Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021
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]
Veni, Viðey Vixi
These Afangar Icelandic Series prints were the first Richard Serra prints I ever saw, and they left a deep impression. MoMA hung these rough, craggy prints off the lobby in late 1991, and they felt very much like prints about sculpture, which is something I’d never considered before. But I resolved to get some—which I’ve failed to do, not realizing that they’d sold out long before I knew they existed—and also to visit Afangar, the sculpture in Iceland they related to. Which only took four years.
Holland Cotter Rabkin Interview Dropped A Minute Ago
I got caught up on listening to it pretty quickly last week, but I have been slow to post a link to Holland Cotter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation executive director Mary Louise Schumacher.
Cotter talked about growing up free range in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and picked the Met for his workplace photo. Which after so many years at the Times, is probably the place he’s written about the most.
Cotter and Schumacher did not talk about his donation of the prize money to the the International Association of Art Critics and the Forge Project, to support emerging and Native American arts writing and fellowships, for which mad respect. [As ARTnews notes, the NY Times prohibits its full-time employees from accepting cash awards, and these days a full-time arts writing job is rarer than even the most generous awards.]
2024 Rabkin Foundation Award Recipient Holland Cotter [rabkinfoundation substack]
Genzken Die Welt Passed Me By
The list of things I missed in mid-November 2016 continues to grow. The special issue of Die Welt edited by an artist that year was on 24 November, and the artist was Isa Genzken.
The paper that day only had five stories to use Genzken’s pictures on, and one of them was a feature on the artist herself. Notably, all Genzken’s roughly collaged pictures included photographs of herself, and one included her with her former teacher and husband, Gerhard Richter.
For his Die Welt guest edit in October 2012, Richter included many travel-related snapshots, and few images of his artworks—among them pictures of his third student and wife Sabine Moritz.
But this, I knew. The advertiser pitch deck for this year’s edition gave the whole rundown, most of which I also missed. From Baselitz, Rauch, Sherman and Schnabel to Koons, Wool, Murakami, Grosse and Kiefer, it’s enough to fill a private museum. The 2024 edition was two weeks ago. Tracey Emin, which I missed.
Maybe Genzken’s newspaper actually goes on a separate, shorter list of things I’m bummed I missed.
This Is Kasper König’s Welt
On October 6, 2011, Munich newspaper Die Welt replaced all the pictures in their daily edition with Ellsworth Kellys. They also published a signed, limited edition reproduction of the front page on archival paper. Which stays brighter longer, which is nice. But it’s only printed on one sheet, on one side. And so it misses the entire point of the project, while replacing it with a picture souvenir.
With this signed, dedicated copy of the actual paper being sold this week, Kelly gave Kasper König the best of both worlds. It was König’s invitation that led Kelly to make his first floor piece, Yellow Curve – Portikus (1990), the work which was re-realized at Glenstone in 2015. I guess they stayed in touch.
Sure König’s Welt already turning yellow, but it’s got eleven other Kellys inside it. And there’s even a recursive version of itself on the back. And Lufthansa knocking off Milton Glaser. AND Amanda Knox.
And again, it’s an actual newspaper, not a picture of one. And that makes all the difference.
02 Oct 2024, Lot 146: Ellsworth Kelly, Die Welt, est EUR1000-1500 [update: sold for EUR5940, which is the most] [vanham]
Previously, related: I Wanna The Kelly Welt, Chico, An Everthinisinnit
Oh right, I saw it in person, and it rocked: Wade’s Welt, Excellent
Dazzle Painting Little Guys
One of the things they never tell you about the WWI dazzle ship painting thing is that it made it hard to tell how big a painting of a dazzle ship is.
I had to dig around in three years worth of National Gallery of Canada Instagram to find an installation image of Edward Wadsworth’s 3-meter tall Dazzleships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). So thank you, @arunprasaad, for your service.
I was wondering why Wadsworth painted this—I was about to say “so big,” but if you’d spent the war painting 2,000 actual ships, 10 feet would seem like a major downsizing. Oh hey, speaking of scale, he put Little Guys with brushes in there.
But I reading the 2015 Liverpool Biennial Journal about Dazzle and its history, I now understand that it was an awarded commission to commemorate the Canadian involvement in the war. And that the Memorial Committe basically said No Modernists, No Cubists. So Wadsworth, determined to revive the pre-war manifesto of the Vorticists, made a naturalistic painting of an abstract painting project.
Meanwhile, there was actually a time when the National Gallery emphasized the scale of their pictures (though tbh, that was partly to use square footage to justify the price they paid for their Barnett Newman.)
Even a couple of years after Wadsworth, Gerald Murphy had no trouble in communicating the scale of his 18 x 12 foot lost masterpiece, Boatdeck (1924):
The scale of which, it must be said, is rather hard to gauge from a picture of the picture alone. I once missed an eBay auction for an old photo of Boatdeck by a day. I’ve been crushed ever since.
Previously, related: A Domestic Proposal: at home with Voice of Fire
What I looked at today: Gerald Murphy; Giant Picasso Painting By Prince Alexander Schervachidze
This It could be Anthony d’Offay
At the New York preview for Christie’s Contemporary Evening Sale in May 1999, Louise Lawler made a photograph of a ghostly male figure with his hands behind his back, in front of Robert Gober’s Crib (1986) and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #48 (1979).
She titled the photo, It could be Anthony d’Offay, wrapping the presence of one of the 20th century art market’s most recognizable and powerful figures with a bit of ambiguity.
1999 turns out to be the period of time when two different women who worked for d’Offay’s gallery in London said he subjected them to repeated, unwanted sexual advances and abuse.
One woman, then 25 and hired in 1998 as d’Offay’s assistant, who received an undisclosed settlement after leaving the gallery in 2000, described her experience on what could even have been the trip photographed by Lawler:
“He started taking me for meetings and appointments outside the gallery. He would hold on to my arm or put his arm around me. I thought it was not quite right, but dared not voice my discomfort,” she said. Her concerns deepened when he informed her that he would like her to accompany him to New York. “That’s when things escalated. He grew more touchy, and would put his hand around my waist, very close to my bum. There was no sense of boundary in respect to personal space.”
This quote, the report of these two women, plus another who complained of sex pestery and professional coercion and retaliation by d’Offay in 2004, were first made public in 2018 by The Guardian. D’Offay denied the accusations.
2018 was when Trevor Traina, the collector who purchased ed. 3/5 of Lawler’s photo, began serving as Donald Trump’s ambassador to Austria. Traina’s grandfather had also been an ambassador to Austria, in the Eisenhower era. His mother Dede Wilsey, a noted San Francisco socialite and longtime Republican donor, famously took control of the deYoung and Fine Arts Museum in 2011, after the director’s death. Traina’s Lawler was exhibited at the FAMSF in 2012, in a show titled, Reel to Reel: Photographs from the Trevor Traina Collection.
Next week Traina is selling 132 works from his collection, including the Lawler, in a single owner sale at Christie’s. “As part of an exciting and innovative partnership,” Christie’s effused, “all lots from this auction will be presented on the blockchain and offered with an associated digital certificate of ownership exclusively included with a Kresus wallet.” Traina is the founder and CEO of Kresus.
Part of the genius of Lawler’s work stems from her sensitivity art’s context, and her ability to capture fleeting moments as it moves through the world. I think it’s hard to imagine another Lawler photo—or another example of this one—accruing as much 21st century history has this one has, even before it got put on the blockchain.