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.
On June 16, 2021, Pablo Martinez, the head of programming at MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, gave a talk about Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ use of the motif of crowds in his work. In a socially distanced auditorium still wary of crowds and the threat of viral contagion they posed, Martinez presented key early works by Gonzalez-Torres where crowds alluded to the protests and epidemic fears of the AIDS crisis. With callbacks to Baudelaire, Benjamin and Barthes, crowds also embodied the dualities of community and alienation, catalyzing liberation and identity as often as they dissolved the self into anonymity.
Martinez spoke as part of “The Performance of Politics,” a one-day conference on Felix’s approach to identity politics: “Felix Gonzalez-Torres deliberately sought to stand outside any identity essentialism and, on the contrary, to activate various strategies of disidentification, as José Esteban Muñoz put it, in response to the state apparatuses that employ racial, sexual and national subjugation systems through protocols of violence and exclusion.” [All the talks are available on YouTube, which is pronounced youtubae in Spanish.] Which was part of an exhibition, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation,” curated by Tanya Barson, that examined the artist’s work in the context of the Latin world.
René Magritte, La vie secrète, 1928. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zurich, image copyright adagp via Christie’s
Humans have always looked up into the sky and said, “wtf is that floating orb?” And sometimes it has not been the sun OR the moon.
René Magritte looked into the void—whether of the world or his own unconscious, I do not know, ask a Magritte scholar—and saw a smooth, mysterious sphere, a precursor, if not an ancestor, to the satelloon.
In 1928 he put a human-sized orb in a space, if not exactly a room, in his painting La vie secrète [now at the Kunsthaus Zurich], which was one of many orbs in his one-person show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussells in 1932. Magritte’s poet friend Paul Colinet was inspired to write an orb-themed poem, and even give Magritte a little sketch of a guy standing on a floating orb.
René Magritte, l’Ombre Monumentale, 1932, oil on canvas, 33 x 55 cm, a private collection in Florida, probably, image via Christie’s
The rate of growth of Magritte’s orbs, and their escape into the wild put them into the timeline of the satelloon, though it’s not yet clear where. A giant orb overshadowed a house in l’Ombre Monumentale (1932), which echoes images of the test inflation of NASA’s Project Echo 1A in a disused dirigible hangar in 1960.
Project Echo IA, 1960, NASA test inflation of a 100-ft diameter satelloon at Weeksville, NC
There is a direct resonance with Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 concept forFloating Cloud Structures, mile-wide communities of thousands of people living not on, but inside floating geodesic spheres.
The genesis of NASA’s satelloons, Project Echo, traces to the aftermath of the Sputnik launch, and a conference over what to do with the V2 rockets spirited away from the nazis after WWII. But the concept of a giant floating orb orbiting the earth and visible to the naked eye originated in 1955 with Wernher von Braun himself; he proposed an American Star to dazzle the Asian mind. Did von Braun see or know of Magritte’s orbs?
1964 photo of Echo I and Echo II satelloons crossing orbits in the night sky over Sandia Labs, via LIFE
We know, at least, that Magritte lived long enough to see von Braun’s. Project Echo 1A launched in 1960, and Echo 2 launched in 1964. So for the last seven years of his life, his night sky was occasionally crossed by at least one, and sometimes two, floating orbs.
Whenever I wonder why no one has ever reviewed or analyzed Cady Noland’s 2021 monograph, The Clip-On Method, I wonder if I’m the guy in the hot dog costume or the guy in the color-coordinated suit. I mean, I’ve read both volumes, and refer to them regularly for info and images, but I’ve never written about them, or what they contain, or what it means, and what it tells us about Noland and her practice and the world she sees.
Well, someone finally did, and the results are bleak as hell.
Garrett takes a long, close look at Noland’s work, but also a close read of her texts. He begins with her signature 1987/1992 essay on our culture of the psychopath, “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” which has been namechecked for years without, apparently, sinking in. But he then goes deep into the essays and papers Noland included in The Clip-On Method, key texts by sociologists Stephen N. Butler and Ethel Spector Person.
[brb gotta run to a lecture, but the Glenstone Noland exhibition closes tomorrow, so get going.]
Now I am not saying it makes up the global cultural suffering caused by their other major contribution to the modern media landscape, Eurovision, but the European Broadcast Union deserves praise for promulgating one of the most sublime, iconic, and minimalist images ever: the EBU color bars used to calibrate the chrominance and luminance of PAL format video signals and receivers.
And how does TV artist Nam June Paik, who spent more time surrounded by these color bars, on more monitors, than any other artist of the last hundred years, honor it? By making a perfect, little painting. Which apparently looked too much like writing paper to not fill the columns with a repeating series of delicately painted pictograms.
Nam June Paik, Smaller Rosetta Stone (Ch 12), 1983, 11 x 14 in., oil on canvas, from Holly Solomon and Thomas Solomon’s collection, selling at Christie’s 28 Feb 2025
Maybe the interest for Paik was mediating our global shift from written to visual language, because he called the work Rosetta Stone. [Smaller Rosetta Stone (Ch. 12), actually, which implies the existence of a larger Rosetta Stone, or Rosetta Stones for the 11 other channels on the dial, or both.]
By the time he published Rosetta Stone prints a year later, in 1984, Paik flipped the color bars to the correct orientation, and framed the image in the convex rectangle of a CRT screen. And he made the translation reference more explicit by pairing his pictograms with their often-representational Chinese character counterparts. I just noticed that fifteen years later, in 1998, though it did use the specific logo (〒) of Japan Post, NTT designer Shigetaka Kurita’s first set of emoji included no kanji elements, only Roman letters.]
Anyway, the painting belonged to Paik’s dealer Holly Solomon, and now her art advisor son Thomas is selling it. Unsurprisingly, it’s already past the estimate with a week to go.
Destroyed: Karen Kilimnik, The Great Hamptons Fire, 1995, 24 x 18 in., 0il on canvas, via 303gallery
While promoting her personal style memoir published in 2015, Chlöe Sevigny told the story of how the first painting she bought, Karen Kilimnik’s The Great Hamptons Fire (1995) burned up in the second of two supposedly mysterious house fires of then-methhead writer/director Harmony Korine. Getting an unspun account of Y2k-era Korine and his fires has been difficult; by 2008, all he knew was, he woke up, and the house was gone [twice.] by 2019, the fires are just a line in Chris Black’s cute puff piece.
In her sadface emoji shoutout to Sevigny’s story—while blurbing Kilimnik’s current show at Gladstone—publicist Kaitlin Phillips linked to a scraped version of the story on a defunct Russian art dealer blog rather than to the original magazine. [Maybe because their image of the painting hadn’t disappeared.]
Anyway, the painting was in Kilimnik’s 1995 show at 303 Gallery, her third, which opened on Halloween, three months after Kids, and while the F/W95 Jil Sander campaign featuring Amber Valletta she’d based the painting on was still in print. The ICA show she loaned it to was called, “Belladonna,” a group show of women artists that opened in early 1997. In addition to Sevigny’s Kilimnik, Korine’s Connecticut fire destroyed the footage for Fight Harm, an in-process project where Harmony’d get the crap beat out of him by passersby, and Leo DiCaprio or David Blaine would film it. That pushes the date past 1999.
If we are to understand the story and the timeline, though, Sevigny either put the painting in Korine’s care before the first fire in New York, and left it with him, OR she gave it to him after he’d already burned down one house. All so that more people could see it, in Korine’s suburban drug den. I, too, am sad this beautiful early Kilimnik was destroyed, but it seems like Sevigny is leaving out some key aspects to this story.
Tony Feher, Untitled, 2009, space blanket & binder clip, 18 x 14 x 11 in., selling from the estate of Brent Sikkema at Christie’s Feb. 28
One of the works I’d love to live with is a John Chamberlain foam sculpture. Just to be able to study its topology, reverse engineer in my head the gestures and knotting that produced it, shade it from the sun, gently sweep up the crumbs from around its pedestal as it crumbles to dust. ars brevis, vita brevis.
An Ugo Mulas photo from 1969/70 of the biggest Chamberlain foam sculpture I’ve ever seen, in the Franchetti-Twombly’s palazzo in Rome, as published in Cy Twombly Homes & Studios
I think this gorgeous Tony Feher sculpture made out of a crumpled gold mylar space blanket and a binder clip does a lot of the same thing, while also catching the sun. Though their material is doomed, the foam pieces would at least, presumably hold their shape when handled. I don’t know how Feher deployed that binder clip, but I imagine keeping this shape requires considerably more care. From the estate of Brent Sikkema.
Cindy Sherman Madame Pompadour Soup Tureen & Platter, 1990, ed. 25 for each of four colors, with Rose being the best, selling 26 Feb 2025 at Christies
In addition to being the art world’s second-greatest tureen, her Sevres porcelain soup tureen with her self-portrait on the side as Madame Pompadour (née Poisson) is Cindy Sherman’s second-greatest work. It has a perfect harmony of content, context, image, and medium that made the Untitled Film Stills so lastingly powerful.
Cindy Sherman 30-piece dinner service, 21-piece breakfast/tea service, each in an edition of 75 in each of four colors, with Rose, again, being the best.
The only thing to improve it would be setting it among the complete Limoges dinner set and the tea & breakfast set Sherman produced with Artes Magnus in 1990, in the sclerotic culture of Reagan/Bush, and then to sell it into the darkening maw of our burgeoning technomonarchist oligarchy.
I have no doubt the successful buyer will track down whoever lost the lid to the sugar bowl and have them audited, chained to the floor of a LC130, and shipped off to GTMO before the Christie’s wire transfer even clears. February 26 is coming.
I could not remember where I got this 2000 Cy Twombly photo, until I found a screenshot with a caption, and I realized it was from Steffen Siegel’s presentation on the photos at Cy Twombly: Bild, Text, Paratext, a 2012 conference held at the University of Cologne. It went undiscussed. Even though it seems to embody Siegel’s ultimate point, that Twombly made photos as an exercise to capture the artist’s vision. In this case, a glance at a raking angle of sunlight reflecting on the crackled surface of a painting in his house at Gaeta.
Siegel talks about Twombly’s blurriness and “excessive nearness” as he takes photos with “mediocre” equipment, as if the instantaneous intimacy is not obvious, and obviously what attracted Twombly to his medium.
Siegel discusses this at more length in regard to Nuts (2004), another image from Gaeta, of an extreme closeup of walnut shells on a painted credenza.
From the Belgian artblogger at Utopia Parkway, we learn that Nuts was included in Cy Twombly: Le temps retrouvé, an exhibition at Collection Lambert in Avignon in the summer of 2011, one of the last shows Twombly worked on before he died. Twombly selected photos by a whole range of artists—Brancusi, Lartigue, Lawler, Mann, Sherman, Sugimoto—to show alongside his own. I would think that a closer look at this show, organized, we’re told, by an “artist eager to renew the experience” of his last successful show at Collection Lambert, with a title taken from the last volume of Proust, would yield more insight into Twombly’s view of his photographic project than parsing Barthes for the hundredth time.
James Harris had to photograph this, and Nurit Chinn had to rewrite the press release under their own name for wallpaper*, maybe art journalism is the real endangered species here, people
It’s ed. 1/3, and let me guess that there are no ed. 2 or 3, and someone associated with this Miami PR stunt got tired of paying their shark storage unit. On the bright side, this is the smallest one. Go for it!
Japanese paper is treated with silver gelatin, and the raking light of the sun indexes the paper’s texture, wrinkles, and undulations as an image. The process and Santambrogio’s other explorations of developer-based photography are in a peaceful video by Gudrun Thielemann on his site, The Gardener of Shadows.
Shadows makes me think of Tauba Auerbach’s crumple paintings, and Isa Genzken’s Basic Research paintings, while being fundamentally different from both. Auerbach printed a photograph of a crumpled piece of paper onto canvas, and then painted it by hand; her work marks the distance between what is seen and what it is, and the many steps it took to get there. Genzken, meanwhile, basically made monotypes by painting her floor and pressing the canvas against it. So what’s being indexed is the floor. Santambrogio’s Shadows are the paper itself. And the chemicals, and the light.
Danielle Mysliwiec, Gather, Miniature (red), 2024, 4 x 3 in., oil on linen on panel, via ig:daniellemysliwiecstudio
I would not say a sucker for any tiny painting. But maybe that’s like how, all evidence to the contrary, I don’t think I’m a dog painting guy, either.
Anyway, Danielle Mysliwiec just posted this gorgeous little painting to her Instagram. She made it for Barely Fair last year in Chicago. The work’s title, Gather, is perhaps a reference to the undulation in the painting’s surface, which alludes to a woven material, while being unmistakably an extruded one: paint.
Most of Mysliwiec’s works are much larger, but no less intricate, and time-intensive. So there’s something rare here: a painting made in one go.
2018 real estate listing photo of the Rockefellers’ E 65th St living room with a Bonnard [L] and a Corot [R] obscured
In 2018, while I was still in my late blur and middle monochrome and real estate eras, I conceived a project that would realize all the blurred artworks in the real estate listing for Peggy and David Rockefeller’s extrawide townhouse on East 65th Street. I’d seen digitally blurred art from MoMA before. I’d seen significant art obscured in real estate listings before. But I had not seen the same art that had been photographed in situ before, being blurred in a real estate listing, at the same moment it was being promoted and sold in the biggest private collection sale in Christie’s history.
Cezanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat, a 1955 gift to MoMA, but not yet; the Rockefellers kept an interest in the work until their deaths, and it came home with them from time to time. via Christie’s, I think
So I went through the listing, the auction, and other documentation of the Rockefellers’ house to identify everything, so that each work would be the correct dimension and appearance. No slapdash conceptualism here; authenticity rules. So the Bonnard Interieur over the fireplace and a Corot to occupy the spot between the windows when the Cezanne is at the Modern. [The Rockefellers retained a life interest in the works they donated to museums, so they could keep them around.]
2018 real estate listing photo of the Rockefellers’ foyer with ten blurred out artworks including a Picasso by the stairs and a Redon on the right.
Though I mapped out the project, 30 works, I was undecided on the best way to realize the blurred works. Transmuting such digital-first source material into another medium has been a challenge since the first blurred and pixellated and pano-torqued images appeared on Google Maps and Streetview. But the Facsimile Object-style dye sublimated prints on aluminum seem promising. I just found my 2018 spreadsheet this morning, though, so it’ll take me a minute to reorient myself to this project.
Liz Deschenes, Frames Per Second (Silent), 2025, installation view at the George Eastman Museum via ig/i_phil_taylor
Liz Deschenes likes to decouple her instagram feed from the urgency of the now by often posting images of shows or work from the past. So it took me a moment to realize that this show at the George Eastman Museum, posted with curator Phil Taylor, is on right now, from January through August.
Frames Per Second (Silent) gets its title from a body of photogram-based works Deschenes made that transmute the framerate of cinema to architectural space. When she showed them at Miguel Abreu in 2018, the viewer’s movement through the gallery flickered across the uniform photograms’ surface like a zöetrope, or a motion study of Étienne-Jules Marey.
In Rochester, the photograms are syncopated, and of varying width within a work, a reference to the variable frame rates of silent film. [This 2015 essay by Nicola Mazzanti on about variable archival frame rates and the transition to digital cinema projection is as thoughtful and detailed as anything you’d find on David Bordwell’s blog. It sounds like silent film frame rates, cranked by hand at 16, 20, or up to 30 fps, varied even within a single film, and for a variety of reasons, including content-driven aesthetic choices. Deschenes’ variations reflect that (sic).]
not a vitrine: Liz Deschenes monochrome dye transfer prints installed at the George Eastman Museum, via ig/i_phil_taylor
But the show also contains other works, including a monochrome on Gorilla glass, and—ngl, this is what pushed me to post—a set of dye transfer monochromes. I love the way they’re installed, on a little shelf, with a sheet of glass pinned over them. It’s an elegant an unobtrusive solution for these fragile objects of saturated color. A road trip is in order.
[next morning update: Liz responded to point out these are new dye transfers made with the Kodak dye transfer dye on Epson papers. Anachrony is one of her mediums.]
what jumped out at me was how Mammy Prater’s figure in the photograph exuded a weight and patience, a knowledge about a future time when something might be recognized in the photograph. The poem talks about how she waited for her century to turn, until the technology of photography was ready to capture this something. It seemed to me that the statement she conveyed through the photograph was waiting to be understood by us in much later years. It could be understood in her time, but not sufficiently—not in in a way that could repay that pose. Only in the future could that pose be repaid by an understanding of what it took to sit there and be there.
Henry G. Fitz, Jr., Self-portrait, prob early 1840, 80×60 mm Smithsonian, National Museum of American History via The Art Newspaper
Prater was 35 when the first photographic portrait of an American was made in 1840, a self-portrait by Henry G. Fitz, Jr. of Baltimore, who kept his eyes closed during the long exposure time required of the Daguerreotype process. [It was just discussed on The Week in Art, because it is on loan from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to a Rijksmuseum exhibition of American photography.]
Prater was 13 when Frederick Douglass was born in 1818. Douglass, of course, escaped slavery and went on to make himself the most photographed person in the 19th century. Isaac Julien’s 2019 multi-channel portrait, Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass, includes several scenes of him making photographs. It’s on view at the Smithsonian through 2026. When Douglass died in 1895, Prater was just 85.
Charles Sheeler, Aunt Mary, 1941, deaccessioned from the Museum of Modern Art in 2018, image via Christie’s
Prater was 60 when Mary Brown was born in 1865. Brown would be photographed 70 years later by Charles Sheeler, while she was dressed as “Aunt Mary,” a fictionalized enslaved cook she portrayed when she worked as one of the few Black performers at the Rockefellers’ Colonial Williamsburg in 1935-36.
Our oldest had to read Mansfield Park in 9th grade and very much did not like it, and so I’ve avoided it. Until I heard poet Dionne Brand talking about it with David Naimon on the Tin House podcast, Between The Covers. [youtube] Brand’s latest book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck, is a forensic return to a whole host of “classic” texts, including Austen’s Mansfield Park, that find Blackness where it has been omitted by the structures of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. But Brand goes beyond literary analysis to question the function of a novel, and how forms of writing—and thus thinking—perpetuate and protect the structures that spawned them.
[Dionne Brand] I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.
[Saidiya Hartman] I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful.
Even if I hadn’t heard Brand’s conversation, I like to think I’d have spotted the glaring anxieties of capitalism that obsess almost every character in Mansfield Park, as well as the many references to Antigua and, thus, the direct dependence on plantation slavery of the family’s fortunes—and their entire world. I’m only halfway through, and this book [Austen obv] is grim as hell.
Brand’s not through, though. Her and Hartman’s discussion of photography, visual art, aesthetics, and beauty continues to work away in my mind.
[meanwhile, in case you needed any evidence that this conversation happened in September: “Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)“
