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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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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Posted by greg at
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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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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Posted by greg at
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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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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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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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...
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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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,"...
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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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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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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...
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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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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
8:17 PM
The ever-unfolding scandal of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board and the Warhol Foundation's apparently massively criminal machinations is just mind-boggling. Richard Dorment wrote in the New York Review of Book last fall about veteran London dealer Anthony d'Offay's run-in with...
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Posted by greg at
1:35 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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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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Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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 http://www.gotouring.com/razzledazzle/articles/dazzle.htmlDazzle 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 5, 2009
W. T. F.??? The National Mall is ringed with Smithsonian museums, none of which seem to have programmed a piece of public art or sculpture outside their own walls in at least a generation. Washington DC has no public art...
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Posted by greg at
10:40 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 own1969 slideshow lecture...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
