Blogging during a coup, I feel a bit like Myanmar PE teacher Khing Hnin Wai, whose exercise video (originally posted to Facebook) appeared to have inadvertently captured the beginning of that country’s February 2020 military coup. I might smile and keep dancing, but my back is not turned. Like so many others in Washington, DC, my seat squarely in the splash zone.
I’ve used blogging and the research, writing, and looking it involves, as a respite, a counter to the new administration’s cloud of malevolent, unconstitutional chaos that has engulfed friends, family, and neighbors who work for the federal government.
So if I stare for a minute and fixate on the minutiae in the corner of an artist’s studio, that’s why.
But an unelected nazi billionaire is seizing control and destroying of key functions of government. And an elected felon is subverting the Constitution and consolidating power while looting the country and inflicting injustice and suffering on millions, including many, many people I know and love. And they really have to be slowed and stopped and held accountable.
Let’s stipulate that it is wild that objects survive for hundreds of years, so each one is a little miracle and marvel of its own. But how did this painting come to be, and how did it come to be in Simon Dickinson‘s booth at TEFAF?
Basically, it’s a 17th century Dutch seascape painted over a slightly earlier 17th century Dutch portrait of an unidentified man. As artnet reports, the head was only uncovered after a recent cleaning. So for centuries, the painting had looked like a regular, little seascape, c. 1685-1690, which Dickinson attributes to Ludolf Backhuysen, Amsterdam’s leading marine painter at the time.
The cleaning also apparently revealed the seascape painter’s meticulous, intentional preservation of the portrait—which Dickinson attributes to Isaack Luttichuys, with a date of 1655-1660.
I do not have the connoisseurial chops to raise any issue with the Dickinsons’ attributions; for what it’s worth—nothing—they look solid to me. Backhuysen was already a leading painter by 1665, receiving commissions from local burghers and studio visits from foreign kings. He was not scrimping, scavenging for a used panel to paint on in 1685. Luttichuys, a generation older, was well-known in Amsterdam as a portraitist, and he died well-known in 1673, presumably content in the belief that this and his many other portraits would survive him.
In Judith Benhamou’s video, Milo mentions that this surreal composition is exceptional, but that they’d seen some things like it, or kind of similar to it. And I guess it’s true that overpainting is extremely common in the history of paintings: fig leaves get added, draperies get touched up, windows get painted out. But reading through the 1995 catalogue of the National Gallery’s 17th Century Dutch painting [pdf], overpainting is equated with chasing fashion or botched restoration; it’s a scourge to be obliterated on the way back to a painting’s earlier, more authentic state.
And that is very clearly not what Backhuysen was up to when he painted on top of Luttichuys’s head, turning it into a darkened storm cloud that hovers over four civilian boats. Was it perhaps a philosophical gesture? A reference to the giant on the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan [published in Latin in 1668]? Did it relate to the war in which William III of Orange set sail to seize the English throne from James, his father-in-law?
I guess I’m fine with not being able to know for sure. But I do wonder why we have to rely on the serendipity and close reading of a single gallery to discover incredible objects like this. I mean, TEFAF is good at surfacing rarities and lost masterpieces, but it still feels hermetic and almost random. What else are we missing?
I watched the Robert Irwin documentary, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and it is good. [It is currently on Kanopy for free, support your local public library.]
Some things stand out:
Irwin’s mystical-sounding development of his pursuit of perception was fascinating: posting up on Ibiza and not talking to anyone for eight months? wandering around the desert or whatever, painting dots for 16 hours/day, 7 days/wk? But he was not, in fact, alone in that pursuit. Some art world context would have been more helpful than repeating his refusal to allow his work to be photographed.
The Whitney installation was nice, but it felt somehow confusing, which is weird because there was even a real reinstallation of it, with footage and everything. The filmmakers did somehow manage to shoot other phenomenological aspects of other installations coherently.
Evelyn Hankins, who curated Irwin’s spectacular Hirshhorn retrospective, was thoughtful and present—but that show was somehow not, at all.
Which, wtf, the MCA San Diego’s masterpiece, 1° 2° 3° 4°, was done dirty here. Is it the ultimate “you had to be there” Irwin? Except for the Chinati building, which took up the last third of the film?
The dynamics of shooting and interviewing around Marfa and Chinati was weird. Marriane Stockebrand, the inviter, I guess, was everywhere, but Jennie Moore, the director who dragged that project across the finish line was airkissed in one crowd shot? Maybe that is #chinatiworldproblems, I guess I’ll demur. The weird caginess over whether he’d attend the 2016 ribboncutting was eerie, too; it made it sound like he died in production. [Spoiler: he stuck around for seven more years.]
For a documentary about perception and reproduction, it did shoot Irwin’s own dot paintings immaculately. But the shimmering moiré of halftone dots and pixels during pans across archival photos was hilariously distracting.
Seeing Arne Glimcher as a producer both makes sense and raises some flags, but how is that any different from anything the Glimchers have done all this time? It is what it is.
For such a singular thinker, who’d done so much work on his own mind and being, maybe give the film a title that reflects something he said, not just something he quoted?
David Diao, Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work (Updated), 2010, acrylic & vinyl on canvas, 84 x 156 in., image via Greene Naftali
Speaking of books derived from Barnett Newman paintings and paintings derived from Barnett Newman books, David Diao’s got both. Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work (Updated), 2010 [above], turns Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue into an infographic tallying Newman’s output, as recorded in the artist’s catalogue raisonné.
David Diao, BN Spine (2), 2013, acrylic and silkscreen, 72 x 100 in., image via Greene Naftali
BN Spine (2), meanwhile, makes a zip from the cracked and worn spine of Diao’s copy of the 1966 Guggenheim catalogue for Newman’s Stations of the Cross. Diao worked as an installer on that show, and meeting Newman and his work had a foundational impact on Diao’s own project.
Study for Chop Shop Newman Painting Nos. 1 [L] and 2-6 [R], 2016
When I first made a modest proposal of cutting up Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, it was to make it more manageable to live with. I knew its purchase by the National Gallery of Canada in 1989 was controversial. When I suggested cutting it up to save it, though, I really did not have any idea of where the nihilist authoritarian government threat might come from:
So should Canadians ever face an arts crisis where, say a Taliban- or ayatollah-style regime takes over that is decidedly unsupportive of the kind of painting Newman practiced, I’d think cutting it down and dispersing the painting would be far better than burning it. Or bombing it, Buddhas-of-Bamiyan-style, out of existence.
When I actually did start cutting it up, in early 2016, as part of Chop Shop, it was a direct critique of the exploitative market machinations of Stefan Simchowitz. And again, who could have known where that year would end up?
Krisjan Gudmundsson, 200 Pages on Barnett Newman, 2001, 24 x 27 x 3 cm, ed. 100, via The Archive Is Limited
Still, how is it only when I saw Kristjan Gudmundsson’s artist book, 200 Pages on Barnett Newman, THIS MONTH, that I finally computed the terrible implications of chopping up a Barnett Newman painting? Because Gudmundsson surely knew it in 2001 when he made the book.
Detail from a 13th-century window in the Basilica of Saint-Quentin depicting the creation of a stained-glass window in Middle Ages, posted to wikipedia by JojoMarg
Looking something up about the history of stained glass, I found this detail of a 13th century window of stained glass makers making the stained glass window, which,
an original production cel from The Simpsons, Season 6, ep 2F15, “Lisa’s Wedding,” via Acme [d’oh, sold]
In January I was watching an Hermès making of video for something I don’t remember in the Necessaires d’Hermès collection, I think, and there were brief shots of this incredible-looking object. I scoured the website to figure out what it was, and it looks like it’s not available in the US, which serves us right, frankly.
But it turns out to be an ottoman, but it also has storage, and a handle. The whole top slides off, and it can hold a blanket, as these screenshots show. For something that doesn’t seem that capacious or actually portable, it sure is beautiful. I will keep it in the necessaires column.
OK, it was a Necessaires video, which is on the product page, and I had to have been watching it for the Groom wardrobe stand, or the Long Bench, a name which loses the sense of the French: Cheval d’Arçon, pommel horse.
Gustave Caillebotte said shirtless workers’ rights: The Floor Scrapers, 1875, collection: Musée d’Orsay
Fellas, is it gay to depict athletic male bodies in form-revealing outfits in suggestive work that makes room for a desiring gaze that is not necessarily male or heterosexual? Is the question not quite asked and not not answered by the Gustave Caillebotte retrospective that has come from the Musée d’Orsay to the Getty. William Poundstone has a rundown of the LA version of the show, its premise, shifting titles—Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men is the Getty’s low-key hilarious variation—and the wall text I paraphrased in the first sentence.
Gustave Caillebotte, le Chien Paul, c. 1886, 65 x 54 cm
What’s important is, the show also includes Caillebotte’s second best painting of a floor: his 1886 portrait of his dog Paul on a Persian rug, that didn’t sell in London a little while back.
Vija Celmins, postcard inscribed “to Mr. Wallace Berman,” collage, 1969, 11×15 cm, via Matthew Marks Gallery
The day after humans landed on the moon, Vija Celmins collaged a photo of a penguin on a rock onto a photo of the lunar surface, onto a postcard of the moon, and she sent it to Wallace Berman.
But that show ran from April-June, and the entire message on the back of this card was, “Cheers.” So this was not about that. It was just a, “Hey, penguin on the moon!” collage sent to a collage artist who was close to the hallucinatory witches shadowing JPL. Can you even imagine? I cannot.
screenshot of Kriston Capps’ IG of an installation photo from the National Portrait Gallery of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ light string work, “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass), turned off. photo: Matailong Du/NPG
As my comment on Kriston Capps’ insta shows, it’s somehow always a surprise to see a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string with the lights off. My reaction led Kriston to doublecheck with the National Portrait Gallery whether it’d been OK to post [tl;dr it was, but hold on], and it sent me looking for more.
“Untitled” (Toronto) [on] and “Untitled” (Miami) [off], installed in 1992 at Andrea Rosen Gallery, image via FG-T Foundation
Of course, it goes back to the beginning, where they were shown on and off, side by side. Gonzalez-Torres’ whole point of his works was that the owner [or exhibitor] was to decide how to display them, and that includes whether to turn them on. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation has photos of an unlit “Untitled” (Tim Hotel), 1992, in a collector’s home, which feels like the normal, private state. Maybe it gets turned on for company, which raises the question of public vs. private presentation as well as space.
Because obviously, they look the sexiest when they’re on, and it’s understandable for curators of public exhibitions to want that glow. But that allure also underscores the impact and importance of seeing them turned off sometimes.
1974 Horst photo for Condé Nast of Pierre & São Schlumberger’s house in Paris, where they hung Rothko’s No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black, Orange), 1951 (but dated 1953), upside down. via ig/collectorwalls
Speaking of hanging paintings upside down, a few days ago Claudio Santambrogio shared a link to a Sotheby’s Magazine story by Lucas Oliver Mill about a Franz Kline that Cy Twombly’s brother-in-law had hung upside down. In it he mentioned Pierre & Sã0 Schlumberger “famously [hanging] their Rothko upside down in the entryway of their Paris home out of pure preference.”
Which sounds like new information from last July, when Mill posted Horst’s photos of the Schlumbergers’ hall on his Instagram @collectorwalls. Then it wasn’t famously, but “Curiously,” and it was unclear if the inversion was “by personal choice or perhaps by mistake.”
Well, when Horst shot their house for Vogue in 1974, the Schlumbergers were the life of the party in Paris; São was the biggest single customer of couture in the world; and in 2014, Sotheby’s liquidated their estate, including the Rothko. So no one in that crowd was going to say the Rothko hang was anything but a masterful decorating gambit, sir.
Thanks to everyone who called in, and who shared the word about this little audio experiment, which I’ve called an anthology, a compilation, and now a mixtape. Phone It In, Vol. 1 [mp3] is also a reading list, with sources and links to the included quotes. As you’ll see from the playlist below, there are some classics, some fresh finds, and even a breaking news story.
Whatever it is, if you come across some art-related writing that sticks with you for whatever reason, please call and share a bit of it at 34-SOUVENIR, and I’ll bundle those up, too, and put them out here.
As I was putting the tracks together, I discovered that when I first downloaded the calls, I’d accidentally overwritten Carolina Miranda’s call over everyone who called after her. And for a minute I thought, her call is such a mic drop, I really should just go with that. Instead, I moved it to the end, one of the only chronological shifts in the compilation. [Miranda’s cold open is a lol clapback to my voicemail greeting, which I shortened from a full explanation of the project to “Whadja find??”]
Miranda’s quote, from Annie-B Parson, really laid bare the unspoken essence of what I was hoping for here: not just favorite line, or a moment of memorable or powerful writing, but something that you read now that had an impact now.
It feels like an impossible ask, or at least a daunting one, but I really wanted to hear examples, even snippets, where art-related writing mattered in this dire af moment. I think everyone came through, and I am psyched and grateful.
altered installation photo of upside down flag paintings from The Broad’s 2018 exhibition, “Something Resembling Truth,” original image by Eugenio Rodriguez, via artforum
When I first thought of it, it was still within the framework that has dominated art critical discussion of Jasper Johns’ work since the beginning: Is it an upside down flag painting or a painting of an upside down flag?
But this is not the moment for glib rhetorical dualities. Right now an upside down flag does not have to be either “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property” or a political protest. With active attacks on democratic institutions and the rule of law under the US Constitution, it can be and must be, unfortunately, both.
Speck rolled up on Twombly in Rome in 1970 as a young collector, and the two kept in touch:
A selection of letters from Twombly to Speck is the foundation of this project. For Speck, the thrill of collecting lies in interrogating the ways that art, reading, and writing influence one another; these letters are a personal manifestation of this interest. In placing these letters alongside the ephemera and artworks they discuss, this exhibition and its publication strive to materialize these conversations and to create a tangible transcript of their relationship.
With their layers of text and imagery, Twombly’s works function as another kind of transcript, merging poetic and painterly elements and creating subtle visual palimpsests. Twombly’s works evoke the literary, mythical, and historical worlds of Western culture and interweave them with his abstract gestures and contemporary reflections. These works reveal Twombly’s artistic depth and highlight the integral role of language and literature to his process—a pursuit that resonates with Speck’s devotion to literature.
This relationship between drawing and writing, art and poetry, is an endlessly rewarding way into Twombly’s work. Poet Dean Rader talked about this last year at the Nicola del Roscio Foundation; and Tacita Dean spent part of her night in the Menil’s Twombly Pavilion trying to replicate words from his paintings. As with his photographs, bringing Twombly’s letters and books into consideration of his project feels long overdue.
NGL, the way the jpg above was cropped in my browser left me reeling as I imagined Twombly breaking out his sickest, most stripped back letterhead to write Speck the most stripped back letter: “To Rainer, Cy T.” But it turns out to be the title page dedication of an exhibition catalogue. Which is still great, but it does mean I don’t have to jump on a plane to LA this second; I can plan a little.
