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No, Clyfford Still Only Threatened To Exhibit A Blank Canvas

John Perreault recounted the story in his 2005 review of Mike Bidlo’s Erased de Kooning Drawings show, but I think he got it from Robert Rosenblum’s catalogue essay, who got it from Bidlo himself: that Clyfford Still once submitted a blank canvas to a museum group show out of spite, and then Bidlo did it out of homage. Here is how Bidlo explained it to Rosenblum in 2003, in Artforum:

RR: And didn’t you also do some kind of performance/installation piece about a mythical Clyfford Still?

MB: Oh yeah, that was the show curated by Alan Jones. The piece was based on the time Clyfford Still was asked to take part in a museum exhibition of regional work from California. Still claimed he didn’t want to compete with other artists, so he suggested that his contribution be a six-by-ten-foot unprimed canvas. I found this story in the Metropolitan Museum’s Clyfford Still catalogue. The idea of the blank canvas fascinated me. So many other artists have used blank canvases to make aesthetic statements, but Still’s gesture seemed to be the most nihilistic, a true act of anti-art. When we installed the piece in the Philippe Briet Gallery in SoHo, I included the text from the catalogue in a frame next to the painting.

I couldn’t find the Met’s Still catalogue, but Rosenblum did, and said the show was a group show of large-scale drawing at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in 1949, and that Still sent a, “6-by-10-foot canvas blank as the fabric comes from the factory.”

But there is an earlier source for that quote, and it sounds like neither Bidlo nor Rosenblum knew of it, because it did not exactly go down that way.

It’s a letter Still wrote to Mark Rothko, a transcription of which is in the library of the Still Museum in Denver. [pdf] The letter is from December 1949, and includes a reference to “two days ago.” But there is also a “postcript” in which Still mentions repeating the tale “years later.” So did the show happen in 1950, or sometime closer to his arrival at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946?

Most of the story is Still mocking his colleagues’ efforts to supply a large drawing to the show, while refusing the invitation himself. Still didn’t show a blank canvas; he only threatened to:

Two days ago after a very sumptuous dinner at the Curator’s, the issue was revived. “All the show needs is a drawing by you, Clyff. That will really put it over. How about it, Clyff. Just a nice big drawing.”

“O.K. I’II give you a picture. After alI, this show to an artist of integrity can only be a gesture. Since it is made for a museum program, I will give you my gesture, my respect for the public art gallery working in these terms. I will give you my contempt for the whole business: a 6 x 10 foot canvas blank as the fabric comes from the factory.”

The matter was not mentioned again.

I don’t quite get how the postscript timing works—

Postscript: I told the story years later to Ed Cahill in New York City. He said, “I would have taken you up on that and hung your canvas.” I repIied, “I know you would have, Ed. That is why I wouldn’t have made even that offer to you.”

—but there are letters in the Still Archives from 1954 where Still refuses Cahill and Dorothy Miller’s group show invites more graciously.

For his part, Bidlo was happy to contribute to a group show, which was titled, improbably “Clyfford Still: A Dialogue.” It was organized in October 1990, and Roberta Smith described Bidlo’s massive blank canvas as, “mostly as an accessory to a story of Still’s megalomania told in an accompanying wall label.” The fate of Bidlo’s Not Still is unknown to me at present.

Oh, Walter de Maria’s Africa Lithograph for Hommage à Picasso, We’re Really In It Now

After Picasso died in 1973, publishers in Berlin and Rome decided to capture the moment with a sprawling print portfolio project, Hommage à Picasso. It included 69 artists in six boxed volumes in red linen. Even though many of the 58 artists in the initial five volumes were Americans, there was also a separate 11-artist volume for America’s Hommage à Picasso—which included two works too big to fit in the box. There were also three artworks delivered in matching linen-covered tubes.

It’s really all over the place, and Hommage à Picasso‘s most accurate embodiment of Picasso’s influence on the 20th century art world is that it was almost entirely men (66), almost entirely white (65), and the portfolios that didn’t go to museums have often been broken up and stripped for parts. [Sotheby’s had a complete set in 2017, and Wettman sold a 54/58ths Hommage last May, with a complete America’s Hommage sold separately.]

The only reason I mention any of this is because in 1974, Walter de Maria was at Virginia Dwan’s ranch, working on the first version of Lightning Field. And I can only imagine him taking a break from precisely driving stainless steel spikes into New Mexico soil to make his contribution for America’s Hommage à Picasso portfolio:

Walter de Maria, *Untitled (from America’s Hommage à Picasso)*, 1974, published 1975, lithograph on 30 x 22 in. sheet, this is Dorothy Miller’s proof at MoMA, but Stair has another AP rn

In a slightly more just world, this would be the most famous work of art of the age. In an actually just world, though, it would never have existed.

20 Nov 2024, lot 368: Walter de Maria, Africa-Picasso [sic], est. $500-700 [update: sold for just $400!] [stair]

The Little Prince

a 14 x 11 in painting by richard prince floats in a plain white frame. on a monochrome kelly green surface, a joke is screenprinted somewhat jankily in pale pink ink: you know i was up there in prison talking to charlie manson and he says to me, he says, is it hot in here or am i crazy? selling at christies in nov 2024 — *Untitled*, 1992, 14 x 11 in., acrylic & silkscreen on canvas, selling this month at Christie’s

Over the years, I’ve tried making some myself and used them as references for other works. Nothing profound to say here, I just really, really like Richard Prince’s little joke paintings.

a richard prince painting, 14x11 inches, is painted all over in brushy bright yellow, with splotches of green peeking through from underneath, like a change of plans or a correction. a joke is screenprinted on the center in dark purply black ink: my mother and father keep fighting. they rand and they rave and they shout. who is your father somebody asked. that's what they're fighting about.
I think this one sold at sotheby's a while back, but these little paintings were originally shown at john mcwhinnie's rare book gallery in the 1990s. rip — I mean, they’re like trading cards

They also do remind me of John McWhinnie, who showed them, and was amazing, who always had discoveries, and is gone, which sucks. So maybe it’s weird that a monochrome joke painting can also be mournful, but here we are.

22 Nov 2024 Lot 811: Richard Prince, Untitled, 1992, est. $100-150K [update: sold for $296,000] [christies]

Cady Loan’d

Alex Greenberg not only has a review of Glenstone’s Cady Noland exhibition, he breaks news about it. And he not only breaks news about it, HE HAS PICTURES. Run, click, don’t walk. I’ll wait.

OK, while I think he’s kind of overinterpreted the transgressive unavailability of those black palettes Noland has added to the room otherwise filled by the contents of the artist’s Gagosian show last year, Greenberger is right to notice the slipperiness of the exhibition checklist. There are objects that are on the map, but not on the works list. The stacked palettes are an “element” in this category, and so is another stack of aluminum objects—which turns out to be a 2024 work “on loan” from the artist [scare quotes in the original].

It’s been almost three weeks, and they have not “corrected” their information, and the Glenstone folks get a little coy when Greenberger asks if they will. Now Glenstone is a professionally run and thoughtful institution where the impact of subtle detail is not unappreciated. This incompleteness, this inaccuracy, is part of the encounter; this disconnect between what you see and what you’re told is part of the experience.

[December 2024 update: they have added the loaned work to the checklist. It is “‘Untitled’ 2024, metal crate, metal palettes, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.”]

clip-on man is a 1989 work by cady noland depicting a cropped photo of a wild drunk middle aged white guy in a dark suit with empty six pack rings clipped to his belt, a beer in his hand, and one left dangling in front of his crotch. the image is screenprinted in black on an aluminum panel, while a grid like a flimsy set of strainer bars sticks out on the right side, roughly forming a square. the work sits on a wood floor and leans against a white wall. the pic is via gagosian but the work is currently on loan from the artist [shhhh] to glenstone. the photo is by a guy named charles gatewood; he took it at mardi gras in the early 70s — Cady Noland, *Clip-On Man*, 1989 screenprint on aluminum, image: Gagosian via Beach Pkg c. 2017

Let me add another piece of info in turn, which I don’t know whether to believe myself, but that fits: Clip-On Man, the 1989 work at the pavilions’ entrance, listed as being from a “private collection,” is also a loan from the artist.

In 2017, Beach Packaging Design blogged about Clip-On Man and the source of Noland’s deranged image: Sidetripping, a gonzo street photography book by Charles Gatewood, with a text hustled from William Burroughs, published in 1975 [hey, the same year as that Joan Didion speech!]

I read Sidetripping at Glenstone last time I was there, sitting on Martin Puryear’s elegant bench, facing a tastefully manicured wilderness. Gatewood revels in the underbelly of New Orleans as a degraded destination of American freakdom. Burroughs’ text is a highly baked, freeform riff on the photos, which Gatewood put in front of him while working on assignment for Rolling Stone. In subject, luridness, and bleakness, it felt like a touchstone for Noland’s entire project, if not a straight-up Rosetta Stone. I can see why she’d put that at the entrance of her show. [And name her previous show after it, and her book.]

a heavily patinated galvanized metal milk crate, square with solid sides and open handles on all four sides, via atlanta auctions

[NEXT DAY UPDATE: I went back to Glenstone today to see this shiny stack I’d seen before, now disclosed to be a new work from the artist. This Pinkerton’s crate situation is a bit overdetermined, I think. There are actually two similar crates of stamped, galvanized sheet metal in the gallery, each with the name of a different regional dairy, and each threatening the involvement of the Pinkerton’s if you steal it. One looks like this, complete but very vintage. The one Alex says was cast certainly has a pristine finish. It could be sandblasted or remade, for sure. I did find a picture of the previously unacknowledged work on the internet:

a pyramidal stack of three shiny silver metal objects, two pallets of one half the size of the other, and of slightly different construction, topped by a solid-sided stamped metal milk crate embossed with the name of miss georgia, a local dairy, and a threat that the crate is being guarded by the pinkertons, this is an untitled work from 2024 by cady noland, loaned without announcement to her installation at glenstone in potomac maryland. next to it in a square plexi bos are a cast aluminum george washington and horse, part of another sculpture nearby. behind it a nestable black plastic pallet sits on a square black vinyl mat on the whole field of light grey terrazzo flooring. this picture was found on the internet — a previously unacknowledged untitled artwork from 2024 by Cady Noland, seen in an uncredited photo found on the internet, also showing a pallet whose auratic status has yet to be disclosed.

That middle pallet is the one with the Amazon ASIN sticker still on it: the Vestil AP-ST-2424-SB, currently listed on AMZN as unavailable, though it can be easily found on other retail sites.

Speaking of Amazon and pallets, that black pallet in the background is of the type also mentioned in Alex’s review. It, too, is findable online, though maybe you need a commercial account to purchase it. I think the “violation of state law” thing is, like the Pinkerton’s warning, a boilerplate assertion of ownership for property that circulates unattended on these mean streets. A cattle brand for corporate assets.

On my way home, I had to return a cursed Amazon purchase, and so made a rare trip to a Whole Foods, where I was greeted by this:

in a whole foods parking garage a stack of black plastic nestable pallets sits next to a stack of chartreuse nestable pallets of a different model, but same concept, while garbage bags of paper rest atop them. the black pallets are identical to the ones cady noland includes in her installation at glenstone, though so far, she has not identified them as a work or part of a work, just part of the landscape, like here.

While we wait to hear if these pallets, too, are a previously unacknowledged Cady Noland, we can bring their implication in the monopolistic retail/digital/content behemoth engulfing our world into the unsullied noncommercialism of the Glenstone installation. Also, if, looking back at the Gagosian show it felt like half the non-vintage elements were sourced at The Container Store, remember there is one in Chelsea, right next to a huge Whole Foods. Instead of an artist who has walked away from artmaking, we may have to reimagine Noland as someone making art from the churning world she passes through every day on her way to the gym.

Richter Cinematic Universe [ed. 8]

a still of richter and belz's computer animated film, moving picture (946-3) shows mirrored and repeated vertical sections of a richter squeegee painting in reds pinks greens yellows, and some turquoise across the middle. the abstract and random squeegee marks become baroque geometric patterns when mirrored and morphed in varying widths, which is a technique richter began using in strip paintings from 2009-2012, and which he documented in a book, patterns, which provided the impetus for the film. this image is via gagosian, but it's the same one that's been circulating with the work since at least 2019 so — Still from *Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version*, 2019-24, by Gerhard Richter & Corinna Belz, as introduced by Gagosian for an upcoming immersive installation in Rome, Dec. 2024.

As we try to make sense of wtf happened, and what the future holds, let me try to bring some clarity. As fields and factions drunk on their own importance clamor for dominance, let me try to bring a shared understanding.

So far there have been computer animations based on two Gerhard Richter paintings. They have followed the slicing and mirroring mathematical process of the artist’s Strip series (2009-2013). Richter provided the image to and they were made by filmmaker Corinna Belz. They have been accompanied by music commissioned from multiple composers.

The project having its “gallery debut” next month, which Gagosian Rome is pleased to announce, Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019–24), is of the second painting, Abstraktes Bild (CR 946-3), from 2016. It is, thought, the first to be presented as an immersive installation in film and sound, and the first to be sold, in an edition of eight. What is it, and how did it come to be?

Joan Didion’s Commencement Robes

Maybe Joan Didion’s 1975 commencement speech at the University of California Riverside was better when it was ‘lost’ and all we had were the YOLO excerpts from the end. Well, it’s all here now:

I think what you might be blinded for, what you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. There’s an objective reality, there is an objective social reality. Take it on faith.

All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

Hhmm! While I’m glad she made a plug for reality, the idea of graduating from college, and Joan Didion driving out to Riverside to say don’t try to make the world better frankly sucks.

Joan Didion’s ‘lost’ commencement address, revealed [ucr.edu via jodi kantor]
Previously, related; Joan Didion’s Mantle

“Did you ever see them again?”

I watched Corinna Belz’s documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting today, thinking that the artist hard at work in his studio would clear my head, or at least distract me.

Then I was overwhelmed anew by an exchange with Belz as Richter is sorting through stacks of old photographs. As Richter held a snapshot of his middle-aged parents, Belz asked, “You left Dresden, East Germany, in 1961. Did you ever see them again?”

“No, never.” Richter replied. “I was a recognized refugee. A certified political refugee. And it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t get a permit…a travel permit for the East.

“Not until later, 1987, when I had an exhibition there. Then, with the ambassador, suddenly everything was possible.

“But by then they were all dead.”

“Did you realize in the 60s that you would never see them again?”

“No. Absolutely not. You think things will change and it won’t last. You don’t think people will grow old and die. When you leave them, they’re young.”

I knew this was here; I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and it inexorably changed the way I thought of Richter’s relationship to photographs, his subjects, and the arc of his entire project. A young artist becomes a refugee when his war-ravaged country splits apart, and he never sees his family again is not the Richter origin story we were used to. And Richter lost in sadness as his answers to the questions linger in his silence is not the icy master of critical detachment we’ve been taught.

But today, my ache over the career of this artist built on personal trauma that unfurled across the shifting fascist and imperial politics of the 20th century was overshadowed by my dread of the future. Because part of my processing today involved replaying with unwanted, fresh intensity the idea of leaving, of fleeing.

The questions of where? when? how? land differently than they did even yesterday. But at least I asked them. Am I ready to never see my parents again? wasn’t even a question I’d thought of. Neither, it turns out, did Richter.

Diese Genzken Tin Foil Hat

The anxiety I’m experiencing while imagining having to take care of the tin foil on this Isa Genzken sculpture is actually a welcome change from the anxiety I woke up with.

It seems odd that this is apparently not considered a Weltempfänger (World Receiver), even though it certainly looks Weltempfängerisch.

29 Nov 2024, Lot 714N, Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2016, EUR40-60,000 [grisebach]

Property Art

Reese Lewis writes for the Brooklyn Rail about Cameron Rowland’s commission and exhibition at Dia, including Plot, a one-acre section of Dia Beacon’s site on which Rowland and their company, Plot, Inc., have placed a burial ground easement, under the assumption that it contains the unmarked graves of formerly enslaved residents on the land.

Surrounded by Dia’s landed property, Plot feels like it is floating arbitrarily in space with no real constraints other than the conceptual desire to be sized at the singular unit of one acre. In all of the text, Rowland does not suggest that we go up digging burial grounds or claim this site to be a discovery. Rather, this site is ultimately a universal model that suggests if one parcel of land is capable of being an unmarked slave burial, any site in the US is capable of being one.

Rowland also produced Estate (2024), a publication detailing Dia’s own real estate holdings, which include the thousands of acres it acquired and placed restrictions on to protect the vistas of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. Any site in the US is capable of being subject to such easements, but Dia feels exceptional in its institutional position as a custodian of the real estate of art.

Cameron Rowland: Properties [brooklynrail.org]
Cameron Rowland Properties is at Dia:Beacon thru October 2025* [diaart.org]
Previously, related: One Acre and Dia Mule

*As if planning for such things a year from now is normal.
** “That things just go on is the ‘catastrophe’.” -Walter Benjamin

Felix Navidad Exhibition Copy

A snapshot sent from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Anne Umland, dated Dec. 21, 1992, MoMA at NPG

One unexpected thing from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the inclusion of a few examples of the artist’s correspondence, the notes and snapshots he regularly sent to friends and colleagues. They’re shown amidst all 55 of the artist’s photo puzzles, which underscores their similarity to the photos and letters Felix used. But only to an extent. By expanding the borders of the pool of imagery and text from which the artworks were drawn, they reveal nuances of the artist’s decisions.

verso note from FG-T to Anne Umland, collection, MoMA

And when it’s correspondence with curators and collaborators, they trace the network of relationships in which Gonzalez-Torres worked and lived. One example is two similar Christmas cards sent to Julie Ault and MoMA’s Anne Umland in 1992. Umland’s lightstring snapshot might be the OG Felix Navidad.

The text reads: “Dear Anne, To more years of living, loving, leaving for long train trips, fat cats, sweaters, breathing deeply salty air, new white shirts, unexpected flowers, new friends, streets full of lights, simple moments, views to remember, tough art objects, Paris, moving poems, writing, crying, learning, growing, shopping, hoping, waiting for love letters, heart beatings on one’s [?], little radios, and more, so much more, …in 1993 and beyond, Feliz Navidad, Felix”

One thing I can’t figure out, though: according to the checklist, this is an exhibition copy, on loan from MoMA. Did the museum decide not to loan a piece of correspondence from their archive? Or did Umland keep the personal card, but give the museum a facsimile? What goes into producing a double-sided photo & handwritten text? Because I feel some new facsimile objects coming on.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres @ MLK

It’s also installed at the National Portrait Gallery, but after seeing the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation’s instagram, I realized I had missed this 1991 stack, “Untitled” (Party Platform 1980-1992), at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. So I went back to see it, and the place was full of people voting.

Oddly, it does not get out much.

Previously: Felix Gonzalez-Torres @ NPG

All The Erased de Kooning Drawings

The first wall at Glenstone that used to have Hilma af Klint drawings has been rotated. Now there is a whole row of stunning Willem de Kooning drawings of women, each, I thought the other day, more tantalizingly erasable than the next.

*Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings*, installation view, Francis Naumann Fine Art, Sept-Nov 2005

While contemplating this embarrassment of targets and what Duchamp guru Francis Naumann had to say about the shovel, I was primed yet unprepared to know that in 2005 Naumann staged an entire show of Mike Bidlo’s Not Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawings.

Mike Bidlo, *Not De Kooning Woman, c. 1951*, 12 1/2 x 9 1/4 in., as published in Francis Naumann’s 2005 catalogue, *Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings*

According to Robert Rosenbaum’s essay in the catalogue I just got—and which seems like the only source for images of the actual works—Bidlo’s NREdKD began as almost a performance, when he erased what looked like a de Kooning in front of his shocked fellow guests at an artsy retreat in Maine in 2003. When a collector couldn’t buy it, he appealed to Naumann, who appealed to Bidlo, who agreed to make a whole show of them.

Mike Bidlo’s *Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing*, 2005, 22 1/4 x 18 3/8 in., ibid.

For each work, he made a beautiful Not de Kooning drawing, which he erased into a Not Rauschenberg. Each got a Johns-style label, and a facsimile FRAME IS PART OF ARTWORK frame, in a variety of dimensions. The show included documentation of the drawings, but also all the eraser crumbs, under glass, which, ngl, seems kind of corny.

Still as someone who, as I’ve already confessed here, thinks about erasing de Koonings whenever I see one, I can do naught but stan.

Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, Sept-Nov 2005 [francisnaumann]
previously, related riffs on Erased de Kooning Drawing: Archival Bühler-Rose

Ellsworth Kelly Black Face

Ellsworth Kelly, *Found in the sand*, 1964, collage on paper, 31 x 25 cm, selling 13 Nov 2024 at Rago

The jankiness of this 1964 Ellsworth Kelly collage is surpassed only by its intricacy. And its problematics lapped them both.

It is one of [at least] two collages Kelly gave to David McCorkle, who sailed with the artist to France for the last three months of 1964. Dale McConathy, listed in the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation’s chronology as a former employee of Betty Parsons Gallery, also joined them, and wrote a catalogue essay for Kelly’s show at Galerie Maeght. [Upon his return in 1965, McConathy became an editorial assistant, and then quickly literary editor, of Harper’s Bazaar, where he published his avant-garde artist friends and French theory. James Meyer wrote of McConathy’s role in magazine/art culture and the confluence of art & fashion in 2001. I think McCorkle later tried his hand at Broadway, then in the ’70s became a caterer. In any case, in 1964 Kelly was 41, and it sounds like McCorkle and McConathy may have been 40 together.]

The primary element of both of McCorkle’s collages, for sale at Rago Arts next week, is a Sea & Ski suntan lotion ad. They could have run elsewhere, too, of course, but the one with the girl grabbing the guy’s hair, titled PAL because of another collaged element, ran in the June 19, 1964 issue of LIFE magazine. And the one above ran in the July 3 issue.

Ellsworth Kelly, *David*, the AP of the 90×60 cm lithograph published by Imprimerie Maeght in 1964-65, a 1969 gift of the artist to the Norton Simon Museum

Kelly has torn the blonde, sunglassed face of the lifeguard in the ad, and drawn another in the void, with Black features. [From the one of many portraits Kelly drew of McCorkle that Galerie Maeght published as a lithograph, we know that Black face is not McCorkle’s.] We don’t know if McCorkle had a gorilla tattoo on his shoulder, one of the tiny, almost surgically collaged elements Kelly added. [Other carefully cut elements include “David” on the patch on the lifeguard’s swimsuit, and the compound that gave the work its title, “found/ in the sand, the,” at least part of which came from a caption in the same issue of LIFE.]

pp 8-9 in the July 3, 1964 issue of LIFE, featuring Albert Murray’s essay, “‘The Problem’ Is Not Just Black and White,” and the Sea & Ski ad Ellsworth Kelly used for his young friend’s collage

“in the sand, the” puts the whole issue of LIFE in Kelly’s hand at some point, not just a tearsheet. So what was on the page facing the lifeguard? A book review about “The Problem,” aka, “The Negro Revolution,” by Albert Murray. Is that what the Black face Kelly drew is looking at? Or was it the inspiration? That feels like the most benign explanation, though it does not explain the gorilla, which does not appear in this or any contemporaneous issues of LIFE.

13 Nov 2024, Lot 145: Ellsworth Kelly, Found in the sand, 1964, est. $5-7,000 [update: sold for $6,048] [ragoarts]

Flip Your Noguchi Coffee Table

That Scott Burton article has tuned my antenna for furniture sculpture. While Burton’s own interests took him back to, among others, Brancusi, this apparently rare, pre-production marble-top table by Isamu Noguchi just dropped into my inbox.

Noguchi Coffee Table, 1945-47, shown at left in a vintage photo with the aluminum “floral well” filled, and at right by Heritage Auctions, which is selling this rare thing on 22 Nov 2024

It was introduced produced for Herman Miller between 1945-47, and introduced alongside Noguchi’s similarly scaled and more extravagantly shaped chess table in 1948. It was expensive and not a success, especially compared to Noguchi’s more famous glass-top coffee table. This table was bought from the showroom by a Marshall Fields employee, and has been in the family ever since.

Anyway, point is, Heritage Auctions’ email says, “Its perforated and tripod form relates closely to Noguchi’s work in sculpture of this period, specifically his interlocking assemblages of shaped slabs of marble, slate, and wood. Concurrently, Noguchi experimented with functional ‘sculpture-for-use’…” “Everything was sculpture,” Noguchi said of the table forms through which he experimented with abstraction alongside his non-functional sculpture in the 1940s.

Honestly, I would love nothing more than to crawl under this table with a book on the history of furniture-sculpture and not emerge until Wednesday. But there’s probably a chapter about how Noguchi met the fascist threat by getting himself locked up in a Japanese American detention center, and yet went on to design the most innovative coffee table sculptures in history.

22 Nov 2024, Lot 67030: Isamu Noguchi, Rare and Important Table, est. $700k-1m [ha.com]

David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela Is In Atlanta, Y’all

David Hammons, *Free Nelson Mandela*, 1987, a 2015 installation image in Piedmont Park via Google Street View

I’m getting used to not knowing every work David Hammons makes privately, which he may or may not announce until years later. But I am not dealing well with only finding out about public sculptures commissioned more than three decades ago, which turn out to still be chillin’ in the random corner of a park in Atlanta.

TBF, Free Nelson Mandela IS mentioned in the 1988 intro to Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons, one of the rare, foundational texts on the artist and his practice. But it never occurred to me that it wasn’t just a historic occurrence.

Anyway, it is a giant boulder with a “fan-shaped display” of iron bars topped with barbed wire. When it was originally installed, the gate in the prison-like fence was padlocked shut, and the artist had purportedly buried the key under the sculpture. Probably when it was moved to its permanent location in Piedmont Park, Hammons entrusted the key to Atlanta’s politicians, who opened the gate after Mandela’s release from prison.

The sculpture’s wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012, but by Mandela’s death in 2013, it had been cleared of extraneous, artist-unapproved shrubbery. The interpretation of the Smithsonian’s public sculpture inventory description has the inscription on the work’s back. Would that also have been behind or “inside” the prison fence? I don’t know. The current siting definitely makes the inscription feel like the front, though.

David Hammons, *Rock Fan*, 1993, surrounded by little protest rock fans, at Williams College

What seems more interesting is how formally resonant this sculpture is to Hammons’ other works of the time. Like, specifically, Rock Fan, the giant boulder topped with antique fans Hammons installed at Williams College in 1993, which is only the biggest of his rock- and fan-related works, if not the only politically topical one.

The full/official/original title of the work is Nelson Mandela Must Be Free to Lead His People and South Africa to Peace and Prosperity. Which, with meddlesome South Africans in the news lately, makes me wonder if Hammons would make a JAIL ELON MUSK sculpture, perhaps in a park in Pennyslvania.