Author: greg

While an audience question that is more of a comment is a curse, a lecture that’s more of a performance is a blessing. Mindy Seu writes in Outland about artists who work in the medium of the lecture.

Lecture-as-performance calls assumptions of authority and credibility into question, Seu argues. It also opens the process and tools of lecture—such as podiums, Powerpoint, and Zoom grids—for critical examination or reworking.

One intriguing example Seu cites is Gordon Hall’s 2014 work, Read me that part a-gain, where I disin-herit everybody. Through the course of talking, Hall registers the implications of power, precarity, tension, and chill as he engages an array of prop-, screen- and podium-like objects.

Seu’s article was a reminder to look again for one of the most spectacular artist lecture/performance works, Suzanne Bocanegra’s Honor, which took place at The Met in February 2022. And wow, finally, it is on YouTube. Honor, as The Met describes it, was “a stage work that masqueraded as an artist lecture about one of The Met’s most important 16th-century tapestries.” If the theatrical link wasn’t strong enough, Bocanegra had actress Lili Taylor present the lecture while she, the artist, sat at a table on the edge of the stage, apparently feeding Taylor her text.

Which, in turn, makes me think way back to an artist talk I attended at the New School, by Maurizio Cattelan. Except, at the end of the lecture, the speaker revealed that he was not actually Cattelan, but a friend of the artist named Massimiliano Gioni, who was then an editor for Flash Art. Carol Vogel wrote about it months later, but I have not yet found this recording online.

Claire Bishop wrote about the lecture-performance as a form and namechecked some more classics of the genre, including Andrea Fraser and John Cage, in her review of Honor for Artforum’s Best of 2022 roundup in December.

Performing Lectures, by Mindy Seu [outland.art]
Best of 2022 | Claire Bishop on Suzanne Bocanegra’s Honor [artforum]

Jason Polan had a pencil that belonged to Ray Johnson. He got it from Robert Warner, a friend and longtime correspondent of Johnson’s. It will be sold next month with a note from Polan written [in? with the?] pencil.

Lot 13o on 3 May 2024: Ray Johnson’s Pencil, est. $500-700 [update: sold for $504] [wright20]
Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Bob Warner, 2012 BAMPFA exhibition [rayjohnsonestate]

Alex Greenberger was not getting the Arthur Jafa love message, on account of all the death. In his ARTnews review of Jafa’s shows, he doesn’t see a point to the en-Blackening and looping of violent scenes from Taxi Driver at Gladstone; nor to Jafa’s concatenation at 52 Walker of Cady Noland-esque image/sculptures “seemingly at random,” fronted by an image of Noland herself:

Those borrowed shots continue outside Picture Unit in the form of an assembly of cutouts, some of which have holes bore through them. These sculptures allude to similar ones by Cady Noland of Patty Hearst (from her Symbionese Liberation Army days). Noland’s portrait, featuring her hands in front of her face, is here appropriated by Jafa. He places her beside an image from 1970 of artist Adrian Piper, performing with a sock stuffed into her mouth. What do Piper and Noland have to do with, say, a black lamb with a red ribbon around its neck or a group of rock musicians? Nothing, except that the images all ended up in Jafa’s archive, as have many others that he has arranged, seemingly at random, in the form of binders.

Greenberger’s experience feels a little wild, ngl, because it does seem closed to what have been central tenets of Jafa’s visual art practice from the jump: his decades-long accumulation into binders of photos, images, clippings, and ephemera that resonate in some way with the lived Black experience and as documentation of a generative Black aesthetic language; the centrality of music to Black—and American and world—culture; and the fundamental decentering of white validation and judgment. Everyone gets to listen in, Jafa has repeatedly said, but he is addressing Black people.

In 2001, textilemakers to the King, AB Märta Måås-Fjetterström inaugurated an Art Council to select an artist who would be invited to make the Textile Artwork of The Year. Between 2002 and 2014 (sorry, 2011 and 2013!) MMF managed to make eleven Textile Artworks of The Year . Though some years, as we will soon see, also have an artist’s proof, most of the Textile Artworks of The Year seem to be unique.

The inaugural TAwOTY in 2002, above, was made by provocative Swedish painter, filmmaker, and theater artist Marie Louise Ekman. Her textile depicts a female-coded figure breastfeeding a hovering infant through a full-body costume not unlike those Ekman designed for a 1987 ballet. As it happens, this TAwOTY is being sold at Bukowski’s, which is now the Swedish node in the Bonham’s network. The listing for Ekman’s textile includes all of the artists invited to create a TAwOTY, and notes that most of them are in prestigious public, institutional, and private collections.

In 2009, the 90th anniversary of the MMF studio, the TAwOTY was created by HM Artist/Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, whose artistic practice has been discussed here previously. Titled Kustlandskap [Coastal Landscape], it appears to be an aerial view, perhaps invented, or perhaps of a beloved fjord. 2009 was around the time Margrethe was also working on her film adaptation of De Wilde Svaner, so perhaps this is a prince-turned-swan’s-eye view. This textile’s dimensions and present whereabouts are unknown, but tbh it looks about as big as a doormat.

The next artist after Her Majesty was Olafur Eliasson. The Green Glass Carpet was produced as Ed. 1 + 1 AP. This is the Ed. 1/1, and it hung in the London outpost of Aquavit until that restaurant closed last fall. The New York connection goes deeper, though. The Green Glass Carpet is based on a photo of The Inner Kaleidoscope (2000) as it was installed in 2000 at Bonakdar Jancou (now Tanya Bonakdar Gallery) in Chelsea.

The Green Glass Carpet has dislodged Fog Couch (2018) as one of my top three faorite textile works Olafur has made so far, after the geometric lap blanket he made for NetJets Europe and the multidimensional prayer mats of waffle-knitted grey Icelandic sheep wool he made for Grace Farms in Connecticut. Amazingly it, too, is being sold next week by the Bonham’s network. I am not sure whether I will be bidding.

[update: both Textile Artworks of The Years have gone unsold.]
[june 2024 update: I unexpectedly have seen the AP installed.]

A few weeks ago, I got a correction from Jeffrey Rian about which Richard Prince interview of his I was quoting, and I wanted to see what the one I’d missed actually said. It was from the March 1987 issue of Art in America magazine, and Prince’s work was on the cover. There was an interview, an intro article, and copious full-page images of Prince’s work. The print copy I looked at in the National Gallery’s library looked fresh as the day it was bound.

The interview was indeed interesting in unexpected ways, and I’ll get to it in a bit. What jumped out at me, though, was Untitled (Kool-Aid), 1983. It felt unusual, and had I realized why at the time, I would have tried to take a better snapshot of it. #rerephotography

I am so late to this, but thanks to Christian Alborz Oldham’s superlative assemblage newsletter, I am now completely enthralled by Anna C. Chave’s close reading of Carl Andre’s 2013 Dia retrospective.

Chave’s essay, “Grave Matters: Positioning Carl Andre at Career’s End,” published in the Winter 2014 edition of CAA’s Art Journal, is a revised version of the talk she gave, amazingly, at Dia itself, part of a 2-day symposium. And it is devastating.

Speaking of Scott Burton, David Getsy recently posted his December 2023 presentation at Artists Space 0n his Dedalus Foundation Award-winning book, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art, and it is full of fascinating bangers.

This book, 20 years in the making, is somehow the first monograph on Burton, and it sounds full of revelations and new information, based on the artist’s archives and decades of first-person interviews. Burton’s early performances are grounded, Getsy argues, in the queer experience of public and private space, and the examination of and navigation through heteronormative interactions and culture.

A series of performances in museums and at Documenta in the 1970s called Behavior Tableaux were about body language, hidden or discovered communications, and the enactment of power. Getsy explains how they were based in part on street cruising, and the lexicon of movement, gesture, and expression that gay people developed, both to survive and to connect with each other. In less obvious but no less important ways, Burton specified the constrained, limited, and distant spatial experience of the audience, too

It was alongside and out of these performances and Burton’s research—both academic and, uh, in the field—that he created his furniture-like sculptures. The first one, Bronze Chair, debuted on the street across from Artists Space in 1975. Before he gets to the furniture, Getsy talks about Burton’s performances and artworks that deal with Carl Andre, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Morris, right in the thick of the 1970’s art world’s complicated dealings with feminism, gay liberation, and macho bullshit. It’s a tantalizing preview of what sounds like an important book.

David Getsy on Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art [youtube]
Buy Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art from Amazon or UChicago Press
Previously, related: Scott Burton-inspired chair-inspired sculptures by RO/LU
PREVIOUSLY HOW DID I MISS BLOCK OR FORGET THIS: Getsy spoke about Burton’s development of his sculpture and performance as a response and critique to Minimalism and Michael Fried’s critique of it, at the 2011 symposium for Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery, which I attended. And which I blogged about at the time. Oh, blogged about catching two lectures. “Does anyone even read this website?” he yelled into his front-facing camera.