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Yoshio Taniguchi Hardhat

The groundbreaking for the Yoshio Taniguchi addition to The Museum of Modern Art took place in May 2001 under a tent in the demolished Sculpture Garden, which had been repurposed as a staging area. I was sitting on the outer edge of the first bay of seats, stage right, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s security detail was standing behind me, on the aisle, while he was on the low dais with everyone. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi was on the far side of the arc of trustees and dignitaries. There were silver MoMA Builds hardhats and shovels for everyone, arranged in rows on edge of the dais next to the dirtbox.

david rockefeller and rudy giuliani hold silver polished shovels and fake dig in some dirt for the groundbreaking of moma's yoshio taniguchi renovation. taniguchi and agnes gund and other folks stand on the dais behind, waiting their photo opp turn. the setting is a white tent, with some crowds visible in the background, applauding. image circa may 2001 via bizbash, a corporate party rental portal that is going strong in 2024, i guess — David Rockefeller and Rudy Giuliani ceremonially breaking ground for MoMA’s renovation in May 2001. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi talks with Agnes Gund in the background, image: bizbash

When it came time to do the ceremonial groundbreaking, there was some not completely scripted bustling around, as everyone got their hardhats on, and when someone tried to hand a hardhat to the mayor, his security guards sprung forward and hissed to each other intensely: “Oh shit, not the hat, not the hat.” because Giuliani was still in his combover era. He ended up not wearing a hardhat.

After the photo-opp broke up and the mayor left, gladhanding and milling about began, and I grabbed one of the unclaimed hardhats from Taniguchi’s end of the dais. [A shovel seemed a bit much.]

gothamist photo from a moma catwalk facing down onto the atrium, which is being set up for a party/preview, with drink stations and cater waiters milling about. the green grey slate floor dominates. barnett newman's bronze sculpture, broken obelisk, an obelisk perched upside down on the tip of a pyramid, is at the atrium center. on the back wall, monet's water lilies look flat as hell. — Gothamist‘s November 2004 photo of the inaugural installation of the atrium, with Barnett Newman’s *Broken Obelisk* looking great, and Monet’s *Water Lilies* looking flat af

The dedication of the Taniguchi addition took place in November 2004 in the Marron Atrium. I brought the hardhat in my eight month-old daughter’s stroller. As the event was breaking up, I took her to meet the Taniguchis, and presented the hardhat to him to sign, which he graciously did. I’ll post a pic of it when I can.

matisse's dance hung above a floating staircase with glass safety rail, and long window beyond facing onto moma's atrium, with multiple catwalks and the sculpture garden beyond, one of the dramatic details of yoshio taniguchi's moma redesign, image: tim hursley, 2004 — This was originally called the Matisse Stairwell. My 2004 copy of this Timothy Hursley photo is 250 pixels wide.

The stairway with the window on the atrium; the separate window onto the atrium that gathers dust beautifully; the windows onto the city; the restored entrance of Goodwin & Stone’s building; the porches on the Garden; and the corner where he resolved Cesar Pelli’s otherwise unrooted tower in the lobby and the Garden, are my favorite elements of Taniguchi’s design. They’re all moments where Taniguchi sought to integrate his space and structure with its context and history.

The galleries have always been fine for me; I think I was cured of misplaced nostalgia for the Pelli-era or earlier galleries by a conversation with Terry Riley, where he relayed a conversation with Taniguchi. After the finalists had been selected, Riley suggested to Taniguchi that he reconsider his more reverential approach to the existing galleries. He showed plans of the evolving museum, and how the galleries echoed the dimensions and plans of the rowhouses that had been demolished with each expansion. This constraint was long gone, Riley showed, and the new building could—and should—take its program from the art and the curators who would use it. I remember thinking this was profound and correct. But over time, I’ve also come to recognize that those phantom townhouses didn’t just impact the floorplan, but the kinesthetic experience of viewing art in the spaces they influenced. MoMA’s galleries felt a certain way, and that has changed as the building and the institution evolved.

a gothic window of st thomas's church on fifth avenue is tightly framed by the glass walls and soaring white steel roof of the porch of yoshio taniguchi's moma, while a tree in the sculpture garden inhabits the middleground, and two curved plates of rusted corten steel of a richard serra torqued ellipse fill the left and lower section of the photo, taken from inside serra's sculpture in 2005 — Taniguchi and Serra and St Thomas Church, 2005

Taniguchi delivered beautifully on what he was asked to do, opening up the museum to the city as a spectacular stage for the likes of Richard Serra and Marina Abramovic. It set the stage for what followed, too: the real estate maxxing, the Nouvel supertower, and Diller + Scofidio turning the townhouse-sized Folk Art Museum into a void. [No bronze tables yet, though.] I wonder how often Taniguchi visited.

florine stettheimer's painting of a gold glowing christmas tree in the center of an iceskating pond at the corner of columbus circle and central park, with buildings and theaters in the pinkish background, and a cast of city figures in the foreground at the bottom of the painting, including a cop leaning against a horse, an orange figure in a full indian headdress, a kid, a lady in a mink coat. a snow-flecked statue of i think it's shakespeare looms in the center right, and a similarly dark gazebo roof pokes in from the left — Florine Stettheimer, Christmas, 1930-40, says Yale

Painting is not photography, so the date of 1930-40 for a painting that includes a reference to a broadway show that only ran in 1925 is plausible, given other evidence. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.

Qu’est ce que c’est Cy Twombly Sketches?

a sketch by cy twombly on a sheet of perforated notebook paper has three landscape oriented boxes filled with marks, notes, preparatory sketches for working out a composition that involves mount olympus. not sure how he used these, but they were at his friend willie's paris apartment and sold by artcurial in 2022 — Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial

Maybe you’re different, but I confess, I never imagined Cy Twombly making sketches. Like his marks, or his line, which Barthes described as “without goal, without model, without telos,” his compositions always feel like they just happened, products of the moment of their execution.

this framed 1960 work by cy twombly called study for school of athens has some cloud like forms above, and a cluster of bar charts vertical elements, and some roughly drawn texts or mountains or something on the bottom. in various later works, those volcano like mountains stood in for penises, but that'd be a lot of penises, even for twombly. via hauser & wirth — Cy Twombly, *Study for School of Athens (R0me)*, 1960, photo John Etter via Hauser & Wirth

He called some works studies, of course, but those always seemed like iterations, or versions, which were things he made a lot of. Hauser & Wirth brought one to Basel a few years back, and it very much feels like a version.

He also worked in series, groups, and it’s impossible not to imagine he mapped those out ahead of time, or at least planned them in some way.

a notebook sheet drawn by cy twombly shows one landscape composition in a rectangle, with indecipherable marks and text in it, and then a full-scale drawing of mount olympus surrounded by clouds and such, more representational than you'd expect for twombly. sold by artcurial — Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial

But here are five what look like preparatory sketches on two sheets of little notebook paper. They are from 1961 and belonged to Robert William Burke, a dealer in Paris whose books from Twombly were inscribed to “Willie.” On the back of these sheets, though, Twombly dedicated them to “My K… 2” and “My K… 3,” and honestly, “Who is K?” is a less urgent question right now than, “So that means there’s also a 1?”

Actually, the real question is what these actually are. I don’t have Twombly’s complete oeuvre handy to see if these relate to some specific c. 1960-63 works, but I can’t find any that map to the narrative. And to the map. There is geography and place—landscape—in these sketches, with Mount Olympus towering over all. The last one looks like Mordor. It’s the one Burke apparently kept in the foyer.

a snapshot of a chic cluttered interior of paris art dealer robert william burke's apartment. art books stacked on antique tables and chairs are pedestals for little artworks. shopping bags by lichtenstein and warhol are framed on the wall between or below two black charlotte perriand sconces, and one of burke's twombly sketches sits on top of a stack of books in a gilt frame. via artcurial, though i think it actually came from barnaby's or someplace, because artcurial started deleting its burke and/or twombly-related content. — Robert William Burke installation view, via Artcurial

There is also time, sequence: that top one literally goes left to right, start to end, with battles and places in between.

That Twombly planned, or worked out, or imagined, such traditional compositional structures for his paintings feels almost as anachronistic and radical as his antique, classical, and poetic references. Even if they get buried by his marks and signs, or even if they just remain in his head, or his eye.

Felix Navidad Post Office

a warmly lit snapshot of a felix gonzalez torres light string stretched horizontally across a white wall is encased in a freestanding plexiglass holder in a plexiglass vitrine that multiplies reflections of a warmly lit gallery with light blue walls crossed by reflections of a felix gonzalez-torres light string. a christmas card from the artist to moma curator anne umland in 1992, on view at the national portrait gallery in dc in 2024 — installation view of an exhibition copy of correspondence material at Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always
to return, National Portrait Gallery

I had wanted to post this snapshot Christmas card Felix Gonzalez-Torres sent to MoMA curator Anne Umland again on the date he wrote on the card, December 21, but I missed it. So I am posting it on the day I imagine he posted it.

35 Days Wait at 980 Madison

a portfolio with a reproduction of a cy twombly work on paper mounted on a board, the work is the phrase, V day wait at Jiayuguan written with a loaded ink brush, via reed sims — Cy Twombly, V Day(s) Wait at Jianyuguan, 1980, one of only two images of one of only two copies of this artist book documented online, one at the Menil, and the one from whence I ganked this image, a 2023
catalogue by the London rare book dealer Reed Sims

In the fall of 1979 Cy Twombly traveled through the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, which seems unexpected, though probably not as unexpected as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. The suite of works on paper inspired, we’re told, by this trip, Five Days Wait at Jianyuguan, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Twombly also published a little artist book of the same name, a portfolio of sixteen mounted reproductions, in an edition of 50.

Jianyuguan, or Jianyu Pass, is a fortress at the western end of the Great Wall, , and the Silk Road’s historic gateway to China. For Chinese people, meanwhile, Jianyuguan evokes exile, where the desert awaits those expelled through the “gate to hell.”

Nothing in Twombly’s chronology or the texts for the Biennale works make mention of the artist going into China, and I cannot imagine a less plausible route into China for an American artist in 1979 than traveling overland from Khazakhstan, across the Gobi Desert, to Jianyuguan. The westbound route is even less plausible, and not just because what lay on the other side, Xinjiang province, was now a part of China.

It’s safe to assume, then, that Twombly was not the one doing the waiting. So this title, and perhaps all the works, reference a literary source, perhaps an adventurer’s travelogue from a bygone era. The titles of the various works in the portfolio do sound like captions: “Uygur taking tea on arrival”; “Harem”; “Leaving the land of men”; “Preparing for departure.” So maybe Twombly was referencing a set of images or illustrations.

And speaking of preparing for departure: the Jianyuguan works will be reunited for the first time since Venice, and the artist’s book will be reissued in facsimile (of a facsimile), for an exhibition next month at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. It seems likely that this will be the last exhibition in this soon-to-be-bygone space, as the building will become the headquarters of the Bloomberg Foundation.

[day after update: Claudio traced the Reed Sims example to the Paris estate auction of dealer and friend of Cy Robert William “Willie” Burke, where it sold for EUR1529. Nice return on a four-month investment.]

Cy Twombly opens 23 January 2025 at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue [gagosian]

Of Saints in the Wilderness

a c. 1400 panel painting of saint jerome in a white tunic standing in the mouth of a dome-like cave of grey smooth stone, with an outcropping of rocks on one side, and a few trees on the other, all against a background of gold leaf, by lorenzo monaco — Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1398-1400, tempera and gold on poplar, 23 x 34 cm, put up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2005

In 1965, during its 50-year disappearance into a private collection beginning in 1929, this painting of Jerome in a stylized grotto-like cave was reattributed from Pietro Lorenzetti to Lorenzo Monaco, and proposed as one of five predella panels from an altarpiece/polyptych Lorenzo executed for a chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence between 1398 and 1400.

the digitally reconstructed altarpiece by lorenzo monaco for the church of santa maria del carmine in florence has a virgin and child at the center, with two prophets or probably evangelists on either side, all on gold ground with gothic gilded frame elements, and a row of tiny landscape paintings of other saints mostly outdoors, on the predella underneath. — Piero di Giovanni’s *Carmine Polyptych* as it would look if everyone lent their pieces to the Galleria dell’Accademia like they were asked. via wikipedia

It turned up at Sotheby’s in 1988, then again in 2005, and was to be part of the first reuniting of the polyptych in the 2006 Lorenzo retrospective at the Galleria dell’Accademia. It didn’t sell, and I don’t know that it was lent to the show, but the wilderness geology of the various predella panels would look great together.

a square painting of oil on gold leaf on panel by mark leckey which is centered on the unusual dome/hut-shaped cave from lorenzo monaco's st jerome, which is flanked by stone outcroppings on either side, and with three towers of a hilltop town or cirtadel small in the background. the square format gives much more room for a gold ground sky. from mark leckey's bandcamp — from Mark Leckey’s Carry me into the wilderness, 2022, via bandcamp

When Mark Leckey made a gold-ground painting for his 2022 audio work, Carry me into the wilderness, he gave a shout out to Lorenzo Monaco, where he got the cave, but he squared it up, and added a hilltop city or citadel. And the hermit saint who wasn’t there was Saint Anthony, the Desert Father and ur-Hermit. While the possible theological nuances of Leckey’s saintswapping are lost on me, I find this image of the empty hermit’s cave resonates with the central sample of Carry me into the wilderness: a recording Leckey made of himself being overcome by an instant of natural beauty while in a park during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. The liberated hermit here, was him, and us.

‘I Just Walk Out Into This, And’

a wall in a dark gallery photographed at an angle with various rectangular forms along it, receding into the left distance. one group of four vertical rectangles are lit gold-ground icon style paintings; a series of apertures in the wall, most around painting height, fill the middle, and on the near right is either a monitor showing a painting or a spotlit gold ground painting. mark leckey installation view at gladstone gallery, nyc, nov 2024-feb 2025 — Mark Leckey, 3 Songs from the Liver, installation view, 2024-25, Gladstone Gallery, NYC

How can something feel completely otherworldly and viscerally, personally real at the same time? Or maybe it toggles back and forth, faster than a toggle, a vibration, a quantum state where quotidian sensation and transcendence are both present until the instant you take measure of it. And then you realize you’re in a darkened gallery, with several of Mark Leckey’s multichannel video and audio works looping around you at once.

And some of the things on the wall are paintings, icons, and some are monitors, and some are apertures. But then Leckey’s comment about icons collapses those distinctions: “they are not an image, or a picture, but a window through which we can mediate between material reality and disembodied realms, and between distant persons and ourselves.”

A fleeting credit title in one work and and the shoutout to the artist’s longrunning radio show orient Leckey’s Gladstone Gallery show toward music. But it’s only when I’m home that I realize how familiar some of the overwhelming elements of the installation are, and why: they include audio tracks on his Bandcamp and videos on his YouTube.

These platforms are as much studio as presentation, especially in the moment—2021-22—when the most intense experiences of the pandemic remained largely unprocessed, and normal [sic] life was still a tentative thing.

against a dark background of a cell phone video, a square gold leafed icon painted in the style of lorenzo monaco depicts a starkly painted hermit's cave surrounded by other barren rocks, a hilltop town or fortress in the distance. below the painting a cluster of fat votive style candles glow, though the actual light on the painting is not entirely from them. the screenshot from mark leckey's 2022 video, carry me into the wilderness, on youtube — Screenshot from Mark Leckey’s *Carry me into the wilderness*, 2022, depicting an icon after Lorenzo Monaco, via youtube

Leckey’s show, 3 Songs from the Liver, is at once an evocation of these moments and memories of trying to live and connect online while barely holding it together, and a rejoinder that physical experience and IRL encounters can be sublime, even sacred. For all their elegiac sense of having made it through the wilderness, the show’s visual references to 14th century painting also nod to the future. Taken together with the most disturbing sculpture/video from the present, it’s not clear whether Leckey sees another Renaissance awaiting us, or just wars, plagues, and tyranny. Maybe it’s both.

Mark Leckey’s 3 Songs from the Liver is at Gladstone Gallery on West 21st St until February 15th, 2025 [gladstonegallery]

Made In Belgium, Shown in Miami, Offloaded In New York

what happens when you want the unique work, the bigger work, instead of the edition, is you might end up with the more boring work, like rosa de la cruz [rip] did with this set of 16 terra cotta tiles which gabriel orozco poked with his finger a few times each. no disrepect, and these are definitely the best ones selling this week (december 2024), but the other ones are better — Gabriel Orozco, pluie de doigts, 1993, 16 terra cotta roof tiles, being sold at Christie’s by the de la Cruzes

In 1993 Gabriel Orozco made sculptures by poking, clawing, and bending ceramic roof tiles on the Pottelberg factory floor in Coutrai, Belgium. Then they went into the kiln, fixing the artist’s slight gestures, marks, and even fingerprints forever. Or at least as long as you take care of them.

At least two variations resulted:

Pluie de Doigts (Rain of Fingers), was a group of sixteen flat, interlocking tiles, in which the main gesture was Orozco poking the clay with his fingers. Though a couple of the tiles show a little more aggressive manipulations, the overall effect of the stacked tiles is of the slightness of the raindrops’ traces.

from the top, gabriel orozco's made in belgium appears almost like an unaltered roof tile, though the corners and edges are turned under, and tension cracks formed along one lower edge. it's generally boat-shaped now, though, and has the foundry mark, made in belgium stamped on the top. this one, one of 14 made, was a 2023 gift to the art institute of chicago — Gabriel Orozco, *Made in Belgium*, 1993, terra cotta, one of 14, a 2023 gift of Howard and Donna Stone to the Art Institute of Chicago

There was also a group of fourteen half round tiles, with the title of the foundry’s stamp, Made in Belgium. They were each clenched in intimately ominous ways that evoked the clay lump of one of Orozco’s earliest masterworks, My Hands are My Heart (1991); and torqued into forms that Richard Serra would later explore in steel on another factory floor years later.

gabriel orozco's made in belgium is a 1993 sculpture of a terra cotta roof tile, which the artist pinched and bent on the end flanges before it went into the kiln. this tile is turned on its side, so the concave underside is revealed as a little boat, or perhaps an evocative allusion to the female form. this one was sold at skinner in boston in 2018 — Gabriel Orozco, *Made in Belgium*, 1993, sold by the estate of Richard Anderson at Skinner in 2018

These were exhibited as an installation scattered across the floor of the vaulted cave of Chantal Crousel’s Paris gallery, but were sold individually, as unique editions.

So this body of objects is scattered, and their relationships and this installation, are basically lost. And the ostensibly more significant unique sculpture, which is fine but whose interventions are ultimately less interesting, is acquired by a privileged collector, and preserved and promoted—and is now to be purged.

This paradox is acute with Orozco’s work, which has often found extraordinary beauty in the most ephemeral gestures or fleeting observations that run counter to the market’s—and, frankly, institutions’—conflation of scale and effort with importance. While collectors were offered large, indistinguishable gold leafed paintings, Orozco’s tablesful of maquettes and tiny, perfect objects would only be sold en masse, to a museum. [Or a collector’s private museum, RIP.]

edouard manet's the funeral is an unfinished landscape painting with a grey cloudy sky over the monmartre skyline of paris, brushy cathedrals in grey and white forming a band across the upper middle, and the lower half/foreground mostly green of a cemetery with barely formed brushy trees in dark green. a sketchy funeral party of little figures in black are in the lower right quadrant on the grass. an unfinished painting of baudelaire's funeral, which manet attended, but all depicted from afar for some reason. it's at the metropolitan museum — *The Funeral* was good, though, and its sense of being unresolved really comes through irl.

But the way bigger is better, and a unique [sic] work is privileged over an edition, is a real, net negative for artists who have some of their most important achievements in series or small works. I just saw a room at the Met filled with giant Manets, and all I got was a longing for a little dog. I bought the last of the Made in Belgium edition more than 25 years ago, and even on its own, it’s better than Rosa’s. She had some truly major Orozcos, and this ain’t one, but good luck Wednesday.

[update: congratulations to the $15k bidder who got them for $18,900 all in]
Previously, related, but kind of cranky of me, tbqh: Gabriel Orozco at Documenta 11

What Happens In Copenhagen

a billboard by felix gonzalez torres of a dark snapshot of the silhouette of a figure behind a sheer curtain was installed on a rough congrete wall along a street in copenhagen in 1992 — Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1992, billboard as installed in Copenhagen in 1992 for Paradise Europe, image: Bizart via Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

In July 1992 Felix Gonzalez-Torres showed “Untitled,” a photograph of a figure silhouetted against a curtained window, in Paradise Europe, a group exhibition in Copenhagen of 120 artist billboards organized by Bizart, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, and five galleries. [One, the local gallery, Stalke Out of Space, had already begun postering Copenhagen as an artistic practice and distribution platform in 1991, and was itself part of the exhibition, in addition to representing four of the artists. But let’s come back to that.]

Felix traveled to Copenhagen and presented a lecture there, which we know from a 1993 interview, published by A.R.T., when Tim Rollins mentions “grumbling” over “the lack of overt political or Latino content” in his work:

I had a problem just recently in Copenhagen where I went to give a lecture. A man in the audience immediately started talking about winning the battle for multiculturalism. I said: “Look, okay, first I have trouble with that kind of language about winning battles. That’s too male-oriented for me. That’s too macho, that’s too much about war.” Then he said something about numbers-a certain amount of women, a certain amount of Hispanics, etc. No, multiculturalism is not about numbers, it’s about inclusion. It’s about opening up the terms of the argument, opening up the terms of the discourse so that everybody can participate with equal footing. It’s not about naming two female, three Hispanics, four whites, five blacks… It’s not about quotas. Sometimes quotas are necessary when it comes to concrete things like businesses, but in culture it’s more complex. It’s about opening up the terms of argument, and it’s about re-addressing the issue of quality and who dictates and defines “quality.”

Now in the latest episode of The Art Newspaper’s podcast, A Brush With…, where Ben Luke interviewed Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, we learn that Michael was in the audience for Felix’s lecture. Michael, who still considered himself a poet on the threshold of being a fine artist, wrote to Felix, inviting him to dinner, “because I had a lot of questions about how to do art, and how to deal with identity in such a fantastic way, like he did.”

It’s a wonderful story which the super-prepared Luke had never heard, and which I, who’ve been immersed in these artists’ work for decades, had never heard, either. And yet it seems to have been profoundly important to Michael’s work: “We spent a long night where he generously gave me a lot of inspiration, and a lot of hope for continuing doing art projects.”

In the interview Michael didn’t mention the year, so I pulled that, and the show, from Felix’s exhibition history. Felix’s response to Rollins resonated anew with Elmgreen’s response to Josh Spero in the Financial Times in October:

He is slightly less delighted when I read out a quote from a 2002 review, which says — in an apparently supportive way — that Elmgreen & Dragset had staged “a ‘gay infiltration’ of minimalism’s famously macho high aesthetics”. “Minimalism has been infiltrated by queerness from the very start,” Elmgreen says. “I’m sorry, dear heterosexuals, but you can’t trademark minimalism as yours that will [then] be infiltrated by queers . . . You don’t need to accept being boxed in as a queer artist and having certain sets of aesthetics that are provided to you because you are not a heterosexual man.”

What I did not expect to find was the full artist list for Paradise Europe [pdf]: Lorna Simpson, Guillermo Paneque, Sean Landers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Emilio Fantin, Federico Guzman, Formento-Sossella, Tommaso Tozzi, Lars Bent Petersen, Stalke Out of Space, Alan Belcher, Olafur Eliasson, Lothar Hempel—and Elmgreen & Olesen.

a poster for paradise europe, a 1992 exhibition of posters and billboards by artists in copenhagen, that reads stalke out of space/ lars bent petersen/ olafur eliasson/ elmgreen & olesen in dark blue or black on an otherwise blank white sheet. — poster for Paradise Europe, “Project No. 18” of Stalke Out Of Space, with billboards by artists Lars Bent Petersen, Olafur Eliasson, and Elmgreen & Olesen, published in Sam Jedig’s Flying Notes On ArtStamp.dk

So not only was Michael in the audience, he was in the show. And in a collaboration with, I think, Henrik Olesen. Olesen’s CV does not include this show, or any work before 1995. Elmgreen & Dragset, meanwhile, mark the beginning of their artistic collaboration to 1995, after becoming a couple in 1994.

Besides that Stalke poster above, the only other prominent online mention of Elmgreen & Olesen is of work held at the Esbjerg Kunstmuseum.

But as much as I want to know more about this collaboration and their work, I’m even more intrigued by the idea of Elmgreen— and Dragset—being inspired by Felix’s work. And not just because I have a work from the 1990s by them, that is a slide projection on a wall of the silhouette of a man. For years, I’d lowkey regretted not also buying the emptied pairs of jeans and underwear on the floor, which was in the same show. But now I think I’m good. And I want to dig that piece out of storage again.

The Canes of The Martyrdom

an unsmiling, thin, old white guy in a dark suit and tie sits holding a walking stick carved, we're told, from the blood-soaked oak boards of the temporary coffins that carried the murdered Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum back to Nauvoo, Illinois in 1844. the man is richard taylor, whose father john taylor was with the Smiths when they were killed. this photo was republished in 1981 in byu studies journal — Raymond Taylor, son of the third Mormon prophet John Taylor, holding the Dimick Huntington Cane in an undated photo, republished by Steven Barnett in “The Canes of the Martyrdom,” 1981

In June 1844, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, where they were being held in jail for treason. [Joseph, who in addition to being the founding president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was also the mayor of the Mormon-dominated city of Nauvoo, had destroyed the printing press of an anti-Mormon/anti-Smith newspaper and declared martial law. This led to his arrest for treason against the state of Illinois, but somehow none of that is particularly important to this blog post.]

The bodies of Joseph and Hyrum were brought back to Nauvoo, 22 miles away, in hastily constructed coffins of oak lumber. They were buried in a Smith family home, then moved to another site seven months later.

The blood-soaked wood from the temporary coffins was cut up and distributed to a few church leaders and friends of the Smiths by their widows, to be made into canes. When the bodies were reinterred, clippings of the Smiths’ hair were collected, distributed, and incorporated into the heads of some of the canes. These canes became known as Canes of the Martyrdom, and in a religious culture that officially eschews such things, they have become ersatz relics.

Inland Steel Curtained Wall

google streetview image of the steel and glass lobby of chicago's inland steel building with two white curtains hanging inside, between the two revolving doors. circa 2022 — Inland Steel Building, 1958, Chicago, as documented in Aug 2022 by Google Streetview

While looking at Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building in Chicago, I was surprised to find curtains had been hung in its iconically transparent lobby.

google streetview image of the lobby of the inland steel building in chicago with full unobstructed glass panels between steel mullions, richard lippold's eight pointed star shaped sculpture radiant 1 against the black background of the lobby wall, and frank gehry's cast glass blobs assembled into a security desk against the glass, between the two revolving doors. a bright red pedestal with perhaps a model of the building itself is against the left glass wall. circa 2017 — Inland Steel Building, Lippold, and Gehry, as documented in Sept 2017 by Google Streetview

Installed between the 2017 and 2018 Streetview updates, the curtains entirely block the view of Radiant I, Richard Lippold’s perfect lobby art, a sculpture of webbed wire, steel, gold and copper, hovering above a reflecting pool. But I suspect that is just collateral visual damage, and they were really installed to block the view of the massive cast glass jumble of Frank Gehry’s security desk. Or perhaps they’re really just to give the security guards a bit of privacy in which to check their websites, and blocking the view of Gehry’s desk is just a bonus.

[Heliostat and] Window for Moving Light

a closeup of ornately carved gothic finials on a wooden choir wall that are painted what seems to be white, with the larger space of the cathedral nave extending into the background, but the main feature of this photo is this architecture bathed, from bottom to top, in red, orange, yellow, and blue light, pouring in through the handblown glass window installation by olafur eliasson. at the st nicholas cathedral in greifswald germany. — Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas Cathedral, Greifswald, Germany, image: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net

Olafur Eliasson has created a work of light and handblown glass for the east windows of St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Greifswald, a Hanseatic city near the Baltic coast of Germany, which was the birthplace of Caspar David Friedrich. Originally built in the 14th century, the church was remade in the 19th century with woodwork by Friedrich’s brother, Christian Adolph, including the elaborate Gothic choir wall which closes off the windows from the rest of the interior.

The work is titled, Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light). Because the east window only catches the morning sun for a small portion of the day—and that portion is limited further by the building directly across the street—Eliasson installed a heliostat, a mirror that tracks the movement of the sun, on that building to reflect afternoon sun into the morning window.

the east facade of a gothic brick cathedral in greifswald germany is dark against the deep blue sky of late afternoon or early evening, flanked by shadowy trees. the three tall, thin gothic windows with white tracery glow in a rainbow spectrum, dark red at the bottom to deep blue at the top, so mostly oranges and yellows in the middle, an installation by olafur eliasson — Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, exterior view of the east facade of St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net

When I first discussed with Olafur an idea for a work that involved a heliostat reflecting light into our north-facing apartment in New York, in 2003, [while I had the concept, he already knew what a heliostat was and where to get one], I imagined sunlight that doesn’t move around the room would become very unsettling.

So it is buck wild to see a similar setup behind the altar of a church, where it is intended to encourage “pause and reflection – aspects central to both the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Protestant spirituality.”

Or does an beam of sunlight coming at an uncharacteristic time into a building oriented so specifically have a different effect? The afternoon sun from the east can become a metaphor, or it can encourage pause and reflection on the human, artistic intervention that produced it, drawing viewers’ attention to the world outside the church.

Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light), 2024 [olafureliasson.net]

The Opposite of Dumpster Fire

olafur eliasson photo edition of a mass of icicles and just ice, covering an undetermined pile of garbage and debris in a weedy field in front of a dark loading dock near the berlin warehouse where his studio was in the early 2000s. produced as an edition titled atlantis. — Olafur Eliasson, Atlantis, 2003, photogravure on Hahnemühle, 34 x 68 cm plate on 54 x 84 cm sheet, ed. 35, produced in 2004 by Niels Borch Jensen Editions, image via olafureliasson.net

I don’t know why, but this early-ish Olafur Eliasson work popped into my head this morning: a pile of debris accumulated outside Eliasson’s studio near the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, which the artist sprayed regularly with water until it formed this mass of ice. Which, I never realized all this time, he photographed at night. Maybe it was called Atlantis because it was soon lost. Not clear whether it’d ship in time for Christmas, but you can check.

Is This Really A Print Of Derek Jarman’s Blue?

a vertical strip of 35 millimeter film stock is entirely blue, with two white waveforms of an optical audio track running in black down the left side. sprocket holes punctuate either side of the film strip. this is apparently a piece of a print of derek jarman's monochrome blue film, Blue, made in 1993, as he was losing his sight as a side effect of aids and related medications.

Is this really a 35mm print of Derek Jarman’s Blue, no frames or nothin’?

Thanks to art historian A.V. Marraccini, I saw this Doc Films at the University of Chicago using this image to promote a screening of Blue this week.

2013 was my last exercise to understand how Jarman made Blue blue. Early live performances used a filmed loop of an Yves Klein painting. That was replaced by a blue gel. Rowland Wymer’s 2006 book said the blue was “electronically produced,” which, if the image above is to be accepted, means it was not filmed in camera, but on the film stock itself.

Perhaps it is far past time to make some actual inquiries instead of just poking around in books.

[a little later update: In 2014, Mason Yeaver-Lap wrote about Blue, “a film without film,” and how the Walker Art Center exhibited it on a loop in a gallery. Though the museum has a 35mm print, for conservation reasons, they went with, “a flickering projector (aided by a piece of kit called T’he Flicker-O-Meter,’ whose manual can be found in the Walker archives) [which] would beam through a projection window coated with a blue gel. This filmless projector would thus throw a perfectly IKB shade, accompanied by a CD dub of the soundtrack. Again, Blue was a film without film.”

FWIW, this blog post will be the second mention on the internet of the “Flicker-O-Meter. We’re gonna need to see that manual.

This really is my Saturday night. DVDBeaver has technical information on the various DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Blue, and the greatest set of screencaps the medium has ever produced.]

Previously, very related: International Jarman Blue

Schunk’s Glaspaleis, by Werner Mantz

a black and white 1936 print of a photo by werner mantz of schunk department store in heerlen, the netherlands, shows an eight story square building encased in large sheets of glass curtain wall, which leaves the internal concrete slab and flared column structure completely visible and unobstructed. the plaza in front of the store is framed with trees along the image's edges. for sale at grisebach, a german auction house, in dec 2024 — Werner Mantz, photo of Schunck’s Glass Palace, Heerlen, NL, 1935-6, 169 x 227 mm, gelatin silver print, selling 15 Dec 2024 at Grisebach

Before seeing Werner Mantz’s photo of it, I had never heard of Shunck department store, which sits at the center of Heerlen, a coal mining town in the southern tail of the Netherlands near Maastricht (actually, it’s closer to Aachen, Germany). Commissioned in 1932 from unorthodox modernist Fritz Peutz, it has an extraordinary glass curtain wall separate from but surrounding its 8-story, beamless reinforced concrete structure, on three sides.

Deparment store owner Peter Schunck and Peutz were apparently inspired by the Van Nelle Factory (1925-31) near Rotterdam, which has a pioneering but less ambitious glass curtain wall. I’m not going to get into the dispute of who designed that one.

google streetview image from 2019 of schunk glass palace in heerlen, a color image of the all glass and steel skin of the eight story building with a red flag atop it, and a slightly larger tree in the right foreground. the building is now the town's cultural center and a music school. — Schunk Glaspaleis, Heerlen, NL, c 2019 via Google Streetview

Anyway, the building quickly became known as the Glaspaleis, and it was rescued from destruction in the 1990s, beautifully restored, and now functions as the town’s cultural center. The spot where Mantz was standing is now a McDonald’s. Nice work, everybody.

15 Dec 2024, Lot 1384, Werner Mantz, Glaspaleis, c. 1936, est EUR 700-900 [grisebach]