Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021
“Did you ever see them again?”
I watched Corinna Belz’s documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting today, thinking that the artist hard at work in his studio would clear my head, or at least distract me.
Then I was overwhelmed anew by an exchange with Belz as Richter is sorting through stacks of old photographs. As Richter held a snapshot of his middle-aged parents, Belz asked, “You left Dresden, East Germany, in 1961. Did you ever see them again?”
“No, never.” Richter replied. “I was a recognized refugee. A certified political refugee. And it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t get a permit…a travel permit for the East.
“Not until later, 1987, when I had an exhibition there. Then, with the ambassador, suddenly everything was possible.
“But by then they were all dead.”
“Did you realize in the 60s that you would never see them again?”
“No. Absolutely not. You think things will change and it won’t last. You don’t think people will grow old and die. When you leave them, they’re young.”
I knew this was here; I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and it inexorably changed the way I thought of Richter’s relationship to photographs, his subjects, and the arc of his entire project. A young artist becomes a refugee when his war-ravaged country splits apart, and he never sees his family again is not the Richter origin story we were used to. And Richter lost in sadness as his answers to the questions linger in his silence is not the icy master of critical detachment we’ve been taught.
But today, my ache over the career of this artist built on personal trauma that unfurled across the shifting fascist and imperial politics of the 20th century was overshadowed by my dread of the future. Because part of my processing today involved replaying with unwanted, fresh intensity the idea of leaving, of fleeing.
The questions of where? when? how? land differently than they did even yesterday. But at least I asked them. Am I ready to never see my parents again? wasn’t even a question I’d thought of. Neither, it turns out, did Richter.
Diese Genzken Tin Foil Hat
The anxiety I’m experiencing while imagining having to take care of the tin foil on this Isa Genzken sculpture is actually a welcome change from the anxiety I woke up with.
It seems odd that this is apparently not considered a Weltempfänger (World Receiver), even though it certainly looks Weltempfängerisch.
29 Nov 2024, Lot 714N, Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2016, EUR40-60,000 [grisebach]
Property Art
Reese Lewis writes for the Brooklyn Rail about Cameron Rowland’s commission and exhibition at Dia, including Plot, a one-acre section of Dia Beacon’s site on which Rowland and their company, Plot, Inc., have placed a burial ground easement, under the assumption that it contains the unmarked graves of formerly enslaved residents on the land.
Surrounded by Dia’s landed property, Plot feels like it is floating arbitrarily in space with no real constraints other than the conceptual desire to be sized at the singular unit of one acre. In all of the text, Rowland does not suggest that we go up digging burial grounds or claim this site to be a discovery. Rather, this site is ultimately a universal model that suggests if one parcel of land is capable of being an unmarked slave burial, any site in the US is capable of being one.
Rowland also produced Estate (2024), a publication detailing Dia’s own real estate holdings, which include the thousands of acres it acquired and placed restrictions on to protect the vistas of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. Any site in the US is capable of being subject to such easements, but Dia feels exceptional in its institutional position as a custodian of the real estate of art.
Cameron Rowland: Properties [brooklynrail.org]
Cameron Rowland Properties is at Dia:Beacon thru October 2025* [diaart.org]
Previously, related: One Acre and Dia Mule
*As if planning for such things a year from now is normal.
** “That things just go on is the ‘catastrophe’.” -Walter Benjamin
Felix Navidad Exhibition Copy
One unexpected thing from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the inclusion of a few examples of the artist’s correspondence, the notes and snapshots he regularly sent to friends and colleagues. They’re shown amidst all 55 of the artist’s photo puzzles, which underscores their similarity to the photos and letters Felix used. But only to an extent. By expanding the borders of the pool of imagery and text from which the artworks were drawn, they reveal nuances of the artist’s decisions.
And when it’s correspondence with curators and collaborators, they trace the network of relationships in which Gonzalez-Torres worked and lived. One example is two similar Christmas cards sent to Julie Ault and MoMA’s Anne Umland in 1992. Umland’s lightstring snapshot might be the OG Felix Navidad.
The text reads: “Dear Anne, To more years of living, loving, leaving for long train trips, fat cats, sweaters, breathing deeply salty air, new white shirts, unexpected flowers, new friends, streets full of lights, simple moments, views to remember, tough art objects, Paris, moving poems, writing, crying, learning, growing, shopping, hoping, waiting for love letters, heart beatings on one’s [?], little radios, and more, so much more, …in 1993 and beyond, Feliz Navidad, Felix”
One thing I can’t figure out, though: according to the checklist, this is an exhibition copy, on loan from MoMA. Did the museum decide not to loan a piece of correspondence from their archive? Or did Umland keep the personal card, but give the museum a facsimile? What goes into producing a double-sided photo & handwritten text? Because I feel some new facsimile objects coming on.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres @ MLK
It’s also installed at the National Portrait Gallery, but after seeing the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation’s instagram, I realized I had missed this 1991 stack, “Untitled” (Party Platform 1980-1992), at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. So I went back to see it, and the place was full of people voting.
Oddly, it does not get out much.
Previously: Felix Gonzalez-Torres @ NPG
All The Erased de Kooning Drawings
The first wall at Glenstone that used to have Hilma af Klint drawings has been rotated. Now there is a whole row of stunning Willem de Kooning drawings of women, each, I thought the other day, more tantalizingly erasable than the next.
While contemplating this embarrassment of targets and what Duchamp guru Francis Naumann had to say about the shovel, I was primed yet unprepared to know that in 2005 Naumann staged an entire show of Mike Bidlo’s Not Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawings.
According to Robert Rosenbaum’s essay in the catalogue I just got—and which seems like the only source for images of the actual works—Bidlo’s NREdKD began as almost a performance, when he erased what looked like a de Kooning in front of his shocked fellow guests at an artsy retreat in Maine in 2003. When a collector couldn’t buy it, he appealed to Naumann, who appealed to Bidlo, who agreed to make a whole show of them.
For each work, he made a beautiful Not de Kooning drawing, which he erased into a Not Rauschenberg. Each got a Johns-style label, and a facsimile FRAME IS PART OF ARTWORK frame, in a variety of dimensions. The show included documentation of the drawings, but also all the eraser crumbs, under glass, which, ngl, seems kind of corny.
Still as someone who, as I’ve already confessed here, thinks about erasing de Koonings whenever I see one, I can do naught but stan.
Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, Sept-Nov 2005 [francisnaumann]
previously, related riffs on Erased de Kooning Drawing: Archival Bühler-Rose
Ellsworth Kelly Black Face
The jankiness of this 1964 Ellsworth Kelly collage is surpassed only by its intricacy. And its problematics lapped them both.
It is one of [at least] two collages Kelly gave to David McCorkle, who sailed with the artist to France for the last three months of 1964. Dale McConathy, listed in the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation’s chronology as a former employee of Betty Parsons Gallery, also joined them, and wrote a catalogue essay for Kelly’s show at Galerie Maeght. [Upon his return in 1965, McConathy became an editorial assistant, and then quickly literary editor, of Harper’s Bazaar, where he published his avant-garde artist friends and French theory. James Meyer wrote of McConathy’s role in magazine/art culture and the confluence of art & fashion in 2001. I think McCorkle later tried his hand at Broadway, then in the ’70s became a caterer. In any case, in 1964 Kelly was 41, and it sounds like McCorkle and McConathy may have been 40 together.]
The primary element of both of McCorkle’s collages, for sale at Rago Arts next week, is a Sea & Ski suntan lotion ad. They could have run elsewhere, too, of course, but the one with the girl grabbing the guy’s hair, titled PAL because of another collaged element, ran in the June 19, 1964 issue of LIFE magazine. And the one above ran in the July 3 issue.
Kelly has torn the blonde, sunglassed face of the lifeguard in the ad, and drawn another in the void, with Black features. [From the one of many portraits Kelly drew of McCorkle that Galerie Maeght published as a lithograph, we know that Black face is not McCorkle’s.] We don’t know if McCorkle had a gorilla tattoo on his shoulder, one of the tiny, almost surgically collaged elements Kelly added. [Other carefully cut elements include “David” on the patch on the lifeguard’s swimsuit, and the compound that gave the work its title, “found/ in the sand, the,” at least part of which came from a caption in the same issue of LIFE.]
“in the sand, the” puts the whole issue of LIFE in Kelly’s hand at some point, not just a tearsheet. So what was on the page facing the lifeguard? A book review about “The Problem,” aka, “The Negro Revolution,” by Albert Murray. Is that what the Black face Kelly drew is looking at? Or was it the inspiration? That feels like the most benign explanation, though it does not explain the gorilla, which does not appear in this or any contemporaneous issues of LIFE.
13 Nov 2024, Lot 145: Ellsworth Kelly, Found in the sand, 1964, est. $5-7,000 [ragoarts]
Flip Your Noguchi Coffee Table
That Scott Burton article has tuned my antenna for furniture sculpture. While Burton’s own interests took him back to, among others, Brancusi, this apparently rare, pre-production marble-top table by Isamu Noguchi just dropped into my inbox.
It was introduced produced for Herman Miller between 1945-47, and introduced alongside Noguchi’s similarly scaled and more extravagantly shaped chess table in 1948. It was expensive and not a success, especially compared to Noguchi’s more famous glass-top coffee table. This table was bought from the showroom by a Marshall Fields employee, and has been in the family ever since.
Anyway, point is, Heritage Auctions’ email says, “Its perforated and tripod form relates closely to Noguchi’s work in sculpture of this period, specifically his interlocking assemblages of shaped slabs of marble, slate, and wood. Concurrently, Noguchi experimented with functional ‘sculpture-for-use’…” “Everything was sculpture,” Noguchi said of the table forms through which he experimented with abstraction alongside his non-functional sculpture in the 1940s.
Honestly, I would love nothing more than to crawl under this table with a book on the history of furniture-sculpture and not emerge until Wednesday. But there’s probably a chapter about how Noguchi met the fascist threat by getting himself locked up in a Japanese American detention center, and yet went on to design the most innovative coffee table sculptures in history.
22 Nov 2024, Lot 67030: Isamu Noguchi, Rare and Important Table, est. $700k-1m [ha.com]
David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela Is In Atlanta, Y’all
I’m getting used to not knowing every work David Hammons makes privately, which he may or may not announce until years later. But I am not dealing well with only finding out about public sculptures commissioned more than three decades ago, which turn out to still be chillin’ in the random corner of a park in Atlanta.
TBF, Free Nelson Mandela IS mentioned in the 1988 intro to Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons, one of the rare, foundational texts on the artist and his practice. But it never occurred to me that it wasn’t just a historic occurrence.
Anyway, it is a giant boulder with a “fan-shaped display” of iron bars topped with barbed wire. When it was originally installed, the gate in the prison-like fence was padlocked shut, and the artist had purportedly buried the key under the sculpture. Probably when it was moved to its permanent location in Piedmont Park, Hammons entrusted the key to Atlanta’s politicians, who opened the gate after Mandela’s release from prison.
The sculpture’s wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012, but by Mandela’s death in 2013, it had been cleared of extraneous, artist-unapproved shrubbery. The interpretation of the Smithsonian’s public sculpture inventory description has the inscription on the work’s back. Would that also have been behind or “inside” the prison fence? I don’t know. The current siting definitely makes the inscription feel like the front, though.
What seems more interesting is how formally resonant this sculpture is to Hammons’ other works of the time. Like, specifically, Rock Fan, the giant boulder topped with antique fans Hammons installed at Williams College in 1993, which is only the biggest of his rock- and fan-related works, if not the only politically topical one.
The full/official/original title of the work is Nelson Mandela Must Be Free to Lead His People and South Africa to Peace and Prosperity. Which, with meddlesome South Africans in the news lately, makes me wonder if Hammons would make a JAIL ELON MUSK sculpture, perhaps in a park in Pennyslvania.
Mica’s Kenneth Noland Regift
NGL, the 4.75-inch by 9-foot painting Kenneth Noland gave Mica & Ahmet Ertegun looked more imposing on the Christie’s site. Actually, no, it is almost comically illegible as a jpg. And actually, it looks positively sweet and domestic in their dining nook. [Their 81st St townhouses are in contract.] The commode, urns, and accoutrements are available next month in the furniture portion of Mica Ertegun’s auctions, in case you want to recreate the whole tableau. [The Morris Louis is in the evening sale.]
Christie’s describes this as a gift of the artist “by 1992,” but of course, Noland ran with the Erteguns long before that. Maybe Noland traded the painting for Mica and Chessy Rayner decorating his apartment in 1972. Maybe there was a housewarming rehang when the Erteguns acquired the Louis in 1974. Whatever happened, it’ll be regifted soon [with a 26% buyer’s premium].
20 Nov 2024, Lot 134: Kenneth Noland, Mica’s and Ahmet’s Gift, 1969, est. $100-150,000 [christies]
Previously, related: Should we throw a party? Should we invite Alexander Julian?
Scott Burton Estate Planning
Julia Halperin’s NY Times article on the precarious state of artist Scott Burton’s legacy is fascinating and somewhat exasperating. As he was dying of AIDS in 1989, the sculptor hastily made a will that left his entire estate, archive, works, and copyright, to the Museum of Modern Art. Burton’s dealer, Max Protetch and his friend and supporter Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA’s chief curator of painting & sculpture, figured it’d be the best way to preserve and promote his work. It sounds like it was a mess even when Protetch was still dealing and Varnedoe was still alive, but it has only gotten worse.
MoMA is not set up to maintain the market for Burton and his collectors, nor to rally for the preservation of his many public sculpture installations—which the museum does not own—and I don’t think they should be, frankly. [That said, even as a fan with some history, I had no idea how threatened or destroyed some of Burton’s NYC installations were.]
But it seems like the museum does have at least a financial interest, and perhaps a fiduciarily related art historical one, in supporting Burton’s reputation. [Whatever its asset holdings, MoMA appears to have only six Burton works officially accessioned into the collection. Maybe most of the remaining assets of Burton’s estate are the declared but unrealized editions of his sculptures. And maybe that’s what Kasmin Gallery’s doing in this story: angling for more posthumous edition business.]
Meanwhile, I’ve been fascinated to read art historian David Getsy’s history of Burton’s performance art practice of the 1960s and ’70s, which was in part a conceptualization of his experience in public as a queer man. That work—and that experience, Getsy argues—were influential on, even crucial for, Burton’s development of the subtle public sculpture practice he is best known for. It was that incipient queerness, in fact, which led Burton to suppress his performance work in a hostile political climate of the 1980s, so it wouldn’t thwart his public and corporate commissions.
It sounds like a little more public attention to Burton’s work and MoMA’s involvement with it will help them do what’s right.
A dying artist left his legacy to MoMA. Today he’s almost forgotten [sic] [nyt]
Previously, related: David Getsy talking about Scott Burton’s performance art
2023: Scott Burton Marble Armchair
Roni Horn And Anxiety In The Age of Digital Reproduction
Our collective understandings of shared reality are fraying. Archives are being erased. AI is flooding our digital commons to increasingly dire effect.
But only yesterday, I saw some Roni Horn glass sculptures. And I stood in their presence in an austere, if not quite nondescript, concrete space. I am saying I’m feeling very attuned right now. And I am almost 100% convinced that the pictures Christie’s is using here are computer-generated renderings.
And if I offered up my third party guarantee, I would still calculate a non-zero probability of taking delivery of a crate filled with 800 lbs of wet newspapers and a giclée print on top that said, “NO REFUNDS.”
This is why we need a video of a skateboarder jumping over it, please.
21 Nov 2024, Lot 5B: Roni Horn, Untitled (“The yes without the no.”), 1993, est.$800,000-1,200,000 [christies]
Previously, what does related even mean? Wade Guyton And Anxiety In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Fresson Twombly Tulips
Remember how some of Cy Twombly’s photos were made by hand by a secretive French family who’s perfected some ludicrously complicated and luxurious wet-printing process, and the others were made by enlarging Polaroids on a color copier?
Yeah, these tulips are some of the former. Fresson Prints. Ask for them by name.
22 Nov 2024, Lot 690: Cy Twombly, Tulips (iii), 1993, est. $50-70k [christies]
Previously, related: Makin’ Copies: Cy Twombly Photos
States of Change: Bangers For Democracy
A lot of bangers in the mix at States of Change, a limited-duration, open edition photo print fundraiser to support State Voices, a growing coalition of grass roots organizations around the country that work to preserve and expand voting rights in the US.
A lot of really good artists have put in some very solid work for an important cause at a critical moment. But NGL, these kind of prints are nice, but small—digitally printed on 10×12 paper—and unsigned. So a little slight in themselves. But what they are designed for is to shake $100 or more needed dollars from you. So just pick your favorites and go for it, while you can.
States of Change is open through November 4, 2024, to US citizens and legal permanent residents. [statesofchange.us]
I Am An American
To recognize that censoring Dorothea Lange’s photos of American citizens being incarcerated without charge or cause by the US government because of their race has a long history absolutely does not help when they do it again.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “[U.S Archivist, Colleen] Shogan and her top advisers told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees. Shogan’s aides also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational materials, other current and former employees said.”
It’s among a whole host of controversial, conservative, and censorious demands Shogan and her team have made as part of the renovation of the National Archives Museum. Every reported change whitewashes American history with explicit conservative slants, and silences or erases non-white Americans.
Just as the racism-fueled shameful injustice of Japanese American incarceration during WWII was ordered by FDR, this cowardly censor running the Archives was appointed by Joe Biden.
[next day reactions update: via @shannonmattern.bsky.social comes Charles Pierce’s context-setting on Shogan’s pre-emptive cowardice in the face of, of all people, Josh Hawley]
Prevously, all too related:
2018: A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X
2011: I Am An American