Hero, filmmaker, and longtime greg.org reader Chris was surprised to realize that the hovering biomorphic forms of the screen elements of the set Isamu Noguchi made for the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 1950 production of Judith were affixed, not to chainlink fence after all, but to the much more delicate fishnet.
Unfortunately, when I clicked through to the Isamu Noguchi Collection, Catalogue Raisonné, and Archive to investigate further, I bound myself to some access agreement that strictly prohibits me from using any material from their collection without authorization from the Noguchi Museum, which also prohibited employees so strictly from wearing a keffiyeh [“bearing an abstract black-and-white fishnet pattern and the red and green colors of the Palestinian flag”] in support of Palestinian liberation, that it fired them.
I’d like to think if I were running the archive and museum of an artist who, after voluntarily incarcerating himself in a Japanese American detention camp, found out that oh wait what, what do you mean he could not just walk out when he wanted, I’d be a little more circumspect about dictating to visitors.
[s/o Bryan Hilley for the Noguchi Museum report that made direct mention of the keffiyeh’s fishnet origins.]
Benjamin Cottam, Yves Klein(Dead Artists), 2002-03, silverpoint, 11 x 9 cm, selling at 27 Sept 2024 at Rago Arts
Eventually, every artist will be a dead artist, but so far only a select few have been included in Benjamin Cottam’s Dead Artists Series. Done in silverpoint on a fine little card, the exquisitely ghostly little portraits are only the size of a fingernail.
Benjamin Cottam, Arshile Gorky (Dead Artists), 2002-03, silverpoint, 11 x 10 cm, selling at 27 Sept 2024 at Rago Arts
It feels like these two, Yves Klein and Arshile Gorky, fall into an exceptional category: artists whose deaths become a significant element of their art historical narrative.
Maybe that distinction is just me. Back in the day, in the thick of Cottam’s project, we got Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Eva Hesse. Looking through some of the other Dead Artists in the series, there are certainly plenty whose main qualification does seem to be that they were dead. [A lot of those are also just faces in a smudgy haze, with an even eerier vibe than these disembodied heads.]
Another criteria, though might be the availability of a suitable reference photo; when I asked the artist about a Felix Gonzalez-Torres, he looked around and the very few Felix pictures around at the time, and said it wouldn’t work.
So yeah, we have some of these, we love them, and these feel right in sync with those. So am I a dope for hyping them before scoring them? I guess I’d also be happy to see them spread around. Too may Dead Artists in one place might raise suspicions.
Matter had photographed the sculpture, perched on a radiator in front of a window looking out onto Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, for a 1956 Vogue Magazine feature on banker/art collector Chester Dale. The photo was made in color, but ran in black & white, and extremely cropped. So Stott’s version is the most magnificent it’s ever looked.
The photo’s caption read, “A Modigliani head, austere, magnificent.” Somehow the next spread in the magazine shows Mrs. Charles Wrightsman: “With her husband, she also collects eighteenth-century French furniture, which they use, magnificently, in their house in Palm Beach, set on the sea’s edge.” In Condé Nast style, then, I have gone back and replaced two lesser words with magnificent.
Rachel Harrison, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2011, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, typewriter, typewriter case, dog leash and photo, 55 x 53 x 40 in., selling at Phillips 25 Sept 2024 [update: sold at Phillips, in fact, for 2x the estimate]
Fans of Rachel Harrison and Scarface who prefer their sculptures incorporate readymade framed scans of gifted Central Park tourist souvenir portraits of Al Pacino as Tony Montana without a bullet hole are in luck.
Valid Like Salad (2012) installed at Harrison’s 2016 exhibition at Greene Naftali, image via artnet from here
Whatever it means for an artist to have a recognizable style or practice, this is the first time I’ve noticed Harrison using a readymade object in at least two of her sculptures. But then, this particular object—a framed, print of a scan of the original drawing given to Harrison by a friend—is explicitly a copy, so why shouldn’t there be more than one? Does it have Deep Meaning that in addition to the 2012 sculpture, Valid Like Salad [whose later history of violence and conservation was discussed previously], Harrison used this movie star sketch in a 2011 work titled, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? You tell me.
Because now that I’ve seen Harrison reuse a specific object at least twice, I can’t stop looking for other repetitions and patterns in her work. Portrait was exhibited in 2011 in estrella distante, a Roberto Bolaño-themed group show at kurimanzutto, organized in collaboration with Harrison’s LA gallery, Regen Projects. Though it would have been obvious because it was facing a doorway, the installation views of Portrait omit the Tony Montana picture—should we assume it was there?—and center the typewriter perched on top of the painted concrete block, which sits in turn upon the typewriter’s case.
Rachel Harrison, Structural Design, 2010, Polystyrene, cement, Parex, acrylic, and Royal Safari portable typewriter, 58 x 33 x 28 in., image via regen projects
Which is itself a repeat of a move Harrison used in Structural Design (2010), a sculpture she showed at Regen Projects in 2010. Arguably, that work, or the keyboard of the Royal Safari portable typewriter it incorporates, gave the show its title, Asdfjkl;. The artist also makes an appearance in the press release, where the reference to typing hand position is described as “mentally tactile, as it speaks to the moment when one is just about to touch an object, or when one’s fingers have just had that physical encounter. The rapidly changing relationship to writing produced by the aid of machines is central to this title (the artist grew up without texting and is still not that good at it). Structural Design is a sculpture whose components are a Royal typewriter and painted forms balancing on the edge of the typewriter’s case, teetering in a moment between gravity and expression.”
Now these forms, both the boxes and the sheets, and the teetering, come into focus as elements of Harrison’s vocabulary. So does this strategy of separating two elements—a typewriter and its case—with sculptural forms. And hanging a framed photo on them. Or putting them on bases or plinths. And on and on. Seen in volume, and over time, a syntax appears, and a portrait of the artist does emerge in the work, or at least a portrait of the artist working.
Roe Ethridge, Untitled (Point Break), 2010, 35 1/4 x 23 7/8 in., ed 1/5+2AP, via Phillips, 2019
Untitled (Point Break), 2010, Roe Ethridge’s self-portrait as Patrick Swayze;
Sam McKinniss, Pansies in a Basket, 2019, pastel on paper, 9×12 in., via artsy
Sam McKinniss’s Pansies in a Basket (2019), from a Swiss Institute benefit auction;
Louise Lawler, Silent Night, 2011/13, cibachrome on museum box, 51 x 39 x 2 in., via Sprüth Magers
and Louise Lawler’s Silent Night (2011/13) are three of the over two hundred artworks and design items included in the inventory of assets of Lisa Schiff and her former advisory firm, Schiff Fine Art. The inventory was filed as part of a bankruptcy proceeding and, as recently reported here, will possibly be liquidated at auction as early as November.
I broke out the inventory from its larger filing [pdf]. It’s after the jump.
In other filings from May, the bankruptcy trustee is seeking to recover deposits paid to two galleries by Schiff Fine Art of nearly $1m for work whose sale was never completed. $575,000 was paid to Thaddeus Ropac for a $750,000 Cory Arcangel work, Topline (2019). [idk, but Arcangel lists Topline as the title of a 2019 show in which none of the works have that title. Maybe it’s me for not keeping up with his prices, but that does seem like the price of an entire show?] And $398,000 was paid to Gladstone for a $650,000 sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, The Seated IV (2019), which was installed on the facade of the Met.
Though not identified in the filings, both purchases were initiated on behalf of Candace Carmel Barasch, the collector and former client who sued Schiff in 2023 for $6.3 million in undelivered art. It must suck to have a million dollars of your money sitting somewhere, and to have it classified as the assets of a bankrupt company, and you’re classified as a creditor, not an account holder. Has Barasch’s and others’ lawsuits prompted people to change the fiduciary or custodial agreements they made with their agent/art advisers?
And here I thought I could be chill and grateful and just acknowledge the congratulations as they came in, while I processed the shock of being included by the Rabkin Foundation among an inspiring but frankly daunting group of writers, but I guess not.
One of my favorite things to discover about Maria Lind’s 2012 Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies show was the Wade Guyton narrative arc. And how Guyton’s massive, black painted plywood floor in the Konsthall raised the profile of the his black printed plywood edition in Lind’s controversial selling show at Bukowskis auction house. And how that very example did not sell then. And it did not sell in 2019. And it did not sell again in 2022.
And so the “Distinguished European Collector” who’s been stuck with it—I like to think it’s the Lundins—has had to keep enjoying what is truly, as far as these things go, an iconic work. How would it be?
Well, for a brief shining moment, now you can find out.
One reason I thought of for why this excellent example of Guyton’s work didn’t sell was the volume. Not just that it is an edition, but that there are actually two editions. When Guyton made this 8×4 ft plywood edition of seven in 2008, he also made a Parkett edition of 60 [38 numbered, XXII proofs].
But as I’ve noted before, what matters about the works of Guyton’s Black Paintings Era, which were all produced using the same monochromatic bigblack.tif file, is that they exist as a series. The editions, even more so. I’m getting shivers just imagining them being made all at once, 22 sheets of ply pumped into the inkjet printer, and admiring the the little differences.
Like being little. Though it elegantly maintains the proportion and scale of the ed. 7, Guyton’s untitled edition for Parkett 83 is a quarter of the size [4 x 2 ft., 15 sheets/4 = 60.]
Think what it’s like to move it around, perhaps in your car, or even in your pickup, or to store it, or to ship it. What the Parkett edition may lack in surface area, it more than makes up for in convenience.
And now, somehow, Parkett has one left, the “last available work from a previously sold-out edition.”
Went with this Jean-Baptiste Béranger’s photo of the 2012 installation of Abstract Possible at Tensta Konsthall to get the full Guyton Floor Effect, via e-flux
In 2012, in her new post as director of the Tensta Konsthall, a community-focused art center in suburban Stockholm, power curator Maria Lind tried to figure out if there is ethical abstraction under capitalism. From “Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies,” her four-month, three-venue exhibition and art economics report, the answer can only have been: lmao no.
I’d seen Issey Miyake’s 132 5 Project clothes, but not the lamps. Now here is a lamp.
In 2010 Miyake and his Reality Lab groupies developed a collection of one-piece of recycled polyester textile, geometric origami-based garments, paying as much attention to how they looked folded flat as to how they worked on a body. Like his Pleats Please and APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) concepts, 123 5 was an experiment with material, process, and form without too much concern for how it looked on, because it always just looks like: whatever, you’re wearing Miyake.
[Looking now for an image to post, I can also say it didn’t matter to Miyake how it looked on a mannequin, in a photo, in a store, or what a press release said. The charitable explanation is that it privileges the physical experience with the product.]
Anyway, Miyake brought this folding-focused concept into a lighting collection at Artemide called IN-EI. Typically written as In’ei (陰翳), Miyake told Artemide it means “shadow, shadiness, nuance.” But the term is most directly associated with 陰翳礼讃 (In’ei Raisan), “In Praise of Shadows,” Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s foundational 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, which had a huge influence on Japan’s own sense of cultural exceptionalism vis à vis the Modernism of the West.
Another reference that is very unmentioned is Isamu Noguchi’s Akari series, which brought a modernist and modernizing sensibility to Japan’s long tradition of paper lanterns. Many of which also fold flat, obviously. My long-simmering fixation with the Akari arc from lamps to “light sculptures” is probably what made me notice this lamp in the first place. And seeing the stacked rhombus lamps in this Miyake boutique, it’s clear Noguchi was on Artemide’s mind, too.
Artemide and Issey Miyake, making sure “Each lampshade is created using 2 or 3D mathematic principals” since this pic was taken the NYC store in 2012. It was even stenciled on the wall lmao.
However long this cruise ship napkin-shaped table lamp was in production, I don’t know, but the IN-EI Collection currently only has four pieces in it, and this is currently not one of them. Its name, Hoshigame, translates as star tortoise, and yes, its shape does look like the shell of a Burmese Star Tortoise. So maybe in 2015, when the Kemono Friends manga dropped, and an Indian Star Tortoise was among the exotic animals in the magic zoo that turned into kawaii little girls, Artemide decided to quietly excuse itself from the search results.
As long as you know to search for Hoshigame, though, you will not need to rush to buy this one in Paris. Turns out they’re all over the place, at prices ranging from etsy cheap to 1st dibs ridiculous.
How can there really be only five of these Ming Dynasty tiles known?
Christie’s dates this one to the Zhengde-Jiajing period, the first half of the 16th century (1506-1566), which splits the difference between the British Museum (Ming, c. 1500) and the Palace Museum in Beijing (Jiajing, 1521-67). The V&A has the same Jiajing date on theirs, but their early registrar log for the tile says it came “from the Porcelain Tower, Nanking [Nanjing], completed in 1430.” It’s an association that didn’t make the cut for the digital record.
Despite the specificity of Christie’s bibliographic references, the V&A’s was the only tile I could find online. Like the Christie’s tile (13 X), it has a number incised on its edge (11 Front), that does make them sound like part of a larger project. But the Porcelain Tower? It was a nine-story pagoda of porcelain brick that rose 79 meters tall, and was considered a marvel of the world, and then it was destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion in 1856, and rebuilt in 2015 with a billion yuan donation from Wang Jianlin.
It was, unsurprisingly, Alain Truong who first put a spotlight on it, but I first saw it lighting up my tumblr timeline this morning [where pwlanier posted it, and punk-raphaelite reblogged it]. My immediate thought was that such an exquisite object should be considered alongside a comparable painting, like a panel from a Christian altarpiece or something.
Then I took a closer, slower look at its incised surface and the hasty way the glaze spills across the design, and maybe it calls for a more modernist, abstract aesthetic context. Which, never mind, I realize what I’m thinking is I just really, really want it.
Before there was bluescreen or greenscreen, there was yellowscreen, and it was better.
beam splitter prism graphic, screenshot from Collision Crew
In the 1950s Petro Vlahos created an in-camera, sodium vapor process which filmed actors lit frontally with white light, against a monochrome backdrop, backlit by yellow sodium vapor lamps, using a beam splitting prism that recorded the color image and its monochromatic mask simultaneously on two reels of film. It is basically a dichroic version of Technicolor, invented by Wadsworth E. Pohl, which used prisms to split an image into three color-separated frames.
The OVR’s only text, from a 2010 essay by Anthony Huberman, links these works to Kassay’s silvery, electroplated and singed paintings which lit up the art market’s way out of the global financial crisis. But there is also silvery runoff and splatter on the floating cedar frames. Which would mean Kassay was dipping the whole framed objects in his electroplating bath? It reminded me of Rauschenberg’s order, “DO NOT REMOVE…FRAME IS PART OF DRAWING.” written in all caps on the back of Erased deKooning Drawing. If that were the wildest discovery in this virtual show, it would have been enough.
20210104_JRose_Princeton_060-scaled-2-1024×682.jpg via Galerie Greta Meert
But there was also this completely other mystery:
It’s an overpainted photograph that appears to be a study for a mural [?] at Princeton. The extensive caption reads: “Jacob Kassay, Princeton Charlie (studies for the removal of Woodrow Wilson mural), 2018, paint on photograph Washington Post article, Princeton to remove ‘overly celebratory’ mural of Woodrow Wilson, Mary Hui and Susan Svrluga, April 27, 2016: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/27/princeton-to-remove-overly-celebratory-mural-of-woodrow-wilson.” To the dates, 2016 and 2018, the jpg filename adds 2021, for a study shown in 2023.
A seven-year span of events, yet I could find no image of the completed mural. Or even a mention. Or any confirmation that it even is a mural.
I’ve been slowly picking my way through Anne Rorimer’s 1978 article on Blinky Palermo, which I think laid down the path for most Palermo understanding that followed, at least in English. And maybe there’s a metaphor for a discourse that goes to such clunky effort to not say 200cm or 80cm, much less know what it means physically:
The Stoffbilder are often square in format, though not exclusively, generally measuring 78 3/4 inches square. The standard width of fabric, which in Europe is usually 31 1/2 inches, determines the maximum possible width of each area of color.
Tamás St. Turba, Czechoslovak Radio 1968, 1969, sulfur paint on brick, documenta 13 installation image via socks-studio h/t jeremy millar
I’ve been fascinated for days by Tamás St. Turba’s Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 (1969) since Jeremy Millar posted about the project on bluesky. St. Turba, who has like five spelling variants and alternate names, is a Hungarian filmmaker, archivist, activist, and Fluxus artist who took Fluxus seriously enough to stop calling himself an artist or his projects art.
Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is/was a conceptual artwork as protest against the Warsaw Pact military forces’ radio ban: a brick was painted to look like a transistor radio, which Czech residents pretended to listen to. This simple gesture was taken up as an act of defiance to the point that the military confiscated brick radios along with real ones.
St. Turba has made or remade the radios since, as needed, including for Documenta 13 in 2011, and one he remade in 2008 which found its way into Tate’s collection in 2016.
In an early conversation between the artist and myself about the Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 piece the artist noted that the brick could be ‘used to build the courthouse or as a missile to smash it’. On this occasion it seemed the artist had opted to deconstruct or ‘smash’ the format of the project. In terms of a public event, I can only imagine the audience perception of the piece as something thin and uncomfortable. However, in addressing the trickster-ish and conspiratorial nature of Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 it playfully presented a series of disruptive and subversive strategies that resonated with the impulse of the original work.
At a time when resistance to authoritarian stifling of culture has never felt more urgent, it’s been maddening to see how fragmented or detached discussion of St. Turba’s project is. Partly that could be because he refutes it artwork status, but also because he’s busy trying to fill in the archival gaps from Cold War oppression while Hungary grapples anew with another fascist. But it feels like the art apparatus has been failing in its job.
It may also be because the art apparatus, as such, can’t really deal with non-valuable or non-auratic objects. Even/especially when they look and sound uncannily familiar.
Weltempfänger (World Receiver), 1982, Multi-band radio receiver, 37 x 51 x 20 cm, Collection of the artist. PHOTO: Jens Ziehe, Berlin via leapleapleap
I only realize now I don’t know the origin of Isa Genzken’s concrete World Receivers. She first showed a working world receiver as a readymade in 1982, which was then a context, if not a gesture, of reaching information within borders and beyond. I think the non-functional concrete simulacra only came later, and I don’t know how. But maybe it’s entirely unrelated.
