greg – Page 175

The International Symposium for Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes

The Moment has a Q&A with Mike Bidlo, whose work, Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964), 2005 is currently on view in the Lever House lobby:

Did you ever meet him [Warhol] more formally?
Yes, at a party at Jean-Michel Basquiat’s loft. There was a big group of people there, but I knew he knew who I was. It was a little awkward.
What about Gerard Malanga?
I was with him on a Brillo Box symposium in Nuremberg, Germany [in 1999] with Arthur Danto and others. He might come to the opening. To me he’s the expert.

Malanga is the expert because he, along with Billy Name, did much of the fabrication of those first Stable Gallery Brillo Boxes in 1964. But everyone knows that story. What I want to know about is this “Brillo Box Symposium.”
According to a footnote at warholstars.org, The International Symposium for Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes was held “under the auspices of the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Nuernberg, Friday, 19 November 1999.” Danto presumably discussed his 1998 paper, “The End of Art,” which took Brillo Boxes as the inflection point of a 3,000-year art historical cycle or something.
Malanga’s paper titled, “How we made the Brillo Boxes,” was reprinted in his 2002 book, Archiving Warhol. It provides the most familiar accounts of Malanga, Billy Name, and Warhol painting, turning, screening, and turning all seven varieties of the box sculptures in the first couple of months of 1964. [Four Stable Gallery boxes sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $973,000.]

But the 1964 Brillo Boxes aren’t the only ones Warhol made. Or Bidlo. Or–well, hold on. Back to The Moment:

If your Brillo Boxes shouldn’t be considered a simple substitute for the originals, what should New Yorkers be looking for?
There are so many more layers. When you start peeling back the layers you see that Warhol did all these different versions himself. There’s the Stockholm version, there’s the Pasadena, the original Stable gallery version. So really it’s about learning about the different providences [provenances? -ed.] of the piece, the situations that they were made for.

The image above is from the Tate Magazine, of Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1969), 1991, and is Bidlo’s replica of the 100 boxes Warhol authorized the Pasadena Museum to fabricate in 1969-70 [LACMA was allowed to refabricate 100 Kellogg’s boxes. Warhol donated both sets of boxes to the respective museums.]
And before that, there were the 100 boxes Warhol authorized Pontus Hulten and the Moderna Museet to make in Sweden for the 1968 show organized by Kasper Koenig. Or was it 500? Or was that 500 actual cardboard Brillo Boxes bought from the company and 100 wooden ones to fill in? Or 10?
Until 2007, everyone thought they kind of knew. Or they didn’t think much about it. Then some Swedish investigative journalists from Expressen reported that no wooden boxes were ever exhibited in 1968, only cardboard.
And the 94 1968 “Stockholm Type” Brillo Boxes which passed the Warhol Authentication Board’s test, and were accepted into the 2004 catalogue raisonne, were actually part of a batch of 105 boxes Hulten fabricated in 1990, three years after the artist’s death, in Malmo, Sweden. And that Hulten represented them as 1968 works in shows in St Petersburg and Copenhagen that year. And that he sold at least 40 of them in 1994 as 1968 works. [Does that include this group of 10?] And that he gave six of them to the Moderna Museet in 1995 as 1968 works.

Yow. “Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Pontus Hulten, Stockholm” – Christie’s, 1998.
The Authentication Board hastily examined the Stockholm Type boxes and issued a letter to owners, saying there were two types of Stockholm Box, one of which might actually have been made in 1968 or so. Maybe there are 10 of those. But there are no documents so far authorizing either those 10, or the 105 Hulten made, only the Stable Gallery and the Pasadena boxes, that’s it. So far. And yet they fully accepted the Stockholm Boxes, no sweat. At this point, the only thing the Warhol Foundation people are saying is that they had nothing to do with this mess.
But what in the world was Pontus Hulten thinking? I mean, come on, the guy’s a modern art museum demigod who founded the Moderna Museet, the Pompidou, and MoCA. It’s not like he really could have just thought, “What the hell, I’ll order me up 100 Brillo Boxes and start showing, selling, and donating them as if they’re from 1968.” Could he?
Did Hulten get authorization from Warhol in 1968, then not really use it [all], and just assume it was still valid? ArtNews quotes an unidentified source as saying that Hulten fabricated his 1990 boxes at the Malmo Konsthall with the help of its director [and Hulten’s friend] Björn Springfeldt. Surely he could characterize how he and Hulten talked about the motives and assumptions for the production. [Factcheck: ArtNews says Springfeldt was director of Malmo Konsthall in 1990 when these boxes were fabricated. Actually, he had quit in 1989, to become director of Moderna Museet. He succeeded Olle Granath, who had succeeded Hulten, and who had been a co-curator of the Warhol show, and who was directly involved in its installation. He also owns three Stockholm Style Brillo Boxes he says were made in 1968. If there’s anyone in the Swedish museum world not directly implicated in this story, would you please raise your hand?]
How different is Hulten’s situation from, say, Giuseppe Panza’s later controversies over authorization and remote fabrication of work by artists like Judd, Flavin, Andre, and Nauman? Does this Brillo Boxes question dovetail with the emergence of artists’ certificates and minimalist-style, no-artist’s-touch production? Are there other examples lurking out there where artists phoned a piece in, then didn’t actually get involved–or even see–the final product? I’m going to guess yes.
If ever there were a time for another Brillo Box Symposium, it’s right now.
“Andy Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes,” from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 2007 [myandywarhol.eu]
2007 Authentication Board letter explaining the history and production of Warhol’s box sculptures [zimblo.com]
Nice hustle, Art News: “The Brillo Box Scandal,” Nov. 2009 [artnews.com, link updated to archive.org Sept. 2016]

Mark Leckey’s In A Long Tail World @ICA

Last October, Mark Leckey presented In A Long Tail World at the ICA in London. From the writeups, it sounded like a cross between Chris Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Ted by way of the Guggenheim Las Vegas.
Leckey’s now loaded the whole thing onto YouTube, in six parts. Though he’s got a big, Laurie Anderson-y screensaver of an ending, my favorite segment is probably part 1, above. It includes both Leckey’s re-enactment of the earliest TV broadcasting experiment [a recap of his 2007 work, Felix Gets Broadcast] and his quotes from Charles Sirato’s Dimensionist Manifesto from 1936 which posited a new, dematerialized art with humans at the center.
If Leckey didn’t quite make the case that the Long Tail was the fulfillment of Sirato’s vision, it at least crossed its path. And it’s a good watch. [via gavin brown’s (!) blog]

The Planck All-Sky Survey

ESA has released images of the first all-sky survey from the Planck space observatory, which is currently in orbit around Lagrange-2, a balancing point between the gravitational exertions of the moon and the earth.
Planck rotates at a constant 1 RPM, and it continually repositioned to avoid the sun, enabling it to produce a full survey of the entire sky in about a year. This computer animation video demonstrates how the survey image was constructed:

When Planck’s data is added to the American Museum of Natural History’s Digital Universe Atlas, it should help fill in that gigantic torus marked, “empty areas we have yet to map.”
Planck all-sky image depicts galactic mist over the cosmic background [esa.int via javierest]
Scanning the microwave sky with Planck [esa.int]

The Hamamatsu Photonics R1449 And R3600 Photomultiplier Tubes

Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world’s largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the University of Tokyo in a mine in rural Japan.
Within a year, Hamamatsu had managed to design a 20-inch (50cm) PMT, and successfully manufactured it by 1981. It was dubbed the model R1449:

Because this was a 20-inch PMT, the biggest question was whether or not its cathode could be manufactured correctly. The days leading up to the completion of the first PMT were anxious. Moreover, in steps such as antimony evaporation, there was no other recourse but to rely on the eyes and judgment of those professionals performing the tube evacuation task. An ordinary PMT can be held in the worker’s hand throughout the production process, but the large 20-inch PMT first had to be secured in place. Then, the worker could perform his required tasks while walking around the outside of the PMT. The workers donned protective helmets equipped with explosion masks, mounted steps to the platform holding a large pumping bench, and began the final fabrication, which consisted of making the photocathode and sealing the PMT.
The color formed from oxygen discharge in the photocathode manufacturing process was visually attractive. When made to react with potassium after antimony evaporation, the tint immediately changed to an ideal color for a photocathode. Cheers arose from the staff gathered around the pumping bench, as it was a moment of high emotion for everyone.

Hamamatsu delivered 1,050 R1449 PMTs to Kamiokande, where they lined a giant tank of ultra-purified water 1,000 meters below the surface.

In 1987, the PMT array at Kamiokande detected for the first time neutrinos given off by a supernova. [It was a discovery for which Professor Masatoshi Koshiba [above], who spearheaded the Kamiokande research, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002. Those may be the two most awkwardly constructed sentences in this post.]
Meanwhile, an even larger detector was being planned for Kamiokande. Dubbed Super-K, the new tank, 39m high and 41m in diameter, would hold 50,000 tons of water and 11,200 PMTs. These new, improved PMTs, known as model R3600, were based on the R1449. They cover approximately 40% of the interior surface of the tank. Super-K began operations in 1996.
On November 12, 2001, as the tank was being refilled, a PMT imploded, sending a shock wave through the water, and causing a chain reaction which destroyed around 6,600 other PMTs.

The survivors were redistributed, protective acrylic shells were added, and research resumed. Beginning in 2005, newly manufactured R3600s were installed. The detector reopened in 2006 as Super-K-III.

According to reports at the time of the implosion, an R3600 cost around $3,000 new, an extremely reasonable price for such a magnificently crafted object. I would most definitely like one. Also a convenient display stand. Also, that tank is absolutely stunning. If I were a sculptor of shiny round objects of a hundred feet or more in diameter, I would find it hard to get out of bed in the morning knowing this exists.

20-Inch Photomultiplier Development Story [hamamatsu.com, the original Japanese version is a little more dramatic]
portrait of Prof. Koshiba hugging a Hamamatsu R3600 [u-tokyo.ac.jp]
hi-res images in the Super-Kamiokande photo album [ICCR at U-Tokyo]
Accident grounds neutrino lab [physicsworld]

The Rainbow Bombs

NPR’s Robert Krulwich had a fascinating story the other day that works even better online. Because there are slideshows and video footage of Starfish Prime, the hydrogen bomb the US detonated in space on July 9, 1962.
The launch occurred on Johnston Island in the South Pacific, and was part of an early test of ICBM technology–and an attempt to understand the weaponizing potential of the earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. Just in case Moscow was up to anything funny.
Scott Hansen pointed to Peter Kuran’s excellent-sounding documentaries about atomic testing, including Nukes in Space: The Rainbow Bombs.

Almost a thousand miles away, Hawaii had been primed for a potentially “dazzling” light show. NPR’s lead-in called it “the single greatest manmade light show America has ever created.”
And Starfish Prime delivered. Cecil Coale, who was involved with the launch and monitoring it from Johnston Island, described the flash that turned night to day and the ionizing rainbow that followed:
“It was like a flashbulb…then the sky turned green for a second.
then yellow and blue, “really vivid, unnatural bright color.”
Then red. “it wasn’t shimmering it was glowing red like a neon sign. Then it slowly disappeared, there wasn’t any sound to this at all, it was entirely visual…i think about this every day of my life.”
Listen to the Bomb Watchers [npr]
DOE library of historical nuclear test films of Operation Dominic, Operation Fishbowl, and Starfish Prime [doe.gov]

Blow

This FT essay by Daphne Guinness about buying Isabella Blow’s estate before it was dispersed at Christie’s is a wonderful, sad, incredible thing. [via @artnetdotcom]
All the way back in 2002, I overwrote a long post about Blow, Walter Benjamin, Bill Cunningham, fashion, and street photography. The occasion was Guy Trebay’s writing about street fashion.
Frankly, I’m surprised at how much of it I’d forgotten. Did Benjamin really call the flaneur “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers”?? That is awesome, I could totally use that!
What I’ve never forgotten, though, is Cunningham’s expertly serendipitous street photo of Isabella Blow blowing into a fashion show in Paris:

Your Search For A. James Speyer’s Sunstein House Now Returns Three Google Results

In 2008, I discovered this drawing of A. James Speyer’s Sunstein House, a 1940 modernist pavilion in the Adirondacks made of tree trunks and local stone, in an architecture guidebook published by The Museum of Modern Art. Even though the guidebook gave driving instructions, the lack of photographs, combined with utter online silence about the project or the client, made me wonder if the house actually ever got built at all.
Now, while searching for images of the house Gregory Ain built in MoMA’s garden in 1950, I found that the Museum has since published its archive of press releases. And it seems that Speyer’s Sunstein House was at least real enough to be included in a traveling exhibition the Museum organized in 1941 titled, “The Wooden House in America.” [pdf] So the search is back on.
Speyer is probably best known for his work as a modern curator at the Art Institute of Chicago; Anne d’Harnoncourt cited his influence regularly and his innovations in both curation and exhibition design. But he also practiced architecture, primarily in Chicago and his hometown of Pittsburgh. His 1963 house for his mother Tillie Sunstein Speyer is his most widely praised work, but his most famous work is the Ben Rose house, from 1953, which he designed with David Haid. It was Cameron’s house in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. [Which is still for sale, btw, asking $1.65m, down from last year’s $2.3m.]
Anyway, Speyer got all International Style like that because he was Mies van der Rohe’s first graduate student in the US, and the Sunstein House dates from the time he was studying directly with Mies. And it’d predate by a decade Mies’ own first realized American buildings. So we’ll keep on it, and see what’s out there.
Previously: Forest for the Mies: A. James Speyer’s Adirondack Mystery Cabin

Decommission Commission: Harrier And Jaguar By Fiona Banner

Harrier and Jaguar, Fiona Banner’s commission for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries opened this week, and from the making of film and interview with the artist, it looks spectacular.

Banner has installed two decommissioned fighter jets–a BAe Sea Harrier XE695 and a SEPECAT Jaguar XZ118–in the grand neoclassical space. By altering each slightly, and by placing them in atypical, non-functional positions, the artist turned them into overwhelming, beautiful objects–sculptures–which nonetheless manage to retain all their original significance and meaning as highly advanced weapons of war.

The Harrier was covered with a delicately feathered matte wash and hung, nose down, just off the floor. It barely fits inside the limestone-clad hall. The SEPECAT Jaguar was stripped down to bare metal and polished to a mirror finish. It rests upside down, on its cockpit. Did I mention it looks spectacular?

With those reflections it generates, it’s like a 3D realspace version of Google’s distorted Street View portraits.
Video | Fiona Banner Harrier and Jaguar, 9’23” [tate channel]
Duveens Commission Series | Fiona Banner 2010, through 3 Jan. 2011 [tate.org.uk]

Olafur Street View

One of the simplest, best parts of Innen Stadt Außen [Inner City Out], Olafur Eliasson’s multiple public and museum projects in his adopted hometown of Berlin this year, is now online as a short film.

In what feels like the diametric opposite of Google’s Street View scanning, Olafur and his studio rigged a truck with a giant mirror and drove it around town. Part of me wants to not say what it is, but to let viewers figure it out. But the whole exhibition was promoted with photos of the truck. And I knew what it was, and I still was enthralled by every sequence and cut in the film.
Innen Stadt Aussen, from Studio Olafur Eliasson, 10’31” [vimeo via @grammar_police]

Someone Get Souren Melikian A Blogspot Account

Souren Melikian’s auction analysis for the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times is almost always entertainingly specious, but he is at his best/worst when he writes about contemporary art, about which he obviously knows nothing:

The next lot, “Cristina Passing By,” was the fun figure of a girl realistically painted in tissue paper on stainless steel signed by Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1968. It also far exceeded the high estimate, if at a modest level, when it brought £313,250. Much earlier than the Cattelan, it is more original.
But originality or creativity is hardly what motivates the buyers of contemporary art in its forms now promoted in the auction arena. What triggers a response is an easy, instantly perceived image — and the echo that it receives in the media. Like slogans in politics, the power of words repeated a hundred times generates success. Achievement has little relevance, if any at all.

Seriously, why does the Times keep publishing this untethered nonsense?
What does this even mean?? Novelty Sets Cheerful Tone for Christie’s Contemporary Auction [nyt]
Previously: The Eternal Sunshine of Souren Melikian’s Spotless Mind

Arshile Gorky Was An Expert Camoufleur

I like writing the word camofleur.
In response to the burning question [sic] that arose from Ad Reinhardt’s chronology, what was up with Arshile Gorky wanting to start a camouflage school in 1943?
Because everyone knows that Gorky was already teaching camouflage in 1942. He’d spent at least a year, and possibly longer, trying to get a camouflage class started, partly because he and other artists saw it as an alternative for getting called up in the draft. “Can’t fight, too busy camouflaging!”
This need intensified after Pearl Harbor, and even after Gorky was rejected by the draft board for being too old. But that was also because Gorky needed money, and a class of 20 students paying $15/each a month sounded very appealing.
[Hayden Herrera has a chapter called “Camouflage” in her 2005 biography, Arshile Gorky: Life and Work. Most of this info comes from there.]
In his prospectus, Gorky wrote, “What the enemy would destroy, however, he must first see. To confuse and paralyze this vision is the role of camouflage. Here the artist, and more particularly the modern artist, can fulfill a vital function, for opposed to this vision of destruction is a vision of creation…
“Mr. Gorky plans a studio workshop in which each student becomes a discoverer…” The coursework would include modern theory, scale modeling, and “abstract constructions.”
One of Gorky’s particular concerns was how colorblindness might thwart camouflage. He also, we read, had “a plan to camouflage the whole of New York City,” which he felt should be promoted heavily by the New York Times.
According to one of his most satisfied pupils, the then-future art dealer Betty Parsons, the class ran for from three to six months, and was highly popular. Of course, according to Harry Rand’s book, Gorky’s camo course “fared poorly.” If the goal was to provide a steady source of income, I guess these can both be true.
And that might explain Gorky seeking help from Reinhardt to revive or rework the camo school idea in 1943. In any case, Gorky’s eventual dealer, Julian Levy, said that camouflage was the key to the artist’s character, whatever that means.
Previously: Civilian Camouflage Council
image: Garden in Sochi, 1943, Arshile Gorky, via Tate, and Telegraph UK

A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! [Except When It Is]

Thanks to greg.org reader Fred for sending along a link to a memo computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith wrote in 1995, soon after his company Altamira [the one he founded after Lucasfilm and Pixar] had been assimilated by Microsoft.
The Title: “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square!” [pdf via alvyray.com, a year later, he added, “(And A Voxel Is Not A Little Cube)”] Two guesses what it’s about.
Alvy’s rant sounds exactly like what I’d expect from circa 1995 Microsoft: brilliant, self-assured, and presumptuously prescriptive. Which is not, alas, the same thing as being entirely right or even aware of its own limitations.
Because it gets a little rambling, and because I am basically arguing pixels with the guy who worked on the Project Genesis sequence in Wrath of Khan, I have moved it all after the jump.

Continue reading “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! [Except When It Is]”

On Warhol’s Rain Machine[s]

First up, a high five to Andrew Russeth at ArtInfo for highlighting Nicholas Robinson Gallery’s summer installation of Andy Warhol’s unusual Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall). What a weird, wonderful–but mostly weird–work.
It’s basically a mural of shimmering, lenticular photos of flowers behind an illuminated, recirculating, double wall of simulated rain. Let’s set aside the fact that the raw mechanicality of Rain Machine makes it look like a missing Pop link in the genealogy of Olafur Eliasson’s work. The similarities are both less and more interesting than they first appear.
Begun in 1968, Rain Machine has its origins in two of my favorite pseudo-utopian art/technology events, the Osaka 70 World Expo and LACMA’s sprawling Art & Technology collaboration project, which ran through 1971.

When Warhol was first approached for the A&T Program, which paired artists with cutting edge technology companies to realize a new, innovative work of some kind, he imagined making a wall of 3D holograms that would be barely visible through the mist. But Bruce Nauman had already nabbed RCA’s hologram guy, so Warhol fell back onto decidedly low-tech lenticular imaging.
Then the rain wasn’t working, the prints didn’t line up, the budget was a joke, the US Pavilion exhibition space was cramped, the whole thing was a potential mess. The story is recounted in glorious, play-by-play detail in LACMA’s 1971 Art & Technology Report, which is cheap to buy used, and [brilliantly] available as a free PDF download from LACMA’s online library:

Perhaps the most important decisions determining the work’s final appearance in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo were made not by Warhol but my MT [Maurice Tuchman, LACMA’s A&T curator/organizer], the Expo Design Team members, and some of the other artists in the show. The entire installation operation was characterized by a sense of crisis, and there were moments when the peice seemed simply destined to ignominious failure. In the end, somehow, it worked; many people and particularly the artists who were there installing their own pieces, felt the Warhol to be one of the most compelling works in the exhibition because of its strangely tough and eccentric quality. Robert Whitman commented that “of course Andy’s forcing everyone into the act;” the work istelf, when completed, made that conspicuously evident, and yet it was unmistakably Warhol. When it was rumored at one point just before the opening of Expo that the work might be taken out of the show, as was suggested by several of the Expo Designers and by a visiting critic who was conversant with Warhol’s oeuvre, the American artists who by this time knew the piece intimately objected strenuously.

When Rain Machine came back to LA, it had to be reworked, or debugged, and reconfigured. The most noticeable change is probably the scaled up daisy photos. As Robinson explains, the current installation follows an even newer [remastered?] set of specs developed by the Warhol Museum for its 2002 refabrication of the work.
Update: Interesting, LACMA received a set of nine lenticular daisy photos as a gift in 1999. They’re the larger, single daisy-style, which makes me think they were extras, loosies, or maybe even leftovers from the 1971 Art & Technology reinstallation. A few of these have popped up in the market over the years; they’re not that expensive, though without the rain–hell, even with the rain–they’re a little weird.
Update Update: aha, interesting. according to this auction description, the lenticular photos were commissioned in an edition of 50 for the LACMA show.

Wherein The Inventor Of The Pixel Totally Agrees With Me, Even Though I Don’t Totally Agree With Him

53 years later, the guy who invented the square pixel regrets the error.
In 1957, NIST computer expert Russell Kirsch scanned the world’s first digital image [a photo of his infant son, above] using the country’s first programmable computer. To accommodate the memory and processing capacity of the available equipment, Kirsch had the computer break the image up into a 176×176 grid, and to assign a binary color value, black or white, to each of the resulting 30,976 square pixels.
Apparently, it’s been eating at him ever since, because he has, at age 81, published a suggestion for increasing the “precision and accuracy in scientific imaging” by replacing uniformly square pixels with pixels of variable shapes.
I do not know enough about compression algorithms and data/information loss to know whether Kirsch’s proposed method is either necessary or superior to the state of the art. But it is most fascinating to see one of the inventors of digital imaging remain so engaged and critical of the system he helped bring forth.
And frankly, though I don’t know any of the history or the context, I don’t necessarily agree with him that the grid and the square pixel was an “unfortunate” solution. In the 50+ years since the square pixel became the irreducible unit of visual information, it has acquired its own aesthetic and cultural context.
[Looking through the NIST Museum site, it sounds like the “serious mistake” was using a binary [i.e., b/w] basis for computer scanning in the belief that it was an accurate representation of human neural activity and visual data processing. It also sounds like the NIST folks started trying to correct for it almost immediately.]
When he completely agrees with me and validates my own assumptions, however, I agree with him completely. The man is a genius and a living legend:

…we show that the usual assumption that increased precision is accomplished with higher resolution of square pixel images does not necessarily result in the increased accuracy that can be achieved with the use of variable shape pixels…

PDF: Kirsch, Russell A., “Precision and Accuracy in Scientific Imaging” [nist.gov]
Square Pixel Inventor Tries to Smooth Things Out [wired.com thanks Joerg Colberg, who has been experimenting with cooler-shaped pixels himself lately]
related? coloring the pixels of Mariner 4’s first image of Mars by hand

Chronology For, By Ad Reinhardt

How much of discovery is really just rediscovery? or learning remembering?

I was waiting to read how editor/art historian Barbara Rose had decided to model the chronology at the opening of her 1991 book, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, after the personal+historical “date” portraits of Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

1943 Refuses to help Arshile Gorky start a camouflage school.
1943 Wonders what Adolph Gottleib and Mark Rothko are up to when they announce, “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”
1943 Continues making paintings about nothing.
1944 Liberation of Paris

But then I scroll up and see that Reinhardt’s chronology was his own, and that he was constantly reworking it. The version Rose chose was published in the catalogue for Reinhardt’s 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum.

So Rose didn’t get it from Felix, but that means Felix must have gotten it from Reinhardt. And sure enough. I pulled down my special 1994 edition Art & Design, which served as the catalogue for the Camden Arts Center exhibition featuring Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. And there is Nancy Spector writing about Reinhardt’s influence, both direct, and refracted through the strategies and theories of the intervening generation of conceptualists:

Reinhard’s parodic biographical exercise was, at the time of its creation, interpreted as mere ‘documentation’, as tangential to his artistic enterprise. But, because of Conceptual art’s deployment of linguistic analysis and its use of language as a medium through which to demonstrate the discursive foundations of art, a younger generation inherited the freedom to use words as a viable alternative to image-making. Therefore, Gonzalez-Torres’ various inventories of disjunctive historical incidents and private moments, followed by the year of their occurrence, can and actually do constitute his art…these ‘date’ works use now conventional Conceptual strategies to mimic the idea of an ‘Artist’s’ chronology. More importantly, however, in the over-arching equivalency of everything listed in these works, Gonzalez-Torres is underscoring a crucial reality in today’s world: that the political cannot be divorced from the personal.

I think Reinhardt makes the same case; and I agree with Spector that Rose’s interpretation is incomplete, and that the extremely politically engaged Reinhardt did not mean for his chronology to reveal art to be “a matter of small consequence” when seen from “a perspective of world affairs.”
Spector suggests another reading, that “[Reinhardt’s] inclusion of cataclysmic world affairs in an ‘artist’s biography’…bespeaks the impossibility of divorcing cultural endeavours from the social and political context in which they are pursued.” [image: Untitled, 1988]
Now about that Arshile Gorky camouflage school…