May 24, 2012
Roy Lichtenstein, Composition, 1969, image via sothebys.com With the confluence this week of an incredible-sounding retrospective in Chicago and a bonkers-sounding sale at Sotheby's, I was reminded of one of the weirder things I stumbled across during a dive...
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10:31 PM
May 23, 2012
Usuyuki, 1981 Alright, Katy Martin, who made two incredible Jasper Johns films in the late 1970s when you were practically a kid. Uh, actually, yeah, that's about it. Just watch them. Harvard's Sackler Museum just opened a show yesterday,...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
I find the maxim of not reading reviews of one's work to be much easier to live by when there are no reviews. Because at least two takes on Richteriana have already been published, and I like the concept. It's...
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Posted by greg at
8:48 PM
May 22, 2012
Well that's mighty interesting. The National Exemplar has an exhibition of Richard Artschwager, which includes this 1965 piece, described as a "three-dimensional 'chair picture.'" It's roughly chair-size, and with materials of acrylic and paper and wood, I'm going to...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
May 20, 2012
The first thing that was blowing my mind about Short Circuit was not just, how could there have be a Johns Flag before the first [sic] Johns Flag, but how could there be a missing Johns Flag? I mean,...
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Posted by greg at
4:50 PM
May 18, 2012
Photograph of a painting destroyed by Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter Archiv via Spiegel Since I first started looking into them, I've wanted to know why Gerhard Richter destroyed some of his paintings. Because, of course, some of them weren't...
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Posted by greg at
11:51 AM
May 17, 2012
Ooh, that is interesting. By covering themselves in paint, members of Occupy Frankfurt effectively inverted the crowd control technique where police use dye cannons to disperse protesters--and to tag them for easier identification and roundup later. Nice to see...
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Posted by greg at
5:53 PM
May 15, 2012
While everyone else is cavorting on Tom Sachs Mars, I'm home, watching this rather entertainingly deadpan documentary short about the approved color palette in Sachs' studio. I imagine it to be a highlight of the new assistant orientation seminar....
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Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
May 14, 2012
While trying not to steal his thunder, let me just post the awesomely vivid ending to LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's review of Williams + Tsien's unavoidably flawed Philadelphia museum building now housing the art-centered educational institution known as...
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Posted by greg at
8:19 PM
Destroyed Richter Painting #03 First off, a huge thanks to everyone who came to the opening of Richteriana Saturday, and a high five to Magda, Postmasters and the artists in the show. It really does look great, and interesting,...
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Posted by greg at
10:17 AM
May 11, 2012
Richter's studio, 1965, as seen in Elger's A Life In Painting. Note the lady in the bikini on the left, which Jasper Johns is well known for destroying his early work, thereby managing and reordering the story of his...
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Posted by greg at
2:59 PM
May 8, 2012
Will you look at that, another one of Irving Blum's Pasadena-style Brillo Boxes is coming up for auction in the morning at Christie's, with an estimate of $400-600,000. [The last Blum Pasadena Brillo box I wrote about sold for...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
May 7, 2012
Flag, 1954-55, collection and image: MoMA When, after a couple of weeks of poking around, I didn't stumble, Banacek-style, onto the Jasper Johns Flag painting from Short Circuit, and then flip it for my 5%, reunite it with Rauschenberg's...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
May 3, 2012
Oh, now that's interesting. I can't find an actual print copy of the Portable Gallery Bulletin anywhere, but Joel Finsel has scans of a couple of pages in Swimming Naked At The Y, his biography/oral history blog about Edward Meneeley....
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
May 2, 2012
Well this is interesting. I don't know how I missed this before now, but Albert Vanderburg was the associate editor of Portable Gallery Bulletin whose 1962 article discussing the impact of Rauschenberg's inclusion of Johns' flag painting in Short...
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Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
May 1, 2012
Two months. I'd feign shock, but frankly, it's been almost a year since I figured it out, and I'm only now posting it. Last January, while going through the newly opened Castelli Gallery Collection at the Archives of American...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 PM
April 30, 2012
For issue 5+6 of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box (1967), guest editor/curator Brian O'Doherty conceived of a conceptual art exhibition in a box. [Which really should be staged in real space somewhere. Has it ever been?] One of...
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Posted by greg at
7:51 AM
April 29, 2012
And speaking of big universes and small worlds, I'm starting to listen to the 1991 recordings of John Cage's Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), and just ten minutes in, I'm reminded that Cage's...
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Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
Ross Andersen has a fascinating interview with JWST scientist Alberto Conti about the orders of magnitude increases in the amount of astronomical data being gathered these days:There are two issues driving the current data challenges facing astronomy. First, we are...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 PM
April 28, 2012
ZOMG, I will never complain about the minor annoyances of painting ever again. Brooklyn Bridge painters at work high above the city, on December 3, 1915. via Alan Taylor's archive-diving into the newly released digitized treasures of New York City's...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 AM
April 27, 2012
Can you tell I'm trying to clear out the to-post photos from my desktop? In Februarry Christie's sold an interesting, large Richard Prince Joke painting in London that was made in 2007. The date is significant for reasons that...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 PM
During the 1960s, Mickey Ruskin regularly let artists eat and drink for free or trade art for sustenance at Max's Kansas City. So when Ruskin ran into financial trouble, artists rallied and held a benefit auction for the bar, on...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
April 24, 2012
Destroyed Richter Painting No. 04, 2012, oil on canvas, 110x110cmPostmasters is pleased to announce: RICHTERIANA GREG ALLEN, DAVID DIAO, RORY DONALDSON, HASAN ELAHI, FABIAN MARCACCIO, RAFAËL ROZENDAAL May 12 - June 16, 2012 opening reception, saturday, may 12, 6-8...
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Posted by greg at
7:55 PM
April 20, 2012
Fingerspuren/Finger Marks, with Palermo, 1970, image via gerhard-richter.com Despite an 11-year difference in their age, Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo became fast friends in the early 1960s. Richter's first wife Ema sewed Palermo's groundbreaking Stoffbilder/Cloth Pictures starting in 1966,...
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Posted by greg at
5:23 PM
Reuters' Jorge Duenes' cropped aerial shot of a 300-acre marijuana plantation "discovered" in Mexico last July that The Atlantic's InFocus photoblog ran today was dramatic and awesome enough to make me want to see the full thing. Here it is:...
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Posted by greg at
4:27 PM
April 18, 2012
top right is Bonnefoy's beautiful but otherwise ridiculous Giacometti, and center left is Gober's Sculptures and Installations, which turned out to be lighter than it looked. So yeah, hmm, I probably should have glued up the braces on the...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
April 17, 2012
I love this 1991 Cady Noland plywood edition, Enquirer Page with Eyes Cut Out Template, even more than the silk screened aluminum Enquirer Page with Eyes Cut Out itself [which is in SFMOMA's collection, along with Template I]. Lot...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 PM
April 15, 2012
I've liked this explanation Gerhard Richter gave in 1972 to Rolf Schön about the relationship in his work between photography and painting for a long time, but it's been particularly awesome lately:RS: How do you stand in relation to illusion?...
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Posted by greg at
7:51 PM
An interesting detail from The Economist's report on Ai Weiwei's house arrest, and the irony of the police order to stop broadcasting his own webcams:And he knows of at least 15 police surveillance cameras mounted within 100 metres of his...
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Posted by greg at
2:33 PM
As in "Canceled" is opening, not "Opening is canceled." I'm very stoked to announce that Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al... will be included in an exhibition at The Center For...
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Posted by greg at
7:03 AM
April 14, 2012
Oh, I SEE....
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Posted by greg at
12:29 PM
April 12, 2012
Well this is a rather fascinating piece of information. Looks like I'll have to buy that awesome, 200-lb Carleton Watkins mammoth plates catalogue after all. [whoa, Tyler got blurbed!] Carleton Watkins daguerrotype, c.1855-8, image: Santa Clara Univ. Archives via Calisphere...
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Posted by greg at
9:10 AM
April 11, 2012
MoMA's not the only museum on Google Art Project to show works by artists living--or recently dead. The Art Institute of Chicago's stunning Sculpture Court is right there, too, with nothing less than Ellsworth Kelly's Chicago Panels, six monumental,...
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Posted by greg at
9:31 PM
April 10, 2012
I hate when I lose the context of something, it's like I"m no better than a tumblr around here, minus even the traffic. Anyway, this image of The Latest Photo Mural Equipment is from somewhere and some time in...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
April 9, 2012
At first I was thinking this is odd seeing Warhol himself going at something with a big ol' brush. But then I figured the bloctchy paint scheme for the 1979 BMW M1 was similar to the underpaintings on his...
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Posted by greg at
7:20 AM
April 5, 2012
Joseph H. Choate, a civic-minded attorney and member of the Provisional Committee which, under William Cullen Bryant, undertook the creation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke for the Trustees at the dedication of the Museum's first building on March...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 AM
April 4, 2012
I went to the Goethe Institute's Lunch Bytes panel today, primarily to hear poet and Ubu founder Kenneth Goldsmith. So I was caught off guard when I introduced myself, started my fanboi spiel, and he goes, "You're greg.org! It's so...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
John Chamberlain with Diana Ross, the Supremes, and Diana Ross's mother--Mrs. Ross, if you're nasty--in New York in 1964. For no fathomable reason besides sheer awesomeness, it is included in the sculptor's chronology at the end of his catalogue...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
Can I just say, it's only a couple of weeks in, but I'm loving Richard Prince's blog. [And loving Anaba all over again for linking to it. Thanks, Martin!] Not really a blog, I suppose, but more of a journal....
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Posted by greg at
9:58 PM
Untitled (Still/Free), 1992/1994/2007/2011, installation shot at MoMA via Google Art Project Seeing Rirkrit Tiravanija's work Untitled (Free/Still) in MoMA's Google Art Project space reminded me that I've been meaning to write about it for a while now. I revisited...
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Posted by greg at
7:51 PM
April 3, 2012
It looks like Les Blurmoiselles d'Avignon have some company. The Google Art Project has released a new batch of 134 museum participants, bringing the total to 150, though only 51 institutions are offering Street View Museum View. And a couple...
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Posted by greg at
6:19 PM
March 31, 2012
Well that's an unexpectedly awkward situation I just stumbled into. greycu.be: what, you mean your car doesn't have a domain name? A week or so ago, I decided my new car needed a domain name. So I registered greycu.be. Partly...
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10:47 PM
March 30, 2012
Just read the complaint in De Sole v. Knoedler Gallery [Case 1:12-cv-02313-UA], and it's pretty awesome. If you like getting utterly defrauded of $8.4 million for forged Rothkos, that is. Anyway, the image comes from the materials analysis, which...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
Construction with J.J. Flag, aka Short Circuit, 1955 photo by Rudy Burckhardt You know what, it's way past time to wrap up this missing Jasper Johns Flag caper. I'm going to get right to it. But first, a quick...
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Posted by greg at
10:50 AM
March 28, 2012
Yes, we now have Doug Aitken, which might help, and there's an After Hours party every quarter, but the Hirshhorn's outdoor space has always struck me as one of the most potentially interesting and under-utilized public spaces for contemporary...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
March 22, 2012
image: JJ Films The thing is, everybody in Iceland has a monster truck. Or a big ol' van with balloon tires and a four-foot lift kit. The country only got a paved road in like 1979 or whatever. But...
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Posted by greg at
9:05 PM
We came out of the Hirshhorn tonight after the surprise [to me] screening of Space is Process, a 2010 documentary about Olafur Eliasson, only to find they were testing Doug Aitken's Song1, a 360-degree projection on the barrel of...
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Posted by greg at
1:02 AM
March 20, 2012
The DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities is organizing the 5x5 Project, a temporary public art festival? exhibition? program? that coincides with the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Last night at a panel discussion at the Corcoran, the DCCAH Project...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 PM
March 19, 2012
Annunciation after Titian, CR 343-1, 1973, collection Hirshhorn Museum, image: gerhard-richter.com I confess, I love Gerhard Richter in the 70s. Here are some of the best/funniest excerpts from a interview he did with art historian/curator Gislind Nabakowski that was...
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8:50 AM
March 15, 2012
I tell you, now I cannot get enough of that Henry Codax. Fortunately, Codax isn't letting a little auction setback, or the fact that he's a fictional character from an anonymous corporation's collectively authored novel, cut into his practice. Or...
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8:21 AM
March 12, 2012
Henry Codax, Untitled (Dark Grey), 2011, via christies.com Wow, do I owe Henry Codax an apology. Last week I'd declared the fictitious painter's beautiful gray monochrome a failure because, not only did it not "Strip away any obvious authorship,"...
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Posted by greg at
9:30 PM
image: DARIO THUBURN - AFP/GETTY IMAGES, see washpost for fullsize There has been much talk among such circles about the possibility of a lost, unfinished mural by Leonardo da Vinci hidden behind a fresco by Giorgio Vasari, in the...
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Posted by greg at
12:38 PM
March 7, 2012
[image via artinfo] A little Anastasi, a little Lawler, a little Shore, a little Fischer, a little Albenda. I wonder what color Michael Riedel's awesome photomural in Zwirner's booth will be by the time I get to the Armory...
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Posted by greg at
7:44 PM
March 5, 2012
This is fantastic, a 1955 industrial film by E.I. duPont deNemours, Inc. about their miraculous new plastic film, Mylar. I mean, first off, it's Mylar, so satelloons and Warhol balloons and everything else about the future. But then there's...
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Posted by greg at
12:24 PM
March 4, 2012
Jacob Kassay can't hide. One of the square monochromes he allegedly1 created allegedly2 with Olivier Mosset for last summer's Henry Codax show at Carriage Trade is being flipped this week at Christie's. Fortunately [sic], it's the awesomest, i.e., most...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 PM
March 3, 2012
I've got a few reservations, but I'm really quite smitten with London-based Scottish artist Robert Montgomery's poetically critical billboard artworks. The one above was unfurled at a Stop The War protest in Trafalgar Square last October. It reads:WHEN WE...
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Posted by greg at
8:47 PM
February 28, 2012
And here I am barely able to keep up with The New Aesthetic. Meanwhile, TNA honcho James Bridle is cranking out other awesome projects left and right, and works like this one, Shadow, which, yes, please, very much. Shadow,...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
February 20, 2012
Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class. - Jeff Koons— Berfrois (@berfrois) February 20, 2012 It's well worth looking at the fuller context of that awesome Jeff Koons blurb about abstraction and luxury being the guard...
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Posted by greg at
8:21 AM
February 18, 2012
Of the many extraordinary photos of Max Ernst and his sculptures that Michael posted at stopping off place this week, this is my hands-down favorite My guess is Thomas Houseago has stared long and hard at this thing as...
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Posted by greg at
5:57 PM
February 17, 2012
Last year I picked up this extraordinary photograph, and then didn't have immediate results researching it, so I put it away until now. Then, wow. NASA launched the first Project Echo communications satelloon in 1960 to much fanfare, but...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 PM
February 14, 2012
Look, I don't care if you ARE Domus and you have Paola Antonelli herself as a judge; it is no small thing to call your design competition Autoprogettazione 2.0:Autoprogettazione 2.0 is an invitation to consider the potential of a diffused,...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 AM
No amount of waiting in line can help me now. This awesome, bronze, iPhone-shaped paperweight by Jonathan Monk is sold out. I'll console myself with the knowledge that had I heard about it in time, the goofy name would...
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Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
February 13, 2012
Untitled (for Parkett), 1994 image via phillips de pury I've been wondering how Felix Gonzalez-Torres' billboard edition, Untitled (for Parkett) was playing out in the real world. How many of the 84+15+? copies still existed? How many had been...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 PM
February 12, 2012
this one. Untitled, 1991, Site #21: 504 W 44th St. One of the formative artworks in my life is set to re-appear this month. I saw one of the giant black & white billboards of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres' empty...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 PM
February 9, 2012
First, Happy Birthday, Mr. Richter. Destroyed 1964 Richter painting, image from Gerhard Richter Archkiv via Spiegel I don't know if Joerg knew at the time he first tweeted about it--he is plugged in and German, so who knows?--but I certainly...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 AM
February 8, 2012
image of the front page of the Feb. 26, 1942 LA Times, via framework.latimes.com Back in 2007, this blog experienced a notable conceptual shift, when I found myself writing about things, works of art, I guess, that I wanted...
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Posted by greg at
3:16 PM
Got posts stacked up like flights at LaGuardia, but I can't get past these paintings by Douglas Gordon [right?] coming up at Christie's London sale next week. They're 1-m square monochromes of acrylic housepaint with a text and date that's...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
February 5, 2012
I think part of my fascination with Google is the way it is reprocessing the way we see the world. It has its own way of looking, and that, it turns out, is what we see. Timo Arnall's Robot...
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Posted by greg at
4:12 PM
February 4, 2012
OK, this sanding thing is completely new now. Before, when I was using the brush, I'd be sanding down drips and bulges around the edges of the panels, and hoping to even out ridges in the brush strokes. Now...
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Posted by greg at
8:14 PM
February 3, 2012
This is utterly fantastic. It's Quebecois pianist/composer Marc-André Hamelin's 1991-4 work for two player pianos, "Circus Galop," and because it occasionally hits all 12 staves or 21 notes simultaneously, it is unplayable by humans. The boingboing headline is a bit...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 AM
I don't think Hirst's assistants would agree that spots aren't about time, but Karen Rosenberg's line in her On Kawara review is nice:Speaking broadly, you could say that one is about time and the other is about money. (Though,...
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Posted by greg at
9:07 AM
February 1, 2012
I haven't yet decided whether to more proactively engage the growing numbers of people who use Google as medium or subject for their artmaking, or to forge ahead alone, buoyed up by the certainty of my own unequaled, Googly aesthetic...
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Posted by greg at
8:54 PM
Joerg tweeted last night about a "[DESTROYED]" 1982 Gerhard Richter candle painting, and heeyeahsure, I'll look at that. It turns out though, that the artist's own term is not entirely accurate. Because according to his website, the painting, 2 Candles...
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Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
January 31, 2012
The stories of Jasper Johns' Flag is almost as famous as the artwork itself. In 1958, Leo Castelli had come for a studio visit with Robert Rauschenberg, only to find Jasper Johns' work there, and offer the younger, unknown...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
January 29, 2012
Alright, the mourning process seems to be ending, but the Guggenheim still hasn't posted video of the crazy/awesome/all over the place speeches from "The Last Word," the TED-like symposium marathon organized last weekend for the end of Maurizio Cattelan's "All."...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 PM
January 27, 2012
This 1963 episode of I've Got A Secret pops up periodically. From this week on Boing Boing to Alex Ross's 2007 blog post searching for Karl Schenzer. And it is, indeed, pretty interesting. John Cale was recently arrived in...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 PM
Marine Hugonnier, Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly), The New York Times (Week of February 21st to February 27th 2005) Now this gets very interesting very quickly. Jason, a sharp-eyed greg.org reader in Paris, just sent along...
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Posted by greg at
5:42 PM
I stopped by a friend's studio yesterday--which was fantastic, btw--and as I was leaving, and I noticed the cool, old Ellsworth Kelly exhibition poster in the bathroom, I so I was all, have you seen the Kelly edition of Die...
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Posted by greg at
9:45 AM
January 25, 2012
Ausgezeichnet! To promote his two shows in Munich this fall/winter, at the Pinakothek and the Haus der Kunst [which closed this week, btw], the local paper die Welt published a special issue in which all photos were replaced by Ellsworth...
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Posted by greg at
5:37 PM
Basically, yeah, there was no way I could just let Daniel Barnes' hearsay claim that there's a secret text encoded in each of Damien Hirist's spot paintings go untested last night. But the mechanics of decoding a Hirst Code, if...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 AM
January 24, 2012
Alright, I think we finally may be onto something. I switched to a high-density foam roller for this next coat, and though it looks kind of eggshelly in the photo, it actually ends up drying to a smoother finish...
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Posted by greg at
4:58 PM
January 23, 2012
Speaking of texts written in entirely unlikely places... I really have no idea what to make of the kicker in Daniel Barnes' Artslant review of the Brittania St installation of Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings:As to be expected with...
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Posted by greg at
10:06 PM
There is much to do, and much to write, but it'll have to wait. Because right this minute, a copy of Moby Dick typed on six rolls of toilet paper is for sale on eBay:MY FRIEND AND I ONCE...
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Posted by greg at
7:04 PM
January 21, 2012
I've come across ads while surfing through New Yorkers from the 1950s, but this is one of the first times I've seen actual Pablo Picasso silk screened fabric turn up on eBay. And there's a whole 16-yard run of...
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Posted by greg at
5:06 PM
January 20, 2012
It's funny, all this time I've been looking hard at the brushstrokes of modernism, abstraction, and monochrome, trying to figure out how they were made--and, thus, how I might make some paintings myself--and I've ignored Jean Arp. When I started...
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Posted by greg at
12:37 PM
January 15, 2012
Another Sunday painting. Or another Sunday spent painting. I did another round of taping off and painting on the Dutch Camo Landscape photo of Noordwijk today. The first time, I did two identical gray polygons This time, I did three,...
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Posted by greg at
5:35 PM
January 14, 2012
Well, that was a total surface disaster. The size and disposability of this crappy little foam roller made it irresistible. The bubbly eggshell finish that even contains a few crumbs of foam made it a total failure putting paint...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
January 12, 2012
A couple of things that I still wonder about about Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing: What did de Kooning think? The story of making it is always told by Rauschenberg, or from his side. Did de Kooning ever tell the...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
January 11, 2012
Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, "drawing | traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame." via SFMOMA TIMELY BUT UNNECESSARY HOOK: LAST VISIT TO THE DE KOONING RETROSPECTIVE Part of the reason I hustled back...
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Posted by greg at
7:50 PM
January 9, 2012
"@takashipom #EGO Takashi with H.E Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani" via @QatarMuseumsAut I am in awe of the new, Povera-meets-Lars von Trier direction Takashi Murakami is taking his work. It's like pure signifier now. A master's bravura...
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Posted by greg at
7:41 AM
January 6, 2012
John, John, 1988, installed at Ann Temkin's Color Chart show in 2008, via moma Alright, before this thing gets too much farther, let's check what we know. From the Gagosian Gallery exhibition page::The exhibition will take place at once...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 PM
January 5, 2012
Oh, man, just last night I was goof-tweeting about this, and it turns out it's already a thing. Registration for The Complete Spot Challenge starts tomorrow:Visit all eleven Gagosian Gallery locations during the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 PM
January 4, 2012
It was a favorite in the Met's Pictures Generation show. And I liked her recent, similar show at Metro Pictures. But hey-ho, how awesome does Louise Lawler's show at Sprüth Magers look?? I mean, I might have been content...
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Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
January 1, 2012
After processing the odd hippie hipness of the idea of John Cage driving Merce Cunningham and his dance company around the country in a VW Microbus, it was really dancer Carolyn Brown's excellent memoir that persuaded me to see the...
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Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
December 29, 2011
The very special presentation of Merce & John: The VW Years will return after this brief announcement from holy crap, Richard Serra's suburban! Thanks, wary meyers! Now don't get all stalky. And stay tuned, eventually, finally, for Donald Judd's Land...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
December 23, 2011
Sometimes all Mark Grotjahn wants is to dance. Here are four five videos of those times, in chronological order: Nov. 2007: Jan. 2008: May 2008: Feb. 2011 [via artblogartblog]...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
December 22, 2011
You know what I never got around to doing in 2010? Finishing the catalogue of all the designs created for the Alcoa Forecast ad campaign in the late 1950s. That was the postwar, civilian/consumer-oriented, Glorious Aluminum Future PR campaign that...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 PM
December 21, 2011
Electrum @ Reference with Hugh Scott Douglas, 2011 Oh, man, basically every thing in Ben Schumacher's shows and his source and reference material and his investigations and archive divings and whatever the hell else in his tumblrs is just...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 PM
The VW bus makes many appearances in John Cage's own writings, especially his tour diaries in Empty Words: Writings '73-78:After winning the mushroom quiz in Italy, I bought a Volkswagen microbus for the company. Joe's was open but said it...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 PM
December 19, 2011
Let me tell you, spare, door-sized black & white prints in screen-like triptychs are not what I think of when I hear "Carlo Mollino" and "photography." [Google search possibly nsfw] But Becky Beasley's show "The Outside," at Francesca Minini...
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Posted by greg at
9:26 PM
[l to r] Viola Farber, Bruce King, Remy Charlip, Carolyn Brown & Merce Cunningham performing Nocturnes in 1956. photo CDF/Louis A. Stevenson, Jr. via the estate project Remy Charlip was an early collaborator in Merce Cunningham's orbit. Years before...
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Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
December 17, 2011
John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg photographed in 1960 by Richard Avedon In a few days, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform for the last time. I have not been a close follower of Cunningham's work, except...
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Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
While I was painting today, I first listened to a slightly underwhelming Q&A from MIT with Otto Piene and Hans Haacke, which was short, and so my iTunes started shuffling, which never happens. I don't really listen to music,...
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Posted by greg at
4:01 PM
While moving some art around this week, I found a bag of acrylics I bought early last year, when I planned to paint the Dutch camo landscapes. Trying to figure out how to do it led me to start...
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Posted by greg at
2:10 PM
Since I appear to only be able to find the time bandwidth to paint on the weekend, sometime I might have to investigate terms that already haunt me anyway, like "weekend painter." At least I'm not painting on Sunday,...
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Posted by greg at
2:01 PM
December 14, 2011
OK, here are some more details about how the crazy-awesome synthesizer/lightboard came together in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, courtesy of Ray Morton's 2007 book on the making of the film. Maybe not surprisingly, it grew and evolved along...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
I'm really bummed to have missed The Gifting of Bill Walton's Studio on December 4th, the extraordinary culmination of the ICA Philadelphia's memorial recreation/exhibit of the late local master's crowded workplace. As ICA blogger/curator Rachel Pastan tells it, the...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
This is so awesome. I know there's no sound, but it seems like I can hear all those reality TV show team members' hearts beating. [Michael David Murphy via waxy]...
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Posted by greg at
10:11 AM
December 12, 2011
I don't know what, if anything, these mean, but these two stories last week made me wonder about the relationship of art and politics and Washington DC as viewed from a political/media perspective. First up, and most disturbing, was the...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 PM
The new issue of Public Art Dialogue is out--as you know, right?--and it includes an article by Drake University art historian Maura Lyons that looks at how Disney, photography, and Ken Burns altered the Gettysburg National Military Park. In the...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
Here is a PBS Newshour Q&A with Steven Tepper, discussing his research into why art--or the arts, really, since he looks at theater, libraries, music, too--triggers protests in some communities at some times and not others. He found that...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
December 10, 2011
"Season 3, Episode 3: 'Golden Anniversary'" This is epic. Painting the key sweaters of The Cosby Show, one episode at a time, in chronological order. Which is awesome, not because it charts the evolution of the Cosby Sweater; any...
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Posted by greg at
8:34 PM
December 9, 2011
BELLMAC-32A Layout in the Ball Labs, Murray Hill Lobby, image: ieeeghn.org Look closely, at least until I can track down a larger version of this snapshot. Because it may be the world's largest plotter pen drawing. It's a 20x20-foot...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
December 8, 2011
A few months ago, I was asked to write something about Ray and Charles Eames by the folks at Humanities Magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH had provided some funding to Jason Cohn and...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
Here's video of James Bridle giving a live, keynote speech version of his awesome tumblr, The New Aesthetic, at a web conference in Australia. Lots of good stuff, though not much that will be new to TNA followers. There are...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
December 7, 2011
Here's another recipe from John Cage, this one maybe from a stay in Ithaca? Before he went vegan, obviously. From Empty words: writings '73-'78, p. 91:Holiday Inn: Room 135. Four cups of ground walnuts; 4 cups of flour; 12 tablespoons...
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Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
December 6, 2011
We took the family to Hillwood over the holidays. It's Marjorie Merriweather Post's house-turned-house museum, and it's kind of bizarre, frankly. Not seriously wack, but just a low-grade oddness which, who knows, maybe the passage of time and the accretion...
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Posted by greg at
11:17 PM
A little while ago, I got an email from LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, asking if it was alright to reference some photos I took a few years ago of unusually awesome modernist houses in Salt Lake City. She planned...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
December 5, 2011
The new issue of Cabinet arrived today [free with my new iPad case!], and it includes a fascinating article by Susan Schuppli about the 18 1/2-minutes of erased audiotape at the center of the Watergate scandal. Apparently, the National Archives...
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Posted by greg at
9:36 PM
December 2, 2011
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross posted this extraordinary video of Philip Glass and the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly outside Lincoln Center, where the Metropolitan Opera performed Satyagraha, the composer's 2008 production of his 1980 telling of the...
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Posted by greg at
2:00 PM
December 1, 2011
Whether you're sitting at home, poking at your remote to stretch, squash, and crop your Criterion movies; or preparing a video group show in Miami, Electronic Arts Intermix's High Definition Video Guide is an indispensable source of basic technical information:If...
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Posted by greg at
12:04 AM
November 29, 2011
Sebastian Errazuriz came up with the idea for his coke slab when he saw friends scratching out lines on a coffee table. The indentations make it so easy, a child could do it! It's so functional and brilliant, I'm...
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Posted by greg at
5:13 PM
November 27, 2011
One of the startling images Alan Taylor included from the EPA's DOCUMERICA collection is by Bruce McAllister. The caption:A train on the Southern Pacific Railroad passes a five-acre pond, which was used as a dump site by area commercial...
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Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
November 26, 2011
Following on from the multiple installments of archival World War II images on hisphotoblog In Focus, Alan Taylor has assembled selections from another remarkable public photo archive, this time from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the early 1970s, the newly...
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Posted by greg at
5:41 PM
November 25, 2011
In what is probably the most ideologically analytical essay ever written about paperweights, curator Barbara Casavecchia notes that many of the 60 paperweights she selected from Enzo Mari's collection "are the product of a manual labor--serving as fragmented evidence of...
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Posted by greg at
6:16 AM
November 23, 2011
(K-2-28) This is the first of our United States, Department of Commerce, Trade Fair domes. It was erected in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1957. The U.S. Department of Commerce came to me in an emergency and with a very small...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 PM
November 22, 2011
Apparently, as a state-of-the-art battleship in the US Navy during the 1920s, the USS Maryland was "in great demand for special occasions." Which might give a hint about why she was tricked out at some point in these dazzling...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
image via artreview Oh, man, oh, man. I think this clears up a lot. Finally, here is a quote that gives some insight on Rirkrit Tiravanija's approach to art objects and object-making. The artist is discussing the making of...
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Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
Looking through Social Photography II, Carriage Trade's second Phone Camera benefit auction, I find this photo by Sarina Basta, Zapata Headquarters, Cuernavaca, and I'm like, Zapata? I swear, I've seen this before. But not quite. In the Diego Rivera murals...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
I'm sure the original's long gone, but I want the Moog synthesizer-equipped lightboard from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The idea of communicating with extraterrestrials via "a basic tonal vocabulary" synched to a gridded light show is like...
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Posted by greg at
9:00 AM
November 19, 2011
Theoretically, I can get the prep and sanding and tacking and painting of a new coat, and the cleanup, and a bit of documentation, done in a little over an hour now. But I also find it takes a...
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Posted by greg at
12:33 PM
November 18, 2011
gerhard richter, blood red mirror, cr736-3, 1991, image via gerhard-richter.com via jenettem's twitter/tumblr to cavetocanvas's tumblr You see the problem: this is exactly the effect I'm trying to get with my Rijksoverheid Rood paintings. Only with a brush. I...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 PM
November 17, 2011
I confess, I haven't checked out Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds since the Terraserver era. But I just checked them out again on Google Maps, and I've gotta say: China has taken the lead in the awesome, Earth Art-like, military industrial...
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Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
November 16, 2011
Byron Kim, Untitled (for S.B.), image via jamescohan.com Byron Kim's first show at James Cohan consists of large, nearly monochromatic paintings of the night sky in Brooklyn. Or perhaps they're of memories of the night sky in Brooklyn, or...
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Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
There are so many fascinating things about the Gene Davis Giveaway, I almost don't know where to start. And I'm embarrassed to not have known about it sooner. Gene Davis Giveaway, or Give Away, or as it was called...
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Posted by greg at
7:27 AM
November 15, 2011
Gotta hand it to the Bloomberg Administration: scheduling the expulsion of the Occupy Wall Street protesters for the middle of the night, and then arresting and beating and harassing journalists covering the raid, thereby minimizing--but apparently not eliminating entirely--the...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
November 14, 2011
How Ya Like Me Now?, a large painting of a white Jesse Jackson by David Hammons, was one of seven outdoor works in "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," an ambitious exhibition organized in the Fall of 1989...
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Posted by greg at
12:39 PM
These two quotes from Coco Fusco and Christian Haye's 1995 Frieze essays on David Hammons reminded me briefly of, say, gala artists and, say, Jacob Kassay, respectively:'Visual art may be the obdurately white and upper-middle class field of our culture....
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Posted by greg at
8:17 AM
November 13, 2011
OOPS! Never mind! In my dead-serious indignation, I had completely overlooked the potential of Marina Abramovic's MoCA Gala for pathetic comedy. Fortunately, we have Ryan Trecartin, who speaks diva absurdity fluently. Trecartin's livetweeted photo report from inside the tent is...
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Posted by greg at
7:32 PM
November 12, 2011
At the invitation of Jeffrey Deitch, Yvonne Rainer has seen a rehearsal of Marina Abramovic's performance art project for this year's MoCA Los Angeles gala. And in a new letter to Deitch, she has refined and reiterated her condemnation of...
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Posted by greg at
3:36 PM
November 11, 2011
Insurrection, 1962, image: corcoran.org I needed to see some hard-to-find Chris Burden catalogues--more on that later, but soon--and the quickest place I could find them was the Corcoran School's library. I called ahead, and they had them waiting for...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
November 10, 2011
You'd think I'd learn the importance of clearing browser tabs by now. I've had this eBay listing open for a couple of weeks now, thinking I'd buy it. And then last night I decided to pull the trigger. And...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
November 7, 2011
In 2005, designer Ian Adelman and his colleagues spotted The Gate chasing Robert Smithson's posthumously realized Floating Island. Adelman snapped a photo, which ended up on the front page of the New York Times. It was only revealed some...
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Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
Paul Thek's birthday was last week, so I probably should have posted this photo of his re-creation of Tatlin's Monument to the Third International then. Thek installed this version of his Tower of Babel at his only US museum...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
Not sure what's cooler about JWZ's post about visiting the repurposed Christian Science church that is now The Internet Archive's San Franscisco Mothership: their slick and simple book digitizing station setup, or the "terracotta army of avatars of their long-term...
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Posted by greg at
9:41 AM
Sweet, near the end of World War I, Paris planned and began construction on a "Sham Paris," decoy trains, stations, avenues and factories, to confuse German aerial bombers. Above, a detail from the photo, "Luminous canvas on the ground...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
November 6, 2011
I count it as a matter of pride and oddly satisfying accomplishment to learn I'd been thinking some of the same things about the International Prototype Kilogram that Charles Ray was thinking about the International Prototype Kilogram. Picture Piece:...
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Posted by greg at
4:47 PM
November 5, 2011
The classic saying, so closely associated with the conservative icon economist Milton Friedman, just sort of came out last night during a brief Twitter discussion with Bill Powhida and Magda Sawon about what, exactly, my point is on Rirkrit...
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Posted by greg at
11:47 PM
November 4, 2011
For he that hath eyes and was paying attention last year, The Selby let him see. For the rest of us, the show at Sperone Westwater is the first time to see Tom Sachs' awesome Donald Judd furniture hacked...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
Thanks to Awl for reminding me that not everyone is not talking about Rirkrit Tiravanija's sexy, blingy objects. I'd found this last week, but it was crashing my browser, and it may do the same to yours, probably because it's...
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Posted by greg at
5:29 PM
November 3, 2011
I've tweeted on this a bit already, but it's really worth repeating: Richard Prince's appeal of the Patrick Cariou copyright infringement decision is a really great read. The brief was filed last week, and I finally got around to...
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Posted by greg at
12:34 PM
November 2, 2011
Punishment Park? How did I not know about Peter Watkins' incendiary 1971, anti-war, anti-fascist, faux-news documentary? I mean, it was the movie Rirkrit chose to broadcast on his unlicensed TV station in the Guggenheim. I sat in Anthology's rickety...
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Posted by greg at
3:07 PM
November 1, 2011
Just this morning, while I was watching Sarah Sze's 2010 lecture at the Smtihsonian American Art Museum, and she was showing videos of her installations for the first time [borrowed, with permission, she said, from various YouTube users, which is...
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Posted by greg at
1:49 PM
October 31, 2011
Razzle dazzle camouflage painting was not, as the photographs would have you believe, entirely black and white. [For that matter, neither was WWI itself, but that is a matter for another day.] In any case, British camoufleur Norman Wilkinson...
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Posted by greg at
11:19 PM
I love a lot of Jason Rhoades' work, but only have a little. I wish I'd known about this sooner: Blue Room and Love Seat is an edition produced with 1301PE's Brian Butler in 1995, maybe when it was still...
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Posted by greg at
10:27 PM
A piece I left out of my Rirkrit's blingy objects post yesterday may be more important than I originally thought, and for more reasons than its shininess. Untitled 2005 (the air between the chain-link fence and the broken bicycle...
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Posted by greg at
6:27 PM
October 30, 2011
I've been writing this post in my head for months, years, even, but so many pieces have piled up in my browser tabs, it's slowing my computer down. And plus, this weekend MoMA announced that they acquired and will exhibit...
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Posted by greg at
3:40 PM
October 27, 2011
I'm so blown away by this. RO/LU's and welcomeprojects' project for this year's High Desert Test Sites was called Here There, There Here. To call it a contemporary nod to earthworks almost feels backward; it's like the earthworks movement...
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Posted by greg at
10:48 PM
October 26, 2011
Well that's kind of fantastic, like Victorian- era Rauschenberg. Apparently, to commemorate Her Majesty the Queen's to the Isle of Jersey, The Jersey Herald printed copies of the September 11, 1846 edition of the newspaper on silk panels, which were...
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Posted by greg at
11:18 AM
Huh. I guess Artforum's back-of-the-book review section does not purport to ignore the art market's overdetermining forces any more. Ben Carlson's review of Jacob Kassay's show this summer at L&M Arts in Los Angeles is framed around the burning...
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Posted by greg at
9:30 AM
October 23, 2011
Joie de Vivre, Mark di Suvero, Zuccotti Park, detail of image via ourtravelpics.com Or maybe #OccupyJoiedeVivre, then? Either way, please tell me I'm not the first or only one to think of this. Actually, please tell me someone's already...
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Posted by greg at
3:08 PM
October 21, 2011
See, this is why I wonder about whether Gerhard Richter, "shocked" by seeing Edward Steichen's MoMA exhibit Family of Man in West Berlin in 1955 while he was a student, ever went on to research Steichen's earlier photography exhibitions,...
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Posted by greg at
12:48 PM
The Tate video of Nic Serota and his team in Gerhard Richter's studio is nice for many reasons: it includes some squeegee action scenes from Corrina Belz's Gerhard Richter Painting [which I'm trying to get a copy of; Is...
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Posted by greg at
9:55 AM
October 20, 2011
I'm sure photomural historians out there are chuckling, wondering when I was finally going to catch up on this, but HOLY CRAP, PEOPLE! ANSEL ADAMS PHOTO MURALS! Alright, it's not quite so unknown. The Polaroid ransacking auction last year at...
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Posted by greg at
7:33 PM
October 15, 2011
Via Wayne Bremser comes this nice interview with Doug Rickard, who talks about his Google Street View photo project, A New American Picture. Rickard is in HERE, an exhibit of at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. [Bremser's notes...
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Posted by greg at
5:11 PM
October 14, 2011
ce ci n'est pas un Razzle Dazzle? Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Meschers, 1951, moma When tiny scans of Gwyneth Paltrow's Interview interview with Ellsworth Kelly first appeared on tumblr, the only thing you could read was his pullquote about...
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Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
October 13, 2011
Hoo man, David has an interview with Ball and Nogue about their High Desert Test Site project which is called Yucca Crater, and which appears to be an earthwork, but is man-made. It's a tricked out plywood recreational structure...
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Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
Karen Meyerhoff, Managing Director of Business Development at the Guggenheim Museum, and my new hero:People come to an art museum in part to be inspired by the works of art on view there. And we develop an emotional relationship with...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
October 12, 2011
This is pretty awesome. Or it was, for the second there when I first saw the thumbnail in the lot list and thought Maurizio was channeling Baldessari or Prince or whomever. It'd still make a nice painting, though. And it...
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Posted by greg at
4:37 PM
October 11, 2011
It's all in the book, so you could definitely buy it and read about it in depth, but it didn't occur to me until Brian Dupont tweeted about it ["Aspen : #OccupyWallSt :: St. Barts : Canal Zone. Every apocalypse...
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Posted by greg at
5:56 PM
Ever since Wired's article on the history of the International Prototype Kilogram, or Le Grand K, and the debate over its replacement, I've been thinking I'd write something about them again. So I went back to reread my 2009 post...
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Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
You know, for a couple of weeks now, I've had this thing Bomb Magazine tumbld sitting in my browser, some teaser for their archive about Richard Serra dangling a chicken in Rauschenberg's face at Yale, which, of course, he did,...
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Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
October 10, 2011
From the Frieze blog, the Goldsmiths brain trust answers the burning question, "How to get to Turbine Hall"?:'Eleven Statements Around Art Writing' is co-authored by the teaching team -Maria Fusco, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin and Yve Lomax - of MFA...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
I now know that the bubbles sand right out. But what I learned this time is the importance of checking to see if you missed any spots in your smooth, monochrome surfaces before you clean up your brush and...
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Posted by greg at
10:57 PM
I was very saddened to learn that the great designer John Neuhart passed away last month. He and his wife and fellow designer Marilyn were early and influential colleagues of Ray and Charles Eames, and have been heavily involved...
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Posted by greg at
5:53 PM
If I've accomplished little else with my grandiose ambitions for my satelloon fetish, it has at least turned me into several people's go-to guy for odd projects involving shiny balls and/or large amounts of Mylar. So thanks Michael Dumontier...
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Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
October 6, 2011
I'm bummed to miss it but "While You Wait," a group show organized by Brian Dupont in Extra Gallery, his Chelsea art firm's expropriated lobby is opening right now. [Spoiler alert on the venue's lobbyness? I can't quite tell,...
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Posted by greg at
5:51 PM
October 5, 2011
At MoMA yesterday, I was talking about some Google Maps and Street View projects with a trustee, who was all, "There's an artist in the New Photography show that uses Google Maps, they're stunning!" And it only occurred to...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
So I got the piece installed last night for "While You Wait...", organized by Brian Dupont. It really only works in the daylight, so I won't know yet how it actually looks, but it went in just as I...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
For the record, I think a press conference is a pretty suboptimal forum for discussing art, even worse than for discussing film. So while I was first leaning towards laughing at Gerhard Richter's apparently gruff, uselessly short-for-a-sound-bite answers at yesterday's...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
October 4, 2011
Holy smokes, The Brooklyn Rail reviewed Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta:Appropriation art is such an accepted part of the contemporary vernacular that some already find it passé--or at the very least no longer trendy. Gagosian isn't exactly at the...
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Posted by greg at
6:51 AM
October 3, 2011
This interior shot of Fuller/Sadao's US Pavilion at Expo67 almost has it all: installation view of the giant paintings Lichtenstein, Newman, Warhol and Johns made for Alan Solomon's American Painting Now; plus a giant photomural of the moon, perfect...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
I'll probably write some more about Andy Warhol's Shadows, but I want to find more details about its creation and Heiner Friedrich's involvement. In the mean time, though, I just came across a 1985 Richard Serra quote from the Pratt...
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Posted by greg at
7:18 AM
October 1, 2011
Here's a look I'm calling Red Steel. The other side. These stalactites form after the panels are put away to dry, I guess by the paint settling across the surface. Then I have to sand them down before doing the...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
September 30, 2011
Well, let's just get this out of the way: if you can only see one Warhol exhibition in Washington this year, see Shadows. The Warhol Headlines show is very slight. It's hard to call it a highlight, but a series...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
I-- hmm:Pointing out that the museum's difficulties in importing art duty free have arisen out of the present tariff law's definition of art, Mr Packard said that it was not the function of government to define art "any more than...
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Posted by greg at
9:03 AM
Kriston Capps' tweet to Powhida about art and immortality instantly reminded me of RH Quaytman's conversation with Steel Stillman, which ran in Art in America last summer, and which upended my own comfortable memory of first encountering Quaytman's little...
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Posted by greg at
7:38 AM
September 29, 2011
Mondo Patrick tipped me off to this a little while back, and for a while there, it was kind of turning my table world upside-down. It's an autoprogettazione table by Enzo Mari, of course, model 1123 xE, one of...
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Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
The story of Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space getting hung up at US Customs in 1926, which did not believe it was a work of art, is well-known. [Just for fun, here's a story about Richard Feigen smuggling a Brancusi...
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Posted by greg at
10:48 AM
September 28, 2011
"K32 HMS Helsingborg Anchored off Gotska Sandoen, cropped," wikipedia via tna Every time I go back to James Bridle's tumblr The New Aesthetic, I'm like, "The New Aesthetic! I'm soaking in it!" and remind myself to visit more often....
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Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
Gerhard Richter: Peinture 2010-2011, installation view, Marian Goodman Paris, image via Yes, well. While everyone is transfixed with Gerhard Richter's c. 2009 on-camera squeegee technique, the artist himself has moved on to a schmear of the digital kind. Gerhard...
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Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
September 27, 2011
I was stoked to see [thanks to Paul's link from the Walker's Off Center] that Trevor Paglen included Murmurs of Earth on the reading list he shared with art21. The book is the authoritative account of the making of...
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Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
Sometimes I really just am slow to put things together. I mean, I've written at length, ad nauseam, even, about the history of Mark Cross. Mondo-Blogo had a huge post months ago about what Superfreaks they are. There's the...
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Posted by greg at
10:58 AM
September 26, 2011
I need a way to put the people in my Twitter feed in touch with each other. Because what are we fighting for, if not the right to all 50 flavors of Doritos?...
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Posted by greg at
5:10 PM
No disrespect for DPC and whoever else he sends off with The Digital, but Jill Krementz' photoreport from the Picasso to Koons: Artist as Jeweler show at the Museum of Arts and Design, or the MAD1 is the mad-funniest...
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Posted by greg at
1:42 PM
San Francisco collector Harry "Hunk" Anderson's 1973 letter to Leo Castelli is now in the Archives of American Art. I am going to take a wild guess and say that his awesome letterhead was designed by his good friend...
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Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
September 22, 2011
In her post about how her Mario Kart reflexes started cropping up while she was driving a real car, Sally Adee introduced me to a new term, "everting," which William Gibson introduced in his 2007 novel, Spook Country, and which...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
September 21, 2011
Rirkrit Tiravanija, ink on paper, shown at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Nov-Dec 2008 as part of JG Reads, image: detail of a shot by James Nova from the opening. j-No has more images of two other dollar bill drawings....
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Posted by greg at
7:44 PM
September 20, 2011
Spectrum IV, 1967, image via moma Amazing how you can look at something so often, for so long, how you can like it, seek it out, even, follow it, poke around the awesome/odd parts, all without really realizing what...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
For his performance/project The Long Glance, Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan VanDyke spent 40 hours standing in front of and looking at Jackson Pollock's painting Convergence, 1952 at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. He carried this out over the course of...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
September 19, 2011
As those who kindly email me about run-on italics--and those who don't--know, I don't actually visit this site site as often as I probably should. Which is part of the reason I didn't notice until just now this nice side-by-side...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
Cady Noland's Tanya as Bandit, 1989, General Idea, and Guerrilla Girls at MoMA, 2010, image via greeds Welcome to another installment of Things I've Been Meaning To Post For Months. Only this time, the longer I wait, the more...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
September 16, 2011
Once again, I'm getting burned for procrastinating on a project. And once again, I'm forced to reckon with how susceptible we are to the illusion a company can create of cultural stability and reliability, even as it constantly effects changes...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 PM
September 15, 2011
Gotta get a piece of that Gerhard Richter Painting. After completing a documentary about the artist's Cologne Cathedral stained glass windows in 2007, filmmaker Corinna Belz began working on another project, filming Richter at work in his studio. She...
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Posted by greg at
11:32 PM
image: nymag The awesomeness of David Byrne's giant, inflatable globe shoved under the High Line gives us a good chance to look back. To remember David Byrne's pioneering show of PowerPoint Art at Pace in 2003. And also to...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
September 13, 2011
When is a Flavin not a Flavin? Lot 3 in the upcoming contemporary sale at Christie's London is a work by Dan Flavin, or at least part of one. Untitled (to Marianne II) is a signed diagram for a...
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Posted by greg at
11:52 AM
September 10, 2011
My Suitor, Matt Connors, image: vwberlin FInally, images of Matt Connors' show, Line Breaks, which just opened at VeneKlasen Werner in Berlin. I've slowly/recently come to find his work rather captivating, and after he posted a teaser image or...
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Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
It was the other night, while Googling around for Tris Vonna-Michell info, that I found my way back to Carefully Aimed Darts, an awesome art-related weblog which went dormant about a year and a half ago. And I remembered...
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Posted by greg at
10:12 PM
September 9, 2011
"You cannot imagine how happy I was to read your email." That was the almost-immediate reply to my request to stop by MoMA's Painting & Sculpture department to discuss Vern Blosum and to review the collection file for Time Expired,...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
So, my mind is kind of blowing because Vern Blosum is in a show opening tomorrow. Blosum's work was included in some of the very first exhibitions of Pop Art in the early 1960s. His deadpan paintings of objects...
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Posted by greg at
12:24 PM
September 6, 2011
So you should really read Daniel Kasman's review of the Venice debut of Mark Lewis's awesome-sounding short film, Black MIrror At The National Gallery, because Kasman is sensitive to both the tone and surprise/reveal of the film in a...
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Posted by greg at
12:58 PM
September 5, 2011
Another inadvertent Google find, also from the World War II School of propaganda art. In anticipation for an invasion of Japan, 1945 LIFE Magazine wanted to give the general public a fighter pilot's-eye view of ground attacks. Perhaps because...
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Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
Instead of jumping to the first search result, Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button should go to something tangentially related but certifiably awesome and probably better than what you were looking for in the first place. For the first datapoint...
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Posted by greg at
12:02 PM
September 3, 2011
So. Found the local Pantone shop and brought home a liter of Hollandlac oil-based enamel in Rijksoverheid Rood, aka PMS 485c. Ordered some small galvannealed steel and white aluminum panels, both paint-ready, and cut as close to A4 as...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
September 2, 2011
Between 1981 and 1985, Paul Tschinkel and Marc H. Miller produced 17 episodes of ART/newyork, a subscription-based video magazine about contemporary art for use, incredibly, in public schools and libraries. Their 1982 interview with Richard Serra, a Yale classmate of...
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Posted by greg at
1:30 PM
I am aware of the work of Pablo Neruda Gerhard Richter. I have not been reading Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007 straight through, of course, but it's been with me a lot lately. And it's kind of annoyed me that there...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 AM
September 1, 2011
Chiang Mai farmer/laborer Lung Neaw has worked with RIrkrit Tiravanija for several years now. He helped build the artist's house. Tiravanija's footage of him has appeared in various gallery and museum installations. And Saturday, Tiravanija's film, Lung Neaw Visits...
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Posted by greg at
10:58 PM
August 31, 2011
So lately, I've been thinking a lot about The Dutch, and their politics and art. The Rijkshuisstijl and 1 Logo Project, which redesigned and centralized the Dutch government's visual identity, which happened to coincide with political shifts to the...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 PM
Sam Thorne in this Summer's Frieze looks at writers writing about looking at fictional art. He includes the hero [sic] of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the post-poststructuralist filmmaker James O. Incandenza, whose lost masterpiece gives the novel its title:Incandenza...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
August 30, 2011
I was intrigued by Roy Lichtenstein's Prop For A Film when it showed up last summer at Phillips in London. Obviously, the main thing was the work itself: a large [3.5 x 8 ft] abstract, shaped field of Ben-Day...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
August 26, 2011
People walking the city streets with made-on-the-spot chairs. First there was the Chaise Bordelaise. Then it was the Sedia Veneziana. And yet, though The Generator by Raumlabor has had two incarnations at Storefront for Art & Architecture this year,...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
image: designboom Enzo Mari was brought in to design the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Vaudon-Vodun, African Voodoo Art from the Collection of Anne and Jacques Kerchache. It's simple and spectacular, and designboom has, as usual, rather comprehensive visual...
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Posted by greg at
12:10 PM
August 22, 2011
Oh brother, I have this giant post mostly written about how Leo Steinberg's awesome 1997 lecture Encounters With Rauschenberg includes all these references that show that, not only did he recognize the intimate interrelationships between Johns' and Rauschenberg's early...
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Posted by greg at
3:26 PM
August 19, 2011
The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security on the government's deployment of body scanner technology on streets and in roving vans. These are the three pages of the...
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Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
August 18, 2011
Via Tyler Green comes another awesome installment of Alan Taylor's photoblogging journey through WWII for The Atlantic. This time, a selection of stunning Kodachrome transparencies made by the Office of War Information, selected from the Library of Congress's growing digitized...
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Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
Fear not, I have not given up the search for the missing Jasper Johns Flag painting. The one which was in Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine, Short Circuit, a combine which was originally shown with the title, Construction with J.J. Flag....
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Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
August 16, 2011
So wonderful. William Smith writes about visiting Robert Breer's home studio as part of Triple Canopy's publication in residency last Winter at MOCA Tucson. Which sounds like the awesomest boondoggle ever, btw: Breer famously composed most of his films one...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
The backlog around here is so big, I was joking with a friend this morning that I should rename the blog, "Things I've Been Meaning To Write About." But for some reason, I can't let another day go by...
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Posted by greg at
7:59 PM
August 15, 2011
I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated with the Netherlands, or more precisely, why it's the source/site/subject of so much of my art/object/image/culture interest. Maybe it's because of New York, which has always felt to me of a piece with...
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Posted by greg at
1:15 PM
August 14, 2011
I've had Michelle Kuo's interview with Robert Breer [artforum, nov 2010] open in my browser tabs for months now, ever since Steve Roden posted about his incredible little toy Float, which was sold at MoMA's gift shop in 1970,...
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Posted by greg at
7:41 PM
Everyone was so hyped up about the extraordinary, long New Yorker feature detailing the hunting and killing of Osama Bin Laden, that well, obviously, I couldn't post about it at the time. But I was so pissed at Helmut Lang...
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Posted by greg at
1:18 PM
August 12, 2011
image: portlandart.net I confess, I was as taken as the next guy by the Shiny Object-ivity of Jacob Kassay's electroplated solo debut at Eleven Rivington in 2009. Next guys like Portland Art's Jeff Jahn, who wrote the show felt...
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Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
August 3, 2011
Busy? Oh, yes! But never too busy to turn someone else's PDF into an artist book! When @borthwick tweeted this yesterday morning about "a spectacular calibration failure at Google Books" where "Beautiful, digital errors become art," I knew I'd have...
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Posted by greg at
12:19 AM
July 31, 2011
image: the legacy photo project Where'd I get this link to The Great Picture, the world's biggest photograph taken with the world's biggest camera? In 2006, a group of photographers working as part of The Legacy Project, which is...
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Posted by greg at
9:42 PM
July 30, 2011
Robert Smithson, "Conversation in Salt Lake City," 1972:There's a word called entropy. These are kind of like entropic situations that hold themselves together. It's like the Spiral Jetty is physical enough to be able to withstand all these climate changes,...
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Posted by greg at
3:16 PM
July 29, 2011
In the early Cold War of the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union countered American condemnation of its repressive actions in East Germany and Hungary with criticism of the US's internal policies of segregation and racial discrimination. Planners of the US...
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Posted by greg at
12:19 AM
July 27, 2011
What's the opposite of writer's block, the thing where you have so much damn good stuff to write about, you're paralyzed into inaction? Because that's what I've got, and August vacation voids or not, I just can't help it;...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
July 26, 2011
I'm looking into ways to paint on aluminum, and so I've come back to Gerhard Richter's 4900 Farben, which is made up of 196 Alu-dibond panels, each with 25 lacquered [aluminum?] squares mounted onto them. Whatever the exact process, they...
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Posted by greg at
9:31 PM
July 25, 2011
In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, 1961 I'm long overdue for updates on the search for the Jasper Johns Flag Painting that went missing from Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine, Short Circuit. I'll get to them...
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Posted by greg at
12:27 AM
July 16, 2011
Mirror Stratum, 1966, Robert Smithson, image via moma Robert Smithson's Mirror Stratum is a longtime favorite of mine. These crystalline and strata sculptures are like abstracted geological or topographical structures, which is awesome enough. But these mirror [there's at...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
July 14, 2011
The short answer is yes, Dave Hickey's writing was even more off-the-wall in the Seventies, and you really might just as well scroll straight down to the song. Otherwise, I just brought home a stack of old Art In Americas,...
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Posted by greg at
12:26 AM
July 13, 2011
Underlying [literally] this whole Spiral Jetty situation is the fact that Smithson constructed the Jetty on so-called sovereign land, the land under a body of water--in this case, Great Salt Lake--that is claimed by the state under Public Trust doctrine....
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Posted by greg at
12:46 AM
July 10, 2011
As you might expect, I've been going deep into the history and context of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty lately. I'm in Salt Lake City right now, meeting folks and listening and trying to gather some firsthand perspectives on the issues...
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Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
July 7, 2011
I've begun speaking to enough people on the ground that it wouldn't have gone unnoticed for much longer, but now word's got out that I've established a foundation to bid on the site of Robert Smtihson's Spiral Jetty, a...
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Posted by greg at
3:45 PM
July 6, 2011
In the Spring of 1991, I was about nine months out of school, and six months into a new job. After striking up a conversation with a documentary film crew from NHK at Tennessee Mountain in SoHo, I'd bailed on...
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Posted by greg at
7:07 AM
July 5, 2011
Add Jonathan Monk to the list of artist Enzo Mari fans. For the Brussels gallery D&A Lab's show at Design Miami Basel Miami Wynwood Art Week Whatever Fair last month, Monk created Mari Thirteen, an edition of Mari's autoprogettazione...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 PM
July 4, 2011
I have no willpower. I was going to hold off posting about this incredible project found on an incredible blog until I happily scored the book, but I couldn't wait. Now I can only hope that my post will...
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Posted by greg at
3:11 PM
Doug Rickard, Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, 2008, "A New American Picture," via bremser Thanks to Joerg, I've had it in my browser tabs for almost a month now, meaning to write about it, but the TL;DR version is, Wayne Bremser's...
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
July 1, 2011
In May, Steve Roden wrote very nicely about Fionn Meade's "Time Again" show at Sculpture Center, especially the conversation between one of his paintings and a little-known photograph of Projecktion, a Blinky Palermo project from in 1971, in which...
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Posted by greg at
9:07 AM
June 30, 2011
As I mentioned the other day, I've been going through our storage space, getting these time capsule-like pops of memory from old files and boxes and stuff. One of the more unexpectedly unexpected encounters: print photos. I just don't have...
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Posted by greg at
9:21 AM
June 27, 2011
We're consolidating storage spaces between New York and Washington, and it's given me a chance to reorganize a bit. I found a couple of boxes my 1994 self apparently just threw stuff into, sealed up, and shipped off, almost...
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Posted by greg at
5:30 PM
Meridith Pingree ----- Blue Curtain Meridith Pingree's in a show right now at Freight + Volume. Thanks, Anaba for the heads up on this fascinating-looking work. It reminds me a bit of Rebecca Horn's work, which, frankly, I haven't seen...
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
June 26, 2011
The near-universal consensus from the VIP opening was that the Italian Pavilion exhibition curated by art critic/Berlusconi apparatchik Vittorio Sgarbi was an unalloyed, over-politicized disaster. Yet so far, I have seen very little substantive criticism or engagement with it. Rome-based...
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Posted by greg at
2:41 PM
June 22, 2011
Robert Rauschenberg's massive 1970 silk screen edition, Currents sure is hard to miss. And not just because it's 18 meters long. MoMA's copy from the edition [of just six] has been wrapped around the corner of the second floor galleries...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 PM
Ro/Lu is en fuego these days, in case you didn't know, and I've been lucky enough to get warmed by their fire. First off, they've been doing this Simple Chair project, an exploration of how and where our stuff is...
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Posted by greg at
10:06 PM
Last year about this time, after seeing Jeff Koons's BMW Art Car, I tossed off the idea that artists could be cranking out vinyl wraps as artworks. Which I will happily assume is why designboom and Porsche had this contest...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
June 20, 2011
After hipster bouncy castles and food truck happy hours, and shuffling like giddy commuters along a packed, 10-block-long sidewalk the size of a lesser tunnel passageway at Penn Station, I was forced the other night to contemplate the cheery,...
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Posted by greg at
8:06 AM
June 19, 2011
I've been moving art and life at our storage unit in Long Island City several times the last couple of weeks, and it's given me time to really look. Look across the water to the most spectacular structures built...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 PM
I'm always thinking of the Danish artist collaborative Superflex in terms of media or information, action or activism. But they sure can make some fine-looking, seemingly commodifiable art objects, too. A few years ago, as part of their Copyshop...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
June 18, 2011
Away | Out, 2010, Seth Adeslberger via Seth Adelsberger's evocation of Erased de Kooning Drawing in this work on found paper manages to be both calculated and offhand. It was one of my favorites in "Out of Practice," Baltimore...
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Posted by greg at
8:56 AM
June 15, 2011
So when I first published the Richard Prince Canal Zone YES RASTA book in March, I got some nice responses from people, including a couple of folks who suggested I look at joining ABC, the Artists' Book Co-operative. ABC is...
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Posted by greg at
10:29 PM
As part of their project Caché-Exposé, investigating the Netherlands' largely invisible detention and deportation system, the Amsterdam art & design collaborative Foundland documented obscure, anonymous detention sites around the country. Then they used a highly official, public system to...
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Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
June 14, 2011
I finally made it down to City Hall Park to see the Public Art Fund's installation of Sol Lewitt structures. Which, first or now, you must watch the discussion of working with Lewitt at the New School. Go ahead,...
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Posted by greg at
7:13 AM
June 13, 2011
I love it when a plan comes together. Or at least when several subjects of interest converge unexpectedly. It seems the Dutch art world is about to be decimated by sudden and substantial government funding cuts and reorganizations. [for angry...
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Posted by greg at
1:04 PM
June 9, 2011
Short Circuit, Robert Rauschenberg, et al, via the estate/VAGA I always [well, for a weekend or two last December, anyway] figured I'd find the original Jasper Johns flag painting that was inside Rauschenberg's Short Circuit before the Combine was...
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Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
June 8, 2011
Holy smokes, this is like something out of Land Art Kafka. Tyler Green points to a just-published report by the Salt Lake Tribune's Glen Warchol: the Utah Department of Natural Resources is claiming the Dia Foundation's 20-year lease on the...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 PM
I found a beautiful and odd book the other day, Reflections: The Story of Water Pictures, published in 1936 by Marion Thayer MacMillan. While vacationing in the Indian territories surrounding Georgian Bay on Lake Ontario, soon after the end...
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Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
June 7, 2011
Erased de Kooning Drawing as of 1999 at SFMOMA When we last left Erased de Kooning Drawing, the late, great Leo Steinberg had finally told his story about getting Rauschenberg on the phone in 1957 in order to sort...
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Posted by greg at
9:38 PM
June 6, 2011
Looking back at some of the other projects of FREE SOL LEWITT co-curator Daniel McClean, I have basically concluded that we have been walking in a weird parallel in the art world for ten-plus years, without ever actually meeting....
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Posted by greg at
8:48 PM
So everyone dutifully reproduced the press release about Craig Robins putting Buckminster Fuller's 24-foot version of the Fly's Eye Dome through a "historic restoration" by boat fabricator Goetz Composites, yet no one seems to have followed through with picture...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
US Pavilion at Jeshyn Fair, 1956, photo by James Cudney In the Spring of 1956, as the Jeshyn Fair celebrating Afghan independence approached, and the Soviets were well along in constructing a massive pavilion, US diplomats in Kabul thought...
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Posted by greg at
7:33 AM
June 5, 2011
So awesome, yet, so annoying. How did I not know of this? When it was going on? I was emailing with the Van Abbemuseum at the time about replicas of artworks, particularly their refabrications of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
June 4, 2011
Lee Krasner, Bird Talk, 1955, oil, paper, canvas on cotton duck Lesley Vance on Lee Krasner, in Artforum's artists on ab-ex feature: At one point in the early 1950s, Krasner grew dissatisfied with some drawings she had been working...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
June 3, 2011
You know what, it's the weekend. We can have two long Leo Steinberg-related posts at once. Read'em on the NetJets to Basel. Though he mentioned it in his most important piece of writing, which was also the most important piece...
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Posted by greg at
4:27 PM
So ultimately, Norman Mailer's off the hook. We know that when he wrote about Erased de Kooning Drawing in the 1970s, 1980s, Mailer fragged Rauschenberg for selling it--which he hadn't--as much as making it. And he got the title wrong:...
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Posted by greg at
3:38 PM
June 1, 2011
One of the more amusing Erased de Kooning references I've come across is from Norman Mailer. It's reproduced in his 2003 book, The Spooky Art: Thoughts On Writing, but it seems to date from either a 1984 lecture or even...
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Posted by greg at
10:04 PM
Oh, the Biennale! So many people asking you what you saw! So many names you just read on the page, or the label, or the banner, without pronouncing! I'll be adding some Venice Biennial names to the official greg.org art...
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Posted by greg at
8:07 AM
May 31, 2011
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, "drawing | traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame." via SFMOMA So the basic question, "What do we really know about Erased de Kooning Drawing and how...
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Posted by greg at
4:41 PM
May 30, 2011
So I try to take a break from this [now rather long] exploration of the history of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing by reading my Avalanche magazines. And there I find an announcement for Oh Dracula, a 1974...
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Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
How do we know what we know, and when? For instance, we know that Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) is one of Robert Rauschenberg's most important, influential works. It's the kind of commonly accepted history that lands a piece in...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 AM
Oh, yeah. With this awesome cheese grater screen, Mona Hatoum has just won a 10-year pass in my book; she can do whatever she wants. Oh, really? It's called Grater Divide? And it was made in 2002? Well, her 10-year-pass...
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Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
I've always admired the series of site-specific Wall Works produced over the years by Edition Schellmann, even though I've never mustered the courage to buy one. Fear of commitment, I guess. Too nomadic. Well, no, that's not quite right....
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Posted by greg at
9:18 AM
May 26, 2011
I really need a photomurals tag at this point. The Kodak Colorama billboard was installed in the Great Hall of Grand Central Station from 1950 until around 1990, when the station began a long-overdue restoration. Anyway, 18x60 foot backlit,...
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Posted by greg at
11:54 PM
May 24, 2011
O wow. Olafur Eliasson's Your Rainbow Panorama opens Thursday on the roof of ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. It's a 360-degree glass promenade which paints the cityscape with every color of the spectrum. Too bad the promenade roof's not...
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Posted by greg at
9:55 PM
May 23, 2011
On October 4th, 1994, at an artist panel discussion for MoMA's Cy Twombly retrospective, Richard Serra made an offhand comment about how "The last century of art has been based on a misreading of Cezanne." To a young, impressionable...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 PM
May 22, 2011
In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara, 1961, Art Institute of Chicago I've had a jpg of Jasper Johns' 1961 painting, In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara on my desktop for months now. It was one...
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Posted by greg at
8:36 PM
May 21, 2011
All this Rapture hype reminds me of this old school Elmgreen & Dragset piece from their Powerless Structures series. Even though I'm sure the Rapture people are sure the two guys not wearing these outfits are goin' straight to...
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Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
May 20, 2011
Andy helpfully pointed out this mirrored glass ball, which I'd missed in the catalogue for Phillips' upcoming design auction. Everyone knows the Bauhaus was a huge party school. And during the Winter 1929 semester, Oskar Schlemmer had put an...
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Posted by greg at
2:53 PM
May 19, 2011
Well this certainly wasn't in his MoMA retrospective. There are rubber and neon pieces dated from 1966-7, of course, and because they look prescient now, Benjamin Buchloh's catalogue essay discusses early Richard Serra sculptures like Doors and Trough Pieces as...
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Posted by greg at
11:00 AM
Von Heyl-bait: Spatial Force Construction, 1921, Lyubov Popova A couple of weeks ago Charline von Heyl made a refreshingly badass presentation on painting at the Hammer Museum. [It was organized by UCLA's art department.] The tenor was quite different,...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
May 17, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
May 16, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
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...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
May 15, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 PM
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...
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Posted by greg at
6:44 AM
May 14, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
May 13, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
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...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 AM
May 12, 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...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 PM
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,...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
May 11, 2011
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,...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
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,...
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Posted by greg at
7:17 AM
May 6, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
May 5, 2011
"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...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
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...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
May 4, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
11:22 PM
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...
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Posted by greg at
8:00 AM
May 3, 2011
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....
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Posted by greg at
12:12 PM
May 2, 2011
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...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
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....
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Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
April 29, 2011
Flipping through the lots for Christie's upcoming contemporary sale feels like diving into the greg.org archives. Besides the Rauschenberg combine coming out of the Ganz's closet, there's also: a great Johns White Numbers painting (1991) by Sturtevant. This text is...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 PM
Christie's is selling The Tower, a 1957 combine by Robert Rauschenberg which Victor and Sally Ganz bought from Betty Parsons in 1976. The work is a double portrait assembled from found, painted objects and light bulbs, and was originally part...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
April 27, 2011
In 1989, a group of veteran activists organized the Berkeley Art Project to create a monument marking the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Mark Brest van Kempen's conceptual proposal won the elaborate national competition and dialogue. It is...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 PM
In 1969, Rene Block in Berlin published Blaues Dreiecken, Blue Triangle, an instruction-based edition by Blinky Palermo. It includes a large triangular stencil, a tube of blue paint, a brush, and a print made with same. The instruction sheet reads,...
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
April 26, 2011
Mr. Kenyon Cox expresses the views of a sound artist and a rational human being in relation to the so-called art of the cubists and the futurists in an interview reported in the Magazine Section of THE SUNDAY TIMES....
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Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
Everyone [sic] probably has the story tucked away in their head that science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was the father of the communications satellite. I only recently realized, though, that satellites have, if not a thousand, then at least...
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Posted by greg at
10:12 AM
I ♥ the fact that Switzerland had Thomas Hirschhorn make a series of stamps to mark his involvemente in the 2011 Venice Biennale almost as much as I ♥ Thomas Hirschhorn's stamps. Stamp | Crystal of Resistance [crystalofresistance.com]...
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Posted by greg at
9:44 AM
April 25, 2011
Oh, RO/LU, you are so awesome for posting this. 9 Artists/ 9 Spaces was a public art exhibit organized in 1970 for the Minnesota States Art Council, while the Walker Art Center's new building was under construction. The concept of...
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Posted by greg at
11:34 PM
Then please email me if you haven't already. greg at greg dot org Electronic or print, either one. Because I have something for you....
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Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
Good grief. When McDonald's in the Louvre made a giant photomural wallpaper from a Jake Dobkin photo of REVS & COST tags, which was included in a Hugo Martinez book, did they bother to ask either REVS or COST...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
I've seen a million and one lawn ornaments without ever noticing any connection to satelloons. And then I saw this odd ball self-portrait of Edwaerd Muybridge last spring at the Corcoran [detail below], and I"m like, big shiny Victorian garden...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
April 24, 2011
Thomas Lawson's 2010 interview with Andrea Bowers is like five kinds of great. It concerns the works in her show at Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles, "The Political Landscape." Bowers' story of making a video piece about activist and Bush-era...
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Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
April 22, 2011
You stumble upon something that Google doesn't know anything about, and you post about it, and then a while later, the other handful of people wondering about the same thing eventually email you, and you try to figure this...
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Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
April 19, 2011
I've been meaning to post more about this for months, but now I'm glad I waited. In January curator/writer Pablo Leon de la Barra posted Google Street View photos of the Hotel Palenque on his blog, Centre For The...
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Posted by greg at
9:01 PM
Andrew Russeth has a great post about the making of Robert Irwin's Black Plane. As part of the Whitney's 1977 survey of the artist's work, Irwin had the museum staff paint the intersection of 42nd St & Fifth Avenue,...
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Posted by greg at
2:09 PM
April 18, 2011
And speaking of Richard Serra. I can't figure out how James Meyer's 2004 Artforum essay on the problematics of size in contemporary sculpture got by me until now. It ends too soon, but it's pretty great. Beginning with the overwhelming...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
Richars Serra's work, and especially his drawings and sketches, have a pretty foundational place in my art worldview. So I'm stoked to see the Met's drawings retrospective, especially after Brian Dupont's process-oriented perspective on the work and the show. I...
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Posted by greg at
10:13 PM
The curators of NIST's collection of historical and scientific artifacts have thrown open the racks in hopes of crowdsourcing the origins of some unknown pieces. On top of the list: this brass one foot scale, in a handy, fitted,...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
Another book report just came in, this one from Andy: "Bonus: ups driver was smoking in the truck. Box smells like weed." Thanks for partaking!...
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Posted by greg at
2:00 PM
April 17, 2011
Though there was some buzz about the "Chinese Embassy" on 42nd Street, which is actually the UN Mission, I wasn't seeing anything in the twitterstream about the protesting the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei by restaging a global version...
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Posted by greg at
3:13 PM
April 16, 2011
What is the point of books if you're just going to store them out of sight? I mean, just look at the back cover of A.R.T. Press's 1992 interview of Vija Celmins by Chuck Close. If only I'd had this...
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Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
April 15, 2011
I know what it is, and what it's for, and where it is, and what what. But still. In a year when politicians' considerations of art have had considerable impact on art, artists, and the art world, it is fascinating...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
April 14, 2011
As they say in Blurmany, this is ucking awesome. You, a new print by WIlliam Powhida at 20x200.com [20x200.com] Previously: Google Art Project, or Les Blurmoiselles d'Avignon Blurmany and the pixelated sublime...
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Posted by greg at
3:17 PM
April 13, 2011
You know how at the end of The Player, Griffin is talking on the car phone to his erstwhile rival-colleague Larry Levy, who's driving through Century City, on his way to an AA meeting? And Griffin says, "Gee, Larry, I...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 AM
April 11, 2011
Barbara Rose called this partially obscured page of text "The most tantalizing fragment" visible in Jasper Johns' 1962 painting, Map, and speculated that it came from "probably ripped from a paperback book Johns had in his studio." The visible...
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Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
April 8, 2011
Map, 1962, Jasper Johns, via moca.org For her contribution to the Jasper Johns Gray (2007) catalogue, Barbara Rose writes about the history and significance of Map, 1962, the artist's first big, gray masterpiece. Johns made it to raise money...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 PM
I kid about Jon Rafman, but it's out of love. Just check out this incredible pano of BF wherever stitched together from different CMYK separations. It could be a Rauschenberg or something. By which I mean it'd make a...
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Posted by greg at
8:35 AM
April 7, 2011
You know, every once in a while, I think that it's crazy to be considering satelloons as art instead of what they really were--aestheticized objects designed to be seen and exhibited. And then I'll catch a glimpse of Expo...
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Posted by greg at
9:52 PM
This is basically the funniest Oskar Fischinger post you will ever read. Oskar Fischinger's Love Machine [lacmonfire]...
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Posted by greg at
8:19 PM
April 6, 2011
This LACMA interview with Vija Celmins about her show there of early work is just great. [The show itself is great, too; it was first at the Menil.] No sooner did I watch it, than Celmins' name came up in...
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Posted by greg at
9:01 PM
April 5, 2011
I'm trying to remember what made me think of this. I'm coming up blank. In 1995, Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger decided to work together to create space which facilitated longer-term contemplation. They called their...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
So I try to create a book with as little creative alteration as possible, to hew as closely as I can to the court documents themselves, without changing, editing, or annotating them at all. OK, so I weave images from...
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Posted by greg at
8:58 PM
Italics in original:Nan Rosenthal: Does the color gray carry for you a suggestion of ambiguity? Jasper Johns: Everything carries for me a suggestion of ambiguity. From the q&a in Jasper Johns Gray...
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Posted by greg at
1:40 PM
The Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet, image via national gallery Edouard Manet made three large paintings in 1867-8 on The Execution of Maximilian, a subject torn from the day's headlines, but which, because they were critical of Napoleon III's...
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Posted by greg at
7:43 AM
April 4, 2011
Looks like Monday is Unboxing Day. Whether UPS or USPS, be sure to thank the union members who worked through the weekend to bring you your art nerdy books. The hardback with the current cover design [updated link, see...
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Posted by greg at
4:58 PM
April 3, 2011
image via Morioka Yoshitomo's online syllabus of Art & Technology I don't collect posters, I really don't. I just buy some. And then some more. But when I saw the description of this poster in the Getty's E.A.T. archive...
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Posted by greg at
8:26 PM
People often ask me, "What is it that makes your Google Street View Art so different, so appealing?" Actually, no one asks me that, they just send me "Hey, look!" emails with links to Jon Rafman and Michael Wolf. But...
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Posted by greg at
7:02 PM
When Kurt Schwitters died in 1948, his lawyer inherited the art the artist had held onto. After his death in 1956, it was dispersed. Sidney Janis bought this 1922 Kurt Schwitters Merz collage, titled er, and then promptly sold...
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Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
April 2, 2011
Wow, can I just say that, when combined with the rapid production power of our digitized present, appropriation art is just awesome? I just got the first hardcover copies of the first version of the book I conceived of a...
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Posted by greg at
6:37 PM
April 1, 2011
You know what, in my six days as a published author, out there flogging his book, I find myself thinking, again, of Cervantes and Don Quixote. I mean, I it really feels like I'm living in the Quixotian name I...
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Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
So I'm slowly making my way through the 35-page press release [!! those were the days, right?] for MoMA's 1968-9 exhibition, "The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age," which included a long-lost, recently stumbled-upon in a...
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Posted by greg at
9:02 PM
I recently found a poster for a Pontus Hulten exhibition at Moderna Museet called "Utopier & Visioner, 1871-1981," which I think may have come from Billy Kluver's own collection. There's not much information online about the show with that title,...
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Posted by greg at
1:45 PM
March 31, 2011
As I have tried to make sense of the Cariou v. Prince decision, to figure out how Judge Batts found it so easy to dismiss Prince's detailed explanation of his transformative ideas and process, I can come up with two...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
We know that Rob Pruitt made the chromed fiberglass figure for The Andy Monument by bodyscanning his friend and collector, the Cincinnati former car dealer Andy Stillpass. But am I the only one who thinks the sculpture's face, too,...
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Posted by greg at
1:03 PM
I may be too late to see the Getty Research Institute's exhibit on postwar Japanese art, but I think it's also past time I hotfoot it out there and start digging through the E.A.T. archives. If there are more...
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Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
March 29, 2011
I guess if you think about it, archivists really wouldn't think it's exciting, or even that amusing, when you tell a story that wrongly makes it sound like they've been taking smoke breaks for 25 years, leaving their random blogger...
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Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
Before I talk about Microworld, the 1976 industrial film made for AT&T by Owen Murphy Productions, let me just state the obvious, and get it out of the way: We are long, long overdue for a comprehensive, scholarly retrospective...
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Posted by greg at
9:03 AM
March 28, 2011
Enough Prince! Let's talk about someone else! Richard Serra, for example. Bellamy, 2001, Richard Serra, image via gagosian.com Did you know--I did not, which is why I am kind of fascinated to mention it here--that one of Richard Serra's early...
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Posted by greg at
2:00 PM
Thanks for the support and feedback on the Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents &c., &c. book. [updated link info below] Some folks who ordered the electronic version--the first to get the compilation in their hands, since...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 PM
March 26, 2011
from greg.org: Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in hardcover, 290pp. $24.99 [updated link info below] Because really, why not? It's always bugged me when I read a news story about a legal case,...
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Posted by greg at
6:38 PM
Has it already been two weeks since I went to Rirkrit's show at Gavin Brown? Sheesh. Despite being there on a Thursday, there was no soup, but there were T-shirts. Nick was cranking them out, and I wanted to...
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Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
March 24, 2011
What with all this Prince in my head, I start seeing and reading and remembering things in relation to the Canal Zone case. For instance: In conjuring up a meaning for Richard Prince's Canal Zone work that fit the crime...
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Posted by greg at
9:27 PM
March 23, 2011
Paddy and her commenters have already done a pretty good job sorting through the decision in the Cariou vs. Prince & Gagosian case, and there are other folks out there with far more expertise and time than I who...
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Posted by greg at
11:39 PM
Holy smokes, Richard Prince, Patrick Cariou, Larry Gagosian, Judge Batts, Bob Marley, Richard Serra [! I know, right?], Brooke Shields, $18 million in artwork, the fate of appropriation, the implosion of the gallery system, copyright apocalypse, there's so much...
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Posted by greg at
7:46 AM
March 22, 2011
Holy crap, I go away for a long weekend, and what happens? The death toll in Japan doubles, The number of meltdowns triples [or something], We are at war in Libya, The Death Star has the T-Mobile rebellion caught in...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
March 16, 2011
So I guess you could argue--and you wouldn't be completely wrong--that no matter how many coats of hand-rubbed varnish it has, no matter how carefully calculated its design, or how flush its finishing nails, how stainless its many steel...
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Posted by greg at
1:02 PM
March 15, 2011
You know, I tried. I really tried, but there just are not enough hours in the day. You can all take down David Colman's John Currin & Rachel Feinstein Style section article yourselves. Lord knows everything but the headline--"Their Own...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
March 14, 2011
Have we considered Damien Hirst's vitrine sculptures from the Wunderkammer perspective? Because the giant grab-bag auction at Pierre Berge & Associes in Brussels is stuffed [heh] with disturbing taxidermy, eerie medical/scientific specimens, and elaborate butterfly displays. Yes, that is...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
I totally remember seeing John Cage's The First Meeting of the Erik Satie Society in the summer of 1994. An unbound version was on view at the Fuller Building on 57th Street. Susan Sheehan Gallery. It was on during...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
March 13, 2011
I've written and been inspired by Ansel Adams' WWII Japanese-American internment camp photos for years, but inexplicably, I haven't looked closely at Dorothea Lange's. Paul has some intriguing examples at Eyeteeth. He also notes that Lange was actually covering...
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Posted by greg at
4:46 PM
March 9, 2011
I don't know how this slipped by me, but now it's going up for sale tomorrow at Christie's: a very early Jim Shaw pencil & airbrush drawing from 1981 with the obvious-now-that-you-mention-it title, Mormon Missionary and Prostitute Making Each...
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Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
What's that, dear? Oh, nothing, just some legendary but unknown drafts for the first film adaptation of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, by veteran Hollywood screenwriter Benjamin Hecht. After reading various references to the early 60s script, Jeremy Duns decided to...
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Posted by greg at
5:43 PM
March 8, 2011
Warm nostalgia apparently equals d-bag public access video + time. Reading Andrew's report from the Dependent Art Fair, I kept flashing back to the Gramercy, and all the art in the bathrooms, and on the beds, and the insanely crowded...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
March 7, 2011
Holy smokes. Of course you know that blogger/collector/scholar Jim Linderman published The Painted Backdrop: Behind the Sitter in American Tintype Photography 1860-1920. Which would make him the go-to guy for anyone with some actual, original, extraordinarily rare, painted 19th...
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Posted by greg at
8:47 AM
March 6, 2011
So awesome. Is there nothing that can't be made better by Rirkrit chroming the hell out of it? Fear Eats The Soul, Rirkrit Tiravanija, through April 16 at Gavin Brown's Enterprise [gavinbrown.biz] Awesome photo of chrome stainless steel Brillo...
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Posted by greg at
8:35 PM
March 4, 2011
Yeah, there's photomurals, but anyone who's spent some time poking around greg.org might have found my even longer-lasting photo obsession: the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey [see background and making of info here and here.] The idea is to take he...
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Posted by greg at
7:30 AM
March 3, 2011
So I'm searching through the New York Times archive, trying different combinations of keywords to find references to photomurals at the Museum of Modern Art, and I find this intriguing 1934 headline:TWO FORSAKE ART TO FOUND A PARTY; Museum Modernists...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 PM
March 2, 2011
In other seemingly obscure art historical news from 53rd Street: while Googling around on Compo Photocolor, I found this mention in a 1964 press release [pdf] from The Modern, which turns out to be a checklist for the newly...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 PM
When I first came across the pixelated Dutch landscapes on Google Maps , I imagined the polygonal camo distortions hovering over the sensitive sites. From the ground, I thought, maybe it looked like a Gerhard Richter overpainted snapshot. But now...
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Posted by greg at
9:36 PM
While trying to find out where and how to make a photomural, or at least how they used to make them, I found this slightly ridiculous 1966 Popular Science article about making photomurals in your very own home. And...
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Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
March 1, 2011
The question or theme or whatever hadn't crystallized for me, but when Tyler linked to the previous two posts about Lt. Comm. Edward Steichen's wartime propaganda exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, he noted that "there's a lot...
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Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
February 26, 2011
Looking through the installation photos for Road To Victory, Edward Steichen's 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I find myself asking two things: Who took these photos, and how did they make them? [Of course, my real...
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Posted by greg at
12:21 AM
February 24, 2011
So in my ersatz zigzagging through the history of photomurals, I kind of skipped from Edward Steichen's landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955, where Paul Rudolph deployed enlarged photo prints for content and experience, as well as architectural...
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Posted by greg at
10:56 PM
February 20, 2011
In 1909, balloonist/photographers André Schelcher and Albert Omer-Décugis took this picture from about 50m above the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is one of 40 images they published that year in a book titled, Paris vu en ballon...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
February 19, 2011
Oh no! I mean, oh yeah! Gerhard Richter did do other steel balls. At the end of his 1973 interview with Irmeline Lebeer, he complains about my favorites of his series, the grey monochromes:the only problem with them is that...
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Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
Honestly, I don't know why I didn't see it before. The answer's staring me right in the face. And I was so close with the Serra, too. Annunciation After Titian, 343-1, 1973, Gerhard Richter [image via g-r] This morning I...
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Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
February 18, 2011
Frieze has been around 20 years? That's crazy. I feel so old. I'm really liking the dips into the archives by invited Big Thinkers. Jens Hoffmann's picks focus on biennials and such. My favorite has to be Jenny Liu's firsthand...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
It's true, I like Mason Williams' 1967 Bus for what it is. But right now I love it for how it was made, the whole ridiculous, unanticipated, dogged, improvised, and ultimately successful process: the 4x5 negative; the 16x20 print; the...
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Posted by greg at
2:40 PM
My Twitter feed is so complicated right now....
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Posted by greg at
11:45 AM
February 17, 2011
A 1968 NY Times review of Robert Rauschenberg's giant Autobiography edition by Hilton Kramer was titled "Art: Over 53 Feet of Wall Decoration." And the abstract mentioned simultaneous installations at the Whitney and MoMA, so I was interested to...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 PM
Air Training Corps cadets building recognition models, via CollectAir Looking for the "Plaster of Paris Aircraft Corp." and coming up empty [stay tuned], I did find plenty of aircraft made from Plaster of Paris: WWII-era recognition models used to...
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Posted by greg at
9:44 AM
Wow, so I'm just throwing Jasper Johns' name into the archives of New York Magazine, and up pops this wild story from 1982 about Frank Waxman, a Philadelphia doctor who amassed a blue chip collection of tiny artworks by stealing...
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Posted by greg at
7:39 AM
February 16, 2011
Andy sent along this great ffffffound fffffflag picture, posted today on thekingof.tumblr. which reminds me of one of my favorite Johns riffs, the 2005 work by Jonathan Horowitz, Three Rainbow American Flags for Jasper in the Style of the Artist's...
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Posted by greg at
6:06 PM
I think Robert Rauschenberg's Short Circuit was exhibited only twice in its original state: once in the Spring of 1955, in the Stable Gallery annual exhibition for which it was created, and once at the White Art Museum at...
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Posted by greg at
1:24 PM
I cannot believe this has under 1,000 views. I'm only about 8:00 into this YouTube video, and already, Viktor Pinchuk is my hero. While anyone with a yacht or a palazzo could assemble a tranche of the art world...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 AM
Johns, Flag: "American artist Jasper Johns has produced a distinguished body of work dealing with themes of perception and identity since the mid-1950s." -whitehouse.gov I've been trying to get a better sense of the first decade for Rauschenberg's Short...
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Posted by greg at
8:22 AM
February 14, 2011
During some recent archive dives, I've come across a ton of different letterheads. Apparently, people used to write letters to each other all the time, can you imagine? Must've taken forEVER. Anyway, one I particularly ilke is the United States...
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Posted by greg at
10:26 PM
So I'm reading along in my new copy of Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007--which is pretty awesome, and which does appear to supersede the artist's previous collected writings, The Daily Practice of Painting, which is good to know, but really, what...
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Posted by greg at
7:41 AM
February 13, 2011
Michael Wolf thought he would be provoking a heated response when he entered four of his series of Google Street View photos in the World Press Photo competition, and he was right. The "A Series of Unfortunate Events" project...
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Posted by greg at
1:27 PM
February 12, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, while stopping by the symposium attached to the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibition, I saw a huge, intriguing Robert Rauschenberg work, Visual Autobiography, in the lobby of the Patent Building auditorium. I noticed it...
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Posted by greg at
4:21 PM
February 11, 2011
I'd say, "Adieu" or "Au revoir," but Janette Laverrière was as fierce an atheist as she was a communist, designer, and artist. So I'll just say I'm slow and sad to learn that Laverrière died last month at the age...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
One of my absolute favorite Steve McQueen films is one of the first ones I saw, a one-minute super-8 called Exodus. But until now, I'd never heard the making of story of this found scene. According to Carol Kino's...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
February 10, 2011
Wall Text from MoMA's Picasso Guitars show, via @bryanthepainter I've been loving Bryan's tweets of the various pullquotes in MoMA's incredible Picasso Guitars show, but none more than this one from Andre Salmon in 1919, where Picasso apparently invented...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
Demonstration from a STASI disguise workshop, via Simon Menner If Germany's a little touchy about Google's Street View panopticon, maybe it has something to do with how, for the last half of the last century, half the country was...
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Posted by greg at
9:10 AM
February 8, 2011
Flag, 1954-55, via moma The creation myth for Jasper Johns' Flag is well-known, and well-told. Like Leo Castelli's story of discovering Johns' groundbreaking oeuvre, fully formed, while he and Rauschenberg were raiding the icebox, and how Johns' first show...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 PM
While poking around online about Tate Modern's version of the Gabriel Orozco retrospective, I found this rather incredible letter from 2009, written, apparently by Orozco himself, to his dealer Jose Kuri. The letter is an ostensibily-but-not-really private round in an...
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Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
Sister Andreina holding Yves Klein's ex-voto for Santa Rita di Cascia in 1999, photo: David Bordes I get the sense that in the contemporary art world, an artist's religiosity or spirituality is often perceived as an obstacle, an eccentricity...
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Posted by greg at
7:38 AM
February 7, 2011
Now we're getting somewhere. James Davis was Tate Britain's pointman for the Google Art Project, and he gives an interesting behind-the-scenes account of getting locked in the museum with the Street View Cart overnight:[It] seemed to me to be...
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Posted by greg at
9:30 PM
Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps have been manufactured at the Ozeki Lantern Company in Gifu, Japan since 1951. They are contructed from paper and bamboo using the traditional techniques for which Gifu's lanternmakers are famous. In Japan. [via @freduarte via @langealexandra]...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
February 6, 2011
Sometimes I can't tell when something is obvious, or when it's just obvious to me. But whichever this was, the idea came to me as soon as I figured out that the unidentified guy who was photographed at least...
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Posted by greg at
2:57 PM
February 5, 2011
Here's the introductory text I wrote last Spring for Walking Man - A Collaborative Self-Portrait With Google Street View. I made some proofs, but I'm still figuring out the best size. If I do decide to publish it, I...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 PM
February 4, 2011
Last February, I realized that the subject of this awesome, distorted Google Street View portrait was not just a random pedestrian. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world have been photographed once by Google's roving,...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 PM
February 3, 2011
May your wife have a cow every time....
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
Hannibal Hanschke/dpa/picture-alliance/newscom via tpm Believe me, I've tried, but I can't look at this photo of protestors under a sodium streetlamp in Cairo and not see Olafur Eliasson's 2003 Turbine Hall installation, The Weather Project. image via mark barkaway's...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
February 2, 2011
I took the kid to see Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Legacy Tour the other night. And as I'm reading up on the funding of the Trust that will oversee Merce's choreography after the company disbands, I found a mention...
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Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
February 1, 2011
Though to a guy making something called Atlas in his spare time it still probably feels pretty empty and limited, Gerhard Richter's website is pretty expansive. Via Twitter, we learn that his web elves have just added a quotes section,...
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Posted by greg at
1:55 PM
Nice, someone on the Google Art Project has a sense of art historical awareness, or at least a sense of humor. The gallery included in the British National Gallery contains Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Ambassadors, which is...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
Alright, this is kind of killing me right now, not just with its awesomeness, but because I have been planning to do a very similar project, and also because like half my blog these days could be called Google...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
January 30, 2011
Last week in my interview with Mike Maizels for Pinkline Project, I'd mentioned how the Grand Palais in Paris would be an acceptable art venue for exhibiting my satelloon project. Not only was the grand nave one of the few...
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Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
January 29, 2011
After dropping in on the National Portrait Gallery's daylong symposium [it's still going on, in fact] connected to Hide/Seek just now, and though I only saw two presentations, whoa--I feel like a cigarette. Jonathan Katz, co-curator of Hide/Seek, titled his...
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Posted by greg at
5:50 PM
So much history-making postwar art missing, so little time! The Pebble Beach Art Heist had gone cold for a while, but now, thanks to a new website ["made on a Mac"!] it is flaming back to life. And for the...
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Posted by greg at
9:25 AM
January 28, 2011
Maybe it was me looking for Tacita Dean's Sound Mirrors that brought me there, but David Williams' 2009 post at Skywritings about Dean, Derek Jarman, Dungeness, gardens, Tehching Hsieh is pretty wonderful:Everything here has been found, salvaged, re-cycled from...
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Posted by greg at
4:46 PM
I've been kind of busy, and I didn't want to get fingerprints all over the signed edition, and my few original issues are in storage somewhere, so I'm really only now getting a look at Primary Information's beautiful facsimile...
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Posted by greg at
3:09 PM
January 27, 2011
John Powers just retweeted it now in parts, and he included it in his epic Star Wars Modern piece at Triple Canopy last year, but this quote from "American Painting During the Cold War," Max Kozloff's 1973 Artforum article, is...
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Posted by greg at
9:38 AM
In reviewing Johan Grimonperez' 1997 film, Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., which was exhibited at Deitch, Ronald Jones underscores artists' failure to, well, to matter very much in contemporary culture. And he reminded me of this, which I had completely forgotten:Paul Goldberger's...
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Posted by greg at
12:43 AM
January 26, 2011
Now we're getting somewhere, even if it's only to the library. Since the Finch College Museum was originally [and wrongly] fingered as the site of the theft of Johns' Flag from Rauschenberg's Short Circuit, I've been looking for months...
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Posted by greg at
6:36 AM
January 24, 2011
While I'm obviously no David Hockney, after a year or so, I see a Brushes trend emerging: people sitting in front of me. On the most recent one, I decided to pare it down. From the width of the...
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Posted by greg at
11:30 AM
January 22, 2011
If you can see the full text of "On Collaboration In Art," David Shapiro's conversation with John Cage, published in the Autumn 1985 issue, (No. 10) of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, perhaps you can tell me if it does, in...
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Posted by greg at
2:29 PM
A little Saturday stenography. Alan Solomon wrote "The New Art," a catalogue essay for "The Popular Image," one of the first museum exhibitions of Pop Art, organized by Alice Denney in the spring of 1963 at the fledgling Washington Gallery...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
So I thought I'd check Jasper Johns' bibliography to see if there was a review for Alan Solomon's group exhibition at Cornell, which included Short Circuit. There was not, but after seeing the first entry for 1958, from Johns' hometown...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 AM
January 21, 2011
tiny detail of a Robert Rauschenberg registry, dated 1957-9, which I can't reproduce in full because of the terms of access to the Leo Castelli Gallery Archive at the Archives of American Art Another day back in the Leo...
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Posted by greg at
2:03 PM
January 19, 2011
I tried searching the 150,000 million images in the ETH Bibliothek photo archive, too, but I sure didn't come up with one of these: One thing's for sure, though: if I were ever to show some videos on little screens,...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 PM
January 17, 2011
Huh, so I'm poking around online for info on the Saarinens' unrealized design for a Smithsonian Gallery of Art [above is a SI photo of the model, built in 1939 by Ray and Charles Eames, of all people, perched...
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Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
You know what, it's been too long since we had a good, old-fashioned photomuralin' around these parts. And one that combines a bit of Google Maps-ready, roof-as-facade architecture? And camo? Even better. I only go to the Museum of the...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
January 16, 2011
Maybe it's the CSI-ification of everything, but as I dig through archives and piece together timelines, and interview people--oh, I haven't really mentioned the interviews, have I?--while trying to track down the story of Robert Rauschenberg's Short Circuit and its...
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Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
January 14, 2011
This just in from the greg.org Department of Stunningly Beautiful Digitized Maps of The Netherlands: Bibliodyssey has some highlights from the National Library of the Netherlands' fresh upload one of the rarest and most beautiful atlases in history, mid-17th century...
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Posted by greg at
6:46 PM
January 13, 2011
So here is where, after a few months of searching, I basically get caught up to the editors of Johns' collected writings, who noted in 1996 that Johns' Flag painting disappeared from Leo Castelli's warehouse sometime "before June 8,...
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Posted by greg at
1:24 PM
January 12, 2011
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991RB Before I knew you I saw something... You know what I'm going to say? FGT I dedicated a piece to Ross. RB Exactly. I thought, this is so sweet, I want to...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
January 10, 2011
Compared to Germany's digital scrim effect, the Italian Google Street View opt-out regime is extraordinarily, even romantically, naturalistic. Haha, no. It's a photo from Elmar Haardt's careful and unassuming project documenting Bondeno, a seemingly unremarkable small town in Ferrara. [via...
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Posted by greg at
9:41 PM
January 5, 2011
One of the first Japanese sayings I learned was "Chiri mo tsumoreba, yama to naru," "Pile up dust and it becomes a mountain." At his incredible blog Four Color Process, John Hilgart continues to mine the gap between comic...
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Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
January 4, 2011
Doug Ashford ended the 2009 presentation I just posted about, "Abstraction as the onset of the real," with a slide of this beautiful painting, Untitled, 1950 (May 20) by Myron Stout. Washburn Gallery had a sweet little early Stout...
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Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
I'm still trying to figure out quite what he said, but whatever it is, Doug Ashford said the hell out of it. Forget speaking or writing like this, I wish I could even think like this. Brains back on, people!...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
Maybe it was the news, or those long family car rides over Christmas with his cousin's evangelical radio station going the whole way. But Frank Wick has of late been considering The Big Questions of Life, questions such as,...
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Posted by greg at
7:26 AM
January 3, 2011
Holy smokes, it's been 15 months since I found the Dutch Camo Landscapes on Google Maps; just over a year since I started systematically screengrabbing them; a little less than a year since Google's particularly beautiful Delaunay triangulation distortion...
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Posted by greg at
8:54 AM
January 2, 2011
A dismal, depressing subject can be made enjoyable by great writing. And the spirits can be lifted by an awesome photo at the end. These are my takeaways from Richard Hendy's travel/history/economics/politics/apocalyptic decline essay on Amakusa, a hardscrabble group...
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Posted by greg at
1:33 PM
December 21, 2010
It's exactly the kind of scribbled note I dug through five boxes of Smithsonian archival material hoping to find: "Someone may have loc. stolen ptg. So Charles will talk to Bob about it." Well, I talked to Charles about it....
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Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
December 20, 2010
So much to blog, so little time. I may have to institute a new practice of dumping my interesting-looking browser tabs if I don't write about or use them within a month, or blogging about them. For example, ever since...
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Posted by greg at
10:10 AM
December 19, 2010
You know, some things have just been bugging me about this Blake Gopnik/Washington Post situation. I deeply don't care about Gopnik in a gossipy way. I suppose if I were pressed, I'd be generically glad for him now that it...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 PM
December 17, 2010
Did I mention that I got a copy of the 316-pg instruction manual for Lego Set 10179-1: The Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon? It is worth every penny. It is a thing of beauty. And gigantic, the first coffee table LEGO...
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Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
I didn't realize how closely the Modern's 1932 Murals and Photomurals exhibition and the anti-communist controversy it provoked dovetailed with the far better known confrontation over Diego Rivera's rejected and destroyed commission at Rockefeller Center. Rivera had a hugely...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
December 15, 2010
I've been deep in the commercial letterpress lately, and neglecting my Ant Farm. Fortunately, Mondo Blogo is there to bring me back in line, with this awesome poster the Farmers made for 20:20 Vision, their show at CAMH. 20:20...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
December 14, 2010
New York, montage photomural, Berenice Abbott, all images via moma's 1932 catalogue I've been meaning to post this for a couple of months, but with museum censorship battles and political mural controversies in the news, what better time, right?...
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Posted by greg at
9:45 PM
The Gala As Art, greg.org, at #rank 2010 from greg allen on Vimeo. Here's the narrated slideshow I did at #rank during Art Basel Miami Beach. Many thanks to Jen and Bill for inviting me, to Magda for instigating, to...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
December 12, 2010
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a sweet Struth photo of the Cologne Cathedral, and somehow, Gerhard Richter's pixel-style stained glass window is not the most awesome thing about it. Also, is that a mop on that ledge in...
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Posted by greg at
2:47 PM
December 11, 2010
I'm trying to imagine this happening today, or this century--or last, for that matter--and I just can't. The best account of it I've found is from Calvin Tomkins' 1964 New Yorker profile of Rauschenberg, so I'll just quote him:[Rauschenberg and...
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Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
I realize I only tweeted it, and that doesn't count, so I'll say it here: Nick Stillman's essay about Chris Burden's television-based work at East of Borneo is great stuff:Velvet Water feels like the culmination of a thread that began...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
The New Yorker obsoleted my old New Yorker Magazine Database by finally letting Google index their website and adding a search function, and making their archive available online, and that's as it should be. But whenever I browse the...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
December 10, 2010
I love it when a tossed-off plan comes together. In this case, it's the idea of artist-designed vinyl car wraps. And camo. The Times had a great story about auto spyshots, and the increasing use of camouflage vinyl wraps...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
December 9, 2010
There's some interesting background info as well, but the big news [sic] today in piecing together the history of Rauschenberg's Short Circuit is that Finch College is off the hook--and Holland Cotter is right after all....
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Posted by greg at
10:04 PM
Does an Anglo calling The Hague "Den Haag" sound as obnoxious as one calling Florence "Firenze" or Milan "Milano"? This is not a rhetorical question. I really need to know. Celestial Vault in 1996, James Turrell, image via: stroom.nl...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
December 8, 2010
It's crazy sometimes how long it takes to see what's right in front of your face. I've been thisclose to artist James Seawright's kinetic and electronic sculptures over the last couple of years, and yet I only really discovered...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
I was nervous, I admit, but I really had a blast last week giving my Gala As Art presentation last week at #rank. The crowd was great; the other #rank folks I met were nice, with interesting projects and...
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Posted by greg at
6:04 PM
December 7, 2010
After a brief break, during which I briefly pwned Miami Art Basel, the search for the Jasper Johns flag painting which was included in Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine-painting Short Circuit [above], continues. Actually, because I had to carry on...
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Posted by greg at
12:56 PM
December 6, 2010
Via Ubu comes a provocative essay, "Constructed Anarchy," from the poet and John Cage critic Marjorie Perloff. She takes the death of Merce Cunningham and the company's plans to dissolve after a worldwide farewell tour as an opportunity to ask...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 PM
In my talk at #rank in Miami Friday, I called for more scholarship on the growing genre of yacht art. Which, via this NY Times Style section slideshow caption, now includes at least one work of hybridized performance/institutional book party...
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Posted by greg at
7:18 AM
December 5, 2010
image: walkerart.org Welcome to one of the oldest tabs in my browser: the inflatable balloon set for Merce Cunningham's 1968 piece, Walkaround Time, which is based on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, which was made by the company's artistic director...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
December 1, 2010
I recently went with my daughters to see "Hide/Seek" at The National Portrait Gallery. They're 2 and 6, so most of the content of the show is way over their heads. [Much of the work, like the vintage photographs,...
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Posted by greg at
7:24 AM
November 30, 2010
Rather than post this beautifully composed 1895 photo of Henri LaChambre's rather awesome gas balloon inflated at Nancy, I should've freakin' bought it by now. Of course, my problem is that, now that I've seen it, I've filed it...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 AM
I've got a lot of browser tabs to clear before I head to Miami. Am I not listening or looking in the right place, or is there really not enough discussion about MoCA's exhibition of drawings by the composer/architect/polymath Iannis...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
November 28, 2010
It's less than a week away, and I can't believe I haven't hyped it yet: I'm giving a presentation this Friday in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach titled, "Relational Aesthetics For The Rich, Or A Brief History Of The...
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Posted by greg at
12:18 AM
November 27, 2010
At least now we know what NY Times museum building critic Nicolai Ourossoff has been up to lately. Just as I am thinking I need to add Saadiyat Island and the names of the grand new patrons of the...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
Something Holland Cotter wrote today made me really think: "Short Circuit is a sweet reminder of Rauschenberg's collegial generosity; he believed in art making as a communal endeavor, and acted on that belief." Collegial generosity is certainly one way...
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Posted by greg at
12:11 AM
November 26, 2010
In his review of the Robert Rauschenberg show at Gagosian, where the work is somehow different because it is for sale, Holland Cotter explains Short Circuit's origin as an attempt to get his recommended artists' work into the Stable Gallery's...
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Posted by greg at
4:43 PM
November 24, 2010
Alright, the search is on; I'm working to trace the history of Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine Short Circuit and especially to figure out what happened to Jasper Johns' flag painting, and when and how Sturtevant's flag painting got in...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 PM
November 23, 2010
Brooklyn-based photographer Ofer Wolberger is right in the middle of an interesting project: The Photographic Book Series, twelve limited edition artist books, each with a specific subject or theme. Sometimes he uses source photos, sometimes they're [presumably] his own....
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Posted by greg at
4:38 PM
November 21, 2010
Also up at Phillips today was this nice little [25x25cm] seascape, Meer (Sea), a 1973 offset print by Gerhard Richter. Richter replaced the sky in one snapshot with the sea from another. This particular example sounds like it had...
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Posted by greg at
7:42 PM
An interesting curatorial pairing where you'd least expect it: deep in the middle a random, Sunday afternoon print sale at Phillips de Pury. Lot 327: Washington Monument, is an unnumbered edition sliced up from a wallpaper Andy Warhol made...
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Posted by greg at
4:19 PM
More of Germany is appearing on Google Street View, and we can start to see what 240,000 blurred out residences looks like in a country of 8 million-plus: a lot. Far from being a marginalized fraction, the blurred structures...
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Posted by greg at
10:57 AM
November 18, 2010
I don't know why I do it either, but here is Washington Post arts blogger Blake Gopnik ruminating on just what it is that makes Arshile Gorky's paintings so upbeat, so appealing:The most striking thing about this AbEx show...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
November 16, 2010
The Rauschenberg show at Gagosian is pretty incredible, but then again, I've had Walter Hopps' incredible show of Rauschenberg's 50s work imprinted on my brain from day one. Anyway, here's a little art history mystery about one of the...
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Posted by greg at
1:31 PM
November 13, 2010
Christoph Brech is the master of the meaningful tight shot. In Sea Force One, he focuses in on a pair of workers in a small boat who are scrubbing the hull of Francois Pinault's black yacht in front of Punta...
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Posted by greg at
11:55 AM
November 12, 2010
We go to History with the culture we have, not the culture you want, or might wish to have at a later time. 316 pages. 136 Mb PDF download. Not including the copyright notices, well under 1,000 words. I can't...
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Posted by greg at
9:27 AM
Remind me again where I got the idea to buy Susie Linfield's new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence? I ordered it two weeks ago, but it just arrived yesterday, which turns out to be too long after...
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Posted by greg at
7:35 AM
November 11, 2010
So fantastic. When I started digging around a bit on its history, I just assumed Jean Tinguely's kinetic masterpiece, Homage to New York, would itself be the most interesting find. Not quite. After making a name for himself in Europe...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 AM
November 10, 2010
Our stop at the Stedelijk over the weekend gave me On Kawara on the brain. Which makes me sad to have missed the San Francisco Art Institute's show this summer, On Kawara: Pure Consciousness In 19 Kindergartens. It was about...
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Posted by greg at
11:34 AM
Now I knew George Catlin did some bird's eye views, but I did not realize he also did some Bird's Eye Views. This is one of the latter, an 18-inch gouache from 1827, Bird's Eye View of Niagara Falls....
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Posted by greg at
10:43 AM
I am aware of the argument that because a) I have never spoken to anyone at the Smithsonian1 about this show, it follows that, b) the specific venue, date, and funding for this show being, to say the least,...
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Posted by greg at
8:24 AM
"Good for any part of the country." I love it. And not just because it reminds me of one of my favorite Olafur photogrids: The Landscape Series, 1997, horribly hung in an image by Christies....
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Posted by greg at
8:12 AM
November 9, 2010
Looking at objects and vintage photos in isolation, it blows my mind that Enzo Mari is somehow not a famous, formative artist, but only [sic] a designer. How did that happen? Did he make all his work in secret? Did...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
November 8, 2010
When we last considered the techno-militartistic merits of pre-WWII era sound location devices, I wondered where to start. And now I know: the Netherlands. I'm not sure why, but it was acoustic locator-palooza over there. On the wall of the...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
The last time we were in Holland for a Museum Night, it was in Rotterdam, and it was an infuriating mess. All the museums in the city stay open until 2AM and program special activities and events. In 2005,...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 AM
November 5, 2010
I don't know why i ended up with so many art projects in and about The Hague this year, but there you are, or here I am, really. It's one of the most interesting places on Google's green Earth. Anywhay,...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
November 3, 2010
Look, I don't doubt that Enzo Mari hates the art world as much as he hates design. Even more, probably, since he's a faithful communist in an era when--Picasso bedamned--it's really hard out there in the art market for...
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Posted by greg at
11:04 AM
November 1, 2010
I'm feeling more serious about turning Richard Neutra's Cyclorama building at Gettysburg into an educational monument to the wounded and a wheelchair-accessible battlefield observation platform. War becomes history, reduced to its most basic contours, a date, a bodycount, and a...
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Posted by greg at
7:45 AM
October 29, 2010
"...how, slowly and patiently, Mr. Lamson, wearing welder's goggles, moves his drawing machine along." William Lamson's show at The Boiler, "A Line Describing The Sun," got a nice review from Ken Johnson in the Times today. The 2-channel video...
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Posted by greg at
10:04 AM
October 27, 2010
Though I had considered entering, and I'd sampled a few of the 125 videos on the shortlist, I had planned to not write about the YouTube Play Biennial at the Guggenheim. But then reps from a couple of the...
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9:55 PM
October 26, 2010
Holy smokes, experiential science artist Nelly Ben Hayoun has re-created Japan's Super Kamiokande neutrino detection facility as a Disneyland ride. Visitors in white Tyvek bunny suits are guided by an actual particle physicist through a boat ride tunnel where...
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9:53 AM
October 25, 2010
The close follower of the Warhol Brillo Box saga will surely find amusement in the details of Lot 137: a Pasadena Type box that once belonged to Warhol's early early LA dealer Irving Blum at Christie's upcoming Morning After...
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11:05 PM
Holy smokes, the auction's normal size, but the catalogue for Christie's upcoming contemporary evening sale is huge. And some interesting stuff. This late Rothko, Black on Gray (1969-70), for example. In his biography of the artist, Jimmy Breslin referred...
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10:32 PM
October 24, 2010
Someday this will all look and sound really coherent, I swear. But for going on, wow, 20 years, some of the most powerfully influential photos for me have been the images Ansel Adams took at Manzanar, the desert prison...
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10:32 PM
My recent photomural binge has flushed out some interesting comments and suggestions, including one from Craig about the use of a photomural as a key interior design element in Woody Allen's 1980 film, Stardust Memories. Allen's character, filmmaker Sandy...
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2:54 PM
October 20, 2010
One of the most incredible works of visionary art in Washington DC is James Hampton's The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly. Hampton, an African American WWII veteran and janitor at the General Services...
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6:13 PM
October 19, 2010
While I've mentioned it on my Twitter feed--the 500 people who read this blog are the same 500 who follow me there, right? @CheapDrugs4U?--I should say here, too, that I have been invited by the folks at 24|7 Creative, a...
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2:10 PM
Worlds Fairs turned out to be the perfect venue for photomurals--they were catchy, usually didactic, packed a visual punch, and got the point across to the shuffling masses. And at least in the 1930s, they looked like the future....
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Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
October 18, 2010
image: vintage silver gelatin print, signed, Ezra Stoller, 1939, via morehousegallery Do turning back another chapter or two in the history of enlarged pictures, photomurals, and photomontages, where do they turn up the most [besides/before the Museum of Modern...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 PM
I'm on a bit of a photomural binge at the moment. In email, Dr. Olivier Lugon, he of the awesome article about Stephen Shore's Signs of Life photomurals, points out two things about Edward Steichen [and, let's give the man...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 AM
October 16, 2010
So yes, I've got a million other things to do, but thanks to this Mies thing being auctioned, and Michael Lobel's article on the the photography and scale--and by implication, photography and painting, pace Chevrier's forme tableau--I'm become slightly...
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Posted by greg at
8:29 PM
October 15, 2010
Hah, it didn't occur to me until I started looking into the history of photomurals, and--thanks to Michael Lobel's great exploration of contemporary photography and scale in the new Artforum--I sucked it up and started reading Michael Fried's new book...
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Posted by greg at
6:27 PM
October 13, 2010
Christian Viveros-Faune's ruthless smackdown of the Luxembourg & Dayan show of Jeff Koons' porny 1990 Made In Heaven series is an acid, but necessary reminder of how economically and critically disastrous the early 1990s were for the artist. [Though I'm...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
So I think I had a breakthrough in figuring out the details of Jeff Koons' Wall Street Era. I just wrote a post about it. It is so long. So I put it below....
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Posted by greg at
8:10 PM
The other weekend, I pigeonholed former Washington Post art critic Paul Richard after his talk, titled "What I Saw," at the National Gallery of Art. I said that I'd been interested to hear his take on public art over his...
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12:55 PM
October 12, 2010
Here are some things I find I have kept open for several days or weeks, which I guess is one measure of how they are sticking with me: Andrew Russeth's look into the market and objects of Marcel Duchamp is...
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9:56 PM
October 11, 2010
Karen Green has a show of her most recent art work at the Space Art Gallery in South Pasadena. Thematically, it is similar to her show last year:The work of making the pieces in "Latent Learning Experiments," Ms. Green said,...
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11:36 PM
October 8, 2010
Bob Adelman, Castelli's house, 1965, fairly ganked and shrunk via corbis] Now that they're selling for a million dollars or whatever, it's hard to imagine how Warhol's Brillo Box sculptures were perceived at the time they were made. When...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 AM
The Brillo Box formerly known as Stockholm type, and formerly known as being by Andy Warhol, sold at Christie's in 1998. So awesome. The Beverly Hills art dealer Robert Shapazian's bequest to the Huntingon Museum of 10 Brillo Boxes...
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7:51 AM
October 7, 2010
What if they decided to put Tilted Arc back? What if the General Services Administration, and the Jacob Javits Federal Building folks called up Richard Serra and said, "You know what this Federal Plaza needs after all is a...
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9:35 PM
October 5, 2010
Terrance O'Shea, late 1960s, 11x11x2 slab of laminated plexiglass This summer while poking around into the conflicted treatment of the Pasadena Art Museum's Warhol Brillo Boxes, I found a tangential mystery: 10 or 30 or 40 or more Kellogg's...
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Posted by greg at
8:36 PM
About this time last year, while pondering the ur-satelloons that were Prof. T.S.C. Lowe's Civil War-era aerial reconnaissance balloons operated for the Union Army, I was struck by the idea of re-creating the rather awesome-sounding and -looking portable hydrogen...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 AM
I've never done an actual, in-depth search for any, but I've always wondered what became of the giant photomurals architect Paul Rudolph used for the exhibition design of Edward Steichen's landmark 1955 MoMA show, Family of Man. [vintage scan...
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12:03 AM
October 4, 2010
Now I love me some rodeo, but primarily bull riding. It pains me to think how many rodeos I've missed at Madison Square Garden. So seeing legendary Magnum photographer [wait, is there any other kind?] Ernst Haas' 1957 photo...
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10:25 PM
While pursuing his MFA at the University of Miami in 1976, artist Leo Rosenblatt created a printmaking process called Stat Art, "a technique incorporating drawing and mixed media on large sheets of commercial copy film in conjunction with light...
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6:00 PM
October 3, 2010
I just got back from hearing longtime Washington Post art critic Paul Richard speak at the National Gallery of Art. Richard is an excellent speaker and an alluring storyteller. His lecture, titled "What I Saw," began with his move from...
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Posted by greg at
5:25 PM
October 2, 2010
From the website of Sri Dharma Mittra, the Asana Yoga pioneer of Gramercy Park, and the Bernd & Hilla Becher of yogic typologies:In 1984 Dharma completed the Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures, as an offering to his Guru,...
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5:57 PM
I don't know why, exactly, but as I was looking online for Zakaeuses this morning, the description of this early 18th century Inuit knife from the British Museum caught me off guard:This type of knife was made and used...
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12:57 PM
October 1, 2010
Hahahahahahawesome. Threadless pandaterrorists used facebook to plot a silent but hilarious panda-in at Gavin Brown yesterday to protest Rob Pruitt's "alleged misappropriation [to put it mildly]" of a panda t-shirt design by Jimiyo and AJ Dimarucot. Never mind that...
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7:03 PM
It's taken a while, mostly because I've been slack about following up on them, but the artist proofs from the 20x200.com edition of my print, Untitled (300x404), are in the mail and should be here very soon. I've seen...
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2:57 PM
Huh, I didn't notice that, but maybe I liked Ditto's limited edition Why Shapes What? book so much because of its gorgeously saturated palette? I wonder what Untitled (300x404) would look like stencil-printed on a Riso V8000? How would...
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1:38 PM
September 30, 2010
So after posting about Four-Color Process, I was looking around to see who is working to preserve this masterful, cheap, laborious-looking halftone printing process. I mean, we brought letterpress back, right? Well. So far, on the printing front, I'm not...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
UbuWeb's tweet about Nam June Paik's music reminds me it's long past time to post this hilarious story of Paik's 1965 Fluxus-style performance in Reykjavik, where he and Charlotte Moorman nearly capsized Iceland's nascent new music movement. Artnews.is quotes a...
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12:00 AM
September 29, 2010
Sure, you can get it for free right here, in all its original jpeg glory, but if you want to see the velvety printed goodness of Untitled (300x404) in person, you should head to 20x200's booth at the Affordable...
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5:26 PM
September 28, 2010
As longer-term readers of greg.org know, I am slowly trying to locate an original copy of the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, an 1870-plate portrait/catalogue of the visible universe [or the universe visible from the Palomar Observatory, anyway] taken...
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10:30 PM
This is so awesome, a dome home that doesn't leak:Lot: 207 R. Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Home model Pease Woodworking Company USA, c. 1960 mixed media 13 dia x 7 h inches Pease Woodworking Company was licensed by Fuller to...
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9:33 PM
September 27, 2010
Holy smokes, Gary Beydler. A Los Angeles experimental filmmaker whose 1974 time-lapse silent short, Hand Held Day, was just mentioned by Steve Roden. It's incredible. Youtube user austinstein posted this version in 2007, before Beydler's too-small body of work...
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11:42 PM
September 26, 2010
Trying to clear some browser tabs. From John Hilgart, the guy who brought the world Comic Book Cartography, comes his next foray into the overlooked, undersung details of comics history, Four Color Process. It's an incredibly beautiful collection of...
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3:03 PM
September 24, 2010
So I just got Odd Man In, Suzanne Muchnic's 1998 bio of Norton Simon, and yeah, the Pasadena Art Museum was a mess, and Simon's takeover of it was pretty stunning. But Muchnic portrays it as of a piece with...
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7:52 AM
September 23, 2010
Tyler thought the inadvertent awesomeness of this Hirshhorn photo of Ellsworth Kelly's Red Yellow Blue V (1968) was right up my alley. And he's right. It is awesome enough to make me think the photographer might have been especially...
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Posted by greg at
6:03 PM
Ed Ruscha is the most handsome 'cowboy' artist I've ever seen. I think his paintings are not only beautiful to look at but also have a sad, poetic and painfully truthful commentary on America... He is a true American hero:...
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7:49 AM
September 20, 2010
The movement predates his arrival, but on a sunny Sunday in September, with the wave of relational aesthetics breaking against the rocky Malibu cliffs beneath his feet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art powerfully proclaimed his institution's support...
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Posted by greg at
11:30 PM
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Hal Laessig, a Newark architect, developer, and artist who was a graduate student of Daniel Libeskind's at Cranbrook, and who came back to build three fantastical, fantasy machines for LIbeskind's...
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Posted by greg at
7:41 PM
Jerry, Jerry Jerry: Once upon a time in the nineties, art that wanted to be complicit with the system, that tried to lure collectors as it criticized the artist-dealer-buyer complex, had an edgy Trojan-horse coerciveness. A lot of people got...
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9:31 AM
September 18, 2010
God bless the Internet and all who surf upon her. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I thought was an esoteric topic, even for greg.org: the fantastical lost machines from "Three Lessons of Architecture," Daniel Libeskind's exhibition...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 PM
September 17, 2010
Hey you people, with your dying print venues, muscling in on my action! "A visit to the show might end with a broad smile at three paintings by Arcimboldo (pronounced Arch-im-BOLD-o)" - Blake Gopnik, Washington Post "In the current show...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
September 15, 2010
Dear Art World, Please arrange the following on a 2x2 grid for me? Or maybe a spectrum? Because I cannot: Eve Sussman's 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), which I quite like, but: Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching (2007) and his cinematic projections...
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2:53 PM
And so far, I can't find it anywhere:UEZ: when your work first started to appear and was classified as Conceptual art, did you have a secure visual language which you knew would be viable over time? Or could you have...
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7:28 AM
September 14, 2010
It's funny how I think I know the history of the Pasadena Art Museum, when all I'm doing is projecting back and assuming a bunch of stuff based on a bunch of great-sounding anecdotes: First museum shows for Duchamp, Lichtenstein,...
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Posted by greg at
2:23 PM
That's Futurist painter Luigi Russolo on the left being helped by his friend Ugo Piatti, probably around 1913 or 1914. They stand amidst Russolo's musical instruments, intonarumori, noise-intoners, which were designed in accordance with the principles laid out in...
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9:38 AM
September 12, 2010
Good grief, it was only a couple of hours ago, and I can't even remember what took me to this three-year-old link roundup on BLDGBLOG that mentions hail cannons. I mean, hail cannon. Turns out they still make'em, they just...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
My list of incredible objects and machines from the past that need to be refabricated as art objects continues to grow. Actually, I guess the acoustic mirrors, built in the 1920s and early 30s as part of a sound ranging...
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2:58 PM
September 11, 2010
Christopher Knight took the occasion of an Alberto Burri retrospective in Santa Monica to tweet about Cretto, the artist's absolutely incredible 20-acre memorial/earthwork, in which the earthquake ruins of the Sicilian town of Gibellina were encased in a grid...
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2:20 PM
September 10, 2010
Here [via COS] is David Shrigley's animated short for Save The Arts, which is trying to help arts organizations in the UK avoid debilitating budget cuts. At first, I thought WTF?? The Arts are so screwed! Then I thought, well,...
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11:39 AM
September 9, 2010
Seascape I, 1964, screenprint on Rowlux, ed. 200, from New York Ten portfolio [via] You know how you just think you'll blog about one thing, and then you want to get a little context, so you dig a bit,...
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10:49 AM
This is why greg.org readers earn the big bucks, people. GF-R spotted this hilarious/sublime juxtaposition of ad and content from the LIFE Magazine report on the 1958 fire at the Museum of Modern Art and asks,:coincidence? Or the work...
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7:14 AM
September 8, 2010
Over the weekend, I hit the road to interview some people I've wanted to meet and talk with for months now. I'll be publishing the results soon here on greg.org. One of the artists whose work I've been interested in...
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1:16 PM
September 6, 2010
And in other Just Cold Stealin' My Satelloon Idea Before The Fact News: This has been stuck on my iPad for way too long. At a space flight conference a couple of months ago, the Global Aerospace Corporation announced their...
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10:23 PM
September 3, 2010
I can't quite figure out how it ties to the rest of the story, but I still think Sean O'Toole just shortlisted himself for arts lede of the year:For every Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein there is a fascist doppelgänger...
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Posted by greg at
8:48 AM
via la_biennale So Venice is not a total bust. Raumlaborberlin have installed their 2006 mobile inflatospace sculpture, „Das Küchenmonument," in the Giardini. And next to it is The Generator, an on-site workshop for knocking together "sedia veneziana," which are...
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7:32 AM
September 2, 2010
via tsaaby Yeah, so I'd been poking around flickr for a while, looking to see how MOS's project for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale turned out. Because well, because. via Erika-Milite And hmm. What is it...
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Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
This is where Nightcrawler 'ports in and shouts, "Ausgezeichnet!" Here is Joseph Beuys, pop singer, performing his greatest anti-US, anti-nuclear hit from 1982, "Sonne statt Reagan, [Sun not Reagan]." Reagan, remember, is a German homonym for rain [Regen], so it...
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4:53 PM
The fire at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC this morning reminded me of the incredible story of another museum fire, at The Museum of Modern Art in 1958. Before my time, I know, but I'd only learned of...
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1:10 PM
August 31, 2010
It's taking me a while to warm to Tom Houseago's sculptures, but that's fine. It took me a very long time to come around to Rachel Harrison's work, and boy, is it worth it, so I'm happy to give...
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Posted by greg at
11:26 AM
The Ed-werd Rew-Shay Memorial Art World Pronunciation Guide keeps on growing! the latest additions include: Richard Anuszkiewicz Huma Bhabha Thomas Houseago And some great mispronunciations that needed addressing: Chinati Laocoon Modigliani Also, I just know the Aperture Foundation's video editors...
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9:39 AM
August 29, 2010
this is pretty awesome:...
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1:56 PM
August 28, 2010
In the 1980s Daniel Libeskind was an increasingly prominent architectural theorist who--I was about to say "who had nevertheless not actually ever built anything," but the whole thing that's turning my head upside down is that he did, in...
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1:57 PM
August 27, 2010
One of the great stories surrounding MoMA's 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye" is how collector/garmento Larry Aldrich turned several Op paintings he owned into fabrics, and then into dresses, which fed into the Op Art Trend that was apparently...
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9:31 AM
August 26, 2010
Danish artist Jacob Boeskov flew to Lagos, Nigeria to make and star in a short action film he wrote titled, Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front with the noted Nollywood director Teco Benson. The film was produced by...
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7:55 PM
August 25, 2010
Holy smokes, Gordon Hyatt, I didn't know what you did 44 summers ago. Among the episodes of CBS's news program "Eye on New York" which were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1967 for their Television Archive...
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Posted by greg at
12:47 PM
After watching the first segment at maryandmatt's blog, I was hooked. Mike Wallace, shooting a 1965 episode of WCBS news show Eye on New York in and about The Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster exhibition of Op Art, "The...
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8:45 AM
August 23, 2010
I watched the documentary Alice Neel last night, made in 2007 by the late artist's grandson Andrew Neel. It's pretty good, definitely worth a watch. Documentaries by family members come with a whole set of conflicts and challenges baked in,...
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2:21 PM
August 22, 2010
Dear painting experts, Please tell me that the brush-steadying stick with the sock on the end which is so vital to the painting process that it must be included in Serious & Important Photographic Portraits of such artists as Arnold...
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1:06 PM
August 21, 2010
I know that what's really needed around here is a redesign, and probably the addition of a few thousand tags. But right now that's an 8th burner project, and I've only got a 4-burner stove. But in the mean time,...
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2:43 PM
I'm glad and not surprised to see I'm the only person using Google Street View as an artistic source. Since at least last year, photographer Michael Wolf has been making a series of Street View-based works that explore urban...
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Posted by greg at
12:00 PM
August 20, 2010
This has been sitting on my desktop since last month, when Google Maps announced the addition of 45-degree Aerial View imagery for new locations, including Dortmund, Germany. So I clicked over to Dortmund, and zoomed in there to the central...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
And thus we see the painful difference between meaning to buy Wary Meyers' awesome-looking design project book Tossed and Found and actually buying it. I would have been inspired by their Enzo Mari autoprogettazione-esque mantle many months ago. What...
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1:31 PM
August 18, 2010
When it was publicly announced in March 1990 that the National Gallery of Canada had purchased Barnett Newman's 1967 painting, Voice of Fire for $1.8 million (Canadian), there was an immediate press and political uproar that so much public money...
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7:23 AM
August 17, 2010
Speaking of National Gallery of Canada upheavals, Walrus Magazine, late-career post-minimalist kitsch, and Blake Gopnik: In March 2010, Walrus celebrated the 20th anniversary of longtime NGC contemporary curator Brydon Smith's purchase of Barnett Newman's towering 1967 painting, Voice of Fire...
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Posted by greg at
12:50 PM
It takes a big man to acknowledge when he agrees with Blake Gopnik. Paddy Johnson's post about controversy at the National Gallery of Canada led me to "Pop Life: Art in the Material World," Jack Bankowsky et al's solipsistic exhibition...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 AM
August 15, 2010
Dealer-turned-public art empresaria Emi Fontana talking in Artforum about West of Rome:...people believe that public art needs to occupy planned and assigned spaces. What we're doing is much more fine-tuned: You have to find the space that resonates with the...
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3:47 PM
August 14, 2010
While wandering through the National Air and Space Museum [family's in town], I stumbled across James Keeler's lantern slides of spiral nebulae, taken at the Lick Observatory outside San Jose beginning in 1888. Keeler was a pioneering astronomer at...
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Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
Well, a color chart print, anyway. In 1974, at the height [and end] of Gerhard Richter's production of painted grids of colored squares and rectangles, he also published Colour Fields. 6 Arrangements of 1260 Colours, a portfolio of six...
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Posted by greg at
3:04 PM
August 13, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Henning Lohner's film essay/documentary about working with John Cage to make One11 and 103, Cage's only feature film project, completed just before he passed away in 1992. It's on YouTube, chopped up...
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Posted by greg at
2:18 PM
In anticipation of Creative Time Summit II--it's October 9-10, just a few weeks away!--I've been watching some of the talks from last fall's Summit, organized by Nato Thompson held at the NY Public Library. [For an overview, check out Frieze's...
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12:18 AM
August 10, 2010
John Emerson saw an "I [HEART] NY" flyer in Arabic posted in the East Village a few days after September 11, 2001. He posted a large, printable graphic version on his blog a year later. A few months after...
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1:32 PM
August 9, 2010
In addition to being the subject of his film and photographic work, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator modulated light and space as a sculptural installation, and it served as a Light Prop for an Electric Stage. But in 1930, the...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Licht Raum Modulator, 1970 reconstruction, image: bauhaus.de Did I say a few minutes? Laszlo Moholy-Nagy spent around eight years [from 1922-30] building his Light Space Modulator, and then he carted it around Europe, and to America, reworking...
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Posted by greg at
4:14 PM
July 29, 2010
I'd known Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1930 kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator indirectly as a film subject, and then in 2002 through incredible color photographs Oliver Renaud-Clement showed at Andrea Rosen in 2002. [And again, in direct relation to the artist's sculptures...
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Posted by greg at
9:15 AM
July 27, 2010
Digging around on Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator and its relation to a later generation of kinetic light works by artists like Otto Piene, I came across some early works by Piene's Zero Group co-founder, Heinz Mack. As early as...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
July 26, 2010
Breaker, Breaker One-Nine, I got Moving Serra, a documentary about transporting Richard Serra's 242-ton sculpture Sequence cross-country, from MoMA to LACMA on a fleet of flatbeds, that's blowing my mind right now. We need a convoy of Serra torqued...
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2:57 PM
July 23, 2010
Oh Gerhard-Richter.com, why did I ever doubt you? Last February, while holed up in the Snowpocalypse, I thought the hell out of the Serpentine Gallery's catalogue for Richter's 4900 Colours. The work consists of 25 enamel color squares arranged randomly...
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Posted by greg at
12:36 PM
In addition to the world's greatest artist website, artist Gerhard Richter also makes paintings. Now these two endeavors come together with the debut of a micro-site devoted to 4900 Colours, the set of 196 5x5 grids of 25 randomly...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
July 22, 2010
That Google Street View snafu yesterday reminded me of a still from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1932 abstract//constructivist short film, Lichtspiel, or Lightplay. Normally, I'd say that's the art-nerdiest possible free association in the world, but I've actually been meaning to...
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2:37 PM
July 21, 2010
While scoping out the 1974 video art conference at MoMA, "Open Circuits, the Future of Television," filmmaker Jose Montes Baquer decided that for some reason, Salvador Dali should be the artist he would collaborate with for his documentary. Baquer...
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Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
I was on the phone, trying to give directions to a friend to a small Japanese grocery store in Rockville, Maryland, so I pulled it up on Google Street View. Which turned out to be useless, but weirdly beautiful....
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Posted by greg at
3:13 PM
Holy smokes, people, just watch how these things turn out. In April, I spotted this photo at MoMA; it was in the second floor hallway just past the cafe, with no caption, and a date: 1970. I spent a...
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Posted by greg at
12:09 AM
July 20, 2010
I was half-watching the German artist Ferdinand Kriwet's Apollovision, a film & sound & video collage of the Apollo 11 moon landing as American media spectacle made, incredibly, in 1969, when I heard this:Now you can follow the Apollo...
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Posted by greg at
8:32 AM
July 18, 2010
The things you learn at church. So of course I knew that the late illustrator Arnold Friberg's dramatic paintings of scenes from the Book of Mormon, with ripped Nephites and Lamanites striding around the Promised Land, are lodged in...
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Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
July 17, 2010
The only word I can think of is the one Things already used: epic. Sean Michaels goes long and deep for a Brick Magazine profile of the not quite invisible, not quite underground world of L'UX, Untergunther, La Mexicaine de...
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Posted by greg at
3:35 PM
July 15, 2010
Melvin Sokolsky's classic Bubble Collection photoshoot for Alexey Brodovitch's March 1963 Harper's Bazaar got BoingBoinged this week, and given the recent reorientation of the blog towards retrofuturistic orbs, Jason kindly passed along exactly what I was looking for: the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:54 PM
The Times reports happily on the bright future of enlarging and printing our digital images--a future which is here today!Some companies offer the option to print onto a stretched canvas. The effect is instant art, ready to be hung. Canvas...
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Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
July 14, 2010
So woohoo, Andrew Russeth pointed back to a Charlie Finch artnet gossip column from 1998, and just wow. I was there, I mean, I remember a lot of that stuff, and it is freaking me out how alien and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
July 12, 2010
From Artforum: On Thursday evening, the 2010 Renaissance Arts Prize awardees were announced. Winners Barbara Nati, Steffi Klenz, Laura Mergoni, and Natalia Saurin received awards donated by David Morante, cofounder of the prize and former Consul General of Italy in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:34 AM
I was talking shop with Tyler Green this weekend, and he told me that the Washington Post's art critic Blake Gopnik actually did devote more than a paragraph in a review of two unrelated shows at a different museum to...
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Posted by greg at
10:00 AM
July 11, 2010
Len Lye called his kinetic artworks Tangible Motion Sculptures, or just Tangibles, because they made visible motion and other phenomena, like the wind. In 1960, he and his wife Ann, along with some other friends, headed over to huge...
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Posted by greg at
2:41 PM
Larry Gottheim's 1970 short film Fog Line is just beautiful to watch. 11 minutes of fog imperceptibly but inexorably dissipating in a rural landscape. It reminds me a bit of Tacita Dean's Banewl, a 63-minute fixed shot of a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
July 10, 2010
I came across a mention of Len Lye's spectacular-looking kinetic sculpture a couple of weeks ago, while reading 1965 coverage of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts. Sandwiched in between a photo of Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:02 PM
July 9, 2010
How much of this is really unanticipated, unexpected, unsurprising, and ultimately, unauthorized? The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College [no relation] has two Warhol Brillo Boxes from 1970. It describes them as "(enlarged refabrication of 1964 project)." Then this:Exhibitions...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
July 8, 2010
Wow, I knew about the Moon Museum segment because Jade Dellinger emailed about it. But I didn't know the first episode of this season's History Detectives also included a whole segment on satelloons and Project Echo. I love how they...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:43 PM
July 7, 2010
I didn't make it the first time, of course, but I did see Gilbert & George's reprise of "The Singing Sculpture" in 1991 at Sonnabend. It left a pretty deep impression on me in a way their photo compositions...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:50 PM
According to the Gerhard Richter's website, FAZ Overpainted, a 2002 squeegee paint-on-paper edition is based on a photograph of a 2001 copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). The hand visible on the right is that of Richter. The...
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Posted by greg at
3:06 PM
July 5, 2010
The Moment has a Q&A with Mike Bidlo, whose work, Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964), 2005 is currently on view in the Lever House lobby: Did you ever meet him [Warhol] more formally? Yes, at a party at Jean-Michel...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:12 PM
Last October, Mark Leckey presented In A Long Tail World at the ICA in London. From the writeups, it sounded like a cross between Chris Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Ted by way of the Guggenheim Las Vegas. Leckey's now loaded...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:30 PM
ESA has released images of the first all-sky survey from the Planck space observatory, which is currently in orbit around Lagrange-2, a balancing point between the gravitational exertions of the moon and the earth. Planck rotates at a constant...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:16 PM
Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world's largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
NPR's Robert Krulwich had a fascinating story the other day that works even better online. Because there are slideshows and video footage of Starfish Prime, the hydrogen bomb the US detonated in space on July 9, 1962. The launch...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:44 PM
July 3, 2010
This FT essay by Daphne Guinness about buying Isabella Blow's estate before it was dispersed at Christie's is a wonderful, sad, incredible thing. [via @artnetdotcom] All the way back in 2002, I overwrote a long post about Blow, Walter Benjamin,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:32 PM
July 2, 2010
Harrier and Jaguar, Fiona Banner's commission for Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries opened this week, and from the making of film and interview with the artist, it looks spectacular. Banner has installed two decommissioned fighter jets--a BAe Sea Harrier XE695...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
One of the simplest, best parts of Innen Stadt Außen [Inner City Out], Olafur Eliasson's multiple public and museum projects in his adopted hometown of Berlin this year, is now online as a short film. In what feels like...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
July 1, 2010
Souren Melikian's auction analysis for the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times is almost always entertainingly specious, but he is at his best/worst when he writes about contemporary art, about which he obviously knows nothing:The next lot, "Cristina Passing By,"...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
I like writing the word camofleur. In response to the burning question [sic] that arose from Ad Reinhardt's chronology, what was up with Arshile Gorky wanting to start a camouflage school in 1943? Because everyone knows that Gorky was...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
Thanks to greg.org reader Fred for sending along a link to a memo computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith wrote in 1995, soon after his company Altamira [the one he founded after Lucasfilm and Pixar] had been assimilated by...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
June 29, 2010
First up, a high five to Andrew Russeth at ArtInfo for highlighting Nicholas Robinson Gallery's summer installation of Andy Warhol's unusual Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall). What a weird, wonderful--but mostly weird--work. It's basically a mural of shimmering, lenticular photos...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
53 years later, the guy who invented the square pixel regrets the error. In 1957, NIST computer expert Russell Kirsch scanned the world's first digital image [a photo of his infant son, above] using the country's first programmable computer....
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Posted by greg at
8:08 PM
How much of discovery is really just rediscovery? or learning remembering? I was waiting to read how editor/art historian Barbara Rose had decided to model the chronology at the opening of her 1991 book, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
I'll confess, when I saw the tweets start flying about Mira Schor's essay on Otto Dix, Greater NY, and Bravo's Work of Art, I was skeptical. How the hell was she gonna fit any of those, never mind all three--at...
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Posted by greg at
12:12 PM
June 28, 2010
See, now here is another reason I've gotten so backed up: I was overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this. It's currently freaking me out how much is turning on the Osaka 70 World Expo. It's as if there's a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
After I posted about Sigmar Polke's photocopied masterpiece Daphne, Mondo-Blogo emailed the great news that Corraini has republished Bruno Munari's Original Xerographies. I have the original Original Xerographies in a box somewhere; it's more handbook-ish than I remembered--which is...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:44 PM
I hear blogging is out, everyone's tweeting or facebooking now. While I don't quite buy it, I am finding that I'm more likely to keep something I find interesting in my browser tabs for months rather than post it straightaway....
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Posted by greg at
4:22 PM
June 26, 2010
Thanks to Paul Schmelzer at Eyeteeth for pointing to Bob Nickas's great 1999 interview with Maurizio Cattelan. Good times. I really wanted to focus on his experience with painting, so this excerpt starts kind of in the middle of the...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
First, the good news: The Jeff Koons BMW Art Car ran in Le Mans! The bad news: it totally sucked and crapped out after just a few hours. I know how it feels, Jeff. I once helped organize an all-female...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 AM
June 25, 2010
I only met Tobias Wong a couple of times, but it took me aback to see so many people I do know were described or quoted in Alex Williams' NY Times piece as Tobi's friends. Tobi liked to give other...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
I may have something to write later about Yves Klein, I don't know. Peter Schjeldahl summed up what I'd already noticed, that the art discourse is very uncomfortable--or at least largely silent--on the topic of Klein's apparently deep or abiding...
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Posted by greg at
4:45 PM
June 24, 2010
Alberto Giacometti's figures look the way they do because he tried to capture what he called, "The moment I see them" and the way "they appear in my field of vision..." Arthur C Danto said this accounted for "the...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
June 22, 2010
Now before we get too far, let me state for the record that so long as there's no thievery or lying involved, but appropriate credit or consideration is, I got no problem at all with a man who takes another...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
June 20, 2010
Last fall, I was looking for a way to paper the art world with giant versions of the awesome PDF wanted posters the LAPD Art Theft Detail had created for Richard Weisman's stolen Warhol Athletes Series paintings. So I created...
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Posted by greg at
5:18 PM
June 19, 2010
I didn't follow Sigmar Polke's work closely. At least not consciously. This excerpt from Reiner Speck's essay about Polke's 2004 artist's book Daphne is awesome, even if it sounds a bit like someone's been huffing toner at the end:An...
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Posted by greg at
9:16 PM
So funny, last night at the Brooklyn Museum, Andrew Russeth was saying as how some late Warhol paintings look remarkably like David Salle. Villaca Caja, 1929, at Galerie Hopkins-Custot And I was flipping through The Art Newspaper's Basel daily edition,...
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Posted by greg at
8:32 AM
June 18, 2010
Ian Wilson's conversation-based art practice reminded Ben of the introduction to Asif Agha's 2006 book, Language and Social Relations. An excerpt:...It is therefore all the more important to see that utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human...
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Posted by greg at
3:00 PM
June 16, 2010
I've long admired Ian Wilson's conversation-based art works, though for years I've wondered if selling conversations as art doesn't complicate one's daily interactions with people, sort of a conceptual version of how doctors always get hit up for medical advice...
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Posted by greg at
10:48 PM
June 11, 2010
I find Gerhard Richter's squeegee paintings to be both endlessly fascinating and seemingly endless. I don't sweat too much when I think about the one I didn't buy when I could have; it's just so hard to decide that this,...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 PM
June 10, 2010
When I offhandedly declared a jpg of Richard Prince's 2003 rephoto, Untitled, (Cowboy) to be my own work a year ago, I had no idea it would ever leave my blog post. As an idea, appropriating an appropriation might be...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
June 9, 2010
I'm as excited as the next guy that there's an app for the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn. I bought it the first day to try it out. I did not expect it to be as cool as the...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 AM
June 8, 2010
Look, no one is more surprised than I am about this. But when Jen Bekman and I started talking about it a while back, it started sounding like the awesomest thing in the world. So I've done an edition with...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 PM
The day I watched the video of Jeff Koons' crew wrapping the vinyl decals on his BMW Art Car was also the day I surfed across Little Lamb, Richmond artist/musician Sara Gossett's awesome blogspot compendium of psychedelia [which has...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 AM
It's a testament to the PR-fed, context-free media machine, I guess, that Olafur Eliasson, the last artist to make a BMW Art Car, goes entirely unmentioned in the promotions of Jeff Koons' iteration. [One exception: Richard Chang at the...
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Posted by greg at
7:37 AM
June 7, 2010
The Brooklyn Rail's Phong Bui interviewed Vija Celmins about her show at David McKee GalleryBrooklyn Rail: About the night sky paintings, I always wanted to ask you, with all of the subtleties of gray tones embedded in the white...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 PM
Whoa, check that out! The Moon Museum's on the Tee Vee! Or it will be, June 21st. The PBS show History Detectives is trying to figure out whether the Moon Museum, a SIM card-sized ceramic wafer created in 1969...
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Posted by greg at
7:16 AM
June 4, 2010
Bell Labs' Billy Kluver guided Andy Warhol to the Mylar balloons the artist used for Silver Clouds, his 1966 installation at Leo Castelli Gallery. And at Ferus Gallery. And at the Cincinnati Arts Center. At the time, Bell Labs...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
June 2, 2010
After bagging on Blake Gopnik's comments on Marcel Duchamp playing the buyers of his readymades for fools, I started looking more closely at Duchamp's actual statements and working process. It's so easy to consider him as just a source of...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
May 29, 2010
Sure, there's Dutch Camo Landscapes, and Razzle Dazzle, and the Civilian Camouflage Council, but it all pales in comparison to the truly epic WWII camo accomplishments of Jasper Maskelyne and The Magic Gang. Maskelyne was a British magician-turned-Army camo mastermind...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
May 28, 2010
Colorful, cheap African textiles: they're not just for Yinka Shonibare anymore! Called Pagne in West Africa and Kanga [also khanga] in Tanzania, 1x1.5m screenprinted cotton wraps are produced all across Africa. There is a tradition to make commemorative kanga...
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Posted by greg at
9:43 AM
May 26, 2010
So fantastic. I stumbled across this inadvertent diptych in Google Books, it's pp. 86-7 of P. Ch. Joubert's 1844 addition to the Manuels Roret series, Nouveau manuel complet du fabricant et de l'amateur de tabac. It's beautiful, somewhere between...
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Posted by greg at
5:53 PM
May 24, 2010
Hans Ulrich Obrist, is there anything you haven't done? In 1993 as part of the Museum In Progress project, Obrist helped the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti realize a longtime idea of putting art on airplanes. In addition...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
Artist/curator Anton Vidokle reworks an excellent lecture on the problems of curator/artists in the latest issue of e-flux journalI feel that whereas artists' engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of...
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Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
This 11-minute documentary short by Brisbane animator Simon Cottee gives a nice look at contemporary pixel art and its origins. Unsurprisingly, game developer Jason Rohrer has the most thoughtful perspective on the idealized, ex-post-facto perception of pixels as these perfect,...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
On the occasion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul [1] winning the Palme d'Or, Frieze's Dan Fox has a incisive recap of the debate over Slow Cinema that erupted after Nick James' Sight and Sound recent op-ed calling the genre out as a...
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Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
May 23, 2010
A couple of months ago, I wondered aloud about the reason Yves Klein schlepped all the way out to the Parisian suburbs to make the leap into the void for his famous photocollage, Leap into the Void. The site, 3,...
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Posted by greg at
11:47 AM
May 21, 2010
That is so Epic. From Epic Brewing Company, Salt Lake City, Utah. Spiral Jetty IPA | Epic Brewing Company [epicbrewing.com via the freshly relocated tyler green] Related? The Shoppes at Rozel Point, from Visiting Artist (sic), a lecture involving Smithson...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 PM
A digitized collection of vintage NASA Goddard Space Flight Center newsletters led me to the June 23, 1963 issue of LIFE Magazine. If it were possible for any photo of a Project Echo satelloon to be slightly less than awesome,...
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Posted by greg at
11:41 AM
May 20, 2010
The ad's been running for a while now, but Jean just spotted this disclaimer at the end of AT&T's "Blanket" commercial last night: "The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect affiliation or involvement with AT&T." I...
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Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
My buddy John Powers has been working on this insane project forlikeever: an artists commentary track--with pictures!--that runs alongside Star Wars IV. Tonight he's presenting it at Philoctetes, and discussing it along with Colby Chamberlain and Luke duBois, who's made...
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Posted by greg at
6:24 AM
May 19, 2010
I think we all know that Jeff Koons worked on Wall Street before he became an artist. It's mentioned in many of his profiles. But what, exactly, did he do? And what relevance, if any, does it really have...
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Posted by greg at
2:38 PM
Holy smokes, this is so incredible. Vincent Ocasla beat (sic) Sim City by spending three years designing and building Magnasanti, a six million person city that runs flawlessly (sic, again, obv) for 50,000 years. The YouTube video is ominously awesome....
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
May 18, 2010
Do you find yourself wanting to talk about Group Zero, but the only names you can pronounce are Fontana and Klein [and Westwater]? Do you ever call galleries you're about to walk into, just to hear them say the artist's...
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Posted by greg at
6:04 AM
May 17, 2010
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik commenting on the tiny chip of porcelain Eva and Franco Mattes, the formerly anonymous artists behind 0100101110101101.org, reportedly took from one of Marcel Duchamp's urinal sculptures: In the case of Duchamp's "Fountain," could it...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
December 1942, the US is at war, and everyone is tinkering in his basement, doing his part to protect the civilian and industrial landscape against the latest technological threat: aerial photo reconnaissance. From a lengthy, fascinating article in Popular Mechanics:But...
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Posted by greg at
8:02 AM
May 14, 2010
First up, let me just say these are fantastic; I would love to see this row of bombardier training simulators parked in any gallery in the world, right next to Chris Burden's homemade B-Car. But then you'd have to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:07 PM
Apex Art just announced that Courtenay Finn and Gary Fogelson were selected for this year's open curating slots. Finn's proposal uses a work by Bruce Nauman as a jumping off point for a show about "the role of reading in...
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Posted by greg at
4:26 PM
May 11, 2010
10 works from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962/1989, each 50x58cm, edition of 25 I am a huge Ed Ruscha fan, have been for a long time. His artist books of typological photographs were some of the first works of art...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
May 8, 2010
This explains the "two or three Happenings" discrepancies; there was a matinee Happening on Thursday. Also: "Globe Poster - Baltimore." I've had this on my desktop so long, I've forgotten where I ganked it. Oh, that's right, Oldenburg's print...
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Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
April 29, 2010
God bless him, even if he's on the wrong side of [most of the intervening 40 years of] contemporary art history, you gotta love Hilton Kramer's eviscerating takedown of MoMA's 1970 conceptualist exhibition, Information, curated by Kynaston McShine:The exhibition is,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
with apologies to Marco, whose skin, which is not really chartreuse, was done early on, before I figured out a more suitable color....
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Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
April 27, 2010
Alright, all y'all who didn't tell me about Otto Piene's classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:35 PM
Thanks to Judd [no relation] Tully, I pulled Martha Buskirk's book, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art down again and was reminded of how awesome it is on the fascinating conflicts between Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Donald Judd [and...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
April 26, 2010
No, not Michael Whitney Straight. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in a 1995 interview with Rob Storr:There's a great quote by the director of the Christian Coalition, who said that he wanted to be a spy. "I want to be invisible," he...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 PM
April 25, 2010
More from Giuseppe Panza's 1985 Archives of American Art Oral Histories interview with Christopher Knight, this time on Panza's preference for abstraction: But I believe that the modern science reveal to our knowledge a world which is far above the...
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Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, interviewed by Christopher Knight in 1985 for the Archives of American Art:DR. PANZA: Well, the connection between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art was made through Rauschenberg, because if you look at Rauschenberg, you see also the...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 PM
On 2nd, 3rd and 4th of April 1985, there was a discussion between Christopher Knight and Count [sic?!] Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. What was said remains in the collection of Christopher Knight. And in the Archives of American Art. And...
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Posted by greg at
8:30 PM
April 24, 2010
On some day in January 1972, there was a discussion between Count Panza and Ian Wilson. What was said remains in the collection of Count Panza.--A guess at what a young gallery assistant named Jeffrey Deitch typed up on a...
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Posted by greg at
3:34 PM
April 23, 2010
I cannot go to Oregon for the weekend, but I would pay cash money right here and now to watch a livestream of the Judd Conference, the Univerity of Oregon's day-long exploration of Donald Judd's fabrication methods. The official title...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
April 20, 2010
While researching the National Gallery of Art's Barkley L. Hendricks paintings, which were purchased by J. Carter Brown with money from Michael Whitney Straight, I came across one of the crazier space-meets-art moments in the history of exhibition design: Art...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
April 19, 2010
Oh, I take it all back. The Washington Post does support a vibrant local art scene. If they didn't, would they be "looking to discover the Washington Region's newest talents" with their "Real Art D.C." Art Contest? I didn't think...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
Sperone Westwater calls it Light Ballet on Wheels, 1965. Sure. It's hard to tell from the microfilm, but a photospread of artist-made household objects in the New York Times Magazine ["They Call It Art," (-ouch), Sept. 25, 1966] sure...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 AM
April 18, 2010
Following on to their 2008 retrospective of ZERO, Sperone Westwater is exhibiting work by the group's co-founder, Otto Piene. " Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967" runs through May 22nd. [16 Miles has very nice installation shots.]...
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Posted by greg at
2:50 PM
April 17, 2010
Figure in Landscape, 2009 I'm probably enjoying reading the legal filings in Craig Robins' lawsuit against David Zwirner a little too much. [Randy Kennedy's got a nice summary in the NYT today; basically, Robins says Zwirner revealed a confidential...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 AM
April 15, 2010
Cross a first edition of Yoko Ono's 1964 "event score"/instruction-based art book Grapefruit off my Ones I've Let Get Away list. Turns out it's not just me:There are no copies of the first (limited) edition of Grapefruit currently being...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:13 PM
Some interesting developments since putting the Walking Man self-portrait collection out there. Thanks for the feedback and responses. I think it's becoming clearer that walking man is not, as I wrote, a guy who "came upon the Google Street...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 AM
April 14, 2010
You could argue that Primary Information's facsimile editions of Avalanche, the awesome artist-run journal published in the mid-1970s by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, are only the 3rd and 4th greatest editions of Avalanche, after Wade Guyton &co's bootleg photocopied...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
April 12, 2010
Google Street View Bilbao 2 Originally uploaded by artberri I have no idea who walking man is, and ultimately it doesn't really matter to me; the portraits of him that got inserted repeatedly throughout Google Street View ultimately stand...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
HUGE news from on the Enzo Mari autoprogettazione X [Scandinavian Furniture Giant] mashup front: The Finnish manufacturer Artek will announce 'sedia 1- chair,' "the first object from Mari's thought-provoking project 'autoprogettazione' to go into production" with the company. "the...
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Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
April 10, 2010
In the Summer of 2009, an unidentified young man came upon the Google Street View Trike preparing to map the Binnenhof, the center of the Dutch government, in The Hague. He decided to tag along. The man walked alongside...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
April 9, 2010
He's pretty harsh on unnamed governments who complain about unblurred faces, and got more than a bit of engineer's arrogance, which is why, I guess, he works for Google, but Michael Jones's talk, "The Meaning of Maps,"at O'Reilly's Where...
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Posted by greg at
9:18 PM
If there's something I'm happy to be corrected on, it's my assertion earlier this week that the National Gallery of Art has never exhibited its awesome, early, major Barkley Hendricks portraits. It turns out they have, and here's how we...
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Posted by greg at
8:08 PM
Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, "Configurations of the New World,", papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as...
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Posted by greg at
1:34 PM
April 8, 2010
5. That plant. 4. That Girard-lookin' wall hanging. 3. Those Piet Hein Eek-lookin' sofas. 2. The Courier-lookin' typeface on those teasers. 1. A tie between Curries & Smog. via LA Modern, which will be auctioning this and other vintage...
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11:25 PM
April 7, 2010
Dealer Leo Castelli in a December 1969 interview with Paul Cummings, discussing the early work of John Chamberlain:Then before that, he had done those foam rubber sculptures, which were really very, very good. At that time, people were more...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
April 6, 2010
It's hard to say where the momentous awesomeness of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's 1963 Pop Art Festival first overwhelmed me. When I learned that noted Pop Artist John Cage performed on opening night? When I found out that...
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7:39 AM
April 4, 2010
Maybe that should be, "Hast du mich gesehen?" Do you have Andrea Fraser's Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER'S Writings...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 PM
Seriously. It's been eating at me for over a year. Like everyone else who saw them in "Birth of the Cool," Nasher Museum curator Trevor Schoonmaker's retrospective, I was in awe of Barkely L. Hendricks' straight-up full length portraits...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
April 3, 2010
I was reading Calvin Tomkins' 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold's giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
March 31, 2010
I've already mentioned the May 3, 1963 Time Magazine article about the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's Pop Art Festival; it's really not much, but it contains the most extensive contemporary account of Claes Oldenburg's 1963 Happening, Stars. Here's how...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
I've been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it's been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos. Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
March 30, 2010
So the last couple of months, I've been working on an idea for book, and I wanted to see a mockup/proof. It's mostly photographs/images, with a very text introduction, and I wanted only one image per spread, like a nice...
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Posted by greg at
2:39 PM
The Archive of American Art's collection of transcripts of Paul Cummings' interviews with art world figures is always good for a firsthand account and an interesting nugget or reflection. But I don't think I've ever had quite the visceral reaction...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
In her 1998 biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Nina Burleigh used Stars, Claes Oldenburg's Happening at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's 1963 Pop Art Festival, as a bellwether for sophisticated Georgetown/Washington's temperament towards contemporary art. Here's how Burleigh described...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
March 27, 2010
Hello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art? Never mind, Blake Gopnik is...
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Posted by greg at
8:22 PM
March 25, 2010
The week before The Pop Art Festival in Washington DC, Art Buchwald had lunch with Claes Oldenburg, WGMA Assistant Director Alice Denney, and publicist John Mecklin. The topic was Oldenburg's upcoming Happening, Stars. Buchwald wrote (in the first person...
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Posted by greg at
3:09 PM
In Frieze, Jennifer Allen [no relation] declares the death of photography. Film photography, that is:Digitalization brings photography closer to cinema, too. The galloping horse that Eadweard Muybridge photo-graphed with 24 cameras can now be captured with one high-speed digital camera....
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Posted by greg at
12:57 PM
March 24, 2010
Suddenly silver mirrored balls are everywhere. Music video and filmmaker Roel Wouters created the trailer for last year's International Film Festival Breda: A silver sphere on an endless checkerboard floor is the default for many 3D modeling applications. It can...
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Posted by greg at
5:01 PM
March 23, 2010
I could feel Mondo-Blogo was baiting me as I scrolled through the photos from MoonFire, Taschen's luscious 2009 commemorative book for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. He was amped about the text by Norman Mailer, and the...
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10:48 PM
It's been a few months, and now I've been researching it so many places, I can't remember exactly where I first discovered that Claes Oldenburg did a Happening in Washington DC. And an early one, too. He was invited...
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Posted by greg at
3:42 PM
March 22, 2010
Through The Night Softly was a 1973 performance piece-as-latenight-TV-commercial by Chris Burden. It's a 10-second video of the artist, in a Speedo, inching on his stomach across a parking lot full of broken glass. [View it on UbuWeb.] Burden...
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Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
March 21, 2010
A great post on language & progress, Claude Levi-Strauss & TIno Sehgal. Some of the most interesting commentary I've read on discerning the actual structure and contours of Sehgal's This Progress, too. [futureofthebook.org via @briansholis] Which makes me wonder: do...
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3:28 PM
March 20, 2010
I've been working on a shot-for-shot remake of the Spiral Jetty film for a while, and so I'm quite familiar with the storyboard-like drawings Smithson did for it. Familiar with them as drawings, that is. He called them Movie...
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Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
March 19, 2010
It doesn't feel like a tangent to go from satelloons and museums on the moon to other aesthetic aspects of space and the space race. Plus there's the fascination at discovering, as a grown man, how much I hadn't...
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Posted by greg at
9:45 PM
Roberta Smith loves loves loves the Ken Price/Josef Albers show at Brooke Alexander. I all but stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago after finding Brooke's interview with Price (PDF), and I have to agree. It is incredibly...
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12:03 AM
March 18, 2010
Ivan Lozano's post about Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, and the conservation of performance art is absolutely fantastic. [It's built off the Performance Workshop Klaus Biesenbach held a couple of weeks ago, which was written up by Carol Kino...
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Posted by greg at
11:31 PM
March 16, 2010
You remember how, a couple of months ago, I could find next to nothing online about Vern Blosum, the mysterious artist whose crisp, deadpan paintings of parking meters were featured in one of the very first museum exhibitions of Pop...
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Posted by greg at
10:18 PM
While rummaging around in Vito Acconci's early exhibition history for traces of Kathryn Bigelow's work [more on that in a second], I came across a set of three early, short Super 8mm films I'd never heard of: Three Attention...
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Posted by greg at
1:17 PM
"The lady clad in bright red silk was having her picture taken from every angle around Abramovic's performance. It was spectacular." C-Monster has an awesome photoset and a firsthand account of experiencing Marina Abramovic's MoMA performance, The Artist Is...
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Posted by greg at
11:02 AM
From a 1983 New York Times profile of up-and-coming artist/photographer Cindy Sherman:One day several years ago, in the studio of David Salle, who borrows extensively from the media, Miss Sherman saw a soft-porn magazine photograph of ''a housewife looking sexy''...
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Posted by greg at
9:40 AM
March 15, 2010
I'm slightly fascinated with the talk-based artwork of Ian Wilson. The last couple of weeks, I'd been working on a Conceptualism-related proposal, and so I had out my catalogue for Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer's awesome, formative [for me, anyway]...
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Posted by greg at
4:34 PM
Can I just suggest that, when you buy an article from the New York Times Archive, you go ahead and buy a 10-pack? In addition to supporting your local paper in their time of financial distress and dire need [ahem],...
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Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
March 14, 2010
Part of re-creating the Project Echo satelloons as art objects is tracking down the documentation and history of it all, identifying archives and primary source materials, and finding out how, exactly NASA built these early, early satellites. Because it's...
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Posted by greg at
5:41 PM
March 13, 2010
Like everyone else reading it on OSCAR NIGHT®, Andrew Hultkrans' 1995 Artforum interview with Kathryn Bigelow gave me hope for the films-by-artists genre, if not quite from the direction people might expect. To hear a double OSCAR® winner say of...
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7:40 AM
March 12, 2010
was in Carol Vogel's article on the Hirshhorn's upcoming Yves Klein retrospective [and the Kleins being auctioned to coincide with it]:A colorful figure who was an aspiring judo instructor, Klein studied Rosicrucianism and was obsessed with philosophical and poetic investigations...
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6:48 PM
Ken Knowlton's artistic collaborations have been less well-known that his Bell Labs colleague, Billy Kluver, who created E.A.T. Experiements with Art & Technology, with Robert Rauschenberg and who introduced Andy Warhol to Mylar. But we'll get to that. In...
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12:54 PM
Stan VanDerBeek and Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs collaborated on a series of digital structuralist computer/graphic/text animations in 1966. They used BeFLIX, [Bell Flicks], an 8-bit graphics programming language Knowlton developed in 1963. The Tate's clean version of Poemfield No....
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Posted by greg at
12:16 PM
March 9, 2010
I'm still looking for the c. 1958-9 images of the 12-foot satelloon prototype being inflated in the US Capitol Building as part of NASA's push to fund the 100-foot version. But look what I found in the March 14, 1961...
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8:53 PM
The story smells a little planted, but as long as a couple of these awesome Razzle Dazzle, Dakis Razzin,' New Museum critiquin' posters find their way into a mailing tube and land on my doorstep, I will definitely play along:...
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Posted by greg at
2:02 PM
I often wonder what it'll do to my kids to grow up immersed in contemporary art the way they are: reading Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series at bedtime; seeing every vertical line in a painting as a "zip"; choosing to watch...
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12:25 PM
March 8, 2010
In 1961, Hazleton Laboratories, a pioneering biological sciences testing company based in Falls Church, Virginia, was growing rapidly. For one of their expansions, executives and scientists were given allocations to buy cutting edge abstract art for their offices. Which...
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9:31 AM
March 6, 2010
I just bought this incredible poster at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in DC. It's for "Hier ist die Future," an exhibition held last year at the library by British artist...
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2:25 PM
March 5, 2010
Jeffrey Weiss's Artforum article on the implications of forensic analysis of paintings has me stoked to see "Radical Invention," Stephanie d'Alessandro and John Elderfield's incredible-sounding exhibition of experimental Matisse in the 1910s. Weiss calls out the potential trap of uncritically...
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10:21 PM
March 4, 2010
A lot of people are excited about the takedown of Nicolai Ouroussoff in Design Observer this week. And I can see their quaint, anti-starchitect point. But for me, Ouroussoff's biggest crime only became clear this afternoon. That's when I...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
I'm afraid there's part of me that sees Edward Hopper as a little too loved-it-in-high-school, the Salinger of painting. But I still like Empty Room in the Sun, 1963, and I really like the way Brian O'Doherty talks about...
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8:26 PM
March 3, 2010
For a generation of art watchers, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty existed primarily as an image, via the making-of film and Gianfranco Gorgoni's iconic aerial photographs, which were exhibited at MoMA's seminal Information show and were published in Smithson's Artforum...
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Posted by greg at
11:31 PM
From Ken Johnson's thrilled NYT review of "Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age," which was at the National Gallery last winter:The painters of the golden age in Holland brought the city onto center stage and made...
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1:36 PM
547 West 27th Street Proposed Rooftop Painting Originally uploaded by Madilworth Last fall as the Dutch Landscape paintings idea was kicking into gear, artist Molly Dilworth emailed me a link to her rather awesome project, Paintings for Satellites. For...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
March 2, 2010
Apparently, in the 1890s, the Swedish modernist playwright August Strindberg went through a period of intense imagemaking. He created paintings and photographs [hold that thought] that sound and look decades ahead of their time using chance and natural/chemical processes...
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10:55 AM
March 1, 2010
Joerg has an interesting recap of Thomas Ruff speaking with Philip Gefter a couple of weeks ago at Aperture. I'm a fan of several of Ruff's series of work--and distinctly not a fan of others, but hey. Here's a...
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9:43 PM
February 26, 2010
Hey Snow People, I'll be participating in a "non-hierarchical panel discussion" about collecting art tomorrow, Saturday, 2/27 at #class, that's hashtagclass, Bill Powhida and Jen Dalton's show/performance/talk-in at Edward Winkleman Gallery. The gig is organized by Barry Hoggard and James...
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4:52 PM
February 25, 2010
I've been thinking about this image from Google Street View, the one of the Mauritshuis which contains two distorted images of the guy's head. As that elongated lower head shows, Google's image knitting algorithm apparently combined two photos of...
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11:29 PM
February 24, 2010
For all my talk lately about satelloons, Olafur's stayed very politely quiet about his own giant, swinging aluminum balls. Maybe because he only has one? Seriously, though, I hope it's an edition. Your Imploded View is a 51-inch diameter, 660-lb...
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10:20 PM
February 23, 2010
These are mostly for me, just kind of gathered here without order or comment for the moment. I've been thinking about Alberto Giacometti lately, and his sculptural, spatial pursuit of that moment when a figure comes into view. Arthur...
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11:15 PM
February 22, 2010
Because I now appear to be constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise, after mentioning the Mauritshuis, the Vermeer-loaded Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, I checked to see if was camo-obscured on Google Maps. [I kind of knew it wasn't,...
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5:36 PM
February 21, 2010
The inconvenient intrusion of war and political upheaval [i.e., the collapse of the Dutch government and the looming withdrawal of Dutch troops from their frontline deployment in Afghanistan] into my Dutch Landscapes project has sent me trying to re-find...
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5:27 PM
February 20, 2010
You may recall how Google Maps recently changed the polygonal camouflage on one of the Dutch landscapes I was using for my painting project. I was back there, getting a clean shot of the nicely distorted grid plaza--the site...
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9:45 AM
February 19, 2010
As you can guess from the mentions of Sherrie Levine, I've been studying the issues around copying and reproducing and originality and authorship. And whenever you do that, Walter Benjamin comes up, specifically his concept of aura. Basically, it's what...
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8:44 PM
Who are the freaks and nerds who call out picayune corrections in newspaper articles? Me, for one. On a New York Times piece I did once, I changed an entire line during the copyediting process. The piece was much,...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 AM
Gareth Long's giant lenticular prints based on the iconic-yet-anachronous 1991 cover designs for JD Salinger's books are freaking me out right now. They're like Noland or Morris Louis canvases, reanimated through some immediately dated, retrofuturistic technology. Something an aesthete...
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8:26 AM
February 18, 2010
For their "Art of Two Germanys" show in 2008, LACMA recreated part of a 1966 gallery installation by Gerhard Richter called Volker Bradke, which was designed to mimic or reference the postwar German bourgeoisie's penchant for ticky tacky floral wallpaper....
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1:05 PM
February 17, 2010
Here's Sherrie Levine talking in 1993 about the making of her Meltdown woodblock print series with BAM's Constance Lewallen in the Journal of Contemporary Art. Levine did just what Susan Tallman, who reviewed Meltdown kind of negatively in 1990, feared:...
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3:42 PM
February 16, 2010
Reductivist abstraction and pixelated photo-appropriation? If only it could involve a short film, an Ikea table, or a White House stage set, I could wrap this whole blog up with a bow and go home. From Peter Blum Editions' text...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 PM
February 10, 2010
Wow, Sotheby's auction of iconic Zero works from the Anne and Gerhard Lenz collection today in London went through the roof. Whether it was the recent renewed critical interest in key Zero artists beyond the big names--from Klein, Fontana...
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11:49 PM
February 9, 2010
So from what I can gather, Duda Miranda is a fictional collector persona, created by an artist, who collects by fabricating replicas of conceptual artworks. He first exhibited his collection in his [or someone's] house in Campinas, Brazil, in...
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11:15 PM
February 8, 2010
As soon as I started thinking that Dutch Polygonal Camo on Google Maps would make great abstract landscape paintings, I thought of a some giant, abstract, polygonal landscape paintings I'd seen way back in 2000-2. But for the life...
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Posted by greg at
11:04 AM
I guess that's the whole point of camo, you just never really know what you're gonna see. In February 1942, the Dutch minesweeper the HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen survived the Battle of the Java Sea, in which the Japanese Navy...
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7:22 AM
February 5, 2010
Been waiting to finally see one of these. Looks like this week is my chance:In the main gallery upstairs, Eliasson exhibits a series of watercolor drawings on paper. Configured in sequences, they use ellipses and circles as narrative exercises...
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8:17 PM
February 4, 2010
Gather ye screengrabs while ye may, I guess. The camo-obscuring of sensitive sites on Google Maps by the Dutch Intelligence Service (MVID) is a dynamic process. One of my favorite sites I found last November is a complex along the...
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8:58 AM
February 3, 2010
I swear, I didn't plan to go all Errol Morris and do three posts about one photo in one catalogue about one artwork. So look at this other photograph! The second thing you notice--first if you just crack it open,...
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8:04 PM
OK, now it's been bugging me a bit, this catalogue photo of Gerhard Richter with a paint brush, ostensibly going to town on the work that is the lone subject of the book, 4900 Colours, which is comprised of...
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2:57 PM
February 2, 2010
So my copy of the Serpentine Gallery's catalogue for "Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours" finally came. This is the frontispiece, a photo by Joe Hage [who is turning up everywhere in Richterland now? He's the collector who's helping the artist...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
A 2001 visit to Gerhard Richter's studio, from when Michael Kimmelman used to write about art:He puts a canvas on an easel at the end of the room and slides the photograph into a projector. The photo appears, projected onto...
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Posted by greg at
1:12 PM
I've been searching for historical and primary source material for Project Echo, one of NASA's earliest missions, which kicked into high gear in 1958. The giant, inflatable satelloons were functional--passive reflection communication satellites. That they were shaped just like...
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6:58 AM
January 31, 2010
I finally picked up a copy of the exhibition catalogue for the 1973-4 Duchamp retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Here is the end of Hilton Kramer's non-review of the show for the New...
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9:35 AM
January 30, 2010
I was going to call it a guilty pleasure, but entering Souren Melikian's reality distortion field every weekend is clearly a vice. Melikian covers the art world for the International Herald Tribune--which, for him, begins and ends at the auction...
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7:29 PM
The nightly LED show on the facade of the new Motor City Casino in Detroit [via sweet juniper] Multiverse a now-permanent installation by Leo Villareal at the National Gallery of Art: I think it's clear that when it comes to...
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8:46 AM
January 29, 2010
So I went to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian this morning to do a little research on the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Unfortunately, most of the WGMA's archives are still at the Corcoran, which merged...
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12:32 PM
Ten years, people. That's how long it took me to spot this. Ten. Years. What can I say, I got no excuse. I let you down. Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999 [olafureliasson.net] While I'm on the topic, my friend...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
January 28, 2010
So jealous. MoMA bought R.H. Quaytman's awesome little storage rack of paintings, Iamb: Chapter 12, Excerpts and Exceptions, with Painting Rack, which the artist filled over the course of eight years, and showed in 2009 at Miguel Abreu. [Abreu,...
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5:52 PM
January 27, 2010
The BBC has nice footage of the mockup for Michael Arad's World Trade Center Memorial waterfalls, which was constructed in Brooklyn last week. My impression: unexpectedly Olafur-esque. Also, the [engineer?] guy saying it is to be an "Eternal Waterfall"...
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10:36 AM
January 26, 2010
I guess if God can appear to a backwoods New York farmboy, send an angel to groom him for four years, and then command him to translate a sheaf of golden plates into the Book of Mormon, He can...
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7:41 PM
I know dolphins are supposed to be super-intelligent and all, BUT. While this detournement of Smithson's Spiral Jetty executed from rapidly dissipating, tail-agitated mud is passably performative, as a critique of entropy, it's a little too pat and predictable....
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7:25 PM
January 23, 2010
When DC art lecturer and blogger John Anderson emailed to ask if I'd heard about the scandal surrounding the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Tom Wesselmann, I was like, "Tom Wesselmann scandal? Do tell!" He pointed me...
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7:00 PM
January 22, 2010
I've been poking around to find examples of the artwork of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the Washington DC painter who was connected romantically to both Ken Noland and JFK. When her work is discussed at all, she's generally been associated...
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1:19 PM
January 21, 2010
You start pulling on a thread, and you never quite know what starts to come out. For some great stories about the Washington Gallery for Modern Art and "The Popular Image Exhibition," reader JA suggested, I should really check out...
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10:52 PM
January 20, 2010
As I've been digging into the history of modernism and contemporary art in Washington DC, one of the most prominent events I keep coming back to is "The Popular Image" and its performance companion, the "Pop Art Festival." Organized Alice...
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9:59 PM
January 19, 2010
A little while back, when I realized that Bruce High Quality Foundation, the ambiguous, anonymous art collective and The New Hotness, were behind The Gate, I took them at their word and began to question whether what we knew...
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7:52 AM
January 18, 2010
Seriously, I could fall into Gerhard Richter's website and not surface for days. There's just so much stuff. And related stuff. And meta-stuff. Auction histories for specific works? Cross-referenced Atlas pages? It just goes on and on and on....
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Posted by greg at
11:06 PM
Now that I can make any map or image into a color-averaged, triangular camo abstract wonderscape, I am in big trouble. Triangulation - web interface [triangulation.jgate.de via andy] original image: Stadtbild PL, 1970, Gerhard Richter [gerhard-richter.com]...
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Posted by greg at
9:54 PM
January 17, 2010
As someone who backed into a project last September of making paintings of readymade abstraction, I was nervous, stoked, and inspired by "Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture," the group show curated by Debra Singer which...
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3:29 PM
January 15, 2010
I've recently stepped up my search for more examples of objects that resonate with Enzo Mari's autoprogettazione model: artists and designers who offer not just the non-authorial conceit of "made by anyone," but "permission to make it yourself." It's...
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11:14 PM
January 12, 2010
Regular readers of greg.org will recall the Moon Museum. Initiated by the artist Frosty Myers--who know prefers to be called Forrest Myers, I take it--the Moon Museum was the first art on the moon, a tiny ceramic chip containing...
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Posted by greg at
10:50 PM
I've had a research question simmering on the back burner for a while, trying to figure out what the history of modernism and contemporary art have been in Washington DC. Partly, it was the dearth of good modernist architecture that...
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Posted by greg at
4:41 PM
January 10, 2010
Recently I've been researching the postwar history of contemporary art and architecture in Washington DC. This article sounds like it could have been written last week:The Art Game in Washington Amid a growing art boom, local artists feel they are...
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4:43 PM
January 9, 2010
This also goes on my Lists Of Things 'We' Did Not Know In 2008 and 2007, Which Is When James Wagner Mentioned It. I admit, I largely pulled back from the whole Bruce High Quality Foundation hype when it, well,...
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Posted by greg at
5:03 PM
Last month I watched the essentially sculptural process of designing and making fiberglass Eames chairs, and I wondered "how design and art ever stayed separate in those days." The answer, of course, was that it didn't. David Zwirner just...
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Posted by greg at
12:29 PM
My first reaction on reading the BBC's 2009 list 100 things we didn't know last year for 2009 was, "What you mean 'we,' Kemosabe?" But seriously, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster was never actually used in WWII,...
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Posted by greg at
9:13 AM
January 8, 2010
The California College for The Arts is organizing an open pin-up show to honor Larry Sultan, the photographer, conceptual artist, and teacher who passed away last month:This show is a way for us to mark his passing and his enormous...
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Posted by greg at
8:24 AM
Jörg M Colberg [who blogs photography at concientious] introduces complexity and subjectivity with content-sensitive jpeg compression:These Adaptive Jpegs (ajpegs) [1] - "American Pixels" - are an experiment. Jpegs are images where the original information was compressed to save space....
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Posted by greg at
7:33 AM
January 7, 2010
So I was watching Marie Lorenz' video, Capsized, on WNYC's Culture Blog, like I was told to do. And not just because she had co-curated Invisible Graffiti Magnet Show inside those Richard Serra torqued spiral segments stored along the Bronx...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 AM
January 6, 2010
Inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist's perennial interview question, I wrote about artists' unrealized projects a few years ago for the NY Times. As I stack up some [as-yet] unrealized projects of my own--including, alas, catching up on my unread e-flux...
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Posted by greg at
11:34 PM
January 5, 2010
Last night on very short notice, I went to "Running for Cover(age), A panel discussion on arts criticism in the DC area," organized by the Washington Project for the Arts. Here are the impetus and content of the discussion in...
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Posted by greg at
9:58 AM
January 2, 2010
I'm fine with somethings in the air, and zeitgeists, and influences, and inspirations, and appropriations. When I finish some of these Dutch Landscape paintings, I'll go up to Mary Heilmann and Gerhard Richter and a dozen other folks and give...
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Posted by greg at
5:47 PM
Just getting caught up on some blogs I lost track of the last couple of months. Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a great writeup of an amazing-sounding show in Athens at the DESTE Foundation titled, "A...
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Posted by greg at
3:08 PM
While poking around last night looking for more films and videos made by Ernesto Neto, I found this clip, a black & white making-of short for Looking for the end, an installation Neto made in the southern Paris suburb of...
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Posted by greg at
9:02 AM
January 1, 2010
What's the bigger news, that the traditional shell-and-machete-based distribution system of beachfront coconut water is threatened by industrial-scale canned product? Or that Ernesto Neto is releasing catchy video manifestos for the cause on YouTube? Água de coco Ernesto Neto...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 PM
December 29, 2009
Thanks to Find The Warhols! and the Pebble Beach Pollock, 2009 was the Year Of Sketchy Art Thefts here on greg.org. Definitely didn't see that coming. But after a couple of intense months, both cases have grown dishearteningly cold of...
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Posted by greg at
1:13 PM
December 17, 2009
The American Museum of Natural History maintains a Digital Universe Atlas, which maps all the objects in the universe using the most current data available. They just released The Known Universe, an animated version of the data, in conjunction...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building,...
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Posted by greg at
7:48 AM
December 15, 2009
Paddy recognized a good match for MOCA's Felix Gonzalez-Torres [Christmas] light string card. If the folks at Luhring Augustine would hop to, we can still get this printed and sent in time for Kwanzaa, at least. Alternate headlines: Deck...
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Posted by greg at
9:55 AM
Sweet. The Hirshhorn Museum is floating the idea to turn its central plaza into a 4-story event space by filling it with a giant temporary balloon pavilion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The $5 million pavilion would be put...
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Posted by greg at
7:47 AM
December 14, 2009
Not sure how I feel about this, I'll tell you when my order arrives. Pretty damn pleased with the headline, though. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Holiday Cards: Last Light, $14.95 for a box of 10 [mocastore.org]...
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Posted by greg at
1:29 PM
Robin Pogrebin reports on all the museums waking up with a financial and strategic hangover after a decade of Bilbao Effect-ed building. It's good, obvious-and-not-just-in-hindsight stuff. I seem to recall during the midst of the boom, the American Cinematheque in...
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Posted by greg at
10:47 AM
December 13, 2009
The first time I did the Miami collection visit circuit was in 1998, with MoMA's Junior Associates. A few things stuck out in my mind: Ernesto Neto camped out on Rosa de la Cruz's floor with a sewing machine; Zhang...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
Considering how important and incredible the work is, it's funny how ambivalent the Times' Gabriel Orozco feature sounds. Ann Temkin did a great show of Orozco's work in Philadelphia, and yet she comes across as a bit flustered discussing the...
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Posted by greg at
7:54 AM
December 12, 2009
A periodic check on eBay for Project Echo-related material turned up this photo from April 29, 1963: "NASA-MERCURY, HANGAR 5, CCMTA - Left to Right - William Carmines and William Armstrong of NASA describe the balloon experiment for the...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
December 10, 2009
So fantastic. This promo film was made by Eames Office for Herman Miller in 1970, and it shows the making of fiberglass shell chairs, from the analog beginnings of design to the box. The idea of design has been...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 PM
I'm fallen in love all over again with the Solar Toy Ray and Charles Eames created around 1956-7 for Alcoa. Writing about it in 1958, Charles Eames also called it the "Do Nothing Machine." As Steve Roden discussed a...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
I've always smiled when I read this exchange from James Meyer's 2001 interview with Anne Truitt: JM: People often try to connect the artist's life and work In obvious ways: They refract the art through the lens of biography. I...
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Posted by greg at
4:56 PM
December 7, 2009
Whoops, looks like the number of spectacular corporate fraudster's secret art stashes about be pawned off to unnamed Russian collectors has dropped by one. The Guardia di Finanza del Nucleo Polizia Tributaria in Bologna raided several Parma homes of...
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Posted by greg at
9:43 AM
December 6, 2009
I love it when several plans come together. Apparently, not all the Dutch Google Maps landscapes camo'd out by the Military Intelligence Department are actually sensitive sites. And some sites will toggle in and out of camouflage without warning...
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Posted by greg at
7:03 PM
December 5, 2009
So how did the New York Times review Dan Flavin's seminal 1964 show at Green Gallery? Actually, it didn't. Stuart Preston just gave it a snarky, inaccurate blurb in the weekend gallery listings on Nov. 28. I can't imagine it...
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Posted by greg at
11:54 AM
December 4, 2009
I understand the back to basics theme that Holland Cotter's working with in his Chelsea walkaround. But I'm baffled by the retrograde sniping about authorship in his non-review of Alighiero e Boetti's maps:Gladstone on West 21st Street has pulled...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
December 2, 2009
Add Shift, a seminal, early site-specific sculpture from 1970-72, to the list of Richard Serra works you can see on Google Maps. The series of wedge-shaped, concrete walls is tucked away on remote farmland in King City, Ontario. The...
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Posted by greg at
8:32 AM
November 30, 2009
I've thought about similar situations before, so when I saw the mention in the NY Times article about all the dela Cruz's Felix Gonzalez-Torreses I realized I was surprised at how infrequently I hear or see Felix's partner mentioned...
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Posted by greg at
6:23 PM
November 29, 2009
Gerhard Richter used a randomizing computer program to place the 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 different colors in his 2007 stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral. He used the same program at the same time to...
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Posted by greg at
10:51 PM
Been trying to think about where the idea of painting an intentionally obscuring, computer-generated, institutionally applied abstract pattern onto a systematically produced aerial photographic map of the entire world fits into the historical painting/photography, abstract/representational context. From Andre Bazin's 1945...
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Posted by greg at
2:16 PM
November 25, 2009
In 1969, Allen Ruppersberg created Al's Cafe, a detailed, functioning facsimile of an archetypal diner, which was to operate/perform one night a week. Allan McCollum, who was making work in Los Angeles at the time, wrote about Ruppersberg and Al's...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 AM
November 24, 2009
You know what we haven't been hearing much news about lately? That's right, art crime. No Pebble Beach "Pollocks" bollocks, no Find The Warhols! updates from LA... So it's a relief to hear that hilarious Warholian scams haven't all disappeared....
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Posted by greg at
9:54 PM
November 23, 2009
Just another, particularly beautiful, addition to the list of sky atlases throughout history which showed the entire universe. Or the known universe. Or the known universe that they could show: Zwillinge (Twins : Gemini), a 1799 constellation map by Christian...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
November 21, 2009
Well known Twitter pioneer Shaquille O'Neal is curating an exhibition next February titled "Size DOES Matter," which will look at the issue of scale in contemporary art. The show will take place at the Flag Art Foundation, which was founded...
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Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' The headline was glib enough that I waited several days before actually reading it, but Spiegel's interview with Umberto Eco does turn out to be worth it. SPIEGEL: But why does...
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Posted by greg at
1:37 PM
November 20, 2009
Pentagram has nice coverage of Abbott Miller's work for the crisp signage and graphics systems at Thom Mayne's spectacular new building for the Cooper Union. Which looks, in some of its particulars, quite like Roni Horn sculptures. I look...
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Posted by greg at
6:10 PM
November 19, 2009
So last winter, after finding Jake Dobkin's, and Nathan Kensinger's photos during my search for Richard Serra sculptures visible on Google Maps, I got a little fascinated with the massive Cor-Ten sculptures Richard Serra stores in a riverfront machine...
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Posted by greg at
6:15 PM
November 18, 2009
I don't know who Bruce MacEvoy is, but his is the most exhaustive series of comparative analyses of various theories of color theory I've found. [aha. A web guy/artist who sold YHOO better than I did.] As I debate in...
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Posted by greg at
2:38 PM
November 17, 2009
Is Charlie Finch feeling left out? In his new column on artnet, Finch downplays the New Museum's Dakis controversy--by throwing out several blind items he thinks are even bigger, yet unacknowledged scandals, including a claim he made in his Urs...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 PM
November 14, 2009
I can't say how I feel about Francesco Vezzoli's work; that's not how my mama raised me. I will grant though, that he's extremely smart and astute and has successfully identified an elemental dynamic of the art world and makes...
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Posted by greg at
5:45 PM
November 13, 2009
The first Project Echo satelloon may have started out as a 100-meter sphere, but it didn't stay that way. Echo IA launched on August 12, 1960, and it stayed in orbit and visible to the naked eye until May...
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Posted by greg at
4:05 PM
Though they're pixelated abstractions, and though they're almost as likely to be landscapes as people, Alex Brown's paintings feel a bit like the opposite of what fascinates me about the Dutch Landscape paintings I'm working on. From a q&a...
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Posted by greg at
2:27 PM
November 12, 2009
I didn't realize it until I surfed across this half-pixelated Takashi Murakami painting, but I have Murakami's factory lodged in my brain as a model of digital-to-analog painting and production. Back before the whole Louis Vuitton thing, even before...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
November 10, 2009
More from Paper Monument, the print version #1, an interesting critique of Tomma Abts' Turner Prize-winning exhibition in 2006 by editor Dushko Petrovich:Understatement is of course a wonderful tactic, provided that you first have something to state. Without content, the...
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Posted by greg at
8:05 PM
Oh, Paper Monumentalists, please keep going. The only thing I don't like about your almost-too-short-to-tweet reviews is that there are too few of them:Josiah McElheny "Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism" September 12 - October 17 Andrea Rosen Gallery Ruined by...
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Posted by greg at
1:37 PM
November 6, 2009
You never know what'll turn up. In the same sale as that Sheeler study is this 1965 geometric abstract painting by Dean Fleming, one of the pioneers of SoHo. In 1962, Fleming founded the Park Place Gallery, an artist...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
To be honest, I've never felt very interested in the late paintings of Charles Sheeler. After his Precisionist, industrial peak, and his consistently strong, modernist photography, the delicate, highly constructed, cubist/abstract Pennsylvania barn compositions seemed a little twee. They...
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Posted by greg at
7:57 PM
Jacques Torres chocolate bunny, originally uploaded by 16 Miles of String. Wow, I am sorry I missed the opening party for Performa 09 last Friday. A ton of ribs, a ton of honey, a ton of ice, a ton...
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Posted by greg at
10:17 AM
November 5, 2009
So now that the White House has returned Alma Thomas's 1968 painting, Watusi (Hard Edge) to the Hirshhorn amid a flurry of interest in its making and in the artist herself, I assume the museum will quickly put it...
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Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
November 4, 2009
I guess I can understand if the White House saw the rightwing faux-controversy over Alma Thomas's Watusi (Hard Edge) as an unhelpful distraction, and it's not like the country elected Obama to be curator-in-chief, but that doesn't mean their...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
Walter Hopps' 1991 exhibition at The Menil, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, changed my art life, basically. Bob and Cy trekking around Italy. Bob and John and Merce collaborating. Bob and Jasper, whoa. Did not hear much about that...
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Posted by greg at
12:36 PM
November 2, 2009
Maybe I've just been living in the digital world too long, but I'd like to somehow extract a color list from these polygon-laden Google Map images, and then order paint that matches. Only I'm not finding a vast, well-developed, digital-to-analog...
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Posted by greg at
4:03 PM
November 1, 2009
I just got the first prints of Dutch Landscapes to paint. And I've captured a few more to prep for printing. Here are a few more of the camo-obscured Dutch sites I also like but haven't gotten around to capturing...
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Posted by greg at
5:19 PM
Tacita Dean on the making of Craneway Event, the rehearsals of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in a former auto factory on the San Francisco Bay, which she filmed exactly a year ago: I edited it alone on my film-cutting...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
October 31, 2009
Anyone with an interest in Piet Mondrian's painting technique probably already has Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, published by the Harvard Art Museums in 2001. It's a fascinating, in-depth, and not-at-all boring look at a unique body of Mondrian's work,...
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Posted by greg at
5:15 PM
October 30, 2009
It's hard to see Theo van Doesburg's work up close these days, especially paintings. But for this Dutch Landscapes paintings project, the technical and theoretical logic of both Mondrian and van Doesburg is pretty inarguable. Though the de Stijl...
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Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
October 29, 2009
At the press preview of the New Museum's Urs Fischer show yesterday, curator Massimiliano Gioni said that Fischer "treats reality as if it were software," an assessment I suspect is designed to be tweeted more than analyzed. Gioni and...
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Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
October 28, 2009
Sheesh, as if I wasn't painfully aware of the nearly finished Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup table sitting behind my sofa, I get this, from Peter Nencini, [above] which frankly just hurts:A couple of weeks ago we reassembled 32...
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Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
It happens all the time in the Old Masters market, but I could never understand how a work of art could sell at auction for one price, only to reappear--and to sell--at a fair a few months later with a...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
October 27, 2009
From the Other Things I Didn't Know About What Goes Inside Geodesic Dome Pavilions Department: Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison devote a chapter in their 2003 book, Architecture and nature: creating the American landscape to geodesic domes, including this description...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 PM
How to account for my dogged fascination with the temporary/permanent, futuristic/historic paradoxes of Expo art and architecture? Buckminster Fuller's 20-story Biosphere was far and away his greatest single success and the hit of the most successful modernist world's fair,...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 PM
October 26, 2009
So it looks like we won't be finding the Warhols just yet. The Kickstarter project deadline came today, and only $265 of the $1400 or so required to print and ship a batch of giant Wanted posters had been pledged....
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
October 22, 2009
From the Observer profile of Massimiliano Gioni:Growing up outside Milan in a town he likened to Newark, Mr. Gioni found himself drawn to art precisely because there were no adults talking to him about it. "It didn't belong to the...
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Posted by greg at
7:28 AM
October 21, 2009
Yale just held a panel discussion on conservation and artist intention. This kind of thing drives me a little crazy:Not all work inevitably degrades, though. Some art improves with careful conservation. [Yale University Art Gallery director Jack] Reynolds showed a...
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Posted by greg at
11:28 PM
Yeah, well it's like five days until the Find The Warhols! project expires on Kickstarter, and we're still a ways to go from our goal. Normally this would right about the time that a groundswell of sympathy for the...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 PM
October 20, 2009
Lawrence Weschler narrates a slideshow of David Hockney's iPhone/Brushes drawings for the NY Review of Books:When he finishes one of these drawings, he sends it out into the world... There's about 15, 20 people, and he assumes that we send...
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Posted by greg at
8:47 PM
Wow. Every Christmas since 1988, Peter Norton and his family have commissioned artists to create a work, which they produced and sent out to friends, family and other art world folks. Now Norton, a MoMA trustee, is emptying out...
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Posted by greg at
5:26 PM
Note to self, the Brazilian media & world's wire services: the guy standing outside his burning house and saying he lost everything does not, in fact, know that everything is lost. Such is the case with the Projecto Helio Oiticica,...
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Posted by greg at
7:50 AM
October 18, 2009
Unbelievable. The Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica refused to sell his work; his estate, the Projecto Helio Oiticica, held an estimated 95% of his entire output when he died in 1980. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston had a...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
October 17, 2009
Considering the awesome graphic power of their official publications, you'd think I would have visited the Los Angeles Police Department's Art Theft Detail website sooner. Well, let me make amends: THE LAPD ART THEFT DETAIL WEBSITE IS FANTASTIC! Seriously,...
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Posted by greg at
12:37 PM
Well that's complicating. Richard Weisman has withdrawn his $25 million insurance claim for the 11 Andy Warhol paintings he reported stolen last month from his home in Los Angeles. As a result, the insurance company, Chartis, has withdrawn its...
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Posted by greg at
8:54 AM
October 15, 2009
Maybe Jonathan Monk had the same misremembering of Walter de Maria as I did. His series at Lisson Gallery at Frieze comes with various, built-in resale price caps. [via sarah douglas for artinfo]...
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Posted by greg at
10:17 AM
October 14, 2009
Why, I feel just like Alma Thomas, what with my shopping around for a modernist painting technique to use on my Dutch camo Landscape series... Anyway, I headed over to the Phillips Collection in search of Arthur Dove paintings....
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Posted by greg at
1:35 PM
The late, great curator Walter Hopps on his Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles:Anyway, one of the painters I loved--and I realized that a number of the artists, including [Robert] Irwin, also really loved him--was Giorgio Morandi. No one was showing...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
October 12, 2009
This 1960 LIFE Magazine photo by Grey Villet of Antenna bouncing first message off Echo I satellite is a great, uh, echo of Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky series....
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Posted by greg at
2:40 PM
October 11, 2009
So I decided to make the Dutch landscape paintings I wanted to see made from those incredible security-obscured Dutch Google Maps I found a couple of weeks ago. I'll print the images out and paint over them. Since they...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
October 10, 2009
I guess it doesn't matter anymore that I don't see why the White House's art borrowing is news now, when almost the entire list was already published and discussed four months ago [and many weeks before that, too]. Because...
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Posted by greg at
1:23 PM
I'll have more to say about the incredible work of Anne Truitt in the Hirshhorn's retrospective, thoughtfully curated by Kristen Hileman. Whether on canvas, paper or sculpture-like wooden armatures, Truitt's exhaustively spare paintings induce, by design, a lot of...
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Posted by greg at
6:47 AM
October 9, 2009
I'm really busy Finding The Warhols!, but when the Palm Beach Pollock heist went down, and no one in the crime beat media seemed to know enough about art to spot the inconsistencies and implausibilities in collector/dealer/boytoy Angelo Amadio's claims,...
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Posted by greg at
7:54 AM
October 7, 2009
News that the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth acquired a painting by Charles Sheeler of the Boulder Dam sent me looking for more, and guess what I found? Sheeler's painting is one of six commissioned in 1938 by...
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Posted by greg at
3:44 PM
October 6, 2009
So first the big news about the Pebble Beach Pollock Caper: did I call it or what? The Monterey Herald reports from the Sheriff's Dept. press conference today that Angelo Amadio and Ralph Kennaugh are now being considered suspects in,...
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Posted by greg at
11:35 PM
October 4, 2009
Now that the Monterey Herald's on the case, I think the Pebble Beach Pollock heist will be wrapped up pretty soon. Then we can get back to Finding The Warhols! Out of Angelo/Benjamin Amadio's shifty, grifty interview with reporters Larry...
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Posted by greg at
8:26 AM
October 2, 2009
Stolen art aficionados, please don't let the reports of a giant $60 million art theft in Pebble Beach distract us from Our Important Task of Finding The Warhols, because it is a big gay hoax. I'll bet you a Warhol...
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Posted by greg at
12:32 PM
September 30, 2009
BeDazzled was an exhibition organized by the appropriately named RISD librarian Claudia Covert of the library's collection of WWI Dazzle Camouflage patterns and photographs from the US Shipping Board:Maurice L. Freedman donated the plans and photos in the collection...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
Last year Jeff Koons covered Dakis Joannou's angular yacht Guilty [designed by Ivana Porfiri] with a pattern inspired by WWI naval camouflague. The technique, known in the US as Razzle Dazzle and in the UK as just Dazzle Painting,...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
September 28, 2009
A Google Street View image of a French radar-jamming installation obscured by order of the Ministry of Defense or an overpainted photograph by Gerhard Richter? You decide....
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
September 27, 2009
NL Architects thinks it might make a good Herzog & deMeuron project, but I think Google Maps' security pixelization of the Dutch Royal House's Noordeinde Palace in Den Haag would make an absolutely fantastic series of landscape paintings. Where...
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Posted by greg at
8:18 PM
September 26, 2009
Sheesh, build an Empire State Building out of Erector Sets at Rockefeller Center and the NY Times still thinks you're dead:The greatest enchantments at Inhotim are produced by works that not only draw on powerful subconscious currents but that also...
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Posted by greg at
8:20 AM
September 21, 2009
Earlier this month eleven portrait paintings by Andy Warhol were reported stolen from the home of Los Angeles collector Richard Weisman. The paintings, known the Athletes Series, depict some of the greatest athletes in the world in 1977, plus...
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Posted by greg at
9:25 AM
September 16, 2009
For a month after being beaten and detained by Chinese police, artist Ai Weiwei had complained of constant headaches. While in Munich to install a show, he went to a doctor, who sent him into emergency surgery to alleviate a...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 AM
Not that it doesn't sound fascinating, but a diagram of this sentence would be as big as the Lightning Field itself: In this lecture Chris Taylor will present Land Arts of the American West as a work that makes other...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
September 14, 2009
From Henry David Thoreau's Walden, quoted by Mark Noonan in the Columbia Journal of American StudiesBut while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and...
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Posted by greg at
8:45 PM
It's got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it's been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik's mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn...
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Posted by greg at
1:58 PM
16 Miles found the money quote [heh] about his upcoming US retrospective in Luc Tuymans' TAN interview : "The US tour should lead to steady sales." But wait, there's more! That guy has had it up to _here_ with...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
September 13, 2009
Just like how, once you've learned it, you start hearing a word all the time, now I see satelloons everywhere. Including at the Buckminster Fuller retrospective last year at the Whitney [which went on to Chicago this summer.] Buckminster...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
September 12, 2009
In a 1970 paper, two Harvard/Smithsonian scientists proposed A Passive Stable Satellite for Accurate Laser Ranging. Dubbed project Cannonball, the 38-cm spherical satellite would be covered with triangular reflectors and would weigh--did someone drop a decimal?--a prodigious 8000 pounds. Cannonball...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
September 11, 2009
I've steered way clear of architect's Michael Jackson Monument Competition because--hello, in what universe does that decision actually require any explanation? Because. Anyway, after seeing the winners, I just have to raise a single, ungloved--and as yet unmittened, hold...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
The [Modern] bought its first large waterlily painting -- at 18 feet across, the widest painting to enter the collection up to that point -- in 1955, for the equivalent of $11,500. A mere three years later it paid the...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
September 9, 2009
House exterior (test) Malibu, CA Kitchen Malibu, CA Ian James is a recent CalArts graduate. He posted a series of images--photos--of Lens color cast correction on his blog. which are kind of fantastic:Lens Color Cast is an dilemma specific...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
September 6, 2009
While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects...
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Posted by greg at
1:48 PM
September 4, 2009
For anyone interested in improving his chances of running into Brian Sholis at a brainy and/or arty event, he has compiled a rather awesome calendar of openings, symposia, talks, readings, screenings, and other happenings in New York. Me, I just...
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Posted by greg at
10:23 AM
September 3, 2009
Grain Edit has some truly spectacular gouache/lithograph-based advertising work done for the late TWA by the late David Klein. It's one truly beautiful poster after another, starting with this piece featuring the Gateway Arch. Tyler Green just got back...
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Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time, originally uploaded by id. As Antoni helpfully pointed out in an email, Canadian artist Brian Jungen has created a work wherein he carves a design into the gallery wall with a router,...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
September 2, 2009
And speaking of "The Quick And The Dead," I swear I've seen a nearly identical piece to Pierre Huyghe's Timekeeper, 1999, before. I thought it was at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, on the east wall of the central gallery,...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
Clearly, I miss some good things that are posted to the Walker Art Center's blogs in between my visits. Such as Peter Eleey's discussion last April on the opening of "The Quick And The Dead," the Walker's exhibition of...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
September 1, 2009
Ouch. As if things weren't bad enough in the art world last October, a 1969 Brice Marden diptych titled Au Centre fell off the brackets in its travel crate while in transit from Moscow to New York. The fall...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
August 31, 2009
Classic. Throw it on the compost pile; it is done. Burning Man's official delusional complicity in its own cynical corporate exploitation is now complete. This year, the Man has been set atop a pyre [above] made of 2x4s swirled...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 PM
See what happens when you just ask? My posts the last couple of days about [mis]remembering Walter de Maria's 1966 stainless steel sculpture, High Energy Bar/ High Energy Unit, is shaking loose some interesting bits of information on the...
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Posted by greg at
1:46 PM
August 30, 2009
After blogging about it the other day, I thought it was high time I get the real story on the msyterious Walter de Maria stainless steel edition I'd been watching for all these years, the one which has never...
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Posted by greg at
2:55 PM
August 26, 2009
Three people--a 59-year-old phony aristocrat and an art dealer couple in their 60's--were arrested in Stuttgart, Germany for fraud and copyright infringement [!] after police broke up an international Alberto Giacometti forgery operation. Over 1,000 fake Giacommetis were confiscated...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
According to BoingBoing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation's been testing its SA-60 Spherical Airship at the Reno-Stead Airport. [SNC's the same company whose surveillance blimp was set to be mooned this month by 1,500 hundred angry Canadians in the quiet...
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Posted by greg at
1:42 PM
And speaking of conceptually loaded minimalist objects of precision-crafted metal, here are a couple of early Walter de Maria works I was looking at a few months back: Betty Freeman bought Melville [1967, above] in 1968. It's a polished, book-sized...
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Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
Turns out the IPK is on the cover of one of Andy's favorite books, The Best Book Designs 1997, designed by Simon Davies: Also, from Metric Views, a blog of "commentary about the British measurement muddle," a PDF of "Standard...
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Posted by greg at
8:36 AM
August 25, 2009
Caught this on the CBC last night. I always assumed a kilogram is equal to the mass of a liter of water. But it turns out to be messy/tricky/complicated to measure water accurately enough, plus, some scientists decided to...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 AM
August 21, 2009
My step-father bought this crazy Pedro Friedeberg painting in 1966 in Mexico City. It's ink and paint on board, and the title is Hairless Hearts Of Some Hairy Nuns. Here's a large detail of the central rooster, who is...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 PM
August 15, 2009
I've never thought much of Ai Weiwei's work; despite some of its undeniable power, he'd been compared to Warhol a few too many times for me to take him seriously. Well, it's time for me to rethink that. First and...
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Posted by greg at
1:46 AM
August 12, 2009
Hah, Michael Govan's kickback public engagement in LACMA's decision to suspend its film program surprised me, but not as much as seeing the museum basically organizing its own netroots opposition. Now, barely ten days into the LACMA Film Program Deathwatch,...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
August 10, 2009
It's now known as "Theater Piece No. 1," and it is considered to be the first multimedia happening. It included simultaneous solos of dance, poetry readings and a lecture, along with slides, film, painting, and phonographic recordings. But if John...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
August 8, 2009
I'd ignored Artforum's recap of the recent Süddeutsche Zeitung report that the EU's looming ban might pose a problem for museums and artists whose work incorporates. incandescent lightbulbs. I mean, it seems like such a piddly little question, right? Sure,...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 AM
August 4, 2009
The newly redesigned Design Observer would've been awesome even without hosting the archive of Places: Forum of Design For the Public Realm, a print journal published by the architecture faculties at MIT and UC Berkeley from 1983 until Spring 2009....
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Posted by greg at
10:22 AM
Before I realized that if I wanted to see an exhibit of a 100-ft silver balloon, I'd have to make it myself, I was still just ruminating on art I hoped/wished someone would make. One of those projects I...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
August 1, 2009
Tim Burton was at MoMA yesterday, talking to media folk about a film dept. retrospective of his work, which includes an exhibition this fall of sketches, storyboards, props, puppets, etc. from his wacked out output. I wasn't in town...
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Posted by greg at
12:12 AM
July 31, 2009
Regular readers of greg.org know it, but I'll say it upfront: I'm Team MoMA. I've supported the museum for years--I feel like I grew up in it, art-wise. And film-wise. Right now, MoMA's film department and programming are stronger than...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
July 29, 2009
Estuaire is the three-time biennale in beta for the Nantes region. This year, the second incarnation includes I.C.I., Instant Carnet Island, a habitable, riverfront collection of micro-architecture which is for rent--EUR10/person/night, bring your sleeping bag--and for sale. Several of...
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Posted by greg at
8:00 AM
July 27, 2009
Was watching this ancient panel discussion, "Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art," from Pleiades Gallery in 1978 with Merce Cunningham, but then I totally fell for Nam June Paik all over again instead. A couple of...
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Posted by greg at
1:20 PM
July 26, 2009
I'd seen Tauba Auerbach's text- or letter-based paintings before, but I didn't know about her prints. She did a couple of pairs of prints using pixels last year with Berkeley-based Paulson Press. There's a black and white set, 50/50,...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
July 25, 2009
Not only is Becher German for gridding up large assortments of black & white photos of similar things in a self-consciously futile attempt to catalogue the entirety of the built environment, it also means cup! Beierle + Keijser's joghurtbecher...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 PM
July 24, 2009
Here are some dots I never would have connected. When Stephen Shore took his photography-changing 1972 road trip from New York to Amarillo, was he going to see Stanley Marsh 3? No se, but as this portrait shows, Shore definitely...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
I was researching a project just now, came across this, and then noticed the date:ROBERT SMITHSON, 35, A SCULPTOR, IS DEAD July 24, 1973, Tuesday Page 41, 227 words Robert Smithson, a sculptor, was killed in the crash of a...
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Posted by greg at
9:41 PM
July 21, 2009
Damn, but that is one fantastic propaganda billboard. James Hill shot it for the NY Times. Apparently, it's in Abkhazia, and the two guys are the presidents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway provinces of Georgia. LAXART curates an...
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Posted by greg at
2:56 PM
If I'm a little high right now, it's just because these conservators just hit like every art button I have:To photo-document Spiral Jetty, we used a tethered helium balloon about 8-10 feet in diameter, attached to a digital camera...
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Posted by greg at
1:55 PM
July 20, 2009
Not 2004 when the state put up a sign pointing to it. Not 2002, when my sister first took a college date out to see it but Artforum's Nico Israel couldn't find it. 1994. After a Salt Lake City artist...
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Posted by greg at
6:50 PM
I've had Christy Lange's long 2005 Tate Magazine essay about revisiting conceptual art systems open in my browswer tabs for weeks now, but I hadn't read past the Walter deMaria section that first led me to it. Well, it's just...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
July 16, 2009
Like everyone else, I see modern architecture--the whole modern world, or at least the West Coast of it--in glorious black and white, thanks to Julius Shulman. Just as Hugh Ferris's smoky charcoal skyscraper renderings defined Gotham a generation earlier, Shulman's...
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Posted by greg at
10:57 PM
Herbert Muschamp in a giant weather balloon movie in Monaco WHAT?This is something we did in Monaco where we put Herbert Muschamp's text, "Bubbles in the Wine," to film. It was my job to go out and find these...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
July 12, 2009
Gay Talese writes everything everyday on shirtboards-- INTERVIEWER Do you use notebooks when you are reporting? TALESE I don't use notebooks. I use shirt boards. INTERVIEWER You mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts? TALESE Exactly. I cut the shirt...
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Posted by greg at
11:54 PM
Solicitors for the National Portrait Gallery are apparently threatening legal action against a US Wikipedia user for downloading 3,300 digital photographs of paintings in the UK museum's collection, and then uploading them to Wikipedia. Says Londonist:All of the paintings are...
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Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
July 11, 2009
So earlier this week, the NY Post's Adam Nichols reported that the owner of the River Cafe, was suing for $3 million damages caused by Olafur Eliasson's The New York City Waterfalls:Their suit, filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court last week,...
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Posted by greg at
11:08 AM
July 10, 2009
From Linda Yablonsky's article on The Pictures Generation in Art in America:Bloom remembers seeing Levine's appropriated Walker Evans photos and thinking, "Oh my God, that is so radical and so insane. It was also brilliant. Sherrie didn't address any of...
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Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
July 9, 2009
In April 1975, Burden brought something of an end to the series of extreme and/or dangerous performances that brought him such critical acclaim and notoreity. For a piece called "Doomed," he installed himself under a pane of glass in...
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Posted by greg at
11:44 PM
July 8, 2009
When I first saw Sebastian's stunning photos of the Mona Lisa at C-Monster, I was, naturally, stunned. I haven't been to the Louvre since 2005, when la Joconde was moved to its new, purpose-built space, designed by Peruvian architect...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
July 1, 2009
Of all the work in the Met's Pictures Generation show, Jack Goldstein's surprised and intrigued me the most, but I liked Louise Lawler's the best. That Pollock/soup tureen photo that's been making the marketing rounds for the show is...
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Posted by greg at
1:35 PM
June 30, 2009
The "What art should the Obamas hang in the White House?" story rolls slowly onward. Last week in ArtInfo, Ruthie Ackerman published the suggestions of several of the art world's greatest minds. Greatest among equals, obviously, is Magda Sawon of...
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Posted by greg at
8:17 PM
June 29, 2009
ikea x Mari mashup being mashed up, originally uploaded by gregorg. I realized I'd been putting off the actual assembly of my Enzo Mari table, daunted by the impending exactitude and fearful of the commitment of actually screwing all...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 AM
June 28, 2009
Josh Foer is on fire, and I'm like a moth to the flame. Foer's guestblogging at BoingBoing, and is just lobbing up one crazy-awesome megasphere after another. It was his charticle in Cabinet a while back about the history...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 PM
June 27, 2009
Artforum's William Pym covering the extremely non-chalant X-Initiative opening this week:Jordan Wolfson, hovering by Barcelona's Latitudes, took several prods before he could even remember that he was participating in a group show with healthy buzz opening at I-20 Gallery round...
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Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
June 25, 2009
On his incredible illustration blog A Journey Round My Skull, Will has posted several selections of photochromes, or photochroms, or photochromosomes. [here and here] They were color-retouched photolithographs popular around the turn of the last century. They used at...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 PM
From Linda Yablonsky's account of a Matthew Barney/Elizabeth Peyton colabo on Hydra, sponsored by Dakis Joannou:"Barney looked at his watch. 'Just about two hours,' he said to Peyton. 'Not bad. After all, there's a limit to how long you can...
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Posted by greg at
7:42 PM
June 24, 2009
Steve Roden's sculpture and sound installation, nothing but what is therein contained is in the previously closed off top rooms of Founder's Hall at Girard College. It was created as part of the Hidden City Philadelphia festival, and this...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
VOISIN STANDARD TYPE BIPLANE (1909), originally uploaded by public.resource.org. The Grand Palais was already the best of the three venues in the world capable of accommodating my Satelloon project--a re-creation of NASA's Project Echo (1960), the 100-ft metallic spherical...
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Posted by greg at
12:11 AM
June 23, 2009
On June 19, 1885 Gaston Tissandier and Jacques Ducom set off in across Paris in a balloon. They were on a photo expedition, and managed to get seven shots. This one, of the pont Louis-Phillippe, at the western tip...
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Posted by greg at
8:09 PM
June 19, 2009
I'd seen this installation shot of Johannes Wohnseifer's show at Johann Koenig in Berlin, but I couldn't track down any details of the sculptures until now. But I see from Contemporary Art Daily that Koenig has finally posted some...
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Posted by greg at
10:29 AM
June 14, 2009
Jen Bekman's Art for The People gallery, 20x200 is having a sale, 20% off all prints and photos through Tuesday. [see details and promo code info here.] There's a bunch of interesting stuff; among my favorites are Jorge Colombo's...
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Posted by greg at
4:58 PM
June 12, 2009
Dear Bootleggers of Christian Marclay's 4-channel masterpiece, Video Quartet, First off, you're fabulous. Second, rather than pan back and forth and back and forth across the four screens, if you would please station yourself to the side and get...
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Posted by greg at
8:13 PM
June 11, 2009
Artforum reports today that The Art Newspaper reported Tuesday that the Washington Post reported that Ukrainian mogul/collector Viktor Pinchuk is the "fourth stakeholder" in the made-up "sale" of Damien Hirst's £50 million diamond skull. What no one reports, though, is...
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Posted by greg at
12:13 PM
June 10, 2009
I just got my first edition of Untitled (300 x 404, after Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 by Richard Prince) from the printer. It's a 1px = 1mm version, which came out to be 12 x 16 inches, inkjet printed on...
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Posted by greg at
2:59 PM
June 9, 2009
P060709PS-0038, originally uploaded by The Official White House Photostream. That would be the President and all his men getting a private view of the Pompidou's Kandinsky retrospective, as seen in the official White House flickr stream. Also: Calder; Goncharova,...
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Posted by greg at
3:27 PM
Francesco Bonami, director of the 2003 Venice Biennale, writing for the NY Times' blog, The Moment:...the sculptor Bruce Nauman, the Sam Shepherd of Contemporary Art, was awarded the Gold Lion for best national pavilion. (A sign that the Obama effect...
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Posted by greg at
9:42 AM
June 7, 2009
Enzo Mari x Ikea - Joinery, originally uploaded by gregorg. The tile in the guest bathroom in North Carolina was handmade and sun-dried in Mexico, as you can tell by the single square with the artful flaw, a footprint...
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Posted by greg at
11:00 PM
June 6, 2009
But enough about muscly, young, naked performance art hustlers in Venice staging homoerotically charged events for attention and acclaim for a moment. My friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset just won a Special Mention Award at the Biennale for their...
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Posted by greg at
7:09 PM
In 1973, Chris Burden bought a month worth of late-night ad time on a local TV station in Los Angeles, and aired a 10-second film clip of Through the Night Softly, a performance where Burden, clad only in bikini...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
June 5, 2009
Apparently, it's Chris Burden day. Kottke just posted a clean clip of Chris Burden's 1979 work, The Big Wheel, in which a massive, 19th century iron fly wheel is set into rapid motion by a little motorcycle wheel. I think...
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Posted by greg at
10:20 AM
June 2, 2009
You remember how Buckminster Fuller had some folks handwire together a basketweave Perspex prism truncated icosahedron chandelier as his wedding present [two years late] for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon? Of course you do. Now it turns out that the...
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Posted by greg at
11:09 PM
June 1, 2009
Wow, the 2-minute clip of Daniel Martinico's 15-minute Khaan! is fantastic. This is more what I thought Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's Zidane would be like, but wasn't. LA Weekly review from a 2008 screening [laweekly via boingboing]...
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Posted by greg at
4:34 PM
May 31, 2009
In 1972, the Austrian architecture collective Haus-Rucker installed Oasis Nr 7 at Documenta 5. A steel pipe structure was cantilevered out the window of the Friedericianum, and a platform, two palm trees, and a hammock were installed. The entire...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
May 27, 2009
image via flickr by RobieRob Composer Brian Eno is projecting some of the 77 million iterations of his 77 Million Paintings series onto the Sydney Opera House as part of the Luminous Festival. The Festival, which Eno is also...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
May 26, 2009
Amazing to think that all this was happening at the same time as the satelloons of Project Echo and just five years after Sputnik. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory director William Pickering was the grand marshal of the 1963 Rose...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 PM
In 1965, after the Mariner 4 probe had possibly transmitted its first closeup images of Mars and in the many hours before JPL computers would finish processing that image, mission scientists were concerned about what, if anything the data...
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Posted by greg at
7:27 PM
According to the very slowly reported story [1] in the Wall Street Journal, the Obamas have been selecting modern and contemporary art for the White House from among pieces in national and museum collections. The artists they requested includes...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
May 23, 2009
An update on the Enzo Mari x Ikea autoprogettazione table project: I just finished putting on the second coat of varnish sealer, and now everything's drying and curing in the basement. The picture above was how the wood sat...
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Posted by greg at
2:07 PM
May 21, 2009
Though I suspect the easiest thing would be for Michael to let Cerre know where he scanned the image from, here's what I can figure out about this dress made by Ellsworth Kelly in Sanary, France in 1952: Sanary,...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
May 20, 2009
So the other day, I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Slate's editors were, "ironically, unable to get permission" to reproduce Richard Prince's Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 for Sarah Boxer's slideshow review of "Into The...
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Posted by greg at
4:07 PM
May 18, 2009
From Slate's review of MoMA's "The Wild West," "Into the Sunset," [thanks todd] a scattershot exhibit on photography's role in forming perception of the American West:And the opening shot of the show--right at the entrance to greet you--is Untitled (Cowboy),...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
May 16, 2009
Did you know that the National Gallery had the first show ever of Frederic Remington's paintings of night in 2003? Me either: Frederic Remington (1861-1909) has long been celebrated as one of the most gifted interpreters of the American...
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Posted by greg at
10:10 AM
May 14, 2009
Frederic Remington, Ceremony of the Fastest Horse, c. 1900 [art institute of chicago] Look, I'm as surprised as you are that I was stoked to see a Frederick Remington painting, but here we are. As a card-carrying East Coast...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 PM
via Artforum:At its May meeting, the College Art Association board of directors made difficult decisions on behalf of the esteemed organization, including strategic budget reductions and other measures. These have been instituted throughout the association to balance the budget and...
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Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
May 13, 2009
May 13, 2009, LOT 221: est. 400,000-600,000 Sold 2007: $964,000 Sold 2009: $458,500...
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Posted by greg at
3:12 PM
I know it deeply doesn't matter, and I feel kind of dickish pointing it all out, but since it involves the famously impolitic Daniel Loeb, I'll just say Carol Vogel's account of last night's Sotheby's sale was like one...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 AM
May 9, 2009
Hans Ulrich Obrist - My last question, Olafur, is one I've asked you many times before: what is your favorite unrealized project? Olafur Eliasson - I would like to build a museum--to reevaluate the nature of a museum and build...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
May 7, 2009
Yo te amo, Cintra Wilson:One $75 T-shirt bore the word ARTIST across the chest in a bold glitter font. Now, any artist I know who's worth his salt would print the shirt himself if it cost more than $22 --...
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Posted by greg at
8:12 AM
May 4, 2009
Untitled, Tom Friedman, 1999 Untitled ( Perth Amboy Series), Rachel Harrison, 2001 [via] Untitled (My Bathroom), Greg Allen, 2009 Reservations Advance reservations for an overnight stay at Untitled (My Bathroom) are required, and are accepted beginning March 1 for...
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Posted by greg at
10:13 AM
May 3, 2009
Hello, Earth to Le Corbusier archive! Corbusier conceived Poeme electronique for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Expo in Brussels. It was an 8-minute immersive light, film and sound experience which told mankind's long, hard slog towards peace. Don't...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 PM
April 28, 2009
This gorgeous Darren Almond photograph, Infinite Betweens: Becoming Between, Phase 3, of an impossible-to-map landscape covered with Tibetan prayer flags is coming up at Philips in a couple of weeks. It reminded me how quietly strong his work is,...
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Posted by greg at
11:47 PM
April 27, 2009
Who knew? Tacita Dean writes in the Guardian about her late friend JG Ballard's shared interest in Robert Smithson:My relationship to Ballard had begun a little earlier, with our mutual interest in the work of the US artist Robert Smithson....
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Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
April 25, 2009
Untitled (Autoprojettazione, 1123 xE/1123 xR), 2004 courtesy kurimanzutto As I've said before, the first Enzo Mari autoprogettazione furniture I ever saw was by Rirkrit Tiravanija. He had tables and chairs fabricated from polished stainless steel, which his gallery from...
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Posted by greg at
5:01 PM
April 24, 2009
In its first iteration in 1984-5, The Territory of Art I was described as "a sixteen part series of half-hour radio programs that explored issues of contemporary art and design through commentary, interviews, original drama, and new music from more...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 AM
April 20, 2009
If you're in Milano--and after all, why wouldn't you be this time of year? It's Il Salone del Mobile, after all--definitely check out Everyday Life Objects Shop, an experimental retail exhibition of sorts organized by Apartamento Magazine and master curator/shopkeep...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 PM
April 18, 2009
"Somebody wants to buy your apartment building!" Oh, how developers long to hear those words again. Who could know how or when a work of art transmutes into an icon? Andy Warhol may have had some ideas on the...
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Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
April 17, 2009
Awesome. YouTube user fluxlaser has created levels in Little Big Planet based on The Cremaster Cycle. So far, there's Cremaster 4 [above] and Cremaster 1 [below], which is tighter. I can't wait to see the mirrored salt flat rodeo...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
He starts out a little twee, and there's a tugging undercurrent of ambivalence, but Andrew Hultkrans' Artforum writeup of an artistic evening at the Angel Orensanz Foundation inspired by David Maisel's Library of Dust is pretty awesome. He totally nails...
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Posted by greg at
3:54 PM
April 16, 2009
These are the last two segments from the lecture I gave at the University of Utah School of Art in 2007, titled Visiting Artist [sic]. They're both about Robert Smithson. The first [above] is about Smithson's own 1972 slideshow...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 PM
But it turns out Torqued Ellipses in the rain and at night are as awesome as classic Grace Jones....
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Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
April 14, 2009
On one block of West Robinson Rd West Robinwood Rd in Detroit, all but five of the houses are abandoned. Jim Griffioen took photos of both sides of the street. His massive, stitched together photos are on Sweet Juniper...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 PM
April 8, 2009
I didn't realize it at the time, but these two clips about Cary Leibowitz and Joep van Lieshout end up being related. Both artists make work that directly questions the value that the "Art" label imbues to an object....
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Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
April 7, 2009
In April 2007, I spoke at the University of Utah as part of their Visiting Artist lecture series. I was stoked, partly because Robert Smithson had famously spoken at the UofU, too, in 1969; his lecture and slideshow, "Hotel Palenque,"...
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Posted by greg at
11:07 AM
April 5, 2009
Last September was the first anniversary of what's now called the Saffron Rebellion, where Burmese monks took to the streets to protest the military government. As a commemoration of that movement, the Stedelijk Museum showed the first of three...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
April 1, 2009
Tyler Green turned his critical shredder on the National Gallery's new group of Thomas Demand photos depicting his life-sized re-creation of the Oval Office:The result is a photographed stage set of a stage set used by the United States...
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Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
March 30, 2009
Helen Levitt passed away; she was 95, and an incredible, sensitive photographer of city life. Her pictures of childrens' chalk drawings are probably my favorites, and I wish the documentary short she made after WWII with James Agee and...
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Posted by greg at
11:27 PM
March 26, 2009
Apparently, with all the digital technology and whatnot, they hold onto that stuff at Bloomberg News, even if you're not indicted immediately. Art Dealer Charged With Stealing $88 Million [image: chip east/bloomberg news, photographed in 2007]...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
March 25, 2009
What do we really want when we go to an artist's talk? It's not like the conventions of the format--darkened auditorium, daisy chain of thank you's, cuing of slides, thoughtfully forced repartee, polite laughter, tidbit or two of gossip, annoying...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 PM
Paddy Johnson is taking the search for art on Google Maps to a place it's never been before: In Real Life. This Saturday, at Capricious Space in Brooklyn, Paddy is hosting a Google Maps artwork faceoff, a real-world, real-time challenge...
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Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
The closest I've ever come to getting a tattoo was this one, a 1992 work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The artist first showed this motif, a circle of dolphins that looks like it could have come from the border of...
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Posted by greg at
9:58 AM
March 22, 2009
I'm not interested in the so-called PC aspects of discussing hair loss. The parody of an apologetically sensitive term like "follicularly challenged" is still of a piece with the negative connotation baked into the term, "hair loss" itself. Same with...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 PM
March 17, 2009
taro blimp, originally uploaded by hige_megane. While I would like a blimp--or technically, a satelloon--on display, I think I want to forgo the life-sized mannequin of myself. Thanks all the same. [via andy] taro okamoto museum, originally uploaded by...
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Posted by greg at
4:13 PM
March 13, 2009
Agnes Varda, who's DV mini-masterpiece The Gleaners was formative in my own decision to start making movies, tells Artforum:I've been making films for so long, for over fifty years now, but I really think I have two paths of work--cinema...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 PM
Dan Fox, an editor at Frieze, has a long but excellent essay? article? exploration? of what it means to be a "professional artist." How should artists behave? How should we discuss art, build venues to show it in, tell people...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
Just because I haven't yet doesn't mean I won't eventually throw out the April 2008 issue of Bookforum on which I scribbled down the following notes last night [ex post facto additions in brackets]: Eliminate the object of perception and...
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Posted by greg at
2:17 PM
I've been all 'round this great big world, and I've seen all kinds of Turrells, so I couldn't wait to get to the Hirshhorn last night for the sweetest Turrell lecture in the world. What a horrible opening. Turrell...
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Posted by greg at
8:58 AM
March 10, 2009
G -- He is an archeologist and an anthropologist. A Ph.D. He's a doctor, he's a college professor. What happened is, he's also a sort of rough and tumble guy. But he got involved in going in and getting antiquities....
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Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
March 9, 2009
Besides, obviously, Christopher Wool?...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 PM
March 7, 2009
Pet Shop Boys - Love Etc. (HD) [youtube via andrew sullivan] For the moment, "Love etc." is playing largest on the PSB's homepage [petshopboys.co.uk]...
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Posted by greg at
7:33 PM
March 5, 2009
We're out of town with family all weekend, so we'll miss the art fair circuit. Which is too bad because my brother-in-law Benjamin Cottam is showing some work at Volta. In addition to 'landscapes' and 'blue skies' paintings [hopefully...
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Posted by greg at
12:00 PM
March 2, 2009
Over the holidays, I taped an interview with my great uncle Wayne. He is my paternal grandfather Champ's older brother. [Yes, I did ask him about my grandfather's name. His recollection was that my great grandfather Chester Jehiel Allen hated...
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Posted by greg at
3:29 PM
February 25, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum will get its first painting by Gustave Caillebotte, courtesy of collector/patron Iris Cantor, who made a promised gift of the painting, Femme nue étendue sur un divan, "as a tribute to former museum director Philippe de...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 AM
February 24, 2009
If Laurel Nakadate ever got knocked up by one of her video subjects, and then sent the kid to Yale for his MFA, too... BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo....
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Posted by greg at
7:55 PM
February 21, 2009
Awesome, I just read through the announcement of the 2008 Arts Writers Grant recipients, and I have to give a huge shoutout to Paddy Johnson whose Art Fag City is one of the first two blogs to be recognized by...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
February 20, 2009
[via] Or was it Blake Gopnik? Because Johnson's review titled "From China, Iraq and Beyond, but Is It Art?" of the New Museum's current show is so embarrassingly obtuse, it could almost be in the Washington Post. At first, I...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 AM
February 17, 2009
11/09 UPDATE: Or not. Writing about her visit to the stored Serra for the journal Afterall, Mary Walling Blackburn reports that it is not Bellamy after all. Bellamy is currently in England. There is, in fact, an I-beam on-site spray-painted...
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Posted by greg at
8:04 PM
Whether it's right or not, this book sounds fantastic:Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker)...
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Posted by greg at
10:50 AM
February 15, 2009
In 1967 Henry Geldzahler, while lecturing the Women's Group at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, suggested to Mrs LeVant Mulnix III that the city might do well to install a public sculpture on the plaza in front of city...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 PM
February 13, 2009
Tyler Green Twittered the following from the ICA Philadelphia panel discussion on the 20th anniversary of the Mapplethorpe NEA implosion:[Rob] Storr coins 'misconceptual' art: artists who shortcut to the now via conceptual art without understanding history of conceptualism.tight, tasty, and...
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Posted by greg at
6:08 PM
February 12, 2009
Just discovered Chicago artist Justin Cooper's work [thanks bevel & boss]. Some of his sculptures are these fantastic lines that have a life of their own, which is all the more awesome because it's obviously impossible. It's like he...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 PM
February 11, 2009
Google Earthworks-meets-Sforzian Backgrounds? This is Jorge Rodriguez Gerada's Expectation, a 650-ton sand painting of Barack Obama on the beach in Barcelona. Here's the site, just next to the Forum de les Cultures. Not only was the mockup done in...
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Posted by greg at
5:07 PM
February 8, 2009
Explain to me how Shephard Fairey can still be a sellout if he got arrested for tagging on the way to his museum show....
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Posted by greg at
5:02 PM
February 7, 2009
It's not even a participatory artwork, just a single parenthetical, but Brian Sholis hits the nail on the head in his review of Nancy Spector's theanyspacewhatever "relational aesthetics" show at the Guggenheim:(To be clear, I myself am sympathetic to the...
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Posted by greg at
4:49 PM
February 5, 2009
From a Boston Globe article, "Stimulus funding for arts hits nerve":Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, wants to transfer the proposed NEA funding to highway construction. He failed to get the House to vote on his proposal, so he is...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 PM
February 4, 2009
There's nothing specific on the horizon, but the way things are going, what with all the domes and mirrored domes and Buckminster Fuller and movies and all around here... I mean, you never really know--and by you, I obviously...
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Posted by greg at
11:19 PM
Well that didn't take long. From the always awesome Wooster Collective comes word of a new work by the underground artist JR, Projet Women of Kibera, part of his ongoing 28 millimetres series he has been working on since...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
February 2, 2009
The whole thing about the only human construct you can see from space is the Great Wall of China will be amusing to people growing up in the Google Maps era, where you can't hide anything from the satellite's...
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Posted by greg at
6:08 AM
February 1, 2009
Someone is storing his Richard Serra sculptures along the East River in the Bronx. As massive, vertiginously curved steel plates are wont to do, they tend to stand out, and so they get noticed or discovered periodically. Jake Dobkin...
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Posted by greg at
2:06 PM
January 30, 2009
The contemporary art world's three most [only?] prominent Mormon artists are Wayne Thiebaud, Paul McCarthy, and La Monte Young. Of the three, I'd have to say Young is at once the least well known, the most highly influential, and, surprisingly,...
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Posted by greg at
5:49 PM
January 28, 2009
What a weird, insane s**tstorm is brewing around Brandeis University's sudden announcement that it's closing the Rose Art Museum and selling off its 6,000 piece collection. All the usual outrages and condemnations are moved and seconded, of course, but there...
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Posted by greg at
12:50 AM
January 15, 2009
LIFE Magazine's digitized photo archives includes a few sweet pictures by Gjon Mili from the opening party at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1974. [here's a great shot of a whole gallery full of Giacomettis. Do they still have all...
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Posted by greg at
12:28 AM
January 14, 2009
For their first show in 2005 Orchard, the collaborative gallery/exhibition space on the Lower East Side, recreated Dan Graham's 1966 Project for Slide Projector:Project for Slide Projector was presented as a set of instructions for an experimental work and...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
Red-headed Dia director Philippe Vergne was dressed in optimism--the new armor under Obama--and spoke of his mission this week to save Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty from contamination by oil companies planning to drill into Utah's Great Salt Lake. "We're going...
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Posted by greg at
12:31 AM
January 13, 2009
Of the three Mormon-raised artists I'll be talking about at the Sunstone Symposium on January 31st, painter Wayne Thiebaud is probably the most recognizable and accessible. Thiebaud's brightly lit paintings of cakes, pies, candy, and other American diner delights were...
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Posted by greg at
11:17 PM
Buy this nice c-print study of Gregor Schneider's unrealized Cube Venice at Sotheby's next month, and they'll throw in a fatwa for free! Sale L09621, Feb 6, 2009, LOT 213: GREGOR SCHNEIDER, CUBE VENICE, 2005, numbered 2/6, 3,000--4,000 GBP...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
January 12, 2009
On a visit to Alexandria, Egypt, artist David Hammons asked a curator to ask a local non-profit, Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, if he could do a project with them:I had to explain that it wasn't going to be in their...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 PM
I'm a fan of Walt Disney. I used to work at Disney. Disney has a place in the history of art. But Paul Richards' four-page curatorial fantasia in the Washington Post yesterday calling for more Walt Disney in Our Nation's...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
January 8, 2009
Via Cityfile, we learn that Paris photographer Patrick Cariou has filed suit against Richard Prince, Gagosian [the man and the gallery], and Rizzoli for copyright infringement. Prince used photos from Cariou's 2000 book Yes Rasta in the Canal Zone paintings...
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Posted by greg at
1:18 PM
January 7, 2009
by Joe McKay. Awesome. Now if someone'll do Every Google StreetView Van Reflection On The Sunset Strip, we can close the loop. [via jmb's best of the web @ afc] Previously: every building on the sunset strip--and then some...
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Posted by greg at
8:33 AM
The Martin Kippenberger retrospective closed yesterday at MoCA, which means it's just a few weeks away from opening at MoMA, which means I'll finally be able to see one of my favorite-from-afar Kippenbergers in person. The Happy Ending To...
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Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
December 31, 2008
He wants his concept back....
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Posted by greg at
1:17 PM
Paddy Johnson does great work at AFC. By contributing today--right now, in fact--you can help support the expansion online of art, its creation, exhibition, and its thoughtful interpretation. And thanks to her collaboration with Momenta Art to manage AFC's fundraising...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
The greg.org Unannounced Holiday Break [UHB? Oh wait, that's already taken] is over. A month from now, on Jan. 31, I'll be part of a panel discussing Mormon art and artists at the Sunstone Symposium in Washington, DC. It's sponsored...
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Posted by greg at
8:49 AM
December 19, 2008
It just keeps going and going! From Steven Kaplan emailed with a reply from MoMA curator Christian Rattemeyer about the consciousness of edits in Fischli & Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge: "It is his contention that many astute and observant...
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Posted by greg at
2:08 PM
Spanish artist I've never heard of #48 Miguel Barcelo got the commission to paint the domed ceiling of the UN Palace of Nations' Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations chamber in Geneva. Eyeteeth has some photos; Designboom has some background...
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Posted by greg at
12:12 AM
December 17, 2008
I've been searching for more critical acknowledgment of Fischli & Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge as an edited construct instead of the miraculous documentation it's normally perceived/presented to be. Though he's talking about another Fischli & Weiss piece [above],...
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Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
December 16, 2008
A spectacular image by Reuters photographer Yiorgos Karahalis of a rioter in Athens. Until Joy Garnett gets around to it, the full-size version at the Big Picture is the best way to see it....
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Posted by greg at
11:17 AM
Careful, this might not be a Warhol. After all, it's only a signed drawing of a Campbell's Soup can. But it's in a Warhol book that has the Warhol self-portrait on the cover which Warhol presented to a collaborator--and...
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Posted by greg at
12:51 AM
December 13, 2008
Toothpick Engineering is Dentist's Hobby [popular science, feb 1940, via boingboing]...
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Posted by greg at
4:16 PM
Artforum reports that Fischli & Weiss's 1987 film, Der Lauf der Dinge, (The Way Things Go), [1] was recently sold at Christie's in Zurich for 1.02 million Swiss francs. Which is awesome [2], I first thought, since I have...
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Posted by greg at
11:26 AM
December 10, 2008
I liked Stephen Bayley's takedown of New Urbanist prig Duane Urbany in the Guardian last weekend, partly for its awful description of Poundbury, a traditionalist-veneered village [sic] in Dorset that's beloved of Prince Charles:To visit Poundbury is to be delivered...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
December 7, 2008
In what has apparently become an annual feature here on greg.org, I present Rare And/Or Unique Buckminster Fuller Objets. This time last year, it was the Perspex prism chandelier Fuller [had] made as a wedding gift for Princess Margaret....
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Posted by greg at
8:47 PM
Or if you do, don't have ellipsis in the name, because Schnabel will inevitably fill in the blanks with his name. From the WSJ's article on Spectacle: Elvis Costello with..., the Sundance Channel's excellent-sounding new TV talk show about music:But...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 AM
December 3, 2008
Wait, The Empire was the US and the Rebellion was the North Vietnamese, but Lucas only put them in space after Hollywood suits wouldn't let him make Apocalypse Now? And the grunge was a simultaneous obeisance and refutation of...
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Posted by greg at
12:15 AM
December 2, 2008
In September, a group of artists organized as W.A.G.E [Working Artists and the General Economy] appeared at a Creative Time-organized event to talk about the economic inequities of artists' interactions with museums and other institutions. They certainly earned their speaking...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 AM
November 26, 2008
As much as I love it, Brian Sholis's new blog reminds me how little I actually read and think these days. Here's a quote from an excellent essay he points to by Lucy Lippard on the changing context for the...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
November 24, 2008
Am I the only one who's heard rumours of bankruptcies in diamond-encrusted skull-showing places? update: apparently so. Last major financial transactions reported for Jay Jopling include buying £7.2 million worth of his own artist's work at Sotheby's in September. This,...
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Posted by greg at
9:44 PM
November 8, 2008
Though with their combination of Ikean sculpture, reconstituted Cold War satellites, and geodesic dome playthings, I'm now not sure I'm not actually just a random projection of their collaborative imagination. Daniel Young and Christian Giroux began making work together in...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
November 4, 2008
Last week, I took my 4-yo daughter to the Phillips Collection to see Jacob Lawrence's masterpiece, The Migration of the Negro. It turned out to be the last day of the exhibition where the entire 60-panel series was on...
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Posted by greg at
11:26 AM
Finding Double Negative has never been easier, originally uploaded by gregorg. Not since we programmed it into the navigation system of my in-laws' car, anyway. The car also has an offroad navigation feature that logs virtual GPS breadcrumbs at...
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Posted by greg at
7:58 AM
October 16, 2008
"For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible." I just bought Jonathan Hoefler's poster from the Barack Obama store. If you hurry, 4799 more of you...
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Posted by greg at
12:50 AM
October 15, 2008
Here's Walter De Maria describing his early land art work, Las Vegas Piece, to Paul Cummings in 1972. According to the Center For Land Use Interpretation, the piece is off Carp/Elgin Road in the Tula Desert, one exit north of...
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Posted by greg at
12:04 PM
I started poking around a bit on the making of story of Michael Heizer's Double Negative. I'd known that it was commissioned by Virginia Dwan, the incredible gallerist who was also behind Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Here's a bit of her...
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Posted by greg at
12:24 AM
October 14, 2008
So all this time I imagine that Michael Heizer's Double Negative, dug into the edge of Mormon Mesa, is like the lost earthwork, no one can get to it, no one can find it, &c., &c. Turns out the...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 AM
October 13, 2008
I was talking with an artist friend yesterday, and he made a reference to "Krauss's 'Sculpture and the Expanded Field'," and I was all, "huh?" And he was all, "WHAT?" And so I was like, "Don't know it," and he...
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Posted by greg at
12:37 AM
October 6, 2008
In 1989, artist Rudolf Stingel published Instructions, an illustrated booklet showing how to make one of his silver paintings. "He challenges the process of creating a painting and questions the concept of the canvas and that of authorship," says...
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Posted by greg at
10:20 AM
September 26, 2008
Is he done? I think so. Tyler Green has turned Modern Art Notes into State of Spiral Jetty Notes this week, and it seems clear to me that the biggest entropic threat Smithson's masterpiece faces is not natural, but institutional....
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Posted by greg at
1:40 PM
September 23, 2008
I first encountered filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek's work in Aspen Magazine. His 1964 collaboration with Robert Morris, Site, combined dance/performance, art, and film. Performers create a physical, 3-D approximation of camera wipes and reveals using large black and white panels....
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Posted by greg at
11:30 PM
September 21, 2008
"Hi, this is Dash."...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
September 9, 2008
I really didn't follow the Metropolitan Museum's horse race to see who would replace Philippe de Montebello as director, but I find myself caring deeply that it's tapestry curator Thomas Campbell. Campbell's two shows on Renaissance and Baroque tapestries in...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
September 7, 2008
Former NGA curator and Dia director Jeffrey Weiss writes about the state of Land Art in the latest issue of Artforum. His focus: T.S.O.Y.W., a 3-hour Earthworks road trip movie/installation by Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler shown in this year's...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
August 31, 2008
The water that falls half as long falls twice as bright. If the best part of Olafur's New York City Waterfalls is how their manmade nature is emphasized by their somewhat arbitrary schedule, well, they just got twice as arbitrary,...
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Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
August 28, 2008
I've had some intense conversations with people who wanted to know what the US presidential candidates thought about the arts, who is advising them, and what their policy statements were on the matter. Frankly, I couldn't have cared less at...
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Posted by greg at
12:54 AM
August 25, 2008
No doubt, Cai Guo-Qiang has always had a tricky line to walk, working in the ephemeral, unpredictable medium of explosives and fireworks and all. The expectations for spectacle get built up in the art world among collectors and work/performance...
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Posted by greg at
1:07 PM
August 21, 2008
Awesome. a Lego Mini-Fig interpretation of the first scene of Beckett's "Endgame." The grandparents are just hilarious. [youtube via choire]...
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Posted by greg at
5:02 PM
August 20, 2008
Daniel Birnbaum in Artforum, discussing "Beckett/Nauman," a Spring 2000 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien The organizers of "Beckett/Nauman," Kunsthalle Wien curator Christine Hoffmann and art historian Michael Glasmeier, aren't really out to prove anything, but their juxtaposition of works by...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 AM
August 12, 2008
More 1970's video awesomeness from Anton Perich's YouTube channel: this time it's John Chamberlain with a flensing knife in The Dakota. The site is a smallish, park-facing room in writer John Hersey's Dakota apartment. Much of the space is...
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Posted by greg at
1:19 PM
August 10, 2008
Just, wow. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, and yet the sycophancy and superciliousness of this 1974 interview in SoHo by a couple of early Interview contributors is almost unwatchable. Almost. I just watched it again:R. Couri Hay: My...
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Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
August 6, 2008
Malcolm Mclaren gives Artforum 500 words on the occasion of his portrait series, Shallow:I think our culture today can be summed up by two words: authenticity and karaoke. They can both fit together, but you've got to be a bloody...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
August 4, 2008
Alright, so last night I made some wisecrack about a scene from Kevin Costner's 1997 film The Postman, where a mutant general pacifies his slave army by showing The Sound of Music on a floating theater on a lake...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
Spectacular. New York artist Peter Coffin flew a 7-meter, LED-studded, SMS-controlled flying saucer on unannounced trips around the harbor in Gdansk, Poland last month. The lighting and structure were created with London's Cinimod Studio and with the help of...
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Posted by greg at
12:08 AM
August 3, 2008
I loved Cabinet before I wrote for them, and I love them after. In the latest issue, #30 The Underground, Colby Chamberlain looks at an awesome 1971 drawing by Robert Smithson titled, Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
July 27, 2008
So the geocachers I've relied on to provide the link to the USGS real time data about the elevation of the Great Salt Lake have rejiggered their site. So here's the link I'm using to see if the Spiral Jetty...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
July 15, 2008
buckminster fuller sculpture at La Guardia Place, originally uploaded by yuko 'n sherlock. The Center for Architecture, Max Protetch and the Buckminster Fuller Institute have teamed up to exhibit two of the original Fly's Eye domes, the last dome...
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Posted by greg at
1:52 AM
July 14, 2008
After seeing it posted here and there, I finally got around to reading the Times article on Rachel Barrett's photo series of NYC newsstands. The documentation & typology field has been well plowed, photography-wise, but I guess Barrett doesn't...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
July 3, 2008
In 1982, the Public Art Fund commissioned Agnes Denes to create Wheatfield - A Confrontation. She planted, cultivated, and harvested two acres of wheat on the vacant landfill that is now Battery Park City. The image above is one...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
July 2, 2008
So elegiac. The chandeliers with the painted-on camera flares sequence is particularly beautiful. [youtube via artforum video] related: Interesting. Paddy put into a coherent statement what I briefly wondered and then forgot: what's the implication of ArtForum showcasing YouTube...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
June 30, 2008
Gordon Matta-Clark's 1975 film, Day's End, is on view at MoMA right now. It documents a guerrilla project where he and a couple of collaborators cut a giant, moon-shaped hole in the wall of an abandoned sanitation warehouse on...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
June 28, 2008
I'm out of town, so I haven't seen Olafur Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls in person yet. But even though I'm a fan and a friend of the artist, I'm getting a kind of relieved, embarrassed enjoyment reading the...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 AM
June 22, 2008
The scale of the scandal of the management of BYU's art collection was becoming clear just as I entered the art history program there in the late 1980's. For years, the collection had been ignored by everyone except one professor...
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Posted by greg at
3:05 PM
June 19, 2008
Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly traded outrageous predictions for the future back in 1993. Here's one of Eno's I will definitely be looking forward to:* 2025 AD: A social archaeologist discovers a cowshed built from nineteen old Julian Schnabel paintings.Of...
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Posted by greg at
3:17 PM
June 17, 2008
Though I find Alexey Titarenko's City of Shadows long-exposure photos of crowds in St. Petersburg a little too melodramatic, Geoff's comment about them struck a chord:But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
June 13, 2008
Christie's is calling Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia macrocosmica "PROBABLY THE FINEST CELESTIAL ATLAS EVER PUBLISHED." But then, they would; they have a first edition from 1660 they're hoping will sell for $80-120k next week. Cellarius compiled the celestial maps of...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 PM
June 11, 2008
When I first discovered satelloons a few months ago, I admit, I was a little disappointed to have fallen so hard for the first generation satelloons of Project Echo. This disappointment kicked in when I saw this photo of...
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Posted by greg at
3:39 PM
June 8, 2008
A guard at the Carnegie International defaced a Vija Celmins painting, Night Sky #2, making a "long vertical gouge" with a key. The conservator calls it a "total loss," though the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the 1991...
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Posted by greg at
5:15 PM
June 1, 2008
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up Basel:Ferreira finally teased the name out of the Englishman, who turned out to be Nicholas Logsdail, founder of Lisson Gallery, at which everyone around me seemed to tense up a...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 PM
May 28, 2008
Maybe I shouldn't post about this until I win the auction, but Peter Young's Folded Mandala paintings are spectacular, an entrancing mix of hippie, psychedelic beauty and rigorously visible process. Young left the New York art world behind literally...
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Posted by greg at
7:26 PM
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was the first to devise a way to visualize the sounds transmitted by solid objects using sand. "He demonstrated the method by sprinkling sand on plates of glass or metal and drawing a bow down...
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Posted by greg at
4:13 PM
May 27, 2008
A scroll back through the recent posts on this site will reveal my fascination with sky surveys, astronomers' attempts to systematically document in photographs the entire sky. The broadest such survey, the Palomar Sky Survey, completed in the 1950's, was...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 PM
May 22, 2008
Christopher Knight didn't have as bad a time at the performance/filming of Matthew Barney's "REN" as the audience members who were injured by flying glass when the backhoe went at it with the Chrysler Imperial in the auto dealer showroom:When...
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Posted by greg at
11:31 AM
May 13, 2008
This is awesome, like OG William Kentridge in real space. MUTO is a new stop-action animation by Blu, a Buenos Aires artist, where I guess/hope they have different etiquette about painting over someone else's art on the street. MUTO a...
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Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
May 4, 2008
The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey was sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Over ten years, between 1948 and 1958, astronomers at Cal Tech's Palomar Observatory used a 48-inch Schmidt Telescope to create the most advanced sky survey ever, a comprehensive...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 PM
April 29, 2008
Edward Emerson Barnard was a self-taught astronomer who built a house for himself and his new bride with money earned spotting comets. [A patent medicine magnate was offering $200/comet in the 1880's; in one year, Barnard spotted eight.] He...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 AM
April 26, 2008
Well, he and his studio do. Spatial Vibration documents a series of collaboration/experiments concerning the relationship of sound and space. Several of the experiments are on view in a show of the same name, "Spatial Vibration, String-Based Instrument, Study...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 AM
April 23, 2008
From around 1989-92, the German photographer Thomas Ruff created a body of work using astronomical survey photos from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. There is very little discussion online of this series[1], even though I believe it's the...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
April 19, 2008
In 2005, Robert Gober curated a show at the Menil Collection in Houston. In his catalogue, Robert Gober Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007," for the Schaulager show, Gober says, "Initially, I was only interested in curating from the collection and not...
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Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
April 14, 2008
Just a Vegas-y two second video, but I wonder if this rain machine gives a hint of what's coming this week at Olafur Eliasson's MoMA/PS1 show....
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Posted by greg at
10:00 PM
April 11, 2008
Another of the things that Richard Serra said at LACMA last week has stuck with me was the artist's call to arms for abstraction: basically, for artists in the 20th century, you're either with us [i.e., Serra and Malevich] or...
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Posted by greg at
4:18 PM
April 10, 2008
Andy designed this postcard for the Walker Art Center, which is cool. But the notes on the flickr photo are even cooler. cf. the most heavily annotated photo on flickr [kottke]...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
April 2, 2008
Richard Serra. In the Broad. With a 600-ton steel plate. Serra's always good for a zippy quote, and even though I've heard his and Lynne Cooke's routine before, I figured it'd be worth the trip to hear them speak at...
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Posted by greg at
12:47 AM
March 25, 2008
I don't know, is it a good thing to be rustled awake in the middle of the night by a compulsion to write about an exhibition you saw in December? It's like having a flashback, only to the Elk Grove...
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Posted by greg at
5:59 AM
March 24, 2008
RC Baker gets all caught up in the spirit in reviewing Zwirner & Wirth's re-creation of Dan Flavin's historic 1964 exhibition at Green Gallery, the first time he exhibited only-flourescent works. The show sounds fascinating, and when combined with Flavin's...
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Posted by greg at
9:43 AM
March 19, 2008
So after the Whitney opens its downtown branch, it'll sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison? That's the way I read the blueprints being unfurled in the NY Times the last couple of months. Buried in a late December...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
March 11, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Géode, originally uploaded by zyber. But darned if it isn't pretty damn close. La Géode...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 AM
March 8, 2008
From "Jeremy Blake in Three Parts," written by editor/curator Bennett Simpson for PS 1's "Greater NY" show. In 2000, Blake's 20-min. digitally animated abstraction titled Angel Dust was in both the harried, hasty "Greater NY" and the Pompidou's "Elysian...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
March 5, 2008
So I'm staring at these Solar Balloons by Coolearth Technology, caught like a deer in some headlights [actually, with this pair, maybe it's "caught like a spring breaker in some headlights, but whatever], and I can't figure them out....
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Posted by greg at
2:17 PM
February 29, 2008
If anyone's life's work could have at once so little and so much to show for it, it's Agnes Martin. From Brian Droitcour for Artforum:This brisk tour of Agnes Martin’s career—forty years in twenty drawings—is anchored by On a...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
As he was working on it the last few months, my friend John Powers kept hinting that his upcoming show would have a bit of the Deathstar and a bit of the disintegrating disco ball. He's not kidding. The...
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Posted by greg at
6:55 PM
February 28, 2008
Holy ^%$&! Man Smuggles Art To The &%#$ing Moon! In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60's bad boys Michael Heizer's and...
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Posted by greg at
12:19 PM
February 27, 2008
After riding the It's a Small World ride half a dozen times on my first trip to Disneyland, I sent off for information on how to become an Imagineer. I was seven. Yet somehow it's taken me until this week...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 PM
Now I've been a fan of Joep van Lieshout's work for a long time, even if a lot of it's too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. ["You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
February 19, 2008
LACMA director Michael Govan and photographer Terry Richardson--who looks great, by the way, has he had work done?--at the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum last week. Broad and Butter [artforum]...
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Posted by greg at
5:14 PM
February 16, 2008
Here's a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka '70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, "Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America's Domed Stadiums":Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller's Geodesic Dome built for the U.S....
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Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
February 15, 2008
Of course, I'd only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn't exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric...
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Posted by greg at
5:38 PM
Let's get one thing out of the way first: I'm a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand's supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot...
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Posted by greg at
3:53 PM
February 8, 2008
Now I'm probably biased because we've been longtime fans and collectors of Ruth Root's work, but damned if this isn't the most incredible press release for a gallery exhibition that you will see this year, last year, or next year:...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
February 4, 2008
純粋階段, originally uploaded by nor1. Atelier Bow Wow is my favorite Japanese architecture firm. Rather than by building or proposing some kind of Roarkian vision, they first made a name for themselves [besides the catchy name they made for...
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Posted by greg at
4:49 PM
Augor Revok msk Originally uploaded by RIBBON CONTROLLER Augur & Revok tagged a Takashi Murakami billboard in December. LA Weekly now reports that Murakami took the billboard down for his own collection. [image via the woostercollective photo pool on...
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Posted by greg at
2:06 PM
February 1, 2008
Score one for the bloggers. In the face of an instant, last-minute, blog-fueled burst of attention, the Utah Department of Oil, Gas & Mines has extended the public comment period until Feb. 13 for Application to Permit Drilling #08-8853,...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 PM
January 28, 2008
At the risk of devolving into an Olafur fanboi site, I'll mention that I was flipping through Take Your Time, the photodocumentary magazine published by the studio in November. Turns out there are multiple shots of the making of...
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Posted by greg at
6:52 PM
January 26, 2008
He's a tough guy and a really wonderful architect whose work has sent me on more than one pilgrimage in my life. But even so, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Tadao Ando. The most dazzling,...
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Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
January 23, 2008
From the Great Opening Paragraphs Department, Matthew Placek interviewed NZ documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly for V Magazine:In March of 2006 I traveled with Vanessa Beecroft to Rumbek in South Sudan on two separate occasions to produce an image for...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 AM
January 18, 2008
Choire's got me hooked on the NY Times archives. Here's the headline of an April 2, 1947 review of a MoMA show that contains an early mention of Jackson Pollock:UNUSUAL ART SHOW OPENS AT MUSEUM; Display of Paintings, None Less...
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Posted by greg at
9:46 AM
January 3, 2008
Richter window Originally uploaded by Ralf Stockmann Seriously, the Cologne Cathedral is so on my list of places to visit, once the sunlight returns. I love this photo....
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Posted by greg at
7:36 AM
December 29, 2007
Yesterday Holland Cotter wrote a glowing review of Triple Candie's current exhibition of the largely white art world's history of misrepresenting the work of Jacob Lawrence. The show consists of full-size reproductions of all 60 panels of Lawrence's masterpiece, The...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
December 27, 2007
Rhonda Lieberman on the opening of Helmut Lang's exhibition, "Next Ever After," at the Journal Gallery in Williamsburg:If a New Yorker cartoon had to sketch a perfectly "hip" awkward situation, they couldn't have done a better job: a bunch...
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Posted by greg at
10:24 AM
December 26, 2007
Though my reflex was to read David Antin's Artforum review of Lawrence Weiner's Whitney retrospective as a bit of an overshare:...these readings are as slippery as rain and evaporate fairly quickly. Take [a 1962 work] "an object tossed from...
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Posted by greg at
1:05 PM
December 9, 2007
Wow. I can't believe this was shot in 1977. Stations of the Elevated, Manfred Kirchheimer's remarkable documentary--is art documentary a genre?--of New York City's graffiti-saturated trains and their environs is a total throwback feast. The film puts graffiti into...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 AM
November 28, 2007
Buckminster Fuller wha? It was the photo caption in the photo spread of the Foreign Office Architects country house project in the November 2007 World of Interiors on the coffee table. I snapped a quick phonecam photo, thinking I'd look...
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Posted by greg at
1:27 PM
November 21, 2007
As the art market began heating up and becoming much more fashionable a few years ago, I started to wonder what the effect of all this demand would be on the art that was produced. Surely, 95-plus percent of the...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 PM
Alright, the clock is ticking, only hours to go until Jeff Koons' largest work to date, a 53-foot high balloon based on his 1986 sculpture, Rabbit, bobs down the west side in Macy's parade. It was made using a...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 PM
November 15, 2007
I guess when you're a hammer, everything looks like MoMA. It's "Subverting The Dominant Installation" Week at Modern Art Notes, where Tyler is taking inordinate pleasure in shadow boxing with an opponent who retired long ago: Alfred Barr's rickety, linear...
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Posted by greg at
1:13 PM
November 3, 2007
Hello, Olafur Eliasson's studio has a YouTube channel. A couple of months ago, right before the show opened at SFMOMA, he/they posted three videos that show various behind-the-scenes activities from your mobile expectations, the BMW Art Car project. Actually, part...
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Posted by greg at
5:33 PM
October 27, 2007
The Joshua Foer photo timeline, "A Minor History of Giant Spheres," that got me all hopped up on Satelloons, is now online. It's in the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine. And while you should always buy or subscribe to Cabinet,...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 AM
October 23, 2007
Time has a great review of the big JMW Turner exhibition--at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. The Washington Post, meanwhile, has an incomprehensible ramble about the bigger Turner exhibition at the National Gallery. Does Turner's 40+ year-old position...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
October 22, 2007
The Drawing Center has invited me to participate in a "Curator Slam" this Friday to celebrate the launch of their new Online Viewing Program. One of the Center's greatest strengths has been its slide registry, which enabled artists who hadn't...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
I'm still looking around for anyone who gave an account of yesterday's discussion of Warhol films at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Warhol Film Project director Callie Angell and film critic Amy Taubin were supposed to "discuss the...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 PM
October 16, 2007
It looks like the RISD Mall Dwellers have some stiff, French competition. Via UX frontman and UnterGunther spokesman Lazar Kunstmann comes this most excellent photo of the crates the guerilla restorers used to camouflage their workshop in the Pantheon,...
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Posted by greg at
11:27 PM
October 9, 2007
l: Pantheon r: Pantheon w/Ernesto Neto's 2006 installation, Leviathan Thot Wow, worlds collide, I feel like I'm in an Umberto Eco novel. At nights over the course of a year, a group of urban explorers in Paris who call...
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Posted by greg at
3:41 PM
October 8, 2007
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can't seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, "the most beautiful...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
October 7, 2007
image: NASM From about 1956 until 1964, US aeronautics engineers and rocket scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of spherical satellite balloons called, awesomely enough, satelloons. Dubbed Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloons were one...
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Posted by greg at
11:00 AM
October 3, 2007
tape portrait of FDNY B.C. Dennis Devlin 23rd St, north side, between Park & Lex Wow. Before he became known as Apartment In The Mall Guy, artist Michael Townsend was Tape Art Guy. Over the course of five years,...
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Posted by greg at
3:13 PM
October 2, 2007
"Dude, you totally missed out on the shadow boxes from the Pottery Barn." Spectacular. It's the suburban corollary to the urban explorer-style underground cinematheque of La Mexicaine des Perforation: surreptitiously creating and programming space in that most sprawling of American...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 PM
September 29, 2007
Dara Friedman is unobtrusively videotaping people singing show tunes in public in New York City for a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund:The policeman on the staircase barely looks up; the two little girls beside him continue giggling about...
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Posted by greg at
4:50 PM
September 27, 2007
A support campaign for the marching monks of Burma, including this stencil, which is downloadable as a pdf [saffronrevolutionworldwide.blogspot.com via monoscope]...
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Posted by greg at
10:26 PM
September 22, 2007
I've been listening to WNYC's anniversary tribute programming for John Cage, and it's really great [if a bit over-narrated; I mean, who's going to listen to 24h33m of John Cage programming on-demand who isn't at least somewhat familiar with...
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Posted by greg at
11:44 PM
Randy Kennedy has a great, if slightly artificially naive, article on Richard Prince, whose retrospective opens at the Guggenheim next week. Despite curator Nancy Spector's play-along comments to the contrary, Prince's "readymade" edition of three custom-built replicas of a...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
September 16, 2007
Have Mexican artists ever met an obelisk they didn't want to make portable and drive to New York? Obelisco Transportable, 2004, Damian Ortega, on view with the Public Art Fund, thru 10/28 [image: Ortega's gallery, kurimanzutto]: Portable Broken Obelisk (for...
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Posted by greg at
8:14 AM
September 15, 2007
still from Inner and Outer Space, 1965 Fascinating. In 1965, months before pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik got his hands on his own first video camera, Norelco loaned Andy Warhol its new, $3,950 slant scan video recording system for...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
September 14, 2007
Wait, the Warhol Museum called the 1-hour excerpt of Empire released on DVD an unauthorized bootleg? Yes they did, in 2004:"It's a bootleg!" says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.Which is odd. The Italian...
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Posted by greg at
6:28 PM
September 13, 2007
The Internet is a series of tubes. Also, the art world is a series of dinner parties. My favorite out-of-nowhere aphorism: "Forget about one-on-one art. This fall, elitism will find its feet in a rush of exclusive, invitation-only performances, like...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
September 8, 2007
I continue to be baffled by the breathlessly uninformed reportage of the supposed sale of Damien Hirst's diamond-and-platinum skull. From the very first news report of the sale in the Evening Standard journalists have gotten it wrong, and everyone else...
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Posted by greg at
1:48 AM
September 4, 2007
Ugh, Lee Rosenbaum's op-ed in the LA Times is so wrong in so many ways, even Tyler Green can't keep track of them all. She opines on the looming crisis facing museums ["Public collecting is endangered"!] who can't buy...
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Posted by greg at
1:33 PM
August 29, 2007
Is John Wilmerding the Karl Rove of the American Art world? In May 2005, Alice Walton effectively broke ground on her Bentonville, Ark. museum project Crystal Bridges, by buying Asher Durand's 1849 painting Kindred Spirits from the New York...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 AM
August 28, 2007
When I saw images of front architecture's billboard-shaped house-on-a-pole floating about, the first thing I thought of was one of the first sculptures by Michael Ashkin I ever saw. It's title, "For Months He Lived Between The Billboards," pretty...
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Posted by greg at
4:21 PM
August 26, 2007
Gerhard Richter's design for the stained glass window in the Köln Cathedral was unveiled yesterday. 11,500 handblown glass squares in 72 colors. German: das Gerhard Richter Fenster in Köln English: Gerhard Richter window in Cologne, hires image [washjeff.edu via boingboing]...
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Posted by greg at
8:32 PM
August 21, 2007
This is what I get for not going to the Serpentine Summer Party this year...Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
At a recent conference talk on magic given in Las Vegas, Teller [the quiet one] gave the most amazing definition of magic I wish I'd heard before writing about Scott Sforza for Cabinet Magazine's magic issue:[Magic is] the theatrical linking...
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Posted by greg at
6:43 PM
August 8, 2007
In 1810, the last year of his young life, painter Philipp Otto Runge devised his Color Sphere, one of the first attempts to depict a comprehensive color system in three dimensions. Runge was a correspondent of Goethe, who was...
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Posted by greg at
12:16 AM
August 4, 2007
The Japanese magazine Art-iT asked ten artists, directors, curators and i-don't-knows for their top ten "'artistic' films of the 21st century". I was glad but just a little surprised to see Jeremy Blake's Sodium Fox, which I don't think was...
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Posted by greg at
5:23 PM
July 31, 2007
In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
July 26, 2007
Quadriceptica II is an amazing exhibition of which the Cultural Directorate of Rjamusz can be justly proud, and to which anyone seriously interested in pan-national trends in current post-market cultural production must direct themselves before the onset of locust season....
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Posted by greg at
9:47 AM
July 25, 2007
Alright, I will grant that a 54-carat, flawless pink diamond would push the fabrication cost of an 1,100-carat pave' and platinum skull beyond the $3-4 million I was able to account for. Still, it's worth noting that the whisper...
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Posted by greg at
7:26 PM
July 22, 2007
Good to see he's taking a brave stand against the one museum that isn't contemplating opening an annex on the west side of Manhattan, though. You stay strong, Mitt. [image and scoop: tmz.com, story and aide's inane excuse for...
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Posted by greg at
7:38 AM
July 20, 2007
From Theresa's blog, The Wit of the Staircase:From the French phrase 'esprit d'escalier,' literally, it means 'the wit of the staircase', and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. "Esprit...
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Posted by greg at
1:03 PM
July 19, 2007
Can I just say, I've reached a point in my life where I don't know what's left to accomplish? I mean, how can I top the thrill of getting to write for Cabinet Magazine? I just don't know. I've had...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
July 12, 2007
There's only a partial list of artists included, but the premise of this show holds a lot of promise. Though I would hope that assimilation has more to do with exploration and manipulation, not just funny camera angles:Since photography’s inception,...
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Posted by greg at
2:51 PM
June 29, 2007
There's an excellent, loong interview on Archinect with Kenneth Goldsmith, the artist, poet, dj, theory karaokeist [?], professor, and web developer behind the incomparable UbuWeb. Ubu began with just texts, and as collections and formats and partners came their way,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
June 26, 2007
So if you're going to see the Richard Serra exhibition at MoMA--and you should, it's really quite spectacular--you should see it when the museum is closed, because then you have the whole place to yourself. A friend John and...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
June 23, 2007
Holy smokes. Artforum reports that chef Ferran Adrià is participating in this year's Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, by leaving a table for two open at El Bulli every night for exhibition visitors. El Bulli is in Costa Brava,...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
June 7, 2007
It's actually happening. Ever since it was first announced that Felix Gonzalez-Torres would be the artist representing the US at the Venice Biennale, I've kind of held my breath to see if it would actually come off. And it...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
June 5, 2007
First things first: if someone DOES buy Damien Hirst's diamond-and-platinum skull, it won't be for $100 million. Any shlub billionaire walking in off the street would get 10% off, and any actual collector would get 20%. So if someone's...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:33 PM
June 1, 2007
When I heard that Christopher DeLaurenti used body mics and a mini-disc-equipped vest to make his surreptitious recordings of orchestral intermissions, I was like, "Half the recording is probably the squeaks of his leather vest. What he's actually capturing isn't...
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Posted by greg at
6:14 PM
May 25, 2007
Look, wasn't born in time for this "Human Be-In" of which the Grey-haired Ones speak, but I own shagpad.com, so don't think I'm not down with the groovy, psychedelic 60's. But if going to the Whitney triggered a flashback...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
May 19, 2007
As part of Rotterdam 2007 - City of Architecture, the city commemorated the 15-minute-long German bombing on May 14, 1940 that destroyed the city center, precipitated the Dutch surrender in WWII--and ultimately provided the occasion for all that new...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
May 16, 2007
Raimundas Malasauskas: Can we ask him who he was in his past life? David Magnus: There might be a surprise, but he was an athlete, a preacher. He had something to do with the Mormons. I don't know what, I...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
May 8, 2007
I have no idea what to make of this. Dresden painter Eberhard Havekost's Kontakt is coming up for auction at Phillips de Pury on May 17th. Its oblique, cropped composition depicts the flat, linear patterns of the facades of the...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
May 6, 2007
Seriously, where do they find this stuff? In the 25th issue of the inimitable Cabinet Magazine, Jeffrey Kastner has a few tasty excerpts from The Museum of Modern Art Artists' Cookbook, by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, published in 1977....
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Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
May 3, 2007
We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I'll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries--oh, and Gerhard Richter's disorienting photomural...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
April 17, 2007
Richard Neutra's office building in Silver Lake is for sale. It's about 4900sf, plus two apartments in back, with some Neutra built-ins and fixtures. No price is mentioned, but the broker does helpfully provide a ceiling:RECENT SALES OF IMPORTANT...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
April 11, 2007
And by 'out there,' I mean in North Korea. And by 'a Cremaster,' I mean Cremaster 1, Barney's foray into Busby Berkley stadium spectacle. NK's Arirang Festival has choreographed logistics to make even Barbara Gladstone blush [well, maybe]: 100,000...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:06 AM
April 9, 2007
My favorite line in the Daily Utah Chronicle interview with Paul Morrissey, where he admits Andy Warhol sent a double, actor Allen Midgette, to a lecture at the University of Utah, is from Kay Israel, assistant editor campus paper:Mr. Morrissey:...On...
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Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
April 7, 2007
Staffers in the University of Utah Art Department raised suspicions that night that the man who'd just presented on campus was not, in fact, Andy Warhol, but an impersonator. As a result, event organizers withheld the $1,000 speaking fee while...
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Posted by greg at
12:06 PM
April 6, 2007
So this week I gave a lecture about how collectors and the market get weird with art at the University of Utah. It was a lot of fun for me, and it seemed to go over alright. I took as...
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Posted by greg at
7:36 PM
April 1, 2007
We had a four-hour layover at O'Hare yesterday, which was long enough to become thoroughly disgusted with CNN's non-stop toggling between three major crises: what if that dude with the hair wins American Idol? the daily truck bombings in Iraq,...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 AM
March 30, 2007
"Spiral Doily" postcard, Corinne, UT, 2005 Yow, didn't realize how radio silent it's been around here. I've been working on a couple of deadlines, one article I'll go into later, and a lecture I'm just tightening up right now....
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
March 13, 2007
It had sparked one of those jump-the-shark anxiety attacks when I heard that one of the artists I most admire, Olafur Eliasson, had been commissioned to do an Art Car for BMW. Even as it included such respected artists...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
February 26, 2007
So the Oscars. Did I just miss their press release warning that they were going to inject off-off-Broadway wacky juice into the show? Because after being numbed into catatonia by years of Debbie Allen, Debbie Allen manques, and Gil Coates'...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 AM
February 23, 2007
Paddy Johnson at ArtFagCity manages to capture the Armory Show and the entire art fair phenomenon in two sentences: "It's hard to know what to think of anything. Everything looks like you should buy it." The Armory Show: New Digs,...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 PM
So Christie's bought Haunch of Venison, which will open an outpost in Rockefeller Center, the spectacular, near-raw space where the Judd Foundation pieces were previewed? Great. But is it, as the NYT calls it, "the first time, an auction house...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
February 18, 2007
WPS1 has posted the audio for MoMA's recent symposium, "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." Listening to a panel discussion with no access to the visuals can be a tough sell, but the two talks...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
February 6, 2007
The idea to use a large heliostat to deliver winter sunlight to a small village deep in a valley of the Italian Alps, was a success: The mirror — 870 meters, or 2,900 feet, above Viganella and measuring 8 meters...
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Posted by greg at
9:26 AM
February 2, 2007
I was beginning to think everyone in Boston, and most everyone in the media, and most certainly everyone in the cable news industry, was a freakin' idiot. [cf. nearly every angry, belligerent comment by an embarassed official; the smartass...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
January 30, 2007
The constroversy over Peter Baxter's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance's Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions. This time, it's not complaints by a...
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Posted by greg at
10:40 AM
January 25, 2007
Marcos Vilarino has recreated some early landmarks of modern photography in Lego, including this interpretation of Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Feininger's "The Photojournalist" {note: it's Andreas, not Lionel/Lyonel, who was a painter] and the world's first photo, Niepce's view out his window...
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Posted by greg at
12:59 PM
January 11, 2007
There are very few artists I'd like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist's story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 AM
Awesome. Just. Awesome. A couple who lives in the Rockefeller Apartments across 54th St from MoMA was watching the museum test the projections for the their upcoming Doug Aitken installation. Your Video Art Here [flickr via curbed] One of...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
January 9, 2007
For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil's next project: "finding people who feel their lives...
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Posted by greg at
10:29 PM
January 8, 2007
With six trans-oceanic flights last month, I ended up seeing The DaVinci Code with the sound off at least two dozen times. The only thing that surprises me about this Reuters story is that it's taken this long for other...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
January 3, 2007
Arne Quinze has a posse. The Belgian self-marketer began his cross-country promotional tour for the launch of the new Lexus flagship at Burning Man. Though he didn't really mention the tie-in to anyone there at the time, he sure has...
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Posted by greg at
2:52 PM
December 20, 2006
I used to live downstairs from Nam June Paik. I was too starstruck to ever talk with him at length, but we had friendly chats when we'd see each other in the stairway of our Little Italy loft building....
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Posted by greg at
3:17 PM
December 13, 2006
The funniest line so far from coverage of Miami Basel. It's from New York Mag's "Basel Blog," which reports that collectors have moved to buying work by safe artists from established galleries. Which is probably what it looks like if...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 PM
Sara and Marc are so awesome. The global street art blowout at 11 Spring Street organized by Wooster Collective opens tomorrow, and it runs through Sunday, 11-5 each day. Artists from all over, including some who installed their work on...
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Posted by greg at
7:43 PM
Sorry, I was out of town. Did anything happen art-wise while I was gone? On the film/editing front, the votes were in, and I'm pleased to announce a new addition to the greg.org team: a husky MacBookPro and a couple...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 PM
November 30, 2006
Roll up a host of moribund art magazines. Start an art news portal. Launch a big, glogsy new magazine about the [sic] Biennale Lifestyle. Buy an art fair. It hurts to say it because I have friends there, but am...
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Posted by greg at
4:14 PM
November 25, 2006
It's what I've always said Art Basel Miami Beach needed more of: blimps. And now they've got'em. It's almost enough to make me wish I wasn't going to be in Kyoto. A beachside Blimp Parade with characters from artists I...
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Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
November 21, 2006
The FBI said Monday that it has recovered a 1778 painting by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya that was stolen as it was being taken to an exhibition earlier this month. "Children with a Cart," which disappeared en route...
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Posted by greg at
12:09 AM
November 13, 2006
Maurizio Cattelan's Not afraid of love, 2000, shown at Marian Goodman. [via artnet] and Mr. Snuffalupagus in storage on the set of Sesame Street [via flickr]...
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Posted by greg at
2:14 PM
November 8, 2006
Today, this is just one more picture of a well-balanced bastard. Twenty years from now, though, this dude's family will sell this photo to the Guggenheim: Well Balanced Bastards of The Day [dethroner.com] The photo's from Hans Kemp's book, Bikes...
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Posted by greg at
6:03 PM
November 7, 2006
Wow. The sale of one of the paintings I wrote about in the NYT the other day, a blue-period Picasso portrait being sold by Andrew Lloyd Webber,was recently ordered stopped by a Manhattan court. An heir to Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,...
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Posted by greg at
5:13 PM
November 4, 2006
That was my original choice for a title, but I'm happy enough just not botching the Hamlet reference. Thanks to all the people who helped with interviews and research and editing. Since the story closed, I've heard from a couple...
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Posted by greg at
11:37 PM
November 3, 2006
They're doing construction in DC, and the workers dumped a found-art version of a Richard Serra/Robert Smithson installation in front of our house....
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Posted by greg at
4:31 PM
October 24, 2006
Damn, I just hate when that happens. I hate when some sick poseur geezer company who makes SUV's for orthodontists or whatever totally rips off and corrupts the free, utopian, non-commercial, creative spirit of youth--of the future, even. As...
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Posted by greg at
1:39 PM
October 22, 2006
Bronx, NY, 2004, Funeral service for Sgt. Luis Moreno Paul Fusco began photographing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq in 2004 as a "personal protest against government attempts to downplay the costs of war." It's not the...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
October 11, 2006
We're beyond Machinima, people. Some titles have photography as part of the gameplay, and some players are tweaking the games themselves to take in-game photographs. The results are finding their way onto flickr, like Gregory Perez's homage [top] to...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 PM
October 9, 2006
Curator Nancy Spector described Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque, which the Guggenheim acquired in 1999 from the artist's estate [controlled by his widow Nancy Holt and represented by James Cohan Gallery] this way:Hotel Palenque perfectly embodies the artist's notion of...
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Posted by greg at
4:45 PM
October 4, 2006
Like Pompeii in reverse, Gibellina has been remembered by its ghost-like burial instead of an unearthing. In 1968, an earthquake devastated villages throughout the Belice Valley of western Sicily. The Italian government's incompetent response to the disaster and the...
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Posted by greg at
12:38 AM
October 3, 2006
As has been reported before, Ms. Sydney McGee, an 28-year veteran art teacher in a Texas elementary school has been suspended after a parent complained that his/her child saw nude art during a field trip to the Dallas Museum of...
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Posted by greg at
9:18 PM
September 30, 2006
Carol Vogel has a story about Damien Hirst's restoration replacement of the shark [yes, that shark]: Such is his reputation that when a seven-foot shark washed up on a beach in July, and the Natural History Museum in London needed...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 PM
September 28, 2006
"In terms of the way the art world functions today, 'Scene & Herd' is the new October." Francesco Vezzoli is also working on a documentary funded by Miuccia Prada. Scene & Herd: Burden of History [artforum]...
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Posted by greg at
3:58 PM
September 27, 2006
I guess if Kaikai Kiki had wanted the name of its biannual Toyko otaku art fair, Geisai, spelled properly, they should've upgraded Walter Robinson's seat for him. Instead, as he wrote, he had to use his own frequent flier...
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Posted by greg at
12:59 AM
September 25, 2006
Now, after reading Regine's writeup of Marc and Sara's Wooster Collective presentation on street art, I'm double mad I missed Conflux this year. previously V-2's Adam Greenfield on taking Urbanist icons to the woodshed...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
John Currin's list, for example, reads like his kid's birthday party gift registry. And while I'm tempted to buy Helmut Lang that $5 John Chamberlain wall relief catalogue, I have to wonder why it's on there at all. Did he...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
September 19, 2006
The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust--both the Times' and the Guardian's people panned it, complaining that it's a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture--but I have to say, it...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 PM
September 16, 2006
I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, "Hey, what's been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?" No? Too bad. Cuz I'll tell you. The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
September 4, 2006
The last mention of Lee Siegel on this blog was also the first. Since about three hours after he published that dumbass comment about Twombly, I've basically taken pains not to read his criticism. Life was just too short. And...
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Posted by greg at
12:48 PM
September 3, 2006
It took over 600 years to complete [from 1248 t- 1880], so it should surprise absolutely no one that it takes the Cologne Cathedral [or Kölner Dom] over 60 years to fix a broken window. Gerhard Richter has been...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
August 30, 2006
Six years drinking at the open bar of power is enough to get anyone a little woozy, so it should be no surprise that the shots fired at MoMA from the right by two pundits from the American Enterprise Institute...
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Posted by greg at
4:43 PM
August 16, 2006
For a couple of months now, I've been really pre-occupied by this discussion of the color white and its association with modernism. It's between Olafur Eliasson, curator Daniel Birnbaum, and Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia's architecture school and...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
August 2, 2006
This: The Tangled Web of Syriana by Philip Dhingra [philosophistry.com via mathowie] reminds me of this: from Mark Lombardi: Global Networks, Nov. 1 - Dec. 18, 2003 [drawingcenter.org] in a good way....
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Posted by greg at
8:43 PM
Much like the 24-hour interview-a-thon itself, Claire Bishop's report from the Serpentine Pavilion starts out hilariously--my original title for this post was to be "LOLOLOL"--and ends with unexpected substance and insight. Whether her declaration is the first, I don't care,...
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Posted by greg at
6:06 PM
July 25, 2006
Here's the schedule for this Friday's 24-hour interviewathon at the Serpentine Gallery pavilion. Mega-interviewer Hans Ulrich Obrist and perennial interviewee Rem Koolhaas will be tag-teaming on a whole slate of "culture industry" types. If you can't imagine ending your night--or...
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Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
July 8, 2006
Afangar, Richard Serra sculpture on Videy Island, Reykjavik Originally uploaded by gregorg. I went to Iceland a couple of weeks ago, and I just put some photos up on flickr from the trip. This one is of Afangar, a...
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Posted by greg at
5:42 PM
July 1, 2006
especially when I read something like this--and to be honest, I haven't even finished it yet: Design. Architecture. Football. [cityofsound.com via bldgblog]...
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Posted by greg at
12:30 AM
June 26, 2006
William EgglestoneThis is just a snapshot. I would not even have considered showing this. If you ware going to post pictures you need to make sure it is of something unusual or with a personal vision. Otherwise you are going...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 PM
June 25, 2006
Drawing Restraint, the exhibition of Matthew Barney's complete series of works of the same name, opened this week at SFMOMA. It originated last summer at 21C Museum for Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, which was the occasion for the production...
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Posted by greg at
4:15 PM
June 23, 2006
Q. The Times could set a much needed precedent by creating a culture-news blog that profits from the eyes of an editor, rather than the current norm in blogdom, which is for semi-informed scribblers to post unedited ramblings, and often...
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Posted by greg at
6:54 AM
June 13, 2006
I'm skipping Art Basel this year--got a trip to Iceland and all--with the result that I hear my foreigner neighbors watching TV all day across the courtyard. They may not be able to comply with a "reserved parking" sign, but...
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Posted by greg at
8:02 AM
June 9, 2006
Nickyskye on Metafilter:Joseph wrote me love letters in which he couched his sexual interest in metaphors. I was told he used the image of a bird for penis and nest for vagina. His letters were full of birds and nests.Just...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 AM
June 8, 2006
It's funny, I've never really found the worlds of art and flickr to have that much overlap. Just look at the number of photos posted after the Maker Faire 2006 [4,055] compared to those posted after, say, Art Basel...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 AM
May 25, 2006
Yeah, I've got a post about the MoMA gig with Jim Mangold on Tuesday, which was a lot of fun. Great guy. But first, this picture from Curbed, which was taken on 21st Street between 10th and 11th Avenues: Now...
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Posted by greg at
12:44 PM
May 16, 2006
You may know Brian Sholis from such venues as Artforum and his as-time-permits blog, In Search of the Miraculous. Brian just posted some behind-the-scenes shots of the first of twelve installations Olafur Eliasson's doing at Portikus, the Frankfurt art space....
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Posted by greg at
1:56 AM
May 11, 2006
After conducting the biggest contemporary auction in Sotheby's history, Tobias Meyer told Artforum's Sarah Thornton, "The best art is the most expensive, because the market is so smart." Uh-huh. This is the market that paid a million-one for a...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 AM
May 4, 2006
1) Truckload of Missing Art Found in Trailer Park, by Alan Feuer, NY Times. 2) A-- Actually, we have winner right there....
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Posted by greg at
6:27 AM
May 2, 2006
Considering it's an architecture magazine, I'm surprised there's no mention of his architectural interventions, like turning rooms into cameras obscura [sp?] or cutting holes in the roof to make like a sundial. Never mind Olafur's proposal for a new music...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
May 1, 2006
While he's been actively posing questions about vision and perception and exploring the relationship between the seen/felt/experienced and reality, I've still had a sense of Olafur Eliasson as a sculptural artist. That object/space/experience thing. And I mean that, even though...
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Posted by greg at
8:43 AM
April 27, 2006
You'd never know it from the market today, but according to the Guardian's Jonathan Jones, art and money do NOT go well together. That's his explanation for why Damien Hirst sucks so bad these days--because he has 100 million pounds--and...
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Posted by greg at
10:17 AM
April 21, 2006
Just came across the transom from e-flux:Serpentine Gallery and e-flux announce Agency for Unrealised Projects (AUP) For every planned project that is carried out, hundreds of other proposals by artists, architects, designers, scientists and other practitioners around the world...
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Posted by greg at
8:07 AM
April 12, 2006
That fall the curious flocked to Gladstone's gallery to watch a film depicting him scaling the gallery walls with the help of ice screws. It ended with Barney inserting the last screw into his anus. Stardom came instantaneously.Unfortunately, the rest...
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Posted by greg at
8:54 AM
April 7, 2006
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: "All art and all cultural production is political." The NY Times report on the inclusion of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' works in US Pavilion next year in Venice gives more information on what was included in the Guggenheim's proposal....
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Posted by greg at
11:00 AM
April 5, 2006
Like death and taxes, the State Department will catch up with you. One day. From an interview Felix Gonzalez-Torres once did with Rob StorrFor example, here is something the State Department sent to me in 1989, asking me to...
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Posted by greg at
3:26 AM
I want to love the Walker Center's Walker Channel video streams even more than I do. There was a chat between Rirkrit Tiravanija and writer Bruce Sterling, for example [here's the Walker's blog post about it] And Philippe Vergne talking...
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Posted by greg at
2:40 AM
April 2, 2006
Joel, an eagle-eyed greg.org reader sends in this tip:Maybe nobody in the history of advertising had thought to do this, but it would appear that an artist had. Lucy Pullen, a Canadian artist living in Victoria, BC, dumped thousands of...
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Posted by greg at
6:55 AM
March 30, 2006
Hiroshi Sugimoto created a stage for a Noh performance at Dia; unfortunately, it was in October 2001, not a real hot time for cultural diversions in downtown New York City. Missed it. The Noh stage was reinstalled at the Mori...
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Posted by greg at
3:08 AM
March 4, 2006
It's funny how much of the art that was donated to the Artists For Chinati benefit auction next week seems somehow Chinati-esque. Artists for Chinati catalogue introduction by Marianne Stockebrand View the lots, which go on sale Mon. March 13...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 AM
February 28, 2006
I've always wondered why the New York Observer didn't have an art critic, but mentioning it, well, that's not how I was raised. Fortunately, Jerry Saltz was raised by wolves or something, because he doesn't mind pointing out that the...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
February 17, 2006
Well, actually, there's just one: The Meat Wagon, a turn through the Menil Collection's collections by Robert Gober, which closed on Jan. 22. GlassTire has an excellent writeup....
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Posted by greg at
4:32 AM
February 16, 2006
I've been a big fan and collector of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work for over 13 years now [wow. Typing that just now makes me hyperaware of the passage of time, which is par for the course for Sugimoto.] So when I...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
February 14, 2006
I fired off an email to Charlie Finch's editor/wingman last night, and even though I'm a ridiculous apprentice of nothing, he graciously favored me with a reply. If only I had a nicer rack, he might've gotten me a group...
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Posted by greg at
7:46 AM
February 13, 2006
The irony, of course, is that if Walter Robinson actually had the balls to fire Charlie Finch for this kind of crap, the skeevy old skank would probably just turn around and start a blog. Charlie Finch Goes Too...
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Posted by greg at
6:55 AM
February 3, 2006
Finally, someone's saying something about the inconsistencies, conflicts and caprices of the Warhol Authentication Board, which is wreaking quiet, opaque havoc on the market for Andy Warhol's artworks. The BBC is showing a documentary on the Board tonight on...
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Posted by greg at
1:34 AM
January 30, 2006
Maybe we have the whole Smithsonian entropy thing wrong. In 2002, Artforum's Nico Israel whined with condescension about the homogenous strip mall & fast food landscape he had to endure on his road trip from one perfectly isolated Earthwork [Spiral...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 AM
January 27, 2006
Wow, Artnet associate editor Ben Davis got just what he wanted for Christmas: the chance to write at length about art and technology. He covers the video game-inspired show at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea last month [generally, eh] and better-reviewed...
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Posted by greg at
1:04 AM
January 26, 2006
From The Salt Lake Tribune, 1/21/06:Spiral Jetty cleanup: Utah officials last month removed several tons of junk from Rozel Point, the area along the Great Salt Lake's north shore that is home to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. "Anyone who has...
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Posted by greg at
5:07 AM
January 25, 2006
My boys Elmgreen & Dragset are opening their show, The Welfare State, at the Serpentine tomorrow, and there's a conference related to the show at the Goethe Institute on Friday, and there's a fat catalogue on every day, whenever you...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
December 30, 2005
As the year winds to an end, I think I can officially say it: the art world is whack. It's all about the Benjamins, and I don't mean Walter. I was going to post a diatribe, but instead, I'll just...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
December 21, 2005
I have 20 16 14 10 8 4 free passes to MoMA that expire on 12/31/05. If you'd like a couple, please drop me a line, and I'll mail them out to you today. [update: I ended up with 4...
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Posted by greg at
12:44 PM
I've been a fan of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work since discovering it in the early 1990's. Although his work had him travelling constantly, Sugimoto had been based in New York City for decades. Recently, he has spent four years building a...
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Posted by greg at
12:41 PM
December 16, 2005
Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen's Portable Cities series are models of cities inside suitcases, made using the old clothes that city's residents. In her practice, she explores issues of globalization and homogenization, but also memory and transience. In a way,...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
December 8, 2005
I've been waiting for anyone else to say it, but Zaha Hadid must have some serious cojones to show up in Miami--his own home [away from home] town!--sporting a gigantic Ernesto Neto fallopian tube sculpture. I mean, Neto's Venice...
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Posted by greg at
12:39 PM
November 17, 2005
Mike Ovitz can fight his own battles--although he's been nothing but genial to me, I don't doubt he can be a pretty scrappy guy. But Nikki Finke's LA Weekly article on Hollywood-style dealmaking supposedly poisoning the art world is such...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
November 14, 2005
There are some posters, and some beer, and the gas for the motorboat had to cost a pretty penny, but that's about it. Compared to the expensive (and purportedly expensive) public art it skewered, The Gate that chased Robert...
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Posted by greg at
11:51 AM
November 10, 2005
What with the hazmat crew required to neutralize the thousands of gallons of formaldehyde and the efforts to stabilize the rotting, soaked corpse, moving Damien Hirst's shark costs an estimated $100,000. Meanwhile, Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer ended up donating...
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Posted by greg at
8:25 AM
November 5, 2005
Whoa. The Dugway Proving Ground is in Skull Valley, an hour and a half west of Salt Lake City. It's where the US Army tests chemical and biological weapons and defense systems. It's the site of an incineration program for...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
October 5, 2005
What is it with French people and penguin movies? Next Friday evening, French video artist Pierre Huyghe will be filming the second part of "A Journey That Wasnt," a musical based on a trip to Antarctica. The first part was...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
October 2, 2005
When I first met John Powers five+ years ago, he was like a Tibetan monk with a pile of sand. Only instead of sand, he had thousands of 1-inch woodblocks, which he transformed into a huge, impossibly intricate, mandala-like...
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Posted by greg at
1:17 AM
September 28, 2005
Tyler goes all Observer on Thomas Krens' butt, while giving new Guggenheim director Lisa Dennison a chance to share her vision for the credibility-starved museum: "I would like the person on the street at Pastis to be able to name...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 AM
September 24, 2005
"So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson's island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the...
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Posted by greg at
8:04 AM
I guess there's some...irony? justice? synchronicity? between Robert Smithson's non-site works--pieces of far-off locations displaced into a gallery--and twiddling your thumbs at a boring* Smithson symposium in a college auditorium while the last 36 hours of the artist's Floating Island...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 AM
September 23, 2005
greg.moma reporting: The Modern has reinstalled the contemporary galleries on the second floor, and it's an invigorating pleasure and a huge improvement. Seeing it again yesterday with my mother, I found myself paying less attention to the show's conceptual and...
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Posted by greg at
7:29 AM
September 22, 2005
New York Is Smithson Country this week, what with the Floating Island and the Whitney retrospective and the Smithson Symposium all day Saturday. What symposium, you say? Actually, that's what I said. I had no idea. Anyway, over four sessions,...
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Posted by greg at
7:50 AM
September 20, 2005
I've been invited to speak Tuesday evening (tonight) at A.I.R. on the subject of women's art and the marketplace. A.I.R. is the oldest artist-run gallery for female artists in the city, and it was established for the purpose of fostering...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
September 16, 2005
Randy Kennedy has an article on the making of Robert Smithson's Floating Island, a tree-filled barge which will chug around lower Manhattan for a week or so:Smithson's project is just as intimately connected to Central Park, which he regarded, in...
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Posted by greg at
3:01 AM
September 1, 2005
Well, things could certainly be worse, but I'm pretty fed up with the achingly nostalgic, self-appointed populist heroic, knee-jerk MoMA-hating that passes for an enlightened, progressive cultural standpoint in certain quarters of New York these days. James Wagner takes it...
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Posted by greg at
10:12 AM
August 23, 2005
Regine just posted about some artists in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale who made portable chairs available to visitors, [correction: turns out the chairs were sponsor-driven, not artist-driven.] and it got me thinking about the customer service side...
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Posted by greg at
2:36 AM
Metropolis Magazine's short interview with Rick Smith is so dense with fascinating information, I'd have to excerpt the whole thing, so just got read it now. He talks about convincing Frank Gehry to buy CATIA, the aerospace industry CAD/CAM software...
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Posted by greg at
1:59 AM
August 11, 2005
Art is used to lend Roppongi Hills, the massive land grab mall/office complex I'm loving hating these days, cultural credibility. Minoru Mori, the developer, clearly fancies his development is Tokyo's Rockefeller Center--and, by extension, he's Japan's Rockefeller. At least...
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Posted by greg at
10:24 AM
August 4, 2005
I still have a place in my heart--and fortunately, a spot in the old collection--for Takashi Murakami. The Louis Vuitton thing was rather masterful, and the sheer superfluity of luxury and fashion maps rather well onto some of the more...
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Posted by greg at
3:36 AM
August 2, 2005
He said Pitt and Jolie remained 'in character' through most of the two-day shoot, while the photographer orchestrated their performance in the manner of John Cassavetes, a pioneer of cinma vrit."At least he's stealing from someone dead this time. He...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 AM
July 28, 2005
Turns out the art world's problem isn't that it's a market-obsessed, commoditization-frenzied bubble; it's that it isn't a market-obsessed, commoditization-frenzied bubble enough. No need to fear, though, Domino magazine is here:Art is another form of shopping, [Domino editor Deborah] Needleman...
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Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
July 23, 2005
A couple of months ago, I wrote a NYT piece about artists' unrealized projects. The piece quoted several interviews conducted by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who sees these unrealized projects as under-publicized and under-appreciated aspects of an artist's work,...
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Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
July 14, 2005
Sarah Boxer is disappointed in--can I say it? too late--Janet Cardiff's online piece, Eyes of Laura. Cardiff created a journal (don't tell the bloggers, but she actually calls it a blog) for a bored security guard in the Vancouver art...
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Posted by greg at
8:43 AM
June 28, 2005
Philip-Lorca diCorcia is being sued by this guy for taking his photograph on the street in Times Square in 2001. More precisely, he's being sued for exhibiting it, selling it, and publishing it in books, and his gallery, his...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 PM
June 26, 2005
It's a relief to know that some folks in Venice did know they were being targetted by Francesco Vezzoli's Biennale-stopping Caligula trailer--and are fans of his work because of it. Our Other Man In Venice was like, "but that's the...
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Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
[via land+living]In the wake of Google Maps' release, a few sites have started collecting coordinates and satellite images of various earth art works, including Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, James Turrell's Roden Crater, and Walter deMaria's Lightning Field. Here's...
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Posted by greg at
1:56 AM
In the NYT, Edward Lewine talks to some collectors of video- and projection-based art to find out what it's like to actually live with work that demands both attention and extra hardware. I know collectors who have flatscreens propped all...
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Posted by greg at
1:03 AM
June 23, 2005
Do you ever wish you still had those Matisse Cutout posters from freshman year? Well, the good old days are back, my art advertising-loving friend. BetterWall will sell you an actual, cleaned up, polyvinyl street banner from your favorite museum...
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Posted by greg at
1:03 AM
June 15, 2005
One of my top picks of 2004 for film/video art, Sleepwalkers, by the British collective Inventory, will be included in the first ever US installation of their work at White Columns. It opens Friday 17 June and runs through 23...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
Finally hearing more reports and reviews of Venice. So Francesco Vezzoli's trailer for an imaginary remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula is the favorite of Artforum-istes and the Guardian alike? How amazingly uncritical of these critics to not notice that a...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 AM
June 10, 2005
Why, copyright, for one thing. And a quaint, lingering fixation on outmoded technology for another. Kim's St Mark's location got busted by the NYPD, the Feds--"everybody was here," says one nonbusted employee--the other day, who confiscated all the computers and...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 AM
June 9, 2005
Good Morning, Cicely! Whether that's Cicely Brown or Cicely, Alaska, only time will tell. WPS1 is broadcasting live from a party barge near the Arsenale, site of the Venice Biennale. The web audio programs will should be up within a...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 AM
June 7, 2005
Recent record flooding in Utah has raised the water level (elevation, that is) of the Great Salt Lake to a five-year record high of 4,198 feet, enough to submerge the Spiral Jetty and scuttle any art world latecomer's summer pilgrimage...
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Posted by greg at
8:12 AM
June 4, 2005
Actually, when I saw Cy Twombly, he wasn't naked, and neither was I. I'd gone to Houston for work, right after graduating from college, and I had an extra day, so I set out to find this Rothko Chapel I'd...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 AM
May 19, 2005
The late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres is well-known for appropriating minimalism--the Establishment for his generation--and for imbuing that movement's self-consciously impersonalized, content-free, manufactured forms with deeply resonant emotional, biographical, and political metaphor. So it is again with the next...
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Posted by greg at
11:29 AM
May 5, 2005
Right after their installation, End Station, opened at the Bohen Foundation (415 West 13th Street, Tu-Sa 12-5), I did a back and forth email interview with Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset for the NY Times. The paper ended up...
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Posted by greg at
7:22 AM
May 4, 2005
the 2+ month gap between posts on banker/nude male swimer Dana Vachon's blog/: $650,000 Vachon's last post, an interview with Christo & Jeanne-Claude: priceless....
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Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
After a couple of months of interviews and trying to wrap my head around the question of why there were no expensive women artists, I read Linda Nochlin's seminal 1972 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" It...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
April 30, 2005
I wrote an article for the NY Times Arts & Leisure section about the reasons art made by women sells for lower prices than art made by men. Its a tricky subject, partly because art is subjective and inherently difficult...
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Posted by greg at
8:03 AM
April 28, 2005
Who's the must-have light installation artist in Los Angeles these days? If you answered, "James Turrell," pack up your Uggs and get out. In Pasadena this week, Olafur Eliasson debuted a modernist hill houseful of installations and interventions, organized by...
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Posted by greg at
11:07 AM
April 22, 2005
The soft, supple opening to Charlie Finch's latest column on Artnet:We first met Laurel Nakadate in 2001, right after she received her MFA from Yale. While in New Haven, Laurel lived in a single-room occupancy apartment house full of lonely,...
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Posted by greg at
4:11 AM
April 14, 2005
There's a lot of goodlooking work that's been donated to White Columns' 2005 benefit auction: nice pieces by Verne Dawson, Peter Doig, Rachel Harrison, a pointless-but-nice T-shirt by Payne/Relph, a wheel-thrown ceramic pushpin by Mungo Thompson. Silent and online bidding...
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Posted by greg at
5:02 AM
April 12, 2005
For an exhibition in Dublin, Dutch artist Aleksandra Mir interviews Jim Fitzpatrick, the Irish artist who created the stencil-like poster of Che Guevara. It's a fascinating story of copyright, revolution, and appropriation, told by someone who's been largely invisible, even...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
April 7, 2005
Popular Photography gives Migrant Mom a Photoshop makeover for April 1. [via waxy, see before/after images]...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 AM
+ * 3 || [headline via the comments on Grammar Police]...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 AM
April 6, 2005
It's been a pretty crappy day, already, so don't make me decide which writing is more annoying, self-reflexive, and wilfully misinformed and misrepresentative about its subject: Lee Siegel's free-associational riffs in Slate about Cy Twombly's "doodling," which, after all these...
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Posted by greg at
6:07 AM
April 3, 2005
I received one of these bags as a thank you gift for one of the panel discussions I did in February at Art Rotterdam. [Inside were a couple of great catalogues and a fine bottle of spirits which I shared...
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Posted by greg at
9:21 AM
March 18, 2005
From my friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset comes a show, er, a work that could be titled, Untitled (Hah, made you look!). Right before they left town--and after the opening of their installation at the Bohen Foundation--the artists...
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Posted by greg at
2:23 AM
March 16, 2005
"And with art, there are always boobs, liberated by liquor, out where they shouldn't be, pointing around at paintings they don't understand and could never afford." -The NY Observer's Rebecca Dana reporting from the opening of art dealer Jack Tilton's...
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Posted by greg at
8:39 AM
March 15, 2005
From the Times: But, at first, the thought of painting in this Photo Realist manner intimidated him. When he began in earnest about three and a half years ago, he realized why. "I started out airbrushing," he said. "But the...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 AM
March 8, 2005
AND at The National Gallery? I'd love to hear how it's installed in Ando's (probably) more sympathetic building. Huh. They call The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth "The Modern"....
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Posted by greg at
11:39 AM
March 4, 2005
The other night Thomas Demand offhandedly described some of the insane details of the production of Clearing, the massive photograph of a forest which is now built into The Modern at MoMA. The photograph was laminated onto two sheets of...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 AM
February 21, 2005
Tangentially related to both preparations for my upcoming talks on the art market in Rotterdam and to The Gates being rather showily not for sale, I've been thinking about art you can't buy or sell. e-flux's Do It! exhibition is...
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Posted by greg at
10:56 AM
Shameless plug first: I'm speaking and participating in two panel discussions at Art Rotterdam this week. Thursday at 2000 hours [when is that? someone please tell me.] I'm talking about the effects on art and artists of the art market's...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 AM
February 20, 2005
I just made myself a little batch of "apprentice of nothing" t-shirts, which should be here in about 10 days. I'm taking a couple, and the rest are available--first come, first served--for $20, domestic shipping included. [mon. night update: they're...
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Posted by greg at
12:49 PM
To: greg.org From: someone using the name of a recognizable artist of Christo's generation Date: 2/20/05, 22:06 Subject: the blog of greg allen!Allen, the fastidious analysis of Christo's project you make, the stupid remarks and investigations over his car, his...
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Posted by greg at
7:02 AM
February 17, 2005
Just to clarify a couple of points: the Christos' $350,000 Maybach is not part of the $20 million; in fact, it's not even theirs. It's being made available to them by their friend--in the Maybach marketing department. Maybach's Leon Hustinx,...
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Posted by greg at
11:35 AM
February 13, 2005
No doubt after a euphoric and joyous walk through the park yesterday morning, and a group hug with the world, Daily Show writer Rob Kutner got back to work--making Gates jokes. My favorite is above: "Shut UP Jen. I'm...
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Posted by greg at
11:55 AM
Don't get me wrong; I'm just as giddy as the next schoolgirl [sic] about The Gates, I just can't see how they cost $20 million. That's what the Christos say they cost, and it's a figure which is dutifully...
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Posted by greg at
4:41 AM
February 11, 2005
First, I'd like to welcome and give a passionate cry to new greg.org advertiser Kinsey, an American Experience documentary airing Monday, February 14th on PBS. Psst, even though Kinsey's work is half a century old, don't tell the Secretary of...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
I can't quite say why, but I had a pretty intense Jon Jost phase when I first moved to New York. I saw his All The Vermeers In New York several times, lured in by the title, but kept there...
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Posted by greg at
3:22 AM
February 8, 2005
Artforum's gossip columnist Rhonda Lieberman wasn't on the list for artfully poseurish artworld duo [Yvonne Force-Villareal and Sandra Hamburg] Mother, Inc.'s recent Fendi-sponsored CD listening party, so she traded a blowjob for entry. At least that's how it reads. A...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
February 7, 2005
When I saw Amazon's A9 Local yellow pages feature, the first thing I thought of was Ed Ruscha's 1966 artist book, Every Building on The Sunset Strip. It was the first Ruscha book I bought, and it makes me laugh...
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Posted by greg at
4:23 AM
February 5, 2005
No one rips off quicker than window dressers. They take next week's ideas from last week's paper, or they stop by the magazine stand on the way to Home Depot. One Monday morning, I passed by Bergdorf's on my way...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 AM
February 4, 2005
The exhibition that Choire Sicha curated which inexplicably included me, Regarding Clementine, is closing this evening. There's a swanky beer bust [sic] from 6-8, a closing party, to which the less stalker-ish among you are definitely invited. Clementine Gallery 526...
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Posted by greg at
5:12 AM
February 1, 2005
Assuming they don't close down all discussions of art, film, and culture before I get there, I'll be in Rotterdam, participating in a couple of panel discussions around the upcoming Art Rotterdam fair. In one debate on Feb. 25, Saskia...
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Posted by greg at
9:27 AM
January 28, 2005
Things perked up when Sehgal explained how he actually sells his work in the absence of documentary photographs or certificates of authenticationa weird tale of oral contracts memorized by lawyers and of the artist teaching the buyer how to perform...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 AM
January 21, 2005
I'm gonna be working at the Clementine Gallery as part of Choire's show again today. If you're in Chelsea, stop by and say hi. Clementine Gallery, 526 W 26th st, Suite 211 Previously: Regarding greg.org at Regarding Clementine...
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Posted by greg at
11:47 AM
January 19, 2005
Another cover from Life"the lunar surface photographed by the Apollo astronauts in 1969" yields a comparison to Smithson's cover for Artforum published just a month later: a distribution of mirrors across a square of parched earth, one of a number...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 AM
January 18, 2005
Although Gustav Eiffel didn't explicitly use one himself, an American engineering professor has come up with a mathematical expression for the shape of the Eiffel Tower, based on its creator's own studies of wind resistance, torquing, and load transfer....
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Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
January 16, 2005
I just read this Friday night on the train. Seemed apt:Brenda Richardson, deputy director of the Baltimore Museum, installed the exhibition there. We had agreed that she would install alone so when I walked into the rooms filled with work...
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Posted by greg at
6:55 AM
January 14, 2005
The Smithsonian, specifically the National Museum of The American Indian, accepted a gold record for "Y.M.C.A" from the Indian guy in the Village People. For all the disco celebration in the rotunda during the handover ceremony, it pales in comparison...
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Posted by greg at
10:20 AM
January 8, 2005
Jonathan Jones gives a brilliantly outraged review of a show of 'Italian Aeropaintings,' a Futurist subgenre which flourished in the 1930's. The curators at the Estorick Collection say this work demonstrates "a passion for the new perspectives and vertiginous excitements...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
January 1, 2005
Stephen Flavin is the only child of Dan Flavin and his first wife, Sonja Severdija. Trained as a filmmaker, Stephen, who lived apart from his father since his parents divorce, began assisting his father's company, Dan Flavin, Ltd, in 1992....
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Posted by greg at
11:02 AM
Although they happened too late to make the article, I had some enlightening conversations with Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a collector and curator of Flavin's work, and with the artist's son, Stephen Flavin, who manages his father's estate. They're worth sharing...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
December 29, 2004
I would put Origins Clear Improvement Active Charcoal mask to clear pores as my number one. I was introduced to this miracle product many years ago, when I got a tube in a gift bag after an art benefit (Origins...
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Posted by greg at
10:18 AM
December 28, 2004
Richard Polsky does a round-up of the 2004 art market on Artnet and makes some predictions for 2005, and guess what? Of the dozens of artists he looks at, only four--Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (??) and Ross Bleckner--are...
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Posted by greg at
9:05 AM
December 25, 2004
James Meyer: You turned eighty last year. Has age, in some way, affected your work? Anne Truitt: I don't think age makes any difference except that it endows a person with freedom. Age cuts you off, untethers you. It's a...
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Posted by greg at
10:50 AM
December 23, 2004
It took us a few months to realize it, but one summer evening, the street we were walking along grew increasingly familiar. We'd driven on this street, I told my wife, this is where we parked to go meet Anne...
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Posted by greg at
1:43 AM
I first compiled this list for the NY Times, who, after clearing up (mis)communication from some over-eager assistants, didn't ask for it after all. I am publishing it here, as is. The works in the order I wrote them, nothing...
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Posted by greg at
1:18 AM
December 19, 2004
From Steven Kaplan's accounts of Art Basel Miami Beach, a report from the Rosa de la Cruz party:Before discussing the highlights of the collection, I need to address some unseemly carping that emanated from other coverage of the evening. Regarding...
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Posted by greg at
9:02 AM
December 18, 2004
6. Living a Beautiful Life, Corinna Schnitt, United States/Germany (2003, 13 minutes). A beautiful couple in a Beverly Hills mansion describe what appears to be their perfect life; their dialogue actually comes from Ms. Schnitt's interviews with 14-year-olds in...
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Posted by greg at
9:38 AM
December 16, 2004
Untitled, 1962 exhibited in "Agnes Martin: Five Decades," April 2003 at Zwirner and Wirth, New York. Related: "Agnes Martin: Five Decades," Zwirner and Wirth On the artist in Taos: Lillian Ross meets with Agnes Martin Art worth crossing the...
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Posted by greg at
4:15 AM
December 15, 2004
Great art's demands are more important than the wishes of the mere collector who bought it. The fabric of our culture has been rent in twain, and no one will donate to a museum ever again. I've heard it all...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 AM
My secret indulgence the last couple of weeks--and the reason I didn't care that I missed Art Basel Miami Beach this year--is Artforum's new Diary feature. It's like an art world reality TV show, where the magazine's editors and contributors...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 AM
December 2, 2004
Ceci n'est pas un McCarthy, mme s'il coute $6mmA performance artist has been arrested in Germany after trying to spray blood on a sculpture of Michael Jackson. Istvan Kantor tried to squeeze a capsule of blood onto Paul McCarthy's Michael...
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Posted by greg at
12:43 PM
December 1, 2004
"But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do YOU think of me?" I hate it that I have a line from Beaches burned into my brain, but once in a while, it comes in handy. I know what...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 AM
November 21, 2004
Pamela Lee: After Obsolescence The art historian talks about time and the work of On Kawara, Wolfgang Staehle, and Bill Morrison (Decasia) Todd Haynes in conversation with Richard Dyer Olafur Eliasson, around the time of his The Weather Project...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 AM
November 20, 2004
When we went to DIA Beacon last fall, we gave the Gerhard Richter gallery a cursory glance on the way in, and then were transfixed by it on the way out. It's the kind of thing you have to be...
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Posted by greg at
7:37 AM
November 19, 2004
I heard there was art at MoMA. Here are some highlights: City Square, Alberto Giacometti's tabletop sculpture of personages on non-intersecting trajectories used to be embedded in the wall at the entrance of the post-war galleries. Now it's installed in...
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Posted by greg at
12:50 PM
November 18, 2004
Needless to say, he's in a bad mood. Related, I'm guessing, from Christopher Knight in the LAT: "It will also drive some people nuts, which is another reason to applaud. At a preview, one notoriously fusty critic was heard to...
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Posted by greg at
7:03 AM
November 17, 2004
While a few "right on"s and "elitist"s trickled in over the weekend, and my favorite--"MoMA is a corporation, the new building is a corporate HQ. You are a foot soldier"--just arrived yesterday morning, the quality of the responses to my...
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Posted by greg at
4:21 AM
Was it Documenta where I was taken in by Raghubir Singh's quietly masterful color photographs of India, which bring an artist's eye to documentary photos. Gabriel Orozco meets Cartier-Bresson. There was a great show at the Smithsonian last year, and...
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Posted by greg at
3:00 AM
November 14, 2004
The artist Olafur Eliasson will be speaking at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC about his work, including last year's The Weather Project at the Tate in London. Olafur Eliasson, The Demetrion Lecture: Wednesday, Nov. 17 at 7pm. [Hirshhorn.si.edu]...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 AM
November 11, 2004
Thanks for the response so far. I should say that while I think Kurt Andersen's idea for the federal government to pay for all the country's museum entry fees is a good one, I see two problems with it: 1)...
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Posted by greg at
9:38 AM
November 10, 2004
[Update: I would point out this is my own opinion; I do volunteer work for MoMA, but I don't speak for the Museum or any of its officers. I wrote this in direct reaction to FreeMoMA.org, which makes a...
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Posted by greg at
4:11 AM
November 9, 2004
Why else would you exhibit the same work in two different places? The Museum of Modern Art has this stack, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in two galleries--the Prints Galleries and the Contemporary Gallery. I'm trying to think of any other...
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Posted by greg at
9:02 AM
November 8, 2004
This is better than pirates. Modernartnotes reports that the Whitney is preparing to realize Robert Smithson's work, Floating Island, a landscaped barge which will be tugged around New York Harbor. I've been waiting for this since Spring 1997, when...
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Posted by greg at
10:00 AM
November 4, 2004
After the stunning success of Team America World Police [Hey, turns out they got the US political climate right after all...], puppet projects are breaking out all over. At Harvard's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the artist Pierre Huyghe is...
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Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
October 30, 2004
Just a quick and heartfelt thanks to the wide-ranging advertisers on greg.org. Be sure to show them that yes, in fact, money can buy them love, or a reasonable facsimile: Fleshbot Films' debut DVD, Necromania, "directed" by "director" Ed Wood...
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Posted by greg at
2:58 AM
October 11, 2004
Viva La Revolution! The Guardian's loyal apparatchik, Amelie Gentleman demands that contemporary art collector, museum-builder, Frenchman, and "rapacious capitalist" Francois Pinault confess his artistic crimes. Crimes number one, two, and three: pouring hundreds of millions of his own euros into...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
October 7, 2004
You have 9 days and counting to see David Zwirner's show of 40 years of On Kawara's date paintings. Kawara began painting these works on January 6, 1966, and he has developed a particular set of rules for their creation:...
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Posted by greg at
12:02 PM
October 6, 2004
And it is good. Just got back from the newly opened Dan Flavin retrospective at the National Gallery this morning, and it's pretty wonderful. Some of the galleries are oddly cramped--anyone realize how unfriendly I.M. Pei's actual galleries are to...
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Posted by greg at
4:02 AM
September 30, 2004
In the last two days, I've heard two curators from MoMA talk extensively about what the new building and the reinstallation of the art in it will be like. To use the phrase of the evening, I've gotten mixed signals....
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
September 14, 2004
Arist Monica Bonvicini will participate in a panel discussion at Art Forum Berlin, the giant art fair, next week. Her co-panelists: gallerist Joe Amrhein, and collectors Harald Falckenberg and Mera & Don Rubell. The moderator is Marc Spiegler, an srt...
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Posted by greg at
7:58 AM
September 4, 2004
"We are starting to go buggy, just getting on one another's nerves," Mrs Mildred Mauney, 81, told The New York Times, after spending the night with some strangers in a classroom-turned-shelter in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Whatever, Millie. Join the...
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Posted by greg at
2:27 AM
September 1, 2004
So how did there come to be street signs for the Spiral Jetty? For years, the only way to see Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was from the air, or in a photograph, or in the artist's own making-of film, which...
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Posted by greg at
12:44 PM
Whoa. Choire Sicha has gone all Kit Carruthers on Artforum's monthly Top Ten list; it's truly a site to behold. Usually, even the brainiest people have a hard time coming up with ten relevant things to say, and they pack...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
August 30, 2004
On the 10-year anniversary of the re-emergence of Spiral Jetty and my first visit, and in keeping with our family tradition of visiting the Jetty whenever we attend a wedding in Salt Lake City, we popped on over Saturday...
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Posted by greg at
10:04 AM
While we were in Japan, we made a detour to see the growing collection of contemporary art on Naoshima, a tiny island near Okayama, and within spitting distance of the massive Seto Inland Sea Bridge. In explaining Naoshima, I've taken...
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Posted by greg at
1:06 AM
August 18, 2004
Todd Gibson's posting an extensive first-hand account of his recent visit to the Spiral Jetty, which, because of an ongoing drought, is now completely out of the water. That's fast. Some friends went in early July, and it still had...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
August 17, 2004
WP art critic Blake Gopnik is wants calling for DC's bigwig art collectors--capitalists all, who else can afford a Richter?--to go communist, and open a collective to share their hoard with the contemporary art-starved DC public. It'll never happen, but...
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Posted by greg at
12:44 PM
August 16, 2004
Unsurprisingly, next to this store, which I dubbed, "Jen," was a food court where you could buy a sweetened crepe with bananas, gelato, custard, whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and powdered sugar. This ramshackle building was next to our Circle...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 AM
July 18, 2004
Ok, they're definitely getting the hang of it. This week, WPS1 broadcast an archival MoMA artist panel that was, in retrospect, formative to me, one of the art events that really resonates with me: In 1994, Kirk Varnedoe hosted Richard...
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Posted by greg at
9:10 AM
July 13, 2004
In the late 1990's the artist Donald Moffett began making extraordinary paintings that seemed like a departure from the politically charged work that first garnered attention--and controversy--in protests against the Reagan/Bush-era AIDS debacle. Seductively minimal paintings where it seemed the...
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Posted by greg at
8:54 AM
July 7, 2004
[via MAN] What's shocking about Richard Serra's poster for pleasevote.com--a thick paintstick silhouette of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner--isn't his use of text or figurative representation, both completely absent from the rest of his work (with possibly one 1960's...
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Posted by greg at
6:16 AM
July 4, 2004
When the chief art critic for your town's largest paper publishes a front page review of the cafeteria's "gelato collection", do you: A) Realize now's a good time to rethink the curatorial program of the museum? B) Wish he'd reviewed...
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Posted by greg at
9:46 AM
June 30, 2004
Mail fraud charges--for improperly ordering high school science-level lab samples--were announced yesterday against Prof. Steve Kurtz, a member of Critical Art Ensemble and a colleague. Despite absence of ball, game, playbook, rules, Feds decide to keep kicking....
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Posted by greg at
3:14 AM
June 29, 2004
Critics who don't buy this also don't buy this [via bloggy] I guess if the Observer isn't going to have art critics whose recommendations ever make sense, at least they can have critics whose pans are consistent signals of worthwhile...
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Posted by greg at
1:15 AM
June 26, 2004
So now my big complaint about WPS1 is that you can't link to broadcasts very easily. I've been listening to a series of lectures the art historian Leo Steinberg gave at MoMA in 1960 about contemporary art and the public's...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 PM
It's like WPS1, but it's almost two years old. The Walker Art Center operates The Walker Channel, an online collection of streamable artist interviews and other programming. This is one prong of the museum's strategy to maintain and expand their...
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Posted by greg at
12:43 PM
June 25, 2004
So you better treat her right. Approximately a hundred friends at Downtown for Democracy are organizing a fundraising party and silent auction of works by 35 established and emerging artists Tuesday, June 29, at Passerby. Buy a $75 ticket to...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 AM
June 24, 2004
In anticipation of the reopening of the midtown museum building, MoMA's design department created a new website--including a weblog--for the Junior Associates, a group of 400 or so people who do all kinds of art world-related activities. As far...
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Posted by greg at
8:26 AM
June 22, 2004
In the Old Testament, prophets regularly warned God's People against bowing down to the graven images of Baal that so entranced their Phoenician and Babylonian neighbors. Ble worship is again white-hot, or so reports Le Monde from the just-ended Ble...
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Posted by greg at
6:14 AM
June 16, 2004
If you're in London this Father's Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49') of film and video works which "examine architecture's complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states." It will be shown...
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Posted by greg at
8:25 AM
June 15, 2004
Gabriel Orozco usually installs his photos interspersed with other works--drawings, collages, and sculpture. The Hirshhorn show which opened last week is the first time they've been shown alone. The show felt instantly familiar, and not because I've been a follower,...
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Posted by greg at
1:45 AM
June 11, 2004
Rob Storr interviewed Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1995. Felix identified Helen Frankenthaler as the most successful political artist alive, and then told about the invitation he received in 1989 to participate in the State Department's Art for Embassies Program:It has this...
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Posted by greg at
11:02 AM
Wow. There's opaque and then there's opaque. The Drawing Center was selected to join The Freedom Center in one of two cultural buildings planned for the WTC Site. Their building will adjoin the WTC Memorial, while the other two cultural...
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Posted by greg at
8:22 AM
June 10, 2004
In 1999, I conceived and contrived to make a piece of art. It began as an idea for a commission for the artist Olafur Eliasson, but my idea was so embarassingly specific and complete, there's no way I could bring...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
June 7, 2004
It's only half over, but I feel it's safe to declare 2004 l'Anne du Court Mtrage Soutenu, The Year of The Sponsored Short. Nike got some, Interpol's buyin' some, and now, if you're a socialite, an I-banker, or just a...
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Posted by greg at
2:00 AM
June 6, 2004
I just found and reread this post from a couple of years ago, and I still like it very much, unfortunately. How Conceptual Art is Like a Renaissance Tapestry...
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Posted by greg at
11:14 AM
June 5, 2004
WPS1.org, the online audio program of PS1, has been up for a few weeks now, and it's getting better. Some listening tips: An exclusive preview of "Nurse," the latest CD from Sonic Youth, broadcast on The Larry Rivers Memorial Music...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 AM
June 3, 2004
I went to Houston last week for the opening of an amazing show at the Menil Collection, photographs by Olafur Eliasson. Of course, my post about it is now like a 10,000-word essay, which I don't know if even...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 AM
May 26, 2004
Ouch. a 10,000sf warehouse of Momart, the leading art handler/storage company in the UK, burned to the ground yesterday, taking an as-yet unknown number of major Brit Art works with it. The Guardian has some speculative details on what burned,...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 AM
May 15, 2004
Umm... I was excited for the launch of WPS1: Art Radio, the new online audio programming wing of PS1. Launched three weeks ago, WPS1 is daily mp3 streamed programming in three broad categories: awesome, edge music from all over; rare...
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Posted by greg at
1:04 AM
May 13, 2004
$? $$$$,$$$ !!!!!!...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 AM
May 6, 2004
In the Times, Roberta Smith combines a righteous review of Jon Routson's "Bootleg" series--video recordings of films Routson attends--with righteous indignation against increasingly draconian copyright legislation (like making possession of a camcorder in a theater a felony). It does...
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Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
Not to get all Elvis Mitchell on yer ass or anything, but if auction reports were white cotton handkerchiefs, dry, practical, and folded neatly, dutifully, and boringly into the breast pocket of some print media outlet or another, Stuart Waltzer's...
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Posted by greg at
7:04 AM
April 30, 2004
In helpful, 2x2 grid format: Go to the Jim Lambie show at Anton Kern, which ends Saturday. Nice pants. (Roberta Smith agrees.) Go to Momenta Art benefit auction at White Columns Saturday night. Go to the deKooning show at Gagosian....
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Posted by greg at
1:58 AM
April 28, 2004
Inspired by Tyler@Modern Art Notes's to-bid-on list for the upcoming contemporary art auctions. I don't think I'll be bidding against him on anything, especially now that he's lining his pockets with all that ArtsJournal loot. Too rich for my blood....
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Posted by greg at
2:30 AM
April 23, 2004
It's a fine hook to hang a puff piece for the Guggenheim's minimalism exhibit on: Tour the city with the curators and uncover the minimalism all around us. Should be ideal; so why would I rather take my chances on...
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Posted by greg at
7:11 AM
April 15, 2004
Police arrest 2 under new 'anti-camcording' law 15 Apr 2004 10:07am EDT - By Jesse Hiestand The MPAA announced Wednesdaythe first arrests under a new California law targeting movie pirates who use camcorders in theaters. Min Jae Joun was arrested...
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Posted by greg at
3:04 AM
April 11, 2004
WTF? Herbert Muschamp in today's NYT Magazine: "[Miuccia Prada] has made the world safe for people with overdeveloped inner lives. [I guess, by selling bagsful of $480 polo shirts to armies of style-free mooks and molls from Manhasset. [And by...
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Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
April 3, 2004
Sculptor Anish Kapoor's design for a memorial to the 67 Britons killed on September 11 was selected for inclusion in the British Memorial Garden, which will be created at Hanover Square in lower Manhattan. Unlike the much-publicized [mea culpa], frenzied...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 AM
March 31, 2004
Ever the arts enthusiast in search of a common man constituency, Tyler Green wrote an op-ed for the WSJ that gamely proposes to take the Whitney Biennial on the road, to the people--in the "hinterlands." And what could be wrong...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 AM
She slept through the almost the whole thing*. Until we walked into the Cecily Brown gallery, when she started screaming at the top of her lungs. On this advice, we cut our visit short, leaving via the elevator so as...
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Posted by greg at
1:23 AM
March 26, 2004
">The artist Joy Garnett just had a show called "Riot" at Debs & Co, lushly painted figures in caught in moments of distress or violence. Then she got threatened with a lawsuit by a Magnum photographer for referencing a 1978...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 AM
March 18, 2004
This is the last weekend to see Olafur Eliasson's installation, The Weather Project in the Tate's turbine hall. The museum's keeping the hall open until 1AM on Friday and Saturday, apparently because they're unsatisfied with only 2 million visitors....
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Posted by greg at
11:10 AM
March 11, 2004
Tyler has compiled a convenient checkist for making a complete and utter ass of yourself at The Armory Show this weekend. For [my] entertainment's sake, please follow every piece of advice....
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
March 4, 2004
Editor Tim Griffin introduces In Conversation, a new feature in this month's Artforum, artists talking to artists. To start: Jeremy Blake and John Baldessari, two artists with deep interest in the intersections between painting and ______(cinema, photography, technology, text,...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 AM
February 15, 2004
One of the most rewarding shows last year in New York was The Quilts of Gee's Bend at the Whitney. For generations, the descendants of former slaves in an isolated Alabama town developed quilt designs that stand alongside--and frequently...
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Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
February 10, 2004
Since moving Modern Art Notes to Arts Journal, Tyler Green's been demonstrating his critic-as-advocate chops, sometimes with a degree of acid that'd make even professional bee-atch Charlie Finch blush. He makes nice nice this week, though, by publishing brief excerpts...
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Posted by greg at
6:15 AM
January 21, 2004
For an artist who's only shown a couple of times and whose most well-known work --a 22-minute, reconceived-for-network-TV version of Cremaster 4--has only been seen by a handful of people, Jon Routson sure gets a lot of press. Baltimore City...
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Posted by greg at
4:31 AM
January 13, 2004
Well, not yet. But after years of drought, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is so visible (and walkable), it's getting so many visitors, the Dia Center is thinking: upgrades. Making the bone-jarring road more accessible; maybe adding some rocks here and...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
December 12, 2003
If you're still looking for just the right gift for your Jewish (you better hustle) or Christian friend (you have a little more time), try an artist book from Printed Matter. Here are my, ahem, suggestions: David Hammons, The Holy...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
December 11, 2003
Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler's on a roll, posting frequently and furiously about the current court proceedings to decide the fate of The Barnes Collection, the greatest assemblage of modern art in the country. Tyler does his gadfly best,...
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Posted by greg at
12:23 PM
December 6, 2003
The S is for Self, as in Self-Important. And I wasn't alone. Far from it. The most unnecessary question of the day was the endearing, "Do you know who I am?" It wasn't unnecessary because the Swiss minions running the...
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Posted by greg at
2:50 AM
November 24, 2003
You should feel horrible for missing Gabriel Orozco's latest show at Marian Goodman. His elegant, biomorphic sculptural shapes are recognizable at first as found objects: bones, husks, driftwood. In the rear gallery, though, less finished "sketches" of polyurethane foam...
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Posted by greg at
8:24 AM
November 20, 2003
If not their effectiveness. One more picture of Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project at the Tate in London....
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Posted by greg at
10:49 AM
November 13, 2003
I wonder if it's this amusing from the outside when New York acts as if its concerns are the most important in the whole wide world. The British art crowd's all worked up over a speech by Nicholas Serota, director...
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Posted by greg at
9:05 AM
November 9, 2003
As you'll never see it again... As B.Logman's photos and news reports indicate, The Tate Modern has a massive-crowd-pleasing phenomenon on their hands. Now suddenly this photo I took at the preview seems worth posting, if only because who...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
October 29, 2003
Hall of Thirty-Three Bays, 1995, Hiroshi Sugimoto Hiroshi Sugimoto: I came for the Seascapes, I stayed for the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. I love this series of nearly identical photos of the Sanjusangendo, a Kyoto shrine. They're generally underappreciated,...
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Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
October 25, 2003
Them's fightin' words. In his Cinema Militans Lecture, Greenaway thought he'd rile up his audience at the Netherlands Film Festival with his opening, "Cinema died on the 31st September 1983." (Killed by Mr. Remote Control, in the den, if you...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 AM
October 21, 2003
The Weather Project, 2003, Olafur Eliasson, at the Tate Modern The top one's shot in the mirrored ceiling. I'm working on it, but right now, I got nothing that'll top this....
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Posted by greg at
10:06 AM
October 17, 2003
the british public treats it as the real sun, laying out on their backs as if at the beach. [10/21 update: like I said...]...
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Posted by greg at
2:34 AM
October 15, 2003
Just got back from the preview and party for The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson's absolutely breathtaking installation at the Tate Modern in London. The Turbine Hall is something like 500 feet long, the full length and height of the...
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Posted by greg at
7:25 AM
October 12, 2003
The artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey and their team of 15 people plastered the walls of a church in South London with clay and grass seed. Read their diary at the Guardian and watch it grow to Graeme...
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Posted by greg at
7:34 AM
September 28, 2003
Last week, I stopped by a party to celebrate the first issue of Artforum under its new editor, Tim Griffin, who I've known and admired for years, ever since he was edited the late Artbyte with ICA Philadelphia's Bennett...
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Posted by greg at
5:42 AM
September 10, 2003
[via Modern Art Notes] Nice, too brief info about Gabriel Orozco on the site for PBS' Art:21 series. Tyler said the program segment was "a little too languid," which sounds just about perfect for Orozco's work. The New Yorker...
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Posted by greg at
4:43 AM
August 16, 2003
Slide from David Byrne's DVD/Book of PowerPoint Art Veronique Vienne's got a sweet article in the Times about David Byrne's artistic exploration of PowerPoint. She casts a rather benign look at the way PowerPoint influences forms of discourse and...
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Posted by greg at
12:15 PM
[via ArtForum] An interesting article in the Financial Times on the conservation challenges posed by ephemeral art, especially color photography and video. C-Prints, by far the most popular format for contemporary art photography, have a very uncertain future. Video and...
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Posted by greg at
7:02 AM
August 14, 2003
. Christian Marclay's awesome Video Quartet is on view now at LA's Hammer Museum, as part of a mid-career retrospective of Marclay's art-meets-music work. [In the LA Times, Chris Knight reviews the show--and misses some major points--with nary a mention...
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Posted by greg at
9:01 AM
July 18, 2003
[via WoosterCollective] Banksy, a prominent London street artist, has moved his work into a gallery for the weekend, and some people are pissed (in the American, not British, English sense of the word). Banksy tagged some live barnyard animals, and...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 AM
July 11, 2003
When our DC neighbors' rather inconsiderately left their wireless networks turned off this morning, I ran over to the Hirshhorn to see their new, temporary installation of the permanent collection. It's pretty fresh, with room to breathe. A lot of...
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Posted by greg at
6:21 AM
July 8, 2003
Untitled #7, 1999, Agnes Martin image: zwirnerandwirth.com Lillian Ross makes nice as she hangs out with Agnes Martin, master of minimalistic painting, in Taos. It sounds simple, but don't bother trying this at home: "You paint vertically, but the...
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Posted by greg at
12:52 PM
July 5, 2003
First, thanks to most of you for not coming today. It was kind of nervewracking, but my gallery talk went okay. There was a group of a dozen or so people who stuck through the whole thing, but a...
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Posted by greg at
11:51 AM
July 4, 2003
If you're debating whether to join me at PS1 for my gallery tour among the selected exhibits, remember that many other things are going on at the same time: at PS1: Richie Hawtin cracking open the Warm Up Series at...
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Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
July 1, 2003
I'd say "Come to my museum tour this Saturday," but I just realized they booked my talk against Detroit Techno-god Richie Hawtin (aka Plakstikman), who's performing in the Warm Up Series. I have no illusions.On the occasion of the exhibition...
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Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
June 12, 2003
The Venice Biennale is opening right now, and the artworld (minus 1 or 2) is trying to crash each other's parties. Far from regretting not being there, I am getting a full Biennale experience, thanks to Frieze Magazine's, SMS reports....
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Posted by greg at
10:16 AM
June 7, 2003
Mmmm? In Art Papers, the artist Evan Levy tells the story of visiting The Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd's minimalist mecca in Marfa, Texas. He found "a flaw, a missing corner, in one of the concrete sculptures," which Judd placed...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 AM
May 24, 2003
The Cremaster Cycle is now playing in LA, Berkeley, SF, and Chicago. Wider exposure goes hand in hand with wider discussion, as these two very interesting links show: Wayne Bremser's article, "Matthew Barney versus Donkey Kong", for the video game...
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Posted by greg at
3:35 AM
May 17, 2003
Unless I missed the evite, the world didn't end Thursday. (And even if it did, Armageddon's no reason to stop weblogging.) The Pana Wavers above are using mirrors to deflect scalar waves, not just to create wonderful photos. There...
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Posted by greg at
3:32 AM
May 15, 2003
I probably shouldn't post this until I get mine, but the artist Maurizio Cattelan created this shirt in a limited edition of 48. It's for sale at Printed Matter, the cool-since-a-long-time-ago artists' bookstore in Chelsea. Update: Jeff Jarvis wondered,...
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Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
May 14, 2003
I'm busy with some offline writing (just wait and see), but in the mean time, I felt the gaijin's obligation to provide some context for the recent one-eyebrow-raising >> reach-for-the-doorlocks reports of that road-trippin' Japanese cult, Pana Wave Laboratory. Their...
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Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
April 28, 2003
See Landscape Escape a group show at the Crosby street SlingShotProject. Of special note: John Powers' headscratchingly beautiful sculpture, Daisy Cutter (above); Raphael Renaud's paintings of Marseilles, Cairo, Sao Paulo (which reminded me a bit of RIchter's late 60's...
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Posted by greg at
10:39 AM
April 24, 2003
If I just heard right, Matthew Barney will be interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC at 12pm. [1pm update: hmm.] The entire Cremaster Cycle is showing at Film Forum, starting Friday. Seeing it all will involve multiple tickets and rearranging...
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Posted by greg at
11:44 AM
April 21, 2003
I'm in the last minute throes of editing the AM screenplay before dropping it off for a serious reading. Here are some movie and artsite suggestions to occupy you. A little "Look over there!" handwaving, so you won't notice a...
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Posted by greg at
9:10 AM
April 15, 2003
In an article in the Village Voice, Kate Mattingly gives new details of a disturbing casualty in the US government's campaign for Homeland Security: the increasing difficulty and expense of securing visas for international artists and performers is keeping more...
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Posted by greg at
11:49 AM
March 30, 2003
Go right now, before it closes. You've got three minutes. Just after 8:00, there wasn't any line at all. Galleries were crowded at first. Seeing the drawings required surrendering your personal space in this strange, silent, dance, like having to...
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Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
March 22, 2003
Generally avoiding television "coverage" of the war, but some images inevitably bleed in. Here is some art that's been on my mind as a result. [Also, gmtPlus9 went black in Japan and posted some war-related art. Thanks, Travelers Diagram.] Blast,...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
March 14, 2003
OK, before I talk about how seeing The Cremaster Cycle straight through changed my understanding of Matthew Barney's work, let me get a couple of things out of the way: 1) FLW didn't design those theater chairs to be sat...
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Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
I'm watching the entire Cremaster Cycle today, a Friday feature of the Guggenheim show. In the mean time, Matthew Barney's site, Cremaster.net, is up and running. Check out the trailer; it's beautiful. And it doesn't take all day (unless you're...
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Posted by greg at
8:30 AM
March 11, 2003
A NYT article about Cockeyed's great barcode hack, written by David F. Gallagher (the Lightning Field one, not the shirtless one. "F." must stand for "fully clothed." David, you have my sympathies. At least you're going up against a real...
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Posted by greg at
12:41 PM
March 3, 2003
US Attorney/curator with posters of Rothko, Bacon, deKooning and either Twombly or Clemente, purchased by Sam Waksal with an 8.25% discount, at least. In the grand tradition of deposed CEO's, but with downtown sensibility (and far better taste), Sam...
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Posted by greg at
11:14 AM
March 1, 2003
Untitled (Republican Years), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1992 currently in "Stacked" at D'Amelio Terras If you are boycotting the French right now, you're a loser. They're putting on some of the best shows in town. Additions to an incomplete list: "Back...
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Posted by greg at
4:13 AM
February 28, 2003
Last night at a friend's house, Jeremy Blake showed us some recent work and talked about it. and by "house," I mean a sprawling, gorgeous Fifth Avenue apartment filled with pictures of supermodels (not kissing ones, but just hanging out...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 AM
February 21, 2003
This AP story [via the cool Scrubbles.net] from Indianapolis sounds like the tip of the iceberg: museum curators using ebay to add to their collections. My conversations about eBay with various curator friends all follow a predictable a trajectory:...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
As I arrived at Gawker's launch party last week, I ran into some friends from my old consulting days. (I guess it's Nick's job to know everybody, and he does.) Anyway, their shoutout just before the elevator door closed, "we...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
Yeah, I want a Cremaster belt buckle, but not if it means getting executed in a salt arena... image: guggenheim.org 'cuz it's gonna be all we talk and hear about for months (at least until Matrix Reloaded comes out)....
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Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
February 12, 2003
Alte Pinakothek, Selftportrait, Munich, 2000, Thomas Struth The other night, I heard the photographer Thomas Struth talk about his work. A friend (who has a far more serious art habit than even I do) hosted a reception for the...
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Posted by greg at
12:47 PM
January 24, 2003
Last night I heard the artist Christian Marclay talk about Video Quartet, his enchanting, mind-boggling music/film work at Paula Cooper Gallery. It's a 13-minute musical composition of nearly 600 separate film clips, on four simultaneous channels, projected onto a...
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Posted by greg at
10:17 AM
January 22, 2003
Installation view, Anne Truitt, Danese Gallery (image:artnet.com) Two shows of evocative new work by unrepentant minimalists are on 57th street at the moment, a moment when a pair of artists over 80 demonstrate the power and relevance of the...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 AM
Also at Slate Joshua Clover writes a clever essay (very or too, depending on if those are exhibition posters or actual paintings on your wall) about Richter 858, a luxuriantly produced ode-- in book form, with specially commissioned poems...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
January 6, 2003
Bright Glow Tube (all images, powerpointart.com) Slide 1 - Background: Powerpoint invention and evolution (ref. Ian Parker's May 28, 2001 New Yorker article) Powerpoint taking over human thought. 30 million presentations made daily. (ref. Julia Keller's Chicago Tribune article...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
January 3, 2003
Dollhouse, Interior views, Yinka Shonibare for the Norton Christmas Project 2002 In lieu of Christmas cards, the art collector Peter Norton and his family began sending out specially commissioned works. [Inspired by the Nortons' example, we began commissioning artist...
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Posted by greg at
6:44 AM
November 18, 2002
Superstar, 1987, Todd Haynes Last night we (finally) saw Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story last night. After years of being snubbed by the clerks at Kim's Video when I'd ask for it, and half-hearted attempts to get...
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Posted by greg at
11:52 AM
Serial Project #1, 1966, Sol Lewitt, from Aspen 5+6 Unbelieveable. The entire collection of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, is now online. It's the magazine equivalent of Kieslowski's Dekalog: almost completely unknown, yet highly respected and influential within...
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Posted by greg at
2:03 AM
October 24, 2002
Untitled (Two Windows), 2002, Toba Khedoori Drawing Now: 8 Propositions at MoMAQNS, for Toba Khedoori, Chris Ofili, Russell Crotty, Paul Noble, Kai Althoff [Roberta Smith's NYTimes review; Walter Robinson's artnet review] [There's a Toba Khedoori show at David Zwirner...
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1:21 AM
October 20, 2002
I'm watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture right now, and it's blowing me away. It's the first movie, the one with the original crew, the bald chick, and V'Ger, a cloud-like alien vessel with the Voyager space probe at...
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11:23 AM
October 18, 2002
Beppu, 1997, Liz Deschenes [image via artnet] I can't believe it's been five years since I saw photographer Liz Deschenes' first solo exhibition, Beppu, at Bronwyn Keenan Gallery. It's a show that has stuck with me ever since, and...
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5:26 AM
October 11, 2002
99 Cent, Andreas Gursky, 1999 Watching Paul Thomas Anderson and Adam Sandler discuss Punch-Drunk Love on Charlie Rose. The overly bright 99-cent store in the clip looked familiar, eerily familiar, and, sure enough, it is the same as Andreas...
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1:59 AM
October 2, 2002
Arnolfo di Cambio et al, Basilica di Santa Croce, 1294-1442 [img via] As the Artforum.com discussion of Nico Israel's Spiral Jetty travelogue turned from my smug fact-checking to the romanticisation of contemporary art, E.M. Forster's A Room With a...
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2:55 AM
September 22, 2002
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty.avi [1.3Mb], c. 2002 This will be the entry where I write about our trip to the Spiral Jetty and post some amusing pictures thereof. It will be enlightening and insightful, yet not without wry humor....
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12:47 PM
September 2, 2002
This witty, informative page [via Anil Dash] about the miracle of 40-foot shipping containers reminded me of this great piece by Darren Almond in September 2000 at Matthew Marks, a shipping container with a giant digital clock in its side,...
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2:57 AM
September 1, 2002
The Spiral Jetty is back. Although it was submerged when we checked in July, my college senior sister said it was visible from the hill above it when she took a first date out to see it a couple of...
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7:42 AM
August 7, 2002
A remarkably obtuse article in the NY Observer about an art world lawsuit in which the famous "'white' painter" "debunks" the prices and value of his (and, by extension, all contemporary) art. Who is the artist, you ask? Surely you've...
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9:50 AM
August 1, 2002
Let me offer unqualified praise for the editorial acuity of Artforum's links recommendations. Two quotes from Calvin Tomkins' good Richard Serra article in the New Yorker: According to Richard Serra: Abstraction gives you something different (from figuration). It puts the...
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12:14 PM
July 10, 2002
Contrary to one writer's opinion, Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican who can make pottery. After seeing Peter Schjeldahl's misguided critique of Orozco's work at Documenta 11 cited on ArtKrush to support an even broad(er)side on the state of contemporary art,...
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1:43 AM
June 23, 2002
At the Hirshhorn Museum yesterday (originally to see the Ernesto Neto installaion before it closed), I kind of fixated on the work of Anne Truitt, which is in the "Minimalism and its Legacy" installation on the lower floor. I wasn't...
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4:20 AM
June 21, 2002
Stopped off in Philadelphia for a couple of hours to see the big Barnett Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. One thing I hadn't known before was Newman's (and his other artist friends') battle with the relevance of painting in...
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2:07 AM
June 8, 2002
In The New Republic, Jed Perl wrote an impressive review of an even more impressive exhibition, "Tapestry in the Renaissance" at the Metropolitan Museum, which I saw last weekend. After a detailed, compelling, history-filled analysis, Perl surprisingly (and effectively)...
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2:06 AM
May 23, 2002
One of the reasons I'd delayed submitting to some festivals was (of all things) my lack of a "director's photo (B/W)," which some festivals require. Last week, Roe Ethridge, a friend and artist whose work I've collected for three-plus years,...
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1:06 AM
May 12, 2002
I was on a panel today at -scope, an art fair held here in NYC this weekend. Hoping to follow in the tradition of the Gramercy International Art Fair, which began in the mid 90's by filling the rooms of...
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10:14 AM
May 5, 2002
Ricci Albenda, an artist friend had a party to memorialize his installation at PS1, which will be taken down tomorrow (the installation, not PS1). I went early to see "The Short Century," Okwui Enwezor's extremely far-reaching show of contemporary African...
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12:34 PM
January 5, 2002
Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1 MoMA: It's rare when a work of art has the power to transform, transport so completely. Forty-part motet is such a work. 40 speakers are arranged in an ellipse in the gallery, each playing an...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 AM
