Continue reading “Such Coup. Many Unconstitutional. So Thwart.”
“What do you see?”
The parking spot I’d vacated in front of our house was still open when I returned from the morning school run. I looked at the sidewalk, the ramp at the crosswalk, the exact same steps I walked yesterday afternoon.
I came in, and as I was posting this, I re-read Linda Goode Bryant’s essay on walking the city with David Hammons:
David’s walks count among his most amazing works. And I think he does see them not only as preparation or ways to find material but as a part of the work itself, along with so many ephemeral things he’s done on the streets, things that maybe only he or a few other people around him ever knew about. On his walks, David pushes beyond the merely observant, even the acutely observant, into something much more profound.
Yesterday, just seconds after I’d parked, and before I’d gotten out of the car, an elderly neighbor fell, and was lying on the ramp at the crosswalk. I was the fourth person to come up on her. Two younger women must have seen her fall, and were kneeling on either side of her.
My hands were full of unwieldy things I should have had a bag for, and as I stood there, I silently asked the third person, who was on the phone, if she was calling 911. And she was.
The fifth person to come to the woman’s aid right then was a nurse, she said, and had crossed from the other side of the street to help. The woman’s spindly hand was bent at a terrible angle. Blood around her mouth, she must have fallen forward and failed to catch herself. She was responding groggily but wanting to move when she probably should not. She rolled herself onto her side, though, as I, with no way to help, left.
By the time I got to my desk, the sound of the ambulance came in the window. I did not recognize the woman, but I thought of the difficulties she’d face, how incomplete or impossible healing can be at her age, how her independent life may have ended at that moment I’d just missed when I got out of my car.
I thought of my own grandmother, proud, strong, in her nineties, doing her thing, until she broke her hip, tripped on a hose on her porch, the home she’d built with my grandfather, which her kids rushed to remodel the bathroom with a walk-in tub, &c., so it’d be ready when she got out of the assisted living center, but to which she never returned, her family eventually waving and pantomiming to her through the window during COVID, telling her to put the phone on speaker. The funeral not even allowed to happen in the pandemic-closed church, but it did anyway, for a few cousins, and the local funeral home couldn’t figure out Zoom so they streamed it on facebook, which entailed getting an entire account. I downloaded the video, but haven’t watched it since.
When I looked at the sidewalk this morning, I wondered if anyone else would notice the dark stains on the ramp, much less recognize them as blood. Only I, and the people who’d stopped to help first, would ever have any idea of how, in an instant, a neighbor’s life was turned upside down, on the corner.
David Hammons Concerto Reviewed
I thought I’d see more organically, but now I’ll go look, but at least/at last Nereya Otieno has an insightful review at Hyperallergic of the restaging of David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue at Hauser & Wirth LA.
AND it explains the phone situation: you have to lock your phone in a bag. Are there swaths or pockets of LA life where this happens now? People moving in and out of NDA/privacy/IP leakage control/be-in-the-moment woo woo zones? Or is it just for once-in-a-generation art installations?
HEADS UP, though, I thought it was on until June 1, but the H&W site now says May 25. Don’t sleep on it.
February was a distracting month, so I did miss Eileen Kinsella’s account of visiting Concerto in Black and Blue during Frieze LA.
Mark Pieterson’s review for Sculpture Magazine is good, if bleak. But then [looks around] how could it not be?
In her account of visiting Concerto for Artillery, Brittany Menjivar sounds a little surprised by the experience of the work.
OK, this review [sic] at Flaunt was either written by AI, or it is a review of the YouTube video Hauser & Wirth posted in April, which has a soundtrack. Because there is no concerto playing in Concerto.
Tomorrow, 17 May at 11AM, Darby English will be moderating an IRL conversation at H&W LA with Jasper Marsalis, Harryette R. Mullen and Joe Ray on the question, “How do we see the work’s darkness now?” Eventbrite says few tickets left.
David Hammons Gets At The Why? Of It [hyperallergic]
Previously, related: David Hammons Lights
Tuymans Jesus and The Second Coming of 1990s Figuration

After overcoming the shock to my psyche of seeing an art world moment I very much lived right in and through turned into an historicized theme for a summer group show at David Zwirner—who, let’s be clear, was also there the first time, and so is, for some reason, partly doing this to himself—I did wonder what the Rubells’ Luc Tuymans painting of Jesus was doing there.

The first time I saw this, I wondered about Tuymans’ source image; a few years after this he’d made some works using Mormon imagery—actually, he took Polaroids of the screen while watching a show on Belgian TV in the late 1990s.
In the 1990s the LDS Church had begun using a newer, more naturalistically painted picture of Jesus with a red cloak, like this one, but the angle was different. It still made me wonder. If Tuymans had used it for source/inspiration, it seemed odd that he’d change the angle and entire composition so significantly. And he did not.
This painting was from a Feb. 1999 show at Zeno X in Antwerp titled “The Passion.” It was a series related to the Passion Play performed every ten years at Oberammergau, Germany.

Turns out Tuymans used the photo from the catalogue of the 1970 production of the actor who played Christ, Helmut Fischer. [update: while I knew the foundational anti-semitic history of the Passion Play, on Bluesky Jörg points out how that anti-semitism persisted, even after Oberammergau’s biggest fan (Hitler) was defeated. Turns out the 1970 production, the first since Vatican II, was specifically condemned by the Pope for keeping newly disavowed bigoted portrayals of Jesus-era Jews. They’ve been working on it ever since.]
While that clears that up, I do still wonder about Zwirner revisiting Circa 1995 New Figuration just as the Rubells are divesting it. This could be driven less by art history and more by estate planning.
Warhol Big Electric Chair Big Lie

I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
On 11 April 2025 Christie’s announced that Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair from the Matthys-Colle collection will highlight Christie’s 20th century evening sale, with a low estimate in the region of $30 million.

On 25 April 2025, Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 9 standout lots at auction this May,” including Lot 55A, Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair.
These Big Electric Chair works are very rare at auction because most of them are in major museum collections like the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago, so they have taken on an almost mythical quality within the art market, Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art Alex Rotter said.

On 12 May 2025 the Matthys-Colles withdrew Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair, which did not have a guarantee, from the sale. The lot listing was deleted. Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 8 standout lots at auction this May” with a date of 25 April 2025.
Here, the image is cropped more tightly, which not only makes the chair bigger but almost abstracts it. He’s isolated the chair from the context of a room, so it becomes an everyday object that is elevated as a still life. And what could be a more ultimate still life than a chair that will take the life out of you? It becomes a traditional painting in the vein of 17th century vanitas; a memento mori of sorts.
And yet, the chair is also this transformative object of ending. It can end someone’s life, yet when isolated, is just a chair with electricity running through it. I think that’s the play Warhol wanted to get at. He’s putting this within the canon of still lifes, and the electric chair is the most poignant of all. That’s a very Warholian thing to do, to explore multiple meanings of an object depending on how it’s presented, Alex Rotter no longer said.
In one sense, one might say, it deeply doesn’t matter. It’s just auction house marketing. But things happened.
The painting’s sale was announced. The specialists talked. The painting was marketed. The collectors were praised. The advisers and reporters discussed it. The potential bidders balked at it. The owners withdrew it, and then Christie’s not only erased its traces and actions and publications, it altered them retroactively with no notice.
At this moment this important painting whose comparables are in major museums around the world was put up for sale at a price no one wanted to pay, and so it was withdrawn from sale. The switch was not thrown, the painting was not burned, but it’s perniciously ridiculous to act like it wasn’t strapped in the chair.
Olafur Eliasson Pattern Detection

I didn’t notice it when I blogged about it last December, probably because I was so fixated on the heliostat. But a few weeks ago I gave a talk about stained glass, and the prolonged looking at Olafur Eliasson’s 2024 stained glass project, Window for moving light led to a realization.

“The geometric pattern of the stained-glass window installed in the Gothic eastern windows develops from diamonds and squares at the bottom to large overlapping circles above. The glass panels transition in color from red to yellow to transparent and blue at the top, creating a chromatic fade inspired by the palette of Caspar David Friedrich.”
Continue reading “Olafur Eliasson Pattern Detection”Sheila Hicks Mile High Club

Yesterday art historian Michael Lobel posted Sheila Hicks’ bas relief panel of embroidered silk, four meters wide, which MoMA says is the only survivor of the 19 panels Hicks made for Air France between 1969 and 1977. Lobel has jokingly assigned me the case for tracking down any other remaining panels. So instead of not finding one Jasper Johns Short Circuit flag, I can now not find eighteen back walls from the upper deck first class lounges of Air France’s first generation of Boeing 747s. I am ON it.
Continue reading “Sheila Hicks Mile High Club”Riding Rail With Anonymous Was A Woman
It’s kind of a hectic week, and there are artists I don’t know in The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series and will catch up with afterward, but Thursday May 15’s hero-packed conversation about the Artists Speak Report commissioned by Anonymous Was A Woman is a must-join.
Primary Information: Buy Things, Send Cash

“For about a year,” Gober explained in 1990, “between 1982 and 1983, I painted on a small board. Over this board I had mounted my camera, and as I changed the painting I would take slides of the process. So that in the end nothing remained but the photographic record of a painting metamorphosing.”

Gober first showed Slides of a Changing Painting as a 3-screen slide projection work for just one week [??] in May 1984, at Paula Cooper Gallery. I saw the work first at the Walker Art Center. It’s been central to major retrospectives of Gober’s work, and to understanding his larger project, many, many seeds of which are contained in the Slides.
But it’s the extraordinary book version of Slides of a Changing Painting, coming out in a few days from Primary Information, that has been looming so large in my present. It was shipped early to annual subscribers, and it gives an unprecedented chance to see Slides slowly, one phase at a time, in a way that the actual work avoids by design. But the sheer heft and density of the book— it is small, beautiful, and nothing but images—also gives a chance to get lost in the world Gober painted into—and then out of—existence.
Slides of a Changing Painting is somehow just $30, and it’s $25 on pre-order, but it feels like it should be $50 or $100. Which, about that. Executive director Matthew Walker just sent out an email announcing that Primary Information is one of the many arts non-profit organizations that suddenly had their NEA grant canceled, blowing a $40,000 mid-year hole in their tiny budget.
For nearly 20 years, Primary Information has been publishing and republishing highly important artist texts, bringing them back into the discussion at cost. They have an entire slate of books to come. So when you order, if you’re able, why not pay double, or triple, of 10x, with a donation at checkout, and help keep Primary Information’s work going? Or buy some solid and yet not exorbitant fundraising editions. Or just straight-up slip them a tax-deductible donation.
Pausing The Pod for Neptune Frost
I’ve been working my way back through David Naimon’s Between the Covers, and was listening to a 2023 conversation about translation and African language with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, when I had to pause the pod’ for Neptune Frost. The 2021 Afrofuturist musical was made in Rwanda by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman in February & March 2020, escaping a global pandemic shutdown by four days, like the Deathstar plans leaving Scarif.
The 2022 US trailer from Kino Lorber is kind of choppy, and more about the film’s critical reception, while the earlier, 2021 Directors’ Fortnight trailer gives more of a sense of the film’s atmosphere.
Uzeyman and Williams’ conversation with Eugene Hernandez at the 2021 NYFF gives a sense of the project’s origin, their artistic influences, and the euphoria of pulling it all off.
Hang Together: White Columns 2025 Print Portfolio Just Dropped

The White Columns 2025 Print Portfolio just dropped, and it looks like a thousand bucks. Each. And yet it’s only a thousand bucks for the whole thing. If ever there was a portfolio designed to hang together instead of hanging separately, it’s this one. With Tabboo!’s sun and Ann Craven’s moon; and Craven’s moon and whatever is radiating on the right side of Arthur Simms’ triptych. And the way Simms’ framed head or whatever resonate with Sam McKinniss’s Luigi mugshot. But most of all,


the way McKinniss’s Luigis and Rachel Harrison’s DeKooning Woman & Amy Winehouse just feel like a call to action. So act now, gallerists are standing by.
Simone Prouvé’s Jean Prouvé Table

See, maybe not this one specifically, but this is the kind of FrankenProuvé collab vision I’m talking about.
It sounds like Simone Prouvé made this dining table by taking a base from her father, reinforcing it with an iron frame [which is now rusting], and putting a laminated glass and woven steel top of her own, based on an idea from “self-described Goth” architect Odile Decq, for whom Prouvé wove a steel facade for MACRO in Rome. So that’s around 2006-7.
27 May 2025, Lot 84, Table de salle à manger, est EUR500-800 [artcurial]
Jean Prouvé’s Kit of Jean Prouvé Parts

What’s even more intriguing than Jean Prouvé’s [Daughter’s] Jean Prouvé sideboard is the next lot in the Artcurial sale: a bunch of Prouvé parts.
What could you make with a sliding sideboard door, five shelf/plates, and four drawer/boxes, toute from la famille Prouvé? I am seriously tempted to cook something up.
27 Mai 2025, Lot 32, Jean Prouvé, Ensemble d’éléments en metail, EUR800-1000 [artcurial]
Jean Prouvé’s Jean Prouvé Sideboard

This « tout aluminium n. 151 » Prouvé sideboard is being sold among a bunch of textile and other design objects from Simone Prouvé, Jean’s daughter. So it could have only ever been hers and still accurately described as “Famille de l’artiste, puis par descendance.”
But it cannot be the case that she had to buy it retail, right? And just because Artcurial is only going with the date it was designed, and the EUR60-80,000 estimate seems low [sic], I’m—caveat emptor—sticking with this title format.
27 Mai 2025, Lot 31a, Jean Prouvé Bahut « tout aluminium n. 151 » [artcurial via @pwlanier]
Previously, related:
Eileen Gray’s Eileen Gray Table
Gio Ponti’s Gio Ponti Shelf
Koyo Kouoh RIP

Extraordinary and sad news, that Koyo Kouoh, most recently of Zeitz MOCAA, and the curator of the next Venice Biennale, has died. Aruna d’Souza posted the Zeitz MOCAA Instagram announcement on bluesky.
Having never seen a show of Kouoh’s, I found the most insight and inspiration from her two-part interview in 2024 with Charlotte Burns for Schwartzman &’s What if…!? podcast. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.
Just a person of extraordinary and urgent thinking and action, now gone.
The Art World: What If…?! Season 2, 9, Koyo Kouoh, Part 1 [schwartzmanand]
The Art World: What If…?! Season 2, 10, Koyo Kouoh, Part 2
James Lee Byars Dog Cage
In a way, it’s the quintessential experience of James Lee Byars’ art: clicking through a letter to Sam Wagstaff, written three words at a time on an endless stack of envelopes grabbed? left over? from the Green Gallery, where he showed in 1967, piecing together a plea to stage a museum show of a room—just a small one, though—entirely covered in gold, “A state of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything. Love B.”
Then the next page in the digitized archive is this:

followed by this:

And now I don’t know whether to keep trying to decipher Byars’ five sizes and orientations of abbreviation-filled handwriting; to scour the world for my own archival photo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Imperial cloisonné dog cage; or to just head straight to Philadelphia.

So for now, I’m rereading a bunch of Byars recollections from the 2014 retrospective at MoMA PS1, and just blogging it out.
Previously, related? Marie Antoinette’s Dog House