September 2014 Archives

It's taking longer to gather these things together, but I just found another fascinating statement-as-question from the Q&A session of a panel discussion. This time, it's "Fractures of the Civilization," a discussion by composer/philosophers C.C. Hennix and Henry Flynt, along with John Berndt, held in June 2013 at the Goethe Institut in NYC. The talk was organized in conjunction with a realization of Hennix & Flynt's 'The Illuminatory Sound Environment" at ISSUE Project Room.

I've been a fan of Flynt's music for quite a while, but in the last couple of years I've also tried to step up my engagement with his writings, his talks, his ideas. I must say, it's exasperating; there's real genius and groundbreaking thought, action and insight there, but Flynt's a maddening interviewee, and even more frustrating on a panel. My operating theory is that he's been not listened to for so long, he can't but vent. And his views often have that determined, hermetic brittleness of someone who's had to figure out the world and what's wrong with it by himself. His far-ranging intellect and the rapid vigor with which he makes leaps and pronouncements makes it basically impossible for anyone to ask a follow-up question, or to challenge or probe something further.

My hope is that someone smart enough and well-versed enough will go deep with him on the art and music where his contributions are still only feebly understood. Anyway.

ISSUE Project Room's video of the talk is here; the question comes at around 1:19:00:

There's like this thing that I think about sometimes--
oh, thanks [gets mic]
There's this thing that we--about the Cold War, Progress science in the 20th century, there's this fight between the superpowers in order to get to some,
you know, higher place
to prove some sort of animalistic thought
When that fell apart with the end of Communism,
with this idea that,
you know, Capitalism,
Neo-liberalism's gonna go all through the world
people don't have this thing to fight against, as far as this race,
we've kind of--
the science that we have--
the futurism that we've come to
it's very social and helpful,
but it's not the futurism that we had in the 60s and 70s that idea of what we'd be like
now.
So there's this need
or something
for these
you know people,
Futurist Transhumanists,
to fill in this blank area, that's sort of this faith area that I think you're talking about
where,
you know
they're taking this place of--
basically we work more, as humans now
at some point they thought
robots were gonna
DO most of the work
And people were actually worried
what the lower classes are going to do with all their free time.
But apparently, we work more
than we did in the 60s and 70s,
at least in this country.
So there's this, like,
WANT
for
something to happen with futurism,
this futurism that might be based on a science fiction or something, but
essentially these people are running away with it
and it captures people like a relgious-type
experience.
So I just wanted to say
what do you have to say about that?

Previously: 'I'm going to fail,' or Protocols of Participation

installation shot of Richard Prince, "New Portraits," photo: Rob McKeever, via Gagosian 980 Madison

They're getting more attention now because they're on canvas and at Gagosian, but Richard Prince's Instagram Portraits have been circulating for a while. Do we think of them differently then when he was assembling them in the spring and summer? When they were printouts on the floor instead of canvas on the wall? Or when they were $12 a sheet at karma in the Hamptons, or a couple hundred dollars a box at Fulton Ryder's B-List book fair?

As cool as it might be as an object, there's something about that "Manhattan Project Glass" window that just ain't sitting right with me. I will not be bidding.

The Faces of Project Y, detail, assembled by Alex Wellerstein, via nuclearsecrecy.org

But researching it has led me to some absolutely amazing other objects from the dawn of the nuclear age that are well worth pursuing in an artistic context.

Let's start with The Faces of Project Y, by historian Alex Wellerstein. A couple of years ago Wellerstein pulled all the recently declassified ID badge photos from the 1,200+ people who worked on Project Y, the code name for the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project. Then he tiled them up into one giant, 31x40 grid. It's awesome.

That's Richard Feynman smirking in the center of the detail, just above the woman with the Gerhard Richter blur. Wellerstein puts faces to other notable names on his blog, Nuclear Secrecy, and has created some swag coffee cups and other merch with the images on it. A giant print would be nice. But what's needed, clearly, is wallpaper. Rather than lose the 29 folks on the bottom, incomplete row, maybe you could get all the images as individual files, and just let it flow till the wall is full.

I don't know how I missed the extraordinary career and sad story of nuclear sculptor James L. Acord. Thanks to Seth David Friedman for pointing me to Tom Moody's incredible 2001 tale of Acord's rare, realized masterpiece, Monstrance for a Grey Horse. I will keep reading.

Then there is the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, built under the football stadium of the University of Chicago in 1942. To create a sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction, Enrico Fermi and his team embedded uranium balls in a giant, quasi-spherical lattice of 45,000 graphite bricks, which were supported by a lumber grid, which was enclosed by a square, black rubber balloon.

Last year the Dept. of Energy posted photos of CP-1 to flickr, and it was basically Carl Andre's greatest sculpture. Ever.

CP-1 graphit brick at the Atomic Testing Museum, img via flickr user rocbolt's CP-1 photo album

At least four of the graphite bricks are known to survive. Here's one at Oak Ridge. This photo by Kelly Michals is of the brick at the Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada. I don't know why you couldn't recreate the thing anew. From a window with a dodgy backstory, an untimely death, and a bunch of mug shots, to a nuclear Carl Andre Death Star inside a Kaba'a. These dots practically connect themselves!

Here is a window from the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, USA. It is 3 feet high, 4.5 feet wide, and six inches thick and weighs 1,500 pounds.

I will buy it from someone who bought it from a junkyard in Walla Walla. I will strip it from its casement, except the bottom, where I will install three LEDs. Then I will attach it to an H-shaped base made of 8-inch timbers. I will attach this base to an old wooden cart.

I will take other, smaller windows of leaded glass salvaged from the reactor, which are 16x26 inches, and weigh 800 pounds, and I will carve some of them into sculptures. I will polish some large shards of this glass into abstract sculptures.

I will carve one piece into the shape of a mushroom cloud. I will set these sculptures on a basalt column mined from the reactor site. I will carve two pieces into spheres.

Someone will cut other pieces of this glass into an indeterminate number of 2-inch cubes. Someone else will carve one piece of this glass into a 1.5-inch skull.

I will try to sell as much of this stuff as I can through a booth at the Mineral & Fossil Co-op in Tucson. I will sell a 4-inch diameter sphere for $10,000 and a shard sculpture for $48,000 at Bonham's.

The next year, I will show more shards and the mushroom cloud and the big window at the Mineral & Fossil Co-op in Tucson. Where no one buys the mushroom cloud 'curiosity' for $150,000. I will fail to sell the mushroom cloud for $100,000 at auction.

The next year, I will try to sell the big window on the trolley at auction for $150,000-250,000.

The Internet will explode. Yet no one will ask why, if the windows from the Manhattan Project were 16x26 inches, and this one is 36x54 inches, it is not actually from the Manhattan Project, but maybe from any other period of the Hanford site's five-decades of operation, when its nine reactors and five large-scale plutonium processing complexes produced most of the plutonium for the 60,000+ weapons in the US nuclear arsenal.

And no one will ask why, if the glass is not actually radioactive or contaminated in some other way, even though it was salvaged from one of the most toxic sites on the planet, one of the first EPA Superfund sites [pdf], where specialized crews of hundreds of people spend five years dismantling structures containing such windows in ways that don't dislodge even a flake of plutonium-laden paint, to the cost of $150 billion and counting, with decades still to go, maybe it wasn't installed in a reactor? Maybe it was parts? Maybe there's any documentation or provenance information at all regarding this glass's actual historical use?

And certainly no one will ask about the downwinders of Hanford, and the soldiers and employees and their families, who have suffered from birth defects and cancer for the entire span of the nuclear age, and who have faced stonewalling, footdragging, and abrogation from the government and the military.

A blogger looking at this situation, who was initially drawn to the window because of its resemblance to minimalist sculpture, and its macho-retro-sexiness; and who would then get a little hot and bothered because he has a thing for Cold War-era spheres; and who knows his way around an auction, who would probably start digging. And then he would try to piece the story together, and try to get into the mind of the people involved. And it would keep him up late, when he was supposed to be doing other work. And then in the morning he would decide that the whole thing is screwy from top to bottom, and makes absolutely no sense at all, and what is going on with our world and history and politics and people and money.

Untitled (Muji Tote), 2014, 19.5 x 12 x 1, acrylic on muslin

It's been brewing for a long time, basically every time I see that painting it sticks to me like the smell of a campfire.

It really should be a product, a utility, an it bag for real men, no matter what part of Brooklyn they're traversing.

But it never comes out right. No one will print right to the edge, and it really must be printed right to the edge. It could be screenprinted, but my queue's pretty stacked right now. Printable heat-transfer paper frankly doesn't do it justice.

image from The Internet

Wouldn't you know, Kanye and Condo had the answer: just paint the damn thing. Which is a hard thing to accept sometimes. For some people. Who don't, as a rule, paint. Anyway, here we are.

My favorite part of the whole thing now is that Muji Tote could translate into Anonymous Death. So even though there's only one, and Kimye get first dibs on it [the 24hr clock starts ticking when I hit publish, get your 2nd holds ready], this really is for everyone.

From the moment it launched, I've been trying to figure out what the Google Art Project would look like in real life, what the relationship is between the physical world we inhabit and the spaces and objects we encounter and the digitized pano simulacrum of Google Street View.

What would these blurred Picassos at MoMA look like IRL? Or these pano-distorted Kellys, or this blur-encased Noguchi table in Chicago? Or this clock, or table, or borrowed bust at the Getty?

Though a few slipped in at the beginning, even a year ago Google seemed conscientious about avoiding or removing images of its Street View crews at work. In the Spring, the Google camera cart and its operator were still being blurred out of panos at the Getty.

Well, now I wonder if Google's wondering about itself. This morning Google Art Project tweeted these panos from the Votive Hall of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and I swear, I've never seen a more Google Mapsian space in my life.

The lighting, the reflectivity, perspectival polygons in the air, the glass vitrines with text stenciled on them, little placards floating on wiry stands, the crispy way these matte-finish urns get backlit by the vitrines and end up looking like digital renders of themselves. And then holy crap, what is this thing in the doorway? Now it's like they're just trolling us. Us and Dan Graham.

Google Maps is not hiding anymore; it's taking selfies. And it's remaking the world in its own image. Googleforming.

Click the arrow, come on in.

Turn around, look back, see where we were. Where you were. Where we were.

Getty Museum View, or Seeing Google Seeing
Man With A Pano Camera

hello, new headshot

I wish I could be there right now, for the opening, but I'm stoked to announce the inclusion of some work in a group exhibition at Glitch Gallery in Charlestown, Massachusetts titled, "Challenging the law without infringing the law." The show is curated by Primavera Di Filippi, and includes Brian Dupont, Sara Hendren, Esmerelda Kosmatopoulos, Kofhschlag, and Sara Newman & Matthew Battles.

The show is the first time that Untitled (300x404), a project I began in 2009, is being exhibited IRL. The work's original is a 300x404px jpg image of a Richard Prince Cowboy photo, but the most widely known manifestation is the print edition published by 20x200.com. [Which is once again available, btw, in limited numbers.]

If you're in or near Charlestown, I hope you'll check out the show.

Glitch Gallery Exhibit 005 -- Challenging the law without infringing the law, opens Sept 20, 2014 [glitchmonster.com]

Untitled (happy place), 2014, 15.5x11 in., digital print on glossy stock, ed. 25+5AP, $100, shipped.

From Robert Smtihson & Mel Bochner's "The Domain of The Great Bear" to Gerhard Richter and Ellsworth Kelly's special editions of Die Welt, I've been interested print as art. A couple of years ago Printed Matter turned up a big stack of Inserts, a tabloid-sized portfolio of full-page artworks by the members of Group Material. The Public Art Fund helped the collective produce 90,000 copies, which were inserted in the Sunday New York Times on May 22, 1988, and distributed downtown and in Greenpoint/Bushwick. [even then.] A few turned up at Printed Matter a couple of years ago.

Group Material member Julie Ault recalled that they'd negotiated for nearly a year with the NY Daily News, but that when they submitted the artworks, they were rejected "on the basis that 'it wasn't art it was editorial.'" That tension or ambiguity is one of the things I like most; it upsets a seemingly small but persistent expectation.

I also love The Art Newspaper's art fair editions, reported and published on the spot every day. And when I saw this page from this summer's Art Basel paper, it seemed like an almost perfect object. It includes an excerpt from TAN editor-at-large Georgina Adams' book, Big Bucks: The Explosion in the Art Market in the 21st Century which, like so much of the page, provides a salient, vital picture of the moment.

It's taken me a little while to get it just right, but I am pleased to present Untitled (happy place) as a print in an edition of 25, with 5 artist proofs. It is digitally printed on gloss stock, handstamped and numbered, and measures 15.5 x 11 inches. It will ship flat for USD100.

Marseille fixed its Vieux Port for their stint as European Capital of Culture last year, and it turned out pretty great. The biggest win was to pedestrianize it. It's now wide open and full of people.

The flashiest change is the addition of a kind of ridiculous mirror-finish awning on the east end. I guess if you're going to stick a giant awning/pavilion structure on your vast, bare waterfront, you should make it pop, and it does. It actually steals all the attention from what was my favorite element of the port's makeover: these awesome little timber clubhouses that line the north side, along the Quai du Port.

I was ready to move into one on the spot, even before I realized they were designed by Foster + Partners.

One of the quotes that sticks with me from Richard Prince's deposition in Cariou v. Prince:

Q. All right. Now, you say you picked up a book on them?
RP: In -- literally, yes, I picked up a book.
Q. Okay. And that's the Yes Rasta book --
RP: Yes.
Q. -- that we've been talking about, that's in front of you? okay. now, down a few lines you said, But I love the look, comma, and I love the dreads. What did you mean by that?
RP: What do you mean what do I mean by that? I just said it. I love the look and I love the dreads.
Q. What did you love about the look?
RP: I love the way they looked.
Q. How so?
RP: I don't know how to answer that question, how so. I love the way they looked. I mean that's usually I get -- that's how I respond to images.
I think maybe I liked the way that they were so different.
Q. Than what?
RP: Than myself. I don't have dreads. I wish I could. I mean I think that was some of the thinking or some of the -- perhaps it goes back to the girlfriends.The reason why I took the girlfriends is I wanted to be a girlfriend.
I think some of the attraction that I had to some of these people who looked like Rastas in St. Barth, hanging out at the bars, I said to myself, Gee, I wish I could look like that some day.
So if I can't tweet like that maybe I should paint them. Maybe that's a way to substitute that desire. I mean that's the only way I can answer that love question.

JUNE 2015 UPDATE: The Dutch judge ruled in Kreuk's favor, ordering Vo to create "a large and impressive" work as he apparently originally committed to do. There are other conditions and instructions, like, they have to get along and stuff [not kidding]. It's an extraordinary ruling, and while I'm sure Borgias or burghers compelled artists to make stuff in the past, this proposes an almost unprecedented situation for the creation of a contemporary artwork. I'll do a separate post on the matter, I think. Kreuk emailed me to let me know of the judge's decision, reminding me that I had called his suit "folly." I'm happy to be corrected when I'm wrong, but I'm not so sure I was. Winning can still be folly. I do know I'm even happier not to be involved in this mess.

oy, is this a mess, and the reporting about it is not helping. As the English-speaking art world has learned in the last week or so, Dutch collector Bert Kreuk is suing Danh Vo for around EUR900,000 ($US1.2m) for failing to deliver a $350,000 installation commissioned for a show of Kreuk's collection at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague last summer.

The original RTL story [in Dutch] didn't have many details of the case, but it did mention that Kreuk had been criticized for selling 11 works from the exhibition at Sotheby's just weeks after it closed. This translated into artnet's headline calling Kreuk an "art-flipper." Which was apparently worse than losing a $350,000-1.2m Danh Vo, because it was the focus of much of Kreuk's sympathetic q&a with Sotheby's & BLOUIN ArtInfo writer Abigail Esman.

It all seemed rather confusing and odd to me, and frankly, cut and dry, legally, when an artist takes money and then doesn't deliver. Kreuk had also said that "Danh Vo has already been ordered by the courts to finish another, different work in my collection, backed by an immediate due and payable fine of 40,000 euros and 2000 for each day of delay." Which, again, seemed pretty severe, so I wanted to see the actual court documents, to see the facts underlying the various, specific claims Kreuk was making. Fortunately, one of Kreuk's first tweets was a Dutch art law firm's facebook post which linked to the Rotterdam District Court's preliminary finding [Case no. C/10/442131 / HA ZA 14-57, by the way]. And now I am more confused. But I also find some of Kreuk's characterizations inaccurate at best, and I think his lawsuit is folly, and he would be wise to withdraw it.

Shanzhai Gursky 002, 2014, not included in the show

Brian Droitcour and Zanna Gilbert have curated "It Narratives: The Movement of Objects as Information," which just opened at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, Connecticut. The show examines shifting networks, and how artists use the postal system and the web in the production and distribution of artworks.

I am quite pleased to have some pieces included in the show, which runs through November 9.

In addition to some Destroyed Richter Paintings, the show includes a photo from the Shanzhai Gursky project, previously known in less ethnosocioeconomically critical times as Ghetto Gurskys. [Though the pejorative aspects of "ghetto" still apply to the project itself, in a self-critical way, I think the racialist connotations ultimately kill it for me. "Shanzhai" seems a little pluckier and resourceful than I'd originally pictured the series to be, but I really like it.]

The series are somewhat related, in that they both originate in images circulating online. The Destroyed Richter Paintings are made by Chinese Paint Mill and based on jpgs of photos Richter took in his studio before destroying certain paintings. The Shanzhai Gursky photos are produced to the specifications of the original using the highest resolution jpgs I could find in the wild.

In both cases, the web is the source of the image and the site of production for objects which are intended to be experienced in person. For this reason, and also because the show sounds very interesting, and is put together by sharp folks, I would encourage everyone to go see it.

It Narratives: The Movement of Objects as Information, runs from Sept. 5-Nov. 9, 2014, at Franklin Street Works [franklinstreetworks.org]
Previously, related: Ghetto [sic] Gursky
Unrolling Ghetto [sic] Gursky (Rhein) [which, archivists take note, is now titled Shanzhai Gursky 001.]

Remember how, when Christie's tried to sell a Henry Codax painting as being by Jacob Kassay and Olivier Mosset, Kassay issued a statement saying he had nothing to do with the painting, and his "name should not be associated with it"? I don't think Henry Codax got that memo. Because the new, silvery Codax paintings as Martos Gallery look like they're trying to give Kassay a big ol' hug.

Installation shot of Jacob Kassay's 2013 show at The Kitchen titled, interestingly, Untitled (disambiguation)

For an artist who exists only in the pages of a crowdsourced novel, Codax sure keeps busy IRL. There have been multiple shows every year since 2011, and honestly, just look at this detailing; these paintings are not slapdash affairs:

Clearly, Codax knows his way across the surface of a monochrome.

Henry Codax iridescent paintings, at Martos Gallery through Oct 4, 2014 [martosgallery]
Henry Codax at Shoot the Lobster at Gavin Brown

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, image via arthurrogergallery

Hilarie M. Sheets' recent Artnews article on black artists and abstraction includes Howardena Pindell, whose intensive work making paintings by punching out tiny circles in the 1970s triggered this childhood memory:

On a car ride through Kentucky in the 1950s, she and her father, who lived in Philadelphia, stopped at a root-beer stand and were served mugs with red circles on the bottom.

"I asked my father, 'What is this red circle?'" she recalls. "He said, 'That's because we're black and we cannot use the same utensils as the whites.' I realized that's really the origin of my being driven to try to change the circle in my mind, trying to take the sting out of that."

I looked around for examples of such discriminatory dishware, and I haven't found any yet. I wonder what they looked like. The only red dot image I can muster is of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel tea cups, which were supposedly designed to mask ladies' lipstick marks on the rim. I'm going to assume this was not like that.

Were the dishes sold with red circles on them, or did each diner paint them themselves? Is there a folk taxonomy of segregated china and utensils, the racist equivalent of the coded language of hobos? Were they on the bottom, only visible to the waitress, on the side, where everyone could see, or legible only to those who knew? Are they hidden in plain sight in photos of the era?

Do people collect these artifacts, or is it too fraught? Is taking too great an interest suspect, like collecting Nazi dishes or mammy cookie jars? Are these things buried in attics like Japanese-American internment camp objects, too painful to unearth or discuss? Am I just looking without knowing the proper ebay keywords?

While searching, I did come across this: a Pullman Porter's Blanket, at the National Museum of American History.

The standard Pullman blanket in the 20th century was dyed a salmon color, which became almost a trademark of the company. When a blanket became worn or damaged in service, it was assigned to those blankets reserved for porters' use.

This wool blanket in use between the 1930s and the 1950s, was used by African American railroad porters. According to Pullman service rules, a porter's blanket was never to be given to a passenger. Ostensibly to avoid mixing these with the passengers' blankets, the porters' blankets were dyed blue. This was to comply with statutes in the South that dealt with the segregation of blacks and whites.

Here's a salmon-colored Pullman blanket [via collectorsweekly]. I can't see how you could dye this to make the blanket up top. Which means these were dyed at the factory. Am I wrong, textile people?

The Changing Complex Profile of Black Abstract Painters [artnews]
Related: "Segregation," an exhibition of Gordon Parks' photos of the 1950s South, is at Arthur Roger Gallery through Sept. 20 [arthurrogergallery]