the making of, by greg allen
Last week Christie’s sold a 19th century box of Greek & Roman glass fragments, and now I want one for my great-grandmother’s taped and annotated collection of rocks.
Hmm, there’s also this, framed and mounted on silk, but I think I prefer the box.
I got to Josh Pazda Hiram Butler’s sales archive through an odd John Cage search, and I stayed for an unusual Cy Twombly find: a painting on newsprint—the Washington Post from April 5th, 2001, to be precise.
How did this? What is this? There are clear edges, plust some bleed; the acrylic shows no brushmarks, but does show the folds of the paper. It says framed by artist, but there’s also a bit of scorching right around the painted part, and the signature in the lower margin, like it was matted differently for a while?
Anyway, it turns out to be very similar to a work on, of all places, the Twombly Foundation’s own website, in the Prints section.
Described as a monotype, this work contains the same lozenge-shaped, leaf-like motif. It’s also on newsprint, and has borders very much like those kissed in place by the sun up top.
I think these are cardboard prints, where the image is carved into a sheet of cardboard with something rough, like a nail, and which are painted and pressed against a surface—in this case, straight up newspaper from the porch—to transfer the image.
Twombly made raw, scratchy monotypes right after getting back to New York in 1953, and in 1996, he revisited the cardboard engraving technique for an edition Twombly and Nicola del Roscio printed for the Whitney Museum. Whether it was a pump-priming exercise, a diversion, a warm-up, or something else, this rough, disposable, DIY printing medium seems to have struck a chord with Twombly. At least it worked well enough to let these things out of the studio, conservators bedamned.
“Printed by Cy Twombly; printed by Nicola del Roscia”? [whitney.org]
As reported today on social media, Ubu has stopped adding things.
“As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active.
The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.”
Preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety, except, of course, when it’s not:
“Everything is downloadable on UbuWeb. Don’t trust the cloud, even UbuWeb’s cloud,” said UbuWeb as recently as January.
And as Kenneth Goldsmith said as recently as yesterday, “Let’s keep UbuWeb well alive!” and “Don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future.”
A .tar of the site would be really handy right about now.
Previously, related:
2014: 36 Links From My Life With Ubu; my Ubu Top Ten Sixteen
2006: Non-Sensical, Non-Site, Non Art? Smithson’s ‘Hotel Palenque’
Ring lights are the cursed icon of our age. In the excavations in the future, ring lights on wispy black metal skeletal bases, flattened against a layer of disintegrated grey woodgrain laminate flooring, will be used to pinpoint this moment in history.
All the digital content they were used to create—that wasn’t already deleted from the servers when the monetization ran out—will have been wiped from the servers by EMPs, and archaeologists will hypothesize what they were for, and why every 21st century room had one. Was that just the shape of lamps at that point? The moon was popular, I guess? Were they altars to the Oprah goddess?
Then one day a dig in the Cahuenga Archipelago will turn up this, a ring light WITH A MIRROR IN THE CENTER, and yet it dates from generations earlier. And they’ll conclude that ringlights were once used for an ancient habit of staring at oneself. And at some point in the intervening 50 years, probably because they were processing the looming climate crisis, people became so unconcerned with how they looked that ring lights lost the mirror, but kept the shape, purely as an aesthetic. Maybe they even became symbols of a new humility, a communitarian absence of self-obsession. What an enlightened and advanced society the Ring Light Culture must have been. Why they died out was a mystery.
It would be weird and unsettling to get a letter from someone who killed his wife, is something I have thought about but never had to deal with personally.
In unrelated news, last night Hyperallergic published an account by artist Coco Fusco of the time in 1993 Carl Andre wrote her a letter. Fusco had published an essay in a Mexico City art magazine about Ana Mendieta’s art and her complex and groundbreaking relationship to Cuba. Andre wrote to Fusco c/o the magazine:
He marked his letter “personal and confidential,” put a copyright sign on it, and ended it with “for your eyes only,” as if to say, don’t even think of showing this to anybody. For years, I was too afraid to mention the letter in public, imagining that he might take revenge. I had heard plenty of scary stories about Mr. Andre from Mendieta’s close friends. I had never met him, but I knew he was a famous White male artist who might also be a murderer.
Now that Andre is dead, Fusco describes the letter’s contents, her experience, and the art context of Mendieta’s work, as well as the broader Cuban artist community, and willful misperceptions of it. But because of the copyright/eyes only thing, she still doesn’t publish or reproduce it.
If she wants to publish it, maybe she should put it up for sale.
Last summer and fall, a weird and unsettling collection of dozens of postcards from Carl Andre came up for auction in Chicago. One lot was all postcards of Andre’s own art; another was postcards of other art. It was immediately unsettling that the correspondent had the same initials as Andre’s wife. But that was surpassed by the timeline that spanned many years, but which concentrated on the years after Mendieta’s death, and Andre’s trial for her murder. So during all that, while he sat silent in court, Andre kept up lively conversations and shared his poetic ruminations through the mail.
I spent a little time last year trying to make some sense of these postcards, and to see who might be on the other end of them. I dropped it, partly because it became clear that some of it was related to correspondence art, or chain letters, of sending postcards on to the next person in a chain. Whoever got in the chain next to Andre may have kept up a side conversation. One outlier lot included some correspondence to Andre, as if they sent one letter back and forth. But it also mentions Andre’s shocked rudeness when his longtime postcard friend introduced himself IRL at an opening. It was the early 90s equivalent of a tumblr mutual showing up at your office. And you’d been acquitted of killing your wife.
Anyway, Andre’s signature on all these postcards is a C around an a, which means he must have hated the @ sign takeover. But it does look a little like a copyright.
Researching some stuff on Manet and politics for an essay, I got stuck on this aside from Beth Archer Brombert’s 1996 biography, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat: through 1871 and the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, the Paris Commune and its violent defeat and repercussions, Manet, Archer Brombert writes, “seemed unable to regain his equilibrium.”
In Paris in the aftermath, the only thing he managed to paint that Fall was a small (21 x 26 cm) still life of a pile of unripe almonds. Which turns out to be nearly identical to a detail of a still life he’d painted three years earlier. “As writers have been known to copy earlier pages of their own work or that of others just to get started again,” Archer Brombert explains/confesses, Manet copied himself. Then she goes a bit big: “Still lifes played an important role in Manet’s life; they distracted him when he was low and kept his hand and eye in practice…he turned to still lifes in moments of distress.”
[note: Archer Brombert cites Manet biographer Adolphe Tabarant for the date and interpretation of this painting. The Wildenstein Manet CR dates this painting to 1869, which would kind of wipe out this reading. The painting I think Manet’s said to have copied from, known in the CR as Fruits (RW 83), and at the Musée d’Orsay as Fruits sur une table, is actually dated to 1864, and was shown in Paris in 1865 and 1867. Not sure how this gets solved, unless the Amandes Vertes finally comes out of hiding and shows itself.]
I cannot keep up. Literally the day I was contemplating even the possibility of a Facsimile Object of a Gerhard Richter Grey Mirror painting, Richter put four of them on permanent view. On his 92nd birthday. At Auschwitz.
Last month Gerhard Richter BIRKENAU, a permanent exhibition in a purpose-built pavilion, was opened at the International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim, the Polish town near the nazi death camp that took its name. It contains reproductions of the Sonderkommando photos that Richter used as a basis for the Birkenau series of large-scale squeegee paintings [CR 937/1-4] he made in 2014. [Two photos are visible on the concrete walls below.] It also includes full-scale Diasec-mounted versions of the Birkenau paintings [a medium Richter once used for a category he called “Facsimile Objects,” but which he later replaced with “Prints”]. And facing them are Facsimile Objects of a series of four Grey Mirror paintings. Photos of oil-on-glass paintings printed and Diasec face-mounted with acrylic on aluminum.
In this Guardian article [shoutout greg.org hero/reader Claudio for the heads up] Agata Pyzik tries to put a market–or at least a marketing—critique on Richter’s use of photo copies of paintings, even while acknowledging his attempts to remove his Birkenau works from an art market context. [Richter’s kept the paintings in his foundation, and put the other facsimile edition in the Reichstag.]
I read the Birkenau facsimiles, which he has shown alongside the Birkenau paintings from the jump, including at the Met Breuer in 2020, as an attempt to head off any sacralization of the paintings themselves. He did not make them to be, and he does not want them to become icons of the Holocaust. Even worse for him, I think, would be being seen as attempting to iconize or exploit these terrible photographs, to turn them to his own use. He sees limits to his own project of painting in relation to images and history, and he’s not wrong.
But while all the media attention is on the Birkenau pictures, the most unsettling and powerful element of the installation, the mirrors, barely gets a mention. If this were any other work, any other place, any other time, the fact that Richter made Facsimile Objects of mirror paintings would be enough to keep me going for weeks. These happen to be facsimiles of Grey Mirror [CR 751/1-4], a series of 3 x 1.75 m, color-coated glass paintings made in 1991 for—and by—the St Louis Art Museum, a gift with purchase. [The purchase was Betty.] In Oświęcim, Richter has turned them sideways, and installed them landscape-style, as one continuous 12-meter mirror panorama.
But these are there, and now.
And so visitors to Oświęcim, while flanked on either side by direct photographic evidence of the nazi genocide at Birkenau as documented by its targets, will see reflections of themselves and everyone else with their backs turned to a repetition of Birkenau which looms behind them. It’s at least theoretically possible, if previously inconceivable, that if he opened an exhibition in Germany that made visitors look in a mirror while turning away from the evidence of genocide all around them, Richter could be arrested.
[update: After corresponding with the artist’s studio about broken links on the webpage for this exhibition, I was informed that this mirror work is actually an “exhibition copy” of Grauer Spiegel (4 Parts) [CR955], and not [CR751/1-4]. Which means the dimensions and material aspect of this object are still to be confirmed. For now the artist’s site still describes them as Diasec-mounted prints. Is that whan an exhibition copy of a mirror work is? Or would it be a similarly produced enamel paint on the back of glass? Perhaps we shall see.
What is significant, though, and has been unremarked by anyone, is that with these mirrors, the BIRKENAU installation replicates the current long-term installation of the Birkenau paintings, the Birkenau photos, and Grauer Spiegel (4 Parts) [CR955], at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. So viewers in Germany can, in fact, see themselves in a mirror, with the genocide of Birkenau represented behind and all around them, know that this same situation exists somewhere else right now, and contemplate the differences between an original and a repetition.]
Inauguration of the Gerhard Richter BIRKENAU Exhibition Pavilion [mdsm.pl]
Painting the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter’s most divisive work returns to Auschwitz [guardian via csant]
Previously, related:
2014: Cage Grid: Gerhard Richter and the Photo Copy
2023: Gerhard Richter Painted
2024: Grauer Richter Facsimile Object
After several years of executing works in Cor-Ten steel, Donald Judd opened a welding and fabrication shop in 1988 in the disused Ice Plant building on the northeast side of downtown Marfa. He called it El Taller Chihuahuense (The Chihuahuan Workshop), and he hired local welders, including Raul Hernandez and Lee Donaldson to make his works.
The workers of El Taller also fabricated beds and slate-topped tables of square tubular steel, which Judd designed in 1991 and 1992.
Continue reading “Donald Judd Cama del Taller Chihuahuense”
A few months ago artist David Horvitz was looking into a story of one of his artist neighbors who knew David Hammons back in the LA day. While poking around for some corroboration, I realized this invitation to a 1986 Hammons show at JAM was only and ever published in Elena Filipovic’s 2019 Afterall One Work: Bliz-aard Ball Sale.
Filipovic’s researcher, Alhena Katshof pulled the invitation out of MoMA Library’s legendary Ephemera File, where it was scanned for the first time, I learned, by legendary librarian David Senior.
Anyway, the invitation is a silvery painted postcard with a hand-stamped ball, and a date, 3/13/83. One of the very few other examples of the invitation known to exist, along with the show’s terse press release, mention 2/13/83, so perhaps this one is an error. The show, Icestallation, consisted of a dingy 3-year-old snowball in a used and altered freezer, set amidst the detritus of JAM’s gallery renovation. As printed on the verso, the show was in April/May, so the date, presumably, was the snowball’s birthday? And so the date of Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale action?
Without contemporary recollections of the invitation’s production, Filipovic speculated, based on the size, that Hammons might have used a silver-painted tennis ball to imprint them. I think the seams on a tennis ball disqualify it, though. I’ve spent time trying to identify a similarly sized, seamless, and fuzzy-enough ball Hammons could have used. A round sponge seems like the easiest, but is it the most Hammons-ian? I’ve done the same exercise with Hammons’ favored printmaking medium—his own body—to imagine what might reliably produce a few hundred unperturbed, round imprints. Because it’s not a ball. So a knee? A calf? A cutout and a buttcheek? Is it even actually printed, not stenciled?
Previously, related, silvery, printed: David Hammons’ Spade, Again
A 2-liter bottle with sticks and metal zipper sliders in it from David Hammons, a 1996 sculpture titled, Flies in a Bottle, is being sold this month in New York.
In 1993 David Hammons made a sculpture, Fly In The Sugar Bowl, by placing a metal zipper slider in a bowl of sugar. The first and only place I’ve seen it was in Elena Filipovic’s 2019 contribution to Afterall’s One Work series about Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale.
The first thing is obviously that Haim Steinbach really has this one thing nailed. The second is the visceral resonance of the yellow of the shelf and the yellow of the Bart Simpson mask.
The third thing is this seller at Phillips bought this at Phillips in 2007, so in addition to imagining the 17 years of fascinated engagement this object must have yielded, there’s also a comfort in the circularity of life.
The fourth thing is that in the not so far off future, a latex conservator will be getting a call, and will be forced to reflect on how her years of dedication to the work of Eva Hesse has really brought her to this point. Have your condition report ready.
8 Mar 2024, Lot 194 Haim Steinbach, pop art I-2, 1990, est GBP 15-20,000, same as last time [UPDATE: sold for £12,700, a £10,000 bid, nearly £25,000 lower than it was purchased for. I would not call that a loss, just the price of enjoying living with this beautiful artwork, surely it was worth every farthing.] [phillips]
I don’t think I’ve ever been in an emotionally wrung out state where I get choked up by the beauty of house numbers, but here we f’ing are.
Hector Guimard had these absolutely exquisite numbers cast, like everything else, at the Fondries Saint Dizier. These are painted, which is fine. The set the de Menils bought in 1971 are just naked iron, which is better. The 25yo surmoulage bronze replicas being sold on 1st Dibs look like they’re wearing a gold lamé sweatsuit. It’d be less embarrassing to tape a hundred dollar bill to your door.
[A few excited minutes later update: as recently as a 2016 blog post, le Cercle Guimard reviewed the history of these numerals, which were available as products basically up until WWII. In 1971, some of the earliest connoisseurs rediscovering Guimard obtained the original counter-models from Saint-Dizier, which Dominique de Menil acquired, some for her own collection, and others she donated to the Musée d’Orsay. Their counter-models long gone, Saint-Didier began producing the surmoulage casts in the 1980s.]
12 March 2024, Lot 148: Hector Guimard, House Numerals, est. $3-5,000 [update: whoops, missed this, and they’re gone. were they withdrawn? or did they not sell?] [christies]
I’m haunted by this image by Josef Koudelka, who photographed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and its aftermath. Jan Palach was a 21-year-old student who died in January 1969, after setting himself on fire in Wenceslas Square and running through the streets of Prague.
Koudelka made his photos secretly, under extraordinary and dangerous circumstances, but they always had a feeling of distant historicity. Then a couple of days ago Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old soldier in the US Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy near my house. He was protesting US involvement and support of genocide being committed against Palestinians in Gaza.
Koudelka’s image illustrates Masha Gessen’s New Yorker essay about the implications for the US and its political system for an American soldier to self-immolate in terrible protest against something even worse.
Of all the work remaining to be sold from Chara Shreyer’s fascinating collection, there’s a lot to like. But nothing lands quite like this Cady Noland sculpture. It’s labeled as Patty Hearst Wooden Template, though the aluminum version at MoMA is titled, Tanya as Bandit.
Also this one is dated 1989-90, while MoMA’s—which one would think was created using this template and the instructions written on it in marker—is dated 1989. Maybe it took a little longer for Noland to decide this, too, was a work. But I don’t know, and as the artist’s statement to Sotheby’s makes clear, she was not consulted:
Statement from the Artist:
In an atmosphere of rapidly trading artwork, it is not possible for Cady Noland to agree or dispute the various claims behind works attributed to her. Her silence about published assertions regarding the provenance of any work or the publication of a photograph of a work does not signify agreement about claims that are being made. Ms. Noland has not been asked for nor has she given the rights to any photographs of her works or verified their accuracy or authenticity.
Me, I’d also ask her about that base.
Lot 456: Cady Noland, Patty Hearst Wooden Template, est. $50-70k, update: sold to someone else for $88,900 [sothebys]
Previously, related: An Anthology of Cady Noland Disclaimers
Tania Facsimile Object (N1)
Repeating Sturtevant’s Simulacra, 2013, with some stock footage of Flaco (RIP)
cf. from one of Flaco’s closest observers, @davidlei
previously, related: Sturtevant, Simulacra, 2013