the making of, by greg allen
Clearly I need to get on instagram more frequently, because then it might not take Yoshi Hill to point me to Geoff Snack’s 5-day-old post about scoring this 4’33” chair from Merce Cunningham’s studio. On the other hand, it’s nice when someone sees some wack thing like this and is like, you know who’d get a kick out of this, and thinks of you.
Previously, very much related: Scoring John Cage’s Table
I opened Colby Chamberlain’s [non-paywalled dropbox link October essay, “On Collaboration” immediately, but I confess it took me a couple of days to push through the sneaker drop connotations of the title and actually read it. You, though, should not wait.
Colby takes a historic look at Artforum and other art institutions—PS1, mostly, as proxy for a vaguely self-determined “art world”—as places where critique and opposition happen within the institutional context. “Collaboration,” he writes, “is a patchwork process of working with rather than working against, of temporary solutions and improvised repairs.”
Ultimately his essay poses the question of whether Artforum will still be a site of collaboration and critique after the recent editorial and staff upheavals at Artforum over opposition to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. That his essay is published in a journal formed almost 50 years ago from a previous editorial upheaval at Artforum, is, perhaps, a sign of hope.
Colby Chamberlain, “On Collaboration”, October 187 [tinyurl/dropbox]
I admit I had no idea, but it’s at least a little reassuring to learn no one was more surprised to discover Andy Warhol made portraits of Bobby Short than Bobby Short himself. It turns out he made at least nine, and they were among the very first photobooth portraits Warhol made, in the Winter of 1963.
In the catalogue raisonné the cabaret singer recalled going to the photobooth with Warhol—also Warhol drawing his feet—but said they never talked about portraits or a commission. the nine paintings of four images of Short were found in Warhol’s studio after his death.
Short apparently didn’t know about the paintings until the CR editors came calling; did he ever get to see them? Short died in March 2005, just weeks before at least three went on public view for the first time, at Shafrazi. Another turned up at Christie’s in 2006. The two known photobooth strips Short made do not include any of the images Warhol used for the paintings.
Warhol made his photobooth portraits in the Summer of 1963, beginning with Ethel Scull 35 Times [later Ethel Scull 36 Times when Warhol threw in another painting.] Short was next, then socialite Judith Green and Warhol himself. In this moment Warhol was also working on his 13 Most Wanted Men mural for the 1964 World’s Fair and on his first films—which would soon include the photobooth- and mugshot-influenced Screen Tests.
There is no Bobby Short Screen Test. Short was a voracious collector of famous friends and an absolutely masterful namedropper, and a longtime family friend, yet we heard boo, and Warhol gets zero mentions in Short’s biographies or papers. Was Warhol a little too downtown for Short’s crowd, or was Short just not a Factory type? Or was their relationship—or maybe it’s better to say their interaction—not the kind of thing one publicized back then? Maybe we should reserve judgment until we see the feet pics.
15 May 2024, Lot 142: Andy Warhol, Three Works: Bobby Short, est. $600-800,000 [update: seems like they were withdrawn] [phillips]
11 Nov 2015, Lot 330: the same three works not selling at Bukowski’s for EUR600-700,000 [bukowskis]
Previously, Bobby Short-related: The Little Apple; Monkey Bar by Joe Eula
Josh Slater-Williams has an interview for Mubi with a very thoughtful Kevin Macdonald about the implications of making High & Low — John Galliano, a documentary that about the designer’s career, his conviction for his vile anti-semitic outburst in Paris, and his not-uncontroversial return to fashion afterward.
Coming from outside of the fashion industry and its norms is probably Macdonald’s greatest superpower here; he’s able to recognize the self-delusions that haunt the field and its most intense and talented figures, and to put them on view. What I didn’t expect was to hear how Galliano handled his own role in a situation where he ceded all editorial and creative control:
He wanted to achieve various conscious things, but I think also this is part of his therapy, I suppose. It’s part of his trying to figure things out for himself. That was really apparent to me when I went to the Margiela show that we filmed, that begins and ends the film. I realized as we were watching it: my God, this show is about having a documentary made about your life. It’s about his life filtered through film, because he made a fashion show that is a film at the same time.
A Psychological Detective Story: Kevin Macdonald on “High & Low – John Galliano” [mubi]
Previously, related: Margiela Artisanal Cardboard, Rover, Bunny, Beanie
At a moment when it really felt impossible to even think about art, much less write about it or make it, being asked to write the Sandler Essay gave me a chance to figure out how to do just that. So I’m grateful to The Brooklyn Rail, editors Alex and Charlie, and to Blake for the rec.
Unfortunately, this morning, it’s only gotten easier to imagine what kinds of violence and oppression authoritarianism can unleash, even on those who have felt immune to its threat. But there’s art around us, made by artists resisting autocracy, that can affect and teach us things we desperately need to know.
When I put in Tania Bruguera’s warning from early April, where she said, “I think it’s the beginning,” I worried it might be alarmist. It turns out, it was optimistic to think of what’s happening now as a beginning, and not just an acceleration.
Meanwhile, here is where I take blogger’s prerogative and use another of Geraldo Viola’s amazing photos of Caetano Veloso wearing Helio Oiticica’s Parangolé P4 Cape 1, 1968, which we couldn’t find a high-enough-resolution version of.
Art & Autocracy [brooklynrail.org]
In 2002 Gerhard Richter made a dozen paintings with glass. Nine of them are straight-up panes of Antelio solar glass in different dimensions, with spidery mounts holding them away from the wall. Three have grey paint on the back of the glass.
This one, which Marian Goodman held onto for a while, is now for sale, which is not as important as the view we now get of the back of painting. Richter painted it in—and on—the frame.
17 May 2024, Lot 164, Gerhard Richter, Grau (hinter Glas), 2002, est. $400-600,000 [christies]
Grau (hinter Glas), Grey Painting Behind Glass, CR876-6, 2002 [gerhard-richter]
Previously, related: Pitochetto Painting On Glass
That weird little grey painting on panel from 1964
Shoutout to @dailyrothko for bringing this darkest of all Rothkos to light.
Ink on paper, 42 x 50 inches, not titled, dated, or signed, but from 1969, referred to as 1969, and annotated on the back, “no number/ black/ no. 1” in two different corners. In the National Gallery’s collection since the Rothko kids’ gift in 1986, but I’m not sure it’s been shown. I, for one, would love to see it.
1969, 1969 [nga]
In 2014 art historian Anna C. Chave presented an absolute banger of a talk at a symposium organized by Dia as part of the Carl Andre retrospective. Chave laid out how art world figures and institutions, including the curators and catalogue contributors of Dia’s show, stayed silent on Andre’s involvement in the death of his wife Ana Mendieta, but still could not manage to ignore it completely. It is truly a damning reading, and all the more extraordinary for taking place at Andre’s show, at Dia’s invitation.
In the revised version published in the Winter 2014 edition of CAA’s Art Journal, titled, “Grave Matters: Positioning Carl Andre at Career’s End,” she even called out the organizers of the symposium for changes to the format that appeared intended to head off any possibility that the artist and the curators might face any questioning from—or even any engagement with—Chave.
One thing Chave discussed was an anomalous and macabre sculpture Andre included in his first New York exhibitions after his acquittal for Mendieta’s murder. Titled Large Door (1988)—a pun, Chave argues on, l’Age d’Or—it was actually a window, with a gash in it. Robert Katz mentioned it at the end of his 1990 book on Andre’s trial, Naked At The Window, but it was only published for the first time in Dia’s catalogue.
Andre refused to give Chave permission to reproduce Large Door and another work she discussed, a photo of a vase of roses on Andre’s apartment balcony, in her essay.
So to celebrate New York Art Book Fair Weekend, I am releasing Untitled (Grave Matters), 2024, a new artist book, which comprises JSTOR screenshots of Chave’s essay, with the missing images added. I will mail a signed and stamped edition to anyone who requests one this weekend, just email me to tell me where to send it. After that, we’ll see.
[We have seen, and they are done, thank you to all who engaged!]
[note: your information will only be used to send you an art zine.]
Read “Grave Matters: Positioning Carl Andre at Career’s End” and other of Chave’s publications on her site [annachave.com]
Read “Grave Matters” in Art Journal, W2014 [jstor]
This morning on the good social media, Kevin Buist mentioned that the Museum of Vancouver had a Tobias Wong exhibition last year. All We Want Is More ran from November 2022 thru July 2023. Obviously, I missed it, but there is a virtual tour, and I had to stop and post this, because the first thing you see is Glass Chairs Nos. 1 and 2 in a plexiglass box.
The wall text notes that Wong’s appropriations of other people’s works—in this case, Donald Judd’s 84 chairs—”were not always welcomed or understood and provoked heated conversations about notions of authorship.” Also, because he “had always found Judd’s chairs uncomfortable,” Wong made his chairs “slightly higher.”
The label for the chairs reads: “Initially prototyped in 2002 for the now defunct, New York-based T for Troy [sic?], in 2004 Glass Chairs nos. 1 and 2 went into production with Twentieth, a high-end design store based in Los Angeles. Twentieth granted MOV a one-time license to reproduce the chairs using Wong’s design specifications. “
This is an unusual piece of information for a wall text, but they also have a making-of video that shouts out the mount maker, so maybe that’s just how MOV rolls. What’s important is, rather than borrow some, someone at MOV just ordered some glass and glued these chairs together.
Not to provoke heated conversations about notions of authorship, but Judd’s chairs are 30 x 15 x 15 inches, and Wong’s chairs are 31 1/2 inches tall and 16 inches wide, and the glass is 3/4-inch thick. Which means if the seat is 16 inches square, the shelf underneath—the chair with the shelf is No. 2—is 16W x 15 1/4 D. Whether there is two pieces on the side [No. 1] or one piece on the front [No. 2], the other vertical glass pieces are 19 x 16 inches, and they are set under the seat.
Here is an 8-minute YouTube video on how to make a glass display case with the Bohle UV bonding system. It looks just like the chair! Why not try it at home today?
For years now, I’d assumed that it was vaporware. Research inquiries had always turned up nothing. But where the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation closes a file, Joseph Kosuth…unrolls…a carpet.
Critic Deborah Solomon mention this morning of a carpet in Kosuth’s house led me to Equator Production, an artist carpet venture by Petra and Ranbir Singh with Reiner Opuku, that ran from 1985 until 2003. Petra seems to have rebooted it [Kosuth’s carpet, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, has the earliest date of the new bunch: 2015.]
And in 1991 Equator Production made “Untitled” (Free Tibet), a handwoven carpet with a text saying “FREE TIBET” on it, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which was listed as no. XXVI in the “Registered Non-Works” appendix of the 1997 catalogue raisonné.
Continue reading “That Felix Gonzalez-Torres Carpet”
The Arthur Jafa – Theaster Gates conversation in Tank 96 led me to much more Gates content, including this fascinating discussion by Gates, Yuko Kikuchi, and Hiroki Yamamoto, about mingei, the intersectionally problematic folk art aesthetic of Japan conjured in the early 20th century by Soetsu Yanagi. [The Gates hype was in anticipation of his show, Afro-mingei, which opened at the Mori Art Museum yesterday.]
Despite mingei‘s origins as nationalist propaganda, and its “double Orientalist” emphasis of primitivism while appropriating Korean ceramic traditions, and its gender-biased gatekeeping that continues a century later, Gates et al still manage to make aesthetic and cultural meaning from engaging with it. And that problematic faving paradigm comes in handy.
Continue reading “Theaster Gates, et al”
What was going on in 2016 that I missed an entire Richard Prince copyright infringement lawsuit? It makes no sense!
Well, it kind of makes sense, because it lasted for about five minutes before it was withdrawn, and it never reappeared.
Continue reading “Sid Litigious: The Forgotten Richard Prince Lawsuit”A screenshot of Columbia linguist John McWhorter’s latest NYT newsletter was posted to social media by Bo Austin:
Last Thursday [18 Apr 2024], in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to the surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protestors outside the building…
The protestors are from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and they are calling for Columbia to divest and disassociate from Israel and to stop the genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. The protest began alongside university president Minouche Shafik’s testimony at the US House of Representatives last week. It has intensified and spread to other colleges after Shafik called NYPD into campus to arrest student protestors for the first time since 1968.
The idea that Cage meant 4’33” to be an ersatz reflection on bird calls and room tone is misguided at best. In 1999 art historian Jonathan D. Katz wrote of 4’33” that it, “inaugurated a process of reading that moved the listener, potentially, from unselfconscious complicity with dominant forms of expression…toward a degree of self-consciousness about one’s role as a listener or a maker of meaning.”
Which would be a helluva thing for these kids to learn in their humanities class anyway, including right now. If experiencing performances of 4’33” in the midst of protest, or resistance, or military attack could make a difference of even a day in this horror, then I’d say everyone download the John Cage Trust’s 4’33” app, and start recording.
But McWhorter’s entire newsletter turns out to be a sonic justification of police violence against the protestors. He repeatedly cites the sounds of the student encampment and of sympathizers on the street with destroying the peace, the kind of peace that requires no response. No ruckus, no police.
Looking to see what they’re tearing down to build their new offices and whatever, I was surprised to see the Rothko Chapel is blurred out on Google Streetview.
Just a bit, and just one pano, but still, it was unexpected and unexplained.
Previously, related: Blurmany and the Pixelated Sublime
The performance lecture form has been of interest to me and a topic on this site for an extended period of time.
It has its origins in my own professionally driven interest in Powerpoint as a Creative Medium [oof so many dead links, from when I also believed hotlinking images would be the best practice/fair use realization of a Project Xanadu-like networked utopia. I’ll fix them in a minute.]
Then I was critical of the posthumous transmutation of Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque lecture and slideshow, delivered at the University of Utah in 1972, into an acquirable work of art.
The next year, when I discovered—via some snide comments by disgruntled art faculty at my welcome dinner—that my invitation to speak at the UofU had been arranged under the auspices of a visiting artist lecture, I quickly decided to become an artist. I had my younger brother sloppily record my lecture on video, an homage to Alex Hubbard’s drunken bootleg video re-enactment of Smithson’s Hotel Palenque lecture, which was a topic of my talk. [That video, uploaded when YouTube had still time limits, is in eight parts.]
But I also ended the lecture by declaring it a work of art, in an edition, and I sent around a stack of signed and numbered certificates of authenticity for anyone who wanted one. I think I made 100, and got 40 or so back? [Shoutout to my OG collectors, that turned out to be CR-1.]
In 2010 I made a blog post into a slideshow into a performance at Jen Dalton & William Powhida’s #rank in Miami, “Relational Aesthetics for the Rich, or A Brief History of the Gala as Art”, with gift bag editions [on the table above].
brb, have to check and update a dozen dead links.