And then Bluesky blew my mind when Michael Lobel and Michael Seiwert both posted this photo:
Inside: Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Doris Stockhausen, David Tudor, Michael von Biel; Underneath: Steve Paxton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Robert Rauschenberg, a 1964 photo from Königswinter at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, via Museum-Brandhorst
Germans see this 1964 photo taken during a Merce Cunningham Dance Company world tour and are like, Mein Volks! The Tate caption incorrectly says it’s from Cologne, but it’s got Drachenfels written right on the helicopter. Seiwert points out that in 1964, Stockhausen was living near Königswinter and Bonn, the capital of West Germany, so it would have been an obvious destination for our intrepid dance troupe.
White Columns’ archives have a lot of amazing stuff, but not all of it. Director Matthew Higgs regularly posts outtake gems to his instagram, like he did yesterday when he announced the upcoming White Columns Benefit Auction (June 26, tickets and exhibition start next Friday) by posting some pics of previous benefit auction checklists.
Like this one from at least 1996, when Cady Noland donated a work from 1992 that does not appear anywhere else in the public record. What is/was it? A cozily sized screenprint on aluminum, sure, but of what?
We Are All Sanpaku is a phrase that probably felt so culturally obvious at one point that it was hard to imagine having to explain it. But We Are All Sanpaku’s moment was not 1992. It had already reached New Yorker cartoon punchline by 1985. Nixon was sanpaku, and—most crucially here, I think—Charles Manson was sanpaku, too.
We Are All Sanpaku is the despairing public’s confessional response to the 1965 declaration, You Are All Sanpaku, a best-selling book on Japanese physiognomy and macrobiotic diets by a guy with at least six aliases, including Georges Ohsawa. Sanpaku, three whites, is when the sclera, or white of your eye, is visible on three sides of the iris, rather than the normal [sic] two. Like your blood type and being born in the year of the goat, sanpaku has dire health, psychological and prophetic implications.
After diagnosing the western world—and the most prominent people in the news in the 1960s and 70s, including JFK, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Nixon, and Manson—with not meeting Japanese beauty standards, Ohsawa said it could be cured with brown rice.
Sakurazawa Nyoiti is just one of his names
Which, whatever, my point here is that the aesthetic possibilities of what Noland painted on that metal sheet are a rich feast, and I want to see it. Charles Manson’s mugshot that ran on the cover of LIFE? The ominous eye from the first edition dust jacket? Nixon? In the spirit of sanpaku, I might just make something up and pretend it’s real.
Autochrome postcard of the ruins of Burg Drachenfels above the shiny newness of Schloss Drachenfels above Königswinter, c. 1900, LOC via wikipedia
In the Niebelungenlied, the dragon Fafnir lived in Drachenfels, a mountain towering above the Rhine. Siegfried killed him and became invulnerable by bathing in his blood. The poems of Byron and travelogues of Schlegel turned the Burg Drachenfels and other ruins of medieval castles along the peaks of the Rhine Gorge into Romantic tourist destinations, from which western culture has not recovered. Since 1883 a railway has taken tourists to the Burg Drachenfels, which once protected Cologne from southern invasion. Halfway up is the Niebelungenhalle, a shrine to Richard Wagner filled with Hermann Hendrich’s paintings of the Ring Cycle.
At the base of the railway, in the town of Königswinter, from the end of WWII until the rise of cellphone cameras, Richard Kern ran his family’s Schnellfotografie studio, taking instant souvenir photos for tourists. His 90th birthday last fall was the occasion for all of Germany to remember their childhood visits to Königswinter, when they sat on the donkey, and behind the cardboard plane.
“Untitled”, 1990. Installed in Tattoo Collection. Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris, France. 3 Jun. – 18 Jul. 1992. Conceived by Air de Paris and Urbi et Orbi, image via Air de Paris by way of FG-T Fndn
Last weekend the curators of the National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art’s exhibition, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always To Return, held a public conversation about Felix Gonzalez-Torres tattoos. It was great. But no one, including the curators and art historians who have Felix tattoos, and not me, the rando blogger who’s written about them twice, quite knew the origin of the tattoo Felix made as an open edition in 1992.
In my question to the panel, I said I thought it had been created for a show of artist tattoos, but no one else had heard that, and then I saw that info is not on the Foundation’s website, and I was like, Oh no, did I just Felixsplain something to the professionals and get it wrong?
No, I did not. But I did forget that I’d written about the show sixteen years ago.
Tattoo Collection, installation view, Summer 1992 at Jennifer Flay Gallery, Paris, via airdeparis
“Tattoo Collection” began as a project in 1991, conceived by gallerists Florence Bonnefous and Édouard Merino and Lawrence Weiner, for Air de Paris in Nice. The first 30 artists to create tattoo designs were also asked to invite someone else. Its first incarnation, of Weiner’s design on Bonnefous’ back, took place on a Monaco rooftop. Over two years the project expanded to six other galleries and almost 200 artists. 33 years ago today, 3 June 1992, it opened at Jennifer Flay’s Paris gallery as a summer group show.
In the years since I posted about it, Air de Paris has filled out the “Tattoo Collection” archive with a press release, a 2014 interview, a couple of installation photos, and the names of 189 participating artists, and the consignment forms for most of them—but only some of the tattoos themselves.
“Untitled”, the 1990 rub-on transfer edition of a stylized ring of ten dolphins that was included in Felix’s January 1990 show at Andrea Rosen, was included here, too. The consignment form from 14 Aug 1992 lists two works, both “Untitled” (or “sans titre,” so the survey was filled out by AdP, not Andrea Rosen), with dates of 1990 and 1992. The former is a rub-on transfer (ed. 20), and the latter is a photostat for the open edition tattoo.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres consignment survey for Tattoo Collection, 1993, airdeparis.com
AdP’s basic instructions survey on the consignment form say the tattoo can be bought by anyone, should be black, and should be placed on the “ankle or wrist.” Unsurprisingly, these were not static; the parameters in the certificate Meg Onli got when she purchased her edition from Rosen in 2011 are different and more expansive.
What does seem certain, though, is the connection between the tattoo and the rub-on transfer edition from two years earlier. Though the source of the dolphin motif is still unknown, the source of the tattoo image is the 1990 edition.
There is also much to be explored in the larger Tattoo Collection project. Bonnefous got the inspiration from the instructions for Weiner’s works, that “the work need not be built.” Between this conceptual core and the impermanence of the body, it’s seems realistic to say that the show—and the work—continues to this day, and it’s only our knowledge of it that is limited. Or our memory.
Cady Noland, Untitled, 2024, as installed at Glenstone in October 2024
Now that she’s been having some shows, Cady Noland is known to make changes to installations of her work, even dramatic ones, even last minute. So maybe it was not so surprising to realize she added a new work to the exhibition at Glenstone last October, which came so late in the process it did not appear on the museum’s downloadable checklist.
And while there were also shipping palettes from Amazon stacked in the gallery that were also not on the checklist, the status of this work, Untitled (2024), was only uncovered/confirmed three weeks later, when Alex Greenberger reviewed the show for ARTnews. And it took still more weeks to add it to the checklist, the only prepared information available to visitors.
No indication it’s even a work, yet there was time to add an unnumbered square next to the 6
At the time, I wrote that such a move was not an error: “This incompleteness, this inaccuracy, is part of the encounter; this disconnect between what you see and what you’re told is part of the experience.”
Well, now I wonder if it might have been omitted for reasons other than coy mystery. Because the most prominent elements of the work Noland added are a palette with the Amazon sticker still attached, and a milk crate stamped with a threat from the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons who chase down milk crate thieves, but who are most famous for attacking striking steelworkers on the orders of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick.
I had not realized that last summer, before the museum had fully reopened from its remodeling, Glenstone’s hourly workers voted to form a union, and that the Raleses had hired the same anti-union lawyers and consultants as everyone else—including Amazon. Kriston Capps reported on the union’s efforts and voting almost a year ago. That would have been right around the time Noland was installing her show.
There is not much information beyond Capps’ early reporting. The last post on the instagram account for Glenstone Museum Workers Union, affiliated with the Teamsters, was from November 22nd. It says two bargaining sessions were completed, in September and October–and that the November 2024 meeting had been canceled without explanation. A December meeting was TBD. Noland’s show opened October 17th, in what seems to be the middle of a breakdown of negotiations.
To drop a pyramid of unionbusting references in the center of the gallery could be read as a show of solidarity with the union. If anyone knew to look. Now the prolonged omission of the Pinkertons work from the checklist feels like it could have been a move to deflect or diminish the impact of Noland’s gesture of support.
Unless? Do we really know that Noland’s invocation of the Pinkertons thugs isn’t a shoutout to management, an homage to the Fricks of our day, the industrialist connoisseurs who bought basically every major piece of the artist’s work to come up for sale in the last twenty years? If it was, maybe Glenstone would have bought it. Or they would have at least included Noland’s loans in the documentation of the show.
ISP alumnus Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Forbidden Colors”, 1988, 20 x 67 in., acrylic on panel, collection MOCA
Extraordinary. The Whitney is burning down the Independent Study Program to save the Independent Study Program. Scott Rothkopf issued a statement suspending the ISP. He fired the new associate director, who had named him in her criticism of the censorship by senior museum administration of a pro-Palestinian capstone exhibition and performance last month by ISP participants. And he cited the absence of an ISP director as a reason to rethink the ISP altogether, without acknowledging that he had eliminated the ISP director’s job in February, before all this censorship started. Or became public.
Brian Boucher’s report on artnet has details, quotes, and links to previous incidents, including protests and callouts of trustees last week. The trustees’ involvement in arming Israel and supporting its settler-led ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is not a non-issue, but I think Rothkopf is no puppet; he is fully in control of this situation, and accountable for it. Pushing the timeline back, Dorothy Lichtenstein only died last year, and the Lichtenstein Foundation’s gift of their home and studio to the Whitney as a home for the ISP only took effect last year. We don’t have enough information yet to tell if we’re seeing the realization of the Lichtensteins’ vision for the ISP, or its betrayal.
“This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in Soho, will not precipitate a similar reaction.”
As we’ve seen over the last year and a half, that fact has changed.
Quartet in Black & Blue, 2025, dimensions variable, ed. 2+1AP
Whenever democracy dies in darkness, art struggles to be born. In darkness. Wait, what? Point is, now you and three friends can experience art together at home, or wherever your dark place is. There really are so many possibilities, and they’re increasing every day!
it was there all along: May Tse’s 2014 photo of Koons hulking for the South China Morning Post at Gagosian HK
On the latest episode of artnet’s Art Angle podcast, Andrew Russeth called the Hulks Jeff Koons’s self-portraits, and now every photocall of Koons making deranged faces and poses around his sculptures for the last thirty years makes sense.
Yayoi Kusama, double exposure self-portrait, 1960, via MoMA’s 1998 catalogue, I think.
I think you have to go back to Yayoi Kusama to find an artist more embedded, photographically, in their own work. To the extent it represents her own obliteration, Kusama’s work is a kind of self-portrait, too, I guess.
Warhol, Double Elvis (Ferus Type), 1963, silkscreen ink and silver paint on linen, 82 x 53 or so, I’m rounding for legibility. The guarantor who paid $53m for it at Christie’s in 2019 knows how big it is
Koons calls these Hulks Hulk Elvis, presumably because of the stance. Warhol’s Elvises never registered with me as self-portraits the way Deborah Kass’s Yentl paintings do. But clearly, I’ve been missing the signs.
Deborah Kass, Double Ghost Yentl (My Elvis), 1997, silkscreen ink and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 52 in., via Kavi Gupta Gallery
Russeth also referenced Peter Schjeldahl when saying that Koons’ operative mode is rage, which, after all, is what provoked Bruce Banner to transform into the Hulk. The specific line I remember is from Schjeldahl’s review of Dakis Joannou’s collection exhibition at the New Museum, where he was a trustee, and he said “his deepest passion is anger.” But I think Russeth’s closer. Which reminds me, isn’t the New Yorker art critic desk still open? Can we not manifest this?
In the first paragraph he calls David Hammons’s massive artist book disguised as a six-years-later Hauser & Wirth exhibition catalogue a gift. But with his review of the 7-lb, textless object for Art in America’s newsletter, TK Smith definitely does the work. I’d say he earned it:
Here, I found myself questioning my desire for this book to be legible, conventional, and useful. Is he challenging me, scolding me, or flirting with me? His refusal to make it easy to intellectualize his work feels like an invitation to a wider audience to exercise a different set of skills: he is inviting us to see as he sees while making room for our own responses and interpretations. It is evident through the book’s images that so much of Hammons’s work is made possible by everyday audiences, whether that audience is indulgently purchasing ephemeral artworks or simply taking time to witness the sublime in the mundane. You travel through the pages and experience what compels you. It may be wholly cliché to say, but the book reads much like jazz—there is a rhythm, but it is not consistent. It lingers here or there, it gets loud and hot before lulling to a confident hum.
Screencap from Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), from a gif by @bladesrunner
Imagine an internet retail revolution that not only created online shopping, but that brought digital shopping into the physical world. The mp3 store. The gaming store. The stock footage store.
Sturtevant, Simulacra, 2010, single channel 16:9 video, installation view at Matthew Marks, 2022
The stock footage store.
Imagine a bustling day in 2009 or ’10 at the iStockVideo store in Paris, in the old BHV, the department store where Duchamp bought his readymades. Under the high ceiling a long table arrayed with great horned owl footage. A chic but cantankerous Sturtevant and a cheery, slightly sheepish Spike Jonze both rummaging through the tablets, realizing each other’s presence when the reach for the same clip. They look up, Jonze smiles, says, “Pardon” in his downtown French, and pulls back his hand. He casually peruses his way to another clip.
Installation view of Simulacra, 2010, from Sturtevant: Memes, at Freedman Fitzpatrick, 2019, via CAD
Imagine in that world, as in ours, Sturtevant opens a show at the Serpentine in 2013. Spike Jonze’s Her, 2013, was released in France on March 19, 2014, and Sturtevant died on May 7. Imagine this 89 year old Deleuzian, in what would be the last few weeks of her life, going to the cinema to see the movie about the guy in love with his bot. In that world, as in ours, she just opened a show at the Serpentine with a video wall of owl footage. She sees this scene of Joaquin Phoenix on the sidewalk.
installation view of Rock & Roll Simulacra, Act 3 (2013) in Leaps Jumps & Bumps, 2013 at the Serpentine Galleries, image: Jerry Hardman-Jones
Does she then remember that fleeting encounter, years earlier, at the owl clip shop? Is the question I’d rather consider than the one this world has presented me when tumblr’s algorithm presented this gif to me because it thought I “looked interested.”
Bruce Nauman, Think, 1993, a 1996 gift of the Dannheisers to MoMA [via @voorwerk]
I saw this two-channel Bruce Nauman piece, Think, on the tumblr and marveled briefly at how, when you were soaking in it, the 1990s aesthetic wasn’t an aesthetic; it was just the world around you.
And then I zoomed in to see what exhibition catalogues were stacked on top of the player, and that’s when it hit me: those are no catalogues. They’re the plastic storage cases for laserdiscs. Sitting on top of two new Panasonic LX-101 mini-players, so new they still have the showroom stickers on them.
Luigi Lucioni, Paul Cadmus, 1928, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in., acquired in 2007 by the Brooklyn Museum
In 1926 Luigi Lucioni, 26, and his Art Students League classmate Paul Cadmus, 21, were roommates for a fellowship at the Louis Tiffany Studio on Long Island. In 1928 Lucioni painted this portrait of Cadmus, which got recognition of some kind at the exhibition where it debuted.
Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Chandelier as installed at Drawing Matter London, image: Jesper Authen
I still don’t have it/one, but that’s not important right now. What matters is that the truncated icosahedron chandelier made of Perspex prisms and fishing line that Buckminster Fuller concocted as a belated wedding present for HRH Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon remains in good hands, and is well-cared for.
At some point after blogging about its 2007 appearance in a World of Interiors feature, and after tracing its original sale, I realized that was not some random table in a random former cheesemaker’s cottage in Somerset it had been sitting on. It had been acquired by Niall Hobhouse, and the cottage was part of Shatwell Farm. Hobhouse had made the working corner of his ancestral lands into the site of Drawing Matter, his ambitious archive of architectural drawings and research.
Last fall, Drawing Matter moved into town, and the chandelier came with it. Came home, in a way. In 2008, seeking to fill out its history, Hobhouse invited His Lordship to share his recollections of this singular object. Apparently it was too big to fit through the doorway of their private apartments at “KP,” so it was installed over the stairs. And indeed, it was remembered less as a two-years-late wedding present, and more of a way for Fuller to gain an audience, and perhaps, patronage for his world-building architectural schemes.
Anyway, last week Jesper Authen of Drawing Matter kindly sent along a photo of the chandelier, which lends a mid-century Kensington Palace vibe to the archive’s new Central London space. Truly I’ve never seen it looking better.
John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver, 1879, 93 x 73 cm, on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago
John Singer Sargent made these two vertiginous paintings of orchestra rehearsals in the Cirque d’Hiver when he was in his early 20s. The wild grisaille one at the MFA Boston, tighter, and without the lounging clowns, is thought to be influenced by a similar monochrome rehearsal study by Degas, whose work Sargent knew.
Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver, 1879-80, 57 x 46cm, collection, MFA Boston
The extended text at the MFA Boston makes it sound like Sargent whipped out a canvas in the middle of rehearsal and just started painting. It does look that way, though the Art Institute canvas is almost a meter tall. They’re both at the Met rn for the Sargent in Paris show.
