Donald Moffett’s Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023 installation view at von ammon co
Last fall I was caught off guard by Donald Moffett’s Lot 030323 (the golden bough), which was installed in NATURE CULT: TREMOR, a two-artist exhibition with Shaun Krupa at von ammon co in Washington DC. It stood out, literally, among new, biomorphically baroque iterations of Moffett’s more familiar paint-on-panel works. But even as I type this, I realize it was made of the same materials.
Donald Moffett NATURE CULT, SEEDED installation view of Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023/24 at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 2024, image CMCA via Brooklyn Rail
Pieces of salvaged lumber and driftwood were painted gold and bolted together in a totemic simulacrum of a tree, with an art book and two of Moffett’s [other?] paintings perched among its branches. The gesture felt akin to a Rachel Harrison sculpture, but in inverse, with the found objects serving as an armature for the made ones. It also reminded me of some past works of Robert Gober, Moffett’s partner, who made plinths of painted bronze cast from styrofoam blocks collected from the North Shore of Long Island.
Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023/24, will be on view, with some variations and an expanded date, for one more week in Rockland, Maine, where it anchors Moffett’s show, NATURE CULT, SEEDED, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The work in Maine now supports at least one different painting by Moffett—a throat-like orifice replaced by a perch-like birdhouse—and a different book, trading the 18th century botanical illustrations of Mark Catesby for the 19th century bespoke bovine portraits of Thomas Hewes Hinckley. The most substantive difference is the addition of what Brooklyn Rail reviewer Chris Crosman calls “a section” of the golden baugh: a driftwood limb that holds thirteen ex-libris copies of Jeff Goodell’s 2017 book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.
A couple of weeks ago artist Tom Burr sp0ke at Dia about his and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Now that conversation is online.
Burr was in a 1989 group show with Gonzalez-Torres, Michael Jenkins and John Lindell at Paula Allen Gallery (no relation). One piece Burr showed, Jones Beach State Park, was from a series of bulletin boards outfitted with the texts, flyers, and notices from a specific public place.
installation view of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ [non-work and] work installed at Paula Allen Gallery, 1989. Left is White Legal; right is “Untitled” (White Legal). photo via FG-TFoundation
A few years later in his catalogue raisonné, Gonzalez-Torres adminstered a dropkick to one of his magazine racks. The one mounted on the wall, “Untitled” (White Legal), remained a work, while the freestanding rack, then known as just “White Legal,” was demoted to “non-work.”
None of this is in the talk, btw; it’s just me nerding out. And it’s my way of resisting the urge to just type out the entire conversation about Burr’s Deep Purple, whose form is a 2/3-scale reference to Tilted Arc. Choice stuff.
cane head and spear tip, from the late Nara or early Heian period [c. 800 CE], found at the top of Mt Tsurugi in 1907, image: toyama-bunkaisan
In 1907, Yoshitaro Shibasaki and his team successfully climbed Mount Tsurugi, which was regarded as the last unclimbed mountain in Japan. However, they found a metal cane decoration and a sword on the top of the mountain, and it turned out that someone had reached the top before them. A later scientific investigation revealed that the metal cane decoration and sword dated from the late Nara period to the early Heian period and that shugenja had climbed Mount Tsurugi more than 1,000 years ago.
Shugendō is a mountain ascetic religious practice that emerged in the 8th century in Japan, that synthesizes Shintō, Buddhism, and various local spiritual elements. Because of its integrationist nature it was banned in the Meiji era when government land surveyors found that the ascetics [shugenja] beat them to the top of Mount Tsurugi by a thousand years. [via CraigMod‘s newsletter, where he discusses missing a Shugendō retreat because of XOXO and typhoons.
The three pieces they discuss and play, by Steve Reich, Julius Eastman, and Jason Moran, are all bangers of their kind. No spoilers, but Ligon’s made work related to a Reich text piece [above]; Moran scored a Ligon film, and it turns out Ligon and Eastman will be in a two-person show at 52 Walker in January.
ARTnews is reporting that someone in England is auctioning off ten 1970s Salvador Dalí lithographs found in their Mayfair garage. The £300–£500 they’re expected to bring will not help much toward funding their retirement abroad, but they’re probably selling the garage, too.
Unmentioned in it all is how the Dalí print market is a fifty-year-old joke ever since it became known that the artist pre-signed thousands—tens of thousands, some say hundreds of thousands—of blank sheets of paper, which were then printed with whatever.
The printsellers at Artsy are too ingenuous by saying Dalí “accidentally sabotaged his print market” with the practice. Dalí’s manager eventually claimed the artist signed 350,000 sheets of blank paper. That takes discipline, time, a system. And a way to monetize it—if not, what’s even the point? And none of that sounds like an accident. Maybe Dalí just dgaf about his resale market, and why should he, when there’s paper to sign?
And that’s not even getting near the forgeries. During the last decade of his life, one of Dalí’s former printers went rogue and secretly flooded the market with unauthorized prints; he was joined by straightup forgers operating a network of mall and tourist trap galleries. So he accidentally sabotaged his market by being forged? Or easy to forge?
TBH, the only thing less interesting than Dalí’s print market is Dalí’s prints. What I low-key want to see is his blank paper. Where are some? Did any survive intact? Dalí had a multiyear durational performance of signing blank paper, and it has disappeared without a trace. Worse than that, it was defaced, dismembered, and destroyed, then diluted by a deluge of fakes. Unless there’s a forgotten ream somewhere, sitting unnoticed since the 70s in a British garage, waiting to make some auctioneer’s day.
13 sheets of “Canson-style” paper with Dalí’s signature on them, from some auction somewhere in 2023, via mutualart
Oh wait, no, it was in France, and someone’s been auctioning it off in little batches since 2022. Also, Dalí was a Hitler- and Franco-loving fascist, so never mind.
[NEXT DAY UPDATE: ok, thank you Joshua Caleb Weibley for bringing in the work of Tyler Coburn, who in 2010 showed Thumbprints and Other Takeaways, a sculpture that included a stack of blank print paper, each printed with one of the hundreds of supposedly authentic signature variants Dalí used. 10/10, no notes.]
Thanks to Jeremy Millar on Bluesky for noting the 72nd anniversary of the first public performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. David Tudor premiered the groundbreaking work in Woodstock, N.Y. on August 29th, 1952.
I recently performed it myself a couple of weeks ago, using the 4’33” app, and I posted the recording to johncage.org. It’s the first recording of the piece in Greenland, and you can listen to it here.
[update: yeah, it should be Rømer Fjord, my bad]
Actually, it’s the second recording posted from Greenland; I had made and uploaded the first recording a few minutes earlier. I was on a boat in a fjord when the wind picked up, and some tarps began clacking and thrumming in an unusual way. Rather than just take an audio snapshot, I decided to make a 4’33” recording.
The way the app works, I uploaded it without listening to it first. Playing it back, I noticed a difference, inevitable, between the stereo experience of by ears listening to the original performance, and my phone mic’s recording. But more than that, I also felt like it sounded less like an experience of opening to the sonic world around you, and more of a fixation on an unusual found sound, which, admittedly, it was.
So I set off to find a quieter [sic] place to perform Cage’s silent piece. The result, mostly wind and waves, with a few inescapable lines snapping against masts in the wind, is the one linked above. So a big 4’33” Day shoutout to John Cage, who knew that silence sounds different everywhere.
Artist Keith Haring takes a break from work in his studio making paintings for an upcoming art exhibit.
Poking around The Broad’s Keith Haring show, which is at the Walker for another week or so, led me to this photo of Haring at work. It was taken in late 1982 by Alan Tannenbaum. I feel like I’d seen images of this moment before, but this time, what caught my attention was Haring’s t-shirt.
Paint Fair, in carnival lettering with a circus tent and a frilly, scalloped, tent-like border.
Cady Noland with Diana Balton, Nuts’N’Shit, 1990, screenprint on metal, 28 3/4 x 42 1/8 in., fabricated by Big Apple Printing, collection: MoMA
I noticed it because it looked very similar to Nuts’N’Shit, a screenprinted metal work by Cady Noland and Diana Balton. The one at MoMA [above] is listed as a screenprinted edition of one, but the one in Frankfurt was enamel, framed, and from the Brants. I will trust the artist to sort that out.
This just in from Our Correspondent In Berlin: the recent blog post about Sol LeWitt’s Black Form — Memorial to the Missing Jews (1987/89) is as incomplete as it was unexpected. Let’s go in chronological order, and from what should have been most obvious.
Sol LeWitt, Black Form – Dedicated To The Missing Jews, 1987/89, painted concrete, Hamburg, via
It is not enough to site the 1987 sculpture in the context of a Germany—actually Germanies—that had yet to address the issue of memorials or counter-memorials to the Holocaust. Or even to note—which I didn’t—that the 1989 re-creation of Black Form in Hamburg was not only larger, but happened just as the Berlin Wall was taken down. And of course, Black Form has existed in Hamburg ever since.
What most needs correcting is the context of LeWitt’s statement, “This was the only political art that I made and the only political thing about it was the title, but I thought I owed it to the Germans – and the Jews – to make one comment.” And the perception of exceptionalism it gave to the Skulptur Projekte, and the constraint it put on the political and memorializing element of LeWitt’s work.
Because that LeWitt quote was from 2000. And while it may have been true that Black Form was the only political art he made to that point, it was not the last, either for the Germans or the Jews. And those later memorials were very much related to Black Form, and not just because of their titles.
still from one of Andy Warhol’s commercials for Cadence laxative, 1965, commissioned by Ira Sturtevant and sold at Sotheby’s in 2019
We used to have a company that organized all the world’s information, and now it tells me that practically no one besides Sotheby’s themselves have mentioned that Ira Sturtevant commissioned Andy Warhol to make three commercials for Cadence laxative.
And they’re just about the only ones to note that it happened in 1965, but yet don’t note that was three years before the Schrafft’s restaurant spot that had long been considered Warhol’s first commercial.
still from another of Andy Warhol’s commercials for Cadence laxative, 1965, featuring Sunny Harnett, sold at Sotheby’s in 2019
And they’re about the only ones to note the similarities between the stark commercials—a lone woman sitting on a featureless set—and Warhol’s Screen Tests, which were in full production in 1965. [Sunny Harnett, one of the models in the Cadence commercials, never sat for a Screen Test, nor, for that matter, did Ira.]
We’re told there were three Warhol Cadence laxative commercials on four reels of film
And this is remarkable why? It’s not like we have to worry the laxative commercials will disappear from the art historical discourse: the Andy Warhol Museum has the invoice, and the Whitney Museum showed them in the Warhol retrospective in 2018-19. And five minutes later Crane sold them publicly for $30,000.
But how has no one made the connection that when Ira was befriending Warhol, Johns, and Rauschenberg in the early 1960s, he was not alone, but was in the company of the first Mrs. Sturtevant, Elaine, or as she came to be known professionally, Sturtevant.
the image of Sturtevant’s October 1965 show at Bianchini Gallery, via MoMA
1965 was when Elaine borrowed Warhol’s screen for Flowers and started making her own. It was when he was asked about his screenprinting process, and he said, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine.” It was when she had her breakthrough show at Bianchini Gallery, filled with her repetitions of the works of many of her —and, one must imagine, Ira’s?—artist friends.
In their conversation published last week on the 100th anniversary of her birth, Sturtevant’s two great art historian interlocutors, Bruce Hainley and Michael Lobel, talked about how scarce confirmable details are, and how “our sense of the history and reception of Sturtevant’s art changes” only via “a slow drip of new information.” While it’s obviously not a cure, I do hope blogging about this one connection will help to pick up the cadence.
[COUPLE OF DAYS LATER UPDATE: NEVER MIND. Here is the first sentence in the section of Blake Gopnik’s near 1000-page biography of Warhol where he discusses the artist’s foray into advertising: “In the summer of 1965, Ira Sturtevant, the ad-man husband of the artist Elaine Sturtevant, had gotten Warhol working on a laxative spot.” Print will save us all, but only if we think to look. Thanks for the heads up, Blake, and the opus, obv.]
Sometimes I really am slow on the uptake. Like when it took me all this time to really look at the extensive installation views of Cady Noland’s exhibition at MMK Frankfurt. Somehow I’d just been stuck with the imageless brochure/checklist, and the works I wasn’t familiar with remained unnoticed to me, even when I should have known better.
Like Trashing Folgers (1993/94), the large landscape above, a full-bleed screenprint on aluminum of a c. 1969 wire photo of the junked up backyard from Barker Ranch, the post-murder desert hideout of Charles Manson and his “family.” It’s in the collection of FRAC Grand Large in Hauts-de-France, which is on my Lacaton Vassal bucket list, but which does not help me here.
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve listened to some podcasts, but it’s been even longer since I’ve listened to Charline von Heyl talking about her process. So yesterday I got caught up on both, with her conversation with Ben Luke on The Art Newspaper’s podcast, A Brush With…
And she is still looking at your blog.
Asked by Ben Luke if she sometimes spends more time in the studio thinking about the painting she’s working on vs. doing something to it, she replied, [Here’s a podcast link, but I cribbed the quote below from the YouTube transcript]:
Yeah that’s basically all the time. I mean it’s just I’m probably like five hours or so —not much longer, actually my attention span is not the greatest in the studio—and of that time, the actual painting time will be maybe one hour or so. So most of the time is really looking.
And it’s not just making a painting in my head; it really is also literally looking at images, you know, like opening the computer and just going through really weird old blogs, or there are fantastic painters’ Tumblr accounts which I love because it’s not about personality it’s just really about finding idiosyncratic choices.
And so I just get stimulated by that, and then I will see this one weird little orange corner that triggers desire in me, and then I want to have something similar. It doesn’t have to be that orange corner, but it has to be something that renders me excited in the same way that that did. You’re like—and it might be a conventional move or it might be something bizarre doesn’t matter. But the time in the studio is really a time of visual manufacturing.
Further on, when asked what she has pinned to her studio wall, the answer turns out to be, again, your tumblr:
The funny thing is because I am so much in this whole world of looking through images on the computer—Tumblr and all that stuff—and of course, I’m not on social media at all so I do what all those spies do: I drag the images on my desktop, and then I used to just put them into folders that have monthly dates and basically forget them and never look at them again.
And then during the pandemic, when I was working on the Botticelli remake for Matt Haimowitz, I started to actually print out every single image that I dragged, and wrote on it what it exactly was, and date-stamped it. And I have done that ever since, so I’m actually pinning those things on the walls while I’m printing them out, and they become a slow sort of reference to, you know, like a mood I’m creating, and all the synchronicities that play out in that display.
And then there are some images that I print out over and over again. I see there are certain Beuys drawings that are just really important. and I think the most beautiful thing on earth. Right there are two postcards, actually, that travel from studio to studio, and that’s probably the question you asked. One is this weird Bonnard cat from the Musée d’Orsay, this white cat that’s
BL: Oh I know it it’s wonderful.
CvH: I even painted a little frame around it I just love it so much. It has— it’s so funny and has all the tenderness in the world and all the weirdness and it’s such good painting. I mean, Bonnard and Vuillard are so important to me, too. I love them so much.
Pierre Bonnard, le Chat blanc, 1894, oil on cardboard, 519 x 335 mm, collection: musée d’orsay
On Kawara family snapshots, from “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer,” curated by Alan Longino
Here are snapshots of On Kawara’s family attending Gerhard Richter’s New Year’s party.
Installation view of “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer: On, Anne, On,” scr via ig/alan_longino
They were included in, “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer: On, Anne, On,” an exhibition staged over a series of weekends in Apr-May 2024 in what looks like a student lounge at the University of Chicago. The material was taken down every night so it wouldn’t disappear. It was the fourth and final show of Longino, IAH, a curatorial project by post-war Japanese Art History graduate student Alan Longino. Longino’s idea was a show focused on an art historian, and Rorimer gamely opened her lifetime of files and correspondence, and archive of artist interactions to him.
More than most artists, Kawara’s work was so intertwined with the medium of interaction, correspondence, and daily activity, and the professional and personal ephemera give glimpses of life beyond the edges of his practice.
Screenshot from “A Conversation with Anne Rorimer on Blinky Palermo, On Kawara and Lawrence Weiner, 29 June 2024 at Dia Beacon via youtube
Rorimer began working with Kawara in 1979, when she included him in the 79th American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Judging by the age of Kawara’s daughter in the lower snapshot, the party would probably have been in the late 1980s. A more intrepid soul than I might deduce the year from the date formats of paintings produced around the holidays. Or it’s on that pink envelope. [update: which, that Sojourner Truth stamp was issued in 1986.] Or just ask Rorimer.
Of Longino, IAH, there is a text by Calvin Lee on Longino’s Google Drive, but the most thorough documentation of the show for the moment is Longino’s Instagram. I was stunned and saddened to learn Longino, 36 and at the very beginning of his career, passed away from cancer in July, barely a week after Rorimer & Carter’s conversation.
Until this morning, everything I knew about Ellsworth Kelly and pink triangles I had learned from Jonathan Horowitz. In 2010, Horowitz made a series of works critiquing the minimalist and abstract works Kelly and other artists made for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. “In the face of one of the worst things that’s ever happened, art is represented as having nothing to say,” Horowitz explained when he showed the works at Sadie Coles in 2011.
Two Rainbow Flags in the Style of the Artist’s Boyfriend, 2011, image:jonathanorowitz.com
Pink Curve (2010), above, paraphrases Kelly’s white Memorial (1992), transforming it into a reference to the pink triangle nazis forced gay people to wear in the concentration camps. Pink Curve called out the invisibility or omission of gay identity, not just in discussion of the Holocaust, but in a work by a gay artist. It’s similar to Horowitz’s critique of Jasper Johns—and/or of the discourse around his work—in works like Rainbow Flags For Jasper In The Style of The Artist’s Boyfriend (2011). [The artist’s boyfriend referenced here is Horowitz’s, Rob Pruitt—unless Johns was keeping a glitter-loving twink under wraps on his farm, obv.] And all that makes sense.
This morning I saw these photos, and is that not an Ellsworth Kelly pink triangle painting on the living room wall of a 1979 apartment in Olympic Tower, designed by Francisco Kripacz? Yes, yes it is.
Olympic Tower Apartment by Arthur Erickson, interior by Francisco Kripacz, with a raised glass floor and a pink Ellsworth Kelly, 1979, photo: Norman McGrath, s/o tumblr user runrabbitafterdark-blog
Well, technically, it’s not a triangle, but a triangle with asymmetrically truncated corners, so a pentagon, but still, it is rather trianglish. And technically, the architect, resident, and Kripacz’ partner, Arthur Erickson, called it “a very beautiful mauve” Kelly whose form is echoed by the custom steel coffee table [an actual triangle.]
Arthur Erickson and Francisco Kripacz, Teck Mining Group boardroom with an Ellsworth Kelly green painting between two trees, photo: Norman McGrath via arthurerickson.com
Erickson and Kripacz were the most famous Canadian Design Gays of the 1970s and 80s. They renovated an iconic party house on Fire Island with a retractable roof and fence. They partied and schmoozed with all sorts of famous and powerful people. Gay architect and nazi Philip Johnson had dinner in the presence of the Kelly pink triangle. They kept working together after they broke up, with Kripacz setting up shop in Beverly Hills. And while I can’t find any party pics, I’m sure Dynasty producer Douglas Cramer had to know about Erickson & Kripacz’s pink Kelly triangle when he bought the Cor-Ten steel version in 1984. So maybe Horowitz was onto something.
The Rothko Chapel finally getting the skylight right after 50 years has been on my pandemic bucket list since it reopened in 2020. But that visit will not happen yet, since the Chapel in Houston announced this week that the roof, ceiling, walls, and three of Rothko’s paintings were damaged by Hurricane Beryl.
Given the terrible emergency response to Beryl, which left parts of Houston without aid or electricity for more than a week in early July, maybe it’s really not that big a deal that the announcement of the damage and indefinite closure of the Chapel took five weeks. Those folks have been through some stuff.
So I can redirect my WTF headscratching to Artforum’s unbylined news story of the closure, in which the one-time art magazine of record reports that the Chapel “is home to fourteen site-specific black murals.” They are not murals.
For his part, Rothko Chapel executive director David Leslie calls them “Mark Rothko panels,” twice, so that is the current term of art on campus. But they are, of course, paintings, on canvas, on stretchers, hung on walls.
Also they are not black, but deep reds, browns, and/or purples that approach black. Which brings us back to the lighting situation. Like the Rothko Chapel, Artforum, too, has been through some stuff lately, but this error should not take five weeks to fix, much less fifty years.
In 2003 Thomas Hirschhorn and Ink Tree Editions published Emergency Library, based on a collection of 37 books which Hirschhorn said were important to him, and which he could not do without. He discussed the project, and explained the reasoning behind each of the books, in a text, republished on the artist’s site.
The Library includes three books by Deleuze, two by Bataille, also Walser, Spinoza, all philosophers who Hirschhorn has created public monument/projects for—all but Bataille Monument, at Documenta 11 in 2002, came after the Library, so it could be viewed as a sort of sourcebook or roadmap for Hirschhorn’s subsequent practice.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Emergency Library (Degenerate Art), 2003, color copies on cardboard, 142 x 114 x 23 cm, sold at Rago Arts on 15 Aug 2024
Artists in the Emergency Library include Beuys, Duchamp and Warhol; Meret Oppenheim and Liubouv Popova; Hélio Oiticica and Jörg Immendorff; and somehow both John Heartfield and Emil Nolde. Speaking of Nolde, whose Nazi past was still being actively covered up in 2003, there is also the entire catalogue from Stephanie Barron’s 1991 exhibition at LACMA and the Art Institute, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.
Until I started writing this post, I had always read the photo on top, from Hirschhorn’s own site, as the books of Emergency Library on a table. It turns out to be a composite photo of the actual edition, arranged in simulation. It is only when the artist stands next to it, shirtless, that the scale is grasped. And now I want every single one, starting with the biggest, that sweet, sweet Duchamp catalogue.
Tits out Thomas Hirschhorn posing with Emergency Library, via inktree.ch
