Which turns out to be just one example of how time moved back then. The cover—for which there was no hook except art world vibes—was none other than Florine Stettheimer’s Studio Party (or Soirée). Don’t expect ME to demand an excuse to love Florine Stettheimer!
And then there were dueling reviews of a big Yves Klein retrospective, from Nan Rosenthal and Benjamin Buchloh, who—spoiler alert—may have disagreed on Klein, but they both disliked the show. And while neither of them answered the highly specific Yves Klein-related question that led me to this issue in the first place, I can’t complain.
Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, installation view at the Walker Art Center, 2011
In the 2010-11 retrospective of Yves Klein’s work organized by the Hirshhorn and the Walker Art Center, there was a wall (in DC) and a nook (in Minneapolis) filled with early, small-ish monochromes in a variety of colors that weren’t blue. They surrounded a vitrine with Klein’s amazing 1954 catalogue for an imaginary monochromes exhibition, Yves Peintures.
Yves Klein, untitled (M 109), 1955, 10×10 cm, oil on gauze on panel, being sold at Christie’s Paris
This little red square was not among them, but can you imagine if it was, looking like an emergency button in its gigantic, beveled frame?
Sam McKinniss, Cop Car in Brooklyn, 2020, 11×14 in., oil on linen, via JTT
Yesterday I relistened to JTT’s 2022 podcast episode where gallerist Jasmin Tsou talks with Sam McKinniss about Mischief, his 2022 show at JTT, and about Costume Drama, a 2020-21 show at the Ovitz Collection in Los Angeles. Costume Drama opened in a moment when it was almost not even possible to go to shows, and McKinniss talked about his attempt to convey that early COVID-19 era experience of historic disaster and looming uncertainty. The show included a sweeping 6×8-foot painting of the sinking Titanic—or rather, of a shot from the movie, Titanic—amid almost tiny paintings, including an 11×14 painting of a cop car on fire. Tsou asked him about how he decides the size of his paintings:
We had a small kid and were living in two cities, so I barely made it to a handful of their shows, but Orchard has always felt like one of the defining presences in my art life. I knew some of the members, so I felt drawn to it, but not well enough to really get sucked in, alas. It was new and wild—for being limited-term, historically aware, and not-so-commercial, which doesn’t seem like much to type it, but it was really a lot—and people were always talking about it.
R.H. Quaytman I remember there being two factions: the group that included me, Rhea [Anastas] and Andrea [Fraser]; and the one with Jeff [Preiss], Nicolás [Guagnini] and Karin [Schneider]. Nic had the idea to open an office; Andrea wanted to open a gallery and be the dealer. So, we ended up meeting.
This is the true story of twelve art world people who chose to start a gallery work together and fifteen years later to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.
So to someone teetering on the other side of the fence from Orchard, none of the conflicts were apparent by the time they were all putting on their shows. It already felt so transparent at the time, that in 2009, when Rebecca Quaytman published Orchard Spreadsheet, a three-year ledger of the gallery’s finances—in reverse chronological order, like a blog—as a print edition, the only surprise was that, contrary to what my art star-fixated mind had originally assumed, it hadn’t been primarily underwritten by Dan Graham.
And while Quaytman’s work was the huge discovery for me from Orchard—and, it sounds like, for her, too—to learn Fraser wanted to “open a gallery and be the dealer” makes excruciatingly perfect sense.
If anything, her responses here still show her extraordinary awareness of how the dynamics and structures of art and art history operate, and that includes art magazine oral histories. Orchard felt like The Real Art World, and it was, but it was not only that, which feels worth remembering.
Julie Mehretu, New Dawn, Sing (for Nina), 2023, ink and acrylic on canvas, 36×44 in., est. $900k-1.2m, image Marian Goodman Gallery via Sotheby’s
I’ve been in low-key awe and gratitude for the artists who stepped in to rescue Nina Simone’s childhood home in 2017, and who have continued to lead the effort to make it a site of public history and memorialization. It kicked off with Verne Dawson, who is local in western North Carolina, where Simone’s small house is, and he helped rally Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson, Adam Pendleton, and Julie Mehretu to buy the house and start the preservation process.
Seriously, the thing to do would be to buy all the things, but especially the works of the quartet of artists central to the rescue and restoration project. The auction is conducted by Sotheby’s and processed by Pace. As of now, only Mehretu’s painting, New Dawn, Sing (For Nina), also includes a right-of-first-refusal clause, which is to be executed with Marian Goodman Gallery. Which seems very reasonable.
Anna Cassel, No. 19. 11 April 1913, 1913, oil on canvas. 21 1/2 x 15 1/2″, image via artforum
The Artist Formerly Known As Hilma af Klint was a collective. Documents only discovered in 2021 show that af Klint’s major works were made with a co-equal collaborator (and likely former lover), Anna Cassel, and that together, they led a collective of at least 13 women to produce the paintings that have been considered af Klint’s visionary work alone.
The Artforum from the archives newsletter delivers the news with big how it started/how it’s going energy from Daniel Birnbaum, the art world’s most powerful Hilma af Klint whisperer.
Essential Design, Lot 128: That is not a Frank Gehry skateboard. image: wright20
I am officially on the record as a skeptic of artist skateboard collabs, but I can also say that no one wants there to be a Frank Gehry skateboard more than me.
This group of skate decks in next week’s Essential Design sale at Wright20, “is comprised of decks by AWS for Alien Workshop, Marc Johnson for Enjoi Skateboards, Rick McCrank and Eric Koston for Girl Skateboards, One Fifty One Skateboards, Frank Gehry, and Toy Machine. Printed manufacturer’s mark to six examples.”
New Museum Skateboard as product, 2014, and the SANAA building it echoes. image I was about to make ganked from 9yo artnet article instead.
And the only thing better than a Frank Gehry skateboard is a signed Frank Gehry skateboard. But again, no. This is the upside-down silhouette of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s of SANAA’s New Museum. It is the shape the museum uses as a logo, turned into a skateboard. The limited edition of 150, produced in 2014 by Chapman Skateboards, is still available in the New Museum’s shop.
Castator and Duff @ NuMu, 2012, published to Castator’s tumblr [rip], then published by Complex and blackholed once they wrung enough eyeballs out of it, recovered via the Internet Archive
The idea originated with a 2012 window installation by Canyon Castator and Richard Duff, who put the woeful off-the-rack Supreme artist collab skatedecks to shame with their janky, hand-chopped-and-reassembled New Museum board. Which I am now adding to my auction watch list.
Dorothy Dandridge and the headline, “The Man Who Found $10 Million” on the cover of the Nov. 1, 1954 issue of LIFE Magazine, and a half-page wide aerial photo tracing the path George Vick hiked up a canyon, then up a mountain face, to find a massive deposit of uranium, on p. 124 [via]
Speaking of the outer margins of Henry David Thoreau inspiration, in November 1954, LIFE Magazine published a massive feature on an ersatz uranium hunter named George Vick. At the age of 48, and after nine grueling months searching the Four Corners region of Colorado and Utah, Vick found a massive uranium deposit, which he sold to a mining company for $10 million. The LIFE cover line, “The Man Who Found $10 Million,” made him an instant target for people asking for a piece of that easy money. Vick moved to California and set up his own think tank for the nuclear future, which he called Walden West. Later, when the future looked bleak, he built an apocalypse-proof bunker mansion in British Columbia, which he called, of course, Walden North.
Robert Rauschenberg, Lincoln, 1958, 17 x 21 inches, collage of printed paper, handwritten paper, some dingy damask, a stamped metal tag, and paint on someone else’s canvas
Which all turns out to be the tangent here, because Robert Rauschenberg cut out the aerial photo of Vick’s treasure trail and, in 1958, working in the gap between LIFE and art, he collaged it to the center of a small combine titled, Lincoln. Lincoln is one of at least seven small combines Rauschenberg made in 1958, along with a similar number in 1957. [I wrote about another of these little personal combines, State, in 2020.]
Dan Graham, Children’s Day Care CD-Rom, Cartoon, Computer Screen Library Center, 1998, at Marian Goodman, image via @visitordesign
The Dan Graham tribute show at Marian Goodman looks fantastic; there’s a whole gallery of models/maquettes/studies, tiny little Dan Graham pavilions on pedestals that almost make me want to move to the country.
Visitor took this picture of one of what look like a mountain of gems: a 1998 model called Children’s Day Care CD-Rom, Cartoon, Computer Screen Library Center.
Nan Goldin, Brice Marden in his studio at Eagles Mere, PA, 1995. 10.5×17 in., via Gallery98
For the announcement of his third show of Brice Marden’s work, in October 1995-January 1996, Matthew Marks sent out a photo of the artist in his studio in Eagles Mere, PA, taken by another gallery artist, Nan Goldin.
I still have the catalogue for this show, but the announcement is long since gone. Marc Miller at Gallery98 currently has the above example for sale.
Richard Hamilton, A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein, 1964, 23×26 in, screenprint, given to Mark Lancaster and sold at Sotheby’s for $4,064.
During his 1963 visit to the US to see Duchamp’s Pasadena retrospective, Richard Hamilton also picked up a Roy Lichtenstein poster/lithograph from Castelli. When he got back to the UK, he enlarged a tiny section to make his own two-color print edition, A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein for…, which he liked to give away to friends.
In the eight years since an archival photo of a lone andiron at the Met attributed to Paul Revere—I’m struggling here to say exactly what it did. Diverted me onto a lyrical, conceptual mission? Transmuted itself into an artwork and me into an artist? Whatever, it changed my life. Point is, while I did not turn into some andiron freak, I did gain a somewhat heightened—heightened and specific—awareness of andirons in the world.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Bloodworks), 1992, four 11 x 9 inch drawings in colored pencil and graphite, or gouache and graphite, in the artist’s 12.5 x 10.5 inch frames, selling at Sotheby’s London on 18 Apr 2023
The Sammlung Goetz in Munich is selling stuff?1 Ingvild Goetz is the private museum OG. She’s has the Felix Gonzalez-Torres full stack: a stack, a billboard, a candy pour, a light string, an iconic and haunting photo, a text portrait, which has been installed in her Herzog & de Meuron building since the beginning, and she has—had—these early Bloodworks drawings.
Early in the sense that the lines on the handrawn grids still run “up.” In the book published alongside the artist’s MOCA/Hirshhorn/Renaissance Society show in 1994, Charles Merewhether wrote about these drawings under the heading, “The Line of Fortune”:
From 1988 on, Gonzalez-Torres has composed a series of drawings made of a single line running across a graph. In the earlier work the line ran upwards, and in the more recent down, as if charting the rise and fall of stocks, or sales of one commodity or another. The surplus value of labor, Marx might have called it, but the artist has chosen a different name, “Bloodwork.” The wavering line is not the abstract sign of market value, but of a different economy of fortune. By appropriating a minimalism of style, Gonzalez-Torres was reproducing the clinical character of medical charts of a body’s life. This was an economy of the body, with its line running upwards to indicate a healthy recovery, and down to mark its decline. And in reading such charts daily, so too the audience became its subject whose feeling of hope, of unhopeable hope, rises and falls.
The next Bloodwork drawing after these, a single graph on linen,“Untitled” (Bloodwork – False Hope), is the last one with an ascending line.
Despite their title these works have always felt depersonalized, even cool or cold, and shown in a large sequence, like 21 or 31 days, their similarity kind of defy close attention. But these, and earlier graphs on painted paper, feel like the opposite. Their precision and variation resonates with the time and experience of their making, on page after page in a spiral bound sketchbook.
In a 1991 interview Bob Nickas and Gonzalez-Torres talked about On Kawara’s date paintings in relation to these drawings. And that makes me wonder whether these graphs were a daily practice, an exercise, a routine or a respite, literal marks of the artist’s life and work.
1 Next morning update: A few weeks ago Goetz announced the sale of 49 pieces to fund a charity focused on elder poverty relief in Germany. According to the Die Welt article [shoutout A. G./@kios_que] above, Goetz has been donating and permanently loaning works to public collections since 2014. Mention of other charitable causes probably means additional sales from the 4,600 piece Sammlung are coming.
James Futcher of IKEA and Felix Hallwachs of Little Sun standing next to a guy holding the only SAMMANLÄNKAD LED solar lamp in the world, apparently, in Olafur Eliasson’s studio [via]
Almost a month since the hype machine was activated, and two weeks since it appeared at a few—but not all—Ikea stores in Europe, there is zero sign of the Little Sun X Ikea collab in the US. This post is just me screaming into roar of an offshore wind farm, trying and failing to shop our way out of this climate disaster.
“I have been long inquiring whether any remenant of the house at Walden remained, feeling that it would be a choice relic of axe strokes that were literally heard round the world,” wrote Yale professor Henry Seidel Canby in 1932.
Stud sections and nails from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, a gift of Henry Seidel Canby to the Yale Collections of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale’s Henry David Thoreau Collection is small but intense. Of sixteen items, seven are holographs, texts written in the author’s hand. There are pencils made by Thoreau’s father, and the label for a pencil box they might have c piome in. There are a couple of surveys the author made as part of his dreaded work. And there are two pieces of wood and two nails, which are reported to come from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. They were donated by Professor Canby.
There are two documents in the Collection pertaining to the material history of Thoreau’s cabin: One is the 1932 provenance statement accompanying the wood and nails by Canby, a noted Thoreau fanboy and biographer [who was called the “dean of American literary critics” in his bio in The Saturday Review, which he founded and edited for 12 years.] The other is a 1949 essay/survey of the cabin’s post-Walden history which its authors, two then-students, Francis Shelden and G. Peter Shiras called the first “exact, authenticated history of the Thoreau hut.”
