the making of, by greg allen
Are you on Bluesky? I am on Bluesky. If you’re there, please find me @greg.org and let’s connect.
With [gestures around at the tumultuous state of social media platforms] all this, I am working on a mailing list, which will likely become a very l0w-volume newsletter/projects update.
I will do a proper invitation soon, but if you’d like to be added to my mailing list, please email me, greg at greg dot org.
See you here and there!
It’s fascinating to think of the history of this carved walnut statue hollowed out with a little shelf in the back. Of its genre, a Sedes sapientiae, or the Seat of Wisdom, that depicts the enthroned Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus on her lap. Of how it probably adorned a church in central France from some point in the 13th century, until who knows when, it’s not clear.
Of how it survived the centuries, worn, aged, saved and ignored in some fortuitous combination, gathering the rough patina of a deconsecrated, or at least not ostentatiously venerated, relic.
Of how it made its way to the capital, Paris, to rest for a moment under the authenticating connoisseurial gaze of an online antique dealer specializing in ancient and medieval sculpture.
And then of how, in the last several months, it was purchased by a Vietnamese artist who, using a simple, wedged plank and a stick, transformed it into a birdhouse, and installed it in the greenhouse/performance space of his communal garden/farm/studio outside Berlin. As the Psalmist declared, “Yea, the sparrow hath found an house” [Ps. 84:3].
And of how it traveled from Güldenhof to Brussels, where it perched atop the bookcase of an influential art dealer, and where until last week the rich and powerful of Europe traveled to be in its presence, or perhaps to put a hold on it via pdf.
Whatever the future hold for this object, it is likely to be dramatically different from what it might have expected even as recently as a year ago. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows [Matt. 10:31], but if you ask successfully, perhaps the value of 10% fewer sparrows.
Next Morning Update:
Continue reading “Yea, The Sparrow Hath Found A House”
This is not an Ellsworth Kelly blog, I swear, but with the 100th anniversary of Kelly’s birth coming up in a few weeks, the Kelly Information Complex is kicking into high gear.
Or maybe seeing a Kelly show makes me more attuned to entirely random Kelly content floating by. Like this slightly wild meta-Kelly, a Kelly sketch. It’s a large drawing of a trapezoid made of two lines and the edges of the paper, with the colors—green and white paper—in each section. A piece of paper is collaged at the bottom that reads, “Voor Vincent van Gogh.”
I think it’s the printer’s schematic for this poster, part of a series of artist posters published by the Stichting Van Gogh in 1990 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of that artist’s death. Lichtenstein did one, de Kooning did one. Or had one done. And apparently Kelly did one. Or had one done.
This drawing [sic] has sold twice already, going up about $5,000 each time. So maybe it’s less like a poster design and more like a security. [This is not investment advice.]
23 May 2023, Lot 141: Ellsworth Kelly, Voor Vincent van Gogh, est. $20-30k [update: sold for $27,720][ragoarts]
In May 2018, news of racist vandalism at the Rothko Chapel in Houston was soon overshadowed by a high school shooting in Santa Fe. I remember not posting about it at the time. Don’t give it air, don’t give it attention.
Because just a couple of weeks earlier, I’d been researching Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, trying to find out what protest message it had been tagged with when it was exhibited at the Seagram Building in 1967. And though I was unsuccessful, I’d found and bought a vintage press photo of Broken Obelisk in Houston in 1980, with most of the traces of the previous year’s neo-nazi vandalism erased.
And then within days of finding a photo of an incident I’d known nothing about, a photo of an anti-racism demonstration surrounding Broken Obelisk ran at the top of Andrew Russeth’s ARTNews review of a double biography of John and Dominique deMenil. It was from the same vandalism incident.
Continue reading “The Obelisk’s Not The Only Thing That’s Broken Around Here”ngl, part of the reason I’m running away to the countryside today to see art I’ve just seen is because it’s unexpectedly hard to sit at a computer, at a blog dashboard, and know that Heather Armstrong was around, and now she’s not. Our paths ran in parallel for a long and formative time, and they intersected in many ways, both major and minor, and they diverged. But her voice, her presence, her influence, has been a constant in some form for decades of my life, and it’s painful to know she’s gone. It’s painful, too, to even get glimpses of the suffering and challenges she dealt with, and it is gutting to know that her family and friends will have a hard road ahead. So yeah, I’m going to take a minute.
We went to Glenstone to see the Ellsworth Kelly exhibition last week, which is wonderful. The show is an overwhelming physical experience the likes of which I don’t recall having with Kelly’s work, even at the Guggenheim. So that’s interesting. The loans were tremendous; the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s roomful of later paintings makes sense, as they’re taking the show. It also felt interesting that some major collectors of Kelly’s work weren’t involved. It didn’t diminish the show, though.
There were spiderwebs on the torqued ellipse, both across the sunnier surfaces inside, where they were like glitter, and also in a few of the gaps up high. The Koons was still unplanted, I guess I’m glad they didn’t feel the need to rush it for the Kelly opening.
The floor work was incredible. After all this, I didn’t realize it was considered by the artist to be a new work, not just a reinstallation of the original 1990 piece at Portikus. It felt like a Turrell, or a Doug Wheeler. There’s something extraordinary, though, about the Rales’s capacity to recreate an architectural space of a specific, historic dimension, to accommodate an artist’s work. It’s here with the Gober room, and with the Kelly. In the Kelly’s case, there is also a fascinating vitrine outside with documentation of the work, and Kelly’s involvement in realizing it at Glenstone, including the specs for the support and the recipe for the color. Let a thousand bootleg Kelly floor pieces bloom.
We took these cookies home to plant them, in hopes that they’ll grow to fill the room. Stay tuned.
I was sure that the smaller Color Panels for a Large Wall, Kelly made for himself, which were at Marks in 2019, was in Glenstone’s collection, but it doesn’t show up on the list rn. It is so great up close. So here is a picture of it from far away.
I was going to write about how the only problem with the Kelly show was the difficulty of getting reservations to see it again, but then I checked, and there was an opening today, so I rearranged my schedule, and am heading back.
A few hours later update: The way the Glenstone pieces are grouped together is interesting, like concentrated emphases on Kelly’s practice. It feels more seriously engaged than, say, the Vuitton Fondation buying four works from a late show.
The loans, meanwhile, are mostly from museums and private collections arranged by Matthew Marks. It reminded me of Emily Rales’ conversation with Charlotte Burns last month on The Art World: What if…? podcast, where Rales talked about being a little surprised that Glenstone agreeing to almost every loan request was definitely not standard exhibition procedure. I pictured an inordinate amount of goodwill, more fungible than the niceties of donor development museums are prone to.
For that matter, Rales also talked about Glenstone eventually building a board, and thinking through the question of what a board looks like that is not beholden to fundraising. Though they are surely respectful and perhaps even friendly—as well as competitive—toward other collectors, Glenstone is not beholden to them. And Glenstone’s relationship with other collectors will not necessarily follow the paradigms other museums have created.
And for that other matter, taking more time to study the documents for Kelly’s Portikus floor work felt of a piece. Portikus’ Yellow Curve and the other floor panels were all created in relation to a specific, existing space. When Glenstone acquired their Kelly, in 2015, they created a space in their original Charles Gwathmey building [now called The Gallery], to fit the Portikus work. And then Kelly made it [again.] That realization, during the construction of the new building, was never publicly shown, just an extraordinary treat for the collectors, made possible by an extraordinary deference to the artist.
Previously, related, from 2022: Ellsworth Kelly, Red Floor Panel (1992)
When I saw the photo above in Doyle’s rare books sale I recognized it immediately, and I was wrong.
I scanned over my neighbors.
Slinky Palermo, Slinky Palermo
Now I’m in all the papers.
So far we have only two images of artworks attributed to Slinky Palermo, from Pinterest [above] and tumblr [below]. I guess technically, it’s slinky palermo.
Though namechecked by famous critics in prominent places, and included with major historic figures in a publication for a group show,
the most significant critical information we have on the artistic practice of Slinky Palermo comes from just two sources.
The first is the Dia Art Foundation, which exhibited Slinky Palermo works from 1964-1997 in 2011, as seen in the results for two slightly differently worded Google searches:
It may be possible that additional Google searching will yield more detail from these truncated excerpts, in the way that you can, in desperation, search phrase by incremental phrase in a Google book snippet view.
The other is a New York Magazine directory listing for a 1995 exhibition at Brooke Alexander:
Whatever it may have been in the past, from this point forward, Slinky Palermo is an artist who sees abstraction as a Google search into the philosophy of epistemology.
Given the absence of actual books in the Google Books results, it seems likely that most Slinky Palermo mentions can be attributed to OCR software that predates Google’s own scanning initiative. Whether it’s a steadfast commitment painting in the face of untenable something, or glitching industrial-scale digitization, Slinky Palermo is a tenacious artifact—a bookmark, if not a flagbearer—of a specific historic moment and context, and for those that inhabit and revisit it. Which, looking prospectively, is all of us.
Trying to trace the whereabouts of Jasper Johns’ 1960 Painting With Two Balls around 1987, when Sturtevant made her Johns Painting With Two Balls, I note that it was reproduced in color in Michael Crichton’s catalogue for Johns’ 1977 Whitney Museum retrospective.
From the notes in the Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonée, I see that the painting has been on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, beginning March 1979.
Also, that some of the collage pieces date from December 1959.
Also, the construction is as follows: “four mending braces are attached to the canvas with screws, and a strip of wood runs under the bottom edge of the painting.” [Sturtevant’s version has no such strip.]
Also, THOSE ARE NOT JASPER JOHNS’ BALLS. THE BALLS WERE STOLEN. TWICE. AND REPLACED. TWICE.
When the painting returned from a traveling exhibition in November 1962, the original balls were missing and had to be replaced.
That exhibition, 4 Americans: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz, traveled from the Moderna Museet to the Stedelijk to the Kunsthalle Bern, presumably went off without incident until the end. Presumably, the artist made the replacement balls.
The second set was later stolen while the painting was on view at the Venice Biennale in 1964. According to the artist, the balls were replaced again and paint was applied to them with his approval.
So these balls were handled by Italians. They are, in fact, Italian balls. Palle di Venezia. Meanwhile, four of Jasper Johns’ balls are on the loose, last known location: someone’s pockets in Europe. Keep an eye out, I guess.
If you were thinking we just saw Sturtevant’s Johns Painting With Two Balls at auction, you were right. Gerald Finberg bought the 1987 work in late 2019 at Phillips, and, I assume, had a couple of great years with it.
Now it’s on the rebound at Christie’s, who spice things up a bit by letting us hit it from the back. The three panel construction and the tapered cross bars are clearly visible and—presumably—like Johns’ 1960 original.
The higher-res images also help make legible some of the fragments of the International Herald Tribune Sturtevant used (from April 23, 1987 at least, when the Stanley Cup was also underway) as she painted this thing in Paris[?].
The way we understand Sturtevant’s practice is that she repeated works but didn’t reproduce them, painting from the image in her mind, if not exactly “memory.” But the placement, shape, and even the layering of the brushstroke knots here makes me suspect that’s not how Two Balls went down. I think she used a color image for reference, and maybe even projected it. This is a stroke-for-stroke remake—a drip-for-drip remake, even—which feels categorically different from Sturtevant’s other projects [or at least how they’re presented and understood.]
It feels like there’s a Rauschenberg Factum reference here I can’t quite tease out. It’s not just as if two different people made Factum I and Factum II. It’s two different people made paintings with two balls, 27 years apart, and both of them were there when Rauschenberg made the Factums in the first place. But only one made this comparison possible, decades later, and that’s Sturtevant.
17 May 2023, Lot 40C: Sturtevant, Johns Painting With Two Balls, 1987, est. $500-700k [update: sold for $700k hammer, $882,000 total][christies]
2019 Auction listing at Phillips, where it sold for $680,000 [phillips]
Peter Halley interviewing Sturtevant in 2005 [indexmagazine]
Last night, in a post-MetGala nonsense haze, I dragged myself through the eight [8!] sales Sotheby’s held in late 2021 of Karl Lagerfeld’s estate. The green LL Bean boat tote with Lagerfeld embroidered on it caught my eye.
As his deeply depressing memoir recounts, André Leon Talley and Lagerfeld were extremely close from their first encounter in the early 1970s, when he interviewed the designer for WWD at The Plaza Hotel. Young Talley caused a scandal once in Paris when, running late for a party at Maxim’s, he threw on Lagerfeld’s dressing gown instead of going back to his hotel for the required black tie.
In December 2013, after a Chanel Rodeo in Dallas, Talley asked Lagerfeld to fund a retrospective of a Chanel photographer who’d just died. Karl said he’d think about it. Talley found himself removed from Chanel’s guest and gift lists, and the two men never communicated again.
Lagerfeld’s LL Bean bag caught my eye because a few months ago, an identical one was sold at Christie’s from Talley’s estate. Talley’s lot had a date, c. 2010, so pre-split. What impossibly middle class situation might have occasioned the creation of these matching tote bags for these two men? Did they have them made? LMAO, no. Can you imagine either of these men choosing these bags? Or typing in their embroidery orders on llbean.com? They were swag, or a party favor. Did the men save them, or did the bags only survive their recipients because they were forgotten immediately?
It’s now impossible to say, but that didn’t stop someone out there from paying a thousand euros and twelve hundred dollars, respectively, for these mute artifacts of weekend houseguest culture tenuously connected to these two very damaged men.
Previously: ALT X LLB
I think the world does not need these so I will not be making them.
It wasn’t surprising to hear claims that The Met Costume Institute Gala ripped off Willie Cole’s artwork by making chandeliers out of plastic water bottles. What was surprising was that the thief was Tadao Ando.
Ando is credited as the exhibition designer for “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” He was tapped because he and Lagerfeld collaborated in the 1990s. [He designed a studio in Biarritz which Lagerfeld didn’t build, but Lagerfeld published a book of his own photos of an Ando building a couple of years later.] But Ando apparently had a hand in designing the party, too? Let’s take a look at that.
Continue reading “Great Artists Steal, Gala Artists Recycle”
Jonathan Monk has been expanding his international network of Picture Post Cards Posted from Post Boxes Pictured for almost 20 years. Now, Brooklyn gets its own edition. Jonathan Monk has just published a post card edition with Jonathan A. Hill Booksellers (no relation). Which means Monk signs and addresses the postcard [above] to you, and Hill et al drops it in the mailbox [also above], which, as you can see from the skyline in the background, is near the entrance to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.
Here is the very mailbox on Google Streetview, in fact, at the intersection of Orange Street & Columbia Heights.
The bootleg possibilities are either endless or redundant, I can’t quite tell.
Picture Post Card Posted From Post Box Pictured, Jonathan Monk 2023, $50US [jonathanahill]
All thinking about early, tiny Yves Klein paintings inevitably turns to the most and smallest of them all—if they existed—Yves Peintures.
While poking around to write another blog post about Yves Peintures, which the Estate calls the “first gesture” of Klein’s public career as an artist, I find I am more confounded and confused than ever about what the project/object actually is, what it was, and what it became.
At the most basic level, Yves Peintures is a portfolio, sometimes called an artist book, Klein made in late 1954 in Spain, that echoes the form of a Parisian exhibition catalogue. Rectangles of colored paper mounted on sheets printed with captions seemingly illustrate ten monochrome paintings of various colors, dates, sizes, and cities of creation. All are attributed to Yves. Some “paintings” have “Yves” printed in cursive on the lower right corner, as if they are signed.
Continue reading “Yves Peintures, Qu’est Ce Que C’est?”