When I said I can’t get autographs? I meant, unless conceptually.
Sitting with this unexpected Bach auction for a minute, I realized I actually do get autographs when they convey a meaning beyond, “This person signed this,” or “I met/corresponded with this person.”
Or when I project entirely subjective meaning onto them. Like when I found a souvenir towel from a Merce Cunningham performance on Broadway signed by Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg, and I conjured a “logic” for this object that involved getting Jasper Johns to sign it.
That “logic,” or the pretense of it, was predicated on Johns being the designer of the performance poster. But of course, there were multiple other logics possible, from the art historic to the romantic, to the starkly commemorative, forcing an object into existence that links these four men—physically, contractually, notationally, quasi-publicly, as if there weren’t already countless other products of their decades-long interactions, filling archives and beyond. Here the autograph functions as a singular piece of evidence, superficial and contrived, of some other form of more substantial cultural meaning. But when signs are few, signatures will do.
And of course, the significant emptiness can become the subject itself. Like in Rob Pruitt’s Signature Series, large-format autographs on Belgian linen he’s collected since the Pruitt-Early days. I remember several occasions when Rob would suddenly produce a big piece of linen and a fat Sharpie from his backpack, and turn around, offering his back as a writing surface when none other was available.
Autographs then became a project, an artistic practice, which art world celebrities and citizens alike could appreciate. I remember seeing a few loosies in the wild, but eventually, after years of accumulation, Pruitt showed The Signature Series en masse. And like Byron Kim’s skin tone monochromes, these accumulated markers of somebody else become a self-portrait of the artist moving through the world.
Now going back to Bach and his chopped up and shuffled autograph collection, it’s possible to interpolate meaning from the otherwise random-seeming clusters. Maybe the lots reflect the order in which Bach collected his autographs, a project of a lifetime sliced into tranches based on minimum viable auction estimate.
Rob Pruitt’s Signatures Series [luxembourgco]
Previously, related: Untitled (Merce at the Minskoff), 2015-2018