September 2015 Archives

Just to be clear, this Reuters photo of the 1-ton black bags full of radioactive debris that are being stacked all over Fukushima reminded me of the most terrible Hiroshi Sugimoto seascape ever before I cropped and greyscaled it.

But the more I see of them, the less I see of Sugimoto.

Sometimes an object has its own logic.

A few days ago I saw an unusual auction listing. It was described as a "textile" with the title, "Merce at the Minskoff," and it was signed by "Bob Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage." But the description was cursory, and there was no image. When I called, the small downtown auctioneer couldn't describe it, but they assured me they'd post the image soon.

This textile was clearly related to Merce and the company's week-long performance at the Minskoff Theater in January 1977, the only time they performed on Broadway. But what would be signed by these three?

Untitled (Merce at the Minskoff), 2015 - , ink on towel with four signatures (interim state)

Then I got wrapped up in other stuff, and confused the sale date, and long story short, I missed the auction this morning, and I lost a chance to buy what appears to have been an autographed commemorative hand towel.

So for now getting the designer of the Merce at the Minskoff poster to sign this towel requires not just the acquiescence of Mr. Johns, but the co-operation of the as-yet-unidentified owner/custodian of the towel.

But it will happen. Or at least it must. Because when an object has its own logic, your only viable option is to endeavor to realize it as quickly as possible.

FROM THE ESTATE OF LOUISE NEVELSON HELLO: "Signed Jasper Johns lower right and inscribed, 'Dear Louise, I love you, Merce"

Lot 194: Textile, "Merce and the Minskoff", sold for a measly $125 to someone now carrying the weight of future Art History on his or her shoulders [roland/liveauctioneers]
Apr 26, 2010, Norwalk, CT, Lot 357: AFTER JASPER JOHNS (AMERICAN, b.1930): Signed colored poster. [braswell/invaluable]

UPDATE: This post was edited soon after publication to accept responsibility for an object's realization, even though it is not presently within my control to do so. I must and will do what I can.

APRIL 2016 UPDATE: I was discussing this work with my wife recently; she takes issue with this entire project of asserting art status upon an object beyond my control or ownership. She questioned my claim thus: "Why didn't he sign it? If he designed the poster, it can't be for lack of opportunity. That's the logic of this object: that he didn't sign it." Reader, I married her.

I am bewildered and psyched in equal parts to announce the presence of some greg.org objects at Internet Yami-Ichi New York, this coming Saturday (9/12) at Knockdown Center in Maspeth.

Michael Sarff from MTAA invited me to show some black-marketable items in Over The Opening (OTO) a space (blanket) he is curating, so I sent along the following:

Hand-colored editions of Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta and CZRPYR 2. The original book with Richard Prince's full Cariou v. Prince deposition transcript includes a hand-painted bookplate tipped in with paint, in homage to Prince's technical innovations on the Canal Zone series. CZRPYR 2 includes the complete set of altered illustrations created by the Appeals Court, hand-tinted in the manner of publishers of yore. Supplies will be pretty damn limited.

A rare and exclusive selection of Local Pick-up Only #eBayTestListing prints. Because price and shipping parameters are intrinsic aspects of the eBay Test Listing series, it was not conceptually reasonable to just stick a bunch of prints in a portfolio and sell them like crack on the street. So the only prints available at Yami-Ichi are those few whose eBay listings have local pick-up or store pickup options. Buy them right then and there on eBay, and take them home. Is how it will work.

OTO will also feature pieces from Yael Kanarek's World of Awe; Waterbear flatware by Raphaele Shirley; canonical Before Facebook-era artifacts from MTAA; and the premiere of Sarff's new audio project, Music 4 Music 4 Airports. Like I said, psyched and bewildered. Should be awesome.

Over The Opening (OTO) @ the Internet Yami-ichi (Internet Black Market) [mtaa.net]

So what has the LAPD Art Theft detail been working on in the nearly six years since we first checked in on them? Let's see what's hot:

Or not. Because all is not lost. Besides the unheralded recovery of the Weisman Warhols, the biggest story has to be the recovery last winter of nine early 20th century modern paintings stolen in 2008 from the Encino house of collectors Anton and Susan Roland. The Rolands lost a pair of Soutines, a Hans Hoffman, a Rivera, a van Dongen, and a Chagall. [the complete list is on the wanted poster linked here.] Following some anonymous tips, the police set up a sting to buy the works last December. The Rolands died in the mean time, alas, but their heirs will get the chance to get the works back if they return the insurance settlement. Probably a good deal.

Now let's see what's still out there:

What is it with the Warhols in LA that makes them so hard to keep on the walls? TMZ reports [!] that nine Warhol prints were reported stolen from the offices of a Los Angeles-area film editing company, and were replaced with fakes.

The fakes were discovered "a few months ago" when "a member of the family" sent the prints to be reframed, and were reported to the police in May. Six of the prints are ed. 73/200 from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980) and three are ed. 96/150 from the ten-part Endangered Species series (1983). According to TMZ, the prints were all purchased in the 1980s, but it is not clear whether the company/family had the entire sets.

One of the Endangered Species prints, Bald Eagle, was sold at Bonham's in San Francisco in October 2011 for $37,500, and police have obtained the records relating to that sale.

Which should make for quick work. Just think for a second what is involved in creating [passable poster-sized Warhols, and then replacing them in the frames. [Or can you just buy them now?] This was a rogue framer, a shady dealer, or a determined and crafty insider.

Which, funny I should mention that. TMZ namechecks the other big LA Warhol Caper, the 2009 theft of an entire set of Athletes paintings (1977) from the home of the esteemed collector who commissioned them, Richard Weisman. But they don't say what happened to them.

Study for Find The Warhols, 2009

The Weisman Warhols were the subject of my Find The Warhols Project, one of the earliest Kickstarters, which was intended to plaster the backrooms of the art world with giant, glossy copies of the LAPD's awesome-as-hell $1 Million Reward poster. That Kickstarter failed right around the time Weisman withdrew his $25 million insurance claim, and the insurance company canceled the reward. In 2010 an art theft guru said the Weisman Warhols had not, in fact been stolen, but were the victims of "a domestic kidnapping!" but declined to provide any details.

They were still listed as stolen, though, when the great Zurich designer Lex Treub asked to appropriate the Weisman Warhols poster for an exhibition at the House of Switzerland during the London 2012 Olympics.

Anyway, the LAPD now lists all the Weisman Athletes paintings as RECOVERED! Which is great! What a relief! Or a fraught domestic drama we are not privy to! Maybe it's best to just wish the Weismans well and offer them some privacy as they continue to work things out; because the portrait of Weisman himself is still reported as missing.

If you have any leads on any of the above, give the LAPD Art Theft detail a call.

Andy Warhol Theft | Someone Switched the Jews!!! [tmz]
LAPD Art Theft detail [lapdonline.org]
Previously, very much related: Have You Seen Me? The Find The Warhols Project
Greatest Hits: Highlights from the LAPD Art Theft detail's wanted gallery
update: I got my Jews straightened out in that image. Sarah, not Sandra, obv.

Ever since I posted about them last year, and ever since the 3-D printing files disappeared, I've received a steady stream of emails asking how to get some of Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera's Readymake after Marcel Duchamp chess pieces.

Believing at the time that the set Duchamp carved in 1918 in Argentina was lost, the artists created 3D models from an archival photo. I pointed out that the set still existed somewhere. [Naumann's book actually lists it in Duchamp's Estate.]

Which, now it can be told that Kildall and Cera received a cease & desist order from lawyers for the Estate of Marcel Duchamp, claiming the 3D models, adapted from an unmarked photo of the set the French-born, naturalized American Duchamp carved for himself in 1918 in Argentina, infringed on the estate's French copyright. Which, please.

Kildall and Cera had a very respectful and reasonable discussion with all kind of lawyers and ultimately, with a sympathetic Duchamp heir. The result, more than a year later, is the happy announcement of Chess With Mustaches, a suitably Duchampian homage that steers through the international copyright swamp and straight into the safe harbor of parody.

l'échecs au cul

They are not currently available for download or printing. But I'll be keeping an eye out.

What Happened to the Readymake: Duchamp Chess Pieces? [kildall, thanks bryan cera for the heads up]
Previously: Readymake: And You May Find Yourself 3-D Printing A Marcel Duchamp Chess Set [greg.org]

Could this really be happening? Four years ago I wished for a way to play back the Golden Record, the earthly calling card stuck to the sides of the Voyager space probes nearly 40 years ago. I knew all the recordings and diagrams and photos Carl Sagan and friends recorded on there, but I wondered what it would actually be like to play it back? What would the 116 images turn out like if you played them off an analog record with a needle, and then assembled the 512 raster lines?

I wanted to find an extra Golden Record and play it, which turned out to be hard-to-impossible. And also unnecessary. [Though I'm still game, if you have a Golden Record I can borrow!] Because the Record has been played.

A few weeks ago, Man Bartlett tweeted about some strange electronic passages in a NASA recording of the Golden Record:

@ranjit @ManBartlett @NASAVoyager here's the IA version https://archive.org/details/Voyager1

— gregorg (@gregorg) August 6, 2015

And then sound artist Ranjit Bhatnagar identified them as the encoded data for the 116 photographs. Here's one of the first images Ranjit processed, the aliens' intro to Earth Math:

above: Image of math chemistry from Voyager 1 by Frank Drake, below: same image decoded by Ranjit Bhatnagar

@ManBartlett @NASAVoyager @gregorg here's the intro to math page (and the original) pic.twitter.com/ATQYMpoZLz

— Ranjit Bhatnagar (@ranjit) August 6, 2015

So this is it. The answer was sitting right there on the Internet Archive the whole time. And yet.

above/below: image of Earth, and image of Earth decoded from Voyager 1 by Kyle McDonald

Within a few minutes of Ranjit's decoding, code artist Kyle McDonald happened by, and blew things wide open with his distortion adjustments, which he promptly documented and pushed to github. So it just took four years and one serendipitous hour. And now we know that the images we've sent out into the universe look like a 1970s TV with a tinfoil antenna.

Voyager1 audio track [archive.org]
Kyle McDonald | Voyager 1 Decoding [github]
Previously: Off The Golden Record