A Chinese Paint Mill rendering of a watercolor seen and lost at a Korean flea market. A meticulous bootleg of Michael Asher’s collected writings. A multiyear collab to reverse engineer a 1983 Commes des Garçons sweater from runway photos.
A woodworker’s interpretation of the scrapers used to tend 500-year-old sand sculptures in a Kyoto temple garden. A new edition of Seth Siegelaub’s Kunsthalle Basel poster, “How is Art History Made?” now with Japanese text, domestically printed to dodge prohibitive tariffs. A 200,000-word florilegium of accumulated texts and banned tumblrs.
The press release [pdf] describes each object in Christian Alborz Oldham’s show at Society in Portland as “a double: bootleg, replication, edition, pair.” They also represent Oldham’s individual and collective efforts to pull objects lost to memory, distance, and time, into the discourse of the present. They index the difference between a physical object and an image, a reference, or an idea. How is art history made? The answer is different now because these works exist and will be in the world.
Christian Alborz Oldham: Having no talent is not enough, 23 Aug–15 Nov 2025 at Society in Portland [societysocietysociety] [lore-filled checklist pdf]
Oldham’s Updates archive [itsawowthing]
Previously, related: Statement as Question: How did you get here? From How Is Art History Made? [I love this woman’s question so much]