the house formerly known as the Reid-White House, photographed for the Virginia Landmark Register in 2016 by Sarah Traum, in such a way that the post office in the front yard can’t be seen.
What to do with this story from Sally Mann’s memoir?
Every time [Cy Twombly and I] would leave his house and catch a glimpse of the neighboring Reid White house behind the trees, one or the other of us would repeat our favorite line from a story my mother used to tell about the occupant of that house, Mrs. Breasted White. That’s what I swear I remember her saying: “Mrs. Breasted White.” But now, writing that name, it somehow seems highly improbable.
Anyway, we’d say the punch line, sometimes in unison, and then we would both howl with laughter, as if we had just heard it for the first time. Here’s how the story goes:
Matsuura Takeshiro’s drawing of one corner of his One-Mat Room, with katakana keys to identify the various pieces of wood or other artifact, as published in Mokuhen Kanjin, and screenshot from Prof Henry D Smith II’s Oct 2024 lecture at the Noguchi Museum
After two decades as an explorer and cartographer, Matsuura Takeshirō, who gave the northern island of Japan its name, Hokkaidō, settled into a second life as an antiquarian. In anticipation of his 70th year (1888), he decided to build a tiny study onto his small house in central Tokyo, and asked his antiquarian colleagues across Japan to each send him a piece of old wood. He called the study the Ichijōjiki ((一畳敷), or One-Mat Room, though it is actually slightly larger than its single tatami mat. Matsuura documented each piece of wood, its source and significance, and its donor, in a tiny, self-published catalogue, Mokuhen Kanjin (木片勧進), which Columbia professor emeritus Henry Smith II translates as, A Solicitation of Wood Scraps.
The groundbreaking for the Yoshio Taniguchi addition to The Museum of Modern Art took place in May 2001 under a tent in the demolished Sculpture Garden, which had been repurposed as a staging area. I was sitting on the outer edge of the first bay of seats, stage right, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s security detail was standing behind me, on the aisle, while he was on the low dais with everyone. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi was on the far side of the arc of trustees and dignitaries. There were silver MoMA Builds hardhats and shovels for everyone, arranged in rows on edge of the dais next to the dirtbox.
David Rockefeller and Rudy Giuliani ceremonially breaking ground for MoMA’s renovation in May 2001. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi talks with Agnes Gund in the background, image: bizbash
When it came time to do the ceremonial groundbreaking, there was some not completely scripted bustling around, as everyone got their hardhats on, and when someone tried to hand a hardhat to the mayor, his security guards sprung forward and hissed to each other intensely: “Oh shit, not the hat, not the hat.” because Giuliani was still in his combover era. He ended up not wearing a hardhat.
After the photo-opp broke up and the mayor left, gladhanding and milling about began, and I grabbed one of the unclaimed hardhats from Taniguchi’s end of the dais. [A shovel seemed a bit much.]
Gothamist‘s November 2004 photo of the inaugural installation of the atrium, with Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk looking great, and Monet’s Water Lilies looking flat af
The dedication of the Taniguchi addition took place in November 2004 in the Marron Atrium. I brought the hardhat in my eight month-old daughter’s stroller. As the event was breaking up, I took her to meet the Taniguchis, and presented the hardhat to him to sign, which he graciously did. I’ll post a pic of it when I can.
This was originally called the Matisse Stairwell. My 2004 copy of this Timothy Hursley photo is 250 pixels wide.
The stairway with the window on the atrium; the separate window onto the atrium that gathers dust beautifully; the windows onto the city; the restored entrance of Goodwin & Stone’s building; the porches on the Garden; and the corner where he resolved Cesar Pelli’s otherwise unrooted tower in the lobby and the Garden, are my favorite elements of Taniguchi’s design. They’re all moments where Taniguchi sought to integrate his space and structure with its context and history.
The galleries have always been fine for me; I think I was cured of misplaced nostalgia for the Pelli-era or earlier galleries by a conversation with Terry Riley, where he relayed a conversation with Taniguchi. After the finalists had been selected, Riley suggested to Taniguchi that he reconsider his more reverential approach to the existing galleries. He showed plans of the evolving museum, and how the galleries echoed the dimensions and plans of the rowhouses that had been demolished with each expansion. This constraint was long gone, Riley showed, and the new building could—and should—take its program from the art and the curators who would use it. I remember thinking this was profound and correct. But over time, I’ve also come to recognize that those phantom townhouses didn’t just impact the floorplan, but the kinesthetic experience of viewing art in the spaces they influenced. MoMA’s galleries felt a certain way, and that has changed as the building and the institution evolved.
Taniguchi and Serra and St Thomas Church, 2005
Taniguchi delivered beautifully on what he was asked to do, opening up the museum to the city as a spectacular stage for the likes of Richard Serra and Marina Abramovic. It set the stage for what followed, too: the real estate maxxing, the Nouvel supertower, and Diller + Scofidio turning the townhouse-sized Folk Art Museum into a void. [No bronze tables yet, though.] I wonder how often Taniguchi visited.
Inland Steel Building, 1958, Chicago, as documented in Aug 2022 by Google Streetview
While looking at Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building in Chicago, I was surprised to find curtains had been hung in its iconically transparent lobby.
Inland Steel Building, Lippold, and Gehry, as documented in Sept 2017 by Google Streetview
Installed between the 2017 and 2018 Streetview updates, the curtains entirely block the view of Radiant I, Richard Lippold’s perfect lobby art, a sculpture of webbed wire, steel, gold and copper, hovering above a reflecting pool. But I suspect that is just collateral visual damage, and they were really installed to block the view of the massive cast glass jumble of Frank Gehry’s security desk. Or perhaps they’re really just to give the security guards a bit of privacy in which to check their websites, and blocking the view of Gehry’s desk is just a bonus.
Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas Cathedral, Greifswald, Germany, image: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
Olafur Eliasson has created a work of light and handblown glass for the east windows of St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Greifswald, a Hanseatic city near the Baltic coast of Germany, which was the birthplace of Caspar David Friedrich. Originally built in the 14th century, the church was remade in the 19th century with woodwork by Friedrich’s brother, Christian Adolph, including the elaborate Gothic choir wall which closes off the windows from the rest of the interior.
The work is titled, Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light). Because the east window only catches the morning sun for a small portion of the day—and that portion is limited further by the building directly across the street—Eliasson installed a heliostat, a mirror that tracks the movement of the sun, on that building to reflect afternoon sun into the morning window.
Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, exterior view of the east facade of St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
When I first discussed with Olafur an idea for a work that involved a heliostat reflecting light into our north-facing apartment in New York, in 2003, [while I had the concept, he already knew what a heliostat was and where to get one], I imagined sunlight that doesn’t move around the room would become very unsettling.
So it is buck wild to see a similar setup behind the altar of a church, where it is intended to encourage “pause and reflection – aspects central to both the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Protestant spirituality.”
Or does an beam of sunlight coming at an uncharacteristic time into a building oriented so specifically have a different effect? The afternoon sun from the east can become a metaphor, or it can encourage pause and reflection on the human, artistic intervention that produced it, drawing viewers’ attention to the world outside the church.
Looks like more writeups of the Cady Noland installation at Glenstone are turning up—and more images of it are getting out. Ian Ware at 202 Arts Review has apparently found the same stash of Noland photos online—though he is more assiduous in his image copyright crediting than I was.
And that’s all reason enough to rejoice. But beyond that, Ware has a very interesting, site-specific take on Noland’s take on her works’ new home. He finds a relationship between the temporary walls Noland erected to block a distracting view of the museum’s pond, and the museum’s own temporary walls blocking off the building’s renovations.
He also sees in Noland’s alterations and additions to the installation a critique of the Raleses and their multibillion-dollar project. Here he draws on the larger context of the Raleses’ business dealings and Glenstone’s construction–and the lawsuits with its contractor that precipitated the current closure and renovations of the new museum building—and even some of the lurid investment shenanigans by the contractor’s family—a local real estate dynasty, apparently—that “may as well have been written for a tabloid delivered straight to Noland’s doorstep.”
What feels more resonant—and which I think takes more properly into consideration the involvement of Emily Wei Rales, in curating, collecting, and institution-building—is the exhibition of Noland’s work alongside the text collages of Lorraine O’Grady and the powerful sculptures of Melvin Edwards.
As someone who’s watched the Raleses develop their vision from various vantage points, I feel like they’ve been thoughtful to iterate away from the narrow trophyism of, say, the Fisher and Broad collections. The collecting path from Split/Rocker did not have to lead to Noland, or O’Grady, or Edwards, but here they are. If they do take a couple of hits from an artist they think is significant, I imagine they’d be undaunted, maybe even appreciative. Their venture faces more credibility risk from privileging artists’ approbation than from accommodating their critiques.
But this gets to the crux of Noland’s work today, when the poisonous forces of media, politics and power have outstripped everything she flagged back in the day. Can her new work make a similar impact to her earlier hits? Is that even something she considers? Or does the proliferation of objects trapped and neutralized in acrylic blocks, perched on industrial logistics flotsam target a new, contemporary source of dread we’re still too asleep to realize? And does this luxuriously contemplative installation help us to see, or does it sedate us?
Julia Halperin’s NY Times article on the precarious state of artist Scott Burton’s legacy is fascinating and somewhat exasperating. As he was dying of AIDS in 1989, the sculptor hastily made a will that left his entire estate, archive, works, and copyright, to the Museum of Modern Art. Burton’s dealer, Max Protetch and his friend and supporter Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA’s chief curator of painting & sculpture, figured it’d be the best way to preserve and promote his work. It sounds like it was a mess even when Protetch was still dealing and Varnedoe was still alive, but it has only gotten worse.
MoMA is not set up to maintain the market for Burton and his collectors, nor to rally for the preservation of his many public sculpture installations—which the museum does not own—and I don’t think they should be, frankly. [That said, even as a fan with some history, I had no idea how threatened or destroyed some of Burton’s NYC installations were.]
But it seems like the museum does have at least a financial interest, and perhaps a fiduciarily related art historical one, in supporting Burton’s reputation. [Whatever its asset holdings, MoMA appears to have only six Burton works officially accessioned into the collection. Maybe most of the remaining assets of Burton’s estate are the declared but unrealized editions of his sculptures. And maybe that’s what Kasmin Gallery’s doing in this story: angling for more posthumous edition business.]
Meanwhile, I’ve been fascinated to read art historian David Getsy’s history of Burton’s performance art practice of the 1960s and ’70s, which was in part a conceptualization of his experience in public as a queer man. That work—and that experience, Getsy argues—were influential on, even crucial for, Burton’s development of the subtle public sculpture practice he is best known for. It was that incipient queerness, in fact, which led Burton to suppress his performance work in a hostile political climate of the 1980s, so it wouldn’t thwart his public and corporate commissions.
It sounds like a little more public attention to Burton’s work and MoMA’s involvement with it will help them do what’s right.
The coolest scooter in Santa Monica, at Frank Gehry’s other house, designed with Sam Gehry, and phtoographed by Jason Schmidt in 2019 for Architectural Digest
Via some content artnet was putting into an architecture vertical, I came across some content Frank was putting out in 2019 to boost the Gehry brand via a collab with his son Sam. It was a house in Santa Monica that started as a spec house, but which became an age-in-place reboot of Gehry’s own house.
Which is all fine, I’m just setting the context for why I’m only seeing this 5-yo Architectural Digest photo now. Ignore the Kermit green Steinway [or file it away for an obscene trend piece; it’s a thank you gift from Michael Eisner, for the pavilion Gehry made him in Aspen], and focus in on that scooter/bench.
It’s so sick it makes me want to restart my dadblog.
I can find no mention of it. I’d have guessed it was an offcut, but the dimensions look bigger than the fir beams in the house itself. Was it a sample? How did this come to be?
Photo of Frank Gehry’s Chiat conference table, 1986, from when it sold at Wright20 in 2003 [n.b., it sold twice at Phillips, too]
The closest analog I can find in Gehry’s oeuvre is just down the street in Venice, but ages ago: the giant wood block & roller skate legs on a modular conference table made for the fish room at Chiat/Day’s temporary warehouse/office in 1986. NGL, it feels like a stretch.
“Beginning October 17, and spanning three rooms of the Pavilions, Glenstone will share a presentation of works by Cady Noland. Developed in collaboration with the artist, this presentation will mark the first major survey by a U.S. museum of her decades-long career.”
Reader, the presentation has been marked. Last year I poured one out for anyone who’d hoped to buy a new Cady Noland work. But now I feel for anyone who’s been trying to buy a major Cady Noland the last 17 years. Because Glenstone got them all. Look at that map; Glenstone has Cady Nolands even Glenstone doesn’t know about.
Three of the six open pavilion spaces are Noland’s work. [The others are two galleries of works by Lorraine O’Grady and Melvin Edwards, and the little library.] The first thing you see as you go down the stairs is not a Noland sculpture, but a Noland architectural intervention. At first it read like an Ellsworth Kelly, if only because architecture-scale Kellys were just on view here. Up close, no, closer, inside it, it read like an Anne Truitt, of the back of the Anne Truitts that had backs.
The no photography proscription is excruciating, and I find myself trying to no spoilers my way through this post, as if it’s feasible to say, let’s discuss it after you’ve seen it. The artist adjusted the space to minimize distraction and focus attention on her work, and it works. They borrowed Clip-on Man. Charles Gatewood’s book with the source image is in the library.
The Raleses purportedly acquired Noland’s entire show last year at Gagosian, but it also somehow fills a space three times the size. There is a lot less tape, except when there isn’t.
There are pallet plinths that are not elements of the work, except when they are. There are foam and carpet blocks that precede an installation, except they’re still here. It’s at once pristine and provisional.
The paper labels remain on the white wall tires. You may not ride the tire swings. The internal gear to lift the massive stockade is freshly lubed, but the crank is padlocked. The chain that connected the bench is gone. Oozewald has its corrected and copyrighted stand. The wear on the corners of one (non-mirror-finish) aluminum panel propped on the floor is enough to make the owner of Cowboys Milking weep.
It’s like this survey surveys not only the range of Noland’s work as she made it, but as it was presented, processed and purchased since. Maybe being cast in acrylic and thoughtfully placed in the contemplative suburban art temple of benevolent billionaires is not, after all, all bad.
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.
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.
20210104_JRose_Princeton_060-scaled-2-1024×682.jpg via Galerie Greta Meert
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.
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.
Also Jenny Holzer’s Untitled (1989/2024), with throwback font, photo via JCW
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.
Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1977-79, 1998, 6 x 53 x 5 in., LED sign in black housing, via Sprüth Magers
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.
Jenny Holzer, Green Survival, 2004, 5 x 42 x 1.4 cm, LED sign in aluminum, ed. 20 from Editions Schellmann, via Phillips 2019
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.”
Protect these lamps from what I want, which is to smash them: HOOO!!! and HAAA!!! lamps, 2009, via If It’s Hip It’s Here, which also includes FLOS’s faux-Holzerian invite to the Milan lamp launch
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.]
Until this morning, everything I knew about Ellsworth Kelly and pink triangles I had learned from Jonathan Horowitz. In 2010, Horowitz made a series of works critiquing the minimalist and abstract works Kelly and other artists made for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. “In the face of one of the worst things that’s ever happened, art is represented as having nothing to say,” Horowitz explained when he showed the works at Sadie Coles in 2011.
Two Rainbow Flags in the Style of the Artist’s Boyfriend, 2011, image:jonathanorowitz.com
Pink Curve (2010), above, paraphrases Kelly’s white Memorial (1992), transforming it into a reference to the pink triangle nazis forced gay people to wear in the concentration camps. Pink Curve called out the invisibility or omission of gay identity, not just in discussion of the Holocaust, but in a work by a gay artist. It’s similar to Horowitz’s critique of Jasper Johns—and/or of the discourse around his work—in works like Rainbow Flags For Jasper In The Style of The Artist’s Boyfriend (2011). [The artist’s boyfriend referenced here is Horowitz’s, Rob Pruitt—unless Johns was keeping a glitter-loving twink under wraps on his farm, obv.] And all that makes sense.
This morning I saw these photos, and is that not an Ellsworth Kelly pink triangle painting on the living room wall of a 1979 apartment in Olympic Tower, designed by Francisco Kripacz? Yes, yes it is.
Olympic Tower Apartment by Arthur Erickson, interior by Francisco Kripacz, with a raised glass floor and a pink Ellsworth Kelly, 1979, photo: Norman McGrath, s/o tumblr user runrabbitafterdark-blog
Well, technically, it’s not a triangle, but a triangle with asymmetrically truncated corners, so a pentagon, but still, it is rather trianglish. And technically, the architect, resident, and Kripacz’ partner, Arthur Erickson, called it “a very beautiful mauve” Kelly whose form is echoed by the custom steel coffee table [an actual triangle.]
Arthur Erickson and Francisco Kripacz, Teck Mining Group boardroom with an Ellsworth Kelly green painting between two trees, photo: Norman McGrath via arthurerickson.com
Erickson and Kripacz were the most famous Canadian Design Gays of the 1970s and 80s. They renovated an iconic party house on Fire Island with a retractable roof and fence. They partied and schmoozed with all sorts of famous and powerful people. Gay architect and nazi Philip Johnson had dinner in the presence of the Kelly pink triangle. They kept working together after they broke up, with Kripacz setting up shop in Beverly Hills. And while I can’t find any party pics, I’m sure Dynasty producer Douglas Cramer had to know about Erickson & Kripacz’s pink Kelly triangle when he bought the Cor-Ten steel version in 1984. So maybe Horowitz was onto something.
The Rothko Chapel finally getting the skylight right after 50 years has been on my pandemic bucket list since it reopened in 2020. But that visit will not happen yet, since the Chapel in Houston announced this week that the roof, ceiling, walls, and three of Rothko’s paintings were damaged by Hurricane Beryl.
Given the terrible emergency response to Beryl, which left parts of Houston without aid or electricity for more than a week in early July, maybe it’s really not that big a deal that the announcement of the damage and indefinite closure of the Chapel took five weeks. Those folks have been through some stuff.
So I can redirect my WTF headscratching to Artforum’s unbylined news story of the closure, in which the one-time art magazine of record reports that the Chapel “is home to fourteen site-specific black murals.” They are not murals.
For his part, Rothko Chapel executive director David Leslie calls them “Mark Rothko panels,” twice, so that is the current term of art on campus. But they are, of course, paintings, on canvas, on stretchers, hung on walls.
Also they are not black, but deep reds, browns, and/or purples that approach black. Which brings us back to the lighting situation. Like the Rothko Chapel, Artforum, too, has been through some stuff lately, but this error should not take five weeks to fix, much less fifty years.
Black Quasi Bricks, 2003, at neugerrimschneider, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
Scrolling in the Olafur Eliasson results on liveauctioneers for farflung oddities I’d missed, I came across this unexpected familiar item right in front of me that I’d also missed.
