Yet, in a way, abstract art tries to be an object which we can equate with the private feelings of the artist, the canvas being the arena on which these private feelings are acted out. Warhol presents objects which, in a sense, we can equate with public, communal feelings…In a way [Warhol’s works] might be said to objectify experience, turn feelings into things so we can deal with them.
Gene Swenson, unpublished draft, 1964 via sichel/oup
It’s awesome to hear about the experiences of people other than me who are now living with Facsimile Objects. I’m glad to know it’s not just me who finds them interesting.
Lately I’ve been thinking about them as objects, trying to explore the implications of the term and format I adopted semi-ironically from Gerhard Richter, who used it to explain the unsigned stacks of giclée on aluminum reproductions of paintings he began authorizing for museums as fundraising editions. [As their numbers and critical acceptance have grown, Richter has since classified them under the less obscure and/or more market-friendly term “prints.”]
Warhol was not on my mind, then, but like learning a new word and suddenly hearing it everywhere, I am now hypersensitized to any mention of objects or objecthood. And to asking, “But what does it MEAN [about MEEE]?”
Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021, acrylic on panel, each 20×16 in., 20×68 in. overall.
The Museum of Contemporary Art owns Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ 1988 work, Forbidden Colors [not shown]. The work consists of four panels painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag. The title refers to an Israeli ban, ended in 1993, on any display of these colors in combination within the Palestinian occupied territories.
Forbidden Colors was first shown at The New Museum, then at White Columns. But after MOCA acquired it, they have only exhibited it a couple of times and loaned it once. [It has been shown twice since I first wrote about it in 2013, including at Noah Davis’s Underground Museum in 2018.]
So far, no one at MOCA from Klaus on down has mentioned this important work in relation to the violence and oppression Palestinians are currently suffering at the hands of Israel, its military, police, and the settlers, who are executing a system of apartheid within Israel, Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.
Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors (May 2021) is a repetition of Gonzalez-Torres’ work, which I am making available for exhibition to any gallery, or museum, or other institution who wishes to show solidarity with the Palestinian people and support for their rights.
It is meant to stand in for the artwork it repeats whenever or wherever that work is needed, but is unavailable. If you want to exhaust your efforts to borrow the work from MOCA, that’s fine, but it’s not a prerequisite for getting this one. I’ll provide as many as necessary, at cost, around $400 for materials and labor and (US) shipping. Or pay someone local make one for you; there are surely artists or painters among your staff who could do it. It took me about six hours to make one, but maybe your art handler already knows all the monochrome protips. Send a photo and credit info if you’d like it recorded. As Rauschenberg once wrote of other monochrome paintings, “It is completely irrelevant that I am making them–TODAY is their creator.”
L: Sturtevant, Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-GO Dancing Platform), 2004, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Photo: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main. R: Untitled (300×404) after Untitled (Cowboy), 2003, 2009
In its title Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors pays homage to Sturtevant’s repetitions of Gonzalez-Torres’ light string and go-go dancing platform works.
In its execution and offering up as a stand-in at a moment of institutional timidity, it is related to an earlier work, Untitled (300×404), which I created in 2009 when MoMA and/or Gagosian wouldn’t permit the use of a Richard Prince Cowboy photo in a Slate review of an exhibition.
When Felix Gonzalez-Torres presented Forbidden Colors he described it as “a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo.” Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors (May 2021) is a shared act of consciousness with people all over the world.
Dürer Facsimile Object (D2.38)? a FO of a 9×14.5 in. section of a Dürer, plus Vermeer Facsimile Object (V0.9)?, both at the newly reopened National Gallery, Washington, DC. Plus a FOOL FO (W1), positively glowing in the morning sun as it rests against its hand-stitched flannel packet
News from the Facsimile Objects front: barring any exceptional developments, the National Gallery in London will reopen on Monday (5/17), and so the Dürer there, the heavenly phenomenon on the back of the St. Jerome, will be visitable again. At that point, of course, the corresponding Facsimile Object (D1), will no longer be needed, and so will become unavailable. Get one while you can, I guess. The Karlsruhe agate-like painting on the back of Dürer’s Sad Jesus will, sadly, still be available, while Germany’s COVID numbers remain so high.
Recently I made a couple of Facsimile Objects related to works in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, which has been closed for several months. They will not be issued in any numbers, partly because the NGA just reopened. In fact, we were there yesterday, the first day back, when the shipment of test FOs arrived in the mail.
As you can see from the installation photo above, though, they look nice. Other than their uselessness, I’m pleased with how they turned out.
What O’Brien probably said was that it was a study for the giant four-letter enamel on panel paintings Wool made in 1990. Because he’d been making stencil-style text paintings since around 1987, when he’d famously said he was inspired by seeing SEX LUV freshly stenciled on a white panel truck by a graffiti artist in the East Village.
If you are in the market for that piece–and you’d be a FOOL not to be; it is at once important, fantastic, and adorable–then you need read no further. You are set. You are good to go, and godspeed you. Despite his recent NFT hijinks, Kenny still loves that fiat money, and has surely earned this deal the hard way, on those mean Miami streets. Go cash him out. From here the discussion turns away from mad money and toward Facsimile Objects.
David Hammons, Days End, 2021, awaiting shoes, image: whitney.org
If it’s really going to exist, what this new David Hammons sculpture needs is some old David Hammons. Let’s start by throwing 25 pairs of sneakers over the 8-inch steel beams, and then we can assess.
David Hammons’ Shoe Tree, 1981, on Richard Serra’s T.W.U., 1980, image: probably Dawoud Bey
Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, 1988, 80×60 in., enamel and flashe on aluminum and steel, image: maxhetzler.com
While looking around at early Christopher Wool text paintings, I just saw this. Maybe Wool’s collab with Felix Gonzalez-Torres just looms too large, but I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about his collaboration with Richard Prince.
That was actually before he’d even made the jokes into paintings. He had just done the written, he would write me on paper. And, he proposed this collaboration. I know I’m really impressed with someone’s work, when I have that feeling, “Oh I wish I had done that.” And with the jokes that was really the case, I thought that was quite an exciting thing to be working on. So he gave me his repertoire and I made a couple of paintings, and that was our collaboration. I ended up doing “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name,” actually I chose the ones that fit into a painting the easiest, because it was really hard for me at the time to figure out how to make them. But they were all about change of identity, so it was kind of great. I titled it “My Name” and I felt like I was Richard Prince for a day. The other one was the psychiatrist one: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said ‘Tell me everything.’ Now he’s doing my act.” I titled that one “My Act”. So it was like I was doing Richard’s act.
It consisted of a hallway hung with 43 banners by a signpainter, depicting portraits of great men of arts and letters, plus a quote from each about the transgressive nature of creative genius. There was also one self-portrait by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who’d taken up painting in prison, and whose work was, controversially, garnering market and media attention. Sort of the George W. Bush of his day, except Gacy actually went to jail.
David Rimanelli posted this work on his Instagram recently, and it prompted me to revisit Kelley’s installation, and the quotes he assembled. The Renaissance Society’s documentation includes a text that rightly criticizes those in the spectacle-driven culture who turned a murderer into a celebrity artist. [The work mitigated its own centering of a Gacy painting by including donation boxes for victims’ rights organizations, though, if you think about it, that gesture only offloads the scale-balancing to the viewer.] but it seems oddly silent on what I think was Kelley’s most devastating critique, the consistency with which icons of white male-driven culture seek to excuse themselves from moral obligations to anyone but themselves.
I am low-key transfixed by this painting, and not just because it barely manages to hold it together enough to meet the definition.
Rago is auctioning it on April 29 as part of a 2-day sale of the collection/inventory of Ira Spanierman, whose eponymous gallery was a leader in the field of American Art for decades. In fact, it feels like just yesterday when Doyle held multiple sales of Spanierman Gallery’s inventory–but it was 2012. Anyway I guess there was still more stuff.
Sol LeWitt, Fold Piece, Sixteen Squares, 1972, 10.5 x 10.5 in., image via Hindman Auctions, where it will be sold May 4 (not April 9 as I first imagined somehow)
Without access to museums or galleries, I notice I have been looking at far more art via auction sites than is typical. I am OK with this.
Especially when it surfaces objects like this, a piece of square paper creased into sixteen smaller squares, by Sol LeWitt. It is signed and dated March 1971 on the front, 1972 on the Max Protetch label on the back, where it is called “Fold Piece” instead of “Folded Paper Piece,” an insignificant difference magnified in our Google-based world.
AD FO (D1) & (D2), 2021, in their full, experiential glory, indexing the limits of digital image reproduction. Dye sublimation prints on aluminum, dimensions: 23 x 17 cm and 30 x 18.4 cm, available separately or together, for now, each with a full-size, handmade certificate of authenticity
Do paintings, like people, have a fabricated online persona, and a different, “real” character offline? Or do paintings, like people, have one real existence, different aspects of which are manifested online and in the real world?
These Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects have been propped, taped, and laid out in front of me for a little more than a week now, and while I expected them to live different than their 500-yo painted counterparts, I am struck by how they also differ from their digital images.
Benin bronzes have been in the news lately, and finally for a good reason: museums are finally starting to acknowledge their culpability in holding the thousands of Benin bronze sculptures and other royal artifacts that all made their way out of Africa the same way: via the British imperial troops’ so-called “punitive expedition” that destroyed the capital of the Kingdom of Benin, in present day Nigeria, in 1897.
The British Museum and the Metropolitan each have hundreds of objects frankly labeled as the spoils of this massacre. Very unusually, and for absolutely no reason that I can find, the National Gallery of Art has exactly one: this c. 18th century Benin bronze rooster. Every couple of months for the last couple of years I’ve tried to uncover how this object got to the National Gallery, and why an African object would even be accepted, never mind kept, by a museum with no African art–and with almost no art beyond the European and American tradition. All I can figure is that this Benin bronze sculpture doesn’t belong at the National Gallery of Art, even if it weren’t stolen.
Verso: Heavenly Body, aka Cosmic Phenomenon, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, c. 1494-7, 23 x 17cm, oil on pearwood panel, collection: National Gallery, this low-res image, of the unframed panel, is via casaforte.blogspot.com, but originated on tumblr before 2013. I would really like to know the source, because the National Gallery’s image is cropped, and loses the wax seal in the upper right corner, as well as the general sense of objectness.
There is no more than two paintings by Albrecht Dürer in a public collection in the United Kingdom. One is this swirling, brushy depiction of an explosive, cosmic phenomenon on a small pearwood panel. The other, a meticulous devotional picture of St. Jerome in the wilderness, is on the other side of the same panel. The panel was only attributed to Dürer in 1957, and was acquired by the National Gallery in London in 1996.
Like all England’s museums, the National Gallery has been closed to visitors since December 2020, when a Tier 3 lockdown went into effect to reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. According to current government indicators, museums will remain closed until at least May 17. So assuming it’s really by him, England’s only Dürers will remain inaccessible for at least several more weeks.
While considering whether an Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Object could offer even a partial experiential hedge during this challenging, Dürerless time, another, similar Dürer suddenly became similarly inaccessible.
Albrecht Dürer, painting of a slice of agate, c. 1492, oil on panel, 30.1 x 18.4 cm, collection: kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
Another small oil, c. 1492, depicts a swirling abstraction of sliced agate or other hardstone, painted with a transparency that permits the grain of the fir panel to show through. On the other side of this panel is another small devotional painting, a gold ground picture of Christ, Man of Sorrows, which was attributed to Dürer a few years before 1941, when the Nazis’ favorite art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt sold it to the Musée des Beaux Arts in occupied Strasbourg. It subsequently crossed the Rhine, and is now at the State Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, which was closed on March 22 when German health officials abruptly declared lockdowns to thwart a “third wave” of the pandemic. The government then changed some restrictions after a backlash, but I think the Kunsthalle is closed until at least April 18.
Verso: a flaming color spectacle? c.1492-3, oil on panel, 37x26cm, collection State Gallery in Karlsruhe, via Google, obv
“If a work is on Google Street View, does it even need a Facsimile Object?” is a question that came to mind. But then I wondered what would happen if these two works were decoupled from the paintings they are physically twinned with, the works they were fated to be “behind,” always understudied and overshadowed by? Facsimile Objects might hit different with this not-quite-a-pair. So let’s see.
It feels like a good time to be looking for lost Jacob Lawrence paintings. The publicity around the Metropolitan Museum’s show of his 1942-43 series The American Struggle has so far helped surface two of the original 30 works. Three more remain unlocated, and one of those is known only by its title.
See those four Jacob Lawrence paintings on the left that aren’t from The Migration Series? Coast Guard paintings. image: MoMA, 1944
Which is still more information than is known about the works Lawrence made next, in 1944-45, while serving as a combat artist for the US Coast Guard. Tallies differ, but Lawrence painted either 17 or 48 paintings in the Coast Guard, and all but three are lost. Images exist of twelve more, including the eight shown at MoMA in 1944. And except for a few mismatched titles, that’s it. Until now.
A group of 14 publicity photos for Lawrence’s 1944 MoMA show is up for sale at Swann Galleries next week in New York, and it includes pictures of four previously unknown Coast Guard paintings. Along with one photo that was first published in 2015, that makes five paintings which don’t appear in the artist’s 2000 catalogue raisonné. According to Swann, it appears none of the five were included in MoMA’s show.
Danh Vo, Good Life, Army Boys, 1966/2007, selected from photos taken by Joseph M. Carrier in the mid-1960s in Vietnam
I just learned that Joseph M. Carrier, the former RAND Corporation analyst in Vietnam, who cruised Danh Vo in 2006 at an artist talk for a residency in Pacific Palisades, then invited him to his house, showed him his vast archive of photos, documentation, research, ethnographic material, and erotica, then invited him to go to Vietnam together, has been alive all this time, and only passed away at the end of November 2020.
Carrier has been an important presence in Vo’s work and career. Vo first showed creepshots Carrier took of young men on the streets of Vietnam as Good Life (1966/2007) at Bartolozzi in Berlin, but these homosocial images have been included in many of Vo’s shows since. He’s discussed them both in terms of Carrier’s own experience as a gay man fired for his gayness, and as projected autobiographical content of Vo’s own lost life in the war-wracked country he fled as a child in the 1970s.
What is incredible is that he kept diaries, papers from the RAND Corporation, love letters and lots of photos and original negatives. What’s more incredible is that he gave it all to me!
Primarily I think this whole affair I have with Joe’s material is an act of divine justice for not really having my own history. As a refugee my parents left it all behind, mentally and also physically. No pictures or documents of my family’s life in Vietnam exist, and its a kind of magical coincidence that I got this archive which I strangely but sincerely feel belongs to me.
Sure enough, at an Art Basel Statements installation in 2008, Vo exhibited a copy of Carrier’s will, which mentioned Vo’s inheriting Carrier’s archive.
Danh Vo, “Boys seen through a shop window,” Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln, 2009, installation view via GB
The three-way affair between Vo, Joe, and his material also manifested in a 2009 show at Buchholz in Cologne, “Boys seen through a shop window.” Carrier wrote the press release for the show [pdf] in strikingly personal first-person non-artspeak, but the show really did look like Vo had cleaned out Carrier’s house and turned it into one giant installation piece.
But Carrier was still alive and going strong in 2010, when Vo talked of staying with him on another trip to LA, before his Artists Space show which featured photogravures made of Carrier’s images.
At the time the perceived dynamic of Vo’s relationship with Carrier was colored by Vo’s relationship with Michael Elmgreen, who he was dating at the time, but whose signature he also secretly forged on a Danish Arts Council grant so he could go to the opening of Prada Marfa as a photographer’s assistant.
Vo talked a bit about the ambivalence and instrumentalization of relationships and relationship structures in 2007 [when he was still marrying friends and immediately divorcing them, just to add to his official last name], in the context of a refugee’s desperate survival tactics. But, as he said even then, “I was a boat refugee when I was four, but I’m pretty dry now.”
Vo’s work, and his collaborations, especially early on, were unsettling, not just because of what he called “parasitism,” but because of his forthright ambivalence even then to forefront his questioning of the fundamental assumptions of human interaction. Finding out about Carrier’s death–and the fascinating, complicated and varied life he led–underscores the efficiency of the art context to reduce him to a sort of found object. But it also exposes the limitations we all face in understanding the nuances of someone else’s relationships. Which feels like part of Vo’s point all along. Meanwhile, I think Danh’s gonna need a bigger storage unit.
