the making of, by greg allen
This 2015 sculpture, Smooth Sailing (Tan) by Débora Delman, is as perfect as Gunther Sachs’ 1969 table by Allen Jones is repulsive.
Meanwhile, though the coffee table in which Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek was encased is nowhere to be found,
the purported glass dining table from John Hughes’ 1984 racist teen date rape comedy Sixteen Candles was sold at a COVID compliant estate sale in Highland Park in October 2020.
h/t @voorwerk
Though a review of USGS historic data for water levels at the Great Salt Lake show it had re-emerged briefly in the 1980s, the first reported sighting of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty occurred in the Spring of 1994. I saw it in August 1994, following a half-sheet set of directions and a hand-drawn map provided by the ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, whose parking lot abuts the dirt road to Rozel Point.
In 1998 Tacita Dean made an artwork, Trying to find the Spiral Jetty, of directions to Spiral Jetty, which filled one and a half of two pages of a four-page fax she received from the Utah Arts Council. This edition of Better Read is an audio performance of that those now-obsolete directions, as preserved in Dean’s artwork. The fax is reproduced in Tacita Dean: Selected Writings and Complete Works & Filmography, published by the Royal Academy in 2018, which I surreptitiously photographed at Glenstone while waiting for my copy to arrive.
In June 1997 Tacita Dean was attending the Sundance Institute, and decided to find the Spiral Jetty, which had begun to resurface intermittently starting in 1994.
In 1998 she made an audio work—an installation and an audio cassette edition—titled, Trying to find the Spiral Jetty, and in 1999 she added a slideshow accompaniment, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1997.
I’ve looked intermittently for years for a cassette edition, and have not heard it, but I do know the cover art: a set of typed directions provided by the Utah Arts Council, which were faxed to Dean at Sundance. [According to Tacita Dean: Selected Writings and Complete Works & Filmography, published by the Royal Academy in 2018, her saved fax is also a work in its own right.]
On a recent search for the cassette, I found a 1999 interview with Dean from Audio Arts, a cassette-based art magazine, which has been preserved by Tate Modern. In it she discusses Disappearance at Sea (1998), a short film for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize, and the Spiral Jetty search and works.
I had always assumed that Trying to find the Spiral Jetty was a field recording, a documentation of the trip made following the directions across increasingly remote and rough dirt roads. But Dean explains the audio is a fabrication, an exercise of memory. She and her companion, an audio engineer named Greg, reconstructed the trip in conversation, and then constructed it anew via Foley sound effects, to augment some ambient recording begun as they approached the lake.
Especially in the earliest, uncertain days of Spiral Jetty‘s re-emergence, and based on her work’s title, it seemed that searching for the Jetty had to be at least as relevant as whether she found it. But I also think that Dean was less concerned with the experienced reality on the ground than the produced reality on the tape. At least that’s how it sounds in her interview.
And of course, the embraced ambiguity worked its way through her practice, and led [as] directly [as possible, via the inspired machinations of Jeremy Millar] to her correspondence with JG Ballard, whose writings inspired Smithson, and to JG, her 2013 anamorphic 35mm film work which circled around Spiral Jetty.
I have no idea why, maybe it’s the limpid blue of the unusually clean dust jacket, or the corny way he inscribed it with,
“This copy of Ulysses belongs to me,
Marsden Hartley,”
But as soon as I saw it, I wanted to make a print diptych of the cover and limitation page of Hartley’s first edition copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
OK, this isn’t why why, but I’m pretty sure I would not have thought of it without seeing Robert Gober Potato Prints BTS.
Oh, interesting, that was within just a couple of days of seeing these 1920s Marsden Hartley paintings.
[Also, though Arches is obviously everywhere, Verge d’Arches seems to be a term or paper type only associated with Ulysses and like two other works. Is there a backstory there?]
Does a John Koch painting need a touch of awkwardly sublimated homoeroticism to sell these days? Is retardataire virtuoso brushwork depictions of light dancing off of period furniture and crystal chandeliers in capacious pre-war interiors really not enough anymore?
Koch painted this portrait of Mrs Christopher (Bonaventura) Devine seated in the living room of her 20-room River House triplex in 1973, four years before his death, and twelve years before hers. After two attempts to sell it at seemingly reasonable Koch estimates, one of her grandchildren followed in her philanthropic footsteps and donated the painting to a convent.
And so now the nuns are selling it for whatever they can get, and the estimate is barely a tenth of where it started two years ago. It’s never not slightly weird, I think, to buy a portrait of someone you’re not related to. But the Devines did it; I do not think they had any family connection to the Vernon Children when they bought that 1777 George Romney portrait of them at Parke-Bernet in 1944. So maybe it’s just takes a little time.
Of course, now, after ten seconds of Googling, I learn that the Daughters of Mary are a traditionalist Catholic order who sold a Bouguereau in 2006, and then sued when they found out their appraiser was part of a consortium that flipped it a few months later for 5x the price. They lost. How this information informs your bidding strategy is between you and God.
16 Mar 2025, John Koch, Portrait of Mrs. Christopher Devine, est. $3-5,000 [update: it sold for $9,500, so the nuns’ll net $5-6k?] [kaminski’s via liveauctioneers]
Previously, related: John Koch, Portrait of Benjamin Chester (Version 1)
Everything’s Funnier When You Add ‘In Bed’ At The End