Last September at RogerEbert.com, Soren Hough interviewed Swiss director Cyril Schäublin about his new film, Unrest, which was then in the New York Film Festival. Unrest is about a mountain community of anarchist watchmakers in the 19th century. It sounds fascinating, both for its content, but also for how it was developed and produced, in an exceptionally decentralized, collaborative, mutual aid-inspired mode inspired by its cast of predominately non-actors, but also by the ideas of one of its characters, the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin.
SH: It sounds like your natural aesthetic instinct tied well into this particular story where you, as you say, have this big name in “Unrest”—Peter Kropotkin. He’s not in a huge amount of the movie, he doesn’t have that many lines, he’s not a central character, and it’s certainly not a biopic.
CS: The guy who acts as Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) is a very avid Kropotkin guy. I mean, he’s really into him. And he said to me at the end, “I didn’t say that much!” But he told me the way we were doing the film, and how the film was organized, and how we talked to each other, he felt [it took a] mutual aid approach. That was really interesting for me.
Schäublin talks, too, about the desire to understand and depict the experiences of the women in his family, his ancestors, who worked in watch factories, but also the difficulties in doing so, especially for 19th century people:
it’s much easier to reconstruct male biographies [from the 19th century] than female biographies. I thought, “What can I show of women, like the women in my family who did that work?” The only thing we can reconstruct is their work. People today that go to watchmaking schools still learn how to build a watch from the 19th century—that’s the start of the school. So you can reconstruct the manual labor, but not the biographies—what we call biographies.
Alexander Calder, Little Mobile for Table’s Edge, c. 1939, sheet metal, wire, and paint, 19″ × 24″ × 1-3/8″ (48.3 cm × 61 cm × 3.5 cm), image: Pace
A two-artist show, “Calder/Tuttle: Tentative,” just closed at Pace LA today. Richard Tuttle made sculptural and spatial responses, or recontextualizations, to a series of works by Alexander Calder. I’d first seen someone criticizing it, but to look at the installation shots, I’d say it’s a fresh and interesting way to see both artists’ work.
The Calders are nice enough, but the one above, Little Mobile for Table’s Edge, is exceptional, a mobile that sits like a stabile. Tuttle’s response?—Solution? Proposition? Alteration? Companion? I am undecided what the word should be. In this too-brief video, Alexander Rower calls them vessels, while Tuttle calls them pavilions or frames, none of which apply here.
Tuttle took the mobile off the table’s edge and put it on a sculptural plinth, with a Q*bert-friendly corner of square blocks. As the show’s press release explains, “On a formal level, Tuttle explores enactments of verticality and horizontality—as well as plays of light and shadow—in Calder’s work,” as he focuses “on the space discovered in the mobiles.”
Richard Tuttle enactment [?] with Calder mobile, as installed at Pace LA.
I assume whoever is buying one is buying both, if they can. If you, too, missed it, no sweat; there will be a book.
A companion presentation of Tuttle objects—works of and on paper—made in response to Calder and his work’s context ran concurrently at David Kordansky.
[next day update]: roaming through the Calder Foundation’s archive, it appears that this was the first of only two or three mobiles Calder made with this type of hanging-off-the-table dynamic. Orange Under Table is a much larger mobile from 1949, now in the collection of the MCA Chicago. Meanwhile, the tiny 1948 work, Toadstool With Feather, hangs a counterbalanced feather off the edge of a toadstool disc balanced at its center, putting the “table” element itself in motion. Scrolling through Calder’s oeuvre, it becomes clear that he used or revisited some mobile dynamics often. This is not one of them. I wonder why.
Kusama, an LV X Kusama scarf and bag on her lap, personally oversees every dot on the second floor of her immersive LV X Kusamaverse pop-up store in Harakuku. Image: Ota Fine Arts IG
Let’s stipulate that the artist either approves or at least knows about it. She’d certainly recognize it. But what exactly is going on with the Kusama X Louis Vuitton collaboration? To find out, I turned to an expert [whoever rewrote this December 2022 press release for Hypebae]:
The collaboration comprises ready-to-wear, bags, shoes, luggage, trunks and fragrances, set to launch in two distinct parts. The first drop is set to feature Kusama’s “Painted Dots,” “Metal Dots,” “Infinity Dots” and “Psychedelic Flower” collections, with a second drop due to launch a few months later. The application of every dot on each piece has been personally overseen by Kusama, alongside many of the objects that make up the partnership, with a distinct focus on precision and detail.
Ota Fine Arts Instagram post of Kusama visiting the Louis Vuitton Omotesando store and Harajuku pop-up, 20 January 2023, confirming that the artist is indeed aware of the collab.Kusama mannequin installed at the NYC 5th Avenue Vuitton store in 2012, still from NHK/BBC
This will be one of two posts about the current collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Louis Vuitton. The reaction to the current campaign feels different from the original 2012 campaign. There is concern over how much the 93-year-old artist was involved in the collab, given its vast scale and its hundreds of related products, or even if she is aware of it. This concern was exacerbated by photos on Instagram of a collector posing with a seemingly disoriented Kusama in her hospital, which were particularly at odds with the elaborately styled and carefully managed character she presents at her public appearances.
Kusama being photographed holding various Louis Vuitton products in 2012, image: NHK/BBC
This worry of exploitation of an artist by, in this case, a cabal of dealers and a the world’s biggest luxury goods company owned by the world’s richest man, is valid, but not easily addressable. I don’t know how this deal went down, or who gets what from it, except that it is clearly massive, and involves the concerted, sustained efforts and investments of some of the most powerful people in the art, fashion, and retail industries. It seems significant that the content of this collab is based, not on new work or effort by Kusama, but by an existing product—literally one object, a painted trunk—from the 2012 campaign. [The second post will be a closer look at what is actually happening on the ground, which goes far beyond animatronics.]
a photo from the gallery that shows loose porcelain tchotchkes on concrete floors, via damon k
A woman knocked a chihuahua-sized Jeff Koons porcelain balloon dog off its unsecured plexi pedestal, and it shattered against the concrete floor.
The dog was made in 2021 in an edition of 799 plus 50 AP by Bernardaud, Limoges. One was flipped last April at Christie’s. I don’t really care right now where this happened, or why, or who was involved. I’m just glad for an occasion to hear Meryl Streep say, “My Limoges!”
[update: I’ve read a couple of stories and seen more headlines, and the eagerness to make cynical, uninformed, and clichéd takes is actually pretty impressive. The woman said she was a “collector” attending a “VIP preview” of an “art fair” ON A THURSDAY. The chain of galleries in whose Wynwood pop-up this happened has more locations than Gagosian, which they probably think about a lot. Meanwhile, despite having all the same Bernardaud in his shop, Larry’s never heard of them.]
Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2009, 100 x 100 x 100 cm stainless steel sphere on 100 x 60 x 60 cm base, ed. 1 of 9, for sale at Sotheby’s London on 2 March 2023, Lot 387, est. GBP 60-80,000
So you’re telling me that in 2009, two years after I started spinning about satelloons, but two years before he filled the Grand Palais with Leviathan, Anish Kapoor made not just one 1-meter stainless steel sphere, but nine? And I’ve never seen one until now, and that’s the one he donated to Trudie Styler’s charity dinner in 2011?
What’s that? The provenance lists The Aspinall Foundation & The Ecology Trust Charity Auction on 24 March 2011, but tactfully omits the more common name of the event, the Ormeley Dinner? And the sphere, ed. 1 of 9, sold for £420,000 [nice], reported Trudie as she and Sting sailed on a schooner “from the French Riviera to our [their] Tuscan villa, Il Palagio“? And now the sphere has an estimate of 1/8th of that? How did I miss all this?
Anish Kapoor, Tall Tree and The Eye, 2009, 13 x 5 x 5 m, 73 stainless steel spheres, including some that look like they could be a meter across, installed at Leeum in 2012-13, image: anishkapoor.com
Was it perhaps just left over from Tall Tree and The Eye, also from 2009? Did it fall off the Tree after it was installed in Bilbao in 2010, but before it moved to Leeum in Korea in 2012? Suddenly ed. 9 feels small.
[update: sold for GBP 266,700. amazing. do they get to write off the loss as a donation to Sting’s wife now?]
Lot 387, LL Bean canvas tote bags, c.2010, H28cm, from the Estate of Andre Leon Talley, sold for $2,520
This is the one bag I actually kind of wanted from the sale of Andre Leon Talley’s estate. And yet it felt like it was so not his style. OTOH, “includes a Christie’s dustbag,” so they made it hard to resist. But it also included a VOGUE tote bag, which made it easier. RIP.
Does this look like a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres who’d use a 12-inch LL Bean canvas tote? photo by Jonathan Becker sold, but Tom Ford kimono didn’t, innnteresting.
“It’s like living art history while trying to study it,” I wrote in 2021. Today I’d say clocks keep ticking, in sync or gradually not, but understanding comes in quick bursts, sometimes in the comments on Instagram.
White Columns director Matthew Higgs’ Valentine’s Day post was of the original 1988 checklist entry for Félix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, “Perfect Lovers,” which consisted of two 9.75-inch diameter quartz clocks installed next to each other over the desk:
🕙 🕙🤍🤍 In October 1988 Félix Gonzalez-Torres presented “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) at White Columns in the three-artist exhibition ‘Real World’ with Lorna Simpson and Jon Tower. This is the entry from the checklist, which lists the work as “Perfect Lovers”, 1984, 1987. Edition of 3, and priced at $350.00 (The work didn’t sell.) The work was installed behind the gallery’s reception desk. This was, I believe, the first public presentation of the work, and the checklist is the only time I have seen it dated this way, ie. “1984/ 1987.” (The Wikipedia entry for the work lists its dates as 1987-1990, and suggests it was first shown at Jay Gorney’s gallery in 1990.) 🕙 🕙🤍🤍 #perfectlovers @felixgonzaleztorres.foundation @white_columns @davidzwirner @andrearosengal @jaygorney1 #valentinesday
I responded that the catalogue raisonné did list White Columns’ 1988 show as the first exhibition of “Untitled” Perfect Lovers [cat. 108], with a date of 1987-1990. But that an in-process page of the Foundation’s website says that work was a separate work—now not classified as work—titled “Perfect Lovers,” with the dates 1984/1987. [The CR lists “Perfect Lovers” as A25, with a date of 1987.]
Then who weighs in on Higgs’ post but Bill Arning, who was the director of White Columns at the time, who curated the show—and who typed the checklist:
The work was not planned to be in the show at all during our studio visits but right before we were done installing Félix walked in with a bag, and he had bought the two clocks on his way that morning. They were not fancy clocks at all, little plastic things, and FGT asked if he could hang them over my desk and he did, and then explained the concept of the piece to me so I added them to the checklist. it is always shocking how casual grand moments in art history actually are when you[‘re] living through them.
“Any recollection of how the date 1984 came about? Was this an idea he’d had at the time or for a while?” I asked.
“I know he specified it but I don’t remember the argument—working with him require a belief that he knew what he was doing,” Bill replied.
Indeed it does. Indeed it does. So while we don’t know why the date 1984 is attached, we know Félix knew. Which is something. Knowing that he lived and loved with an awareness of time, of sharing it, of conquering it, of marking it.
Lovers, 1988, a note written to Ross Laycock, who Félix met in 1983.
The CR listed “Perfect Lovers,” as “signed, titled, dated, and numbered 1/3” on the back of each clock, and in the collection of Jorge Collazo. Perhaps this is the source of the 1984 date. These don’t sound like the same clocks Félix pulled out of a bag on the way to White Columns, and which are still there somewhere, at least through 2009. So now we can assume there is another (pair).
“Untitled” (Jorge), 1992, c-print, 75×100 cm, Collection Goetz via FG-T Foundation
Collazo is mentioned several times in Félix’s oeuvre, as the owner of images used in billboards, and presumably as the Jorge in letters turned into puzzles and photographs. And the the artist’s published bio, “1991 Jorge stopped talking to me, I’m lost—Claudio and Miami Beach saved me.” and on the back of a puzzle given to another friend, “Sunlight over the water in between Key West & Miami – trip with Jorge,” which the artist also used for a photo work, “Untitled” (Jorge), 1992. Who another friend Jim Hodges described, in his 2009 artist statement at the FLAG Foundation, as “a missing friend who was often mentioned.”
Maybe an answer is there. With Jorge, or on the backs of his clocks. It all really makes me want to sit people down and ask them questions, and record their memories, and their experiences, while there’s still time.
French Military Paper, (from) Marcel Duchamp, 1918, offered for sale at Christie’s 0n 28 Feb
Marcel Duchamp’s French Military Paper, a readymade of sorts, unpublished until after the artist’s death, and shown only once, as Untitled Ready-Made, in Zurich and Paris [I guess that’s twice, but the same Dada show], is for sale at Christie’s in a couple of weeks. It is a checklist Duchamp made—do we know he made it, or did he just bring it home?—while working as a secretary to a captain in the French Purchasing Commission in New York:
The sheet records the names of four military attachés in the French Purchasing Commission who arrived on 1 January 1918, and required suitable lodging during their stay in New York. The subsequent inked crossing out of the names, and the final X in red over the height of the typescript, suggest that all such considerations had been attended to, and there was nothing further to be done. Possibly contravening whatever security precautions may have then been in force, Duchamp took the document home. No other work of this kind appears in the artist’s oeuvre.
This was a period when Duchamp was exploring the nature of the Readymade, classifying things by signing them. Things like the Woolworth Building, a mural painted by someone else in the residents’ restaurant at the Hotel des Artistes, and, apparently, some expired paperwork from his temp job. And whether it mattered that something was classified as “from” or “by” him. By the time he got to the Boite en Valise, of course, he said, “de ou par,” why choose?
Which is interesting—or at least significant, because this work seems intentionally and almost radically boring, about as non-retinal as you can get—and maybe the reason Christie’s had to add the torn-from-today’s-headlines speculation that maybe Duchamp took classified documents home with him? The ghost of Marcel Duchamp appearing at Mar-a-Lago and saying, “Don’t drag me into this!”
[update: sold for a bid of 110,000, GBP138,600 with premium.]
Olafur Eliasson, Suncooker, 2005, photographed at Neugerriemschneider by Jens Ziehe, via IG
Yesterday Olafur Eliasson posted a work to Instagram that I hadn’t seen before. Itis Suncooker, from 2005. It is a portable solar oven, a parabolic aluminum mirror on an angled steel frame, covered by a large, radiant disc of geometrically cut, multi-colored glass, and with a lamp at the center. It is predictably beautiful, and even though it was only one element of Stockholm Solar Lab, the artist’s installation, it was the main promotional image for the sun-themed group show at magasin 3 during 2005’s darkest winter months.
Olafur Eliasson, Seeing Plants, 2003, solar cookers, silver glazed ceramic pots, cacti, image: Jens Ziehe for OE Studio
Two things came to mind when I saw Suncooker: it looks like the same style of solar cooker that Olafur used in 2003 in his 2003 work called, not Cactuscooker, but Seeing Plants. The description on Olafur’s website reflects [sic] his ongoing interest in the viewer’s awareness of their own perception:
Facsimile Object of Girl Booking Her Trip To Amsterdam So She Can Be A Vermeer Again
Meanwhile, all the Vermeers in DC are gone (four, including the one that the National Gallery says isn’t one anymore, but that the Rijksmuseum’s still down with.)
It wasn’t right there there all along, but it was somewhere. It being the question of whether this is Cy Twombly’s first painting, a copy of a Picasso.
We know now that it is not, that this Twombly copy of 1939 Picasso—in Nicola del Roscio’s house in Gaeta, published in the NY Times in 2016, and haunting me unexplained until 2021—was made in 1988. Part of the confusion came from the artist’s comments in a feature in the Times in 1994, around the opening of his MoMA retrospective.
So I was close, and yet. Because this paragraph was in the 1994 feature in Vanity Fair around the opening of his MoMA retrospective, written by no less than Edmund Wilson:
In Lexington he was taught by a Spanish artist, Pierre Daura, who had lived for years in Paris. The first painting Twombly recalls doing was a copy of Picasso’s portrait of Marie Therese Walter. In the course of interviewing Twombly, I saw a Picasso-ish portrait—perhaps the same one—on the dining-room wall in the house of his closest friend. “Oh, have you seen Cy’s Picasso?” he asked.
“the first painting Twombly recalls doing,” “Picasso-ish portrait,” “perhaps the same one,” “his closest friend.” There is useful truth to be found in the way these words do not say what’s actually going on.
l’Ultimo Mobile, 30 October 2020, by Martino Gamper, image: Robinson Barbosa via Serpentine Galleries
It feels unusual, but it’s important to remember it was unusual times.
Enzo Mari died at 88 on October 19, 2020, and his wife, Lea Vergine, died the next day at 82, both from COVID. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesca Giacomelli’s major exhibition of Mari’s work had just opened, improbably, miraculously, incredulously, in the middle of the pandemic, and the beginning of the Milan Triennale, on October 17th.
“I wanted to make something to remember his spirit, his thinking, his ideas, […] and I wanted to continue his project, the Autoprogettazione. So I made two coffins [in the style of the Autoprogettazione], as a way for me to think about Enzo and Lea’s legacy. I call them L’Ultimo Mobile, or the last furniture. It’s the idea of extending the book somehow – not just to chairs and tables and cupboards.” Gamper has made the coffins in his studio using Mari’s restrictions of 2 x 4 timber and nails, as specified in the Autoprogettazione. “Creating an object for someone you care for and love could be an interesting process for all of us,” said Gamper. “Sawing and hammering, and remembering the person.”
Spread from the Corraini re-edition of Autoprogettazione showing the Letto/Bed 1123 xM, as offered in Tokyo by Twelve-Books
Gamper fittingly chose one of the Autoprogettazione beds as inspiration for his coffins’ design. Robinson Barbosa’s black & white photos, too, are tributes to the stark offset printed images of Mari’s 1974 book.
Martino Gamper in his studio, having sawed and hammered, remembering Enzo Mari
What Barbosa’s photos do not show, until they do, is the actual scale of Gamper’s creations. To honor the ratio inherent in Mari’s chosen material—2×4 pine lumber—Gamper used 1×2 to make quarter-scale, tabletop caskets. In English a casket can be either a coffin or a box. In Italian, a casket/box is a cofanetto, and a casket/coffin is a bara. These are not objects of utility, but of tribute and memory, and media. Made for the ‘gram. Actually, that is all utility, too. And in the dark and weary days of October 2020, I would say these coffins, with their little feet, were serving their purpose as well as could be hoped.
Designer Enzo Mari and his wife, critic Lea Vergine, passed away one after the other in October 2020, the pre-vaccine stage of the COVID pandemic. Disegno Journal assembled a roundtable reminiscence of them, with Mari’s longtime assistant, Francesca Giacomelli; designers Martino Gamper and Corinna Sy; design historian Cat Rossi; and curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lorenza Baroncelli. Thanks to greg.org reader/hero Doug for sharing the transcript, which has recently been republished.
When Mari died, my regret at never sending him information about my Mari X IKEA table exploration was quickly subsumed by my outrage over the fate of his archive and studio. Mari’s archive, his research, his documentation, his journals, his vast collections, all come up many times in the extensive and fascinating discussion:
Francesca: “This archive is a complex codified diary in which Mari collected and conserved his projects and wider programme of revolutionary ideas; it is his life’s work, the essence of his research. For Mari, “The research is the design, not the product”. Now we need to rediscover those methods and ideas, preserve them, and celebrate their astonishing transformative potential.”
Hans Ulrich “Francesca has this immense knowledge and there are literally 2,000 projects or more that Enzo created during his career – she knows each of those 2,000 projects by heart. There’s no-one on the planet who knows more about Mari than her, but this idea of knowledge production was key for Enzo. He wanted design to convey knowledge and so the exhibition in that sense also has to be about producing knowledge. It would be absolutely contrary to his idea of work if the exhibition was about objects and not research.”
Martino “He was also a collector and had a really big knife collection, for instance. Whenever he traveled, he would buy knives. I wanted it for my Serpentine show [Martino Gamper: Design Is a State of Mind, 2014, ed.], but he wouldn’t lend it. He was an avid collector of everyday objects – a bit like Castiglioni, but actually a lot more. I don’t know what’s going to happen with his private collections. They’ve never been shown. He must have kept the knives in his house, because I never saw them in his studio.”
Lorenza “His studio was impressive. It’s going to be destroyed, in accordance with his wishes, but every room was devoted to a topic. One room for materials; one room for prototypes; and all the chairs were stored in the bathroom. The most interesting room was the kitchen, because that was where they produced objects. He was also obsessed with the archive, so created two books with the list of all the objects in the studio and all the documents. He gave Arabic numbers to every object and catalogued everything in those two books. This programmatic system was the basis of his work and I think is the reason why there was no difference between art and objects and graphic design – for him, it was all part of one unique path.”
Wait what? Yes, you read that right. His studio was going to be destroyed, in accordance with his wishes. And his archive, given to the City of Milan, is sealed from public view for “two generations,” forty years.
On the one hand, and it’s a big hand for me, this is basically the rest of my life. On the other hand, it just feels optimistic, maybe even a little dangerously naive, to entrust one’s legacy to a world as it will exist forty years from now. Maybe that’s the bigger hand, the non-zero possibility that society, much less the Milan municipal government, will not be around to open the Mari box in 2060. Between Francesca and Hans Ulrich, can we not crack this open a little sooner please?
Teichert v. The Church – Combined Exhibits 8:23-cv-00180-FWS-JDE Document 1-1, Page ID #39, aka Queen Esther I, 1939, a wedding gift to the artist’s neighbor/model, apparently, image via pacer.gov
The Estate of Minerva Teichert is suing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints twice, in two federal courts, for ownership and control of dozens of religious and pioneer-themed paintings by the artist, which have been on display in chapels, temples, church museums, and historic sites, for decades. Though she found some success in the 1930s and ’40s, Teichert, who studied with Robert Henri, did not gain a significant reputation until after her death in 1976. She is now considered one of the most important artists in Mormon culture, and certainly the most prominent woman. [It feels like irreconcilable folly, bringing terms like Mormon culture and prominent woman together, but here we are. I am fine, though, saying Teichert was the best Mormon painter in the Church’s history.]
