January 2016 Archives

Untitled (Border), 2016, two 4x6-in. blocks of Azul Platino granite from Home Depot, as installed in some apartment in Washington DC

I am stoked to announce a new work which, depending on how the real estate market operates, should be available for viewing during CAA.

Obviously, Untitled (Border) owes a debt to Richard Serra, but the confluence of form, site, and source material-Azul Platino granite is from Spain-put me in the mind of Serra's works at the Reina Sofia.

There's Equal - Parallel: Guernica - Bengasi (1986), of course, which the museum somehow lost, and had to have refabricated in 2006.

There's also his show at Reina Sofia in 1992 which included this pair of square steel slabs just owning the space in between and around them.

image: linneawest

I just found this uncanny photo from the Met's Richard Serra Drawings show, which kind of gives me chills, it's so similar. Assuming Serra is swapped out for a bowl of lemons and bodega oranges. [Which are not to be considered part of the work, btw.]

What I like most about Untitled (Border) is the way it attempts to define an abject liminal space, in this case a kitchen passthru right by a door. Indeed, except for obvious, the word that came to mind the most when I was making this piece a few minutes ago is abject. It practically jumped out of the picture in the real estate listing, fully formed and perfect. Like the work itself.

Anyway, Untitled (Border) will be on view this Sunday, Jan. 31, from 1-4pm, or by appointment.

Well this looks very nice. It's an original flyer for the premiere of Andy Warhol's film Empire, being sold by (or at least with the approval of) Jonas Mekas. It will be signed and shipped with a personalized letter of authentication. Which is a nice touch. Otherwise it's not clear to me what the going rate is for such ephemera, whether $1,300 for an 8.5 x 11 handout is ripoff or a steal.

Empire was made on July 25, 1964, but didn't premiere until March 6th, 1965. It was a Saturday, and the screening began at 8:30. [Does that mean it ran in real time? Not quite. Filming at 8:06 and ended at 2:42. Screening the film at 16fps draws it out to 8h5m.]

What's interesting to me is the credit, "by Andy Warhol and John Palmer." Palmer was an assistant to Jonas Mekas, and he is credited with the idea for Empire. [The 18yo had been using the Bolex his mom bought him to shoot the newly lit Empire State Building from the roof of Film Culture's offices on Park Avenue South.] Mekas pitched the project to Warhol and eventually helped run the camera, but it was Palmer who made the movie possible by securing the office in the Time-Life Building and the high-capacity camera needed to shoot nonstop for 6.5 hours.

Palmer's early equal billing on Empire has not survived the Warholian glare. MoMA's collection entry for Empire namechecks Mekas, but not Palmer; the film is credited solely to Warhol. It would be nice to straighten that out, History.

In her Screen Tests catalogue raisonné, Callie Angell wrote that Warhol "gave" Palmer co-director credit "because it was Palmer's idea to make a film of the [newly] floodlit skyscraper, because Palmer worked on the film, and also because his mother, Mary Palmer, donated money to get the film out of the lab."

ST253, John Palmer, 1966, image: Screen Tests catalogue raisonné

He posed for Screen Tests along with his then-wife, Factory star Ivy Nicholson. Their daughter Penelope was three months old in 1966 when she became the only baby to sit for a Screen Test.

Though he went on to co-direct the tragicomic Edie Sedgwick film Ciao, Manhattan, Palmer's subsequent IMDb credits are primarily as a camera operator. I wonder if there are stories to hear, or perhaps more uncirculated flyers to procure.

UPDATE: Oh, it always gets better. greg.org reader Terry Wilfong sent a heads up for Palmer's interview with Steven Watson in Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. They talked about making Empire, including the lab's refusal to return the film without payment in full:

[Palmer] called Warhol from a phone booth. "Ohhh, John, I don't have any money to pay for thaaaat," he said. "It will just have to stay in the lab." Palmer suggested he could try to get the $350 from his mother; if so, he would have to appear on the credits as codirector. The phone went silent for fifteen seconds, Palmer recalled, and then "Andy, in a voice I never heard and will never forget, said, 'Now you're learning.'"

very rare original World Premiere bill for Andy Warhol's EMPIRE 1964 [ebay]

A Gerhard Richter squeegee painting is coming up for auction in February. It is CR:725-4 fourth in a series of five large paintings [225x200 cm] made in 1990, a very busy squeegee year. From The Art Newspaper:

"The years 1989 and 1990 are the most sought-after in Richter's works," says Isabelle Paagman, Sotheby's senior specialist, contemporary art. "During this time he really embraces the squeegee technique in his abstract paintings. More than half of Richter's works from that period are in museums."

Paagman says his use of grey in Abstraktes Bild also makes it highly sought after. Grey is of particular importance for Richter; in a 2004 interview he described it as "the ideal colour for indifference, fence-sitting, keeping quiet, despair".

Abstraktes Bild CR:725-4, 1990, 225x200cm [gerhard-richter.com]
Gerhard Richter painting being auctioned by Malekis could topple record [theartnewspaper.com]
A 2004 interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker that doesn't include this quote was published in the NYT. [nyt]

Dust Breeding (Bull), 2016, dust, museum, reflection of Picasso sculpture.

Last week I went to see the Picasso Sculpture show at the Modern again. That's when I noticed the extraordinary amount of dust on the window ledge in the last gallery. I took a picture of it with Picasso's Bull in the reflection because it was amazing, and because it obviously reminded me of Dust Breeding, Man Ray's photo of six months worth of studio dust and street grime settled on the surface of Duchamp's Large Glass.

Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920, contact print, from Roxana Marcoci's Photography of Sculpture catalogue.

I've loved Dust Breeding for a long time. Colby Chamberlain wrote a nice piece on it and Anthony McCall's work in a 2009 issue of Cabinet on dust that has stayed with me for its conclusion: the antipathy between august art institutions and dust. I think MoMA has complicated Colby's thesis.

My first comment on Instagram about wanting to donate a vacuum cleaner, but I kept thinking about Matt Connors' noticing the same ledge situation I had, and having it trigger a similar reaction. After a couple of days, I decided to make the situation a work.

And since then, I've been wondering what the existence of such an artwork might mean for someone, or more precisely, what knowing it exists might do for the experience of seeing that ledge.

On the one hand, it might be amazing to have people think of me and my work when they glance out the window into the atrium. Isn't that associative frisson better even than wanting to have an endowed Roomba drone named after me? Just think of the dialogues!

Right now the gallery is filled with jaw-dropping sculptures Picasso put together out of junk and scraps of wood, in a show that includes artworks made from cigarette-burned napkins. Dust blends right in. But in a few weeks, the Museum's permanent collection will return in some form. What interaction might happen then? Duchamp put a little sign next to Large Glass: "Dust Breeding. To be respected." Is it possible for that dust on MoMA's ledge to engender respect?

Though I'm willing to find out, I'm skeptical. A few years ago, I pointed out to a guard on the 2nd floor that someone had written on the wall. She smiled benignly and informed me it was a Yoko Ono instruction piece. Which, of course it was. How cute. I was annoyed, partly for not recognizing it, but mostly that my good intentions had flipped back on me. Instead of being thanked for my civic responsibility, I was being schooled on Ono's whimsy. I somehow doubt I was experiencing what the artist intended.

Whisper Pieces installed at MoMA in 2010, image: moma

Claiming MoMA dust bunnies as art might be seen as even lamer than Banksy, who surreptitiously stuck his own work on a museum wall and gloated about how long it took the museum to take it down. It's just a stick in the eye of people who live to look.

Does declaring it an artwork just seem like so much ledge-half-full spin, a passive aggressive way to shame the Museum needs to break out the cherry picker and the Swiffer? Until I decided it was an artwork, I would have thought so. But now I feel actual dread knowing it'll be gone. Some unknown day soon, maybe as soon as Walid Raad's installation gets cleared out of the atrium, a Museum staffer is going to unceremoniously obliterate my piece. I'll walk into the 4th floor to see some Naumans or Hesses or Broodthaers or whatever, and it'll be gone.

But it will also be back; that's not ten years of dust we're looking at. And while Dust Breeding's parenthetical collabo right now is Picasso's Bull, that will change too. And as it comes and goes, I'll document its condition, and its neighbors. And if you see it, please take a picture and let me know. #dustbreeding

UPDATE WOW: From MTAA's Michael Sarff comes this bombshell of a project: the MoMA's Dust Windows Community on Facebook, established OVER TWO YEARS AGO to document and appreciate the dust that gives "voice to time, memory and entropy set against the ideals of what a museum is often thought to reflex."

@gregorg Jan 1, 2014. You are a bit late to stake out a claim but I'm willing to share the responsibility and stewardship :)

— michael sarff (@mriver) January 16, 2016

I am the prodigal dust son, make me as one of thy dust-loving servants!

[LOL. As I write this, Ann Temkin is actually live on Periscope, offering invited guests to honor Duchamp and the 100th anniversary of the Readymade, a term which first appeared in a letter the artist wrote to his sister on 15 January, 1916. Perfect.]

Previously, related: Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere, Jr.)

A couple of weeks ago, David Dunlap looked back at the bad old days of Penn Station before the wrecking ball made it even worse.

And I found myself thinking the same thing as Michael Bierut, that Lewis Mumford's "crowning horror," a modernist, curved steel and glass ticket counter installed in 1956, was actually pretty sweet.

A quick search revealed the "clamshell," as it was known, was designed by Lester Tischy, who had worked under Raymond Loewy.

In addition to designing the Coke bottle, Loewy was a consultant to the Pennsylvania Railroad. And as this 2011 Transit Museum exhibition of the history of Penn Station showed, Loewy filled the station's main hall with photo murals to honor the 25,000+ railroad workers serving in the US armed forces during WWII.

The Times reported that the 40x25-ft headshots went up in February 1943. The photo above shows five, an engineer, a conductor, a soldier, sailor, and a marine. The paper said there were six, including a Red Cap porter. Also that models were used for all but the marine; so it would be interesting to know if the model for the Red Cap was black. Because that would be quite a monumental public depiction of an African American for 1943.

Penn Station's History Lesson [archpaper]

Richard Prince, "New Portraits," installation shot, Sept. 2014, Gagosian 976, image:richardprince.com

According to his copyright infringement lawsuit against Richard Prince, Rasta-fetishizing fashion photographer Donald Graham sells limited edition prints of his 1997 photo, Rastafarian Smoking a Joint in two sizes: 20x24 inches (ed. 25) and 48x60 inches (ed. 5).

A rasta/model/whatever named @indigoochild 'grammed Graham's image in February 2014. It was regrammed in May by another r/m/w, @rastajay92, three months later. In May Prince commented on it, then took a screenshot, which he eventually printed at 4x5' and showed in his "New Portraits" show at Gagosian Madison in September 2014.

Donald Graham, Rasta Smoking A Joint, 1997-, Lambda print, 20x24, ed. 5/25, sold at Heritage Auction in Nov. 2015

In his complaint, Graham's attorneys detail the alterations Prince made to Graham's image, including making a screenshot, cropping, adding text and emoji, adding all the UI and empty space, and printing at low resolution and large size on canvas. Prince's depiction is clearly of a photo on/in Instagram, with all that entails. It is clearly different in appearance, color, finish, and context, unless you're seeking a significant amount of money, in which case these differences become invisible or irrelevant.

Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, he only registered his copyright for the image after Prince's show, so even if he were able to prove infringement, he would only be able to recover actual damages. Since Prince sold his New Portrait to his dealer Larry Gagosian, those actual damages probably range between the profit from one 4x5 photo print and $18,500, Prince's half of the $37,000 retail price for the IG works at that time.

greg.org, Study for Untitled (Re: Graham), 2016, Donald Graham Lambda print cut down and collaged on inkjet on canvas, 30x24 in., ed. up to 25, I guess

It strikes me that the quickest and easiest solution is to buy one of Graham's prints, cut it up, and collage it on top of the infringing Prince. They're already roughly the same size. For proof of concept, I'm glad to make a study using one of Graham's smaller, 20x24-inch prints. As it happens, the only two ever to come to auction surfaced after Prince's show: in November 2014 in Paris (EUR2600), and in Nov. 2015 in Dallas ($2,475). Delivery date's a little uncertain, but at these prices, I'm sure we can make it work. Win-win-win.

JAN. 4, 1966, New York's traffic strike

just guessin', tbh