1980s Joan Mitchell rocking the T-shirt from de Kooning’s 1978 show in Iowa on the cover of Guy Bloch-Champfort’s book, Joan Mitchell: By Her Friends
When Guy Bloch-Champfort’s book, Joan Mitchell: By Her Friends* came out in English last summer, I—like everyone, I imagine—immediately wanted a souvenir t-shirt from the 1978 inaugural exhibition of The Gallery of Art at The University of Northern Iowa. Alas, my five-month search has been unsuccessful.
Joan Mitchell Season Commemorative T-Shirt, black screenprint on Light Blue** Hanes Authentic T-shirt, with COA, $30 or $40, shipped. [link below]
But now Joan Mitchell Season is upon us, and to celebrate, greg.org is offering a facsimile edition of Joan Mitchell’s most epic swag [above], screenprinted by hand on a light blue Hanes Authentic T-shirt, and accompanied by a numbered, signed, and stamped certificate of authenticity.
On Kawara, Trilogy (I GOT UP, I WENT, I MET), 36 volumes, 13,690 pages, ed. 25, 1968-79/2008, published by mfc-michèle didier
Of all the—
The library of Tama Art University in Tokyo, known as Tamabi, has digitized their collection of publications related to On Kawara. The On Kawara Db includes images and publication information for many exhibition catalogues, but also CD box sets of audio recordings of One Million Years performances. As in, each CD in a box set has an entry and a photo. But no audio.
Hundreds of Today Series paintings and boxes are included, I think from an 1993 exhibition in Bordeaux.
Tamabi Db
And michèle didier’s compilation editions of I GOT UP, I WENT, I MET, and I READ, covering every day from 1968 through 1979 are included, ALL 24 VOLUMES, ALL 16,962 PAGES. By date. I guess all that’s left is to digitize every page of the ONE MILLION YEARS volumes? I’ll keep checking back.
I AM STILL ALIVE, 1974-03-01
There are also an undetermined—but filterable and countable, be my guest and lmk—number of I AM STILL ALIVE telegrams. Fine, I counted, I got 204. I think they constitute the entirety of the 1978 Edition Rene Block catalogue, covering 1970-1977.
This project feels different after a month of watching Palestinians in Gaza post the same daily declarations to social media, until they don’t.
photo of a Mitron 1899-1900, published in The Work of Atget, the catalogue for one of four consecutive exhibitions of Eugène Atget at The Modern from 1981 thru 1985
When the Manhattan Art Review posted this image of Eugène Atget’s c. 1899-1900 photo of a mitron, or baker’s boy, to social media, I did not think of MoMA’s four-show, four-year odyssey through Atget’s oeuvre, where John Szarkowski installed it together withPorteuse de pain, a photo taken in the same spot and the same light of a woman pushing a bread cart.
Eugène Atget, Porteuse de pain, 1899-1900, collection: MoMA
[Not to get all Errol Morris about it, but judging by the shadows of the trees, I’d say Atget photographed the mitron a few minutes before the porteuse. Also, I’d have to disagree with the catalogue where [Szarkowski?] says, “The basket on the head of the mitron is surely the same one that rests on top of the cart of the porteuse.” Uh, surely it is not?]
But none of that mattered; all I could think was to respect the drip. When they present me the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Lettres et Arts, I decided, I’d don my full mitron fit to the Elysée, where I’d thank Bill Cunningham for the workwear, Susan Cianciolo for the apron/skirt—and Berenice Abbott, for saving this whole body of work from la poubelle.
In an article in The New York Times about Israel’s attempts to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, Jerusalem Bureau chief Patrick Kingsley just called the 1948 Nakba—the murder and expulsion of Palestinians from lands that became Israel—a “migration.”
Website for Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration [sic] Series, 1940-41, at the Phillips Collection
Which immediately conjures Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel masterpiece, The Migration Series, the 1940-41 epic that told a tale of “The Great Migration,” “the flight” of Black Americans out of the South “following the outbreak of World War I.”
Lawrence’s original title for his series was The Migration of The Negro. The title changed as language shifted with the political and cultural change. No one today would be confused by this, or by the changing implications of, “The Negro.” Yet the implications and complications of the term “Migration” are still rarely acknowledged.
“To me, migration means movement,” said Lawrence at some later point, according to the Phillips Collection, which acquired half the series. “There was conflict and struggle. But out of the struggle came a kind of power and even beauty. ‘And the migrants kept coming’ [the artist’s caption for the final panel, is a refrain of triumph over adversity. If it rings true for you today, then it must still strike a chord in our American experience.”
Perhaps hearing the 1948 Nakba called a “migration” in the midst of relentless violence on a massive scale, in the pursuit of another nakba, will shock people into recognition. That migration can also mean ethnic cleansing and genocide, and that it rings true today because it’s still endemic in our American experience, and there is not beauty in it.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1989, silkscreen on paper, 16 1/2 x 21 /3/4 in., published in an edition of 250 + 10 AP by the Public Art Fund, image: Andrea Rosen Gallery via FG-T Fndn
There are two paper stack works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres where every sheet in the stack is a signed, numbered edition, and the whole thing constitutes one work. You can’t take those. [Though “Untitled”, from 1991, is made up of 161 signed prints from an edition of 250 the artist made with Public Art Fund in 1989, above. The other 89 prints, plus 10 APs, are all circulating as individual works, sold (and resold) separately.]
“Untitled”, 1990, embossed paper—that’s a ring of dolphins, btw—in archival box, 8 x 14 x 14 in., ed 12+5AP, image: Brandon Wickencamp/Andrea Rosen Gallery via FG-T Fndn
There is one paper stack work that was published as an edition of stacks: 17 8-inch tall stacks of embossed paper in archival boxes. You can’t take those, either. [Unless? HMU?]
“Untitled”, 1991, light blue printed on white paper, 3 1/4 in. ideal height, 8 1/2 x 11 in sheets, the Artist Proof, selling as lot 444 at Sotheby’s on 16 Nov 2023, from the estate of Chara Scheyer
And there are two classic paper stack works, with endless supplies of paper and ideal heights, etc., that were created as editions. Which is distinct from a stack being able to exist in two or more places at once; in this case, an edition is about the number of owners, not the number of stacks. One, “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.), is an edition of three, though there’s only one out there: the de la Cruzes gave one to what’s now ICA Miami, and the Raleses gave one to the NGA.
The other is “Untitled”, above, which is an edition of 1 plus an artist proof Felix gave to Michael Jenkins, an artist, friend and collaborator. [Their two-person show together in 1991 at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels included “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.) and Felix’s text portrait frieze of Jenkins, but not the stack they made together the year before with a naked sailor on it, “Untitled” (Join), which the Rubells whip out all the time.] Anyway, Chara Scheyer bought Jenkins’ little stack a while ago, and now it’s back. If there’s a more manageable stack out there, I haven’t seen it.
Whether the earliest drawings or the monochrome paintings, or anything in between or since, Richard Prince’s joke works were never meant to be funny. But this one feels like it got 100x more unfunny lately. Oh, to go back to the days when it could be the title of a publicity stunt auction instead of the harbinger and reminder of quotidian violence.
Richard Tuttle enactment [?] for Alexander Calder’s Little Mobile for Table’s Edge, 2022/1939, as seen at Pace LA in early 2023.
However rare it was, it turns out Calder used this hanging-off-a-table mechanism at least one more time than I thought: in Boomerang on Table, a 1949 work that was acquired by Nelson Rockefeller. In the undated photo Sotheby’s published of Rockefeller’s modernist house in Seal Harbor, Maine, Boomerang is on the glass coffee table—perched on a tiny little stick. Maybe any Calder can hang off the table, if you try, and vice versa.
Boomerang on Table on a stand on a table, in Nelson Rockefeller’s Seal Harbor house, photo: Lee Bolton via Sotheby’s
One thing I wonder about in the Sotheby’s sale: this Calder is listed as from the “Collection of Richard and Kathy Feld,” who bought the work at Rockefeller’s estate auction in 1980. And I’m sure that’s exactly who is selling it, not Richard and Kathy Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers and longtime MoMA trustee, respectively. There was a children’s clothing wholesaler and contemporary collector Richard Feld who gave the Times a couple of quotes about buying art in a bubble, and that was about it. No mention of his wife. But the catalogue’s been out a month; if Sotheby’s really had misspelled their own prominent client’s name, someone would have corrected it by now. Right?
This custom woven, 10-meter extension cord in an edition of 100 is absolutely one of my favorite Olafur Eliasson editions, because it is an extension cord.
360° room for all colours[including the bisexual ones], 2002, installed at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2004, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
I haven’t ever asked why it exists, but the title, 10 Meter Cable For All Colours and the date, 2004, suggest a connection to Olafur’s 2002 work, 360° room for all colours. This curving spatial structure is filled with red, green and blue lights that shift through all the colours. It was first shown in Paris in 2002, and then in the 2004 Your Lighthouse: Works of Light, 1991-2004 at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, which opened in the glare of Olafur’s Tate Turbine Hall project.
installation view zoomed in on lightbulbs and cables at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2004, image: Alexander Krauss via olafureliasson.net
This unusual top-down installation view of a work which typically had a scrim ceiling shows not only the tightly packed lightbulbs in the wall, but also a thick bundle of extension cords to power them, running up and out of site.
While this work might account for why Olafur had several kilometers of electrical cable lying around the studio, it still doesn’t explain why there’s an edition. My guess would be that a few spools of leftover cable were transformed from surplus into artwork by whatever that mysterious process is, and they were given to employees, friends, and whoever. There is a whole body of this kind of small, interpersonal edition that grows out of the studio’s practice and relationships, and I think it’s just neat.
This example, for sale in a couple of weeks at Bruun-Rasmussen in Denmark, is ed. 4/100, perhaps from someone at the top of the artist’s list. [B-R offered ed. 1/100 in 2012, which was somehow not deluxe enough to reach the DKK 30000 estimate. The current example is expected to sell for DKK6000, under USD1000, which feels like the right balance of reasonable and ridiculous, but most importantly, not too expensive to put it right to actual use.]
