the making of, by greg allen
In 2012, in her new post as director of the Tensta Konsthall, a community-focused art center in suburban Stockholm, power curator Maria Lind tried to figure out if there is ethical abstraction under capitalism. From “Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies,” her four-month, three-venue exhibition and art economics report, the answer can only have been: lmao no.
Continue reading “Actually, This Does Constitute Art Investment Advice”
I’d seen Issey Miyake’s 132 5 Project clothes, but not the lamps. Now here is a lamp.
In 2010 Miyake and his Reality Lab groupies developed a collection of one-piece of recycled polyester textile, geometric origami-based garments, paying as much attention to how they looked folded flat as to how they worked on a body. Like his Pleats Please and APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) concepts, 123 5 was an experiment with material, process, and form without too much concern for how it looked on, because it always just looks like: whatever, you’re wearing Miyake.
[Looking now for an image to post, I can also say it didn’t matter to Miyake how it looked on a mannequin, in a photo, in a store, or what a press release said. The charitable explanation is that it privileges the physical experience with the product.]
Anyway, Miyake brought this folding-focused concept into a lighting collection at Artemide called IN-EI. Typically written as In’ei (陰翳), Miyake told Artemide it means “shadow, shadiness, nuance.” But the term is most directly associated with 陰翳礼讃 (In’ei Raisan), “In Praise of Shadows,” Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s foundational 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, which had a huge influence on Japan’s own sense of cultural exceptionalism vis à vis the Modernism of the West.
Another reference that is very unmentioned is Isamu Noguchi’s Akari series, which brought a modernist and modernizing sensibility to Japan’s long tradition of paper lanterns. Many of which also fold flat, obviously. My long-simmering fixation with the Akari arc from lamps to “light sculptures” is probably what made me notice this lamp in the first place. And seeing the stacked rhombus lamps in this Miyake boutique, it’s clear Noguchi was on Artemide’s mind, too.
However long this cruise ship napkin-shaped table lamp was in production, I don’t know, but the IN-EI Collection currently only has four pieces in it, and this is currently not one of them. Its name, Hoshigame, translates as star tortoise, and yes, its shape does look like the shell of a Burmese Star Tortoise. So maybe in 2015, when the Kemono Friends manga dropped, and an Indian Star Tortoise was among the exotic animals in the magic zoo that turned into kawaii little girls, Artemide decided to quietly excuse itself from the search results.
As long as you know to search for Hoshigame, though, you will not need to rush to buy this one in Paris. Turns out they’re all over the place, at prices ranging from etsy cheap to 1st dibs ridiculous.
How can there really be only five of these Ming Dynasty tiles known?
Christie’s dates this one to the Zhengde-Jiajing period, the first half of the 16th century (1506-1566), which splits the difference between the British Museum (Ming, c. 1500) and the Palace Museum in Beijing (Jiajing, 1521-67). The V&A has the same Jiajing date on theirs, but their early registrar log for the tile says it came “from the Porcelain Tower, Nanking [Nanjing], completed in 1430.” It’s an association that didn’t make the cut for the digital record.
Despite the specificity of Christie’s bibliographic references, the V&A’s was the only tile I could find online. Like the Christie’s tile (13 X), it has a number incised on its edge (11 Front), that does make them sound like part of a larger project. But the Porcelain Tower? It was a nine-story pagoda of porcelain brick that rose 79 meters tall, and was considered a marvel of the world, and then it was destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion in 1856, and rebuilt in 2015 with a billion yuan donation from Wang Jianlin.
It was, unsurprisingly, Alain Truong who first put a spotlight on it, but I first saw it lighting up my tumblr timeline this morning [where pwlanier posted it, and punk-raphaelite reblogged it]. My immediate thought was that such an exquisite object should be considered alongside a comparable painting, like a panel from a Christian altarpiece or something.
Then I took a closer, slower look at its incised surface and the hasty way the glaze spills across the design, and maybe it calls for a more modernist, abstract aesthetic context. Which, never mind, I realize what I’m thinking is I just really, really want it.
Lot 1044, 20 Sept 2024: A RARE YELLOW AND GREEN-GLAZED RECTANGULAR ‘DRAGON’ TILE, est. USD 40-60,000 [update: it didn’t sell? weird!] [christies]
Before there was bluescreen or greenscreen, there was yellowscreen, and it was better.
In the 1950s Petro Vlahos created an in-camera, sodium vapor process which filmed actors lit frontally with white light, against a monochrome backdrop, backlit by yellow sodium vapor lamps, using a beam splitting prism that recorded the color image and its monochromatic mask simultaneously on two reels of film. It is basically a dichroic version of Technicolor, invented by Wadsworth E. Pohl, which used prisms to split an image into three color-separated frames.
Continue reading “They Have Not Found The Magic Prism”
While exploring the ostensible paradox of putting frames on Jacob Kassay paintings, I came across an entire set of paintings with frames by the artist himself. In January 2023, Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels staged an online/backroom exhibition of eight new Kassays, at once familiar and strange.
The OVR’s only text, from a 2010 essay by Anthony Huberman, links these works to Kassay’s silvery, electroplated and singed paintings which lit up the art market’s way out of the global financial crisis. But there is also silvery runoff and splatter on the floating cedar frames. Which would mean Kassay was dipping the whole framed objects in his electroplating bath? It reminded me of Rauschenberg’s order, “DO NOT REMOVE…FRAME IS PART OF DRAWING.” written in all caps on the back of Erased deKooning Drawing. If that were the wildest discovery in this virtual show, it would have been enough.
But there was also this completely other mystery:
It’s an overpainted photograph that appears to be a study for a mural [?] at Princeton. The extensive caption reads: “Jacob Kassay, Princeton Charlie (studies for the removal of Woodrow Wilson mural), 2018, paint on photograph
Washington Post article, Princeton to remove ‘overly celebratory’ mural of Woodrow Wilson, Mary Hui and Susan Svrluga, April 27, 2016:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/27/princeton-to-remove-overly-celebratory-mural-of-woodrow-wilson.” To the dates, 2016 and 2018, the jpg filename adds 2021, for a study shown in 2023.
A seven-year span of events, yet I could find no image of the completed mural. Or even a mention. Or any confirmation that it even is a mural.
Continue reading “Destroyed Or Unrealized? Jacob Kassay Princeton Mural”I’ve been slowly picking my way through Anne Rorimer’s 1978 article on Blinky Palermo, which I think laid down the path for most Palermo understanding that followed, at least in English. And maybe there’s a metaphor for a discourse that goes to such clunky effort to not say 200cm or 80cm, much less know what it means physically:
The Stoffbilder are often square in format, though not exclusively, generally measuring 78 3/4 inches square. The standard width of fabric, which in Europe is usually 31 1/2 inches, determines the maximum possible width of each area of color.
I’ve been fascinated for days by Tamás St. Turba’s Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 (1969) since Jeremy Millar posted about the project on bluesky. St. Turba, who has like five spelling variants and alternate names, is a Hungarian filmmaker, archivist, activist, and Fluxus artist who took Fluxus seriously enough to stop calling himself an artist or his projects art.
Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is/was a conceptual artwork as protest against the Warsaw Pact military forces’ radio ban: a brick was painted to look like a transistor radio, which Czech residents pretended to listen to. This simple gesture was taken up as an act of defiance to the point that the military confiscated brick radios along with real ones.
St. Turba has made or remade the radios since, as needed, including for Documenta 13 in 2011, and one he remade in 2008 which found its way into Tate’s collection in 2016.
Here is a surviving early blog post about the Radio. And Socks-Studio has a basic post-Documenta account and image. But the most in-depth consideration I’ve found of Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is An Active Encounter, a 2014 show in Belfast at PS2 (pronounced, alas, PS Squared), which pulled it from Documenta obscurity and gave its ideas of resistance and engagement and community resilience a real workout. Here is curator Ciara Hickey, in an essay/recap which is only available via the Internet Archive, curator Ciara Hickey:
In an early conversation between the artist and myself about the Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 piece the artist noted that the brick could be ‘used to build the courthouse or as a missile to smash it’. On this occasion it seemed the artist had opted to deconstruct or ‘smash’ the format of the project. In terms of a public event, I can only imagine the audience perception of the piece as something thin and uncomfortable. However, in addressing the trickster-ish and conspiratorial nature of Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 it playfully presented a series of disruptive and subversive strategies that resonated with the impulse of the original work.
At a time when resistance to authoritarian stifling of culture has never felt more urgent, it’s been maddening to see how fragmented or detached discussion of St. Turba’s project is. Partly that could be because he refutes it artwork status, but also because he’s busy trying to fill in the archival gaps from Cold War oppression while Hungary grapples anew with another fascist. But it feels like the art apparatus has been failing in its job.
It may also be because the art apparatus, as such, can’t really deal with non-valuable or non-auratic objects. Even/especially when they look and sound uncannily familiar.
I only realize now I don’t know the origin of Isa Genzken’s concrete World Receivers. She first showed a working world receiver as a readymade in 1982, which was then a context, if not a gesture, of reaching information within borders and beyond. I think the non-functional concrete simulacra only came later, and I don’t know how. But maybe it’s entirely unrelated.
Previously, somewhat related: Cash4YourGenzken
Au bout de La Nuit
Having recently experienced a difficult displacement and resettling himself, conceptual fragrance artist and greg.org hero Chris Rusak devotes his new studio zine to the topics of home and loss. It is titled HOME, and it is a beautifully made reminder of our connection to the people we see in the terrible news of the day.
Rusak is donating all proceeds from HOME to organizations providing mutual aid to Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza.
Zine: HOME, $5 [chrisrusak.com]
Reader, when I say I was not prepared,
when I clicked through the BravinLee email announcement of the new artist carpet design by Rashid Johnson—an Anxious yet handsome rug that manages the sometimes tricky balance of artist’s credible aesthetic and conceptual rugness, and also manages to be “a meditation on race, class, identity and the essential human struggle with isolation, meaning and anxiety,”
only to discover I’d missed the introduction this year of a new artist rug by Willie Cole, and no, the stark but small rug with Cole’s familiar motif of an iron mark, which was released in 2019, did not prepare me,
For the 12×10 foot, hand-knotted monument that is Original Sin. Cole has gone from abstract to searing representation with the 1789 abolitionist drawing of conditions of the Middle Passage. First published by Thomas Clarkson as “Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788,” the drawing quickly became an an abolitionist staple on both sides of the Atlantic.
The question immediately arises: do you have a space hallowed enough to put this on the floor? And I think the answer is, if you put this on the floor, you will.
In an essay excerpted by BravinLee [and published in full], noted art advisor Halima Taha rhapsodizes on the creation and impact of Cole’s Original Sin carpet:
Just as a rug lays a foundation for a room, offering a canvas for intricate designs and patterns to unfold, the thread of American history serves as a foundation for contemplation, weaving together the diverse threads of the nation’s past to create a complex and rich narrative. Each thread in a rug represents a different culture, event, or individual, much like the various elements that have contributed to shaping America’s identity. By examining these intricate weavings of history, one can better understand the complexities, challenges, and triumphs that have defined the American experience. The rug created by Willie Cole, entitled Original Sin, challenges the viewer to decide if the rug should be on the wall or the floor.
So I guess the question that should have arisen is, do you have a wall big enough to install a 14-foot carpet? Because if you do, you will be turning it into a Sistine Chapel of Black history and liberation, so don’t screw it up.
Taha suggests, though, that there can be hope underfoot. Walking on the carpet depicting this inhumane history “could also be interpreted as attempting to stomp out that pain, to reshape and transcend it, or to dance in jubilant celebration akin to Juneteenth, evoking the spirit of resilience and triumph over adversity or standing on the foundations of American prosperity.”
On the bright side, Joshua Caleb Weibley has some pro-tips on stealing a Jenny Holzer. The only catch: you’d have to visit what sounds like a pretty disappointing show at the Guggenheim to get it. Maybe just leave it there.
His perceptive and disheartening takedown takes it all down, but it definitely feels like nothing loses more of the plot than the giant LED scroll of Holzer’s Truisms that wraps around the rotunda:
It’s hard to tell—both from focusing on the sentence fragments that have been swirling past you, and from the ambiguously worded description of its materials—just how much of “Untitled” is generated thoughtlessly by Artificial Intelligence. Some phrases are non sequiturs, but others sound plausibly Holzerian. What would the difference be one way or the other? If it is only the seizure-inducing strobe effects that are somehow the product of an AI, how would that differ from other programmable randomized effects? Whatever form of embellishment the technology is adding to her 1989 formula, it somehow lands as much like an afterthought as a desperate grasp for relevance.
Which, I looked up video of the installation on Instagram and refuse to link to it, what a mess. But that was only after noticing the difference in Weibley’s own photos of the work [above]; Holzer’s signature work is looking its best here, and that is problematic enough. Up top the work shows a high-res white font, while above it switches to a throwback font, in lower-resolution and two colors, which approximates the older diode technology Holzer’s scrolling text pieces originated on, but on an obviously high-res screen.
As a project Holzer’s Truisms have succeeded precisely because they exist in near-infinite formats, from wheatpaste posters to bookmarks to sushi platters to onesies to condoms. As art objects, though, the Truisms are locked aesthetically and collectibly, into a highly specific medium, which is now obsolete: the single-color, seven-diode scrolling ticker signs of the 80s and 90s.
Though it wasn’t clear in 2009 when she did a Q&A with the NY Times, pegged to her retrospective at the Whitney and the launch of limited edition Truisms floor lamps and table lamps in collaboration with Flos, Baccarat Crystal, and Philippe Starck, Holzer was about to become another casualty of the pivot to video: “In For Chicago I have first-time access to a video-compatible L.E.D. array, and I’m in the process of learning how best to program this system. The presentation possibilities, including speed, motion, orientation, brightness, background, and complex double speak are novel and considerably greater than those for older strip signs.”
The process does not seem to have gone well. Jenny Holzer LEDs should be, like Dan Flavin flourescents and Agnes Martin & Ellsworth Kelly paintings, on our culture’s bucket list of things to fill the rotunda of the Guggenheim with at least once. It’s too bad that it didn’t happen sooner.
[no sooner do I post this UPDATE: I check my email and find an invitation to a 2-day Guggenheim Symposium, “Compositions in Light & Language: Conservation of Jenny Holzer’s LED Artworks” at the end of the month. So at least they know.]
Steal This Holzer: Jenny Holzer Light Line Review [interlocutorinterviews]
Previously, related: Jenny Holzer Sushi Platter
Better Read 027: Jenny Holzer’s Arno, as ‘grammed by Helmut Lang
I think it’s obvious by now that any Richard Serra sculpture can be domestically scaled if you have a big enough house. But there is a category of Serras you could install pretty much wherever, and without reinforcing your floors.
So it’s a little weird to see this simple corner prop piece, T with two (2986) in a sale of monumental sculpture. [Which, if you find anything more surreally absurd and superfluous than a sale of giant lawn ornaments installed on pristine chateau lawns, definitely send it along.]
It’s also weird because it felt like I’d seen it before, even though it’s barely been out of Athens. But it’s because the Dannheissers had one just like it, which Elaine gave to MoMA. Same concept, different dimensions. MoMA’s two plates are the same size, while T’s are 2:1. Either way, I’d make sure my floor is level and maybe reinforce my sheetrock. And get some certified riggers for sure.
Did you know MoMA has twelve steel or lead Serra sculptures? TWELVE. And here we are, just window shopping one.
Last fall I was caught off guard by Donald Moffett’s Lot 030323 (the golden bough), which was installed in NATURE CULT: TREMOR, a two-artist exhibition with Shaun Krupa at von ammon co in Washington DC. It stood out, literally, among new, biomorphically baroque iterations of Moffett’s more familiar paint-on-panel works. But even as I type this, I realize it was made of the same materials.
Pieces of salvaged lumber and driftwood were painted gold and bolted together in a totemic simulacrum of a tree, with an art book and two of Moffett’s [other?] paintings perched among its branches. The gesture felt akin to a Rachel Harrison sculpture, but in inverse, with the found objects serving as an armature for the made ones. It also reminded me of some past works of Robert Gober, Moffett’s partner, who made plinths of painted bronze cast from styrofoam blocks collected from the North Shore of Long Island.
Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023/24, will be on view, with some variations and an expanded date, for one more week in Rockland, Maine, where it anchors Moffett’s show, NATURE CULT, SEEDED, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The work in Maine now supports at least one different painting by Moffett—a throat-like orifice replaced by a perch-like birdhouse—and a different book, trading the 18th century botanical illustrations of Mark Catesby for the 19th century bespoke bovine portraits of Thomas Hewes Hinckley. The most substantive difference is the addition of what Brooklyn Rail reviewer Chris Crosman calls “a section” of the golden baugh: a driftwood limb that holds thirteen ex-libris copies of Jeff Goodell’s 2017 book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.
Continue reading “Donald Moffett Speaks To The Trees”A couple of weeks ago artist Tom Burr sp0ke at Dia about his and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Now that conversation is online.
Burr was in a 1989 group show with Gonzalez-Torres, Michael Jenkins and John Lindell at Paula Allen Gallery (no relation). One piece Burr showed, Jones Beach State Park, was from a series of bulletin boards outfitted with the texts, flyers, and notices from a specific public place.
Gonzalez-Torres showed two magazine rack sculptures with an endlessly replenished supply of handouts, which, based on the Foundation’s images, turned out to be a paragraph clipped from the front page of the NY Times on November 26, 1989, the weekend before the show opened. Between that and the bulletin board, it sounds like the show had a real community center vibe, or what Dia curator Jordan Carter called, an “aesthetics of administration.”
A few years later in his catalogue raisonné, Gonzalez-Torres adminstered a dropkick to one of his magazine racks. The one mounted on the wall, “Untitled” (White Legal), remained a work, while the freestanding rack, then known as just “White Legal,” was demoted to “non-work.”
None of this is in the talk, btw; it’s just me nerding out. And it’s my way of resisting the urge to just type out the entire conversation about Burr’s Deep Purple, whose form is a 2/3-scale reference to Tilted Arc. Choice stuff.
In 1907, Yoshitaro Shibasaki and his team successfully climbed Mount Tsurugi, which was regarded as the last unclimbed mountain in Japan. However, they found a metal cane decoration and a sword on the top of the mountain, and it turned out that someone had reached the top before them. A later scientific investigation revealed that the metal cane decoration and sword dated from the late Nara period to the early Heian period and that shugenja had climbed Mount Tsurugi more than 1,000 years ago.
From the wikipedia article for Shugendō
Shugendō is a mountain ascetic religious practice that emerged in the 8th century in Japan, that synthesizes Shintō, Buddhism, and various local spiritual elements. Because of its integrationist nature it was banned in the Meiji era when government land surveyors found that the ascetics [shugenja] beat them to the top of Mount Tsurugi by a thousand years. [via CraigMod‘s newsletter, where he discusses missing a Shugendō retreat because of XOXO and typhoons.
