Category: art

The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens just opened, Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything, an exhibition of joke-related works that seems to focus on new work related to the original joke files of the 20th century comedian Milton Berle. [If you’re within six hours of Athens today, Feb. 21, the exhibition’s curator Shawnya Harris is giving a gallery talk at 2:00. So get going.]

Over his eight decades in show business, Berle had collected, organized, and annotated thousands of jokes on 3×5 inch index cards. Prince acquired four file cabinets of Berle’s jokes from an auction in 2013.

In his second deposition, made in 2018 for the [recently settled] lawsuits over Instagram portraits, Prince talked at length about his use of jokes, and transforming something heard into something seen.

When I first saw these images, I figured that their elongated, portrait-style dimensions reflected a decade of Prince using an iPhone as a studio. But they also simultaneously read as landscapes, with joke mesas extending to a cropped out horizon, a western desert begging for a cowboy. Then I saw the file cabinets, and realized these images also map to their subject, and the experience of living with these physical objects made over decades from words, ideas and language.

I want to find something more to post about these Mike Kelley photos than that he made them in 1985 by jankily rephotographing a Rothko catalogue; he published them in 1996, one of a couple of projects done with Patrick Painter; they were some of the half dozen or so works Elton John bought from Vaknin Schwartz, the once-hot Atlanta gallery down the street from his condo; and they’re one of a thousand other things he’s selling this week at Christie’s.

But it’s not easy.

In May 2023 University of Florida entomologist Akito Kawahara and nearly 90 collaborators published the findings of their massive, eight-year study of butterfly and moth evolution in Nature. greg.org hero Brian Sholis posted a recent article about Kawahara’s research in Smithsonian Magazine. He was inspired by his father, On Kawara:

When Kawahara was 4 years old, his parents noticed that he was scared of insects and would run away from them. To help him overcome this fear, his father started taking him for walks in the parks of suburban Tokyo, looking for insects, talking about insects and carrying a butterfly net. “I still remember the first butterfly I collected,” says Kawahara, his eyes brightening at the memory. “It was near my grandmother’s house. I remember the exact place where the butterfly landed. It was a snout butterfly. I had seen it in books, and now it landed right in front of me. I remember my hands shaking and my dad helping me to catch the butterfly.”

Kawahara still has that specimen in his personal collection in Tokyo, which now numbers between 5,000 and 10,000 and also serves as a remembrance of his father. In his youth, the family divided its time between Tokyo and New York—Kawahara attended schools in both cities—and on weekends, his father would take him on butterfly collecting trips. On Kawara also traveled extensively to create his art and sometimes brought his son along, plus their butterfly equipment. As a boy, Kawahara gathered specimens from Singapore, Hawaii, Alaska, California and all over Japan.

Kawahara would have been 4 in 1983. The exhibition catalogue for Kawara’s fall 1983 exhibition at Galerie Watari in Tokyo includes a facsimile of his painting journal for the period between 1981-83, and three sheets of date painting stickers, to scale [above], including just five made in June, July, and August 1983.

The One Million Years Foundation, notes bookseller Jonathan A. Hill, no longer recognizes the catalogue as part of the artist’s printed oeuvre. But Kawara’s documentation of date painting production on his 100-year calendar does seem to confirm this number. And so now we see that on the other days of the Summer of 1983, the artist was laying the foundations of a major scientific breakthrough by hunting butterflies with his son.

A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins [nature]
Where Did Butterflies Come From? This Scientist Is On the Case [smithsonianmag via brian sholis]
Previously, related: On Kawara Date Painting Stickers
On Kawara Db
Today Job: On Working Late

In his peak performance twink era, Chris Burden was not only putting his life on the line for his art, he was selling pictures of him doing it. Or trying to, anyway.

In 1974 Burden released iconic documentary photos of three early performances in an edition of five: Prelude to 220, or 110 (1971), in which he was bolted to the floor next to buckets of water with live electric wires in them; Bed Piece (1972), where he stayed in bed in a gallery for three weeks; and 747 (1973), where he shot at an airplane flying overhead. According to Christie’s in 2000, beside the artist proof they were selling, only one other suite of vintage prints was sold.

Does that mean except for two sets, the other editions of the prints were sold singly? Or that the rest of the edition wasn’t printed or sold until later? I don’t know.

But it does seem like these four prints at LA Modern were there at the beginning. Three are numbered 1/5, and one (Bed Piece) is 2/5. They were acquired by the same person directly from the artist in 1975. They originally turned up for sale together last summer at suite prices, but didn’t sell. Does that make them a suite or nah? Now they’re being sold separately. It’d be wild if they didn’t stay together, though. Burden collector, you know what you must do.

[day later update: hmm, LA Modern sold both ed. 4/5 ($94k in 2017) and ed. 5/5 ($81k in 2022) which were acquired directly from the artist and, if Christie’s is to be believed, were not vintage, but printed later to complete the edition? So maybe Burden collectors are already doing what they needed to keep the sets together. In 1974 Burden also published Chris Burden 1971-73, an artist book consisting of a binder of 53 8×10 photos and text documenting 23 performance works, in an edition of 50. Oddly, the Met’s copy, acquired in 1993, is catalogued with each of the performances separate.]