I Like Art That Doesn’t Sell

Sometimes I worry I just look too much at auctions, and that my blog is just filling up with free spon for luxury goods from big artists showing at megagalleries.

And then there’s now, when I checked the tabs I had opened for the things that looked interesting at Sotheby’s London yesterday, and literally none of it sold. People really are leaving the good stuff behind these days:

a jim hodges work on paper is on two sheets of paper attached and standing here like a 30 inch tall open greeting card. the left side is swirls of blue on white. the right side is swirls of blue on white with abstract or irregular forms like the gaps through a canopy of trees laid down in gold leaf.
Passed: Jim Hodges, A Passing Gate (for Meredith), 2009, gold leaf on screenprint, each sheet 30 x 20 in., ed. 20 unique variants, did not sell at Sotheby’s yesterday

Gotta admit, I’d mostly watched this Jim Hodges edition on paper because unlike the other 19 in the edition, this one has been for sale so much. It’s one of those see-it-in-person situations, because it’s actually in a corner-mounted shadowbox. It’s got the gold you want from a Hodges. Maybe it holds the corner until you get a spider web.

two thin wood ladderback chairs that almost look like they were jacked from a party rental truck, have been covered by phyillida barlow in globules of concrete and lord knows what else, until they're encrusted with thick mess, which is then painted. one chair is turned on its head with its feet in the air, they're both glorious
Phyllida Barlow, untitled: chairs, 2012-13, timber, plywood, cement, plaster, polyurethane foam, sand, builder’s plaster, scrim, PVA and paint, each: 100 by 54 by 57 cm, did not sell at Sotheby’s

Truly I am glad for whatever Hauser & Wirth did to help Phyllida Barlow realize the ambitious and gloriously monumental sculptural projects she was so genius at. But we cannot ignore that she also made some of her greatest work while stuck at home, and from whatever she could scavenge. These chairs give off that domestic garbage era vibe in the best way. Even if they did come from Hauser & Wirth.

the top of a sarah sze sculpture is a little diorama perched on an alarmingly thin brown cardboard mailing tube. a sandy brick sits on a square mirror, while a battering ram shaped structure made of matchstick like bits of wood rises on its flat surface. a spiral of reed taped together extends from the structure, and a pair of rabbit ear like thin leaves project from that. two large clear tumbler glasses appear to be cemented together, and a weirdly long rubber band hangs off a painted twig that is clamped to the top of the glasses tower. there are a couple of sugar packets of atypical varieties, as if sarah sze collected them for use some day in a tiny sculpture. and here they were.
Sarah Sze, detail of Model for a Dangling Modifier, 2015, mixed media? come on, for GBP 50,000, tell me what’s in there: there’s glass, grass, twigs, handhewn matchsticks or something, clamps, tape, sugar packets, a mirror, a mailing tube, a wood shim, rubber bands, a brick of the kind your conservator’s warned you about, 154.9 by 76.2 by 45.7 cm, didn’t sell at Sotheby’s

And speaking of stuff from the bin, one of the things that’s most impressed me about Sarah Sze’s sculptural works is how infrequently they *have* come up at auction. I think once you learn how to live with one, you never want to let it go.

installation view of one floor of Sarah Sze’s 2015 exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair

This small sculpture, Model for a Dangling Modifier, was from a whole series of unusually self-contained works she called models that feel like perfect Sze moments you can pack in the back of a Range Rover. With each one perched atop a Cy Twombly-style tube, though, these feel precarious in a whole new way. Considering a whole early corner installation just sold for $69K, maybe GBP 50,000 was just a bit aspirational.