The Brooklyn Rail has a whole smorgasbord of Duchamp-related content tied to MoMA’s show. But my favorite still has to be the October 2022 recollections of art historian Carroll Janis, who was working alone in his family’s gallery one morning in 1950 when Duchamp came to sign the urinal Sidney Janis had procured for exhibition.
For the whole time this has been in my tabs, I’ve been thinking about the elaborate, almost performative way Duchamp approached this signing and designation. But as I was writing this, it occurred to me that Janis got the first [non-bôite] replica of Fountain in 33 years, not in New York, where the original supposedly came from, but in France: “[A]s no suitable replacement could be found in New York, Duchamp suggested that Janis look in Paris on his summer visit there at the Marché aux Puces (flea market). Janis found one and shipped it back to New York.”
He sure did, and it’s now in the Philadelphia Museum. And there’s a great museum photo of the underside, with the signature[s!] and the labels.
But now I think back on a whole thrumming history of Duchamp studies where incredulous scholars scoured the early 20th century porcelain fixture catalogues of the J.L. Mott Iron Works and beyond, failing to identify the exact model of urinal Duchamp said he picked up on Sixth Avenue. Why did Duchamp think or know a suitably identical urinal would be found in les puces? Did he get the first one in France, too?
From the New York Times: “’That’s my first sculpture,’ Alessandro, who became an artist, told Maia. Father and son created this elaborate sand castle in 1963 on the beach in Sperlonga, which has been a resort in southern Italy since the time of the emperor Tiberius.”
News of a previously undocumented sculptural collaboration between Allesandro and Cy Twombly would normally be the lead story. But, of course, it was documented, and it is the documentation that here deserves attention.
Tatiana Franchetti Twombly, Cy’s wife, took thousands of photos over sixty years, including this one, on a beach in Sperlonga in 1963. Alessandro’s daughter Maia found the negatives in the house where Tatiana died in 2010. She is putting on a show in Rome in June, and has published just a hundred in a book, Stella Honey, Cy’s pet name for Tatiana. There are 18 in the Times.
Portrait of the Young Artist as a Statue: man bartlett liberty.wav, 2026, 7-in. lathe-cut sound recording in a signed, numbered edition of 25, published by Consultório, Porto
A couple of weeks ago Man Bartlett opened a show at Galeria Ocupa in Porto. Not at Libertyincludes sound works that evoke the artist’s ferry ride in front of the Statue of Liberty, and the melting of ice.
In conjunction with the show, esculápio and/or Consultório has released man bartlett liberty.wav, a 4’04” recording, in a signed edition of 25. The lathe-cut, 7-inch disc is the verdigris color of the Statue of Liberty, and of the brontosaurus on the t-shirt worn by a young Bartlett as he posed in a portrait as the Statue of Liberty, which is reproduced on the recording’s sleeve.
Imi Knoebel, Table, 1982/1987, wood and paint, ed. 11/25, 74,5 × 162 × 157 cm, selling at Grisebach
NGL, I’ve never been as interested as I perhaps empirically should be in Imi Knoebel’s work, and that’s on me. I feel like it requires more understanding or immersion in the context of 80s German painting discourse than I’ve been willing to take on. And so frankly I only end up with an auction’s-eye view of it, which has never thrilled me.
Imi Knoebel, Table, 1982/1987, verso, via Grisebach
Which is all a setup to still fail to explain how smitten I am by this wack Table from 1987. What even is going on here, table-wise? But the multiple side and underside views at Grisebach show an extraordinary construction, a weird mix of kludgy and precise, where dimensional lumber legs are mitered to the precise, weird angles they’re set into, and the whole thing looks painted by brush, and held together with tensioning keys?
This is not a table, but a table-shaped painting and/or sculpture. And though it was produced as an edition of 25 [?!] for a show at the Van Abbemuseum [?! lovethoseguys], it’s very much a handmade object. What a wild combination of attributes for a glitched out Memphis monster that somehow feels very much of its time?
Germany rotated 30 degrees to the left, vector image via simplemaps
[A few minutes later update] Am I high, or is this table the shape of a then-not-yet-reunited Germany?
[Later in the day update] OK, no. The table is properly from 1982/87. I went lowkey mad searching for a Knoebel solo show at Van Abbemuseum in 1987, but it was in 1982. It included the second installation of Ghent Room, 1980, Knoebel’s pivotal exploration of color and space which, for the purposes of this post, looks like 115 monochrome tabletops of various dimensions. It was shown later that year at Documenta 7, and by 1987, had been installed three more times, including at Dia.
Perhaps it took the Van Abbemuseum a while to complete production of their edition. Perhaps it took the Van Abbemuseum community a while to collect all 25 tables. But this table comes from 1982, and at least one example was signed and dated by Knoebel himself.
In 2014, Knoebel produced three new tables, which jigsaw together in two or three pieces, which he showed at Galerie Bärbel Grässlin in Frankfurt. With these works, “Knoebel returns to one of his works from 1982, a table that he had produced in an edition of 25 for a solo show at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven at the time.” According to the Contemporary Art Library version of the press release the tables are “meant to be used,” and come in editions of 3+2AP, or 15 tables made of 40 smaller tables.
General Idea, AIDS (Reinhardt) #4, oil and beeswax on linen on panel, 60 x 60 in., selling at Phillips
General Idea made their first AIDS paintings based on Robert Indiana’s LOVE logo in 1987, in the same Poppy colors as the original. They made a series of Black AIDS paintings, also known as AIDS (Reinhardt), for a summer 1991 show at the Grey Gallery at NYU. Mitchell-Innes and Nash have one, #6, that seems nearly identical to AIDS (Reinhardt), #4, being sold at Phillips.
One or the other might be slightly more legible, or maybe that misses the point; even in the slow pan video in raking light, the Phillips but I expect the Phillips painting barely registers an incised outline of a letter, or a section delineated by slight changes in brushstrokes. It makes an actual Reinhardt seem like a landscape on a summer’s day by comparison. But #4 was also owned for a while by Joseph Kosuth, who we can trust knows his way around a monochrome black square.
Richard Prince, Untitled and Untitled (Ulysses), 2011, at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2014, photos: Rudolf Sagmeister and Dietrich Gehring, via Contemporary Art Daily
Talking this morning with Matt, our book man in Venice, about the intense passions of collectors of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he reminded me that Richard Prince’s own bibliophilia covered Ulysses, too.
In Prince’s birdtalk texts from 2014, there’s a bit about yearning for the copy Joyce inscribed to Ezra Pound. And another about going to Dijon to see where Ulysses was first printed, and hunting down the Greek flag blue that appeared on the cover of the 1st edition.
Which was the same moment Prince opened It’s A Free Concert, a show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which included a large, book cover lithograph-shaped monochrome diptych, Untitled (Ulysses), in Joyce’s—and Greece’s—blue. It’s dated 2011, so he’d had it on his mind for a while.
The brochure is tall. If there were any plebeians in Venice rn, the show would open for them Saturday
I have read the gallery guide for Helter Skelter Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Miuccia Prada’s two-artist show curated by Nancy Spector. I have created a mind palace and walked through it. I’m not sure these artists are operating on the same register.
The exhibition segregates them on the ground floor, and they get together in the fancy rooms upstairs. Spector notes shared ideas, themes, visuals, approaches, without forcing too hard. It feels more like parallel play than direct engagement or dialogue. [Which makes me very interested to see what Jafa and Prince’s collaborative zine ends up like; it could be the song of the summer.]
The image used to promote the show feels like its apotheosis. Prince’s iconic Rasta painting, Graduation (2008) and a Vodoun witch doctor from Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio (2019) are shown side by side, along with two other Canal Zone paintings, near the end of the show. In the text, Spector focuses on appropriation and juxtaposition, and Jafa’s critique of ownership in the historical context of chattel slavery.
[top] Arthur Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio, 2019, at Museum Brandhorst… cropped and combined [bottom] with Richard Prince’s Graduation, 2008, for the Prada Foundation show.
But the elision of Mickey Mouse feels crucial. Jafa has talked about how placing their images next to each other reveal Mickey and Damballah, the Vodoun spirit represented by the witch doctor, are two iterations of the same entity. Placing a whiteface figure next to Prince’s Rasta says blackface, without the hard “R.” But hanging Mickey next to Graduation brings out the minstrel in both.
The autobiography of desire echoes throughout the show, with each artist exploring the yearning of being someone else, an other. Prince made his Girlfriends photos because he “wanted to be a girlfriend.” And Jafa’s Man-Monster self-portrait embodies transformation in ways that resonate with his 2024 race-switching re-edit of Taxi Driver, BG, which in Venice is titled Ben Gazarra [is the misspelling intentional?].
installation view of Helter Skelter so that Mickey’s cropped out again, but that surprised Mickey face-like group of ovals isn’t. image: Fond. Prada via hypebeast, which I only read for the google images
What’s less clear, perhaps, in the show is that Prince testified that painting Rastas was an act of love, of desire, of substitution like the Girlfriends: he wanted to look like them, to be them. For all the real talk of the Black experience, white supremacy, and American masculinity, I feel like both of these artists are mapping the psychosexual contours of a violent, white, imperialist, colonialist elephant, while Spector and Prada are maybe saying, keep the blindfolds on.
I understand the important protection and handling convenience frames provide. And I get why it’s cringe to call it rawdawging, but I have stayed wanting more art without frames.
A couple of months back, after that frameless Da Messina situation, Claudio Santambrogio sent along a link to a fascinating semi-frameless show I’d completely missed at SMK in Copenhagen. There I Belong. Hammershøi by Elmgreen & Dragsetwas a group show of Vilhelm Hammershøi paintings along contemporary artists curated by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset in 2019. The duo highlighted the ominous feelings of Hammershøi’s interiors and the sense of foreboding they could engender.
Three doorways: Installation shot of Hammershøi and Ruff in There I Belong, 2019, at SMK, photo: Inge Pollet
One particular pairing jumped out—actually, that’s too energetic, maybe it bubbled over: a 1980 Thomas Ruff Interieur photo of a door and Hammershøi’s 1888 painting, Interior, The Old Stove. Albertinelyst, which is also largely about a door. Hammershøi gets called serene and austere, but Elmgreen & Dragset’s sense of an unwelcoming stillness is also correct. When I think about hygge, it is now not this.
Thomas Ruff, Interieur 8C, 1980, C-print, 10 7/8 x 8 1/8 in., Framed: 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 in., Ed. 20, 5 AP, via David ZwirnerWilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, The Old Stove. Albertinelyst, 1888, oil on canvas, 61.6 cm x 51.5 cm, collection SMK, image: creative commons
I have to think that showing the paintings naked, without frames, only heightened the unease. Except the image above, also frameless, came from SMK’s incredible Wilhelm Hammershøi Digital Archive. The VIHDA is the culmination of a five-year research initiative into the methods, materials, and construction of over 130 Hammershøi works. Every painting is photographed frameless, naked as the day it was made. And then, in addition to digital scans, there’s a whole range of technical images for each work, too; the dawgs have never been so raw.
Olafur Eliasson, The Island Series, 1997, 56-part c-print grid, ed. 3, this one from Marty Margulies’ bathroom is the AP, selling at Lempertz in Cologne
The first place I saw Olafur Eliasson’s Islands Series photogrid was in MoMA’s New Photography show. The second place I saw it was in Marty Margulies’ master bathroom in Miami. That’s Marty’s above, which is now for sale in Germany, perhaps destined for less humid climes.
I did not see David Hammons’ sprawling 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in person, and I only flipped through the catalogue/artist book when it came out last year. But I had to move it recently from its loadbearing position at the bottom of its stack, and give it the full attention it demands. Honestly, it’s a stunning retrospective feast I’m not sure any of us actually deserve. Along with Michael Crichton’s 1977 Jasper Johns catalogue and the Smithsonian’s Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Always To Return), it’s now only the third exhibition catalogue I’ve read straight through, cover-to-cover. And there aren’t even any words.
“How many of these did you make?” A wall text next to a David Hammons abstract painting covered by a street tarp at Hauser & Wirth in 2019, as published in the book at the exact moment I wondered.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The H&W installation photos that fill most of the second half of the 404-page book pick up the handwritten labels and instructions that punctuated the show.
“Yes you may turn the page” of the artist’s proof of The Holy Bible: Old Testament, Hammons’s epic 2002 artist book that rebound the Duchamp catalogue raisonné to look like scripture
And when I hit this spread about 80% of the way through, I felt like the book was literally reading my mind, or, less supernaturally, that I was being taken through the show—and decades of work—by the artist himself.
Not that I’d expect Hammons to just say how many abstract paintings he’s covered with how many street tarps. And when I went back through to count, I had to decide whether to include paintings with metal panels affixed. And what about other things draped or covered with tarps or metal plates? And what about the Kool-aid paintings, where the covers feel less found? Anyway, I’d say there were at least thirty in the book, but it also sinks in that they’re in almost every installation shot, somewhere.
As for The Holy Bible: Old Testament, I’d wondered, since the times I’ve seen it exhibited it was on a lectern or a prie dieu and practically commanded personal devotion. But in LA it was naked on a pedestal.
Anyway, at this point, if you hear someone calling Hammons elusive or mysterious, it just means they haven’t put in the time to look at the bounty the artist has laid before us.
Sturtevant, Fountain, no date, painted plasticine, 7 x 5 x 4 cm, at Thaddeus Ropac Milan
Sturtevant was using the work of Marcel Duchamp from almost the beginning of her public career in the 1960s, so this kawaii, undated, Bôite-en-Valise-size [but Stieglitz photo-shaped] plasticine Fountain could have been from anytime, really. Or anytime before 1997, when it appears in a collage of Stieglitz-style photos and distorted photocopies.
Sturtevant, Duchamp Untitled, 1997, photo and lasercopy collage on paper, 33.5 x 29 cm, via Thaddeus Ropac Milan
People were talking about Josh Kline’s essay on artists crushed by the economics of the art world in New York. A review of the Whitney Biennial lamented the children of Cameron Rowland. But the press release for SoiL Thornton’s show at Swiss Institute feels like the most visceral and vital documentation of the state of the art at this dire, resilient but, again, dire moment:
Upon entering the gallery, viewers encounter realization suppression / Rihanna_work.mp3 (2026), a large-scale video installation composed of digital rips from YouTube recordings of 79 artist lectures and interviews, excerpted at the moment when the speaker says the word “work.” Each instance corresponds to an utterance of the word in Rihanna’s 2016 hit single Work, with every clip slowed by the same percentage. “Work” hovers between effort and object, verb and noun, insistence and refrain. Through its rhythmic accumulation, the cadence of the pop anthem becomes legible even as the meaning of the references to labor or the art it manifests dissolves. The video is projected onto an existing film setup left in place from the previous exhibition, an “assist.” These remains are used as is. Support is neither neutral nor hidden.
Adjacent to the projection, a framed wall piece assembles documents from the artist’s recent eviction proceedings, including the initial notice and records of its resolution. It also includes email correspondence with the exhibition’s curator, a signed agreement with Swiss Institute, and a kitchen dish towel acquired when Thornton moved into their apartment ten years ago. Production funds for the exhibition were, in part, directed toward eviction relief, collapsing distinctions between the work and the conditions that sustain it.
Dried lavender, associated with relaxation and calming, spreads across the gallery floor in a quantity indexed to the curator’s weight. Its scent lingers as the form is broken down; soiled, tracked and redistributed underfoot by visitors. Nearby, a transparent inflatable structure contains the artist’s mattress and bedding. The bed is both protected and displaced, evoking temporary shelter while staging rest as something deferred.
You know what else overwhelms and triggers sensitivities? Realizing that diverting exhibition budget by reusing the previous show’s setup to thwart an artist’s eviction, and exhibiting the documentation, in a gallery amply funded by the arts program of another nation is truly the kind of art experience that can only happen in New York.
I’ll let Horace D. Ballard’s positively vibrating review of MONUMENTS and his description of filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s installation, The Warden (2025) speak for itself. Just google him and Vindicatrix.
Vindicatrix, which slipped right by me when I read Carolina Miranda’s earlier piece in the NY Review of Books, maybe because my brain was overloaded by her take on Kara Walker’s “aberrant chimera” of a de-reconstructed Stonewall Jackson sculpture at The Brick. Miranda’s description of the Lost Cause, though, it sticks with me as I think about Smith, and about Vindicatrix: “Walker’s surgical reimagination of the Jackson statue instead dismantles the pleasing aesthetics of white supremacy to reveal the ugliness within: the disfiguring myth of the Lost Cause, which has papered over the racist cornerstones of the Confederacy with romanticized stories about sacrifice and bravery.”
I can’t find a video of her whole conversation, but the student paper at Occidental gives an account of Smith’s explanation of The Warden, made with and around Vindicatrix, a decommissioned idealized female allegorical statue from Richmond symbolizing confederate vengeance: “I really had problems with the way her beauty was always discussed in the description of the statue…and I thought that we should be denied some kind of access to her, or that she should be denied the power to project that beauty.”
From both Miranda and Ballard’s accounts, I think The Warden succeeds most fully as an in-person experience—I haven’t seen the show irl. But it’s Smith’s attunement to the weaponization of beauty and how it resonates with the disfiguring myth that haunts me right now.
Marcel Duchamp [& Alison Knowles], Color Swatch, 1968, screenprint, 7 ½ x 5 ¾ in., unique, selling at Christie’s in May 2026
When this little Duchamp was sold at Grisebach in 2016, it was, Untitled (from Coeurs Volants), and Alison Knowles was only listed in the provenance.
It’s a color test for the Something Else Press screenprint edition of Coeurs Volant, a collage Duchamp made for Christian Zervos which was printed on the cover of Cahiers d’Art in 1936. Printed and signed in the spring of 1968 before the Duchamps left New York for Spain, it turned out to be the last work Duchamp put out before his death on October 2nd. [Obviously there was Étant Donnés, and he did make some 3D drawings of a fireplace in the house in Cadaqués, but the point here is, on the ground in NYC, it seemed like his last work.]
Andy Warhol’s Marcel Duchamp Coeurs Volants, 1968, 24 x 18 in. framed? ed. 11/24, sold at Rago in 2022
Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts) (1967) -> 15 x 22″ Silk Screen on Black Coloraid Paper Alphabet Edition of Twenty Four. Color Swatch, 4 x 5″ Silk Screen on Black Coloraid Paper by Alison Knowles signed by Marcel Duchamp. Collection Wolfgang Feelisch, Remscheid
Through Daniel Spoerri, the Something Else Press arranged to meet Marcel Duchamp. This screen print was preceeded by a four by five color swatch showing two circles one red, one blue. He selected this color swatch one day while we are having tea at his tenth street apartment in New York. There were eleven color swatches, each showing blue and red circles but in different intensities. He selected one and lefted it out on table saying “Oh, that’s it.” I put the others in my brief case and we kept talking. Teeny Duchamp walked by the table, saw the color swatch and said “MARCEL, when did you do this?” He asked for a pencil, smiled and signed the color swatch. This color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade! I kept this little swatch for about a year and then sold it to a collecter in Remsheid. Richard Hamilton, to whom I gave a copy of a final print, called this work a piece of memorabilia, not a readymade. Duchamp died the following year but I am sure he would have agreed. I like the story very much because it describes the process as important as the product according to a master.
Which, a lot going on here, starting with Richard Hamilton of all people being kind of a bitch about Duchamp memorabilia, especially after getting a copy of the print. But they’re both not wrong, and I’m sure Duchamp would have approved of the mess.
I don’t think I’m so into Knowles’ takeaway from the story, though I am very interested in what she took away from the meeting, namely the other ten other color swatches that she made, and Duchamp touched but didn’t sign. That Duchamp memorabilia sets my heart aflutter.
But let’s put all that aside and conjure up in our minds the world inside the sentence, “the color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade!”
