Cattelan Cappelletta Sistina

detail from plate 4 of Cattelan: The 11th Commandment, published in 2024 by Three Star Books

After a thirteen-year gap in which the artist retired and unretired, Three Star Books, of Paris, has released a fourth volume in their Maurizio Cattelan trilogy, appropriately titled, The 11th Commandment.

Begun in 2007, each of the TSB books comprises an interview with the artist and one of his curator-collaborators, and images of recent works. This year it is Nancy Spector, who curated both Cattelan’s Guggenheim retrospective—prominently featured in the 2011 title, The Taste of Others—and the gold toilet vortex we’ve been swirling around in since 2015, otherwise known as America.

The interview is fine. The books continue to be remarkable because they are published in portfolio format, and each page is a facsimile of a hand-painted and hand-lettered watercolor original. The 11th Commandment is credited to Qi Han, whose renditions are comparable to previous editions, which were painted by Fu Site.

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2018, fresco, pine wood, steel, 343 x 693 x 242 cm,
as installed in 2021 at UCCA in Shanghai

Above is the best one, conceptually. During Shanghai Fashion Week in 2018, Cattelan curated The Artist Is Present, at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, an exhibition for Gucci inspired by the idea that, “The copy is the original.” Cattelan included a work of his own in the show; Untitled (2018) is a 1:6-scale replica in fresco on wood of the Sistine Chapel. The image reproduced in The 11th Commandment, which includes a human figure for scale, was published on Gucci’s Facebook page. The only thing that would make Untitled better is if it were an edition.

Maurizio Cattelan titles and editions by Three Star Books [threestarbooks.com]

Sold Separately: Cane Acres Dining Room, f/k/a Tonguewell

Furniture sold separately: the so-called Cane Acres Plantation Dining Room, as last seen at the Brooklyn Museum, image via Brunk Auctions

[UPDATE: Reporting on the rooms sale for Artnet, Brian Boucher got a comment from Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak: tl;dr, they’re mid!]

It is at once extraordinary and the most logical thing in the world—admittedly, a low bar these days—but the Brooklyn Museum is selling two of its period rooms at auction next week. It’s actually selling much more, including most of the majorand minorfurnishings of those rooms, hundreds of other antiques, and woodwork elements from two other interiors. [Shoutout to David Platzker for the heads up on the sale.]

The most significant, or historic, or problematic, is now known as the Cane Acres Plantation dining room, which was the Brooklyn Museum’s largest period room, and the first from the South. The museum acquired it a hundred years ago near Summerville, South Carolina, in the middle of what turned out to be a museum period room arms race. Though it’ll be recognizable to anyone who’s been to the museum, what you’re actually bidding on is very different and specific:

Continue reading “Sold Separately: Cane Acres Dining Room, f/k/a Tonguewell”

Donald Judd Cama del Taller Chihuahuense

El Taller Chihuahuense, Donald Judd’s metal fabrication shop in Marfa, as published in Donald Judd Raume/Spaces, 1994, from the Museum Wiesbaden, all photos: Todd Eberle

After several years of executing works in Cor-Ten steel, Donald Judd opened a welding and fabrication shop in 1988 in the disused Ice Plant building on the northeast side of downtown Marfa. He called it El Taller Chihuahuense (The Chihuahuan Workshop), and he hired local welders, including Raul Hernandez and Lee Donaldson to make his works.

Cobb Gatehouse with Judd steel bed and table by, as published in Donald Judd Raume/Spaces

The workers of El Taller also fabricated beds and slate-topped tables of square tubular steel, which Judd designed in 1991 and 1992.

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Hector Guimard Art Nouveau House Numbers

Lot 148, Hector Guimard, house numerals, 1900-08, painted cast iron, at Christie’s 12 March

I don’t think I’ve ever been in an emotionally wrung out state where I get choked up by the beauty of house numbers, but here we f’ing are.

Hector Guimard had these absolutely exquisite numbers cast, like everything else, at the Fondries Saint Dizier. These are painted, which is fine. The set the de Menils bought in 1971 are just naked iron, which is better. The 25yo surmoulage bronze replicas being sold on 1st Dibs look like they’re wearing a gold lamé sweatsuit. It’d be less embarrassing to tape a hundred dollar bill to your door.

[A few excited minutes later update: as recently as a 2016 blog post, le Cercle Guimard reviewed the history of these numerals, which were available as products basically up until WWII. In 1971, some of the earliest connoisseurs rediscovering Guimard obtained the original counter-models from Saint-Dizier, which Dominique de Menil acquired, some for her own collection, and others she donated to the Musée d’Orsay. Their counter-models long gone, Saint-Didier began producing the surmoulage casts in the 1980s.]

12 March 2024, Lot 148: Hector Guimard, House Numerals, est. $3-5,000 [update: whoops, missed this, and they’re gone. were they withdrawn? or did they not sell?] [christies]

This PS1 Slide Was Not A James Turrell; It Was A Patrick Killoran

Honestly I have no idea how it got lodged in my head, but for at least fifteen years, and probably twenty, I was certain that James Turrell made two pieces at PS1.

One is the famous, iconic, even historic skyspace known as Meeting, which has gone through several iterations—perhaps upgrades—since Turrell first created it in 1980 and opened it in 1986.

Turrell’s skyspace, Meeting, under construction in 1986, via MoMA’s interactive timeline that kind of glosses over the dramatic changes of adding an LED lightshow to the work in 2016, just before it was formally accessioned into the collection.

The other was a far rougher, more primitive, but also more visceral, individual experience, just down the hall. A single viewer climbs onto a wooden platform, lays down, and then the platform is slid through an open window just enough for their head to stick out. For a moment, the viewer has a disorienting and somewhat disembodied view of the sky from an extremely unfamiliar vantage point.

This permanent installation began in a gallery, but the space was then taken over for PS1’s administrative offices, which were open to visitors who would take turns having their heads pushed out the window.

Then this piece was gone, and no one spoke of it again, it was the lost Turrell, that I began to wonder if I’d hallucinated it, a Klaus-era fever dream, or janky Turrell erasure? No, I was just wrong.

Observation Deck (Queens) was a 1996 work by Patrick Killoran, which was installed at PS1’s reopening in 1997. It stayed in place until 2006, just before the Phonecam-brian Explosion. One of the few images of it online (above) is at Rhizome’s archive of VVORK. So thank you for that.

Patrick Killoran, Observation Deck (Birmingham), 2016, installation at IKON Gallery,
photo: Stuart Whipps via IKON

A version of it, Observation Deck (Birmingham), has been installed at IKON since 2016, and has far more photo documentation. They appear to have added a safety harness, which makes sense. Birmingham’s just-announced 100% culture funding cuts, while devastating and myopic, are a small enough source of IKON’s budget that access should not be too affected.

As for how and why I conflated Killoran’s and Turrell’s work, maybe it was some resonance of the sky, the sliding mechanisms, the proximity, and the timing? I can only say it was a compliment for which I am truly sorry, and for which I’m glad to finally be corrected.

Nebelmeer, Nebelmeer

Untitled (Nebelmeer), 2024, 48 x 48 in., paint on canvas, installed on a wall painted in complementary Benjamin Moore color with a suitably atmospheric name, via zillow

In what, from the finishes, looks like the early 90s, A police station in Georgetown was converted into two townhouses. One of them is being sold with help from a little known version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea and Fog. The H on the throw on the sofa stands for Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Previously, related: Monochrome House, 2016
Untitled (A Painting for Two Rooms by Cactus Cantina), 2017
Untitled (Blurred Frida), 2020
LMAO I have works like this that I haven’t even posted, just grabbed the MLS image and declared it, talk about tree falling in the forest

Barnett Newman, Other (1963)

David Diao, Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work (Updated), 2010, acrylic & vinyl on canvas, 84 x 156 in., image via Greene Naftali

One of many epic paintings David Diao made about Barnett Newman’s catalogue raisonné is a yearly tally of work, sorted by category, into zips. Every time I see it I think, “Other? What was the one other?”

Barnett Newman, Model for a Synagogue, 1963, collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture

And then rewatching Diao’s 2013 Dia talk last night, I am reminded that Other is a synagogue Newman designed, Diao said, for an architectural competition. There’s a 2014 story at Grupa O.K. about Harald Szeemann wanting to borrow the model [fabricated by Robert Murray] for a show in 1983, and Annalee refusing to lend it. She left it to the in the CCA in Montreal in 1991.

LATER TONIGHT UPDATE: EXCEPT. Newman did not make this for a competition, but for an exhibition. In mid-1963 he was working on the Cantos print series when Richard Meier, of all people, invited him to be the only non-architect in a show at the Jewish Museum, Recent American Synagogue Architecture. Newman also wrote an essay for the catalogue about synagogue architecture in the postwar context. His relationship with the Jewish Museum soured a couple of years later when he opposed what he felt the museum was wrongly implicating him with constrictive labels of Jewish Artist or Jewish Art. Mark Godfrey gets into this and other early postwar artists’ reckoning with Jewish identity and culture a bit in his 2007 book, Abstraction and the Holocaust.

Kominka Renovation By Atelier Tekuto, 2009

and if you go through and to your left.. Jukou, 2009, image: tekuto.com

Traditional Japanese rural architecture was disappearing in the 1950s when Yukio Futagawa raced to photograph it and publish my favorite architecture book ever, Nihon no Minka. Some minka remain in states of reverent historic preservation. What it seems almost never happens, though, is that a minka is renovated. It feels like almost nothing gets renovated in Japan.

…and lie down in the kitchen, just next to the stove room, Jukou, 2009, image: tekuto.com

So it’s wild that in 2009, Yoshihiro Yamashita, working as Atelier Tekuto, did a modern update to a late 19th century kominka in Iwaki, Fukushima, using historically sensitive, if not preservationist, materials.

From the outside, the strongest gesture was replacing whatever metal garbage cladding was there with plaster panels. But the real breakthrough is on the inside, where drop ceilings were removed to reveal the roof and beams. It took me a minute to map this photo to the outside views, but the square paper lamp and stove help; this is just a two-story space photographed while lying on the floor.

Jukou, 2009, by Yasuhiro Yamashita/Atelier Tekuto [tekuto.com]
Previously, related: Kusakabe House, Takayama

Thank You For Your Silver Service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat

four of the eight sterling silver pieces in the Donald Judd dinner service, by Puiforcat

Saw the Donald Judd X Puiforcat silver dinnerware again on wildoute’s tumblr this morning and was reminded I’m apparently not living in a way that it will effortlessly cross my path. I will have to seek it out at the Hermès store [or the Judd Foundation?]

Donald Judd dinnerware, with other Puiforcat photobomb, at 101 Spring, from tiktok/graciewiener

Technically it dropped last spring. From this hilarious tiktokker [“also the building’s beautiful”] and the Vogue piece, it looks like the embargo for the fashion/influencer reveal at 101 Spring lifted on May 15th. But it kept getting announced/discovered through the fall. And the making of video on Puiforcat’s own page for the collection is only a month old. Anyway, I think you can no longer use the excuse that it wasn’t available.

Continue reading “Thank You For Your Silver Service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat”

Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon (1959) by Robert Brownjohn

Robert Brownjohn’s Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, 1959, seen from inside the lobby of 500 Park Avenue, via Peter Huestis’ skeet

Designer/adman Robert Brownjohn had been pumping up the design of Pepsi-Cola World, the monthly corporate magazine sent to bottlers, for a couple of years when he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the lobby of the company’s soon-to-open world headquarters at 500 Park Avenue.

Robert Brownjohn, Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, chicken wire and Christmas ornaments, Dec. 1959, detail, installed at 500 Park Ave., image: robertbrownjohn.com

The result was Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, described by Brownjohn’s official site as “a giant wave supported by pilotti” which was “elaborately constructed with thousands of multi-coloured Christmas baubles embedded in an armature of chicken wire.”

Robert Brownjohn, Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, chicken wire and Christmas ornaments, Dec. 1959, exterior view, installed at 500 Park Ave., image: robertbrownjohn.com

From the exterior views on Brownjohn’s site, the sculpture seems to have filled almost the entire 100-foot wide facade of Natalie de Blois’ building. The Pepsi-Cola Building is, along with Lever House, the Seagram Building, and the Manufacturers Trust Building (510 Fifth Ave.), one the greatest International Style building in New York. It is certainly the most quietly elegant.

Ezra Stoller, Pepsi-Cola Building, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1960, silver gelatin print, 20×16 in., ed. 20 +4AP, via Yossi Milo

The lobby, entirely open, was originally designed as an exhibition space, but no exhibition mentioned in the building’s history sounds remotely as successful as Robert Brownjohn’s chicken wire sculpture that went on view for a couple of months before the building even opened. And which I had never heard a peep about until this morning, when Peter Huestis posted it on BlueSky.

Richard Rogers Tomigaya Exhibition Hall, 1990-1992

Tomigaya, Richard Rogers, Project Partner: Laurie Abbott, 1990-1992, unbuilt. images via RHSP

Just as the bubble was popping, a developer asked Richard Rogers to make a building on a tiny, triangular lot in Tomigaya, on the southwest corner of Yoyogi-Kōen. The zoning permitted a 45m height, but only three stories. And project partner Laurie Abbott came up with this all-glass, wedge-shaped exhibition space with movable mezzanines and an external crane to lift yachts and helicopters and such into place.

earlier iteration of Tomigaya exhibition hall concept with adjustable mezzanine heights and external elevators, made from Erector sets or whatever, 1990-1992, Richard Rogers/Laurie Abbott

Obviously, it was never built, because if it existed, I would have already reconfigured my life to have bought it in the overlapping window of post-bubble malaise and dotcom bubble madness, and I’d be living in it today. Probably with a crossfit studio or something renting out the lower level.

Google Maps looking east: I think the site is the triangular bldg on the right with the white marker? Obviously they got a zoning variance to build more than three floors of vanilla condos

Shoutout to Philip Oldfield for identifying the Tomigaya tower as his favorite unbuilt high-tech building on social media, and for Kate Wagner for the tip.

Tomigaya [rhsp]

Now (And Then) And Forever

“With gratitude for the imagination, creativity, and vision of Kerry James Marshall in his design for the Now and Forever Windows, on behalf of the Windows Replacement Committee and the Fabrics and Fine Arts Committee, we present to you these stained glass windows, fabricated by Andre Goldkuhle, to be set apart for the people of God.”

I watched the dedication ceremony Saturday, but I wanted to see the stained glass windows Kerry James Marshall made at the National Cathedral in person before writing about them.

It is, of course, impossible to consider the windows outside of their multiple contexts, including: the fleeting, classical Episcopalian spectacle of the dedication ceremony, whose explicit purpose was to inspire, and which has already floated away from the physical present now of the installation. The Cathedral and its institutional apparatus’ reckoning with the white supremacist symbolism literally built into it, over decades; the incremental recommendations and changes made in the wakes of multiple instances of anti-Black violence; the official committees formed amidst the activism of Black students at the Cathedral’s schools; and the seemingly relentless drumbeat of white Christianist fascism beyond the Cathedral’s walls.

Kerry James Marshall is surely aware of all this. He’s been making compelling art all his career for cathedrals built to exclude him. The National Cathedral knows all this, too, obviously; it’s what they chose him to do. In a way, or in part. What was the commission, and what, actually, did Marshall do?

Continue reading “Now (And Then) And Forever”

Kerry James Marshall’s National Cathedral Windows Dedication

In 2021 Kerry James Marshall was commissioned by the National Cathedral to create stained glass windows to replace windows that depicted Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Marshall’s Now and Forever Windows will be unveiled and dedicated on Saturday morning, Sept. 23, and a public open house to celebrate them will run all day.

The windows are accompanied by a stone plaque engraved with a poem, commissioned from Elizabeth Alexander, titled, “An American Song.”

The dedication and reading will be streamed live on the Cathedral’s YouTube channel:

A history of the confederate windows, the task force that convened to study and remove them, and the project to replace them, is at cathedral.org/windows.