Seeing these photos of Keith Haring drawing on the subway platform on my tumblr dashboard this morning, I was struck for the first time by the pristine surface of his background.
Did the MTA really have a street team installing fresh black monochromes on unsold ad spaces while the rest of the system buckled? How long did they stay clean? Did they go up on a schedule? Did Keith have to rush out on the first of the month to beat other street artists to the empty space? Did Richard Serra ever make drawings in the subway, or did he just make a lifetime of drawings of the subway? Subway Delivers People.
Did anyone take photos of subway stations with all black monochrome ad units, or was it the de facto state that became invisible to people who had to deal with it?
Keith Haring in the subway at 42nd at 8th, I think, photo: Ivan Dalla Tana via NYT, but the Haring Foundation has a ton of his photos of subway drawings, including a lot of diptychs with ads
[after 30 seconds of googling update: yeah nevermind, Haring’s subway landscape was not a monochrome’d out paradise. It looked a lot like it’s always looked, with occasional blacked out ad boards interspersed among actual ads. Which would make his tagging more opportunistic. He probably didn’t have to look too hard for space, but it wasn’t everywhere all the time.]
I hate that this needed to come back: Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, 2021 —
NGL, it does not feel like a moment to celebrate, and it’ll take a lot of work for 2024 to not become the biggest dumpster fire yet.
But whether via email, commentary, hyping or buying things, many people have engaged with me, the blog, and the various projects this year, and I’m grateful for all of the thoughtful and invigorating interactions. To close out the year, here are a couple of art accomplishments in 2023 which I found satisfying. They are in roughly chronological order:
Celebrating Ellsworth Kelly’s 100th: EK 10 MAR 23 T [via]Biggest show of the year: Mural With Girl With A Pearl, obv [via]Jasper Johns’ Stolen Balls [via]Meanwhile, in this, year three of me swearing I’m not a dog painting guy: Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre Facsimile Object (D1), ‘Pompon’, obv [via]Underground Projection Room (for Rattlesnakes), 2023 [via]Proposed Katharina Grosse (PKG) for Basel, 2023 [via]The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, 2023—? [via]Happy Joan Mitchell Season T [via]
Man Ray, le Cube d’Alberto Giacometti, 1934, 12 x 9 cm, from a photonegative, at the Pompidou
So when I saw this, the earliest photo of Cube, which was taken in Alberto Giacometti’s studio by Man Ray and published in Minotaure in 1934 under the title Nocturnal Pavilion, float by on a timeline somewhere, I thought, hell yeah I’ll repost that. Just let me read Georges Didi-Huberman’s book about it, Le Cube et le Visage, first, for a little value-add.
Four months later update: Wow, seriously? How does art writing like this exist? What is that headspace even like? Maybe I should have just stuck with the old wall text from the Pompidou, which holds one of the two plaster versions of the 94cm tall sculpture that gave Didi-Huberman so much trouble. And, tbf, Giacometti before him.
[L to R] Henry Codax, Lemonade 1, Strawberry 1, Lemonade 2, Strawberry 2, all 2017, all 7’x3.5′, all acrylic on canvas, as installed in “Strawberry Lemonade,” 2017-18 at Everybody, Tucson, Arizona
I confess I thought Henry Codex’s project had fizzled out, when in fact, I had just lost the thread. Since 2017 Codax has had solo shows in Zürich, Paris, and Tucson—twice. This morning Joshua Caleb Weibley skeeted some begrudging praise for Tucson gallery Everybody’s second Codax exhibition, which is currently on view.
Installation view of Henry Codax’s 2023-24 exhibition at Everybody
Unlike the first, “Strawberry Lemonade,” which was staged in Everybody’s original warehouse situation, this untitled show of untitled works fills Everybody’s current murdered-out bungalow space. For an artist known [sic] for large, pristinely executed monochromes, these new paintings, as the gallery’s terse press release notes, “mark a shift in the artist’s approach.” Well, yes and no.
Robert Brownjohn’s Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, 1959, seen from inside the lobby of 500 Park Avenue, via Peter Huestis’ skeet
Designer/adman Robert Brownjohn had been pumping up the design of Pepsi-Cola World, the monthly corporate magazine sent to bottlers, for a couple of years when he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the lobby of the company’s soon-to-open world headquarters at 500 Park Avenue.
Robert Brownjohn, Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, chicken wire and Christmas ornaments, Dec. 1959, detail, installed at 500 Park Ave., image: robertbrownjohn.com
The result was Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, described by Brownjohn’s official site as “a giant wave supported by pilotti” which was “elaborately constructed with thousands of multi-coloured Christmas baubles embedded in an armature of chicken wire.”
Robert Brownjohn, Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, chicken wire and Christmas ornaments, Dec. 1959, exterior view, installed at 500 Park Ave., image: robertbrownjohn.com
From the exterior views on Brownjohn’s site, the sculpture seems to have filled almost the entire 100-foot wide facade of Natalie de Blois’ building. The Pepsi-Cola Building is, along with Lever House, the Seagram Building, and the Manufacturers Trust Building (510 Fifth Ave.), one the greatest International Style building in New York. It is certainly the most quietly elegant.
The lobby, entirely open, was originally designed as an exhibition space, but no exhibition mentioned in the building’s history sounds remotely as successful as Robert Brownjohn’s chicken wire sculpture that went on view for a couple of months before the building even opened. And which I had never heard a peep about until this morning, when Peter Huestis posted it on BlueSky.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer painting, as installed at Rijksmuseum
It was the exhibition of the year, and it was truly an unexpected honor to be a part of it. The Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition lives online in a 360-degree panoramic version, and I’m thrilled to confirm that Mural With Girl With A Pearl (2023) can also still be experienced and studied virtually.
Like the Vermeer it incorporates, Mural With Girl With A Pearl deploys paint to hint at a spatial complexity that extends beyond the field of vision. And it also relies on subtle shifts of light to activate its painterly gestures. That these nuances can be communicated in the mediated experience of the virtual pseudo-space is truly a testament to the enduring magic of painting.
Gertrude Stein and her second poodle, Basket II, flank a portrait of Basket II by Marie Laurencin
On Bluesky, Michael Lobel keeps ringing the dog painting bell, and I keep salivating. Friday morning he posted this photo of Gertrude Stein sitting with her and Alice B. Toklas’ dog, holding a portrait of the dog by Marie Laurencin. Stein and Toklas had three dogs in succession, all named Basket. This was Basket II.
The painting is in the Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas Papers collection at the Beinecke Library, and has not, as yet, been transferred to the Yale Art Gallery. [next day update: I was wrong. The painting is indeed on permanent loan to the Gallery. Who nevertheless does not show it in their collection.]
There is no date. Laurencin came into Stein’s orbit as early as 1908-1910, during her (Laurencin’s obv) affairs with Apollinaire and Nicole Groult. Basket I makes many appearances in the second and fourth albums of Stein’s photographs in the Beinecke, the mid- to late 1930s. Basket II appears in Vol. 4. Oh, the photo above is from Vol. 5, which dates from 1940-1945, and includes soldiers’ photos of a burned out Berchtesgaden. So this presumably follows Laurencin’s rehabilitation after her affairs with the Nazis during the occupation. The verso of the photo has a label, “From tHe CollECtioN Of CaRl VAN VecHten.”
[Next day update: from the published letters between Stein & Van Vechten, the portrait was painted in 1946, before March. Stein sent Van Vechten a photo; was it this one? The photo is well-published, if thinly discussed.]
There is also in the collection a one-page object from 1950 titled, Hommage à Basket : an impression, by Surrealist instigator Lise Deharme, which includes a portrait by Laurencin. Posthumous to Stein, of course, but perhaps relevant.
self-portrait in Liz Deschenes’ Untitled (Gorilla Glass Indigo 100), 2023 at Miguel Abreu
I had a speedrun through Manhattan to pick up some gifts and see some shows, starting with Gravity Pull, Liz Deschenes’ beautiful show of monochromes on Gorilla Glass in the morning light, plus some handblown Claude Glass-inspired pictures? Objects? Optical devices? Transfixing.
Still from Salomé Jashi’s Taming The Garden, 2021, showing a giant tree on the Black Sea en route to Ivanishvili’s private tree zoo. images via a German-titled arte broadcast uploaded to YouTube
In 2021 Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi released Taming The Garden, a documentary about the creation of the Shekvetili Dendrological Park. Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian oligarch-turned-politician who minted his $6 billion fortune in Russia, spent five years collecting over 200 old-growth trees from around the country, which he had transplanted in a park of his own design next to his estate on the Black Sea. The park opened to the public in 2020.
Residents of a Georgian village follow their tree as it drives out of town in Taming The Garden, along a route with probably 90% fewer infrastructure hassles or regulatory hoops to jump through than that rock had to face on its way to LACMA
In her film, Jashi follows several trees as they are removed from the village s, farms, and forests where they’ve been for centuries. She records the resignation and loss of the locals, as well as the surreal transport of the uprooted trees along rural roads, and on barges. The filmmaking is quietly powerful, with dramatic images that only reveal the project’s traumas and absurdities and slowly.
NO SPOILERS but Jashi’s quiet revelations of the sheer artificiality of this ostensibly idyllic natural landscape are amazing
A 2022 dispatch from Ivan Nechepurenko in the New York Times, with striking photos by Daro Sulaukari, reports that around half the trees arrived by sea, and half by truck. The entire project cost Ivanishvili “tens of millions” of dollars, which seems like a pittance for what he did and what he got.
Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, 2005, image via NYT
Why, in 2005, when Nancy Holt authorized Floating Island, a previously unrealized project of her late husband, Robert Smithson, it cost $250,000 to drive a single barge around lower Manhattan for a week.
A miniature version of The Gates chasing a miniature version of Central Park, by, as it turned out, Bruce High Quality Foundation and Robert Smithson, respectively, as captured by Ian Adelman in 2005 in the NYT
I guess I should be more shocked, surprised, dismayed, whatever that Land Art, created in opposition to the collector-pandering commodification of the gallery system, has been so thoroughly subsumed by the billionaire class. But then again, Double Negative was produced and owned by a 3M heiress who donated the first version of Lightning Field, realized on her New Mexico ranch, to the foundation started by the oil heiress which built the permanent version. And which now manages Spiral Jetty. And of course, it was New York’s own oligarch-turned-politician Michael Bloomberg who made Christo & Jeanne Claude’s Gates happen. And the industrialist with the private museum has taken on the care and funding of City. Is Land Art actually about real estate and power? Always was.
“For me, a floating tree was a symbol of power, of desire, of wanting something at any cost,” Ms. Jashi told the NYT. If Land Art can accommodate the Department of Defense’s creations at Dugway Proving Grounds, the cost-be-damned symbolic gestures of a tree-obsessed oligarch should fit right in.
Didn’t think anything of it the first time, but this summer when I watched Mary Jacobus’ 2016 talk at Cornell’s Olin Library about her then-new book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, I was intrigued by this Tacita Dean photo of Twombly’s library, and wanted to know what this sculpture is.
Maybe I noticed it because Dean’s 2008 photos of Gaeta had since been exhibited publicly, at the Fondazione Nicola del Roscio in 2021-22. [Frith Street Gallery has the writeup in English.] Dean had asked Twombly to help select 50 pictures for a photo essay in the catalogue for his 2009 show at MUMOK in Vienna. Prints of these 50, plus one more (a detail of Giorgio Morandi’s workspace), were shown alongside Edwin Parker (2011), Dean’s quietly observant film portrait of Twombly, shot in Lexington, Virginia in late 2010, not long before his death.
detail of a screenshot from somewhere of Tacita Dean’s Edwin Parker (2011), with Twombly’s meds and mail on Twombly’s sculpture
I’ve always loved how Dean captured how Twombly’s sculptures existed in his cramped, storefront studio, thoroughly embedded in life, arrayed with meds, mail, and bulldog clips. Which is exactly how Twombly installed [sic] the classical figure on the console table in his library.
Or as Jacobus described it, “the so-called library,” which was also (?) “the room where Twombly slept. Three walls were covered with art books, and this one, the fourth, with literature and poetry. She explained that Dean didn’t publish this image because it had a blurry spot on the side. Dean is fluent in blur, so we must defer. But about the sculpture:
Angel, Neapolitan, 2nd half of the 18th century, terra cotta, wood, fabric and wire, via MetMuseum
Jacobus called it a “flying sculpture,” which, yes and no. What might look like angelic wings are actually very exuberant drapery, which the twisted, nude figure with a tablet is just about to escape completely. I’ve come back to this sculpture several times this year, trying to identify it, and it’s only now, at Christmas, that I see drapery that wild. Except it’s actually fabric, on the 18th century Baroque Neapolitan crèche figures on the Christmas Tree at the Met. The pose, meanwhile, feels like someone knew the Sibyls on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling.
Michelangelo, The Delphic Sybil, Sistine Ceiling
So I’ve been rummaging around in Italian sculpture fragments, plaster ornaments, pediment sculptures, it says Le on that plaque, is he an allegorical figure of the law? But does it, though?
Cy Twomb-LEE? I think this is painted terra cotta? And what’s up with that left hand?
Because now I think it says “LEE.” Is that somehow related to the former president of the college Twombly attended, in the Virginia town he grew up in, and to which he returned later in his life? Because that would be Robert E. Lee, who is indeed buried along with much of his family and his horse on the grounds of what became Washington & Lee University. These are the Lees I’ve found so far; I would very much love to find others, and to learn that Twombly rescued this statue from their home renovation, or even their gravestone toppling, rather than that he schlepped a melodramatic Lost Cause beefcake statue to Italy to put over his library bed.
[Day Later Update: Of course, maybe the answer lies in the 2019 book, Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, which contains 136 images compiled and edited by Lothar Schirmer, and an account of the featured locations by Twombly’s longtime collaborator Nicola Del Roscio, in which the pictured locations are revealed as unique repositories of art, antiques, and furniture, and as sanctuaries for their late resident’s creative expression. Re-read this description and buy the book at Gagosian Shop.]
Lee Ranaldo, Four Organs (Tom), aka Torn Photograph (for SR & RS) (maquette version), 2000? 7 x 7 inches, ed. 25 at Paul + Wendy Projects
In 2000 Lee Ranaldo made a torn photo artwork for a limited edition Sonic Youth box set. It was a photo taken in the basement of his building, of the four organs minimalist composer Steve Reich used for his groundbreaking 1970 work, Four Organs.
Robert Smithson, Torn Photograph, &c., 21 1/2 x 21 1/2 in., offset lithograph torn in quarters, via Marian Goodman
The idea of tearing a photo into quarters came from Robert Smithson, whose Torn Photograph from the 2nd Stop (Rubble) (2nd Mountain of Six Stops on a Section) was included in the Artists & Photographs box set published in 1970 by Multiples, Inc. [It was also on the cover of the catalogue for LACMA’s 1993 exhibition, Robert Smithson Photo Works.]
the 1993 exhibition catalogue for Robert Smithson: Photo Works, as once for sale Arcana Books
This was a Smithson I bought for some friends back in the day, when Marian Goodman was clearing out a bunch of loosies from the Multiples, Inc. warehouse. They were supercheap and perfect. But I just saw the Lee Ranaldo edition again while looking for art edition gifts at Paul + Wendy Projects, and I wanted to find out more.
Fortunately, Dave Dyment’s blog, Artists’ Books & Multiples, has a writeup of the whole thing, including the hilarious detail from a 2011 interview with Ranaldo, that the dimensions of digital file sent to Paul + Wendy were off, resulting in a tiny “Spinal Tap ‘Stonehenge’ version” of the print. Which explains the “(maquette version).” I love it.
Related: In 1998, Lee Ranaldo released an album, Amarillo Ramp (for Robert Smithson), with a 32-minute sound portrait of Smithson’s last work as its title track.
an unidentified photo of Duchamp’s 1938 installation, with paintings hung on one of two revolving doors he put on either side of the perforated iron brazier that provided most of the light. ganked from Elena Filipovic’s dissertation
Specifically, I never really noticed or heard that much about the revolving doors Marcel Duchamp used as exhibition devices in the 1938 Exposition internationale du surréalisme he designed/curated at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. As Murtha pointed out, Duchamp later considered other elements from the show to be artworks—1200 Coal Bags Suspended From The Ceiling Over a Stove, for example—but the doors didn’t get the same treatment. Despite, as I see below, Duchamp’s well-documented interest in doors—and Large Glass works that, you must admit, look rather doorish.
