Category: architecture

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.

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.

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.

Previously, related: The Whitney House
Oh, Vornado of the Noguchi ceiling and lobby destroying Vornados?

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

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.

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.

But also.

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.

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.]

Maybe they bought in bulk, because they used an identically shaped green Kelly outside the Toronto boardroom of the Teck Mining Group.

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.

Right now I would just like to get lost in transparent mazes of color, tracking the new colors produced by overlapping vistas, and reminisce on the Penetrable installations of Helio Oiticica. Who was driven from Brazil into exile by the military dictatorship.

Turns out discovering this 2011 Olafur Eliasson installation in São Paulo, and later in Stockholm, is not helping me flee the foreboding present, who knew?

Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work), 2011 [olafureliasson.net]
Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work) installation video [soe.tv]

Previously, related: Art & Autocracy [brooklynrail]
What I Saw: Manhattan Speedrun (and Liz Deschenes Gorilla Glass works)