As I sat down to post this late last night, I was falling asleep, which will be an important detail for the next post. It’s called Chekhov’s gun, look it up.
In September 2011 Jasper Johns & Matthew Marks Gallery donated this ink on plastic work to Artists for Haiti, a benefit auction organized by Ben Stiller & David Zwirner to support non-profit organizations working to help recovery efforts in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake that killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000, and left one million homeless.
[SIDEBAR/ENDNOTE: There is a large chunk of poking around content on what happened to the $13.67 million raised, and the many (mostly actor-driven) non-profits involved at the bottom of this post.]
I’m always a sucker for ink on plastic, but I love this one for the sign language, which appeared in many formats across Fragment of a Letter, a body of work which contains a quote from a letter Vincent Van Gogh sent to his friend, Emil Bernard, which he signed, “with a hearty handshake.” Johns included the works in his 2011 show at Matthew Marks, which I remembered most for the appearance of works on and about Shrinky Dink. [That intaglio print, and a related ink on plastic drawing Johns made in St Martin, both have cameo appearances by those little stick figures. The combo of drawn line and brushed/poured gesture in this drawing is an incredible moment in a drawing absolutely packed with them.]
Anyway, Johns made a whole stamp set of ASL alphabet signs, but here he stamps his own inked hand, spelling his own name. The letters run from right to left, and though they didn’t have to be, the extended pinky of the Js are cut off. Also, J is made by drawing a J in the air with that pinky, which in its unmoving state, represents the letter I. So not only do these incomplete marks lack the indexicality of finger prints [which Johns also uses], they don’t convey the motion needed for their intended meaning. As Johns told Terry Winters, “that’s the nature of language, and the gestures here imitate sign language, where meaning is conveyed by gesture.”
The meaning conveyed and lost in these gestures is even more evident and frustrated in the double-sided bronze sculpture Johns showed at the back, behind an even larger gallery filled with cast sculptures. Like a personal Rosetta Stone, Fragment of a Letter, 2009, has Van Gogh’s text in classic Johns stencil alphabet on one side, and in his ASL stamps on the other. Then in the upper right quadrant of the ASL side, Johns set impressions of his hand signing his own name into the cast matrix. I don’t know why I find this gesture of the 80-yo artist making these gestures so moving, when he’s been doing things like this all along. But there he was, making them, and there they are. And all of this in a work that’s only 1cm deep, and that, depending on where you’re standing, almost disappears from view.
[According to Zwirner, Artists for Haiti was its own non-profit established to distribute 100% of the proceeds from the auction, which turned out to be $13.662 million, to at least seven other non-profits who’d been working on Haitian relief efforts over the previous 18 months, including Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization and The Stiller Foundation. On its 2011 990, The Stiller Foundation said it received $307,150 from the auction, one of two fundraising events it organized that year, which brought it a total of $1.081 million. That $307k is equivalent to about 75% of the $410,734 in fundraising events expenses incurred by The Stiller Foundation in 2011, or about 85% of the $358,764 grant TSF made to J/P HRO.
According to Artists for Haiti’s 2011 990, they donated $1.891 million to The Stiller Foundation, which shows up as an expense deducted from the $13.667 million auction proceeds. Of the grant, Artists for Haiti states that, “The organization’s board of directors will monitor the use by the recipient of the awarded grant.” Zwirner was Artists for Haiti’s treasurer. The president of both organizations at the time was, of course, Ben Stiller. The secretary of AfH was Christine Taylor, Stiller’s wife.
Artists for Haiti distributed around half the remaining proceeds, $5.7 million, in 2012, with Penn’s J/P getting $2.5m, Paul Haggis’s Artists for Peace and Justice getting $800k, and Partners in Health, a longrunning NGO, getting $1.2m. Two Haitian-run organizations got a total of $246k. In 2013, AfH distributed $3 million, and Monica Zwirner joined as the fourth corporate officer. By 2014, AfH made two grants totaling under $500,000, and ended the year with $2.2 million of the proceeds still undistributed. It wasn’t until 2022 that all the proceeds from the 2011 auction were distributed.
Thank you all for your service, I’m sure. This was not at all what this post was to be about, but seeing that Stiller’s own foundation was set to receive proceeds from an auction organized by another non-profit he set up seemed odd. And while I’m sure it all worked out, it also seems striking to not have noted the conflict of interest in the 2011 and 2012 filings. Interestingly, in 2013, the AfH 990 deleted the names of grant recipient organizations, using only their EIN instead. That also turned out to be fine, but feels needlessly evasive of public transparency and accountability.]