Author: greg

In his Brooklyn Rail review of Maurizio Cattelan’s Sunday, Andrew Paul Woolbright makes an observation that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else, but which feels like it is central, even foundational, to the work:

Composed of gold plates perforated by bullet holes, Sunday’s surfaces seem to swell, making them formally strange—somehow both ballooned-up and torn-through. Their self-violation as a luxury surface is produced by an uncanny shockwave of physics. Freud defined humor as an important act of transgression, and it is the separation of the audience from what went into making the sixty-four gold-plated panels that is transgressive: in a top-secret invite-only warehouse in Queens, through trick doors and passcodes, Catellan led a group of collectors and art-world VIP’s into an underground shooting range where marksmen fired on the gold plates, an act that detourned the process of violence by making it into an exclusive event.

If he hadn’t made a solid gold toilet named America, I might not have believed it, but I think Cattelan’s project was over months ago.

And so the gold-plated, bullet-riddled wall is just the morning-after detritus of a happening where people thrilled to be party to the spectacle of violence.

I updated Firefox the other day, and when it restarted, it did not give me the option to restore my previous session. So I lost the like 100+ tabs in five thematically grouped windows that I’d been holding onto, some for years. Others were fresh, things I was going to blog about. Now they’re gone, I’m sure they were going to be the best blog posts I’ve ever written.

Oh, actually, here’s one I’ve already written around: In 2021 I wrote about the signed exhibition poster from Cy Twombly’s 1974-75 show at Lucio Amelio’s gallery in Naples, which featured the swagged out artist striking a pose next to Castor and Pollux’s backsides. Amelio and his shows were instrumental in both the development of Twombly’s boat motifs, and the subsequent completion of Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) after two decades in the artist’s studio—and Amelio’s AIDS-related death in 1994.

This copy, ed. 56/80, belonged to Twombly’s friend Donald Baechler, who died in 2022. Much of Baechler’s collection was sold at Stair Galleries last fall, but for whatever reason, this one piece hung back. It’s a slightly weird thing, and it’s weird to see it twice.

And that reminds me, in that same auction are several highly unexpected 1970s, student-era paintings by Richard Prince, which are being sold by a former friend and Nasson College classmate. Among them: this self-portrait with a toilet flush valve coming out of his head, so either an oblique Duchamp Fountain reference, or a stoned unicorn Jesus, who am I to say? The longer it stares at me on my screen, though, the more i want it.

Choire Sicha wrote about his friend Eric McNatt, who sued Richard Prince for copyright infringement after Prince used McNatt’s photo of Kim Gordon—which he shot for Paper Magazine, which paid him $100—for Prince’s own Instagram portrait of Gordon.

As Choire put it so well, “Everyone involved here is still an outsider punk kid in their own mind.” Well, as it turns out, when the settlement was announced, I realized a friend of mine from way back in the day was McNatt’s litigator from Cravath, and I don’t think he has ever thought of himself as an outsider punk kid, then or now.

But Choire’s point observation is still useful, because some outsider punk kids in their own minds still hustle to survive, making $100 for licensing their now-famous photo a second time, and other outsider punk kids in their own mind testify in their depositions to making $45 million a year. So it really is the little differences

The Portrait of Kim Gordon | Why Eric McNatt Sued Richard Prince [vulture]

In January—and not even the beginning of January, either, it was the 28th, so barely three months ago—a “Cranbrook Academy Modernist” silver bowl and saucer, listed as “produced by a student under Harry Bertoia,” in 1942 sold at an estate auction for $370, only barely more than the scrap value of its 410 grams of silver. Never mind that they had a date of 1941 and Bertoia’s monogram engraved on the bottom.

They just turned up at Wright, where it’s instantly $1,600. I thought it was just a quick and easy flip after checking its listing in the Harry Bertoia catalogue raisonné. But the bowl’s entry there has up-to-the-minute provenance and a patina that’s cleaner than January’s, but duller than Wright’s. So maybe it was the monogram that led to the attribution, which led to spotting the pieces in a 1942 Cranbrook installation photo, which led to the creation of the newest CR entry for hollowware, updated Feb. 29. Nice hustle all around, I guess, now if we can just figure out who the FDB monogram belonged to, we’re set.

[update: sold for $4,788]

Previously, artist silver-related: Thank you for your silver service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat

Somewhere amidst all his publishing and other art world activities, Primary Information’s James Hoff created an album, and now he’s released it.

Hoff calls Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands an autobiographical record: “Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies.”

It is not only ambient media remixed from catchy pop songs—though it is partly that. The aural elements that make up the album’s four tracks are “non-cochlear”; both earworms and tinnitus appear or are experienced inside the head without external stimulus. They’re sounds we get stuck with and accustomed to, the kind of “internal soundtrack” that, by definition, no one else hears. So it’s exceptional that Hoff transforms them into something intentional, and something that can be shared.

[TWO WEEKS LATER UPDATE: Just read about artist/musician Lola De La Mata’s project where she actually recorded her tinnitus [??] or whatever sound phenomenon was being generated autonomically in her ear, using an anechoic chamber. Absolutely fascinating and wild.]

James Hoff | Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is on digital and vinyl [bandcamp]
Uneasy on the Ear: An Interview with Lola De La Mata [thequietus]

Beginning in the 1960s William Anastasi would make “blind drawings” that incorporated chance and the environment. One way he did this was by placing a piece of paper on his lap, and holding pencils in his hands while he rode the subway.

The 2011 Christie’s auction where this drawing sold included a short essay, apparently written by watching a 2007 interview with Anastasi on a website that no longer exists: “The reoccurrence of layers due to repetitive cycles in Anastasi’s work is fundamental to his being in regard to his admiration for Soren Kierkegaard who in Anastasi’s words created a “Recipe for life” (ibid.) in saying, “the love of repetition is the only happy love, like that of recollection.”

The subway drawings were titled with the trip or the destination. Many, like this one, from 1988, were made on the way to meet his friend and longtime collaborator John Cage. Cage died in 1992. Anastasi died in 2023.