Kosen Ohtsubo, ロックンロール大根タワーI / Rock’n’roll Radish Tower I, 1989, archival photo by Koichi Taniguchi, installed at Paid , Seattle, July-Aug 2022
Friend and hero of the blog Christian Alborz Oldham has long been an insightful thinker and practitioner of ikebana and its relationship to contemporary developments in art, both in Japan and beyond. In late July and early August he curated an exhibition of archival photos of one of the masters of contemporary/freestyle ikebana, Kosen Ohtsubo, at Paid in Seattle. It was arranged in collaboration with the artist, his school Ryusei-ha, and Empty Gallery of Hong Kong, and is accompanied by an essay by Oldham, and archival writings and reviews of Ohtsubo’s work. The show’s closed now, but installation images are available, and open edition posters of a selection of the images are available via Device for US shipping.
Without getting too this-looks-like-that about it, the work above, Rock & Roll Radish Tower, suddenly reminded me of Yayoi Kusama’s work, especially the stuffed shadow boxes she made in the ’80s. I mean, the daikon’s phallic symbolism is as much a staple of Japanese culture as the daikon itself. There’s definitely enough to go around.
The Florida Man of museum scandals just keeps on going. The NY Times now reports the director of the Orlando Museum of Art and the chair of the board of trustees received a subpoena from the FBI for all communications relating to a group of fake Basquiats in 2021, months *before* the museum opened a show of the works. And instead of canceling the show, they covered up the subpoena, and swore the trustee running the finance committee to secrecy, and threatened any museum employee who talked or raised any objections with instant termination, and threatened *via email* the job of the art professor who objected to finding out her name was being used to authenticate the works she had never seen in person. And that is barely a third of wtf is in the latest article. Why did this backwater museum director ride so hard for these blatantly faked Basquiats in the first place, and why did he and his board chair make things a million times worse for themselves after they knew the jig was up?
In March 2020, as was the custom of the time, Jacob Kassay did an OVR, with a show no one could see at Galerie Art Concept in Paris of 19th century bricks made in Buffalo. That was followed by a bigger show, F’O’O’T’A’G’E’, in the summer. This past March, he talked about them in a brief video, above, which, like the rest of this pandemic, feels like time and space have collapsed.
The project is balanced in the space between these quotes: “I mean, I am relying on the pretension of people knowing about my relationship to painting for these to operate in a certain way.” and “I don’t think I have the ego enough to say like, ‘Oh, this is a readymade.'”
The word “balance” suddenly made me think of another work of saliently stamped bricks, but since it dates from the year after Ana Mendieta’s death, I’m not going to mention it here.
Stone House, 1972, by Tadashi Yamamoto and Masatoshi Izumi, Mure Japan, image: Yoshi Makino/Cereal
Searching for Isamu Noguchi ceiling is highly recommended.
In 1972, the Noguchi’s longtime collaborator, Masatoshi Izumi, built a house next to the artist’s at their stonecutting yard in Mure, Japan. Izumi, who descends from a long line of stonecutters, worked with a plan by architect Tadashi Yamamoto to realize Stone House. Jared Frank wrote about it for Cereal Magazine:
This salvaged cylinder [made from local aji stone, and the basalt core of the first sculpture Izumi and Noguchi created together] still bears the scars of its violent removal, and is the physical and spiritual core of Stone House. It supports a slender truss system that floats over the walls. Painted red at Noguchi’s urging, the grid is flagrantly hi-tech in contrast with the low-tech stonework. Equal parts Superstudio, Cedric Price, and Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964), Stone House is a compelling, one-of-a-kind synthesis of competing trends in late modernist thought and design. To this day it remains both timeless and distinctly 1972. Noguchi appropriately dubbed it a “modern temple.”
I went to Noguchi’s Museum and house in Mure when we went to Naoshima in 2006, but I did not know to put Stone House on the itinerary. [1 hour of google map searching later update: it is not next to Isamu-ya, Noguchi’s reconstructed Ed0-era house. I feel better about missing it.] [and one minute of googling a year later update: Izumi passed away in 2021.]
The bedroom of Isamu Noguchi’s studio/house in Long Island City, as photographed by Hans Namuth in 1962 for the New York Times Magazine. via noguchi.org
Since 2020, when the last of a series of worse real estate developers finally removed what was left of the site-specific waterfall and aluminum louvered ceiling Isamu Noguchi designed in 1957 for the lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue, we thought New York had lost its last Noguchi ceiling.
No. There is another.
Isamu Noguchi photographed in his live-work space in Long Island City by Dan Budnik in 1964. The bedroom is in upper left. image: Noguchi Museum Archives via theartnewspaper
The Art Newspaper reports that the Noguchi Museum will restore the artist’s studio and house in Long Island City, and open them to the public for the first time.
Included in that house–really, a living space carved out of a 3,200 sq-ft factory/studio–is a light-diffusing drop ceiling in the bedroom that reminds me of the Fifth Avenue installation. It’s visible in the photo up top by Hans Namuth, for a two-page NYT Mag feature on Noguchi’s novel live-work design, as clipped and saved by the Noguchi Museum.
Noguchi and a Japanese carpenter whose name only comes up in reference to this project, Yukio Madokoro, built a loft bedroom of polished fir plank flooring cantilevered across 6.5 ft high cinderblock walls. It is enclosed by fiberglass shoji panels, and lined with plywood and Transite walls. [Transite is a corrugated panel of asbestos concrete, so maybe go ahead and don’t restore those, Noguchi Museum?]
But “The unusual ceiling,” according to the Times, “is made of long cardboard mailing tubes. It covers fluorescent lights, giving a soft, over all glow of light” that complements the columnar paper lamp in the corner, which would “soon be available commercially.” Indeed it would. It would take a few more decades for Shigeru Ban to bring us cardboard tube architecture, though.
10 minutes later update: OK, it destroys the entire premise of this post, but there are two Noguchi ceilings in New York: one made, and one found. As Amy Hau’s history of the Noguchi Museum points out, the artist chose to keep the original industrial metal ceiling in the space that is now the museum shop/cafe.
I listen to Proof, a podcast about NFTs by entrepreneur/collector Kevin Rose, with co-host Derek Edwards Schloss. It emerges from a world full of bullshit as a sincere, well-versed discussion. But, ngl, sometimes I just sit back and soak in the vocab, letting the effusive wordstream wash over me.
The current episode features an absolutely en fuego conversation with another collector/investor Todd Goldberg, and it is just an all-cylinders-firing romp through the topics of smart investing during the crypto and NFT market collapse, and the embers of generative, on-chain innovation that will surely rise from the ashes to set the art world on fire anew. These guys are sharp, confident and on point the whole time, speedrunning a game I do not play.
And in this game is a place called Marfa, which inhabits the same X, Y, Z coordinates as the Marfa I am quite familiar with. Last year the generative art platform Art Blocks brought the NFT circus to town when founder Snowfro put on an IRL show in a gallery/space/house that is now their headquarters? Anyway, I was so fascinated by their description and experience of Marfa, I transcribed it below. It starts around 28:00, but seriously, however far you back it up for context, you’ll just find literary and informational gold.
Robert Rauschenberg’s Publicon Station I, 1978, 5 ft tall, open and closed, published by Gemini GEL images via RRF & NGA
It’s weird to see a work of art without knowing the artist, and then to find out it’s by someone you know. The familiar overtakes the novel or, in the case of Publicon Station I, the lmao baffling. As soon as this gold leafed oar with a blue light bulb in its belly, standing in a geometric fabric-lined rhomboid cabinet was identified as a 1978 Robert Rauschenberg, its obviously a Rauschenberg, and from the 70s.
Publicon Station II, automotive lacquer on the outside, 36 x 36 inches across and 14 inches deep, images: NGA
Publicons are a series of six wall-mounted sculpture editions Rauschenberg made with Gemini G.E.L. “Related to the Stations of the Cross”, the Rauschenberg Foundation explains, “the Publicons are cabinets, each of which opens to reveal an enshrined object. The title merges ‘icon,’ a reference to medieval reliquaries and Renaissance altarpieces, and ‘public,’ since sculptures can be manipulated by the viewer. “
Publicon Station III, automotive lacquer on the outside enamel-coated aluminum where the mirrors would be, 36 x 31 in. closed, 69 inches open, and 5 in. deep, images: Christie’s & NGA
Those religious references are all distinct, of course–stations, icons, reliquaries, altarpieces–and don’t neatly map to Publicons. My guess is Rauschenberg was not hung up on dogmatics of symbolism, narrative, or procession, &c.; he was going for a vibe.
Publicon Station IV, which actually has multiple display configurations, including a backlit Alex Israel skyscape when it’s closed, but this is the most let it all hang out, 28 x 36 x 13 in. closed, 54 in. open, images via lamodern & NGA
There’s a common vocabulary of beige auto lacquer on the exterior, and geometric fabric panel collages on the interior. Three have lights: I, IV and V. Four have objects “enshrined” in them. The gold leafed oar feels the most religious; the mirror, wheel and dangling brick are all found in Rauschenberg’s earlier work. (Of course, what isn’t?)
Publicon Station V, with a brick on a chain, reminiscent of the 1955 combine Interview? 18 x 36 x 8 in. closed, images via NGA
Though their 1978 exhibition at Castelli Graphics did get a review in Artforum, not much seems to have been written about Publicons. Rauschenberg had bigger shows, and bigger work–and lots of it. In Artforum, Leo Rubinfien, always hard to please, wrote:
The central device with which the “Publicons” work is the difference between their blank and unyielding exteriors and their exuberant contents. Since they are modeled on icon cases, a hint of the sacred still adheres to them, reinforced by their individual titles—Station 1, Station II, etc. Thus one approaches and opens them a little cautiously, to find a crazy Pop/Surreal confusion inside. They are, in fact, as much jack-in-the-box as icon: Station I, when opened, reveals a canoe paddle covered with gold leaf, with a glowing blue light for a navel—it is as if the piece has stuck its tongue out at one for treating it respectfully.
I think a good part of what the “Publicons” are about is this mockery of their own audience of culture-lovers.
Publicon Station VI, the only one that doesn’t open and close, so maybe one takes the fabric skateboards out of their little slot that the bottlecaps keep them from falling through? image: NGA
If it’s irony one seeks, one should look at the outside of the Publicons, not the interior. These aggressively blank, glossy boxes feel like a comment by Rauschenberg on an academic minimalism, deadpan sculpture with roots in the gestalt materialism of folks like Robert Morris or Donald Judd. The interiors of Publicons are exuberant in comparison to anything except other Rauschenbergs. They feel like the artist trying to relate, if not assimilate, to the art of his time.
Most reproductions of Publicons show only the most “interesting” part: the inside, and usually only one work. I wanted to see what could be seen by putting all the Publicons on one page, open and closed, in order, the way you might find them in a church gallery.
Publicon Station 0
The Publicons contain as many references to Rauschenberg’s own work as they do to any religious mode. But maybe that misses the point; why couldn’t they instead reveal the reliquarian and altarpiece vibes of earlier combines, works where holy relics hide behind cabinet doors.
