Category: architecture

Maybe it’s living on the border, or the multiple additions, but my strongest sense of visiting the Buffalo AKG, the museum formerly known as the Albright-Knox, is of marveling at the things they put next to each other.

By entering through the parking lot and the new Gundlach Greenhouse, I ended up walking backwards, chronologically, through the museum, beginning with a gallery of large paintings made in 2013. Then there was the 90s room, then on back, to the room with this pairing of a Rothko and a Frankenthaler that just felt wild for some reason. But at least I got a picture. The mid-70s pairing of a Susan Rothenberg horse next to a blurry pre-squeegee abstract painting by Gerhard Richter was so unexpected, I forgot to photograph it.

The Coenties Slip room, though, was pleasantly sublime, with Ellsworth Kelly’s 1950s NY NY living across from Agnes Martin’s Tree just like old times. That’s a detail below, obviously; just imagine that extending in infinity.

There were some other nice moments in the permanent collection—the Stanley Whitney retrospective was spectacular, btw. Those little paintings he makes at the end of the day with his leftover paint!

Olafur’s pavilion tree situation was nice, and better than the courtyard it replaced, for sure. Is it worth having to have the Gundlach wing, too? I will defer to the Buffalovians, who did seem pleased with the place.

But the surprise and delight was the Jacob Kassay installation, developed in collaboration with the visually impaired education folks, where he lined the outer edge of the handrail with the letter H in Braille, creating a tactile onomatopoetic evocation of breathing, or sighing, as visitors drag their hand along. It was the perfect opposite of spectacle.

As an architecture fan and a survivor of a visit with him to the Glass House, I feel like I can say it is really too bad Philip Johnson was such a Nazi. Because the ancillary content would have been amazing.

It is still so worth checking out Spencer Bailey’s report in Town & Country on the restoration of the Brick House. Though it is right in front of the Glass House, and connected to it underground—it contains all the plumbing and mechanicals that make the Glass House possible—the Brick House has never been open to the public.

Which is not the same as not open to visitors. The Brick House was originally conceived in 1949 as a three-bedroom guest house, but it was quickly remodeled. And as everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Andy Warhol to Paul Goldberger readily acknowledge, it was Johnson’s sex shack. And it seems like it was hopping.

The butch boudoir interior has been restored to its 50s Fortuny-draped glory; the library has its uncomfortable number of fascism-related titles; and the halls are filled with regular rotations from Johnson’s collection of modern art. And now it is finally open for visitors, both those who head back to the city before nightfall—Johnson’s favorite kind—and the special ones who stay over. Like the Glass House, the Brick House is available for fundraising sleepovers. The mind reels.

Inside the Brick House, Philip Johnson’s Private Playground [townandcountrymag]
Previously at the Glass House, related; Au Bout de La Nuit

NGL, I chose this among the many great RO/LU lots in Patrick Parrish’s upcoming sale at Wright20 for the headline. Even though I got stuck on the ending.

Matt Olsen calls these Rauschenberg Chairs, because they were realized by one of Robert Rauschenberg’s original fabricators. He was one of the first artist/designers to do a residency at Captiva, too, in 2013. So maybe there was some carefree hammock or sling inspo there on the deck, too; I have not asked.

But I think he took the form with him to Florida. RO/LU showed fir and fur-based sling chairs in late 2011, with ropes holding up a wild felt seat element by Ashley Helvey. Their full title was Primarily / Primary (after Carol Bove, Scott Burton and Sol Le Witt), namechecking three artists that had been on/in their minds while making them.

It is unsurprising now, but a refreshing (re)discovery at the time that in exploring the gap between art and furniture, RO/LU would find Scott Burton.

Which, now that I bring it up, I can’t not post the greatest Burton-referenced piece in the sale, this group of walnut forms called Settee X Three After BURTON Photo (Private, Public + Secret). I’ve been staring at the 360-degree photos, and the pull-aparts of the the four pieces for ages, and still cannot quite process or piece them together.

I first got to know RO/LU as a blog before I got to know them as people, and one of the most amazing things they did was experiment with moving from digital/visual contemplation to real world experience when so much of the culture was trying to do the opposite.

So an object (Private) that was produced by eyeballing an old photo of a Scott Burton granite settee at the Dallas Museum, that is temporarily cast in concrete on a Williamsburg sidewalk (Public), and replicated somewhere else (Secret), that you can only understand in person, feels very on the mark.

11 Apr 2024 Lot 179: RO/LU, Aluminum Rauschenberg Chairs, 2011 [wright20]
Lot 169: RO/LU, Settee X Three (After BURTON Photo, In Private, Public & Secret), 2012 [wright20]
2012: RO/LU’s Settee X Three at Sit and Read Gallery [sightunseen]
RO/LU | “Primarily / Primary (After Carol Bove, Scott Burton + Sol Le Witt) Chairs”, 2011 [patrick-parrish]
Previously, related: Scott Burton Marble Armchair

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.

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]

[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 major—and minor— furnishings 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”

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.

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

Continue reading “Donald Judd Cama del Taller Chihuahuense”

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]

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, perhaps not—since Turrell first created it in 1980 and opened it in 1986.

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* was in 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, first installed in his studio in Williamsburg, and then installed at PS1’s reopening in 1997. It stayed in place until 2006 2010, mostly missing 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.

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.

* MARCH 2024 UPDATE: And corrected again. Killoran reached out to clarify the work was always in PS1’s office; I concluded wrongly from the VVORK documentation photo that it was in a gallery space at some point.

He also explained the work’s dates related to its studio vs. public installations. Versions would later be installed in Sydney, Nantes, and London.

As for my retconning Observation Deck as a Turrell, Killoran suggested that may have arisen from a 2004 Village Voice article [long since corrected] that called it a Turrell. I’d already experienced Observation Deck several times since then, but memory is a wild thing. Anyway, now we know a little more.