the making of, by greg allen
In one sense, you really don’t need any more info than what is in the photograph. What you see is what you see: 21 Pebbles, A to U. Yep, checks out.
@octavio-world highlighted the unfiltered finds of photos and objects posted to tumblr by the @metmuseum bot account, and this is definitely one of them.
Continue reading “Actually, There Are 67 1/2 Pebbles In The Bishop Collection”
Speaking of wtf nine-candle lighting fixtures, @octavio-world just reblogged this absolutely magnificent photo of an 18th century “German or French” gilt-and-porcelain chandelier in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum since 1974.
It was photographed, presumably in situ, at the East 66th St home of its owner/donor, Mrs Emma Sheafer, with a scraggly dark cloth behind it, tacked to the ceiling. In the 50 years since, the Metropolitan Museum has not felt the need to document it any further. And really, why mess with perfection? The Met in the 70s really was a golden age of show-the-museum-construct registrar photography while scooping up an entire collection. Very Thomas Hoving.
The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection comprises over 642 objects, a remarkable 119 of which are on display; it’s a lot of Meissen dishes and tchotchkes, though there is one other flower-encrusted chandelier, with better provenance—and a proper photo—which is on view.
On the French Rivierea there’s a villa one hilltop over from Éze that has always blown my mind. In a place where everyone else’s houses and villas are built cheek-to-jowl, the Château Balsan sits on its own 70 hectare (172 acre) hill that drops to the sea (or to the railroad track, at least). It was built in 1920 by Consuelo Vanderbilt and her French second husband Jacques Balsan (thus the name, though they called it Lou Seuil), in collaboration with the landscape architect of Blenheim Palace (she’d been traded to the Duke of Marlborough by her mother).
In all the years I’d known about the house, I’d known about the Vanderbilt connection, but not anything of its current/latest owner. Until yesterday. Vanderbilt died in 1964, and by 1969, it was owned by France’s leading mall developer, Robert Zellinger [de] Balkany. That’s when married his second wife there, Princesse Marie-Gabrielle de Savoie, the daughter of the last king of Italy. Judith Benhamou reports that it was around this time he added the “de” to his name, and insisted on being addressed as Barone, though I don’t think that’s how defunct Italian titles work.
Anyway, he filled Château Balsan and his multiple other houses with extravagant furniture and objets, long after he and the Princesse divorced in 1990. This buck wild vermeil candelabrum, for example, he bought at Christie’s in 2004.
It was made for the Duke of York, King George III’s second son, in 1824, and depicts Hercules slaying the Hydra; each of its nine heads holds a candle. It stands 35 inches high, and is made from 35 kg of silver. It’s a baroque pastiche composition by Edward Farrell, the master silversmith at Kensington Lewis, who fed the Duke’s massive silver habit. Relatedly, it was first sold after the Duke’s death in 1827, along with all his silver, to settle his massive debts. Most of the stuff, though, including this candelabrum, ended up selling for less than a quarter of what it originally cost, which, combined with the death of his main client, kind of crashed Kensington Lewis’s retail business.
Anyway, ZdeB must have bought it after it failed to sell in 2004, because it is not listed. He died in 2015, and the candelabrum was the top lot in a 2017 700-lot sale of stuff from Paris and Éze, the fourth time it came up for sale at Christie’s. Not a lot of bangers; only 20 lots sold for more than GBP 100,000, but he made it up in volume, I guess.
It seems like the house remains in the family, though if it sold, it’d probably be the most expensive house in the world, and would sell to someone far worse than a mall developer.
Arthur Jafa’s 2022 exhibition at LUMA Arles was called LIVE – EVIL, like an impromptu Miles Davis recording. The catalogue documenting the show, though, is called EVIL – LIVE, which I guess is the opposite: a carefully crafted production that took years to realize.
I realized it was out in Arles several months ahead of its release in the US, so I yeeted myself over there to pick one up. There are three Jafa interviews, a grailcollection of his writings, and some choice essays.
Like an excellent deepcut essay by Julian Myers of Grupa OK fame about Jafa’s confounding appearance in the Whitney’s 2000 exhibition Bitstreams. All these years later, my mind has been reopened on that digital art show that left me bored and cold at the time.
And Liam Gillick goes long on Jafa’s wall-mounted metal sculptures, which are an alluring presence throughout the extensive photodocumentation of the massive Arles show. The Arles sculptures are larger and more architectural/structural than the similar works Jafa showed at Barbara Gladstone’s townhouse gallery in 2021. Those felt like Cady Nolands made from a different tool bin. Gillick, with some ambivalence, sees them primarily in relation to the Arles train sheds he helped gentrify. [ofc to the Cady Noland guy everything looks like a Cady Noland; to the extruded aluminum structure guy, everything looks like instant architecture.]
Anyway, buy this book.
Greenpeace really do be preloading the whole story in the captions of their press release photos, I guess. The “blood-red liquid” used for Kapoor’s protest piece, Butchered, is made from sea water, beetroot powder, and non-toxic pond dye.
Does the painting belong to Shell now? Did they take it down after the photos? The status of the artwork beyond this media cycle is as unclear as the archival properties of Kapoor’s medium. But it does continue to be hot as hell here.
Activists install giant new artwork by Anish Kapoor onto Shell platform as heatwave rages on [greenpeace]
What a document, what a moment.
On May 11, 2010, Freedom To Marry announced the release of I do, an edition by Louise Bourgeois, which the artist donated to raise $300,000 for the campaign to recognize gay marriage in the United States.
Continue reading “Louise Bourgeois, I do (2010)”
Since Richard Prince’s video recording of his 2018 deposition in the McNatt & Graham lawsuits briefly surfaced online in 2023 until it was screened at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis as a work, Deposition (2025), it feels like the number of people who have watched the full 7-hour thing would not have filled the smallest theater at the Quad Cinema.
And yet, it is, over and over again, described by those few who have seen it all as one of the major artworks of our time. Prince himself, in a conversation with Rick Rubin, talked about it as wanting to make a work like Andy Warhol’s Empire. Benjamin Godsill could not stop raving about it on Nota Bene. And now Andrew Russeth has delivered one of the most incisive, close readings of Prince’s Deposition I’ve seen anywhere.
If you’re not going to watch it—again, it’s almost seven hours of Richard Prince talking extremely slowly in an adversarial conversation with offscreen lawyers—Russeth’s take and highlights will get you the gist. And the importance.
For me the standout of this second deposition is the extent Prince will go to to maintain an artistic process of freedom and experimentation, almost five decades into his practice. True, it may be the kind of freedom only available to someone making $45 million/year—the tens of thousands of billable dollars per hour represented by a conference room full of the most expensive lawyers in America doesn’t begin to account for the cost incurred to realize this one video work.
But if you’re an artist with the means to re-create the circumstances of your most surprising, innovative moments of creation, wouldn’t you do it? Shouldn’t you?
In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.
This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.
I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.
Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.
[next morning/evening update] I found a 2009 review of Carlson’s collection of Latin texts by Chris Given-Wilson that makes this accidental algorithmic pairing feels unexpectedly relevant. The embedded quote is from Carlson:
“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.
And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”
The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”
With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.
Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.
Buy The Second Deposition of Richard Prince in softcover on Amazon for $20 [amazon]
Buy one, two, or three copies of David R. Carlson’s, The Deposition of Richard II for $29.70 each, plus $13.44 shipping to the US [abebooks]
In June 2015, the Berlin-based performance artists Eva & Adele released a Swatch at Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale. It is pink and gold, and is titled Futuring, the artists’ term for “designating a time unfinished, caught up in the process of developing and revealing itself, challenging people to take an active role in shaping their own future. Futuring is also the principle of the artists’ performance, the unquestioned freedom of sexual self-determination that EVA & ADELE themselves represent.” [via]
A numbered, limited edition of 585 was released in Venice, and an unnumbered, unlimited, but otherwise identical version was released everywhere else.
After Adele’s years-long legal battle to have her birth certificate issued in her proper gender, the pair were married in 2011. Eva, the shorter of the two, passed away in May 2025.
Eva & Adele official website [evaadele.com]
We saw signs for a circus in Provence, and so we went. With basically no online presence, le Cirque Dawson seems to advertise its tiny, roving spectacle exclusively on telephone poles a few villages ahead of their circuit. It was a good show, worth every centime. The heat and the sweat made the juggling act truly suspenseful.
When, after the trained goat, they brought out a raised platform with lights embedded around the edge, and the juggler reappeared, shirtless, and started doing handstands on an evergrowing tower of chairs, it didn’t take much effort to make the connection.
I’m not going to pretend it’s not about me, or my Project Echo satelloon in the Grand Palais,
or the Grand Palais then tweeting at me about Anish Kapoor’s giant inflatable Leviathan,
or about Léon Gimpel’s autochromes of air shows in the Grand Palais.
It is exactly about all of that, and also,
Imagine actually staging a balloon show in the Grand Palais, and deciding what the grandest, vastest art space in the world really needs is five, little Christmas ornament satelloons suspended over a field of temporary sheds, each containing its own Museum of Ice Cream-style balloon instagram spectacle. Does that feel insufficient? Yes? Should we add a light show turning them into disco balls? Should they rise and sink in sync to music? Should they invite Bella Hadid? It’s like, confronted with the central faiblesse of the aesthetic experience, Hyperstudio could only think to keep adding to it.
Look, I am fully aware that a sporadic series of blog posts over 18 years is no way to realize a 100-foot wide aluminum sphere sculpture exhibited in one of the most prominent art venues in the world. I get that. I’m glad the Grand Palais was at least aware.
But this is not just about me and my balloon. Kusama has been showing inflatable immersive environments for years, and she is not here in the Balloon Museum’s Euphoria. LVMH was fine to put dots all over their stores, but apparently did not see fit to underwrite her obliteration of and in the Grand Palais.
And then there’s Martin Creed, an Old Master of the contemporary balloon arts. For the Grand Palais he made, of course, Work no. 3883: Half the air in a given space (2024). And the space they gave was inside a f’ing greenhouse. The Balloon Museum was really given the biggest space in Paris to stage an exhibition of the most important balloon-based artwork of the age, and said, “Half the air in a given space? Sure thing, I give you an Amazon box with a balloon in it.”
In 1995 Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake organized In A Different Light, one of the first exhibitions of 20th century art exploring the queer experience, at the Berkeley Art Museum.
The first section of the show was “Void,” with works “suggesting blankness, absence, and loss.” And the first work on the checklist—which I uploaded to the Internet Archive because it was somehow not there before—is David Tudor’s 1989 reconstruction of the score for John Cage’s 4’33”.
It’s one of the works which “suggest the emptiness of what might be called a state of ‘pre- being’ that precedes the birth of a new identity. Seen negatively, such works evoke the repressive alienation of the ‘closet.’ Seen in a more positive light, they represent a blank slate of unlimited possibility.”
Cage’s original score for 4’33” was dedicated to Tudor, who performed it in 1952. It was made in traditional Western musical notation, with a tempo and length to indicate the duration of each of the work’s three movements. Tudor gave the score back to Johns when he was preparing another copy, this time in graphic notation, which he dedicated to Irwin Kremen. Then Tudor’s copy was lost, and so Kremen’s copy, from 1953 is the earliest surviving score. David Platzker acquired it for MoMA in 2012.
Larry Solomon’s 1998 essay on the history of 4’33” does a pretty good job of tracking Cage’s various editions, but not Tudor’s. James Pritchett’s website is a clearer exploration of 4’33” and its origins, and related works.
Tudor’s reconstruction of the original 4’33” score seems related to the differences introduced in published versions. It measured 60 quarter notes at 4/4 time to be 2.5 cm, or roughly 1 inch of score, so the first 32 seconds of the 33 second movement fit on one 9.3-inch wide page. I think that makes Tudor’s score ten pages long. [Somehow Edition Peters needed the Getty’s help to recover this reconstruction for inclusion in the current, Cage Centennial edition of 4’33”. And they still reduced the page size and mooted Tudor’s calculations.]
In their discussion of the show in for their AAA oral history, recorded in 2016, Blake recalls various aspects of the show, and mentions “Void” also containing a piece by Bay Area artist “Rudy Lemcke who had erased a—John Cage’s score for 4’33″.
Lemcke has made a lot of Cage-inspired work, particularly in Cage’s chance-operations texts and mesostic poems, but also involving the score of Perilous Night (1944), Cage’s pivotal chance-related composition for prepared piano, which also coincided with Cage’s pivot from his wife Xenia to Merce Cunningham. But I can’t find any mention of Lemcke doing an erased Cage score. And Lemcke’s work on the exhibition checklist, right next to Tudor’s, is Untitled (Performance Score for Percussion), 1977, which sounds related to a different series Lemcke was working on over several years.
I’ve reached out to confirm, but if an Erased Cage Score doesn’t exist already, it must be realized immediately, because it sounds absolutely obvious and fantastic. [a few minutes later update] Lemcke confirms that though Cage was an influence on his early work, and particularly his exploration of chance operations and graphic notation, the work shown at Berkeley was not 4’33” related, and he has not erased a Cage score. So now I will.
It would complete the circle, or perhaps spiral outward, from Rauschenberg’s early influence on Cage, who felt the White Paintings of 1951 gave him permission to write “the silent piece” he’d been contemplating for several years already. And the painting Rauschenberg gave to Cage, which he then overpainted black when he was crashing at Cage’s apartment.
From a more limited vantage point, this could have been seen as Blake misremembering, when it is clear that artist prophets walk among us, and they were manifesting Erased Cage Score into being. It should not have taken this long.
Well the most popular grave in the Cimitière de Montparnasse is not Chaïm Soutine’s, Samuel Beckett’s, or even Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir’s—though they’re close. It’s Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda’s.
And while the gleaned potatoes and pine cones and even the prayer flags are chill, I cannot get past the number of people who kiss the headstone with big cheesy red lips, or write on it with lipstick.
It reminds me of the woman who kissed the Twombly in Avignon, who was like, I couldn’t control myself, it’s an act of love. And honestly, people should be able to control themselves at least this much.
When I saw these 1963 Claes Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humors on @toytheatre via @octavio-world‘s tumblr the other day, I thought they were perfect. But then I found out, from Barbara Rose’s 1969 MoMA catalogue, that they’re too small, just 19 x 9 1/2 x 2 inches each, barely the size of a placemat.
Oldenburg said that the inspiration came from seeing the fake fur at a fabric store, so maybe this is all he could get. Within a couple of years, though, he recognized that a Good Humor Bar sculpture should be bigger. He proposed one for the middle of Park Avenue, where the Pan-Am Building eventually went. Too big, tbqh.
In 1972, Oldenburg’s friend Michael Crichton commissioned Oldenburg to make a 3.6m tall version of his 1970 Soft Alphabet Good Humor Bar print, which, frankly, seems like a mistake, both in scale and subject. It looks like when you pop leftover mac & cheese out of the Tupperware. I hope he was handsomely paid, as was whoever sold it to Crystal Bridges.
No, I think these Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humors should be at least as big as a sleeping bag, but not too big to fit on the roof of your VW. Floor Cone is 3.5m, almost the same size as the Crystal Bridges one, but good. And on the floor.
If each Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humor was roughly the size of the raft in Titanic. So depending on where you come down in that debate, four on the floor could fit between four and eight people. They would have roughly the same presence in a room as a Chamberlain F*****g Couch. Or two.
This feels like a needed corrective in the material record and a worthwhile work to realize.
Being Pontus Hultén must have been absolutely amazing, the king of all he surveyed. He was the founding director of at least three modern art museums and one of the most influential figures in 20th century art. A groundbreaking curator, a friend to major artists, and a stone cold crook.
Hultén made the first re-creation of Tatlin’s lost Memorial to the Third International for an exhibition at the Moderna Museet, which, great.
With permission from Duchamp, Hultén made exhibition copies of Duchamp sculptures, including the first copy of the Large Glass, for the Moderna Museet in 1961, which Duchamp signed as recognized copies on his visit to Sweden. No problem, but watch this space.
In 1968 Hultén bought hundreds of actual cardboard Brillo boxes, from Brillo, for a Warhol exhibition, and had a few made of wood in Stockholm, maybe 10-12, and not more than 15, with, if not Warhol’s permission, then his awareness. OK.
But then in 1990, after Warhol’s death, Hultén had 105 more Brillo boxes made in Malmö, which he said were made in Stockholm in 1968. He donated or sold these boxes all over the place until his death in 2006, based entirely on his association with Warhol, and his own assertions of authority. He sold 40 to Duchamp dealer Ronny van de Velde with certificates of authenticity saying they were from 1968. But Warhol never authorized these, and he definitely didn’t do it after he was dead. It turns out many people in the Swedish modern art world knew Hultén’s Brillo racket. Not OK.
An entire investigation and report on the various fabrications of Brillo boxes was conducted by the Warhol Foundation in 2010, which declared all the Hultén boxes to be Hulténs, not Warhols. (This, after Hultén got the Warhol Authentication Board to approve and add 94 1968-I-mean-1990 Stockholm/Malmö boxes to the catalogue raisonné in 2004.) Shady, a bummer for a few collectors, but kind of hilarious.
But in 1960 Pontus Hultén also straight-up stole at least four Duchamp drawings from Yale University Art Gallery. Katherine Dreier had donated Duchamp’s 1920 sculpture Rotary Glass Plates to Yale in 1941 as part of the Société Anonyme. Hultén visited the sculpture for what Yale’s extraordinary provenance note for this sketch on an envelope of the Rotary Glass Plates says was to consider it “for inclusion in an exhibition.”
What he was doing was studying how to refabricate it. The 1961 exhibition, Movement in Art, for which Hultén and Ulf Linde fabricated all the Moderna Museet’s Duchamps, including a Rotary Glass Plates. [Actually, Linde made the Large Glass; Hultén made Rotary Glass Plates with Per Olof Ultvedt and Magnus Wibom.]
Yale writes that “Hultén reportedly removed the sketch, along with three others, from the artwork’s storage box.” I think it illustrates how to clamp the painted glass plates to the central axle on which they rotate. Hultén apparently gave the sketch to Linde as a birthday present, and his widow, along with Duchamp scholar Paul B. Franklin, returned it to Yale in 2018. No word what or where the three others are, but Yale clearly has some idea.
It turns out Hultén made another Rotative Plaques Verre, in French, for the Pompidou in 1979. In 1980 Hultén’s Pompidou published a facsimile set of 289 Duchamp notes and scraps with Paul Matisse, Duchamp’s step-son, with the originals in the collection. Nothing in there seems obviously stolen from Yale.
[Shoutout to rare and amazing artbooks dealer Yoshi Hill for posting the buck wild archive entry to his Instagram yesterday.]