architecture – greg.org

About That Robert Irwin Documentary

I watched the Robert Irwin documentary, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and it is good. [It is currently on Kanopy for free, support your local public library.]

Some things stand out:

Irwin’s mystical-sounding development of his pursuit of perception was fascinating: posting up on Ibiza and not talking to anyone for eight months? wandering around the desert or whatever, painting dots for 16 hours/day, 7 days/wk? But he was not, in fact, alone in that pursuit. Some art world context would have been more helpful than repeating his refusal to allow his work to be photographed.

The Whitney installation was nice, but it felt somehow confusing, which is weird because there was even a real reinstallation of it, with footage and everything. The filmmakers did somehow manage to shoot other phenomenological aspects of other installations coherently.

Evelyn Hankins, who curated Irwin’s spectacular Hirshhorn retrospective, was thoughtful and present—but that show was somehow not, at all.

Which, wtf, the MCA San Diego’s masterpiece, 1° 2° 3° 4°, was done dirty here. Is it the ultimate “you had to be there” Irwin? Except for the Chinati building, which took up the last third of the film?

The dynamics of shooting and interviewing around Marfa and Chinati was weird. Marriane Stockebrand, the inviter, I guess, was everywhere, but Jennie Moore, the director who dragged that project across the finish line was airkissed in one crowd shot? Maybe that is #chinatiworldproblems, I guess I’ll demur. The weird caginess over whether he’d attend the 2016 ribboncutting was eerie, too; it made it sound like he died in production. [Spoiler: he stuck around for seven more years.]

For a documentary about perception and reproduction, it did shoot Irwin’s own dot paintings immaculately. But the shimmering moiré of halftone dots and pixels during pans across archival photos was hilariously distracting.

Seeing Arne Glimcher as a producer both makes sense and raises some flags, but how is that any different from anything the Glimchers have done all this time? It is what it is.

For such a singular thinker, who’d done so much work on his own mind and being, maybe give the film a title that reflects something he said, not just something he quoted?

Mies Kampf

memorial to the november revolution was a horizontally oriented solid jenga structure of unaligned and asymmetrical blocks, constructed of brick salvaged from buildings damaged in the revolution, or the walls against which anti-fascists were shot. a large five pointed star with a hammer and sickle on the upper right section of the memorial had a flagpole attached next to it. a low border of flowers in the berlin cemetery where the memorial was built sits behind a gravel sidewalk, and a chained, low gateway. designed by mies van der rohe and destroyed by nazis — Mies van der Rohe, Revolutionsdenkmal, Berlin, 1926, photo by Arthur Köstler via thecharnelhouse

On this, the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s birth, I recalled the memorial erected to her and other anti-fascists, constructed out of the bricks taken from the walls against which they were shot in 1919. It was designed by Mies van der Rohe, built in 1926, and torn down by the nazis in 1935.

I have not yet found the testimony Mies gave in front of Joseph McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities Committee, but I did find this paragraph from Dietrich Neumann’s foreword to his 2024 biography, Mies Van Der Rohe: An Architect in His Time:

“Politically, Mies was the Talleyrand of modern architecture,” historian Richard Pommer sarcastically noted, referring to the famously opportunistic diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was active under different masters before, during, and after the French Revolution. And indeed, a series of projects by Mies seem to suggest his indifference to political persuasions, be they the Bismarck Memorial, the Monument to the November Revolution [above], the Barcelona Pavilion, or the design for the Brussels World’s Fair pavilion for the nazi regime. Mies’s stand was hardly a profile in courage, but rather driven by opportunism and a desire to maintain the respect of his many left-leaning friends, while keeping his options open with conservative clients or the nazi regime. In the United States, he was suspected both of being a nazi spy and questioned by Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee about Communist leanings due to the Monument to the November Revolution.

Wait, what? Mies van der Rohe, whose most famous building was the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair, also designed a German Pavilion for the nazis at the 1935 Brussels World’s Fair? Was this not mentioned in Mies in Berlin, Terry Riley and Barry Bergdoll’s 2001 MoMA exhibition on the architect’s work through 1937?

OG MoMA Screening Room @Jeu de Paume

a black and white photo from 1938 of a tall ceilinged gallery in the musee du jeu de paume in paris set up as a screening room. thick dark curtains on the doorway on the right wall are currently open. 75 or so simple wooden cafe chairs are arranged in twelve rows facing the far wall, on which a white screen that looks a lot like a robert rauschenberg white painting, is hung high on the wall. the dimensions are for 16m, 4:3, basically. a folding screen stands in the corner below it. on the left wall, two giant windows let in all kinds of beautiful daylight, which, I must admit, is not something I'd have considered for a screening room. via moma archive

Even though it was a film [still], The Public Enemy (1931) that brought me to Three Centuries of American Art, MoMA’s ambitious 1938 Paris exhibition, I was not prepared to find an actual screening room at the end of the 85-pic slideshow of installation photos from the Musée du Jeu de Paume. But here it is.

Harrisonfahrkartenschalter

a freestanding ticket booth at wurstelprater, an amusement park in vienna, is built to resemble a graggy brownish grey cliff two stories tall, except it rests on a plinth of stone or concrete, which the concrete fake rock appears to overlap, like an overgrown tree root. and there is a wide plate glass window with an irregular edge and a level shelf, which contrasts with the seeming natural wildness of the rock. and on the upper right is an air conditioning compressor on its own ledge cut into the fake rock, an even starker contrast of nature and machine than the window. power lines, the tops of various rides behind the booth, etc. poke up from the top. the bottom edge foreground is a neat cobblestone — Don’t tell me it’s not a Rachel Harrison? Wurstelprater via Christian Oldham

It eventually wore off, but for a long while after seeing my first Gabriel Orozco show, it changed me, and I saw his art in every condensation ring on every counter, and every tin can balanced on a watermelon.

Rachel Harrison’s work is the opposite, in that I’ve been looking at it for years now, and this is the first time an object in the real world has seized me with her vision. And if you want me to believe that this fake stone ticket booth at the buck wild Wurstelprater amusement park in Vienna, with the air conditioner perched on its little ledge is not the world’s largest Rachel Harrison sculpture, well, the burden is on you.

Related? Wurstelprater in October, from Half Letter Press [halfletterpress]

Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall

the reid white house, a 19th century red brick house in downtown lexington virgnia, is photographed from this oblique angle because just to the left, behind that hedge, is the post office, which is built on the house's front yard, and so there's no clear view of the house. it has two chimneys on each end, and a white columned porch. the double porch in the background was added later. via vlr — 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:

A Solicitation of Wood Scraps and The One-Mat Room

a woodblock print in two halves of a corner of the one-mat room, a study built by matsuura takeshiro in 1887. on the left a low writing desk in dark wood sits in front of a large, open window. on the right, a hibachi and tea implements are lined up aaginst a fusuma sliding wall panel which has text written on it in japanese. various pieces of wood are marked by katakana characters, which correspond to a key running down the left edge of the page, identifying the catalogue item number of each piece of ancient wood and its source. from mokuhen kanjin, image via henry smith — 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.

Yoshio Taniguchi Hardhat

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 hold silver polished shovels and fake dig in some dirt for the groundbreaking of moma's yoshio taniguchi renovation. taniguchi and agnes gund and other folks stand on the dais behind, waiting their photo opp turn. the setting is a white tent, with some crowds visible in the background, applauding. image circa may 2001 via bizbash, a corporate party rental portal that is going strong in 2024, i guess — 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 photo from a moma catwalk facing down onto the atrium, which is being set up for a party/preview, with drink stations and cater waiters milling about. the green grey slate floor dominates. barnett newman's bronze sculpture, broken obelisk, an obelisk perched upside down on the tip of a pyramid, is at the atrium center. on the back wall, monet's water lilies look flat as hell. — 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.

matisse's dance hung above a floating staircase with glass safety rail, and long window beyond facing onto moma's atrium, with multiple catwalks and the sculpture garden beyond, one of the dramatic details of yoshio taniguchi's moma redesign, image: tim hursley, 2004 — 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.

a gothic window of st thomas's church on fifth avenue is tightly framed by the glass walls and soaring white steel roof of the porch of yoshio taniguchi's moma, while a tree in the sculpture garden inhabits the middleground, and two curved plates of rusted corten steel of a richard serra torqued ellipse fill the left and lower section of the photo, taken from inside serra's sculpture in 2005 — 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 Curtained Wall

google streetview image of the steel and glass lobby of chicago's inland steel building with two white curtains hanging inside, between the two revolving doors. circa 2022 — 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.

google streetview image of the lobby of the inland steel building in chicago with full unobstructed glass panels between steel mullions, richard lippold's eight pointed star shaped sculpture radiant 1 against the black background of the lobby wall, and frank gehry's cast glass blobs assembled into a security desk against the glass, between the two revolving doors. a bright red pedestal with perhaps a model of the building itself is against the left glass wall. circa 2017 — 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.

[Heliostat and] Window for Moving Light

a closeup of ornately carved gothic finials on a wooden choir wall that are painted what seems to be white, with the larger space of the cathedral nave extending into the background, but the main feature of this photo is this architecture bathed, from bottom to top, in red, orange, yellow, and blue light, pouring in through the handblown glass window installation by olafur eliasson. at the st nicholas cathedral in greifswald germany. — 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.

the east facade of a gothic brick cathedral in greifswald germany is dark against the deep blue sky of late afternoon or early evening, flanked by shadowy trees. the three tall, thin gothic windows with white tracery glow in a rainbow spectrum, dark red at the bottom to deep blue at the top, so mostly oranges and yellows in the middle, an installation by olafur eliasson — 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.

Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light), 2024 [olafureliasson.net]

What Might Cady Noland Be Up To?

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?

The House is (Still) on Fire, But There’s a Cady Noland Show to See. [202artsreview]

Scott Burton Estate Planning

a semi circular green granite bench with a matching circular green granite planter in the center filled with leafy plants was originally installed in the atrium of the equitable building in manhattan, and is photographed from above. it is by scott burton and has been dismantled, as the ny times discussed at length in an october 2024 article from whence this photo was ganked. — Scott Burton, *Atrium Furnishment*, 1986, granite, onyx, brass, plants, as installed in the atrium of the Equitable Building, 787 Seventh Avenue, NYC until 2020. photo: NYT says via Kasmin, but it was also in a 2023 exhibition and public program by Darling Green & Soft Network

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.

A dying artist left his legacy to MoMA. Today he’s almost forgotten [sic] [nyt]
Previously, related: David Getsy talking about Scott Burton’s performance art
2023: Scott Burton Marble Armchair

Look At This Scooter/Bench in Frank Gehry’s House

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.

Step Inside Architect Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica Dream House [arch digest]

Cady Noland Pavilions

“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.

GU Could’ve Been Home By Now

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.

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.

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.

Destroyed Or Unrealized? Jacob Kassay Princeton Mural

Installation and drips on frames view, OVR Jacob Kassay, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, 2023

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.

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.