December 2014 Archives

Last summer I wrote about discovering Artisoo, a company selling oil paintings of thousands of artists' images on Amazon. "Chinese Paint Mill has appropriated Google Images and put it up for sale on Amazon," I wrote.

Which reminded me of LifeSphere, the Spamerican Apparel botcompany Babak Radboy wrote about that systematically turns every public domain image into every possible Zazzle product.

We have all set our sights way too low.

image via @tomasvh

This week Dutch National Geographic photographer Tomas van Houtryve began posting pictures of iPhone cases featuring a photo of his, which had recently been selected as a Time Magazine photo of the year.

screenshot from pbs.org

PBS reported that NYT photographer Tyler Hicks found iPhone cases for sale featuring several of his images, including dire pics of Ebola patients and Palestinian children being shot by snipers in Gaza:

"Who wants to buy a picture with a dead child on it," said Tomas van Houtryve..."If any human being in the process had seen that, I don't see how it could possibly get through".

By focusing on the laughably limiting category of public domain images, Spamerican Apparel was too timid and deserves to fail. For these Amazon iPhone case sellers copyright's no object, and Google Images is just the start. Cropping is strictly default settings, actual image be damned. Among the 6,324 phone cases offered for sale by Lynn A Carter are hundreds printed with the center of PR photos of various cars. They have descriptions like, "Daly R Martinez NVDWiaj2848OHOgq Case Cover Iphone 5c Protective Case Alfa Romeo Giulietta 36." Daly R Martinez is another Amazon seller. The string is a product ID, different from Amazon's ASIN. Then there is product + the data that was scraped with the image. SEO enough for Amazon.

They really do just grab any damn image at all. Like this, LvukQDp7415hnQVt Snap On Case Cover Skin For Iphone 6 Plus(kerry Washington). It's a red carpet photo from October 2013. There are nearly 300 other Kerry Washington phone covers like this.

L to R: "Corner Blocked Kitchen With Stainless Countertops Sleek White Cabinets"; "Kitchen Peninsula With Quartz Countertop In Kitchen"; "Eclectic Kitchen With Artistic Pendant Lights" iphone cases

My favorites so far have to be the kitchens. The scrapers have found Pinterest, and have turned it into iPhone covers. Here's the one on the right, on a Pinterest board called "Junk Ideas." Scrapers are turning the great image vortex of our digital ocean into an actual island of plastic garbage on demand. Who are these people?

I will wager they are not the people listed on Amazon, but more digital simulacra. Searching for the sellers turns up a Chinese-language website run on a free .tk domain which is used to manage case returns for various Amazon IDs. Poking around the domain also turns up a quick&dirty Amazon upload management dashboard. It looks to me like a Chinese case manufacturer is flooding Amazon with hundreds or thousands of bogus sellers, each with thousands of scraped data-derived products. That award-winning photographers' images and names got scraped as well should come as no surprise.

What Amazon will do about this vast, digital garbage dump of a retail offering is not clear. Maybe this is just the way it's going to be from now on, every image always available on every product. Maybe we will adapt to Scraper Capitalism by becoming Sifters, consumers attuned to the surreal moments, the horrific, the sublime, the sea glass and driftwood of the web. We'll develop tools for surfacing them, and critical faculties for appreciating them. If we do, Amazon will have them, just 1-Click away.

Jasper Johns Blue Ceiling, 1955, 12x10 feet [!], image: postermuseumblog

How did I miss this? Just a week after I posted about Matson Jones' hand-painted plaster melons and pomegranates, poster dealer Philip Williams revealed an incredible Matson Jones find: a set of cyanotype/photograms titled Jasper Johns Blue Ceiling.

Each of the four panels depicts an underwater scene featuring a male figure holding a trident, or with a Trojan-style helmet; the only figure not in profile has pointy, Sub-Mariner-style ears. They're all signed "Matson Jones" in the image, and apparently, the title, which is apparently a reference to Johns's bedroom, is written on the back in what Andy Warhol said was Robert Rauschenberg's handwriting. They surfaced in the 1980s from the office of Gene Moore, the guy who commissioned Matson Jones [the commercial pseudonym of Rauschenberg & Johns] to create window displays for Bonwit Teller. The prints were apparently a backdrop for a window made in 1955.

Rauschenberg & Weil making a blueprint photogram, 1951, LIFE Mag via tate

Rauschenberg, of course, had made and shown similar photograms with his wife Susan Weil. She [or a model] would lie on the photosensitive paper in a composition, and he'd swing a lamp around her, Pollock-style, to make the image. [MoMA has one.] Weil kept making photograms after their divorce, but I never realized they shared joint custody of the technique. Or that Rauschenberg would use it with his next model--and that's the question here, I guess: is that Johns?

Who else could it be, right? And if it wasn't Johns in 1955, it certainly was in 1962. These 1-to-1 scale photograms make me think of Johns's Study for Skin drawings, which he made by pressing his oiled up face and hands against a sheet of drafting paper, then rubbing it out with charcoal. Richard Serra owns a full-body Johns Skin job from 1975, too, so it's not like he gave it up.

Jasper Johns, Study for Skin I, 1962, image via nga

There's also Rauschenberg's large-scale, 1968 print triptych Autobiography, and though it's a stretch across time, the shadows remind me of Johns's landmark Seasons paintings and prints of 1986-7, which all feature the artists' shadow.

Jasper Johns The Seasons print series from ULAE

Connecting Johns's imprint of the body to Rauschenberg's--and Weil's--photogram process would be interesting enough; but these photograms also connect Matson Jones' production more directly to the art practices of Johns and Rauschenberg.

It does not feel great to not be the first to make this connection. In a Feb. 1959 column in Arts Magazine that is a master class of insiderish gay-bashing, Hilton Kramer denigrated Johns and Rauschenberg as "visual publicists" working in the commercial art "gutter":

Rauschenberg, for example, is a very deft designer with a sensitive eye for the chic detail, but the range of his sensibility is very small -- namely, from good taste to "bad"...Frankly, I see no difference between his work and the decorative displays which often grace the windows of Bonwit Teller and Bloomingdale's. The latter aim to delight the eye with a bright smartness, and Rauschenberg's work differs from them only in 'risking' some nasty touches. Fundamentally, he shares the window dresser's aesthetic to tickle the eye, to arrest attention for a momentary dazzle...Jasper Johns too is a designer...Johns, like Rauschenberg, aims to please and confirm the decadent periphery of bourgeois taste.

Which is why Williams' post of what "may very well be the only known surviving Matson Jones work," is unsettling. It ends with this shoutout, "Today, Friday May 15th, is Jasper Johns' 84th birthday. From everyone here at Philip Williams Posters Happy Birthday Mr. Johns!" Almost as if they were inviting the artist--who has a penchant for destroying early work that doesn't necessarily fit his preferred narrative--to buy it back. Frankly, they belong in a museum. If there is a museum bold enough to take them.

Jasper Johns Blue Ceiling by Matson Jones [postermuseumblog]

I don't see or think about it nearly enough, but I've been fascinated by Lorser Feitelson's 1936 collaged photo/painting Life Begins for years. 1936! LACMA acquired it in 1996.

Feitelson's later, post-war, hard-edge abstraction gets much more attention than the 1930s "Post-surrealist" works, which generally makes sense. Something like Life Begins is just so unusual is almost doesn't fit into that bucket, either. But seeing images of it again recently made me wonder just what is going on here. I can't find almost anything written about it, except Steve Roden's discussion of it in the LA Times a few years ago: "On some days it feels as hermetic as 'outsider art,' and on others it seems the most experimental painting he ever made. I've been visiting this work for 25 years, and I still don't understand it. I really love that."

Which, it's nice to know it's not just me who loves it, and who's baffled by it.

The basics:Life Begins is oil and collage on a shaped masonite panel around two feet square. The painted elements are the blue space, which often gets called a sky, and a half peach and pit on a small plate. The collage elements are two black&white photographs, or close to it, of a doctor holding a newborn baby, cropped to preserve the caption, which gives the work its title; and an astronomical feature.

The "Life Begins" photo in Life Begins is easy enough to source: it's the first photo printed in the first issue of LIFE Magazine, which began publication on November 23, 1936. [That means Life Begins was not in the Post-Surrealism show Feitelson organized for himself, his wife Helen Lundeberg, and other California-based artists at the Brooklyn Museum in May 1936. And it wasn't among the Feitelsons included in Alfred Barr's Fantastic Art, Dada & Surrealism show at The Museum of Modern Art in November 1936.]

The other element has taken more time to track down. When they describe it at all, most sources have called it a photo of a solar flare. But it's not. While solar flares were being observed along with sunspots, on the face of the sun, there was no technology capable of photographing a solar flare like that in the 1930s. The only online source to identify the image correctly was a letter from an MD/amateur astrophotographer of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which had used Feitelson's painting on their cover in 2004. It is a detail of the Western Veil Nebula (NGC 6960) in the constellation Cygnus.

We are very used to such images now, but in 1936, there were very few observatories capable of producing such a photo. The scientific understanding of nebulae, and of the universe itself, was in flux. It was only in 1924 that Edwin Hubble announced, first in the New York Times, that many of the objects called nebulae were actually galaxies, which existed far beyond our own Milky Way. As late as 1933, it was still a matter of speculation whether the Veil Nebula surrounded a star, and was actually the remnant of a supernova.

Let's just say, thanks to Hubble the telescope, it's difficult to search for historical astronomical images, which have been supplanted by higher resolution, full spectrum glitz. After a couple of evenings, though, I think I found Feitelson's source. Wellesley astronomer John Charles Duncan, who published several articles on photographing nebulae, made a 7-hour exposure of NGC 6960 in 1921 using the largest telescope in the world, the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. Duncan used the image as the frontispiece for Astronomy A Textbook, published in 1927. [above]

The image doesn't match Feitelson's in size, exposure, or cropping, obviously, but I suspect the artist either rephotographed the detail from the plate, or got access to the negative at Mount Wilson. Duncan later published a fainter, underexposed version of the image, which extrapolates to what an overexposed version like Feitelson's would look like.

Helen Lundeberg, Red Planet (1934)

This image in Life Begins is not a one-off. Both Feitelson and his wife Helen Lundeberg included astrophotography in their Post-Surrealist paintings in the early 30's. [Maybe Post-Surrealism feels a bit like Post-Internet: a way for artists to signal to lagging institutions they've incorporated something and are moving ahead.] Lundeberg's Red Planet is a paradoxically lit interior featuring a red planet-looking orange hovering over a telescope mirror-looking tabletop, and a photograph of a comet leaning against a book titled, "Mars."

Lorser Feitelson, Genesis #2, 1934, collection Smithsonian American Art Museum

Feitelson's Genesis #2, also 1934, has a telescope pointing through the eyes of several aging masks and a skull, propped on books, toward a painting of what looks to me like a photograph of the Crab Nebula. There's also a trompe l'oeil drawing of an Annunciation, a Picabian outline of a woman and her developing breast, a baby bottle, a conch, an eggshell, and a sliced melon and light bulb that immediately make me think of Matson Jones-era Johns. Which, any connection is impossible, I know, but still.

Genesis #2 combines scientific, religious, and metaphorical accounts of birth, which makes it feel closely related to Life Begins. Now the unusual shape of Life Begins feels related to the perspectival lines and sharp, flat planes Feitelson used to define his spaces. Which makes Life Begins a variation on a Genesis II theme; when Life Magazine launched with that photo, of all photos, Feitelson must have really felt like he was onto something big.

Life Begins [lacma.org]
Genesis #2 [americanart.si.edu]

Satellite Communication: Untitled (YOUR NAME HERE), Study for Dasha

Previously: If I Were A Sculptor, But Then Again

Amazing, how did I never know this? Gio Ponti designed a business pavilion and auditorium for Time-Life in 1958, and it's still there, perched mostly out of view on the north side of the 8th floor setback of 1271 6th Avenue. It's covered with crystalline facets and triangles on the roof and terrace [though the photo above also seems to include some overpainted elements. Also it was flipped, so I fixed it.]

Dubbed "the most versatile and complete business-meeting facility in Manhattan," the pavilion was commissioned by Henry Luce at the instigation of his wife Clare Boothe Luce, who wanted to make Ponti a thing. Writing about a 2010 show of Ponti in New York curated by Germano Celant, Suzanne LaBarre described the pavilion as "the closest thing to a playground a stark, midcentury office building had seen: green-and-blue marbleized floors; saucers and brass strapwork in the ceiling; obelisk sconces; and a smattering of irregular nooks, foyers, and bars." Green & blue marbleized floors? Yow. Sounds like proto-Memphis to me, and makes me curse black and white photography.

Gio Ponti Time-Life Pavilion/Auditorium, on the north side of 1271 6th Ave, looking S/SE on bing

Unfortunately, LaBarre reports that Ponti's interior has been destroyed and remodeled two times over. [The top two images come from Esoteric Survey's extraordinary survey of the 1958 Time-Life Building's interiors, from the likes of, basically, everybody.] Time is out of or leaving the building this year, so who gets the Ponti?

What is most surprising to me, though, is the similarity of Ponti's design to the Unfinished Business Pavilion, created in for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. In an attempt to head off Soviet criticism of the US's discrimination against African Americans and the civil rights protests it spawned, the State Dept. and USAID asked Luce's Fortune Magazine to create a pavilion addressing 'the Negro Problem.' Fortune creative director Leo Lionni's three-part design moves from the "chaotic crystal" of the past to the bright happy square future where children of all races play together in harmony. Which was considered such an insult to the segregationist Dixiecrats in Congress, they demanded Fortune close the pavilion as soon as they got wind of it.

Which is interesting that in color and form, Ponti's pavilion most closely resembles the chaotic crystal section, or vice versa. Maybe Ponti's came first, and Leonni used it as a stand-in for the shameful past we were all trying to overcome. Anyway, this warrants further investigation.

Time-Life [esoteric survey]
Gio Ponti's New York [metropolis]
Previously, related, and devastatingly, depressingly timely: The Unfinished Business Pavilion, by Leo Leonni
None of Your 'Unfinished Business'

Jetty, dir. Skylar Nielsen, starring Julian Sands

RadioWest, the local public radio talk show on KUER in Salt Lake, devoted an hour to Spiral Jetty this morning. Most of the time was spent talking with art historian Ann Reynolds, Dia's Jetty curator and Utah liaison Kelly Kivland, but there were segments from local earthwriter Terry Tempest Williams and director Skylar Nielsen. It was the debut of Nielsen's short film Jetty, commissioned by KUER, that was the hook for the discussion. Jetty had been conceived and shot one morning in September when the actor Julian Sands was coming to town to do Pinter, and he wanted to visit the artwork, which he'd heard about from his friend in LA, Michael Govan.

But this is all backing into the story. Which nonetheless feels necessary, because it was a fascinating and perplexing conversation that, the main guests' credentials notwithstanding, felt utterly detached from the art [historical] context, and its theoretical discourses. Instead of that construct, Spiral Jetty exists, in a public place, in the open, in a culture, and that is Utah. Utah is the site. Which makes the art world the non-site, I guess?

First, they didn't discuss Robert Smithson's film Spiral Jetty at all. Reynolds made one reference to a photo of oil derricks, but that was it. Which is amazing. In 1993, the last year before it resurfaced, curator Robert Sobieszek wrote of Spiral Jetty "coevally manifesting itself as a sculpture, a film, and a text," In practice, though, for two decades, the film was the work; the site was irrelevant. This perspective reflected the physical reality of the submerged, i.e. basically lost/destroyed, sculpture, far off in BF Utah, which, New York and the art world were central, check out the view from up here, and Utah's marginality was the self-reinforcing reason Smithson had picked it. With the re-emergence of the jetty, the enlightened pilgrimage through the chain restaurant cultural desert to the abandoned, entropic wasteland kicked in.

If this morning's discussion was any indication, Spiral Jetty has been pulled to Utah's bosom and squeezed, hard. Redeemed from its oil-drilling & tar-seeping failures, it is a manmade monument at one with nature that offers spiritual solace and communion with the land, sky, and water. It is experiential above all, an engine of personal transformation and enlightenment for all who walk or contemplate it. Reynolds' top tip for visiting Spiral Jetty is to camp out there. And if you can't at least spend 24 hours. Kivland, whose first visit to Spiral Jetty was in October 2011, with Nancy Holt, as part of the lease renegotiation process, agreed, and committed to visiting for the long haul. [Note: there are no facilities for camping at Spiral Jetty, and all the land you hike on is privately owned. Is Dia contemplating some infrastructure to turn Spiral Jetty into a more Lightning Field Experience?]

Smithson's pseudo-mystical writing is used to support this reconfiguration of Spiral Jetty into a devotional labyrinth for psychic discovery. Tempest-Williams gave perhaps the most highly evolved expression when she talked about how the submerged Jetty gave her solace when her mother died in 1987, and how walking its re-emerged path with her adopted Rwandan son gave courage that life will go on when she finally visited it, in 2011. Which, girl? That thing's been out since 1995, and yet you didn't go until 2011? I'm two degrees from Tempest-Williams and respect her and her work, but this strikes me as a pristine example of her ability to refit something, anything, into a deeply felt reflection on the landscape of her self.

Or maybe the apotheosis here is actually the Jetty film, created seemingly on a whim, with a helicopter and a dronecam, when the radio folks heard their famous actor/guest wanted to visit the site. In 3-minutes Nielsen puts Smithson's film through a Fincher filter, with distorted titles, non-spatial edits, and Sands trudging around the landbound jetty, literalizing the Smithson text he intones in a voiceover:

On the slopes of Rozzle Point

[AERIAL SHOT OF SLOPES]

I closed my eyes and

[CUT TO FAST ZOOM ON SANDS STANDING AT APEX OF JETTY, EYES CLOSED, ARMS OUTSTRETCHED TAKING IN THE]

the sun burned crimson through the lids.

[ZOOM TIGHT ON HIS FACE]

I opened them

[SUDDENLY OPENS EYES]

and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks.

Like a circle in a spiral
like a wheel within a wheel
never ending of beginning
on an ever-spinning reel

Actually, I saw A Room With A View as an impressionable freshman in Salt Lake City, though I wanted to be Freddie. And I was the only one in the packed theater to laugh out loud at Daniel Day-Lewis's garden party scene. I may have to reshoot this movie.

Oh man, or just mash it up.

"Mr. Sands, Mr. Nielsen, and Mr. Fletcher fly out in helicopters to see a view. Utahans fly them."

"I have a theory," said Judi Dench's Eleanor Lavish, "there is something in the Rozel Point landscape that inclines even the most stolid nature to romance."

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty [radiowest.kuer.org]
Jetty, dir. Skylar Nielsen, starring Julian Sands [vimeo]
Behind the Scenes | Spiral Jetty [vitabrevisfilms]

Installation view: Protestors' Folding Item (LRAD 500X/500X-RE), ink on Cordura, nylon webbing, LRAD, 2014, Collection: NYPD Order Control Unit

NYPD used an "LRAD" sound cannon today on high school students who staged a Ferguson walkout (via @SeismoMedia) pic.twitter.com/soUovemuUj

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 2, 2014

Installation view: Protestors' Folding Item (LRAD 500X/500X-RE), 2014, Collection: NYPD Order Control Unit

This is related to this: Traveler's Folding Item or, in French, Pliant de Voyage, an Underwood typewriter cover as Readymade by Marcel Duchamp.

Traveler's Folding Item/Pliant de Voyage, 1964 Schwartz replica of the lost 1916 original

From Tout Fait,

On the most basic level, Traveler's Folding Item stands as a typical Readymade. It demonstrates the clear displacement of an everyday object from its original context and function. A cover with no typewriter for it to protect is utterly useless. It tempts the viewer to look underneath its skirt, and suddenly it takes on some very sexual meanings. Museums often strategically display the typewriter cover in a manner so as to tempt the viewer in this manner as if it were a woman's skirt. Joselit explains, "This item, which Duchamp identifies with a feminine skirt, should be exhibited on a stand high enough to induce the onlooker to bend and see what is hidden by the cover" (90). In this way, this Readymade acts as an invitation to voyeurism.

What does it mean to declare LRAD covers a Readymade? Such a designation definitely does not hinge on my making them, or my cashing the checks for their sale. Sorry, flippers, they're only available to institutions. [Carlyle & Co. folks and the Zabludowiczes, call me, we can probably work something out.] If anything, it's a relief not having to worry about fabrication or sales. I can really just focus on the work. True, it takes some effort to gather documentation on venues and edition size, but it's not something a diligent registrar can't handle.

Given the interest my institutional collectors have in control, it also might be difficult to arrange loans to show them in galleries or museums. Which doesn't mean they won't be seen publicly. In fact, at the apparently increasing rate LRADs are being deployed, I'd say my CV is about to explode.

What would the legal implications be for my declaration of these Readymades? Could copyright or VARA or droit moral be used to assert control over the public display of these, my works?

In Alberta, Canada, an artist has fended off gas drilling and pipelines on his farm for eight years by copyrighting his land as an artwork [and by charging oil & gas companies $500/hr to discuss it]. Yves Klein once signed the sky.

According to my fabricator's website, "The LRAD 500X / 500X-RE systems [underneath Protestors' Folding Item] produces a sound pattern that provides clear communication over long distances. The deterrent tone can reach a maximum of 149 dB (at one meter) to influence behavior or determine intent." My work, too, is designed to provide clear communication, influence behavior, and determine intent. That's why they go so well together, like a glove on a hand. Really, they're inseparable. You can't have one without the other.

L: You Hear Me, 2007, R: Eye See You, 2006

"The art world underestimates its own relevance when it insists on always staying inside the art world. Maybe one can take some of the tools, methodologies, and see if one can apply them to something outside the art world," said Olafur Eliasson. In T Magazine. "If we don't believe that creativity as a language can be as powerful as the language of the politicians, we would be very sad -- and I would have failed. I am convinced that creativity is a fierce weapon."

I hope LRAD cover readymades, are too, and that collectors of my work will preserve its integrity by exhibiting it only as originally intended, with the covers on the LRADs.

17 U.S. Code § 106A - Rights of certain authors to attribution and integrity [law.cornell.edu]