Author: greg

Yesterday on the good social media, I floated an idea about custom-printing an oilcloth for our table instead of stalemating over off-the-roll options. When I realized custom was even an option, my mind went first to Guyton/Walker, probably because tables, but also because their poppin’ designs feel like riffs on the most garish tropical oilcloth patterns out there already.

But then it occurred to me, what is a Wade Guyton painting but an artisanal and auratic, custom-printed textile? Which one would be best as a tablecloth? If process is the determinant, Gerhard Richter’s Strip paintings are also printed. But what isn’t these latter days of the flatbed picture plane?

I had the Felix Gonzalez-Torres catalogue raisonné out, and its all-over cover photos of candy suddenly felt like the perfect combination of representation and abstraction, object and pattern. But what color?

The Gonzalez-Torres image universe spilled out before me. Bead curtain? Death by Gun? [oof.] The dark surface of the sea? A bird in a cloudy sky? Black with a couple of lines of biography and historic events printed along one edge? Then I realized I already had a solution. Or at least an option.

Sure, we could print the entire image of footprints in the sand from “Untitled” (For Parkett 39). Or, we could use the eight screenprinted panels of the 3×7-meter billboard edition separately. Except they are mostly square, around 160 x 170 cm, each, plus some border/overlap. So on their own, they don’t fit our rectangular table. They would need to be pasted together in a vertical pair. Do they need to be laminated? Coated? Thrown over with a clear vinyl tablecloth like at Grandma’s? Beyond unworkable, it feels wrong. [lmao as if the whole idea isn’t bad enough.] I’ve taken my Parkett billboard sheets out like twice, and that billboard stock is thick; they are not your crafty mama’s butcher paper.

So printing it is, I guess.

I was unexpectedly giddy when Carolina Miranda posted on social media about the blank ruled page she came across in the collection of the Getty Museum.

I have since had tabs open for all the blank ruled pages in the Getty for several weeks now. There are fourteen. [Also there are 46 “blank pages,” which includes half-blank sheets.]

Continue reading “Blank Ruled Pages In The Getty Museum Collection”

In 1981 sculptor Elyn Zimmerman proposed to polish a sliver of the 300 ft tall basalt cliffs of the Palisades in New Jersey to a mirror finish, so that it would reflect—depending on your angle—the Manhattan bank of the Hudson, the river itself, or the sky.

She showed the maquette of the Palisades Project [above] at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, which also commissioned a related sculpture, a dramatic, 8 x 21-foot freestanding wall of one polished and seven natural cleft granite slabs, for the museum entrance.

When the NY Times visited it in 1982, it was untitled. At some point, it became known as Palisades (1981), and in 1990 it was reinstalled at a winery in Napa with the artist’s involvement, and a reflecting pool, echoing the Hudson, perhaps, was added. It was sold in 2014, and it is now for sale again, this second, decidedly mid reflecting trough not included. Christie’s calls it Palisades Project both times.

Zimmerman’s original proposal had an undeniably thrilling aspect to it, a spectacular vision born of mind-freeing drives upstate. Of course, it was also impossible. The basalt of the Palisades does not polish to a mirror finish. No doubt realizing this at the time, Zimmerman’s Yonkers exhibit included an alternate proposal to mount a polished granite skin on the cliff face, at which point you might as well just stick an actual 300-ft tall mirror on there.

Thus, though that one piece could maybe use some polishing, Palisades Project [sic] survives as the ideal realization of the concept. Bidding starts at $100, plus shipping.

[update: holy smokes, it sold to the lone bidder for $126, this is epic, hmu lucky winner!]

Overnight on tumblr, @voorwerk sent me looking again to Blake Gopnik’s Warhol biography for clues about the freestanding silkscreen-on-plexiglas sculptures Warhol made from some of his film frames.

I didn’t find anything, but Gopnik’s account of Warhol’s Sidney Janis-related commissions did. Janis, a dealer and trustee at the Museum of Modern Art—a combination that museum ethical standards would eventually frown on—commissioned a dumb little portrait of himself using eight family photos, which he donated to MoMA sight unseen in 1967. Gopnik notes that Warhol also got MoMA to take one of the 8-ft tall screens of Janis’s headshot, which the artist had used to make a sprawling 7-panel mural. A mural Janis declined to either buy or donate. Sad!

Point is, Gopnik wrote that Warhol intended for the screen “to be displayed free-standing and lit from behind,” a request MoMA apparently ignored when they showed it in 1968, as part of Janis’s collection gift to the museum [above].

So not only do these see-through Plexi screenprint sculptures relate to the acetates Warhol used to make his screens, in their freestanding frames they could relate to the framed silkscreens themselves.

Previously, related: The Corktown Caper, a stolen Warhol Flowers screen

Tracking that Round Jackie took me back to MoMA’s 1989 Warhol retrospective, and now I wonder why I never think about Warhol’s Plexiglas sculptures.

Large Sleep and Large Kiss are two of at least five examples of Warhol screenprinting frames from a film onto Plexiglas. He made them a couple of years after the films, as he was supposedly retiring from painting. According to Marco Livingstone’s essay in the MoMA catalogue, Warhol also made Plexiglas sculptures of frames of Empire, Couch, and Henry Geldzahler.

Was MoMA the first place these were ever shown? They look so much like Duchamp’s Large Glass it’s crazy that no one seems to have made the connection until 2017, when Thomas Morgan Evans published 3D Warhol, the first book on the artist’s sculpture. Warhol’s intersections with Duchamp were dense: a Bôite-en-Valise, Richard Hamilton, the Pasadena retrospective, Mark Lancaster, Screen Tests, “retiring,” and, here, making Large Glass-looking sculptures with Large in the name.

So it’s a little weird that MoMA’s 1989 catalogue reproduced them without their frames, essentially negating their sculptural nature and throwing them squarely back into Warhol’s image pool. Livingstone traced their origins to the acetate transparencies used to make Warhol’s screens, which sometimes decorated the walls of the Factory. It’s not wrong, but still.

Though they’ve been on view at the Warhol Museum over the years, the 2018-19 Whitney/SFMOMA retrospective was probably the biggest audience for Large Sleep in 30 years. But who even noticed, when Mylar and Plexiglas Construction was hogging the spotlight? What. Was. Going. On?

If Large Sleep was a throwback to Duchamp, Mylar and Plexiglas Construction somehow throws forward to Koons. Warhol made this flaming Minimalist monument the year after Stonewall, the year his Rain Machine (Flower Waterfall) sculpture debuted in the US Pavilion at Osaka 70 World Expo; and the year before James Bidgood anonymously released his cellophane fantasy film, Pink Narcissus. Morgan Evans says that this was functional and made for the Factory. But unlike the film-related sculptures, this one got out; it’s in a private collection somehow, somewhere.

[a few still-fixated days later update: In their bio of the artist, the Warhol Foundation included an image—uploaded in 2021—of the bottom element of the Whitney Mylar and Plexiglas Construction as its own thing, with a date of “1970s”. The patterns on the Mylar match, so it’s not some rogue second or fourth construction. I’m going to have to visit the CR, I guess.]