service to the prestige of these industries (in return for various hard and software) and had accepted. During the term of the project, there occurred the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Democratic Convention riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the invasion of Cambodia, and the student killings at Kent and Jackson State. While these convulsions were taking place, inflaming the radicalism of our youth and polarizing the country, the American artists did not hesitate to freeload at the trough of that techno-fascism that had inspired them.
Kozloff ends by comparing LACMA’s A&T report/catalogue to the Pentagon Papers. He makes no mention in his takedown of the Cowles Corporation, one of the major sponsors of the A&T Project, and the family company of Artforum publisher Charles Cowles. And until 2012, when he reflected on the essay anew, he gave artists no credit for either the critical statements they made in the report, or the “derisive” works they produced.
Previously, related: Art & Technology & Serra & Steel Mills
Cremaster Custom Commissions
When it came out in 1996, everyone who didn’t get an actual laserdisc edition wanted a bootleg copy of Cremaster 2. I wanted a belt buckle even more.
My queries at Gladstone amounted to nothing except the offer to buy an unrecognizable photo edition. So I plotted how to get a bootleg buckle made.
Would Mortenson Silver & Saddles of Santa Fe, who were credited with the extensive silver engraving in the film, make an extra one on the side? I ultimately decided not to ask.
But watching Cremaster 2 again last night—someone has uploaded the entire Cremaster Cycle to the Internet Archive, along with Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018)—I was struck again by the film’s particular beauty. And I wanted a buckle all over again.
Maybe it is too far back, but Mortenson’s doesn’t mention Barney or Cremaster props on their custom commissions page. But they do note the custom buckles the CEO of Outback Steakhouse commissioned as gifts for Princes Charles, William and Harry at a charity polo tournament he organized, probably in 2002 or 2003.
Achaeans In Battle In Palazzo
Claudio Santambrogio just pointed me to some great, moody photos Annabelle d’Huart made of Cy Twombly and his Roman studio in 1978. If only she had Horst’s agent, we would have all been swooning over these for decades, too.
Anyway among the images posted by @paintedout in 2017, is a pair of paintings from Twombly’s 10-panel epic cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam, which is in the Philadelphia Museum. Heroes of the Achaeans [left] and Achaeans in Battle, are at the Nos. 2 and 4 the cycle, and they both look pretty done.
In 2018, the Museum and Yale University Press published a monograph on Fifty Days, in which curator Carlos Basualdo interviewed d’Huart about her visit to Twombly’s studio. The Museum acquired five of d’Huart’s prints, including the image above.
This is the same book that classics scholar Richard Fletcher talked to Tyler Green about on an episode of MAN Podcast, which prompted the Twombly Foundation to send a cease & desist demanding Green delete images of the Fifty Days paintings they discussed from his website, which prompted me to make an artist book out of a print of the screencap of the podcast site. And which actually soured me on buying the book, so not being more familiar with d’Huart’s photos sooner is the result. I have now ordered it; let the healing begin, I guess.
Annabelle d’Huart Twombly studio photos in the PMA [philamuseum.org]
The Met’s Not A Dürer
In 1919 the Metropolitan Museum bought this watercolor from British dealer Charles Elliott Norton as a c. 1515 Dürer. Probably because it had come from the estate of Charles Sackville Bale, whose collection of watercolors was sold after his death in 1880. And probably also because there is a big AD Albrecht Dürer monogram at the top.
Reader, it is not a Dürer, and the Met’s phrase now, “in the manner of Dürer,” even feels like a stretch. But “Sold to us as a Dürer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” is probably too much to expect the museum to say.
Bittern’s Wings: study showing both sides/ In the manner of Albrecht Dürer [the met via @curiousmiscellanies-blog via @punk-raphaelite]
Art Collab Andre Buta
I’m trying to figure out how I’ve lived ten years without a copy of Richard Serra Early Work in my life. [This doesn’t need to happen to you; today’s your last chance to get it for a dollar or whatever at Zwirner’s book sale.]
Anyway, in May 1970, after successfully installing twelve giant fir trees in the Pasadena Art Museum [Peter Plagens going there: “One does not have to be a dedicated Freudian to see the import of huge logs in one of the curved, pristine, uterine chambers of the PAM. Indeed, one has to work pretty hard to fend it off…”], Richard Serra went to Japan, to make work for the Tokyo Biennale ’70.
Attention outside Japan on the 10th Tokyo Biennale has picked up a bit—Tate did a symposium it apparently didn’t record in 2016—but there are no period texts about it in this 2014 Serra catalogue, and no mention at all beyond three photos. If I’m getting this right, Serra made his first embedded angled steel works in Japan: the To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted he dug into Ueno Park was a 130-in. diameter version of the steel circle he embedded in the street in the Bronx later that Fall. [Which is on the cover of the book, btw.] When the Biennale traveled to Kyoto, he made a 300-in. steel square, Untitled (Kyoto Square), in Okazaki Park.
photo: Kuwashi Maruyama as published in Richard Serra Early Work (Steidl/Zwirner, 2014)
I couldn’t find Kuwashi Maruyama’s photo [above] online, only the photo of Shigeo Anzaï which shows Serra laying out a circle with a string and some chalk. Starting with his documentary images of international artists at the Biennale, Anzaï was the Shunk AND Kender of 1970s avant-garde Japan. The print above surfaced when he showed them at White Rainbow in 2015-2016.
Tokyo Biennale ’70 is being reconsidered as an innovative success for curator Yusuke Nakahara’s choice to center artists [no nations, no pavilions]; to use a theme [“Between Man and Matter”] that put Japanese Gutai and Mono-ha artists in dialogue with international artists; and yet to not be too heavy-handed about it. Except that there were zero women; official photographer Anzaï all but ignored the Japanese artists; and almost every anecdote he tells is about something the artists wanted but were not allowed to do.
Christo was forbidden from wrapping something; Sol Lewitt was forbidden from painting on the wall, and on and on. Anzaï’s photo shows Serra trying to plant a tree inside an embedded steel ring in front of the museum, a plan that was rejected. He apparently decided to YOLO it, and installed the sculpture [top] somewhere else in the park, without permission, and without telling anyone where it was.
All of this is really a sidebar to the work Serra did manage to exhibit. A week before the Biennale opened, while Serra was onsite, the Kent State massacre happened. Serra and Carl Andre decided not to let the moment pass. The work they created, listed as “mixed media” in the Serra catalogue, was a wire service printout of John Filo’s photo of Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over the body of Jeffrey Miller; and a hand-painted sign in Japanese and English: “The pig will eat its children.” The two elements are taped side by side to the temporary pegboard wall used in the Biennale.
The Tokyo Museum Collection’s 2005 object listing for Kiyoji Ohtsuji’s 1970/2005 print lists it as “Richard Serra, The Pig Will Eats Its Children (political protest with Carl Andre).” The Serra catalogue caption just calls it a “collaboration with Carl Andre.”
What to make of it?Now, Serra’s worked with livestock before, and pigs specifically. But there is no way he’s not [also] thinking of the cops here, right? Again, zero mention in the catalogue, zero mention online. Oddly, one of the very few other references to this title is in a 2012 collaborative work in a 2017 show at Maureen Paley; Gardar Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon included a photo print on crushed aluminum of two parked Japanese riot police busses titled, The Pig Will Eat Its Children.
The Japanese connection makes me think they knew—Einarsson lives in Tokyo—or that there is a common reference. Though probably not Japanese. Serra & Andre’s Japanese text [豚はその子を食べてしまうだろう] reads like a literal translation, and the somewhat clunky painted version actually gets truncated. So it’s not a common saying. And anyway, dogs, not pigs, are the typical Japanese animal slang for police. So this is from the artist(s). Alas, they’re both dead now, so it’s a bummer that apparently no one in the last 10-50 years asked them about it. But don’t look at me; I only found out yesterday, and here I am.
Tokyo Biennale 70 as Contact Point [tate research]
Art Diverts Revolution
“As a matter of fact, Hoffman’s name came up in the ride to Nevada pretty frequently. Serra had gone to school at Santa Barbara and, after Isla Vista, was having serious doubts about whether he was the most revolutionary1 thing that ever came out of that campus. What, we argued, was the most revolutionary thing to do?
…
“We came back again to see the piece in the early morming, and Joan made a videotape of it. Then we left. On the ride back to Las Vegas we talked about the piece a lot, about politics not at all. It wasn’t as if the problem had gone away; it was, at least for me, as if revolutionary art is where you find it and that the question of what is revolutionary art isn’t too different, in the end, from the question of what is good art. Anyway, nobody mentioned Abbie Hoffman. We all got very happy. Serra wondered whether anyone in the ‘Information’ show had submitted a piece of paper that said: ‘Go to a mesa and dig a slot forty feet deep and one hundred feet long. Then go to the other side and dig a slot…’
…
“1 ‘Revolution’ was the most often-used word I ran into this summer. Nobody used it to mean the transfer of political power from one class to another. Most of the time it seemed to refer to those activities which would most expeditiously bring America to her senses and force her to stop the war, end racism, and begin to take the lead among nations in rescuing the planet from the certain destruction toward which it is headed.”
[Excerpts from Philip Leider’s account of traveling with Joan Jonas and Richard Serra from Berkeley to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, published in Artforum (Sept. 1970) as “How I Spent My Summer Vacation or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah (Read about it in Artforum),” excerpted further from Richard Serra Early Work (Steidl/Zwirner, 2014), a book you have one more day to buy for $10 at the David Zwirner Books Summer Archive Sale.]
FWIW, I think the Isla Vista reference is to either the torching of a Bank of America building or the shooting by police of a UCSB student in the Spring of 1970.
I was just going to post the footnote of their road trip’s working definition of revolution, but every piece of context kept spiraling into a vortex of depressing relevance.
Shame, OTOH
Speaking of mediated political violence, in 1970 Richard Hamilton photographed a TV screen showing a BBC news report of the National Guard shooting at Kent State.
When he decided ‘that art could help to keep the shame in our minds,’ Hamilton made a 13-layer screenprint of an image of freshman Dean Kahler, who was left paralyzed by the gunshots. The print preserves the shape of the television screen and, published in a signed edition of 5,000 aspired to the ubiquitous reach of broadcast TV itself.
The example above, 3034/5000, is being sold—again—at Bonham’s with another Hamilton work, an offset print of Marcel Duchamp, at a slightly lower estimate than the last time.
A Kent State was also included in Galerie Buchholz’s 2022 show of Richard Hamilton works in New York. They’re always available for whatever people feel like paying at the moment. If only shame were so easy to come by.
Signatures of Significance
When I said I can’t get autographs? I meant, unless conceptually.
Sitting with this unexpected Bach auction for a minute, I realized I actually do get autographs when they convey a meaning beyond, “This person signed this,” or “I met/corresponded with this person.”
Or when I project entirely subjective meaning onto them. Like when I found a souvenir towel from a Merce Cunningham performance on Broadway signed by Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg, and I conjured a “logic” for this object that involved getting Jasper Johns to sign it.
That “logic,” or the pretense of it, was predicated on Johns being the designer of the performance poster. But of course, there were multiple other logics possible, from the art historic to the romantic, to the starkly commemorative, forcing an object into existence that links these four men—physically, contractually, notationally, quasi-publicly, as if there weren’t already countless other products of their decades-long interactions, filling archives and beyond. Here the autograph functions as a singular piece of evidence, superficial and contrived, of some other form of more substantial cultural meaning. But when signs are few, signatures will do.
And of course, the significant emptiness can become the subject itself. Like in Rob Pruitt’s Signature Series, large-format autographs on Belgian linen he’s collected since the Pruitt-Early days. I remember several occasions when Rob would suddenly produce a big piece of linen and a fat Sharpie from his backpack, and turn around, offering his back as a writing surface when none other was available.
Autographs then became a project, an artistic practice, which art world celebrities and citizens alike could appreciate. I remember seeing a few loosies in the wild, but eventually, after years of accumulation, Pruitt showed The Signature Series en masse. And like Byron Kim’s skin tone monochromes, these accumulated markers of somebody else become a self-portrait of the artist moving through the world.
Now going back to Bach and his chopped up and shuffled autograph collection, it’s possible to interpolate meaning from the otherwise random-seeming clusters. Maybe the lots reflect the order in which Bach collected his autographs, a project of a lifetime sliced into tranches based on minimum viable auction estimate.
Rob Pruitt’s Signatures Series [luxembourgco]
Previously, related: Untitled (Merce at the Minskoff), 2015-2018
Signs Of The Times
Letters, manuscripts, books, I get, but autographs? I cannot even. Franz Peter Bach could, though. The July 24th auction of his autograph collection includes the following, almost surreal text:
He began collecting in the 1980s, from following music tours in Germany, as well as attending swap meets in Hanover, where as well as exchanging autographs, he was given addresses of celebrities, who he would then write to directly for signatures. His collection was meticulously collated, mostly in albums, and added to over many years. Authenticated prior to the sale by Adam Andrusier. Collated in a presentation album by Mr Bach, with tipped in photograph on opposing page. Following the sale, the autograph(s) will be removed and paired with the photograph, ready for collection / shipping.
Besides dismantling this guy’s meticulously collated collection, the autographs are being sold mostly in inexplicable and entertaining groups. The groups that include artist autographs are as follows:
Lot 51: Christopher Reeve, Francis Bacon, Liza Minelli, Bob Hope, Marsha Hunt, Tom Cruise, Burt Ward, and [Austrian actress] Eva May
Lot 53: Christopher Lee, [director] Ettore Scola, Karl Malden, Lynda Carter, [composer] Johann Maria Eduard Strauss III, and Cy Twombly
Lot 56: Shelley Winters, Lionel Messi, Gregory Peck, Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Don Ameche, Tippi Hedren, Anthony Perkins, and Olafur Eliasson.
Gerhard Richter and Leni Riefenstahl are each sold separately. The postcard with Leni’s autographs is pretty unflinching.
was gonna post about some building i saw on insta, but then i got on my laptop and saw more pics of it, and it looks like crap, so shoutout to the photographer who found one angle for it, i guess.
Tabula Rasa: The Making Of
We used to be a real country, where artists made 6×9-ft unique screenprints of degraded prints of one of the world’s first photographs.
Tabula Rasa, the summer group show at Paula Cooper, takes its name from a series of four unique screenprints Sarah Charlesworth made in 1981, one of which is in the show. On the their pandemic-era blog, PCG Studio, the gallery has posted a series of photos showing the making of Tabula Rasa, as well as another rarely seen work in the show: Face/Surface, a 1976 collaboration between Charlesworth and her former teacher Joseph Kosuth.
Continue reading “Tabula Rasa: The Making Of”Covid Has Entered The Felix Portrait Subject Groupchat
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ portraits are, by design, a conflation of the public and private, the world historic and the individual, the news and the intimate. And the artist encouraged his subjects to add and edit important events, people, and dates, authorizing them to decide what version of a portrait should be used whenever it is exhibited.
So I am pretty sure that when “Untitled” (Portrait of the Rosenbergs), 1994, was installed at Paula Cooper Gallery this summer, the text was provided by its subjects, OG Tribeca collectors Colombe Nicholas and Leonard Rosenberg. The work appears in Tabula Rasa, a fascinating-looking group show tracing study, influence, and relationships across a network of artists around Sarah Charlesworth.
And I guess one way to interpret the inclusion of “Covid arrives 2021” is as the date it finally made its way into the Rosenbergs’ pod? Did they somehow miss the entirety of Covid in 2020, when it was very much a thing? Did the date baked right into the name, COVID-19, not factor in? Did they perhaps mean “Vaccine arrives 2021”?
The very nature of Felix’s portraits, and also the nature of human history as an accumulation of lived individual experience and interaction, and also the ultimate impossibility of knowing someone else’s subjective experience, and also the inevitable failure of art, no matter how powerful, to perfectly capture and transmit the essence of that subjectivity, makes me reluctant to call the factcheckers. If or until I hear back from them or the gallery with more info, for the Rosenbergs, at least, Covid arrived in 2021.
Meanwhile, in his 2023 show of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, David Zwirner exhibited another portrait, “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons), 1993, but in three versions. Artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon created their own versions, and collector/subject Nancy Magoon provided her own version. [cf. this YouTube video of them speaking with Helen Molesworth about the portrait(s).]
In her version Magoon, whose husband and co-subject Robert passed away in 2018, included “Covid lonely 2020.” Which, taken together with “Bedazzled 2019, 2021, 2022,” might mean the pandemic canceled Ms. Magoon’s annual screening of the Elizabeth Hurley/Brendan Fraser classic. Such is the nature of a Felix portrait, of course, that we may never know.
Tabula Rasa is on view at Paula Cooper Gallery until 26 July 2024 [paulacoopergallery]
Your Body Of Work, His Penetrable
Right now I would just like to get lost in transparent mazes of color, tracking the new colors produced by overlapping vistas, and reminisce on the Penetrable installations of Helio Oiticica. Who was driven from Brazil into exile by the military dictatorship.
Turns out discovering this 2011 Olafur Eliasson installation in São Paulo, and later in Stockholm, is not helping me flee the foreboding present, who knew?
Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work), 2011 [olafureliasson.net]
Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work) installation video [soe.tv]
Previously, related: Art & Autocracy [brooklynrail]
What I Saw: Manhattan Speedrun (and Liz Deschenes Gorilla Glass works)