May 2011 Archives

ArtCash by Rauschenberg (top) and Tom Gormley, via nymag

Whatever else it was, Billy Kluver, Bob Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman's Experiments in Art & Technology was wildly successful at never selling out; the collaborative was constantly broke and getting bailed out by whomever they could find. E.A.T. was booted from the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo70 as soon as it opened over wild cost overruns. I saw a thick folder of invoices, IOUs, and pleas for petty cash in the Castelli Archives. I hear there's an identical stack, probably even thicker, in the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. And then the other night, I find this 1971 article about art and money in [where else?] New York Magazine:

In the sixties several American artists, most notably Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol, used money as the subject of their paintings. Calling on their example, a broke E.A.T. organized a gambling event last week to finance further activities. Currency was designed by Warhol, Robert Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms and Marisol [and Tom Gormley], on an escalating scale. But Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom's design was turned down for political reasons--it depicted Nixon inflating and deflating himself...Their gambling night was an amusing comment on the current situation as well as, hopefully, a way to outflank the museum-bank gallery-cartel syndrome.

$25 got you $25 ArtCash bucks, which you could use to win "TV sets and original graphics." At least a few people just took the ArtCash. According to the lot description of an unbroken $500 bundle of Warhol Ones at the 2009 Dumbo Arts Center benefit auction, the ArtCash bills were printed [but not engraved] by the actual American Banknote Company.

E.A.T. published three signed ArtCash posters showing either the fronts or backs of the various denominations. Here's a composite showing two of the three [l via pdp; r via artnet]

The denominations were $1 [Warhol], $3 [Whitman], $12 [Rauschenberg], $24 [Gormley], $51 [Grooms], and $88 [Marisol]. Which means each print had a face value of $468. Considering that Phillips sold the copy on the left for just $1,875 in 2008, these may be the worst-performing Warhols on the market.

Whoa, in tallying that out, I took a closer look at each bill; Gormley's look to include the World Trade Center, which might mean that that underground moving walkway is in Albany, which might make that figure there then-governor Nelson Rockefeller.

The E.A.T. Archives at the Getty includes several more stacks of ArtCash, including some by Jeff Davis, who, who?

Jan 2013 UPDATE: Good things come to those who blog. greg.org reader and/or ArtCash Googler Sarah Hollenberg of the University of Utah Art & Art History department writes that the Jeff Davis mentioned above is none other than the country's greatest example of printing your own money, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Hollenberg:

The bill that the Getty credits to him is by Red Grooms. They mistook the reference to Davis as a signature because they keep the bills wrapped up with a strip of paper, which covers up Grooms' signature.

Police spraying protesters in Kampala, Uganda, May 10, 2011 [image james akena/reuters via cfr.org]

I haven't been able to get these images out of my head since Brian Sholis pointed to them; they're stunning and disturbing at once.

As Time Lightbox's Ishaan Tharoor put it,

We're used to protest movements that come in colors--the yellow of people power in the Philippines, Ukraine's orange, the green of Iran's brutalized democrats. We're less accustomed to seeing protests quashed with color. But in Uganda, security forces sprayed opposition leaders and activists with a vivid pink dye--a mark intended both to humiliate dissidents and make it easier for police to nab them.

In 2008, after Indian police painted protestors purple in Srinagar, Slate's Explainer put together a concise history of the dye cannon. Which is, well, ironic, considering how aesthetically similar the police painting images are to the Indian Holi Festival, where crowds bombard each other with powdered pigment as part of an equalizing, anarchic celebration of religious joy.

Clearly this is not art; but it is painting. And the sobering political implications and power dynamics depicted in these incredible--even, I hate to say it, beautiful--images makes me question the glib, benign assumptions I hold for that word, that action.

For a long time, I've been fascinated by the military definition of 'painting," the use of laser sighting and guidance systems to target weapons ranging from guns to missiles. It made me wonder what other seemingly paradoxical contexts "painting" has found its cultured, refined way into. I guess I can add one more to the list.

Color in the midst of protest [time lightbox]

So I'm kind of dying because there's a screening next week, and I'm trying to figure out how to go.

Three houses were used for the principal location; the production moved from one to another depending on the direction of the sun. "Terry's not really a stickler for continuity," Mr. Fisk said.

Holy smokes, this has to be the greatest photo of David Brooks and Newt Gingrich anyone has taken or ever will take. Will the uncredited Getty Images photographer who was in the Russell Building stairwell last week please step forward to claim your prize? [via andrewsullivan]

UPDATE: Congratulations, Chris Somodevilla!

Sometimes it's like they're just having a conversation in my tweetstream without me. The only possible improvement is if the Kiarostami movie had been Ten, but that's quibbling.

Richard Serra, The American Flag is not an object of worship, 1989, 288 x 376 cm

One of the artworks ImClone CEO Sam Waksal bought from Gagosian but didn't pay sales tax on in 2000 was a huge, $350,000 Richard Serra drawing titled, The American Flag is not an object of worship.

Interestingly, when the drawing sold at Sotheby's in 2004 [for $232,000 against an estimate of just $80-120,000. There really ought to be a word for a deal where you weasel out an 8.25% "discount" after dumbly overpaying by 50-300%. Maybe a Waksale.], the provenance only mentioned collector/Dia board member/Kim Heirston dater Dr. Pentti Kouri [who passed away in 2009] and the Leo Castelli Gallery, where the work was originally shown.

And what a show it was.

"8 Drawings: Weights and Measures" opened in September 1989, in the wake of the Tilted Arc controversy, and six months after the 1981 sculpture was removed [and according to the artist, "destroyed"] from Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. And from the titles Serra gave the massive paintstick on paper works, I don't think he'd quite gotten over the loss.

Poster/flyer for "Richard Serra 8 Drawings: Weights and Measures"

There's a room in the Met's Serra drawings retrospective with several works from the Castelli "Weights and Measures" show, including The United States Courts are partial to the Government [105x185 in.], No mandatory patriotism [93x201 in.], and the massive The United States Government destroys art [113x215 in.], which is owned by the Broads.

I can't find out online, and I don't have my Serra drawings catalogue raisonné with me to check, but it would be interesting, if maybe a little too neatly literal, if the cumulative dimensions of the eight "Weights and Measures" drawings added up to 120 feet, the length of Titled Arc. It'd turn the drawings into fragmented shadows of the lost sculpture, ghost slabs floating in a gallery before being dispersed to haunt collections around the world. Serra's not averse to coding such biographical or historical references in a work's dimensions; I seem to remember hearing that the dimensions of the six forged steel blocks in his 1996 sculpture 58 x 64 x 70 were derived from his and his wife Clara's eye heights. [I can't find any mention of that now, though; I'll have to check.] Anyway, TBD all over the place.

[UPDATE: thanks to the Communications office at the Met for sending along the checklist, which also includes the dimensions of the other two W&M drawings in the show. The four drawings mentioned here do, in fact, add up to 62 linear feet. So a 120 ft total is in the realm of the possible.]

2015 UPDATE: yes, but maybe not? I can't believe I never published the result of this research, but I did gather the dimensions of all the W&M drawings, and they ran about 117 linear feet. If they each have 4.5-in larger framed dimensions, they'll add up to 120 feet, but I doubt Serra's numerological interests would incorporate frames. I'd love to be wrong about that and right about the dispersed, destroyed ghost of Tilted Arc, but I think it's the other way around. Oh well.

Weights & Measures, annotated, dimensions in inches

I just watched Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror for the first time as an adult, basically; when I saw it in college, I had no clue and was bored out of my gourd by it. In fact, for a long time, I'd conflated it, burning houses and whatnot, with The Sacrifice.

Anyway, the largely plotless, highly autobiographical film is a memory-like collage of documentary footage and vignettes set in disparate time periods. When I say, plotless, though, I mean it's a movie about a guy who spent ten years trying to make a movie about his childhood purely as an excuse to show the awesome scenes of a Soviet military balloon from the Spanish Civil War. At least that's how it looks to me now.

Previously: an image of a guy on a balloon inspecting Echo II at Lakehurst, NJ

You never know what you'll find digging around in archives, even your own. While looking back at greg.org posts about Alexander Payne and Dany Wolf, I bumped into this gem from 2003, the reconstructed list of artworks Sam Waksal bought from Gagosian Gallery without paying NY state sales tax, and how much he paid.

At the time, I'd written that not only had Waksal, the CEO of ImClone whose case broke around the same time his friend Martha Stewart was getting charged with insider trading, the newbie collector hadn't negotiated a discount from the gallery beyond the sales tax. And that the ploy of having empty boxes--or in some of Waksal's purchases, just the invoices--sent out of state, had "been tripping up art world naifs since the 80's, at least."

Well, this statement was incorrect on several fronts. The investigation of Waksal had followed on the fraud investigation of certified art world naif Tyco CEO Dennis Koslowski, remember, which had been triggered by an art sales tax evasion inquiry involving the fictitious shipment of 3rd-rate Monets to a factory in New Hampshire. But in a subsequent 2004 wrap-up on the caper, the NY Times' Timothy O'Brien reported that as many as 90 art world figures were implicaited in DA Robert Morgenthau's investigation, including many non-naifs.

And as for the 80's, well.

On a recent visit to the Leo Castelli Gallery collection at the Archives of American Art, I came across a letter from the gallery to Mr. Frederick Weisman, one of the biggest collectors around, who had apparently been confused by the arrival of an empty box at his Sunset Blvd office. The letter was dated Jun 22, 1965:

The package you received was intentionally empty. It represents a Lichtenstein banner that Richard purchased. The package was sent to your California address to side-step New York City tax. I hope this hasn't caused you any unnecessary concern.

The history for a Pistol banner sold at Sotheby's in 2008 mentions its inclusion in a 1967 exhibition at the Pasadena Museum, which Weisman's uncle Norton Simon would soon take over.

It appears the only nair around here is 2003 me.

In 1997 Douglas Gordon surreptitiously videotaped two hours of Andy Warhol's Empire during an installation in Berlin. He called it Bootleg (Empire):

'I did a version of 'Empire', which was called 'Bootleg Empire', it is almost like the amateur version of the auteur masterpiece -- it's very shakily done. I lived in Berlin for a while and I went to see Warhol's 'Empire' and I thought 'I may never get to see this again', so I filmed it for an hour went to the pub and then came back and filmed it for the last hour. So mine only lasts for two hours -- so it's like 'the best of' or something. But quite often my version is seen with his films in exhibitions, which is kind of funny as mine is slightly more dramatic as it is shaky and there are shadows of people walking in front of the camera.' (Jean Wainwright 'Mirror Images' (Interview with Douglas Gordon) Art Monthly, Dec-Jan 2002/03, No. 262) [via a new path]

Anyway, one of the Bootleg (Empire) editions didn't sell Friday at Philips de Pury. The estimate was $30-40,000.

And the details seem confusing. The lot description says "installation dimensions variable," as you'd expect from a Gordon. But when another of the edition sold in 2000 at Christie's [for $9,400], the description said it was "for view on monitor only." The Christie's edition also contained two tapes, a VHS and a Beta, but the duration is given as only 62 minutes, not two hours. Philips doesn't bother to provide the duration information in their catalogue, but the piece was two hours long at the Guggenheim's "Haunted" exhibition last fall.

So far, I can find mentions of at least three other Bootleg works, all of which predate Empire. Bootleg (Big Mouth, Cramped and Stoned), use slowed down, slient concert performance footage from the Smiths, the Cramps, and the Rolling Stones, respectively.

Wow. It's amazing how awkward and wrong this original ending to Alexander Payne's 1999 feature Election seems. According to Peter Sciretta at Slashfilm, this six-minute segment comes from a VHS transfer of an original work print found at a flea market. The ending tested so badly, Payne went back to shoot additional footage for the more satisfyingly harsh ending he released.

Sciretta notes that there's never been any discussion of another ending to the film, but hey-ho, It's right there in Payne's and Jim Taylor's original script.

Watch The Never Before Seen Original Ending of Alexander Payne's 'Election' [slashfilm via matthew clayfield]
Previously: I co-hosted a MoMA Film Dept. party for Alexander Payne in 2003. more recapping here.

From Dennis Lim's brief Q&A with Gus Van Sant at Cannes, where Restless is [finally?] debuting:

We did silent takes of almost every scene so we could maybe use them in the editing. Terry Malick apparently shoots silent takes so he can mold what he wants out of the scenes. But with our takes we actually created a silent version because we had enough material and we realized we could -- maybe it'll be on the DVD. Everything is there except the dialogue -- all the sounds and music, and you hear all the footsteps, but there's nobody talking and no lips moving. They're the same scenes, but it has the distance of not being dialogue-driven. It's the exact same love story but it plays like a different movie.

Previously: Gus Van Sant's go-to guy, the greg.org 2003 interview with producer Dany Wolf

Not quite sure what to make of this, but this image showed up this morning on the golden livestreaming page for Man Bartlett's piece, #140hBerlin.

And though maybe he wasn't even born when it came out, it immediately made me think of... Sandra Bernhard's 1990 performance film, Without You I'm Nothing

So yow, I just watched that clip on rutube.ru? Which, while it might offer Man some programming, if not costuming, ideas, also ties into Berlin's own history.

And wow, I just listened to Bernhard's cabaret cover of "Little Red Corvette" for the first time in maybe a decade, and damned if it isn't one of the most American things about America this American has ever heard.

#140hBerlin runs for 140 hours through May 17. [manbartlett.com]

Believe me, I know how this looks.

But also this. Balloons and the Grand Palais go way back:

And anyway also this, Leviathan has a groin vault:

and is the venue for a concert performance by minimalist composer and maximalist stuffed animal shaman Charlemagne Palestine:

[image of Anish Kapoor posing in front of Leviathan via mymodernmet, as baited by starwarsmodern. Images of Charlemagne Palestine performance inside Leviathan via Monumenta 2011]

"One idea could be using mirrors so photographers could do their jobs out of the president's sight line, the White House's Earnest said."

My mind is blown and I am still picking up the pieces after contemplating the possibility that White House photographers might be instructed to shoot using mirrors so as not to disrupt the president's line of sight.

I mean, the compositional challenges pale in comparison to the artistic compositional goldmine that such an environment would provide. I mean, just imagine. Here's one AP shot I didn't post the other day about Sforzian backdrops at Fort Campbell. Check out how the floating reflection of the camo netting draped over the crowd barrier, which is picked up in the teleprompter:

With mirrors, photos of the president would be like rainbows, visible only from the single specific angle that aligns the lens, the mirror, and the face.

Street photographers would suddenly have an edge. Lee Friedlander, traveling with the President:

I've slowly been making my way through Kierran Horner's analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror in relation to Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'time-image.' I had just gotten to this part when I found the AP White House photo policy story:

Left alone, Alexei locates and sits in front of a large mirror hung on the wall. The next shot begins stationary behind Alexei, facing his reflection in the mirror, and the camera slowly pans in over his shoulder, focusing ever more tightly on his reflection, until, gradually, the reflection becomes the sole image of the frame, staring back toward the actual Alexei.

There is then a sharp cut to reveal a medium close-up of Alexei sat contemplating his reflection from the opposite angle. This shot/reverse shot dynamic and the 'eye-line match' are common to most conventional cinema, establishing an object, or person, as perceived by a character from their point of view.

As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson describe it 'shot A presents someone looking at something off-screen shot B shows us what is being looked at' (2004: 303). However, as in this case, the 'eye-line match' refers conversely to an interaction between two characters, here, the actual Alexei and his virtual counterpart. It is as if he is reacting to/with his reflection. This dialectic can be read as representing the Deleuzian 'crystal-image':

'In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is a 'coalescence' between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.' (Deleuze 2005b: 66-67)

Maybe not mirrors, then, but what about one-way mirrors? Is that what they're thinking? Put the photgraphers on the darkened side of a one-way mirror. Fortunately, there's only 225 hours of Law & Order-related programming on basic cable each week to communicate the absolute trustworthiness of anyone speaking on the mirrored side of the glass.

Before getting too fixated on the complications of presidential imagemaking, though, it's worth remembering that the White House is already a supremely weird place for photographers to work. Go back to 2009, just days after President Obama's inauguration, when the NY Times' Stephen Crowley pulled back the curtain on the surreal and utterly staged 12-second tradition known as the "pool spray." These are the images whose authenticity is suddenly, apparently, of such great concern.

Previously: WH beat photogs upset at staged photographs they don't take

So long, Sforzian Replays. After Reuters photographer Jason Reed went all meta about it on his blog last week, the White House has decided to do away with the longstanding practice of re-enacting speeches for reporters from different media.

"We have concluded that this arrangement is a bad idea," Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said late Wednesday. He said the administration is open to working out some new arrangement with photographers.

...

There are conflicting accounts on whether technology exists to take photographs without distracting the president. One idea could be using mirrors so photographers could do their jobs out of the president's sight line, the White House's Earnest said.

White House Announces End To Re-Enactments For News Photographers [ap/huffpo]

Untitled (Point Break), 2010, Roe Ethridge, via andrewkreps

This is in Le Luxe, Roe Ethridge's awesome show at Kreps, through July 3rd.

Related: Crafting Genre: Kathryn Bigelow, a retrospective of the director's film titles, combined with her early videos, paintings and conceptual artworks, opens at MoMA at the end of May. Point Break will be screening twice in early June, and once in August. [see the complete schedule.]

There sure has been a lot of calling card hoopla these days. It seems like it peaked just as I was moving an old file cabinet, and I found this packet of cards I had made in 1999 in Paris. They were still wrapped in the Hotel Costes stationery I'd used to break the order down and transport it more easily in my luggage.

I'd gotten them made at Calligrane, a small paper store in the Marais that still doesn't have much of a web presence. I remember it as a little giftier than I like, with elaborate desk sets or something, but still the only place I could find who could do the typewriter-like letterpress cards I was seeking.

Because I did not want engraved cards, and I didn't want fine paper. I already had business cards like that, and so did all kinds of people. What I needed, I told them, was a replica of the earlier calling cards I had made in 1995.

That's when I had a business card with three addresses and six phone numbers in two countries on it, it was ugly and ridiculous. All I needed, I figured, was email [gallen@echonyc.com], and since it's the internet, I really thought the cards should be typed.

I got really lucky, it turns out, because in Vieux Nice, just up the hill from the cathedral, was a little printing and paper studio run by a Scandinavian guy named Peter. He'd salvaged the type from old typewriters to do letterpress with. Wow, those were clean.

I still have one small box of those somewhere. It has Peter's full name in a stamp on the bottom. I think when I looked him up to order replacements, he was still in Nice, but had switched from printing to sculpture. Gotta track that guy down again.

If my intermittent obsession with photomurals, and especially with the actual prints themselves, overlooked objects with a presence and character that feels now like a visual and experiential precursor to the monumental painting and photography of the contemporary era, has jumpstarted any interest in the market for these things, they haven't heard about it in France.

On Monday, Artcurial included this 1964 "monumentale photographie" by Jean-Régis ROUSTAN, a 1.3 x 2.3 meter silver gelatin print of an abstracted wall of dented cans, in its books & manuscripts sale. But it failed to reach even its low low estimate.

LOT 483 Jean-Régis ROUSTAN Monumentale photographie, 1964 1,30 x 2,30 m, tirage argentique sur papier. Encadrement baquette aluminium. Nature morte de boites de conserves cabossées.
Estimation : 700 - 1000 €
Invendu

Tirage unique, offert à l'époque par l'artiste à l'actuel propriétaire. L'agrandissement monumental des boites entraine une abstraction. Légères taches.

But this is still a giant, beautiful, vintage object. I remain confused and convinced, if as-yet unmoved to schlep an 8-foot framed photo by a guy I confess, I hadn't heard of until last week, over from Paris.

Hm, OK.

I think we're in the clear here, satelloon-wise. It is true that Anish Kapoor's Leviathan is inflated, and 35 meters tall.

But when you enter the Grand Palais to see Leviathan, you enter Leviathan itself. It's a space, a bulbous, three-chambered cathedral of a space, "like going into the belly of a whale," says the Guardian. Though of course, it's really going into the belly of a cinematic whale. So it's a belly of imagination.

But it's a space, not an object. At least, not at first. When you exit, though, it's a thing. And well, hm. At first, things look pretty grim, which is to say, satelloonish.

But ultimately, it's a different thing, very different. One thing that's emphasized in Kapoor's talk to the Guardian is the light and space of the Grand Palais, and its vast expanses of glass:

"This is a terror of a space, probably much more difficult than the Turbine Hall," Kapoor said. "It's three times the size, huge horizontally and vertically and above all the light is a killer. It's almost brighter than it is outside."

Not only can satelloons not escape the problems Gerhard Richter diagnosed for spheres--they're too beautiful and perfect--they blow these problems up [sic] to gargantuan scale. Which is kind of interesting.

Monumenta 2011 has a Facebook wall [facebook.com]

Alright, so I'm back from a day mostly spent at MoMA:

Wow, the Film Department is firing on all cylinders.

I remember one year when Chaka Khan yelled at the crowd for not paying enough attention to her, and now this year, Kanye West is performing to mad hype. Crazy.

Hmm, the fourth floor where I'd hoped to spend a great deal of time studing Jasper Johns' Flag was "closed for reinstallation," which means they're part of the Missing Flag Coverup! Trust No One!

There are some Bridget Riley paintings in the hallway next to the cafe [I know] that look like they came from Bill Seitz's 1965 Op Art blockbuster, The Responsive Eye. Don't tell Larry Aldrich, though, or he'll turn them into fabrics.

Really, a very crowded place.

Oh, I bought this anthology, Curating and the Educational Turn, and I think it's going to be sweet. Unfortunately, with 27 different authors the chances of anyone topping this sentence, chosen at random from the introduction, are slim-to-none:

For several of the authors gathered here, these primarily function as points of departure for performative or polemical texts which themselves refuse a masterful discourse of explication in an attempt to honour the ethos of counter-institutional and counter-hegemonic practices of dissent and emergence.

I almost bought what is undoubtedly the greatest book of its kind, Murakami Versailles, but it was too heavy to contemplate carrying it around. Also, I expect it will be entered into evidence in Murakami's trail before the People's Post-Revolutionary Court, so I can just grab a scaned version soon enough.

The death of the Sforzian Backdrop has been greatly exaggerated.

They may not show it off every day, but it turns out that the Obama White House's advance team speaks fluent Sforza. As these AP photos from the President's congratulatory address to the soldiers at Fort Campbell, KY clearly demonstrate.

For starters, there's that Patton-esque flag up top, plus the small bleacherful of racially diverse soldiers for the wallpaper effect,

a motif that was so popular in the Bush era [and so hilariously screwed up in the brief McCain phase.] Check out all the cell phone cameras in the photo above. Don't recall that ever happening in the wallpaper before.

Looks like they used camo netting instead of regular bunting or blue curtain to cover the barricade there.

And check out that fresh new banner, hung on the side, so that:

Here's a nice wide angle shot to see how the staging comes together:

But if there's a difference, besides the frequency, I guess, between staged military events in the Bush and Obama eras, it's this: you just never know, so save yourself a peck of trouble down the line

and don't stand under the banner.

[all Ft. Campbell images via ap]

In 1997 or so, the Junior Associates at MoMA organized a day of studio visits in Williamsburg. Worried about where to eat, we packed our own food, sandwiches from a fellow board member's startup, Cosi. We ate lunch on Meg Webster's roof. Most people took the bus to Momenta, but a brave group of us decided to walk, unprotected, up Berry Street. The very idea that we might be from Manhattan being beyond their imagination, some people sitting on the stoop of a vinyl-clad house stopped us and asked if we were Dutch.

This Long Island daytrip comes to mind when I read about Open House, a reconceptualization of Levittown which is the latest project from Droog Lab and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

I hope if my heroes ever organize a self-indulgent, vanity symposium and an utterly disconnected, irrelevant publicity stunt exhibition about the suburbs that misses like five real points and replaces them with trite photo-op interventions designed solely for the benefit of the critics they bus out from the city for the afternoon, my review of their debacle will be as tactful and constructive a devastating takedown of the shitshow as Alison Arieff's is.

Conceptual Suburbia: A Design Project Descends on Levittown [nyt]

Oh boy, here' we go again. As @BDPNT, @joygarnett, @robertpearre, @shelawterry, and @Copycense tweeted, "Welcome to Cariou's world."

A leading origami artist, Dr. Robert Lang, has filed suit along with several other designers, charging Sarah Morris with copyright infringement for making paintings and prints which use particular crease pattern diagrams without permission or credit.

At issue, just as in Patrick Cariou's complaint against Richard Prince, is the legal status of Morris's works, and whether they are derivative, which is infringing, or transformative, which is protected under fair use exemption.

Lang has filed his suit in California, and for some reason a lawyer may be able to explain to me, a great deal of his complaint focuses on the applicability of California as a venue for hearing the case. [The filings, including a sheaf of exhibits, are available for download at Lang's attorneys' website. They're very well-produced, but right now it's too early to say whether I'd turn them into a book.]

Since I have been exactly 100% [0 for 1] wrong in my predictions for the outcome of such transformative use trials, I'm wary to go too deeply into the facts of this case yet. I will say, though, that basically every difference I see between Morris's appropriation and practice and Prince's only intensifies my belief that Morris is and should be in the clear, and that these kinds of lawsuits are a nuisance and a threat. Morris is not an outlier. As an artist she's operating at the center of the art world, not its margins; her practice and method are widely known, critiqued, supported, and emulated. Within the art world.

She's also a couple of orders of magnitude less commercially successful, price-wise, than Prince or Koons. As such, she's more vulnerable than they are, I think, to exactly the kinds of debilitating or chilling effects an expensive, protracted legal fight would entail, especially one fought at an extreme distance. [Morris is based in NYC and London.] Because the stakes for her are non-trivial, they are also more relevant to more artists whose practice includes--I can't even say appropriation, because I don't even see Morris's work within that context. But it'll be what it'll be, I guess.

[UPDATE: oh-ho, I may be wrong about this; a couple of people have emailed to point out that Morris is an alumna of Koons's studio, so this may be exactly the context in which to consider her work. It makes sense, considering the number of people I've met who turn out to have worked for Morris at some point. Time to make the donuts.]

Two things, no, three, that stand out, though:

1) These side-by-side exhibits that lawyers for both Patrick Cariou and Lang produced are seductive and deceptive, and they tend to obscure or minimize otherwise potentially important aspects of transformative use.

Lang uses these exhibits to argue that Morris has done nothing but "colorize" [his term] his copyrighted crease pattern. In fact, she has made several substantive changes to its appearance, content, scale, and materials, as well as to its meaning, utility, and context. A crease pattern is not just the geometric form; each type of line--dotted, dashed, or solid--indicates the direction of a fold, and it a crucial, even fundamental element--for making origami. Morris removes all this functional information, a non-trivial transformation.

Another misleading element of these side-by-side comparisons is size. Even if we assume Lang uses the biggest piece of paper mentioned on his site, 20-inch squares, his pattern is still 95% smaller than Morris's huge painted canvases. A more accurate side-by-side image might look like this:

2) Lang's filing makes the bold but utterly ridiculous claim that "Morris's actions have created competition for Plaintiffs by occupying the market for painted versions of their copyrighted artworks." No such market exists, and I'd argue that Morris's paintings have created one. If people pay $100,000 or more for Morris's paintings, it's not because they look like Robert Lang diagrams; it's because they look like Sarah Morris paintings. Her realized gain attributable to the origami IP itself is incremental at best.

3) Unlike Prince, who did not profess any particular critical interest in Cariou's Rasta photos, Morris has publicly discussed and presented her origami paintings as commentary both on origami and its history and its specific meanings and contexts, but also on its contemporary connection to science and systems. Lang the origami expert is famous in a way that Cariou the photographer precisely is not. As such Lang's work could present a larger, more natural target for someone wishing to make critical new work about origami.

The kicker for all this, is that I'm kind of an origami nerd myself. That my greatest origami accomplsihment was winning 2nd prize and $10 at the Utah County Fair one summer when we were visitng my grandparents' house as a kid pretty much says it all. [I made my origami peacock out of printed wrapping paper.] But I still do it pretty regularly, and I'd say I have an above-average sympathy for these origami masters who feel they've been treated unfairly. I still think they're wrong as hell, though, and that this case is a dangerously unproductive nuisance.

UPDATE: And speaking of my fellow nerds, look who else has spent Friday night picking apart the latest artist copyright infringement case? Joy Garnett has some solid analysis and some biting commentary. I'll only add that between their blog headline and their PR-chasing email to Newsgrist, the origami folks' lawyers are really angling aggressively to publicize their claim against Morris.

Lang Origami [langorigami]
Oy: These Origami Artists Won't Fold [bayoaklaw.com]

"THE WITNESS: This could be a cool book."
- Richard Prince Deposition Transcript, p. 328

Dude, Richard Prince just blurbed my book.

Between the lawyers on both sides of Cariou vs. Prince et al, about 275 pages of the transcript of Richard Prince's 7-hour deposition had been made public as footnotes to various briefs and memos, but there were 101 pages left out.

In the weeks since I compiled the excerpts and exhibits into a book, I've been trying to track down the complete transcript. Now I have it, and you can too. After trying multiple sources for obtaining it, a sympathetic party close to the case pointed me to an apparently inadvertent, unmarked exhibit appended to a late court filing, which included the entire 378-page transcript instead of the customary snippets.

And so I have revised Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA to includ the entire interview, in order, with a handy timestamped topical index, even, and with some additional rounds of legal memos, that give a fuller sense of the give and take that led up to Judge Batts' royal smackdown of Prince's transformative use claims.

In addition, to accommodate wholesale requests, I've switched printers, so the new, revised edition has slightly smaller page facsimiles, but it is also printed on higher-grade paper. It looks pretty slick.

Because of the additional quality and page count bumps, the cost went up a bit, to $17.99, but it's still a pretty sweet deal, I think. You can buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA directly from Createspace.com, an Amazon print-on-demand subsidiary, of if you like, you can also order it from Amazon. If you're dying to see it in person first, both Printed Matter and Specific Object have greg.org-stamped copies available.

For folks who have already purchased the book, either in print or electronic format, don't worry, I've got you covered. I made an Appendix which contains all the missing transcript pages, and I've been mailing out printed and PDF copies to people who've contacted me. Whenever the printed copies run out, I'll be happy to keep the appendix available via PDF.

Because it really does have some interesting stuff in it, like the quote at the top of the page, which was Prince's reaction to the exhibit showing the side-by-side comparisons of the Patrick Cariou's YES RASTA images and the Prince Canal Zone paintings they ended up in. [Obviously, that exhibit is included in the book.]

Now that the whole deposition story can be told, I think I'll go through and pull out some highlights to share here: some great exchanges, useful insights, or straight-up WTF moments. If you have any favorites, definitely pass them along. And enjoy! The damages hearing is scheduled for May 6, tomorrow!

Buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al from Createspace or Amazon.
The book is also available at Printed Matter and Specific Object, both in New York and online.

I've been thinking a lot lately of governments' relationships to modernism and, by extension, contemporary art, and the controversies that erupt around it.

So I was kind of stoked to see the headline in The Art Newspaper, "Revealed: secrets of the Tate bricks
Newly released documents uncover a heated argument and the search for spares." The paper apparently filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents pertaining to the 1976 outcry over Tate Britain's acquisition of Carl Andre's 1966 sculpture, Equivalent VIII, which consists of 120 bricks stacked two high.

Sweet.

But here's the big get: Tate couldn't find any extra bricks left to stockpile. Also, "Among the papers is a memo on 'The Burlington & the Bricks'."

Seriously, that's it. Do they publish this long-lost memo or add anything to the Tate curators' argument in print with Burlington Magazine? No. I guess TAN figures if people really want to know, they can FOIA it for themselves.

Tom McCormack's lengthy look at the contentious, suspicious history of US government support for the arts is worth reading for itself. But it also got me off my butt to write something that's been bugging me since attending the Smithsonian's Flashpoints and Faultlines symposium last week.

I had no plans to go to the symposium, primarily because it seemed like such a transparent attempt to ride out the Smithsonian's "Hide/Seek" censorship mess by throwing up a cloud of bureaucratic, academic dust. While I could be persuaded that Wayne Clough's resignation over his egregious mistake might have served to embolden entrenched critics and weaken the institution in advance of a difficult budget battle, I didn't think a pointless symposium designed to corral the most outraged arts administrators into an auditorium and bore the concern out of them doesn't help either.

But I had a meeting set up with an attendee which got pushed back, so last Wednesday I ended up attending part of the first, museum directors panel, and most of the second, "Exhibitions in National Museums & Public Institutions," or the political operatives & appointees panel.

From these panels, various references to earlier sessions, and the subsequent, sparse reporting, it seems clear to me that the art world really needs to rethink the paradigm for its relationship with the federal government, or more specifically, with politics.

Frank Hodsoll was President Reagan's NEA chairman. He was a foreign service officer and lawyer, later an OMB appointee, and now consults. Not an art guy, but a diplomacy-turned-art/culture policy guy. He talked very openly about his charge to vet NEA grant proposals to weed out potentially troublesome, controversial, or poltiical content. He took credit for personally rejecting or spiking a dozen, maybe 20 [I'm paraphrasing, but the video for the panel is archived now. It starts at around 1:40.] proposals that had otherwise passed the NEA's established panel review process. One example: a Washington Project for the Arts proposal to project images or text or something onto the Capitol Building, which he was sure would anger some Congressmen.

Hodsoll was the Chairman when the exhibition including Andre Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective were both approved for partial or tangential NEA funding. He was very forthright that these projects hadn't been monitored closely enough, and had he been able to scrutinize them, he would have deemed them "inappropriate" and denied them funding.

I guess I was not so amazed that the chairman of the NEA was advocating actively screening and denying grants based on the ideological or political appropriateness of the artwork, but that the NEA was screening out work that might engender controversy or displeasure from congressional representatives. It was a position and policy that rejects not only the possibility that art might have political content or engagement; but also art's essence as an expression of speech.

Putting it in terms of whether this or that project is deserving of taxpayer support misses the point, at least when such support exists. Hodsoll pointed out that artistic expressions get rejected all the time, "it's called selection," by which he meant the NEA's grant evaluation processes, but also, I think, curation.

And so the tautological calculus that art may receive public funding if it wholly disassociates itself from politics and/or controversial issues, and if it pleases--or at least doesn't piss off--someone in the government. And if these terms aren't acceptable, art, artists, and art institutions can deal with the reality that the government has no responsibility or compelling need to support art anyway.

If this argument wasn't disheartening enough, Hodsoll was followed by Bill Ivey, who was Bill Clinton's NEA chairman, the guy left holding the mop--or left holding the bag--after the fiercest Helms-led attacks on the NEA. Ivey spent almost half his time laying out the findings of various polls that showed no matter how you slice it, 30-50% of the population does not support the right to free speech.

Never mind that the right being opposed is always someone else's, and the speech is something they disagree with. With such tenuous support, an inconsistent and unfriendly legal landscape, and the existence of politicians and/or activists who will exploit this rift, Ivey argued, the last, most important thing is to protect the institutions of art, and their funding. [In a perfect segue, the next panelist was Ford Bell who, as president of the American Association of Museum, is basically the art institutions' lobbyist.

From the far side of long careers as political operatives and appointees--only Bell seems to have ever run for elected office--these men uniformly decried the politics, and the politicizing of art and museums--by others. Just as propaganda is the other guy's marketing, playing politics is someone else's common sense policy. The only winning move, we're told, is not to play. A strange game indeed.

And Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, the moderator, opened the panel with a lament that I hear so often, it's like the Washington art world's Pledge of Allegiance: "I wish there members of Congress could hear to this." But they never are.

No wonder the official art world wants to see itself apart from politics; to do otherwise only proves how poorly they do, or how superfluous they are. At least in the nakedest political terms of power and money.

As infuriating or disheartening as these political hands' assessments may be to an art lover's ears, they are still important to hear. They're experienced views from the real, political world of Washington, the world in which money and constituents and lobbying and controversies and demagoguery and negotiation and propagandizing exist. Symbolism is there, too, and dissent, and relationships and persuasion.

If art & museum people thing politics seems intimidating, confusing, or potentially embarrassing, maybe it's worth recognizing that many non museum people, politicians included, feel the same way about art.

The "Hide/Seek" Wojnarowicz crisis was precipitated by a conservative religious and political activist who had no interest in art, but in changing the political micro-climate during the congressional vote to end Don't Ask/Don't Tell. Clough reacted to soundbites solicited from political staffers who saw neither the show nor any political downside to criticizing it and the Smithsonian which sponsored it. By so doing, they only raised the political price their opposition would have to pay for their funding levels and priorities.

Throughout the Flashpoints Symposium, speakers referred to Hide/Seek co-curator Jonathan Katz's rallying cry that Americans would rise up to defend their/our Smithsonian from the threat of budget cuts [or worse.] But that seems as practicable as wishing there were more senators attending your 2-day symposium.

Through the efforts of some combination of, in order of mobilization, directors, boards, curators, artists, educators, marketers, associations, audience and constituents, lobbyists and legislative affairs professionals [that's everyone, right?] I think the art world needs to make a more compelling political case for itself, and to make it more persistently and productively. I have some sense for how that might happen, but at the moment, it still feels like a major endeavor to accurately understand the problem.

So all this time, I've assumed it's common knowledge that I am planning to recreate a satelloon and exhibit it in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. And if the curators of Monumenta, the annual contemporary art installation there, hadn't called about it yet, it was just because they were busy clearing the older guys [Kiefer, Serra, Boltanski] off the list first. Which is fine, of course. No rush.

But then I get this tweet about Anish Kapoor's project, which opens next week, and well:

You can understand my concern. So I "c'est quoi ça?" retweeted, and then I started poking around the Monumenta 2011 site more carefully.

And before I figure out if Kapoor's workin' my side of the street, I have to say, I'm now slightly fascinated by the mechanism of the teaser, the reveal, and the spectacle.

Monumenta has assembled a range of concepts and images highlighting aspects of Kapoor's practice which, I assume, they see as relevant to or illuminating of their own commission.

Artwork become landscape
To see is to imagine
Entropy
Self-generation
The écorché
Fiction and ritual
Concaveness
Light become ghost
Void become shape
The artwork skin
Non-object
Colour
Inhabiting space
Leviathan

I can't help but imagine them as a narrative, a presentation, an argument that culminates in the essential, inevitable work. Leviathan: c'est logique!

The work is called Leviathan, and with references to sea serpents and gargantuan invaders and gaping maws, the write-up taps every ominous, apocalyptic Leviathan reference available, from Job to Hobbes.

Which, now that you mention it, does sound a lot like several of the works Kapoor has done before. And there's this sense of simultaneously wanting something new, that no one's ever seen before--oh, boy, will they be surprised!--and of wanting more of what works, what you know, what has been before. And then what is the nature of anticipation and experience when the pitch for the project is, "it's like Marsyas at the Tate, but bigger and spookier"?

So I'm basically thinking it's the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: The Original Series, but in red? Or mirrored? Or mirrored on one side, and red on the other:

And then today, there's a teaser photo, a detail, on Facebook, which doesn't quite match up to my image:

Unless maybe it's the Doomsday Machine's nuts. Either way, it's all good, and totally different. Still, it's an important lesson learned, and I've decided to preserve a bit of the mystery surrounding my Monumenta project. Which is not to say anticipation.

Monumenta 2011 au Grand Palais, 11 Mai - 23 Juin [monumenta.com via @Monumenta2011]

Photographers take pictures of U.S. President Barack Obama after he announced the death of Osama bin Laden live on television from the East Room of the White House on May 1, 2011.

So I was looking at Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed's side view of a scrum of other photographers getting all up in the President's grille while he was giving his Osama Bin Laden speech, and thinking, "But I saw him walk away. How the hell did that happen?"

And holy smokes, now we know. The Sforzian Backdrop has been retired in favor of the Obamian Re-enactment:

As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.

But if Reed hadn't pulled back the curtain, I don't think many people would have understood that from Reuter's technically-accurate-but-now-somewhat-dodgy caption.

Ready To Record History [blogs.reuters.com via @markdubya, no relation, I assume]

via Eyeteeth | "File under: This could be art"

Can't tell you how awesome this is. I would pay cash money to see the biennial that shows it.

I'm getting pretty comfortable with my love affair/obsession with the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. I mean, it's got Buckminster Fuller; Alan Solomon curating gigantic paintings; photomurals; and satelloons, what's not to love, right?

So seeing Design for a Fair, the 1968 promo short film by Peter Chermayeff is awesome just as it is. The vintage footage and photos are some of the crispest I've seen, and it really is pretty crazy on a whole bunch of levels that this thing existed at all.

But maybe the greatest thing--even better than the giant graphic designed flags that look like a lost Ellsworth Kelly, as if there wasn't enough giant, escalator-optimized, actual art already--and even better than the sheer soft power/propaganda play that was so drop-dead awesome it won the future for the day--is the voiceover.

Because the whole thing really sounds like Chermayeff's idea. Every last bit of it, dome to nuts. It's fantastic. Chermayeff, of course, is an architect and exhibition designer, and his former firm, Cambridge Seven Associates, or C7A, was contracted by the US Information Agency to produce the US Expo entry.

And so, as Chermayeff tells it, they knew they wanted a 3/4 geodesic dome, so they ordered one. And they wanted some giant art, so they ordered that. And the moon stuff, and the Hollywood and all the happy parts of American culture.

Now I don't doubt a thing; I'm sure that's exactly how it all went down. It's just that that's not how it's typically remembered. Architects only remember Fuller; the art world only recognizes Solomon and the artists, not the venue or the show or the implications of it; and everything else is artifact and prop. [And the poor lunar photomural, I've hardly found anyone remembering that at all.]

The historical focus is either on the general awesomeness of the spectacle and mood, the political context and propaganda, or on the parts in isolation. What Design for a Fair reminds me of, though, is the visitor's experience, the carefully orchestrated messaging, and the reality that it was orchestrated by a contractor working to a brief provided by the USIA. It was a government-funded gesamtkunstwerk, a massive piece of installation art before the fact, and probably one of the most cost-effective public diplomacy efforts of the Cold War era. It literally seems unimaginable today.

These people are not wearing their videoconference faces.

According to the EXIF data, White House photographer Pete Souza took this photo at 4:05 PM, or 1:05 AM Abbottabad Time, five minutes in. They're watching it as it happened. Which people already know, since it has garnered 455,000 views been blogged and retweeted and facebooked 455,000 times in a matter of hours.

Souza also asks us to "Please note: a classified document seen in this photo has been obscured." Indeed, there it is. Funny how unobscured it looks at this size.

Let's take a closer look:

Didn't I just post something about collecting all the seals and emblems of government agencies?

Because that's the seal for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency sticking out from underneath there. As you'd expect.

And that corner of landscape does look like the image of left sideyard of OBL's compound. [image via ogleearth]

And now that you mention it, the pixelated image does look like the front gate area of the compound, just at an as-yet-unacknowledged high resolution. Of course, from here, it also kind of looks like a painting. I'll get right on that.

Previously: Google Maps & the everchanging Dutch Camo Landscape

NPR interviewed former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte this morning. Steve Inskeep asked a too-long question about the multi-year intelligence work that resulted in yesterday's attack on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan:

Did some of this happen while you were National Intelligence Director? Would this be the kind of level of detail that would get to the desk of some of the highest people in the intelligence hierarchy, of someone in the White House, if you just had a bit of information like, we think we might have a courier, would that be the kind of thing that--

Well, let's put it this way: the President, President Obama said, and certainly President Bush before him, said that this was the, uh, highest, uh, priority. Very often when representatives or leaders of the intelligence or law enforcement community would come in to brief President Bush, one of the first questions he'd always ask, partly in jest, but also deadly serious, "Have you found him yet?"

I mean, this has been a major preoccupation of our leadership ever since 9/11 occurred.

Also reminds me just how little we actually know of the hunt for OBL between Tora Bora and Abbottabad. The media likes to call itself the first version of history, so we should expect that large chunks of it will be fact-checked, corrected, or thrown out entirely.

Apparently the first footage released from inside Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was shot on an iPhone with Hipstamatic's new Luc Tuymans filter.

Previously, besides basically everything: Errol Morris talking about the Bush era with Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted WH photo editors.

I've written before about the "clean and presumptively powerful" design of various government letterheads I've come across in my recent archive diving.

And I must not be doing it right, because my searches for the expansive survey of the history of such official design, and for the comprehensive sourcebook containing the thousands of seals and emblems of various government agencies and offices keep coming up empty.

I mean, Total Information Awareness, right? Somebody must be keeping a list. Anybody? Bueller?

So I'm reduced at the moment to random click trains through Wikipedia, or to search diving in the digitized collections at the National Archives. Not very productive.

Though it has yielded some nice finds. Nothing spectacular, but then, that's kind of the point of these designs. Up top, the United States Information Agency, once part of the State Department. That's the director's office letterhead there, with the smaller seal.

What I really like, in addition to the undesigned design, is how all the rest of the information is handled. Though a zip code does pop up occasionally, there's almost never a street/mailing address. Or maybe there is; "Department of State comma Washington" would probably get you or your letter there in 2011 as easily as 1898.

But it's the way information accretes, the way the document functions, that's kind of cool, too. The tiny instruction for answering and the reference number on the upper left of this 1922 Dept. of Labor letter, for example. And all the stamps! Check out that received stamp: not just the date, but the time, too.

Anyway, I made a little flickr photoset of a few examples I've found. I'm looking forward to having my scattered, amateur enthusiasm swamped by the exhaustive review of government logo and letterhead design that some expert has already compiled. And then we can start talking about what I'm looking at this stuff for.

Previously: The Great Letterpress of The United States