Tim Davis, Girl in a Red Hat (from Permanent Collection), 2003, 22×20 cm, c-print, ed. 6, being sold at LA Modern on Aug. 1, Lot 155
I last thought of Tim Davis’ Permanent Collection project a couple of years ago, during Louise Lawler’s last show at Metro Pictures of Judd sculptures in the dark at MoMA. Lawler’s big dye sublimation prints had a reflective gloss that made them feel like a Davis photo. Meanwhile, like Lawler, but completely different, Davis made so much of the light falling on artworks, and the palpable experience of them.
Anyway, it’s only now, with this full-scale, Permanent Collection image of the National Gallery’s Vermeer, Girl in a Red Hat, glowing with raking light, that I see the project hits closer to Facsimile Object home. Definitely need to go back and look more closely.
Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2003, installed at Andy’s Gamma Gulch Site in Pipe’s Canyon, Pioneertown, for High Desert Test Sites 2, photo: Regen Projects
Looking back at a desert X I can support. This Wade Guyton sculpture from the second High Desert Test Sites in 2003 came to mind this morning. No reason.
Lot 313: Takashi Murakami, MOCA Flowerball Chargers, 2007, via LA Modern
Takashi Murakami designed the printed plastic chargers that decorated each place setting at MOCA’s 2007 Gala. During the dancing, with Tom Ford egging her on, Naomi Campbell started collecting chargers from unattended seats. When people realized what she was up to, it triggered a hoarding frenzy. If you ever see a full set, though, you can guess who the seller is.
This pair chargers must have hailed from a calmer section of the party. A corner where a savvy galagoer had the foresight to bring a Sharpie and invite the guest of honor to sign the their chargers on the verso. He even took several seconds to add doodlese of his little characters. Was there perhaps a line, a scrum, of eager autograph seekers? Did MOCA’s wealthiest patrons stand around in a circle with their little plastic plates, or did they bring them to the gala’s head table where Murakami and Nigo were holding court?
As is the nature of Gala Art, to know how it went down, you had to be there. And now if you buy these plates, you can pretend you were.
Sometimes a volcano’s just a volcano, but probably not here: Robert Smithson, Buried Angel, 1962, oil on canvas, 125 x 125 cm, sold at Christie’s in 2008
Today is the 50th anniversary of Robert Smithson’s death, and an occasion to revisit Zack Hatfield’s Artforum review of Suzaan Boettger’s biography of the artist, Inside The Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson.
Hatfield reminded me that in addition to Smithson’s almost mystical Catholicist early days, Boettger goes deep on his interest in numerology. And she looks closely at Smithson’s early work, only some of which has been shown before. Which reminded me of a wild group of works sold a few years ago—wow. it was 2008—by the family of George Lester, a diplomat/collector/dealer who invited 23-yo Smithson to stage a show in Rome in 1961.
Robert Smithson, Two Frogs Guarding The Palace, 1962, gouache, oil, ink and collage on paper, 24 x 15 1/4 in., sold from the Galleria Lester archives at Christie’s in 2008
The metric dimensions of Buried Angel, the canvas up top with an angel buried in jumbles of numbers and letters, make me think it was painted in Europe. The dimensions of the fantastical collage, Two Frogs Guarding The Palace, meanwhile, could go either way.
In his 1972 AAA interview with Paul Cummings, Smithson described the work from this period as “phantasmagorical drawings of cosmological worlds somewhat between Blake and…oh, a kind of Boschian imagery…They were sort of based on iconic situations…They dealt with explicit images like, the city; they were kind of monstrous as well, you know, like great Moloch figures.”
Tin French loaf cross section from Owen Simmons’ The Book of Bread, 1903, via Public Domain Review
Owen Simmons’ scientific guide for commercial bakers, The Book of Bread, was published in an elaborately produced edition de luxe in 1902, and in a trade edition in 1903. The de luxe edition includes original silver bromide prints of full-size photos of various types of bread pasted in, while the trade edition uses photogravure.
Martin Parr considers it to be the first artist’s photobook, and I can’t think of a reason to disagree.
French Tin loaf in actual size but not here, silver bromide print from The Book of Bread deluxe edition, 1902, via a link mentioned on Public Domain Review
Prof. Shannon Mattern [@shannonmattern.bsky.social] brought this back to my attention this morning, after Public Domain Review posted about it in January, referencing a 2020 thread by a rare book dealer I don’t mention on a social media site I don’t link to. But that dealer’s thread did include images of the silver bromide prints, which are extraordinary, whereas the PDR scan is of the beautiful-but-more-conventional trade version.
David Hammons, A Fan, installed in “Rousing the Rubble” at PS1, 1990-91, image: MoMA
The way I have the installation views of David Hammons 1990 PS1 retrospective, Rousing the Rubble, open in my tabs for months, like a talisman or something, and still have to make the effort to see the unfamiliar right in front of me.
Like this work, A Fan, from 1989, in which a white female mannequin head is perched on a table leaf, turned toward a TV and VCR playing an archival interview with Malcolm X. Next to the TV is a palm fan, and an arrangement of funeral flowers on a white wire stand.
David Hammons’ A Fan, 1989, installed at “Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos, 9.14.1989-11.26.1989, at the New Museum, NY
Hammons showed A Fan the year before, too, in “Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos,” an exhibit of chaos science-related work curated by Laura Trippi at the New Museum. It was seen there by critic Maurice Berger, who wrote about it, and the resurgence of Malcolm X’s voice into contemporary white-dominated cultural discourse, in his 1990 ARTNews essay, “Are Art Museums Racist?”. ARTNews republished the essay in March 2020, to mark Berger’s death from COVID. It is depressingly fresh:
Without the Hammons piece the sensibility of “Strange Attractors” would have been very different, more typical of the splashy group shows of contemporary art that simply ignore the issue of race. That one image threw the entire show into question and pointed up the racial bias of its institutional context. Increasingly, across the country, similar catalysts are inserting painful questions into the heretofore complacent space of exhibition as curators with good intentions attempt to “include” the cultural production of people of color.
Berger quotes some of the Malcolm X video Hammons used: “There is nothing that the white man will do to bring about true, sincere citizenship or civil rights recognition for black people in this country. They will always talk but they won’t practice it.” Which, though it sounds like it could have been said yesterday, is an interview from UC Berkeley from October 11, 1963.
The TV, VCR, flowers, and fan are all different between the two installations. At the New Museum, the name Malcolm is spelled out in gold glitter on the red bow on the flowers. Of Hammons’ work at PS1, Otomo wrote, “[T]he feeling of being challenged was merely a result of the implosion of the ingrained hypocrisy inside us. Hammons’ work never shows off theory or words. They threaten us, the viewers, just by being there.” She noted that her companion Steve, explaining the unfamiliar cultural references to her, said he “had tried to listen to Malcolm X’s arguments in the 60s.”
Though it would be good to see it now, the present whereabouts/status of A Fan is unknown.
It’s hard to imagine that the cheapest real estate listing in Georgetown still feels overpriced.
A wall was listed for sale yesterday, for $50,000. If the dimensions, 22 square feet, are accurate, that is $2,273/sf, more than twice the going rate for premium renovated townhouse space.
Of course, the difference is, there’s no space here; 22sf is the entire lot [sic] and structure [sic]. The wall is solid brick. It’s a one-foot wide party wall that used to belong to some building that got torn down and replaced by a 1980s bank parking lot. And yet, it does not belong to the bank.
This seeming surveyor’s error of a property barely justifies the term, and yet, there it is.
“Own a piece of Georgetown. This wall located at 30 and M NW. The opportunities are limitless,” the listing hilariously lies.
What opportunities exist for the owner of this wall? The opportunity to abide by centuries of law regarding party walls, for one. So you could you tear it down and build a 1×22 foot, three story fish tank, as long as it doesn’t pose any risk to the house next door.
You could paint a mural on it—the wall is fairly visible from Georgetown’s main drag, M Street—if you wanted the opportunity of subjecting yourself to the nitpicky conservative tastes of the Old Georgetown Board, which advises the federal Commission on Fine Arts, the bodies which review basically any construction, sign, or visual art proposal that is visible from these historic streets. If it were possible or profitable to paint or wrap something on the wall, I’m sure the current owner would be doing it.
I think the most realistic opportunity is for the owner of the neighboring townhouse to buy it for something between $50,000 and a dollar.
[Morning After, How Could I Have Been So Wrong? Update: The Wall will be the site of limitless radical and innovative visual experience, commissioned from the most daring artists, advertising agencies, political actors, and hypebeasts, which are presented regularly to the Old Georgetown Board for review and disapproval. Proposals for The Old Georgetown Billboard will be performed as part of the public discourse. Renderings will circulate in the stakeholder community, and will be collected online as a visual archive. For IRL visitors, Augmented Reality technology will provide scintillating, sponsored spectacle. This joint is about to go from an orphaned party wall to a global wall party. Let the bidding commence.]
[7/25: The Washington Post writes around my proposal like I’m not even here. The ignominy. Also, the seller of the wall, who has a $2.14 basis [!] is like, I didn’t rub two brain cells together to come up with this price. He really should just give the wall to the neighbor at this point. This whole thing is messy and hilarious af. Let this site eventually memorialize what might have been.]
Kelly worked out the colors and dimensions of the five monochrome panels in Sanary, a seaside village in France he visited in 1952. It’s one of the largest of the very few paintings he actually made in France and brought home with him to New York in 1954. The work he developed in Sanary has been on my mind for years; it’s some of his formative work that would inform his whole career.
Ellsworth Kelly, Painting for a White Wall, 1952, 23 x 71 in., oil on canvas on five joined panels, photographed for Glenstone by Ron Amstutz
The NGA’s text, written by curator Molly Donovan, cites Yve Alain Bois’ research that Kelly began with found colors, a set of paper stickers used in French kindergartens known as papier gommette. The colors are very similar to another multipanel work from the same moment, Painting for a White Wall, 1952, which is now in Glenstone’s collection. As Yve-Alain Bois discussed here when his CR Vol. 1 came out, Tiger was instrumental to the beginning of Kelly’s official exploration of color behavior; it was where he set out to understand “the strange orange/pink” that had occurred in the found colors of Painting for a White Wall.
Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Tiger, 1952, collage on paper, 6.5 x 6.9 in., via Art Basel 2017
Anyway, the relationships of the various panels are intuited, not mathematical. Kelly worked them out in sketches and collages, like the one Matthew Marks brought to Basel in 2017.
What I didn’t know until seeing the painting in person and reading up on it, is Kelly’s interest in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. In the 1973 catalogue for Kelly’s MoMA retrospective E.C. Goossen mentions Kelly’s Sanary-era sketchbooks include drawings of the altarpiece’s hinged construction alongside drawings of various compositions of windows and shutters, and even studies for a hinged painting. The connection to Kelly’s most important Paris painting—also in the Glenstone show—the multipanel construction repeating the window of the Musée d’Art Moderne, is obvious.
Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1982, 67 x 96 in., oil and encaustic and silkscreen and arms on canvas, in the Meyerhoff Collection at the NGA
What most intrigues me, though, is the possible connection to Jasper Johns. In 1987 Jill Johnston did an exhaustive and revelatory analysis of Johns’ incorporation of fragments and details of the Isenheim Altarpiece into his paintings in the 1980s. One of the first is Perilous Night, from 1982, a work that is also at the National Gallery.
Actually, now that I put it up there, the composition of Johns’ painting feels very resonant with that of Kelly’s panels in Tiger. Johns did tell Johnston he got a book about the Isenheim Altarpiece from a friend. Didn’t say who, though. From Short Circuit to Flag to In Memory of My Feelings, hinged and multipanel paintings were on the minds of young artists in downtown Manhattan in 1954. I wonder what we could learn from a Kelly/Johns show. I’m sure Tiger would be a fascinating starting point.
[Next day update: On an impulse I checked for reservations at Glenstone last night, and there was space available this morning, so I went, and it was hot and glorious. I listened to most of an aquatic horticulturist lecture pondside, which was fascinating. The pond in the center of the Pavilions building is as thoughtful as the rest of the landscape, which really never disappoints. Even Split Rocker looked good. Not landscape per se, but you know.
Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VII, 1951, 99 x 100 cm, collage on paper, at Glenstone
There were some new pieces in the Charles Ray pavilion, always a marvel. And a couple of beautiful Kelly works on paper, including the dazzling, large collage above, from 1951, in the spot where Tiger was hanging. So I guess they rotate things. It was a low-key flex that they had such an amazing work on hand and didn’t just jump to include it in the show, but chose to let the loans tell the fuller story of Kelly’s practice. Truly a dynamic place amidst all the contemplative stillness.]
Facsimile Object of Girl Who Goes To Europe For A Couple of Months, Comes Back With A Vermeer Accent
The National Gallery sent out word that the Vermeers are back, as is this one, which is now not a Vermeer again. Oh wait, only two Vermeer Vermeers are back. Girl With A Red Hat is still on the road. [Or not yet ready to come out. It doesn’t look like it’s on loan anywhere, and just weeks after Amsterdam, why would it be?]
I looked at the episode numbers and thought it must be a mistake, but no, there hasn’t been a Better Read since 2021. But I’ve used a Sturtevant text before, in a way; in 2016, I had a computer read several pages of Spinoza’s Ethica, a text Sturtevant included in Vertical Nomad, which she showed at Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 2008.
Sturtevant, Simulacra, 2010, single channel 16:9 video, installation view at Matthew Marks, 2022
A 16:9 iStockvideo of a horned owl was one of many found clips of animals and athletes Sturtevant used in her later works. The video clip shows up in Simulacra (2010), which was seen most recently last fall in the Sturtevant show at Matthew Marks.
Installation view from Sturtevant: Memes, at Freedman Fitzpatrick, 2019, via CAD
It was included in the first show of Sturtevant’s video work in LA, in 2019 at Freedman Fitzpatrick, called, alas, Sturtevant: Memes.
installation view of Sturtevant: Double Trouble, 2014-15, at MoMA
Sturtevant used a screencap of the image as Warhol-style wallpaper in Double Trouble, her retrospective at MoMA in 2014-15, which opened a few months after her death. [At MoMA, it was actually preceded by a wall of Warhol cow wallpaper.]
installation view of Rock & Roll Simulacra, Act 3 (2013) in Leaps Jumps & Bumps, 2013 at the Serpentine Galleries, image: Jerry Hardman-Jones
And before that it was in both video and wallpaper for Leaps Jumps & Bumps at the Serpentine, the last show of her work to open during her lifetime. The aspect ratio seemed important, or intrinsic, a characteristic of the age and the system of media we were all soaking in.
Sturtevant, Rock & Roll Simulacra, Act 3, 2013, 18×32 cm, inkjet on paper, ed. 250, via Serpentine Galleries
Sturtevant also published a screencap from the video as a fundraising edition for the Serpentine. The 16:9 image was printed at 18×32 cm on a piece of paper whose stated size, 39.3 x 53.5 cm, is well within the margin of error of 4:3, video’s old aspect ratio. Sturtevant was not one for nostalgia, though, so I imagine that dimension is coincidental. Anyway, back in the day, when I tried to buy one of the prints from the Serpentine, they said the artist had not been well enough to sign but a few of the intended edition, and their stock had run out.
At various points since, I’ve looked for the iStockvideo clip Sturtevant used. Thanks to corporate rebranding the watermark was replaced with “iStock by Getty Images.” So hers has now become an artifact of the very system she was laying bare. [Next morning update: on the other hand, you can recreate it with a $60 license and After Effects. She was still right, though.]
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (USA Today), 1990, detail image from a 2011 installation at the MMK Frankfurt, FG-T Foundation via Jewish Museum
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (USA Today) was included in Take Me (I’m Yours), an exhibition of participatory artworks, which opened at the Jewish Museum in New York in September 2016. The show was first conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1995 in particular reference to Gonzalez-Torres’ work. HUO was joined by Jens Hoffman and Kelly Taxter at the Jewish Museum in organizing the expanded view.
I opted for the image above because it feels like it could be from anywhere, but it is from Specific Objects Without Specific Form, a three-venue, 2011 exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’ work organized by Elena Filipovic in 2010-2011. Filipovic included the work at Wiels in Brussels and at MMK Frankfurt in 2011. When the show was reconfigured by the artist co-curators at each venue, Danh Vo and Tino Sehgal, respectively, the work was removed, swapped out with another candy piece owned by MoMA, “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991. The extensive catalogue for the show was published in 2016.
The parenthetical in the title, USA Today, was originally a reference to a brightly colored newspaper with nationwide circulation, which you’d have to step over every morning on your way out of your mid-range hotel room. The artist once told Bob Nickas the piece referenced the “sugar rush” of patriotism. Obviously, I chose it for the color and everything else.
Apsara loves Mitoken is a Japanese blog specializing in the many limited edition gadgets made to commemorate important occasions involving the Thai Royal Family.
There were at least nine limited edition watches produced to commemorate the 60th anniversary of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s accession to the Thai throne in 2006, including a Patek Philippe and GUIDING LIGHT THAILAND, a commemorative Swatch, issued in a limited edition of 4509. From the text inside the special commemorative cardboard box:
Thai Airways International Public Company Limited is proud to celebrate with all the kingdom the joyous and auspicious occasion of His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne with a limited edition of Thai Airways International and SWATCH wrist watch uniquely made to celebrate this glorious event.
As His Majesty has always been a “guiding light” for the Thai people, symbolic guiding stars appear on the watch. The Thai numerical number “sixty” is attached to the strap, signifying the 60th Anniversary of His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne, and the strap is yellow as this is the color traditionally associated with Monday, the day of His Majesty’s birth.
Upon the death of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 2016, the throne passed to his son. His Majesty King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun’s coronation in 2019 was commemorated by the release of a gold-plated wrist watch by the Italian fashion brand Klasse14 featuring the Royal Emblem on the face. It was available at a Klasse14 pop-up shop at the Siam Paragon Watch Expo that auspicious summer. One can easily imagine that His Majesty The King, who primarily lives in Bavaria, will be the inspiration for a great many things that convey the unique character of His Majesty’s glorious reign.
[five minutes later update: It appears my investigation of commemorative Royal Thai gold-plated Leica cameras has been incomplete. Wayne Bremser just posted a link to the 2022 release of the Leica M10-P Royal Thai limited edition digital camera and matching lens, in gold-plate and gold or green alligator. Of the edition of 30, six were given to the Royal Family, and 22 were purchased by ThaiBev, the country’s largest distiller. ThaiBev is controlled by Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, the country’s second richest person (not counting His Majesty The King, obv), and is run by his son Thapana, who instigated the edition. The 22 cameras were auctioned at Christie’s in Bangkok and Singapore last fall, thus giving the elite of Thailand and the companies they control the chance to publicly demonstrate their support for 22 of His Majesty’s favorite charities. So far I have found one result, of a real estate developer paying 5x the retail price for a camera ThaiBev donated to a foundation for the blind.]
[Few Days Later Update: I was traveling and did not win the auction for four limited edition Swatches designed by and/or commemorating key moments in the life of the Thai Royal Family.]
Lot 653, 11 Dec 2007 at Wright20, sold for $12,000
Speaking of Donald Judd chairs, a copper armchair was ordered, and produced by Lehni in 2006. It was sold at auction for some reason in 2007. It was sold at auction again in 2011. It is now, in 2023, up for sale again.
Lot 216, 27 June 2011 at Wright20, sold for $10,625
The copper armchair is sort of the archetypal piece of Judd furniture. In a project about seriality and variation, it is a single statement chair. And in its relatively brief, 16-year existence, this single chair has clearly seen some stuff.
Lot 145, 18 July 2023 at LA Modern, current bid: $6,000 [update: it sold for $15,720]
In 2007, it looked pristine, practically new. In 2011, it had clearly been polished for sale. And in 2023, wow, dawg, you live like this? Beyond the overall patina, which is substantial, there are two holes [?], vertically aligned, on one side where, I don’t even know what; they seem too low for a cupholder?
Speaking of gorgeous patina: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1972, image via Sprueth-Magers
I was trying to remember where I got the idea that Judd insisted that his metal objects, particularly his bronze and copper works, be either perfectly maintained or left undisturbed to accrue the physical rewards of the passage of time. So I googled it, and it turns out I was told that by a Judd person, and I’d blogged about it 10 years ago when bronze kitchens were a thing.
And so it is that this one, exceptional chair is in perfect harmony with its creator’s intent, and it is also able to tell its own thrice-flipped material story, while reminding me of my own.
