the making of, by greg allen
I want a first edition of Moby Dick, but I think the psychic price of actually ever buying one will be too high.
While surfing around to see how the copy for sale at Christie’s rn stacks up, I fall into a briar patch of rarity, condition reports, restoration and repair, inscription and annotation, and cutthroat antiquarian connoisseurship.
Continue reading “Moby Dick is My Moby Dick”
It’s wild that after cleaning and removing some clunky additions, this painting turned out to be not one of a dozen copies of Quentin Metsys’ Madonna of the Cherries, one of the most celebrated paintings of 16th century Antwerp, but the long-lost original.
Whoever bought it for GBP250,000 in 2015 even did dendrochronological analysis of the boards of the panel it was painted on, and found it was from the same tree as a painting in the Rijksmuseum.
Anyway, now you can buy the painting Archduke Albert II of Austria couldn’t. It’s back at Christie’s for an est. GBP 8-12 million.
[update: the Getty bought it for GBP 10.6m. Maybe one of their curators should have been talking to their conservators about it in 2015.]
2015: “Studio of Quentin Metsys” [christies]
2024: Quentin Metsys himself, baby [christies]
Speaking of Rachel Harrison, for the last post I was going back through the catalogue for Life Hack—an exhibition in a book if ever there was one, and with a sweet artist-designed cover I had a computer read aloud to me. And there was a big, beautiful spread of the eighth incarnation of Marilyn with Wall that felt like an even more direct nod to Louise Lawler than all the rest.
Continue reading “Faith in Pictures”
I kept getting caught off guard by an aggro undercurrent in Maggie Nelson’s essay about Rachel Harrison in The Paris Review. [From 2020, in response to Harrison’s show, Life Hack at the Whitney, it was first published in the show’s catalogue in 2019. It’s been a long pandemic, and the stack of open tabs mocks me from the corner.] But I can’t let this one go by unnoted:
This current of nihilism or violence has been present in Harrison’s work for some time, via its excavation of America and Americana; in 2015, it became literalized, when actual bullets were fired into her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, by an ex–security guard who spray-painted and shot several pieces of art in the After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists exhibit before taking his own life. After defacing the art—including sending a bullet into the forehead of a framed drawing of Al Pacino in Harrison’s 2012 sculpture Valid Like Salad (a new, tragic echo of Davidson’s mop in the head)—the ex-guard, Dean Sturgis, sat in a folding chair and shot himself in the head (a new, tragic link to Circle Jerk).
Whatever urge toward defacement, whatever hostility toward art qua art, whatever exploration, however lighthearted, of American breeds of masculinity, celebrity, and sociopathy may have been at play in Harrison’s work (in 2007, she titled a show “If I Did It,” after O. J. Simpson’s much-maligned memoir)—all must now sit uneasily with the legacy of Sturgis, whose bullet holes serve to remind us that our everyday includes mortal threat and terror as much as it does remote controls and air fresheners.
Nelson makes it sound like this association with the Wexner Center shooting was foisted on Harrison’s work, that it’s been tragically linked, passive voice. But that elides the artist’s own agency, and her own decisions, and risks diminishing her own insights about her work, both before and after it was shot.
Continue reading “Showing Bullet Hole”
If I had a significant Christopher Wool painting in Basel that became famous for not selling with even a single bid, I would simply turn it over and sell it immediately for well above the ask.
HO HO, what’s that on the floor of the Gagosian booth at Basel, between that 1990 Judd stack Zwirner also repped, and that 1990 Christopher Wool painting of Thompson Dean’s that Christie’s ended up with after it didn’t get one bid in 2021?
It is a Cady Noland with a 1990s subject—a NY Post article on mobster John Gotti’s 1992 trial—but a fresh, 2024 date.
What does it mean that Noland put out a work in 2024 about a vain mobster nicknamed “the Dapper Don” being called out by the judge for trying to poison his trial by threatening witnesses? What does it mean that she seems to have made this work out of the same photocopy Andrew Russeth spotted five years ago, in Joanne Greenbaum’s wild 70+ artist group show, “Notebook,” at 56 Henry? [n.b.: “Notebook” closed a couple of weeks before the MMK retrospective opened.]
Did Noland look around her studio and laugh as she considered Greenbaum’s request for one notebook drawing or work they “would never show to a dealer or pull out during a studio visit”?
And the plinth? I just listened to Jeannine Tang’s talk at the MMK symposium that included several quotes from Noland and her sources about the problems of plinths. But I guess they’re OK for high traffic art fair booths?
There is another new Noland in Basel, a wire crate-o-stuff, and if I see the photo again of the guard-like woman standing next to it, I’ll post it here.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, here is what I understand is the piece Noland included in Notebook at 56 Henry in 2019. No date was forthcoming, but it is not, in fact, identical to image silkscreened on the 2024 work. It looks to be a cropped variation, copied with paper strips placed over the elements Noland wished to exclude. There is a little anomaly in the right side of the Gotti caption, which looks like a logo for The Container Store. Is it perhaps a trace of a plastic document sleeve, that might also be the cause of the uneven edge? It’s a narrow window into a practice few people even knew in 2019 was active. If, indeed, that was when Noland made this copy.
Previously, related: “we woke up in a world where Cady Noland makes and shows work. At Gagosian.”
At one moment in time and for the people who saw it then, Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield — A Confrontation was a two-acre field of wheat the artist cultivated, tended, and harvested on landfill on what is now the south end of Battery Park City in Manhattan.
But since then, and for most people, it existed as a photograph. Or rather, it was experienced by looking at a photograph, an iconic image of Denes, hair flowing and holding a staff, looking out at the Statue of Liberty from the midst her amber waves of grain, with the base of the World Trade Center towers and less remarkable elements of the lower Manhattan skyline stretching uptown behind her.
So it is understandable that a week-long “reprise” of Wheatfield in the Messeplatz at Art|Basel Basel would take as its object not the process of the original [instead of four months clearing, planting, tending, and harvesting crops, over 900 planter boxes were trucked in and installed in a couple of days], nor the physicality of the original [est. 930 square meters, less than a quarter of an acre], but the photo of the original. When it was photographed from its intended angle, it would not matter that from other vantage points, Honouring Wheatfield looked like a sod farm or a wheatgrass juicebar.
What I failed to account for fully was the intended angle. Thankfully, ARTnews’ use of Valentin Flauraud’s photo and caption and credit for Agence France Presse has brought the true objective into view. Flauraud recreates Denes’ image with a selfie-taking couple standing in for the artist, and the Art|Basel logo looming behind them, standing in for the World Trade Center.
[A few minutes later update: Another one. I hope Agnes Denes got all the money.]
[A few days later update: The wheatfield will not be dumped tomorrow but will be harvested in August, probably before the International Association for Health Professions Education conference on the 24th, sorry for this, and the error.]
Previously, related: Untitled (Mrs. Alito’s Flag), 2021-24
Reading Travis Diehl’s e-flux journal review of Arthur Jafa’s show at 52 Walker led me to Diehl’s road trip report in x-traonline of going to Cady Noland’s 2019 retrospective at MMK Frankfurt with Rasmund Røhling.
Which led to the recordings of the Cady Noland symposium convened at MMK on 27 April 2019.
Diehl also noted to Røhling that the Charlotte Posenenske sculpture and the Claes Oldenburg bacon soft sculpture included in the Noland show were very World Trade Center Twin Towers-coded. Also not to be a conspiracist or anything, but a Noland sculpture was also included in Peter Eleey’s September 11 show at MoMA PS1 in 2011.
Which led me to go searching for which Noland it was, and it of course, was the stanchion work, The American Trip (1988), which is more ambiguously political than MoMA’s other significant Noland, Tanya as Bandit (1989).
But none of that matters right now, because in looking through the installation shots, I was immediately sucked back in time by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ black-bordered stack of mourning surrounded by Jeremy Deller’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.
And that banner. 90 x 600 inches, it was obviously a full-scale recreation of Bush White House image maker Scott Sforza’s hubristic aircraft carrier banner from 2003.
But I never made the connection to its title or date: Unrealized Project for the Exterior of the Carnegie Museum, 2004-2011. So Deller wanted to hang this banner on the outside of the museum as part of Laura Hoptman’s Carnegie International, which opened in October 2004, just before the presidential election. How far along did this proposal get, I wonder? [Deller ended up showing war re-enactors on tiny televisions inserted into the Carnegie’s dollhouse dioramas, the diametric opposite, attention-wise, from a 50-foot banner.]
On the metro in DC this afternoon, a woman was eating Caesar’s Salad out of a clamshell container with her fingers, her high-contrast makeup turning every chew into a kabuki-like gesture of meaning.
Then she got up, with her salad, and walked over to study the map. She then lost her balance, and dumped her salad all over the guy sitting next to the map. And then she fell down. Except for all this, she was fine. It was at once the wildest, most predictable, and most avoidable scene imaginable.
Then on the way back, a woman kept losing the lid to her beverage container, which rolled along the floor in whichever direction the train’s momentum dictated, causing bystanders to spring into action to capture it.
First, get a Titian, and ten bottles of wine.
Christie’s is selling a rare, early Titian that belonged to the Marquesses of Bath next month for £15-25m, frame sold separately:
Please note that this lot is displayed in a loan Venetian sixteenth-century carved and gilded cassetta frame from Arnold Wiggins & Sons, which is not being sold with the picture, but could be acquired separately. Please ask the department for further details about this and the picture’s original frame, which can be viewed on request.
Now, the Titian was stolen in 1995, and recovered at a bus stop seven years later, so maybe the frame’s seen some stuff, which is fine. The point is, though, maybe I don’t get behind enough 500-year-old paintings, but this Titian is mounted into its loaner frame with the corks from like ten bottles of wine, and I love it.
I sometimes worry about posting too much stuff from auctions. But then I’ll see two works I haven’t thought about in a long time, and have never thought about together, and it only happened because they both happen to be for sale the same day.
In the early 70s Michael Heizer made a show, and maybe a series, of Sandblasted Etched Glass Windows. Peter Freeman had one installed at TEFAF NY 2019, and it really worked, like Heizer drawing on a framed landscape.
Seeing this one in a freestanding frame at LA Modern’s upcoming auction immediately made me think of Duchamp’s Large Glass, though, which felt new. Indeed, it’s as long as the Large Glass is tall, but the other dimension is bigger. Heizer’s Larger Glass.
Meanwhile, I had not kept up with Pae White’s work for a while, but I definitely remembered seeing the Summer group show this sculpture was in at Petzel in 2003. There were several of these distorted Plexiglas sheets in different colors, leaning on the walls like crack-addled McCrackens.
It’s interesting to see the install shots from 2003, where the mirror backing is more evident, the opposite of Heizer’s window.
Especially because it’s listed as an element of the work, the solvent made me think of Warhol’s oxidation paintings, which I happened to have heard mentioned on podcasts twice in the last couple of days: Blake Gopnik talking about handmade [sic] Warhol on The Art Angle; and the Nota Bene Boys discussing a sublime oxidation painting install in an NYC private collection.
And now when I imagine White pouring her solvent onto Plexi on the floor, and Heizer waving his sandblasting gun around, there’s Warhol and his assistants, too, hard at work, or working hard.
[update: auctions are still not partial to such abstractions; neither sold.]
This post will be updated as more motivs emerge.
Europe: it really is the little differences.
It was during the entirely normal activity of researching some Enzo Mari modular shelves that I stumbled upon the absolute licensing mayhem of the Art Design by hb Collection Limited Edition Europe Andy Warhol Foundation Wardrobes, Cabinets, and Cupboards. The first one I saw is above, half of Warhol’s 1966 work, A Set of Six Self-Portraits silkscreened onto the varnished MDF door of a wardrobe. In addition to Warhol’s signature—AND the 1997 copyright credit for The Andy Warhol Foundation, Licensed by MMI [putting a pin in that for later]—silkscreened on the bottom of the drawer like you do on any piece of furniture containing licensed imagery, I guess? In addition to this, there is also the label inside, with the edition number, 405 of 500, and eight metal hangers.
If there were only 500, it would be enough. But there are 500 OF EACH.
Continue reading “Warhol Cupboards And The Expanded Field”
I have to study politics and war so that my son can study baseball and coaching the college swim team, so his son can study poetry, painting and music, so his son can also study painting of an occasionally quite similar style to some of the late works of the son one son up that yet somehow goes unremarked, so that his son can study art dealing and opening a gallery to show the son one son up from him but also the son two sons up from him, though only the works that looked like Picasso, said Allen Goss Twombly (1860-1954) at some point, apparently.