The commercial satellite data The Guardian used to document the Israeli destruction of neighborhoods, buildings, and fields in Gaza is almost a month old now.
The red grid certainly extends further south.
From The Border To The Sea
Month: February 2024
Barbara Visser, Fountain (2023)
I haven’t even scrolled down to read the article, but this caption alone is already my favorite thing of the week. I hope Barbara Visser does a documentary on Richard Prince’s Instagram portraits next.
A Dutch Artist is delving into the murky [sic obv] attribution of Duchamp’s Fountain [artnet]
Sharing The Burden
In his peak performance twink era, Chris Burden was not only putting his life on the line for his art, he was selling pictures of him doing it. Or trying to, anyway.
In 1974 Burden released iconic documentary photos of three early performances in an edition of five: Prelude to 220, or 110 (1971), in which he was bolted to the floor next to buckets of water with live electric wires in them; Bed Piece (1972), where he stayed in bed in a gallery for three weeks; and 747 (1973), where he shot at an airplane flying overhead. According to Christie’s in 2000, beside the artist proof they were selling, only one other suite of vintage prints was sold.
Does that mean except for two sets, the other editions of the prints were sold singly? Or that the rest of the edition wasn’t printed or sold until later? I don’t know.
But it does seem like these four prints at LA Modern were there at the beginning. Three are numbered 1/5, and one (Bed Piece) is 2/5. They were acquired by the same person directly from the artist in 1975. They originally turned up for sale together last summer at suite prices, but didn’t sell. Does that make them a suite or nah? Now they’re being sold separately. It’d be wild if they didn’t stay together, though. Burden collector, you know what you must do.
[day later update: hmm, LA Modern sold both ed. 4/5 ($94k in 2017) and ed. 5/5 ($81k in 2022) which were acquired directly from the artist and, if Christie’s is to be believed, were not vintage, but printed later to complete the edition? So maybe Burden collectors are already doing what they needed to keep the sets together. In 1974 Burden also published Chris Burden 1971-73, an artist book consisting of a binder of 53 8×10 photos and text documenting 23 performance works, in an edition of 50. Oddly, the Met’s copy, acquired in 1993, is catalogued with each of the performances separate.]
I Went By Cy Twombly’s House
He wasn’t there.
Girl With A Reattribution
Technically, it’d still be a Vermeer, then.
On the latest episode of the David Zwirner podcast, Helen Molesworth talks to Claudia Swan and Lawrence Weschler about last year’s Rijksmuseum Vermeer show.
It’s an oddly timed conversation, and one that feels especially absent from the hoopla during the show. Besides the uncritical euphoria of the blockbuster, which is fine, the only substantive scholarly takes I remember coming out were about rediscovering Vermeer’s crypto-Catholicism. So yes, a re-evaluation of Vermeer’s view and depiction of women and public/domestic life—arguably his main subject—would have been welcome.
As would, apparently, any discussion of one of Lawrence Weschler’s ongoing fascinations: the proposal floated by scholar Benjamin Binstock in 2008 that several paintings attributed to Johannes Vermeer were actually the work of his daughter Maria.
Binstock’s theory has been vociferously ignored by institutional Vermeer scholars, but Weschler has hosted two symposia exploring and discussing it. Last year, with the Amsterdam show open, he published an updated article about the Maria Vermeer theory in The Atlantic.
Since Binstock’s initial publication, Vermeer scholarship and science has shifted in ways that should accommodate his speculations, but somehow don’t. The biggest change, arguably, is the National Gallery’s reattribution of their Girl with a Flute to a “studio assistant” of Vermeer, even though Vermeer was known not to have any registered students or assistants. The only loophole for not registering an assistant with the painters guild, Binstock notes, is if they are a family member. He calls Girl with a Flute, a self-portrait. And since the NGA’s Girl with a Red Hat is of the same person, and also, unusually, on a panel, not canvas, it’s also a Maria Vermeer.
You can see where this could lead. And yet it doesn’t. Which is the subject of the Zwirner-hosted conversation.
Tangier Snailmobiles
OK maybe Hamish Bowles is not going to ruin World of Interiors yet/after all. Marie-France Boyer waxes poetic about the absolutely dripping Mercedes snailmobiles of Tangier, beautifully captured in Roland Beaufre’s photos. Mr. Mohamed Ayoub dreamed for years of such swag worthy of the snail soup he serves at night along the beachfront. Then he got his team together, and now there are three.
So while we’re all now plotting our trips to Tangier, Hamish is in a Condé boardroom getting grilled by Anna about how many Acrylic snail objets by Jonathan Adler he moved last month.
Helical Vehicles [worldofinteriors]
Le Tat, C’est Moi
This is a detail of a decoupage panel made by HM Margrethe II, now-former Queen of Denmark. It was the header image of Margrethe II of Denmark, Artist-Queen an exhibition of 60 artworks by the queen at the Musée Henri Martin in Cahors, in southern France. The queen’s late husband Prince Henrik was a French count whose family is from the region—people from Cahors are called Cadurciens—and the royal family owns a chateau and vineyard nearby.
The queen has been making art at least since the 1970s, and she is quite active in several mediums, devoting at least one day a week to her practice. She just abdicated her day job, so perhaps she is in the studio even more now.
Margrethe’s art is in the news because a painting she made in 1988, the year she officially began exhibiting, is coming up for auction. This is apparently quite rare, because The Queen doesn’t sell work; sometimes she gives it as gifts. [This painting is being sold by the family of a former courtier.] Her paintings are probably never as interesting as the moment in which they are being made.
At least they’re not as interesting as this idea of The Queen using her art objects either as gifts or decorations. The website for the Danish Royal Family has a decent amount of information about her art practice. The decoupage items she makes by gluing images cut out from magazines decorate her palaces, hunting lodges, chateau, and yacht. All the guestrooms at Christian VII’s palace at Amalienborg, for example, “are furnished with a wastepaper basket decorated with The Queen’s découpage.” Decoupage is a very active process which benefits from a sense of composition and industriousness, both of which The Queen seems to have in abundance. The Queen decoupages in the opening credits of De Wilde Svaner, the 2009 film adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen tale for which she created the scenery and costumes.
The Queen’s embroidery practice is very similar. She designs her own patterns or even stitches freely, without patterns, as she makes personal and household objects and gifts for family members, friends, and privileged subjects. Chairs
In one sense, this personal creative exercise, crafting nicknacks for yourself, your home, and your friends, feels like a carving out of a private space, a practice of respite and normalcy. But it is also very much the opposite: individual, domestic labor so time-intensive it gets stripped of any economic justification, and so falls/is elevated to emotional and relational tokens of interpersonal exchange, deployed by a monarch in service of the preservation and reinforcing of that monarchy’s power. The beloved queen of the people leaving her personal marks across the vast properties and resources at her—and her family’s—disposal, and cultivating networks of loyalty and influence by giving gifts of her time and artistic pursuits. Margrethe II is an artist, and her medium is Queen.
[2025 update: the painting sold for 160,000 DKK, or around USD22,400, above the pre-sale estimate of 75-100,000DKK]