THE
DAYS
OF
THIS
SOCIETY
IS NUMBERED
and unless we do something about it, that number is 250.
Country Over Party Cup
Amy Sillman on John Chamberlain, Michael Kimmelman on Bouffants
It seems like everyone who’s written about John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures since has quoted Amy Sillman discussing them, but all I can say is, it is not enough. Sillman has published her notes for a 2012 gallery talk on Chamberlain at the Guggenheim [pdf], but she also spoke about Chamberlain in 2008 as part of Dia’s Artists on Artists series, and that video is online, and the whole thing is fascinating.
She puts the foam sculptures squarely in—and ahead of—much of the development of process art in the post-minimalist 1960s. They’re just one example of Chamberlain making very current/advanced new bodies of work that get largely ignored by the subsequent leaders who emerge. And she goes broad and deep and long on Chamberlain’s experience at Black Mountain College and the influence of its director, poet Charles Olson.
But the money shot has to be when she quotes Michael Kimmelman on Chamberlain, who worked throughout the 1950s as a hairdresser, in the NYT in 2003: “The connection between his sculptures and bouffant hairdos is an unexplored avenue of art historical inquiry.”
[It’s not clear from Kimmelman’s review that the bouffant idea doesn’t come from dealer Allan Stone’s text for the show, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s a very Kimmelman thing to pick up on.] And it doesn’t spoil Sillman’s punchline to repeat it here as screenshots
Der Schwerbelastungskörper und Die Schwerbelastungskörperaussichtsplattform
So a nazi-aping fascist’s monomaniacal proposal to build an arch on swampy riverfront is in the news. In 1941 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer got approval to build a giant triumphal arch on a main axis of a redesigned Berlin, and quickly built the Schwerbelastungskörper, or heavy load-bearing structure, to test the ability of the marshy soil to support such a ridiculously large structure. It was built with forced labor from captured French soldiers.
The Heavy Load-Bearing Structure is a cylindrical pressure body made of solid concrete 14 meters high, with a diameter of 21 meters. Its 11-meter diameter concrete base extends 18 meters deep. The 12,650 ton weight was calculated to approximate one of the arch’s four base legs.
The war diverted resources and attention from the arch and the redesign of Berlin, and the HLBS was left behind. Scientists and soil management technicians used the structure for data collection until 1983—postwar analysis showed the ground was too soft to have supported Hitler’s arch without major intervention, btw. And it became a historical monument in 1995, “the only tangible example of National Socialist urban planning.”
Now there is a visitor information center, monthly tours, and a Schwerbelastungskörperaussichtsplattform, a Heavy Load-Bearing Structure Viewing Platform, which looks exactly like what a visitor center for a useless nazi concrete plug should look like.
Chopped Artemisia Gentileschi Is The Opposite Of Chopped
This epically chopped painting of Mary Magdalen passed through at least one generation of heirs and two collections before ending up at auction at Dorotheum, in Vienna. It has been attributed to Artemisia since at least 2011. Its relationship to the nearly identical Mary Magdalen which has been in the Pitti Palace since 1914 has surely been recognized for longer.
Through it all, this damaged painting survived, “rolled up in a cellar.” The circumstances “remain unclear,” Dorotheum says, but the painting was damaged in “an incident most probably linked to the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin.” Does that mean there’s a chance the head and bust of the Magdalen will turn up some day in some Allied veteran’s cellar? Does buying this incomplete painting include any claim on the head, should it turn up, or do the heirs of Alfred Berliner get to sell it twice?
I love this so much. This has rocketed to the top of both my Artemisia Gentileschi list and my painting of a woman in yellow with the center cut out list.
Lot 70, 28 Apr 2026, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Magdalen, a fragment, est. EUR120-150,000 [dorotheum, h/t kottke]
The Chinati Chamberlain Foam Conservation Project
It’s [checks watch] and the world has not yet ended. So to take our minds off of the calamities, let’s return to the state of John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures, which are all disintegrating irreversibly.
In 2005 Marianne Stockebrand organized the first show of the foam sculptures at Chinati. Rejected by the market and largely unknown, Stockebrand tracked down 30 of the 84 then known. Most were made in 1966-67, and a few more through 1981. I’ve seen the number 100 mentioned since. “Chamberlain looped cord or rope around a bunch of plain or painted urethane foam,” Christopher French wrote in Glasstire in 2006. “Tightening the cord, Chamberlain created all manner of dynamic tension, which he occasionally heightened by further cutting or tinting. The result is a fluid, intuitive origami that transforms a quotidian industrial material into evocative abstractions.”
“They have a playfulness and immediacy, and seem necessarily related to the human body, and somewhat sexual,” Gavin Morrison wrote more frankly for the Nasher, which received the 1970 sculpture on the cover of the Chinati catalogue. Chamberlain knew they wouldn’t last. “The only factor in this that people might shudder at in terms of maintenance is the fact that it deteriorates faster than cell tissue. The material evokes a relativity, so that humans reject it if it deteriorates faster than they do.”
Continue reading “The Chinati Chamberlain Foam Conservation Project”Soderbergh On Art, Bloggers
So you’re telling me Steven Soderbergh’s taut new thriller stars Ian McKellen as the once-great painter and Michaela Coel as “a respected fine art blogger”? I am seated, as they say. I am simply too seated.
Matt Zoller Seitz’s exciting review of The Christophers sent me to find the trailer, which seems fine and taut, but frankly, a little bit trailery.
The post-screening conversation with McKellen and screenwriter Ed Solomon, which took place Monday evening, at Lincoln Center, however, is good. McKellen invokes painters like Hockney, Freud, and Bacon when discussing his character Julian Sklar, who’d made it big in the art world of 60s London. He talked, too, about Soderbergh being a POV character in the film, just one of the many exceptional aspects of his production method. Solomon discussed the crucial decision to not really show too much of the unfinished masterworks at the heart of the plot. [Artnet had some chats with the artists who painted the props.]
NEON, the film’s distributor, as experience with emotionally turbulent films that revolve around paintings, having distributed Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019. But that Artnet piece reveals we are on the precipice of a week of astroturfed art-based PR, and I am wary. Little more than an hour from now, a panel of the film’s principals will convene at Sotheby’s HQ, “one of New York’s most significant spaces at the intersection of art, architecture, and the art market,” moderated by Andrew Goldstein. “RSVPs are subject to approval.”
The campaign moves Friday from the Breuer frying pan to the Fyre Festival of art spaces, WSA, Water Street Associates, the former AIG headquarters supposedly transformed into a low-rent, high-luxe creative hub. Sir Ian will be interviewed by Jerry Saltz. Solomon will talk with Ajay Kurian who will also moderate the evening’s climax: a panel on artist-assistant dynamics with Ian Cheng, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Martine Syms.
The only thing left is Steven Soderbergh talking about his own painting. So far, that is not on the agenda.
Sonya Clark’s Unraveling: The Work Is The Work
When I saw Sonya Clark’s Unraveling (2015) at Duke’s Nasher Museum a few years ago, I did not know she started the project of unraveling a confederate flag on April 9th, 2015, the 15oth anniversary of the confederacy’s surrender.
And I did not know until just now, while making this post inspired by Michael Lobel’s Bluesky post about Unraveling and Unraveled, the work where the flag has been reduced to three piles of red, white, and blue thread, that Unraveling is from an edition of 10, and that the Nasher’s is listed as “State: 4.”
And I love that the Nasher’s collection photo of the work is of people doing the work of unraveling. And if “State: 4” is a measure of how far along the flag is at the moment, fine. But I really hope the edition is not ten flags in various artful states of unraveling, depending on how not racist your acquisitions committee thinks they are.
Sonya Clark, Unraveling and Unraveled [sonyaclark]
Jasmine Gregory, What’s In Your Bag
Saw this on the ‘gram this morning and the title of this blog post popped into my mind. Zurich-based Jasmine Gregory’s work felt based in Zurich, luxury institutional critique from the inside, or the aftermath. There’s something more enticingly abject going on here, though, in these plastic bags of stuff hanging forlornly on the wall. She calls them bundles, and the ones on Karma International’s website are just described, opaquely, as mixed media.
But the ones Gregory put in a 2024 group show at Sentiment, including Bundle No. 12 above, include a painting among the disposable flotsam of plastic, packaging, ribbons and wire. The context for painting is shiny, manufactured, and attractive, but also garbage. I am still trying to figure out if they work better by virtue of seeming more unsellable, or is that just going another layer deeper in the critique.
If you’re in Warsaw, you can see how they do in an art fair. Karma [Zurich] will be showing in Constellations 2026, the galleryshare thing this weekend. [constellations.pl]
Sol LeWitt Was Here
Looking into a 1989 etching this morning led me to the Sol LeWitt Prints Catalogue Raisonné, which is great. It’s one of three postwar print CRs produced by Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston. [The other two are for Mel Bochner and Fred Sandback.]
Which is where I saw Windows, a 1980 photogrid LeWitt made as an edition by mounting 72 snapshots onto museum board, 25 times. The example Krakow Witkin has [ed. 15/20] still includes the pencil marks for mounting, which makes them feel like a carefully constructed collage object more than a traditional print. If only I’d made it up to Craig Starr’s show of Phong Bui and LeWitt last summer, I could have seen Windows in person.
LeWitt used photography more than it might seem. Edweard Muybridge’s time and motion studies were an early part of LeWitt’s engagement with seriality. And he made artist books with photos, including some incredible photos of the variations of sunlight on a rough brick wall outside his window that feel like gritty urban Monets. Some books make the SLPCR, but not this one, I guess. Anyway, point is, photographs.
I’d thought of Brick Walls because of how LeWitt’s photos of light on brick captured a sense of space, which an earlier photo book/series Stone Walls (1975) doesn’t. Because while it first appears as just found typology, Windows actually conjures a sense of place. Seeing all the arches in a jpg, I just assumed LeWitt had been shooting lofts in SoHo. But that is not at all what’s going on.
A closer look at the signage shows LeWitt’s photos are from Thailand, specifically Phuket. Place was not something I usually associate with LeWitt’s work—at least not before some highly site- and context-specific works here.
[Now I’m racking my brain to remember which artist had compiled a massive archive of photographs in various typologies and grids, was it the TIME LIFE project Mungo Thompson did?]
Anyway, like learning a new word, I started to see references to place in LeWitt’s work where I’d least expected it. Or at least this once, on another fascinating but atypical-seeming print. Rectangles of Color (Prato) is a woodcut from 1994 that, tbh kind of gives the game away by having a place in the title. It turns out to be an edition published by the Museo Pecci in Prato, Italy, in conjunction with their 1993 commission of a wall drawing for their lobby.
Seeing the print first was baffling, but then I realized it includes the doorways in the museum’s curved wall. I’d imagine many of LeWitt’s wall drawings have similar site-specific characteristics, but none of them had souvenir prints. And the wall drawings catalogue raisonné is $600 for a single login, plus $60/year.
Isa Genzken MoMA T-Shirt
My apologies, Ms. Genzken, I did not recognize your merch game.
When I snapped this MoMA t-shirt at the Daniel Buchholz show, I assumed it had been just some merch, or one of the museum’s Uniqlo collabs, readily findable. But so far there is no trace.
Is it a mockup? A prototype? The credit format throws me. It feels like, which party would put “©ARS, New York” like that?
The photo of the sculpture, Rose II (2007), is MoMA-specific. The highlights of the morning light hitting the painted highlights of the rose petals and leaves matches MoMA’s own image of the work installed at the west end of the Sculpture Garden. [If it’s the same edition, from November 2010 until August 2013, it was on the facade of the New Museum, which dated it as 2008.]
The t-shirt obviously cropped out the sculpture’s base. Interestingly, the base was also edited out of the photo on this 2019 MoMA postcard [ganked from ebay, not important now]. Which also clumsily cloned out the reflection of the base from the black glass wall of the porch.
In any case, before I get too far into conceptual bootleg territory, I’d like to figure out what this actually was. It’d be sick to make an intensely artisanal, 15-color screenprint, only to find out the shirt was Uniqlo junk.
Lichtenstein Bomb Loving
In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein was one of over 400 artists who submitted a 2×2-ft artwork to be installed on Mark di Suvero’s Artists’ Tower of Protest, an anti-Vietnam war pop-up monument which was installed on a vacant lot on the corner of Sunset and La Cienaga in LA. The Peace Tower, as it came to be called, was criticized and attacked, and when the owner of the lot refused to extend the Artists’ Protest Committee’s three-month lease, the Tower was dimantled, and the paintings were sold off, wrapped in brown paper, in an anonymous fundraiser.
Though no museum wanted the Peace Tower itself, Lichtenstein’s painting, Atom Burst, of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb, found its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth by 1968. For some reason they don’t have a photo of it online, but Pioneer Works does. [Me, I signed away all proceeds from selling my blood plasma and my second born child to the Lichtenstein Foundation when I clicked on the painting’s Google result. At this point it’d probably be less hassle to post an Alamy stock photo of it.]
Meanwhile, I guess Roy liked the mushroom cloud enough to make another one for himself. Atomic Landscape (1966) stayed in the artist’s family until last year, when the estate sold it for $1.636 million.
It matters that it’s more a seascape. The images of massive mushroom clouds in the ocean, devoid of the devastation a nuclear bomb would wreak on a city, make it look kind of awesome. Lichtenstein only painted a mushroom cloud twice, but he made over 150 artworks of explosions; the man LOVED to interpret a cartoon explosion. One of the last ones he made was an explosion-shaped trophy for the New York State Governors’ Art Award in 1996. [Fun fact: After being asked to make more for 1997, the Lichtenstein Foundation writes that, “The New York State Council on the Arts confirms that the artist then tacitly agreed to have it reproduced annually.”]
Anyway, when the possibility of deranged despots using nuclear weapons in a failing war of belligerence is now not close enough to zero for disinterested discourse, aestheticizing their destructive power seems like a not such a great idea.
COLA WAR IS OVER! if you want it.
My first thought on seeing this Jonathan Horowitz masterpiece turn up at auction in Los Angeles was, “Good luck shipping a 12-by-17-foot artwork across the country in this gas crisis.”
And then I was like, waitaminnit, no problem, each of the 286 Coke and Pepsi cans is on its own individual 13×8 inch canvas; racked and stacked, that’s only 206 cubic feet of art, plus some packaging. That’d fit easily in one van.
But then I thought, “Who wants 145 Pepsi paintings in their house? Not me.” And then it hit me. What if you pulled a Jacob Lawrence Migration Series on this, and split it? One person gets to be MoMA and take all the Pepsis, and the other gets to be Duncan Phillips and take all the Cokes. The Pepsi collector could pay 51% for 145 canvases, and the Coke collector 49% for 141. Or maybe that’s too messy, and you just go 50/50? Obviously, you agree to lend your cans whenever the work is to be shown complete. In the mean time, you each just have a wall of your favorite soda, and only your favorite soda, to keep you company.
And half the canvases could easily fit inside a minivan.
Lot 308, 16 Apr 2026: Jonathan Horowitz, Coke/Pepsi, 2012, est. $6-8,000, staring bid is $100 [lamodern]
Cy Twombly Flower Arrangements
I’ve had the tabs open so long I can’t remember where I heard or from whom, but someone had made a big point about visiting Cy Twombly and seeing a sculpture in a bedroom that had never been seen, in a style that didn’t fit his typical style. It was a tacky plastic flower, painted black, on a rusty rock, on a velvet-covered box, with a plaque like from a bowling trophy.
At first, I remember thinking, really? The 1998 sculpture on the cover of Twombly’s first monograph of photos, published in 2002? But that is a different experience. [Interesting, the sculpture is configured differently in photos inside.]
Continue reading “Cy Twombly Flower Arrangements”ISA USA W54 NYC
The Isa Genzken show at Buchholz has an archival feel interspersed with some bangers. It’s focused on Genzken’s public projects. Actually, no, it’s what it says on the label—Projects for Outside—and so it excludes public commissions like the U-bahn station she did with Richter. And yet there is the OG 1982 World Receiver. And a Kunstverein edition World Receiver further in. And original documentation of her original 1987 World Receiver installation in a music store window. Which counts as a project for outside, I guess? I have to say, the World Receiver in the window of Buchholz’s new space on 54th St is so close to the glass, the only way to photograph it is from outside. So yes. Also, yes, this was the Manolo Blahnik store.
Continue reading “ISA USA W54 NYC”CLR James Wrote About Moby Dick While Imprisoned On Ellis Island
Relistening to Christina Sharpe’s 2023 conversation with David Naimon on Between the Covers led me to the panel Sharpe organized at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Wu Tsang spoke of her silent film adaptation of MOBY DICK, or The Whale, and how she had been inspired to turn to the novel by C.L.R. James’s powerful 1953 essay, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, in which James countered the prevailing postwar literary establishment’s view of Moby Dick as a Cold War fable of Ishmaelian individualism and liberty triumphing over doomed Ahabian totalitarianism with an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist reading of Ahab as an oppressive captain of industry maniacally driving his multinational crew to destruction.
