Author: greg

Art historian David J. Getsy has a new essay out, a long-brewing consideration of Scott Burton’s public sculpture practice in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and as a subtle, determined resistance to the silencing and erasure of people with AIDS. Everything was going down at once in the 1980s, and Getsy argues that Burton’s furniture-like public installations, readily overlooked, were an early example of an artist grappling with the communal and individual experience of AIDS.

What somehow caught me off guard was how at odds Burton’s public project was to the rest of the art world he was so enmeshed in, a world where the fearless artist’s place in public culture was being thrashed out in the battle over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.

In 1985, while speaking from within “this minority culture that is avant-garde art,” Burton told Richard Francis that, though he supported Serra’s effort, he saw things differently: “I feel the world is now in such bad shape that the interior liberty of the artist is a pretty trivial area. Communal and social values are now more important. What office workers do in their lunch hour is more important than my pushing the limits of my self-expression.”

This difference is central to Getsy’s analysis: “Burton relinquished the recognizability of his role as artist and creator—a role that was so central to Serra’s project and the art world’s defense of it.

This position of passivity (however critically engaged) clashed with the masculinist presumptions of sculpture as a space-dominating occupation.”

“Appearing Asymptomatic: Scott Burton’s Public Art and the Knowledge of AIDS,” American Art 39, no. 3 (Fall 2025): 54–83 [via davidgetsy.com]

[later today update] Getsy’s October 2025 talk in Chicago about Burton’s sculpture incorporates parts of the essay. It was posted three weeks ago.

Previously, related: Scott Burton Estate Planning
Getsy on Burton’s performance art
Scott Burton Marble Armchair [made, ironically, from the same marble used on the redesigned, Tilted Arc-less Federal Plaza]

While speedrunning through Soutines at Christie’s the other day, this popped up, Sherrie Levine’s 1984 watercolor of a Soutine that belonged to Melva Bucksbaum.

Of course, it’s not a watercolor of a Soutine, but a watercolor of a reproduction of a Soutine, yet another flattening step removed from the intense painterly construction of Soutine’s portrait.

The Aspen Museum had a whole show of early Sherrie Levine this past summer, and it’s worth remembering that rephotographing reproductions à la After Walker Evans was just one of Levine’s techniques for exploring the reproduction and circulation of images. Others included buying and framing posters of paintings; framed plates from art books; drew photos of drawings; and painted photos of paintings.

Back in the day, these watercolors were discussed in terms of their declarative absence of the original’s structure and painterly action, and as a thin, even surface on a thick paper ground. But they’re paintings of photos, so whatever flattening is there counts as documentation.

Anyway, I’m not finding a ton of stuff about Levine’s watercolors, nor of her exploration of Soutine. What I do see, though, makes me wonder why Bucksbaum, of all people, matted this picture this way, when it feels like it should be floated on its sheet.

Chaïm Soutine was one of the first artists I found instead of being taught, and I am still enthralled by the intense, uphoved world of his paintings. [His real life, kind of a bummer, tbqh.]

Anyway, after @pg5-ish reblogged Soutine’s Two Children on a Tree Trunk (1942-3) into my tumblr dashboard this morning, I went looking for it, and found instead this great little painting of an unsettled little guy, which sold at Christie’s in 2016.

Sorry, Mark Rothko’s late paintings, there’s a new annoying read of art as foreshadowing kid in town. Victor Brauner’s 1931 self-portrait has been on the Pompidou’s Surrealism anniversary world tour for a while now, and is currently on view at THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, where Andrew Wasserman photographed it yesterday, at a distance that hopefully doesn’t need a content warning.

The wall label reads, “Victor Brauner lost his left eye in an accident in 1938. Seven years before, curiously, he had made this small self-portrait with a removed eye, which now acquired the aura of prophecy. Brauner accepted his partial loss of physical sight, saying it had turned him into a seer.”

Which is still more circumspect than the Pompidou—who owns the painting but does not publish it, apparently—which calls the painting a “premonition,” and the foundation of Brauner’s surrealist cred: “cette œuvre occupe une place symbolique dans la vie et la création de Victor Brauner, annonçant l’accident qui le frappa lors d’une rixe entre Óscar Domínguez et Esteban Francès, dans la nuit du 27 au 28 août 1938, et qui le priva définitivement de son œil gauche (l’œil droit dans le tableau).”

So some things here: the accident was a bar fight between two other artists, and the eye Brauner actually lost was not the one missing in the painting. Losing his eye had an understandably large impact on the artist and his life and practice, well beyond the symbolic. The allure of using art to make sense of such a loss is also understandable.

The Pompidou’s text mentions writings about Brauner’s case and the Surrealist fascination with eyes and sight. So maybe the best thing that can be said is that post hoc prophecying is a lens [sic] on the past, a strategy for making meaning. So is irony, and whether it was prophetic, Brauner’s painting is certainly ironic. Maybe he should have been a Dadaist instead.

While looking for Ivanka’s Christopher Wool next to her Eames lounge chair, I stumbled across this Eames plywood screen that Wool painted in 2002. It was acquired by a Geneva art collector-turned-jewelry designer named Arlene Bonnant for her CAP Collection, which she published a book about in 2005, right before flipping a tranche of it in 2007. Some of her haul might not have ever even made it out of the crate before she flipped it. She held off on selling the screen, though, until 2014.

It’s wild how I can imagine being psyched for an object like at one point, but five minutes of Googling has really soured me on it. What a cursed combination of search terms this turned out to be.

Since October 2023, Max Schumann, the artist and former director of Printed Matter, has been making paintings based on photos and video clips of protests against the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine. Flag Book is a risograph compilation of this series, and is available again at Printed Matter. [s/o visitor]

Flag Book, 2025, ed. 150 by Max Schumann, $30 [printedmatter.org]
Previously, related, June 2023: Max Schumann Benefit Bash Prints for Printed Matter

Listening to Luc Tuymans’ interview with Ben Luke on A Brush With… in the car yesterday, I was fascinated by his regular use of a cinematic or almost narrative framework for making his shows. Which sounds distinct from making paintings for a show, although there are apparently paintings that function a specific way in a show, as a start, or a coda. But there is also a crucial structure or sequence, a context that is somehow foundational to a show and the work in it, yet which is unarticulated, or seemingly completely unacknowledged.

And what struck me was that after the show is done, and the works are sold and scattered, this vital structure disappears forever. The paintings are set adrift, left on their own.

Working toward a show and planning a show is not unusual; it even makes a lot of sense. Considering how works in a show will be situated and seen in space and time is also extremely normal. But there was something oddly specific about Tuymans’ discussion of his narrative approach that set it apart; it stuck, but we all moved on.

Then toward the end of the conversation, Tuymans talked about preparing for a show, and then a dealer came and picked some works to take to an art fair, and in the process, wrecked the whole show.

[I’m paraphrasing here, partly because the transcript is not readily available, but mostly because Tuymans also made a throwaway comment about not being “a primadonna, and I always meet my deadlines,” and I am past a deadline on a piece I’ve been stuck on, and typing just to type is a way to break the jam, but also, I’m hoping feeling called out by someone who’s always sounded arrogant to me, and who, frankly, I did kind of imagine as a primadonna, will also get me finished on this damn thing.]

Anyway, Tuymans then said he switched to making art fair work, paintings which exist on their own, conceived as orphans, and void of whatever the narrative structure or context of a show might give them. He went on to say they weren’t exactly lesser works, but…a different priority. [This feels important to get right, and I’ll come back and add the actual quote after a relisten. UPDATE: OK, here.]

Ben Luke: “When you make a work for an art fair, does it differ at all in terms of… do you approach it differently from the subject matter point of view?”

Luc Tuymans: “Yes, because it’s a singular work, or singular works, that are somehow related to what I’m thinking at that moment what could be relevant or not, but it has a different stance. I mean, it doesn’t have the same priority, let’s put it that way, as a show.”

But there is a whole unspoken category of Luc Tuymans Art Fair Paintings, and maybe looking at them alongside/in contrast to his real paintings will be a productive exercise as curators construct narratives of their own.