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l’Ultimo Mobile, di Martino Gamper

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.

Obrist hosted conversations and reminiscences about Mari and Vergine on the Triennale’s Instagram Live, including one with Martin Gamper, where he discussed the tribute Obrist and Serpentine curator Rebecca Lewin requested of him:

“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.”
Disegno Daily quoting from Martino Gamper’s Triennale IG Live, posted October 29, 2020, but subsequently redesigned into oblivion.

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.

The Last Furniture: Martino Gamper’s Tribute to Enzo Mari [serpentinegalleries.org]

Autoprogettazione, Autodistruzione

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?

Enzo Mari was a Universe [disegnojournal, s/o designnow]

Teichert vs The Church: God Is My Co-Defendant

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.]

The Chinese Star

The sole purpose of this vehicle would be to be seen. To be seen by [330 million Americans,] [1 billion] 400 million Chinese, 200 million Russians, [one billion] 400 million Indians, etc. The ~~American~~ Chinese Star, rising in the west and setting in the east. Father would show it to son, and the priests would be asked about it, too. It would be punctual and predictable like a clock. Don’t you think this would do more for the ~~Western~~ Asiatic cause in the ~~Asiatic~~ Western mind than the Korean war, the existence of the A-bomb, or ~~the Voice of America~~ TikTok?
Adapted from nazi-American rocket scientist Werner von Braun’s 1955 epilogue to a Time Life Books paperback about the future of space flight, in which he called for the United States to use his old V-2 rockets to launch “The American Star,” a giant, white balloon, into space, just to freak the other countries out. [quoted here]

On Kawara Date Painting Stickers

It was On’s ’80s sticker sheet, he coppeth one of three

Among the rich and rare On Kawara publications and ephemera assembled by bookseller Jonathan A. Hill for their latest catalogue [No. 242], past the massive and already unavailable facsimiles and limited editions of Kawara’s conceptual journals I Went, I Met, I Read, or I Got Up, is an unexpectedly kawaii delight.

The small exhibition catalogue for Kawara’s Oct.-Nov. 1983 show at Galerie Watari in Tokyo, On Kawara: Date Paintings 1981-1983…On Sundays, which is mostly a facsimile of the artist’s journal recording the details of each painting he made during the interval of the title, includes three sheets of Date Painting stickers. As every catalogue of On Kawara, and indeed every artist, should from now on.

This Royal Thrown of Punks, Diss Sceptred Tee

Vivienne Westwood/Seditionaries, Jubilee rant shirt, recto, from the personal collection of Malcolm McLaren to the V&A

This the 81st anniversary of his birth is the perfect time to say Derek Jarman had Vivienne Westwood’s number, and she knew it.

In Artforum, punk obituarist Derek McCormack tells The Story of The T-Shirt:

Speaking about Exhibition Space, the Sky Survey, and Satelloons at CPNAS

It’ll be ten years since “Exhibition Space: Images, Objects, and Perception from the early days of the Space Race,” the show I curated at apexart, and I’ve been thinking about it and revisiting it a bit.

Thanks to apexart’s expansive invitation, the show helped me recognize a significant connection between the two main visual and photographic subjects: the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, the first and last photograph of the visible universe before the space age; and Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter mirrored satelloon that was the first manmade object in space visible to the naked eye.

In June 2013, I was invited to talk about the show at the National Academies of Science, which was awesome, and I brought the 10-foot satelloon modeled after the one presented at the US Capitol. It was a great evening, but I remember the webcast being a little complicated, and so assumed it was one of those ‘you had to be there’ moments lost to time.

In fact, it’s been on the Youtube channel of CPNAS, the Cultural Programs for the National Academies of Science, all this time. Go pump up those views!

Previously: ‘Exhibition Space’ Installation Snaps

The Exceptional Sale of A Print of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys

frames from the first of six 35mm reels of a vintage print of Andy Warhol’s 1968-69 film, *Lonesome Cowboys*, being sold at Christie’s Jan. 27, 2023, est. $20-30,000

As if everything in Christie’s The Exceptional Sale weren’t already exceptional enough, the sale ends with the greatest gilt dessert stands France ever made, part of the greatest table centerpiece and dinner service France ever made, commissioned by the duc d’Orleans; the original cover art for a Led Zeppelin album; and a rare, vintage 35mm exhibition print of Andy Warhol’s 1968-69 pseudo-feature film, Lonesome Cowboys.

The lot description for this Lonesome Cowboys print is extraordinary. Maybe like the texts about the Arizona Spike, and for this sale as a whole, the exceptional is the norm. Lonesome Cowboys was not just an anti-narrative, queer, softcore, experimental anti-Western filmed over a cold week in a Tuscon cowboy theme park; investigated by the FBI; and slowly edited while Warhol recovered from being shot. It was the first brick thrown in the “Stonewall of the South,” a powerful document in the fight for equality.

The Exceptional Sale of The Arizona Spike

The Arizona Spike, presented at Promontory Point, Utah on 10 May 1869 by Arizona Territory Governor Anson Safford, for the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, being sold by the Museum of the City of New York at Christie’s on 27 January 2023, est. $300-500,000.

First of all, it seems buck wild that a spike from the Golden Spike ceremony marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad is even available for sale. Second, but really first, it is even wilder how hard the lot description for the spike rides for its urgent historical relevance right. now.

Maybe it helps that the spike, known as the Arizona Spike, is being sold in Christie’s “Exceptional Sale,” an off-season, cross-department assemblage of objets whose only obvious common thread is their uniqueness. But I’m hard-pressed to think of another auction text that makes a stronger case, not just for an object’s historical significance, but its contextualization in the current culture. It’s a text that belongs in a museum, like the spike itself.

Which, yeah, funny story. The spike is one of four [or seven, or maybe even eight, with at least one missing, this essay does have everything] made for the hastily organized 1869 ceremony, and is being sold by the Museum of the City of New York, where it was donated in 1943, by a New York descendant of Sidney Dillon, the Union Pacific executive and US Government defrauder who took the spike home from the hammering.

That defrauding’s in there, along with the delay to the ceremony when Dillon and other execs had their private rail car decoupled in Wyoming, and were held hostage by Union Pacific laborers who hadn’t been paid for five months. And the dispossession of Indian lands by the railroad grants. And the racist legislation banning immigration from China, where so many of the actual railroad workers came from. The same workers who got their due after several paragraphs detailing the preening rivalries and promotional dithering, including the Central Pacific’s Leland Stanford’s wiring his spike to the telegraph, so that his hammer blow would go out to the nation live–and then he missed:

The dignitaries soon left the scene while a Chinese crew replaced the ceremonial tie with a pine tie and common iron spikes — leading one journalist to declare, most appropriately, that in reality was not [the Union Pacific’s Dr. Thomas] Durant or Stanford, but rather it was the ‘Chinese who really laid the last tie and drove the last spike.'”

Somewhere in this Andrew J. Russell photo is Sidney Dillon, possibly holding a/this railroad spike. The Chinese laborers who actually completed the railway were somehow not included

Anyway, the lot description and the feature article related to it are truly a journey. It addresses the spike’s provenance, trying to harmonize incomplete contemporary media references–a very Arizona Spike-ish spike was reportedly displayed in a San Francisco jewelry store weeks after Dillon presumably took the spike back east with him from Promontory, Utah–with family lore–from a family which included a namesake/great-grandson who became secretary of the Smithsonian. But it also puts the historic significance of the Golden Spike (or Last Spike) ceremony and the transcontinental railroad itself into both historic and contemporary context with amazing candor and rigor. What feels like it should be the rule for museums is, for an auction house, exceptional.

UPDATE: Sold for a hammer price of $1.8 million, $2.22 million with buyer’s premium. Excellent monetization, Museum of the City of New York!

The Execptional Sale, Lot 15: A Steel Railroad Spike Clad In Gold and Silver… [christies.com]
A Point of Acceleration: The Arizona Railroad Spike and the birth of modern America [christie’s magazine]

26 Years In The Wilderness With Steve McQueen

I was driving the kid to a babysitting gig, and as we pulled into the street, I saw a Black man carrying a large-leafed houseplant in front of him. I immediately had to explain who Steve McQueen was, and how the first show of his work in New York in 1997 had in one room this amazing, silent, one-minute film he’d made on the street, in 1992, when he was a student, and saw two African men in trilbys, each carrying a potted palm plant, weaving their way through London traffic, and he just found the scene and instantly decided to film it, and it was transfixing and beautiful.

Steve McQueen, still from Exodus, 1992/97, 1:05, 8mm film, collection: Art Institute of Chicago

For The Heir and A Spare

Not van Dyck, Group of Four Boys, probably 17th century? 50 x 40 in., collection: NGA

Anton van Dyck, A Family Group, 1634-35, 44.5 x 63.5 in., collection: DIA

So yesterday’s Artle quiz at the National Gallery started with the top painting, which was a *copy* of a section of a van Dyck, above, that’s at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

“It is possible that the owners of Van Dyck’s original group portrait commissioned the copy for a family member or close relative,” explains the NGA.

Well, we do know from the DIA site, that some of the owners liked to have things painted: “Inscribed, upper left: Family of Oliver St. John | Earl of Bolingbroke [added later; now thought to be a portrait group of a Flemish family] Inscribed, upper right: Vandyke/pinxit [added later].”

As Peter Huestis notes, the paintings match closely enough that the copy must have been made in the presence of the original. But who, when, and where?

Embroidery From The Index of American Design

Elizabeth Moutal, Embroidery, 1943, 11 x 14.75 in., watercolor and graphite on paper, from the Index of American Design at the National Gallery of Art

Of the 18,000+ watercolors in the American Index of Design, some of the most amazing are of textiles and, in this case, embroidery. Index artist Elizabeth Moutal painted stitches and the tacked and fraying hem of what looks like it used to be the upholstered cushion of a little stool or something. Or maybe it’s just where it was pinned down in the making. Beautiful.

Gober Kelly Red Blue

Pic of the “copy of an Ellsworth Kelly painting that Gober made from memory as a teenager,” illustrating his recollection of his first visit to an art museum, in his 2014 MoMA catalogue

In Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Robert Gober’s 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, he told a story of an 11-year-old Gober so “thunderstruck,” “baffled,” and “intrigued” by an Ellsworth Kelly painting he saw at the Yale University Art Gallery, that he went home and “remade it in his family’s basement.” I was psyched, and I would like to see it, I wrote at the time, as I tried to figure out what Kelly Gober had seen–and what Kelly Gober had made.

A few weeks ago, hero Matt Shuster answered at least the second question: RTFM. Turns out there is a photo of Young Gober’s Kelly in the basement in the detailed narrative chronology contained in The Heart Is Not A Metaphor, the exhibition catalogue for the MoMA show. Which I’d stashed, wrapped, and lost track of in 2014.

Luxetarian Fruit Leather Beetle

Fruit leather beetle from Noma in Copenhagen, constructed by Namrata Hegde, perhaps, as photographed by Ditte Isager, via the New York Times

The print headline for Julia Moskin’s extraordinary article on Copenhagen restaurant Noma’s abusive unpaid intern system and the announcement it will close in 2024 is, “‘Unsustainable’ Best Restaurant Will Grill Its Last Reindeer Heart.”

Namrata Hegde, 26, had just graduated from culinary school in Hyderabad, India, when she was chosen as an intern in 2017. Knowing nothing about Noma except that many called it the best restaurant in the world, she flew to Copenhagen to live and work at her own expense for three months.

For most of that time, Ms. Hegde said, her sole job was to produce fruit-leather beetles, starting with a thick jam of black fruit and silicone stencils with insect parts carved out. Another intern taught her how to spread the jam evenly, monitor the drying process, then use tweezers to assemble the head, thorax, abdomen and wings. Ms. Hegde repeated the process until she had 120 perfect specimens; each diner was served a single beetle in a wooden box.

…

Ms. Hegde said she was required to work in silence by the junior chefs she assisted (Mr. Redzepi was rarely in the kitchen where she worked), and was specifically forbidden to laugh.

The article says Noma began paying its interns in October 2022, which feels well within the time frame in which Moskin would have been reporting.

“Everything luxetarian is built on somebody’s back; somebody has to pay,” said Finnish chef and former [paid] Noma employee Kim Mikkola. Whether it’s fine dining, diamonds, ballet, or other “elite pursuits,” the key to luxetarianism is that abuse is built right in.

Everything’s Funnier When You Add ‘In Bed’ At The End

L: Sarah Dalton photographed by Andy Warhol for Harper’s Bazaar, 1963, collection: Getty Museum; R: John Giorno’s butt in frames from Andy Warhol’s *Sleep*, 1963, image via Brooklyn Rail [where the file was called Biesenbach-1.jpg, btw]

Andy Warhol made an oval portrait of Sarah Dalton covered in soap foam as an illustration for the January 1964 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Warhol’s film, Sleep, starring his then-lover John Giorno and edited by Dalton, premiered on January 17th, the week John Koch’s painting, Siesta (1962), appeared on the cover of Time Magazine’s special “SEX in the U.S.: Mores & Morality” issue.

John Koch, *Siesta*, 1962, 30 x 25 in., formerly in the collection of Mrs. Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, sold at Bonham’s in July 2020 for $596,075

The bed reappears, like many of Koch’s furnishings, objets, and domestic spaces, in other of his ostensibly langorous yet unspeakingly tense paintings. Here is one called Manuscript II, from 1975, where two men review papers on a disheveled bed, as men do, or did?

John Koch, *Manuscript II*, 1975, 25 x 30 in., sold in 2000, image via

Do either of these men appear in Manuscript I, of unknown date, but whose title, at least, from the gallery label on the back, seems to account for the existence of Manuscript II?

John Koch, *Manuscript I*, nd, 36×54 in., to be sold at Bonhams Skinner on January 25, 2023

As Bonhams Skinner’s lot description indicates, the elaborate saturnalian table lamp appears in at least two other paintings. Beyond the significant size and tiny estimate, there is much I do not understand about this painting, from the height of that wingback chair to that stripped off bow tie and jacket, and most in between. [update: wow, it was estimated to sell for $30-50,000, and sold for $176, 755. In bed.]