The middle of November 2016 was a rough time for a lot of people, but at least you didn’t flop trying to cash out on your 9-ft tall bronze silkscreened painting by an imaginary art bro collab of a fake statue of an emperor’s butt.
[Unless, of course, you are the owner of Bruce High Quality Foundation’s The View (2013), whose art advisor and auction experts had assured you that $60-70,000 was not an unreasonable expectation. Whoops. I hope you’ll share the insights you’ve gleaned from enjoying living with this prodigious painting for an extra 7.5 years.]
I honestly don’t know where we are on BHQF these days, but this certainly appears to be one of their works. The View is nominally of one of the greatest artworks in the world, the triumphal Roman equestrian bronze monument to Marcus Aurelius. But in fact, that Michelangelo base means it’s in the Campidoglio, not in the Capitoline Museum, so it is the 1981 replica. And though the proximate view the Bruces have given us is of the emperor’s and his horse’s ass, it remains for us to fill in the actual view beyond, which is of the city from the hill, across the piazza.
The View is for sale again tomorrow, Wednesday, with no reserve, and a 90%+ lower estimate. If you’re feeling lucky and have high ceilings, tomorrow could be your lucky day. The winning bid currently stands at $200. [15 minutes later update: and it is now $1,200. This post has awakened the greg.org mob of thousandaires.] [update: sold, for $2,160, so an $1800 bid?]
Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks
I know I’m never going to get a tattoo, but that doesn’t stop me from making a shortlist of tattoos I’d get. And the top Jasper Johns entry on the list are these little guys, with their little rakes, or brooms, or brushes. They’ve been turning up in Johns’s work for decades. They were there in his last drawings show at Matthew Marks, and they’re there again now.
They’re being towered over by an inky armprint, a tracing of Grünewald’s fallen soldier, and torn sheets of John Cage’s pivotal score in a dark and ominous sky, but they’re not daunted. They’re just going about their work, setting the scale, completing the composition. [This watercolor from 1990 predates the first appearance of the little guys in a painting by two+ years, btw. Is this Little Guys: Origins?]
Untitled, 2019, Graphite on paper, six sheets, each: 8¼ × 6 in. via Matthew Marks
Here they are in 2019, in these little drawings, just as busy as ever, working on the skulls. The 1990 guys look drawn by hand, but these guys, and the skull, are clearly reproduced with some mechanical means. I haven’t seen the show yet to figure it out, but nothing could be more Johnsian. [Or haven’t I? I remembered the related prints, but forgot that these little drawings were included in his 2021 show.]
On one level they’re pure exercises in composition. They’re literally just lines. But I can’t not also think of them as little scenes; the grouping practically demands a narrative of some kind. Can you imagine Johns just making up little situations and stories for his little guys? It’s been decades now. Do they have names? Do they have lore?
Even as the autobiographical elements of Johns’s project move in and out of focus over the years, it still feels a little weird or retrograde to wonder such things. But it also feels OK to assume that motifs and figures and strategies recur for a reason; Johns is not some automaton, throwing the same five ingredients into the pot every day.
Until I hear different, then, I’m going to assume they’re these little guys, happily working and living inside Johns’s capital I:
Previously, related [and I love that they used a knee drawing on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, btw]: Taking A Knee; also Blackened Angel; also Little Johns
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Still Life), 1989, stack of light blue 8.5 x 11 in. paper with an ideal height of 6 in., as installed at Terrain Gallery in 1990, image: Armando Rascon via FG-T Fndn
I was going to write that in early 1990 Berkeley radiologist Robert Shimshak and his wife Marion Brenner bought all the Felix Gonzalez-Torres works in San Francisco. Which was three: two puzzles and a little stack. But that’s not quite true.
Those three were all included in a group show, This Symphony Will Remain Always Unfinished, organized by Armando Rascon at Terrain Gallery, the art space on Folsom Street he operated with Peter Wright. The show ran from 8 February through 10 March and included works by Gonzalez-Torres, Lucia Noquiera, Jessica Diamond, and Nayland Blake. [It took me a while to figure out that the show has lived in Felix’s exhibition history with an inverted title, This Symphony Will Always Remain Unfinished, while the other three artists and Rascon match the contemporaneous gallery listings.]
And it is true that the Shimshak/Brenners bought them, because they are now sellingthemall at Christie’s. The text on “Untitled” (Still Life), “Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Blue Flowers 1984 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1987 Interferon 1989 Ross 1984,” is nearly identical to Felix’s first frieze portrait, which he’d just exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in December 1989.
But as I was trying to figure out who else was in the Terrain show, and how Felix’s work came to be in Terrain’s show, which I’d understood was Felix’s first show in San Francisco, I discovered that it was not. The first show, that is.
In their 2016 AAA oral history with Alex Fialho, Nayland Blake talked at length about the contemporary art world’s recognition of a fuller range of art by queer artists and about the queer experience. While making and showing art themself, Blake was also working at the New Langton Arts, an artist-run space also on Folsom Street, where he met Felix and Julie Ault when they came to SF in 1989:
So I was working in a curatorial capacity, you know, I mean Armando at Terrain did, I think, Felix’s first show in San Francisco, but, you know, I included, you know, one of Felix’s stacks in a show, I think the next year, at New Langton. And so we were—so I mean in those situations when I was meeting with people about looking at artists that we could show or that we could bring in, I was also telling them about San Francisco artists.
But that show Blake curated, The Word: text – object – ontology, opened on 25 January 1990, and ran through 17 February. So not only was Blake the first to show Felix’s work in the Bay Area, for nine days in February 1990, there were four works by Felix on view within two blocks of Folsom Street.
[an hour later and after checking the David Deitcher interview tab I had open update: NEVER MIND] Blake was the first to show a Felix stack in the Bay Area, but he remembered correctly that it came a year after Armando Rascon. Because there was a whole other group show with Felix’s work at Terrain in January 1989: Matter/Antimatter: Defects in the Model included two photostats and a rub-on transfer work. In 2013 David Deitcher recalled this show was one of the first times he’d seen Felix’s work.]
“Untitled” (1989/90), installation view from Oct. 2015-Jan. 2016, at the Metropolitan Art Centre, Belfast, image: MAC, Belfast via FG-T Fndn
And the stack in Blake’s show, “Untitled” (1989/90), was actually a double stack, with two texts: “Somewhere better than this place” and “Nowhere better than this place.” And it was realized in two places at once: in the center of Felix’s inaugural show at Andrea Rosen’s new gallery in SoHo, which opened on 20 January, and then, five days later, in San Francisco. And it was certainly not bought by the Shimshak/Brenners, because it was bought by the de la Cruzes.
Unlike the de la Cruzes’ stacks, which have been shown a lot, both in Miami and on the road, “Untitled” (Still Life) has only been exhibited rarely, and off the beaten path. So Felix stack compleatists, beat a path to Christie’s this week, because “Untitled” (Still Life) goes on rare public view tomorrow (9/24).
Chris Burden, Coals to Newcastle, 1978, photographed holding a toy plane in Calexico, CA, at the US-Mexico border, image published in Chris Burden (Gagosian, 2007)
Beginning in 1971 with the padlock that locked him in a locker for five days, Chris Burden marked his early performances with a relic. [There is no bullet.] But by 1978, with more explicitly sculptural interests developing, Chris Burden made his last relic.
Coals To Newcastle was the title given to a preciously transgressive performance in which Burden smuggled drugs across an international border by flying a rubberband-powered plane with two joints on it across the fence to Mexico.
The relic was not just one plane, or even two, but a whole vitrine that included a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED label for the missing third plane [actually, “Plane 1”], and a narrative statement:
Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico are actually the same city separated by a tall steel and barbed wire fence demarcating the international border between the U.S.A. and Mexico. On the morning of December 17, standing on the American side of the border, I flew a small rubber band powered model airplane over the fence into Mexicali, Mexico. From each wing of the plane, like a miniature bomb, hung a cigarette of the finest seedless marijuana, ‘sinsemilla’ grown in California.The plane bore the following inscriptions: Hecho en U.S.A. (‘Made in U.S.A.’), Fumenlos Muchachos (‘Smoke it, kids’) and Topanga Typica (‘typical Topanga’).
Chris Burden, Coals to Newcastle (detail), 1978, “paper rollups” via Christie’s
Plane 2 is “armed” with what Christie’s euphemistically calls “paper rollups.” As to the contents of these decades-old joints, we could ask Josh Baer, who sold this work to Berkeley collectors in 1993, when it was already fifteen years old. Did Burden himself roll these fatties? Did he grow the Topanga Typica inside? Perhaps in the spirit of one of the collectors’ other favorite artists, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the joints are replenished in an endless supply.
Manufacturers Hanover Trust, 510 Fifth Avenue, 1954, photo by Ezra Stoller/ESTO via SOM
Once again the lack of vision among the megacollector class continues to astound and disappoint. Gordon Bunshaft’s Manufacturers Trust Company office has been an architectural masterpiece and landmark since it opened seventy years ago tomorrow (September 22, 1954). Though, reader, it has seen some stuff.
Manufacturers Hanover Trust, 510 Fifth Avenue, 1954, photo by Ezra Stoller/ESTO via SOM
Its travails as a belatedly landmarked, mall-grade retail space are well-known and look to continue. Preservation guru Ted Grunewald reports on social media that there is a public hearing next week to reconfigure the building’s signature spaces on the first two floors, again. The new tenant is GU [say the letters], the Old Navy of Uniqlo, famous in Japan for their 990-yen jeans. And honestly, if GU’s gonna undo some of the bleak retailmaxing damage of Vornado’s Joe Fresh/The North Face/Tahari pop-up/WEB3 Vape Shop era, let them take a crack, I guess? But that’s not the problem here.
watercolor rendering of 510 Fifth Avenue, SOM, via Ted Grunewald
The problem is that Vornado sold 510 Fifth Avenue last year for just $50 million. FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. People spent that on one Rothko. Hell, people have spent more than that on one Beeple. FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. The deal went down in August 2023 as part of a larger liquidation of Vornado’s retail space portfolio, but still.
That means the art collectors who should have bought the Whitney Breuer building for a $100 million house in June 2023, and who lost it to Sotheby’s and the overleveraged Patrick Drahi, also could have bought 510 Fifth and turned it into a house. So GU as in, Gee, you failed to score a 65,000 sf, urban, mid-century architectural icon and adapt it into a slicked-out, modernist art palazzo not once, but TWICE in a matter of weeks.
The North Face-era 510 Fifth Ave. looking pretty dismal, which is the point of GU’s LPC hearing
Granted, it might take a little more vision to turn 510 Fifth Ave. into a house. GU’s Landmarks Preservation Committee petition [pdf] makes the current setup look pretty dire, like a warehouse sale in an old bank. Wait, I mean—that’s a skills issue.
That floor is landmarked, that lighting situation is landmarked. The Bertoia—actually, there are two Bertoias, the screen and a cloud/chandelier, and they not convey. They’re on loan from Chase, though I’m sure a credible collector could sort that out. For those worried about quite so much glass, bring back the gold curtains. Retreat to the recessed penthouse and secret roof garden, visible only to the accountants or dentists or whoever’s left next door, on the backside of 500 Fifth Avenue.
Vornado really did carve out a second unlandmarked retail space on Fifth Avenue that was so bleak it destroyed the NFT market
And while Fifth & 43rd is no Madison & 75th, Bloomberg did used to have offices upstairs. And the neighborhood is clearly nice enough for Stephen Schwarzman to spend $100 million to put his name on the library. And it’s a five minute walk to the clubs, and Grand Central, so an optimal commute to your mid-century country house.
still from Steve McQueen, Exodus, 1992-97, 1:05 super-8 loop, transferred to digital, ed. 4+1AP, image via Marian Goodman Gallery c.2011, on view through Summer 2025 at Dia Chelsea
As I’ve said here before, Exodus, a one-minute loop of Super 8 film that follows a pair of Black men through a crowded London street in 1992, is one of my favorite Steve McQueen works ever. And now everyone can see how it holds up, because it’s on view at Dia in Chelsea for a year.
While trying to find images of McQueen’s new photos, also on view, I came across old photos of his I’d forgotten. At Marian Goodman in November 2001, McQueen showed a video of himself, partly visible, sitting on a hotel bed, bathed in the light of a French TV news report of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Titled Illuminer, it was one of the first works by a contemporary artist to contend with the world taking shape after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
But in that show was also a pair of large photographs that looked like the Milky Way but were actually of asphalt and steam. That kind of instant zoom in and out of perspective, or perception, makes sense in that show. Anyway, turns out the ed. 1 of those photos were sold in 2021 at Phillips. Can you even get 50-inch C-prints made anymore?
“As we stand enraptured by the stunning resplendency of Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow and Blue) we bear witness to what can only be described as an unequivocal masterpiece of twentieth-century art history.”
I still contend that the auction catalogue essay is an underappreciated genre of art writing, and the 4,000-word lot essay for Sotheby’s 2015 sale of this prime Rothko feels worth a read. Especially so because Artnet reports that the auction house is selling the painting again this fall. And so we will have another essay with which we can index the way these classical Ab Ex artworks are positioned, and how their sellers, at least, imagine them to be understood.
In 2015 that meant namechecking everyone from Giotto to Niezstche and evoking the physical experience of standing in front of the painting in the most intense language you can muster. This manifestation is quoted after the jump, if you can handle it.
As for how the buyers understood things, we must piece together our own conclusions. Untitled (Yellow and Blue) is one of nine Rothko paintings Bunny and Paul Mellon acquired from Marlborough Gallery beginning in 1970, immediately after the artist’s death, and so right in the thick of the fiduciary malfeasance that prompted Rothko’s children to sue.
This and at least seven other Mellon Rothkos were promptly included in the National Gallery’s first show of modern art, in 1973.
Mark Rothko painting and Betty Parsons sculptures at a 1973 dinner in the National Gallery of Art, image via the Betty Parsons Collection at the Archives of American Art
Some time between Paul’s death in 1999 and 2006, when it was shown at the Palazzo Grassi, Bunny, by then in her nineties and rushing to spend several hundred million dollars before she died, sold the painting to François Pinault.
In June 2013, Pinault sold it through his auction house, Christie’s, along with a Fontana, to Eric Tan, a cutout for Jho Low, the Malaysian money launderer. [According to the Feds, the $79.5 million invoice was $36m for the Fontana, and so $43m for the Rothko.] In October 2013, Tan gifted the works, along with a $3 million Calder, to Low, with three copy & pasted “gift letters.”
[Because legal filings are another underappreciated genre of art writing, the excerpts of the gift letters included in the US Justice Dept’s 2020 forfeiture filing against other laundered artworks, a Warhol and a Monet, are also after the jump.]
In April 2014 Low borrowed $107 million from Sotheby’s Financial Services, pledging up to $285 million in artworks as collateral, including the Rothko, then he instructed them to sell artworks until the loan was repaid. Sotheby’s put the Rothko in their May 2015 Modern/Contemporary sale, where it was purchased by Russian oiligarch Farkhad Akhmedov for $46.5 million as part of his attempt to conceal $600 million while divorcing his wife Tatiana Akhmedova.
Tatiana was awarded title to the Rothko, other art, a yacht, and an apartment, in 2016, but some of the assets had been secretly transferred to the feuding couple’s son, and in 2020, she was still suing to receive them. When Sotheby’s publishes the updated provenance, perhaps we’ll know if Tatiana is the present seller. Artnet says the consignment was only just arranged, which may be why Sotheby’s pushed back their Hong Kong sale. But if you need to convert eight figures in a somewhat portable but rather traceable masterpiece, November 8 is your lucky day.
In addition to her own work and career, Givhan spoke to Mary Louise Schumacher about visiting the Equal Justice Institute’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Birmingham, Alabama; and the same searing kicker in Hilton Als’ profile of André Leon Talley that has stuck with me for 25 years, too.
Hero, filmmaker, and longtime greg.org reader Chris was surprised to realize that the hovering biomorphic forms of the screen elements of the set Isamu Noguchi made for the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 1950 production of Judith were affixed, not to chainlink fence after all, but to the much more delicate fishnet.
Unfortunately, when I clicked through to the Isamu Noguchi Collection, Catalogue Raisonné, and Archive to investigate further, I bound myself to some access agreement that strictly prohibits me from using any material from their collection without authorization from the Noguchi Museum, which also prohibited employees so strictly from wearing a keffiyeh [“bearing an abstract black-and-white fishnet pattern and the red and green colors of the Palestinian flag”] in support of Palestinian liberation, that it fired them.
I’d like to think if I were running the archive and museum of an artist who, after voluntarily incarcerating himself in a Japanese American detention camp, found out that oh wait what, what do you mean he could not just walk out when he wanted, I’d be a little more circumspect about dictating to visitors.
[s/o Bryan Hilley for the Noguchi Museum report that made direct mention of the keffiyeh’s fishnet origins.]
Benjamin Cottam, Yves Klein(Dead Artists), 2002-03, silverpoint, 11 x 9 cm, selling at 27 Sept 2024 at Rago Arts
Eventually, every artist will be a dead artist, but so far only a select few have been included in Benjamin Cottam’s Dead Artists Series. Done in silverpoint on a fine little card, the exquisitely ghostly little portraits are only the size of a fingernail.
Benjamin Cottam, Arshile Gorky (Dead Artists), 2002-03, silverpoint, 11 x 10 cm, selling at 27 Sept 2024 at Rago Arts
It feels like these two, Yves Klein and Arshile Gorky, fall into an exceptional category: artists whose deaths become a significant element of their art historical narrative.
Maybe that distinction is just me. Back in the day, in the thick of Cottam’s project, we got Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Eva Hesse. Looking through some of the other Dead Artists in the series, there are certainly plenty whose main qualification does seem to be that they were dead. [A lot of those are also just faces in a smudgy haze, with an even eerier vibe than these disembodied heads.]
Another criteria, though might be the availability of a suitable reference photo; when I asked the artist about a Felix Gonzalez-Torres, he looked around and the very few Felix pictures around at the time, and said it wouldn’t work.
So yeah, we have some of these, we love them, and these feel right in sync with those. So am I a dope for hyping them before scoring them? I guess I’d also be happy to see them spread around. Too may Dead Artists in one place might raise suspicions.
Matter had photographed the sculpture, perched on a radiator in front of a window looking out onto Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, for a 1956 Vogue Magazine feature on banker/art collector Chester Dale. The photo was made in color, but ran in black & white, and extremely cropped. So Stott’s version is the most magnificent it’s ever looked.
The photo’s caption read, “A Modigliani head, austere, magnificent.” Somehow the next spread in the magazine shows Mrs. Charles Wrightsman: “With her husband, she also collects eighteenth-century French furniture, which they use, magnificently, in their house in Palm Beach, set on the sea’s edge.” In Condé Nast style, then, I have gone back and replaced two lesser words with magnificent.
Rachel Harrison, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2011, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, typewriter, typewriter case, dog leash and photo, 55 x 53 x 40 in., selling at Phillips 25 Sept 2024 [update: sold at Phillips, in fact, for 2x the estimate]
Fans of Rachel Harrison and Scarface who prefer their sculptures incorporate readymade framed scans of gifted Central Park tourist souvenir portraits of Al Pacino as Tony Montana without a bullet hole are in luck.
Valid Like Salad (2012) installed at Harrison’s 2016 exhibition at Greene Naftali, image via artnet from here
Whatever it means for an artist to have a recognizable style or practice, this is the first time I’ve noticed Harrison using a readymade object in at least two of her sculptures. But then, this particular object—a framed, print of a scan of the original drawing given to Harrison by a friend—is explicitly a copy, so why shouldn’t there be more than one? Does it have Deep Meaning that in addition to the 2012 sculpture, Valid Like Salad [whose later history of violence and conservation was discussed previously], Harrison used this movie star sketch in a 2011 work titled, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? You tell me.
Because now that I’ve seen Harrison reuse a specific object at least twice, I can’t stop looking for other repetitions and patterns in her work. Portrait was exhibited in 2011 in estrella distante, a Roberto Bolaño-themed group show at kurimanzutto, organized in collaboration with Harrison’s LA gallery, Regen Projects. Though it would have been obvious because it was facing a doorway, the installation views of Portrait omit the Tony Montana picture—should we assume it was there?—and center the typewriter perched on top of the painted concrete block, which sits in turn upon the typewriter’s case.
Rachel Harrison, Structural Design, 2010, Polystyrene, cement, Parex, acrylic, and Royal Safari portable typewriter, 58 x 33 x 28 in., image via regen projects
Which is itself a repeat of a move Harrison used in Structural Design (2010), a sculpture she showed at Regen Projects in 2010. Arguably, that work, or the keyboard of the Royal Safari portable typewriter it incorporates, gave the show its title, Asdfjkl;. The artist also makes an appearance in the press release, where the reference to typing hand position is described as “mentally tactile, as it speaks to the moment when one is just about to touch an object, or when one’s fingers have just had that physical encounter. The rapidly changing relationship to writing produced by the aid of machines is central to this title (the artist grew up without texting and is still not that good at it). Structural Design is a sculpture whose components are a Royal typewriter and painted forms balancing on the edge of the typewriter’s case, teetering in a moment between gravity and expression.”
Now these forms, both the boxes and the sheets, and the teetering, come into focus as elements of Harrison’s vocabulary. So does this strategy of separating two elements—a typewriter and its case—with sculptural forms. And hanging a framed photo on them. Or putting them on bases or plinths. And on and on. Seen in volume, and over time, a syntax appears, and a portrait of the artist does emerge in the work, or at least a portrait of the artist working.
Roe Ethridge, Untitled (Point Break), 2010, 35 1/4 x 23 7/8 in., ed 1/5+2AP, via Phillips, 2019
Untitled (Point Break), 2010, Roe Ethridge’s self-portrait as Patrick Swayze;
Sam McKinniss, Pansies in a Basket, 2019, pastel on paper, 9×12 in., via artsy
Sam McKinniss’s Pansies in a Basket (2019), from a Swiss Institute benefit auction;
Louise Lawler, Silent Night, 2011/13, cibachrome on museum box, 51 x 39 x 2 in., via Sprüth Magers
and Louise Lawler’s Silent Night (2011/13) are three of the over two hundred artworks and design items included in the inventory of assets of Lisa Schiff and her former advisory firm, Schiff Fine Art. The inventory was filed as part of a bankruptcy proceeding and, as recently reported here, will possibly be liquidated at auction as early as November.
I broke out the inventory from its larger filing [pdf]. It’s after the jump.
In other filings from May, the bankruptcy trustee is seeking to recover deposits paid to two galleries by Schiff Fine Art of nearly $1m for work whose sale was never completed. $575,000 was paid to Thaddeus Ropac for a $750,000 Cory Arcangel work, Topline (2019). [idk, but Arcangel lists Topline as the title of a 2019 show in which none of the works have that title. Maybe it’s me for not keeping up with his prices, but that does seem like the price of an entire show?] And $398,000 was paid to Gladstone for a $650,000 sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, The Seated IV (2019), which was installed on the facade of the Met.
Though not identified in the filings, both purchases were initiated on behalf of Candace Carmel Barasch, the collector and former client who sued Schiff in 2023 for $6.3 million in undelivered art. It must suck to have a million dollars of your money sitting somewhere, and to have it classified as the assets of a bankrupt company, and you’re classified as a creditor, not an account holder. Has Barasch’s and others’ lawsuits prompted people to change the fiduciary or custodial agreements they made with their agent/art advisers?
And here I thought I could be chill and grateful and just acknowledge the congratulations as they came in, while I processed the shock of being included by the Rabkin Foundation among an inspiring but frankly daunting group of writers, but I guess not.
One of my favorite things to discover about Maria Lind’s 2012 Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies show was the Wade Guyton narrative arc. And how Guyton’s massive, black painted plywood floor in the Konsthall raised the profile of the his black printed plywood edition in Lind’s controversial selling show at Bukowskis auction house. And how that very example did not sell then. And it did not sell in 2019. And it did not sell again in 2022.
And so the “Distinguished European Collector” who’s been stuck with it—I like to think it’s the Lundins—has had to keep enjoying what is truly, as far as these things go, an iconic work. How would it be?
Well, for a brief shining moment, now you can find out.
One reason I thought of for why this excellent example of Guyton’s work didn’t sell was the volume. Not just that it is an edition, but that there are actually two editions. When Guyton made this 8×4 ft plywood edition of seven in 2008, he also made a Parkett edition of 60 [38 numbered, XXII proofs].
But as I’ve noted before, what matters about the works of Guyton’s Black Paintings Era, which were all produced using the same monochromatic bigblack.tif file, is that they exist as a series. The editions, even more so. I’m getting shivers just imagining them being made all at once, 22 sheets of ply pumped into the inkjet printer, and admiring the the little differences.
Like being little. Though it elegantly maintains the proportion and scale of the ed. 7, Guyton’s untitled edition for Parkett 83 is a quarter of the size [4 x 2 ft., 15 sheets/4 = 60.]
Think what it’s like to move it around, perhaps in your car, or even in your pickup, or to store it, or to ship it. What the Parkett edition may lack in surface area, it more than makes up for in convenience.
And now, somehow, Parkett has one left, the “last available work from a previously sold-out edition.”
