Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021
Dianne Feinstein’s Earring
Dianne Feinstein’s incapacitated inaction at a critical moment in US history and her to retire from the Senate long after she lost the mental and physical capacity to function is a stain on her legacy.
If there’s anything to be noted about the sale of her personal collection of mid jewelry, maybe it’s the single Tiffany sapphire and diamond earring whose companion one could imagine was lost in a demented haze, or maybe even stolen by a careerist hanger-on in her waning days. Yes, buy this orphaned earring today, which is small enough to sew into the hem of your clothes if you find yourself fleeing across a border anytime soon.
Lot 2023, 15 Oct 2024: TIFFANY & CO.: PLATINUM, SAPPHIRE, AND DIAMOND SINGLE EARRING, currently $480 sold for $800 [bonhams]
Previously, related [and still for sale, btw]: They Photoshopped Dianne Feinstein’s Pool
Aquavit Would Like To Sell The Olafur Carpet
On The Politics Of Collecting
On the New Books Network podcast, library scientist Jen Hoyer has an invigorating conversation with Eunsong Kim about Kim’s new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Kim looks at the structural inequities of the systems that determine what gets preserved and valued: archives, museums, philanthropic ventures.
In the raking light of her critical literarary scholarship, Kim examines the contours of Henry Clay Frick’s art collecting after the 1892 Homestead Strike, and the intensive campaigns by Marcel Duchamp and the Arensbergs for the most advantageous museum placement of their collection. And much more!
New Books Network: Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting [newbooksnetwork]
The Politics of Collecting [dukeupress.edu]
Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins
I have reviewed the chronology of Jasper Johns’ stick figures, and it is long, and the literature, and it is sparse. The most extensive discussion I’ve found of them is from July 2020, when art historian Isabelle Loring Wallace explored figures and faces in Johns’ prints at the Walker Art Center. [The Walker has a complete run of Johns’ print works, which the artist has been topping up with gifts since 1987.]
Loring calls them both “A motif of unknown origin” and “a crudely rendered Picasso-inspired trio,” seeing a similarity to the figure in Picasso’s 1958 UNESCO mural, The Fall of Icarus. I don’t see it, but sure. Except while other Picasso references appear in Johns’ work sooner, this so-called Icarus doesn’t turn up in Johns’ work until 1992, a full decade after the stick figure trio.
Continue reading “Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins”Just The Tureen
Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine
[note: I’m still looking, but this was not their tureen.]
Ellsworth Kelly’s Gaza
In 2019 the United States Postal Service really did put out a stamp named Gaza. It’s on the lower right, no. 5391, a 1956 four-canvas painting by Ellsworth Kelly in the collection of SFMOMA called Gaza.
SFMOMA’s page says more about the donors than the painting, and has the date as just 1956, while it has otherwise been dated 1952-56. The difference feels relevant, because it spans Kelly’s formative sojourn in Paris and his 1954 move to New York City.
Continue reading “Ellsworth Kelly’s Gaza”Emily Watlington Rabkin Interview Dropped
It has turned out to be an enlightening pleasure to listen to the interviews with the recipients of this year’s Rabkin Foundation awards, and none moreso than the conversation with Emily Watlington.
I’d already had the pleasure of working with Emily in 2022; she was my editor when I wrote about Mormon Architecture for Art in America, and I became a fan and follower of her writing work as well.
With Mary Louise Schumacher, she talks about some of the nuances and challenges of writing about art and disability. They also talk about Watlington’s attuned sensibilities brought to bear on the Venice Biennale, which purported to bring attention and critical consideration to many historically marginalized artists. Watlington’s diaries and in-depth review reveals that it often did just the opposite.
Rabkin Interview 2024 with Emily Watlington [rabkinfoundation substack]
Past The Koonsiverse Pleasurably
While it is true that Jeff Koons website did suck, he did not need to go to the trouble of partnering with the sponsor of every podcast in the world, Squarespace, to make his new one. But here we are.
I have not clicked through, I have not downloaded the custom templates, I have not gotten to the end of the artnet sponcon article about the website refresh. I was stopped cold by the two sentences below, which are perfect in the way the mirror finish stainless steel puckers and creases on Koons’s own balloon animal sculptures are exactingly, terribly perfect:
“What this amounts to is organizing the entire Koons universe into a single domain. It is essentially a minimalist black-and-white world with sharp images that glide past pleasurably.”
Behold, Jeff Koons’ New Masterpiece: A Squarespace Website Template [artnet]
‘Now I’m Done.’
Catching up on Sean Tatol’s always invigorating takes at The Manhattan Art Review, including his review of Jasper Johns’ drawings show at Matthew Marks. Which, like his previous show, includes variations on his 2020 painting, Slice, that got a lot of attention during his double retrospective.
And this line caught me off guard: “He’s apparently announced that Slice is his last painting, and as far as last works go I can’t imagine a more eloquent invocation of mortality and infinity.”
So before getting to the “Wait, what??” let’s cover the, “Yes, and”: Slice certainly is a helluva painting to end on. With themes Tatol observed, rich source images across the board, and a popping backstory that’ll keep people talking, it delivers on multiple planes at once.
And after its star turn in the Whitney/PMA show, Slice was made an anonymous promised gift to MoMA, where the credits for Johns’ reference images expanded in 2023 to include not just ACL doodler Jéan-Marc Togodgue and astrophysicist Margaret Geller, but all Geller’s scientific collaborators on the 32yo Slice of the Universe map she sent the artist unbidden.
But all that said, Wait what? I could neither imagine nor find any context in which Johns would have made such an announcement. So I asked Sean where he’d heard it. And he mentioned a post artist and editor Walter Robinson made last month to two social media platforms: “Jasper Johns (b 1930): ‘MoMA got my first work and MoMA got my last work. Now I’m done.’ A drawings survey opens at Marks on West 24th on Sept 12.”
When reached, Robinson did not say from whom he heard this, or when, but only clarified he didn’t hear it from Johns. Meanwhile, the sound of it is still ringing in my head. “Now I’m done.”
Did Johns decide that after finishing Slice? How’d that go down? How done is he? The newest drawings in the current Marks show date from 2021, the year of the anonymous gift. Is he done with making altogether? The show also includes older works that have never been seen. Has Johns moved to curating? Maybe he’s decided to focus on just revealing stuff now? Let’s start with those little guys, but there is a long list.
Manhattan Art Review: Jasper Johns – Drawings 1982-2021 – Matthew Marks – **** [19933.biz]
@walterrobinsonstudio [threads]
Previously, very much related: Taking A Knee;
Gerhard Richter Painted;
Jasper Johns’ First Flag
Richard Serra Embossment
Election season, when a man’s heart turns to thoughts of Gemini G.E.L. fundraising print portfolios. Or at least it used to.
Fortunately, longtime greg.org hero/reader Terry Wilfong emailed a keen observation about Richard Serra’s Afangar Viðey series prints that momentarily distracts from the genocidal, climate, and fascistic calamities afoot. Like me, Terry missed out on getting any little Viðey etchings, and was drawn to the print Serra made at the same moment for the Harvey Gantt Portfolio. [Gantt was the Black opponent to one of the Reagan era GOP’s biggest bigots, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.]
Terry noted that this print, titled F*** Helms, looked similar to the Viðey etchings, but it was a screenprint. It was not an etching, yet it had an embossed plate mark like an etching. What was going on there?
Continue reading “Richard Serra Embossment”Christie’s Group Show
In the secret heart of the specialist who put together the lot list in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale in London next week is a curator trying to break out:
A curator who can’t get Isa Genzken to return their emails, though:
Two for T
I was excited to read Nicole Acheampong’s feature on David Hammons in art issue of The New York Times’ T Magazine because I knew it would focus on some of the artist’s less documented works off the beaten art world path. [They’d asked me about images of Hammons’ public artworks in Savannah, but opted to not go the appropriated Google Streetview route.] And it does, and it’s great, and it’s especially nice for pointing me back to a profile I misesd in 2018 by M.H. Miller of LES publisher, poet and longtime Hammons whisperer Steve Cannon.
Cannon is one of the creative suns like East Village photographer Alex Harsley who looped Hammons into their regularly orbit from the early 1990s. In the white artworld, Hammons developed a reputation of being aloof, reclusive, evasive But the truth is, he just had his own people he’d rather be in dialogue with, and Cannon has definitely been one of them.
But I was stunned to read Julia Halperin’s cover story about Cady Noland, which tracks the artist’s rise, her apparent withdrawal from the art world—and the rumors or sniping around it—and her recent return to exhibiting her work. Noland’s dedication to the precise positioning and presentation of her work is an ongoing theme, along with the power her work derives from attention some saw as excessive.
I was stunned even though I’m quoted in the article—as “a Noland obsessive,” which lmao is going straight on my bio—stunned because though she refused an interview, Noland agreed to respond to Halperin’s inquiries. The article is thus replete with parenthetical denials of rumors and clarifications of others’ statements, as if she’s carefully correcting the position of each element in her narrative.
Noland also provided the Times with previously unpublished Polaroids. And they confirmed that the artist has been involved in the new installation of her work opening at Glenstone in less than two weeks. Also that the Raleses did indeed buy out her entire show at Gagosian. What is a collector but an obsessive with ten billion dollars?
The Secret Art of David Hammons [t mag]
A Blind Publisher, Poet—and link to the Lower East Side’s cultural history
Cady Noland and the Art of Control
Archival Bühler-Rose
At first glance intarsia is strange medium for portraiture, for immediacy, or for conveying information at all. But that is looking at it through the wrong end of the chronoscope. In his current show at New Discretions, I Want Your Skull, Michael Bühler-Rose uses this permanent—or at least persistent—medium to transform temporal and subjective content into objects for history.
The large, multi-panel studiolo scene is familiar, partly because it consciously evokes the intarsia room-as-portrait of the 15th century Studiolo Gubbio at the Met, but also because Bühler-Rose has lately shown similar studiolo selfies, with different configurations of autobiographical objects.
The other three works feel like they’re doing something different. The one that caught my eye on Instagram [I have not seen the show irl yet] is the museum sticker-covered verso of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. As someone who’s been enthralled by the underseen backs of famous artworks—including this one—this feels like using intarsia’s excessive intricacy to right a historical wrong.
The other two works are the verso of a small Dali painting, and the front of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres puzzle, complete with puzzle pieces and plastic bag. Besides their relatively small scale, the main connection I see here is that both the artworks referenced sold at Christie’s in mid-May 2024. So intarsia turns a moment in time into timeless objects.
But maybe I’m overly fixated on differences when one clear similarity is right. there. Because all four works in Bühler-Rose’s show are based on photographs. The studiolo is self-evidently a composed still life. The Rauschenberg’s verso photo is a key part of its art historical record. The Felix puzzle is itself a transformation of a snapshot into an object, whose photograph is transformed in turn. And Dali’s verso picture, cropped for its inlay version, only turned up because the painting came up for sale. So photography put through its theorized paces.
And unlike other any other printing—or production—techniques, these photos have been fixed in a form we know could last 500 years, because it already has.
[A few hours later update: Bühler-Rose’s unparalleled side hustle, https://boot.foundation, will be having a bootlegs and books popup at Situations this Sunday, October 6th, from 12-6. A reminder to always check insta before posting.]
I Want Your Skull is at New Discretions at Situations’ 127 Henry Street location through 20 October 2024 [newdiscretions]
Studies for Studiolo, 2019 — [michaelbuhlerrose.com]
Studiolo Gubbio, c.1478-82 [metmuseum.org]
On Steve Reich’s Freehand Watermark Tracings and Patterns
I wish I’d known about these before David Hudson posted one to wish Steve Reich a happy 88th birthday. Because I am transfixed.
Continue reading “On Steve Reich’s Freehand Watermark Tracings and Patterns”Whoomp, There It Is: My Rabkin Interview Just Dropped
OK, I have not listened to it myself, but I can already tell from the links included in their post that they left in the part where I cried.
Aaand maybe where I said I quietly boycotted the Hirshhorn while it was wrapped in that Nicholas Party scrim. Love you guys!
[AFTER HEARING IT UPDATE: I llol’d that the Rabkin folks actually used the Hirshhorn clip to announce the interview on their Instagram. Love it. And I forgot that while I did acknowledge my pettiness, I also point out, I’m not wrong. Overall though, I think my favorite quote will be, “Again, with the Manet.” It feels undeniably weird to say, “listen to me!” but it actually turned out OK.]
Rabkin Interviews 2024: Greg Allen [rabkinfoundation.substack]