October 2016 Archives

[Not?] Agnes Martin, Day and Night, 1961-64, enamel on linen or acrylic on canvas, 72x72 in., currently Collection The Mayor Gallery, London

I was already soaking in some Agnes Martin-related research when the news broke last week of a lawsuit filed against the Martin catalogue raisonné, its authentication committee, and Arne Glimcher, the artist's longtime dealer, who controls it all. And so I did some preliminary digging and looking, and oh boy, unless you own an off-market Martin, is it an entertaining mystery.

[UPDATE: Now that the Guggenheim's show has closed, we can call this a retrospective. I'm pleased to announce Agnes Martin: The Complete GIFs, which will remain on continuous loop, I guess.]

Oh my goodness.

"When your eyes are open you see beauty in anything." [via]

Oh look, here is another one.

This interesting Polaroid from the Warhol Estate just turned up at Swann.

It's apparently titled Urinal (Homage to Marcel Duchamp), which would make it kind of fascinating. But there's nothing except an estate authentication stamp on it, no title, date, signature, nothing. So where did the title come from?

It's also on a previous owner's website, without the Urinal or the parentheses in the title. The provenance says it came from the tag sale portion of Sotheby's 1988 Warhol auction.

verso of this Warhol Polaroid, image via alpha 137

But it also says it's a photograph of a urinal, when it is in fact an awning over an arched window. And what looks like adhesive on the back runs along one side, here the left, which would normally be the top of a Polaroid image. So how was it oriented again?

Assuming it's what it says, though, it's interesting that Warhol made his homage to Duchamp's famously inverted sculpture by inverting an image. Or an object, a print (Polaroids are one-offs).

[Also worth noting: in 1973 Warhol bought the prototype for Arturo Schwartz's 1968 Fountain edition. And Dakis bought it from the 1988 auction.]

update: Homage To Marcel Duchamp is a lot of reference for one Polaroid to bear. And it is probably worth considering how many Polaroids Warhol shot in his lifetime: approximately fifty hundred bajillion. And do they all have titles? Do any of them? What is another Polaroid with a title?

Sale 2431 Lot 126 ANDY WARHOL, Urinal (Homage to Marcel Duchamp), est $3-5000 [swanngalleries]

greg.org Untitled (Erster Blick), 2016, digital print and graphite on white bond, 38.6 x 27.3 cm (uncropped), ed. 100+20+10+6

I'm pleased to offer a limited edition, a sort of palate cleanser for Frieze London, an amuse bouche if you will, for FIAC.

Untitled (Erster Blick) is a digital inkjet print and graphite work on white bond. It is a slightly enlarged facsimile of a page from the press clippings archive of the Zentrum für Elektronische Korrelationen und Magnetismus at Universität Augsburg's Institut für Physik.

It will be available until Thursday, October 27, when bidding opens at Christie's Kensington for Gerhard Richter's Erster Blick, a slightly enlarged illustration from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 26th July 2000. The First Open Prints & Multiples sale is scheduled to begin at 2:00PM London (1:00PM UTC), and Richter's work is Lot 76, so perhaps a little after 3:00? But don't dally. And don't come looking for mine if you lose out on Richter's, because it will be gone, and you will lose twice.

Lot 76 | Gerhard Richter, Erster Blick, 2000, offset print, 18.2x15.1cm, ed. 100, plus 20, 10 TP, 6 TP, est. GBP 2000-3000. via Christie's

Following Richter's offset print, Untitled (Erster Blick) will be available in an edition of 100, plus 20 Roman numeral copies, plus 10 trial proofs, plus 6 other trial proofs, marked Probe. All will be numbered, signed, and stamped. It is the artist's intention they remain uncropped, but who knows? It's a wild world out there.

[UPDATE: Thanks to all, and to those getting more than one, that's fine, awesome even, but please consider others in your voracious collecting frenzies. Also, the prints will be numbered/designated in the order listed above. So if fewer than 100 prints sell before the auction, there will be no proofs. So buy early, then buy late? I really have no idea how this thing will play out.

The price for Untitled (Erster Blick) is $US20, shipped. Or it was. The edition is closed and no longer available. Thanks to the collectors and connoisseurs who purchased prints, they will be produced and delivered promptly, stay tuned.

UPDATE: Oh wow, the Richter didn't sell [either, ha].

Previously, related: Untitled (Tanya), 2014

Part of me wants to make this post about auction houses shooting coverage, or about editing-generated hype for off-season auctions of off-peak squeegees. But I think I really just wanted to register my disapproval that such videos of such sales of such paintings are now a sufficient hook for attention from the Times. Which even I don't care about at this point. So it must be the very existence of this video. But that is enough.

[sotheby's via nyt]

image via @alexismadrigal

I haven't been, but I feel like I'm very familiar with the border wall that extends into the sea between the US and Mexico.

Several artists have made projects around it, including using it as a volleyball net, or painting one side of it. It's telling that the Berlin Wall was also painted, on the free side, or rather, on the side that did not erect the wall. Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank is painted in that direction, too.

Anyway, when I saw Alexis Madrigal's photo of the border wall built in the ocean, I thought what I always thought: it's as cool as it is terrible. [I think Madrigal was attending #RiseUpAsOne, concert/festival sponsored by Fusion at Friendship Park on the US side.]

When the political divisions currently ripping the US apart, and the political, cultural, racial, security, and economic differences between the US and our neighbor get sorted out, and our terrified, weaponized national border stance eases, I hope that this section of the wall will stay and become a memorial.

I cannot explain how I didn't catch this when I saw it many months ago, but re-reading Steve Roden's blog post about his return to painting after a year-long hiatus, this completely floors me:

Recently, I have also been obsessed with a photograph of two seemingly insignificant pieces of wood about the size of the inner part of a closed fist. The photograph appeared in an auction catalog, and I was fascinated to discover that these seemingly ordinary, or pathetic objects were pieces of George Washington's coffin, and as such, their presence transcends their objectness.

Aaron Kuriloff, Two Pillows, 1963, image and caption from Walter Hopps' Boxes catalogue, Dwan Gallery, 1964, image: aaa.si.edu

In his Dwan Gallery catalogue essay, James Meyer calls him "a now-forgotten trader in readymades," but I recognized Aaron Kuriloff's name from Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975. Judd reviewed Kuriloff's April 1964 show at Fischbach Gallery for Arts Magazine. He did not like it, dismissing the artist's lightly assisted readymades as domestic misfires done better by George Brecht.

Now that I've seen some pictures, though, I'm kind of intrigued. For Boxes, the February 1964 group show organized by Dwan Gallery director John Weber, Andy Warhol sent three Brillos and a Heinz Ketchup, scooping the Stable Gallery by a month. And Kuriloff sent Two Pillows, 1963 [above], in which blue ticking-covered pillows were inserted in a blue-painted wood shelf.

No wonder Judd didn't like it. I bet Haim Steinbach would, though. And Mark Stahl, who had a similarly promising-but-brief career with similarly found objects in the 1980s.

No less than Brian O'Doherty liked Kuriloff's work, too. He reviewed the Fischbach show for the Times:

Both these shows, one [George Ortman] turn­ing symbols into objects, the other [Kuriloff] objects into symbols, make a new cross‐roads where the traffic is getting heavier --a cross‐roads at which Jas­per Johns originally planted his painted flags, breaking our reflex responses to the most loaded of symbols.

Aaron Kuriloff, Three Switches, 1963, Thibaut Gallery, image via nyt

The Times has at least two other reviews of Kuriloff's work, both illustrated. In December 1963, he was in "Hard Center," a group show at Thibaut Gallery organized by Elena and Nicolas Calas. From Brian O'Doherty's review it sounds like it focused on the recontextualization as art of mass or consumer objects, an early example of Pop getting in formation. And the artist list shows just how far Pop has shifted since: Robert Breer, Nicolas Calas, Kuriloff, Walter de Maria, and Robert Morris. There's a catalogue out there somewhere.

Aaron Kuriloff, A Laundry Bag, installed in 1965 at The Four Seasons, image: nyt

In 1965 Kuriloff is mentioned in a benefit sale/exhibition held at the Four Seasons. It seems kind of a mess, frankly, and the Times report doesn't do it much justice, just sneering at now-acclimated art audiences not rioting over Pop Art. Kuriloff's A Laundry Bag was just that, mounted against a green background, with a label, Erased de Kooning Drawing-style. Priced at $500 for mental health charity, it's not clear if it sold.