My initial impression of the Kennedy Center’s The Reach is obliqueness. It is in a triangle of land carved by a parkway and on-ramps and a bridge, from which it is hard to see. I finally made a visit this morning after multiple failed, drive-by attempts to photograph this new installation of Untitled (Trudeau Trump Brushstroke). This perfectly framed and backdropped view is the only one, and it is in the intersection of a The Reach sidewalk and a commuter bike path.
Mike Kelley and Fred Tomaselli on loan from Glenstone at The Reach
The art at The Reach is on loan. I did not check where the big, blue Joel Shapiro came from, but except for the large, 1969 Sam Gilliam painting, which is from the artist himself, most of the work inside comes from Glenstone. In lieu, it looks like, of a lot of money. David M. Rubinstein, meanwhile, has given more money than even Boeing, and loaned James Madison’s copy of W. J. Stone’s 1823 facsimile etching of the Declaration of Independence (ed. 201, of which around 50 survive, apparently.)
Glenn Ligon neon on loan from GlenstoneFaith Ringgold painting on loan from Glenstone
Boeing also sponsored the exhibition of George W. Bush’s paintings of Iraq War veterans, the billboard for which is not easily visible from the nearby roads. Maybe if you’re stuck in traffic. I did see the show, and will write about it separately.
Other thoughts of The Reach: I felt some spatial echoes with Holl’s ICA at VCU, especially in some peekaboo vistas and the dramatic staircase.
Perhaps this awning rainspout is designed to arc perfectly into the pond and not splash onto the ledge instead?
shattered glass at The Reach, presumably under warranty
This special Tiny House episode of Gas Stations I Want To Live In is brought to you by the Reina Sofia and the Jeu de Paume, who have both showed Luigi Ghirri retrospectives in the last month.
When I figure out the architect of this gem I will update the post.
Piet Mondrian, Colour Design for the Salon of Ida Bienert, 1926, image via e-flux for albertinum
As soon as the e-flux header gif started flashing I knew what Heimo Zobernig was up to in Dresden:
In the Albertinum he is presenting a selection of recent paintings from this series as well as a new spatial installation in the atrium. The basis for this work consists of design drawings produced by Piet Mondrian in 1926 for a room in the home of the Dresden art collector Ida Bienert, which are on view in the exhibition entitled “Visionary Spaces” in the Albertinum. Whereas Mondrian’s design was never actually implemented, Zobernig’s installation in the original dimensions of that room can be entered and experienced as a cubic sculpture.
Yes, but what? Never realized? Never realized in Frau Bienert’s Haus, maybe.
In 1970, Pace Gallery produced a full-scale version what was then known as Salon for Madame B. based on the sketch above, which they purchased from Mondrian’s friend and heir Harry Holtzman. The room was constructed in spectroscopically color-matched Formica by the American Cyanamid Corporation, which simultaneously launched “The Mondrian Collection” of Formica. After its commercial debut in New York, Mondrian’s Formica Room traveled to Chicago, where it went on view at the Art Institute.
1970 photo of Piet Mondrian’s Salon for Madame B., as realized by Pace Gallery and the Formica Corporation
Six years ago I found a vintage photo of Mondrian’s Room, and I tried tracking it down, to see if it still existed. Pace was singularly unhelpful with even the most basic information, so I dropped it. But it has be out there somewhere; Formica is plastic, and we know how long that sticks around. In the mean time, there’s a new version in Dresden, so project usurped, if not mystery solved.
installation view of Heimo Zobernig’s Piet Mondrian: a spatial appropriation, 2019, at the Albertinum in Dresden, image: @mariahuberpod
Untitled Palermo (South Park), 2019, enamel and latex on wood and steel, enamel and steel on cast iron and brick, installation image by Bryan Finoki, aka @subtopes
When he first tweeted this photo from San Francisco, Bryan Finoki saw #fortressurbanism. I saw metal af Blinky with a Melvin Edwards twist.
Untitled, Palermo, 1970 image ganked from wherever (it is not so easy to tell in this jpg, there are actually three bands of green. hashtag metadata, but I can’t tell if this is a different work from the Untitled, 1968, belonging to Grand Duc Jean)
My principled stand against buffing is not softening, and I don’t condone it, but I can’t not appreciate the occasional aesthetic results. Until I’m able to source the exact anti-climbing spike strips in this installation, to see this work you’ll have to go–or google your way–to 2nd & Brannan streets.
Which is fine. Palermo was very into site specifics, which I can appreciate. The painted wall and pipes here feel especially significant.
I’ve recently been taking a long look at the work of Sam Gilliam. There was one drape installation he made in the 1970s at a gallery, and when he reinstalled the piece in a museum, he added a vertical beam to stand in for the gallery’s steam riser. I think this painting, though standalone, would benefit from a similar treatment [chef’s finger kiss emoji].
Mies van der Rohe, Revolutionsdenkmal, Berlin, 1926 (destroyed 1935), photo by Arthur Köstler via thecharnelhouse
It is the 100th anniversary of the execution of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the fascist Freikorps in Berlin. After several years of unsuccessful attempts, a memorial to these and others killed in the German phalanx of the Bolshevik Revolution was finally built in Berlin’s central cemetery in 1926. It was designed by Mies van der Rohe with the sculptor Herbert Garbe.
According to Edward Fuchs, who was instrumental to the project, Mies said, “As most of these people were shot in front of a brick wall, a brick wall would be what I would build as a monument.”
Mies van der Rohe, Revolutionsdenkmal, Berlin, 1926 (destroyed 1935), photo by Arthur Köstler via thecharnelhouse
At the Charnel House from whence these images come, Ross Wolfe notes that the jagged bricks of the memorial “had been assembled from the bullet-riddled remains of buildings damaged or destroyed during the Spartacist uprising” Luxemburg and Liebknecht triggered. It became an iconic backdrop for speeches, and the site was the focus of annual memorial marches and rallies until the Nazis destroyed the memorial in 1935.
Wolfe also traces some of Mies’ political shifts, from Bolshevik memorial designer to apolitical pragmatist Bauhaus head as the Nazis came to power, to whatever he was in the US. But wait, there’s more! Mies was also the favored architectural visionary and mentor to America’s own greatest Nazi architect Philip Johnson. He got called before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. And he rejected student efforts to rebuild the memorial in 1968, and got protested when his Neu Nationalgalerie opened in Berlin.
I guess I would like to see it rebuilt, bust mostly I’d like to live in it, which is complicated, I know. In the mean time, I will try to find Mies’s HUAC testimony, which seems rather underdocumented onlne.
Last winter I was visiting museums on the Mall a lot in order to write this review/roundup. It was pretty grim going, and I don’t think I was wrong about the mood.
These black cubes appeared along my drive, and I would take note of them, think about them. They had an eye-catching, out-of-place presence and no discernible purpose, which made them feel of temporary sculpture. They were also alongside a conduit road whose main feature was not slowing you down on your way, which created a tension, if only for the briefest (passing) moment.
Tony Smith, Die, 1968, 400px image via NGA, because I guess any larger scale would have made this jpg a monument.
They made me think of Tony Smith’s Die, obviously, but if anything, that easy association pushed back against my own doing anything with these cubes. They also made me think, though, of Smith’s massive 1967 sculpture Smoke, which, like so much of his work, first came into being as black plywood.
Smoke being built in the Corcoran, 1967, image via Tony Smith Estate
Smith built Smoke in one half of the Corcoran’s atrium while Ronald Bladen built X in the other. Or rather, the Corcoran built Smoke and X for Smith and Bladen. The sculptures were commissions, fabricated by the museum’s carpenters for a three-artist show called, “Scale as Content.” [The third work was Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, which was installed outside, facing the White House and the Washington Monument. The Corcoran ended up owning none of these works.]
construction of Ronald Bladen’s X, 1967, image: royslade.com
Artforum’s retardataire reviewer didn’t like it “as art,” but “Scale as Content” feels pretty on the nose for Smith, who realized Die in six foot steel in 1968 after noodling for six years over a six inch cardboard model. [In 1967 Smith also showed a plywood version of Maze, and published the cardboard version in Aspen Magazine.]
An old photo I have of Broken Obelisk installed for the first time, at the Corcoran Gallery, 1967, via
Anyway, these boxes were not placed where they are for artistic reasons. I finally went to investigate them on foot in January. They’re cover/markers for some infrastructure node, presumably related to the construction staging on the lawn between the Tidal Basin and the Washington Monument. They’re close to crosswalks; maybe they’re hookups for eventual pedestrian crossing signals.
Inside the Black Cube? UntitledICE, 2018, paint, plywood, reflective tape, installation shot
But this is not really the time, and these are not in the place, for benign indifference to the apparatus of the state. In this era of plate readers, wifi sniffers, Stingrays, and ICE raids on pizza delivery guys, these black boxes now feel like–like black boxes. Given what we keep finding out on a daily basis in DC, what could we possibly not know yet? You don’t have to be Trevor Paglen to wonder about the menace of ersatz apparatuses popping up on the major thoroughfares of Washington. Are they some nefarious surveillance system in waiting, or one that’s already at work?
Trevor Paglen, Trinity Cube, on view at SAAM via IG:gregdotorg
The intervening months have also brought Paglen’s Trinity Cube and Rachel Whiteread’s cast voids to town, and so I still pass these cubes and still think. One thing I think a lot about is the point of declaring something a work. Another thing is declaring. Another is a work. Sometimes, during a year of wondering if I’m rationalizing, I wonder if the reflexivity, the impulsion, the emptiness of these things are reasons in themselves. Emptiness as Content.
As Tony Smith said about Die: “This is a complicated piece. It has too many references to be coped with coherently.”
Susan Weil in her studio in Williamsburg, Sept 2018. image: me, via artnews
Though we have emailed several times over the years that I’ve researched her and her first husband’s work, I finally met Susan Weil a couple of weeks ago, and it was awesome. The occasion was the first US show in nearly 40 years of sculpture by her late (second) husband, Bernard Kirschenbaum, which is currently at Postmasters Gallery. Weil discussed Kirschenbaum’s work, and their life together, and her work, and it was great. Our conversation was just published on ARTNews, so go check it out:
[W]e’re used to the idea of calling what he did as sculptural now, because we’ve come through Minimalism, and the artist’s mark, and having things fabricated, but at the time, that was still largely unheard of: that you could order a sculpture. That you could have something fabricated in a shop, and it would be a sculpture. Did he think about that much, or was it not a concern for him?
Well, it wasn’t that way with him, because he wanted to be a part of every step of it. He didn’t order something and then it came. He worked in all the materials, in the actual welding, and finishing, and this, that, and the other. He had to know everything about how things were made. No, he had a beautiful vision.
The information on it is maddeningly slight. It is apparently from the 70s, and by the architecture professor Lorenzo Cremonini. It has three levels above ground, plus at least a garage below. It is 200 m^2, around a 60/90/50 split, and from the outside, it feels too proscribed to be anything other than a house.
the rear facade, with its own giant sunset? sunrise? image via gmap, obv
It is apparently privately owned, so though it has been a library in recent years, then a daycare center/preschool, it was not a public building. While it was for sale for many years, it was empty when protestors briefly occupied it in March 2016. As of this past spring, it apparently houses a co-working space called Voxel.
Besides its simple, cantilevered concrete slab construction, its most distinguishing feature is obviously its supergraphic tile skin, which is fantastic at every angle. VERY of the period, yet somehow intact. That gigantic concrete canopy feels slightly too big. (Oh, but maybe not from the back, as in the photo above!) The curved section that forms the terrace railing sometimes feels like it should have been straight. Or does tile make it work? So it’s not perfect, it’s awesome.
Except for some boring presentation clips on Voxel’s facebook page, the only interior shot I have found so far is maybe this video of riot police raiding the place? Or nah, doesn’t that seem like an other library, plus the date’s wrong. Still low-key amazing how throwback the Bologna riot police are.
From the unhelpful articles I’ve found, it does seem to be “known” as the Palazzina, but I just can’t say for sure. The absence of almost any info about the building, or Cremonini, is shocking, not the kind of thing I’d come to expect in these internet days. I feel like his 1992 book, Colore e Architettura, might have more information, but it is in Italian, and in Italy. So it will have to wait a little longer.
Octagonal caryatid table by Diego Giacometti, 1983, sold by Hubert de Givenchy and Philippe Venet in 2017 for EUR3.7m. image: christies.com
In the 80s Hubert de Givenchy and his partner Philippe Venet commissioned Diego Giacometti to make furniture and stuff for a house they bought in BF France, 2 hours southeast of Paris. Last year they sold a bunch of it at auction, 21 lots, including three of the bronze tables above, which have carytids sticking up from all the legs. Together the three tables sold for EUR 11 million, almost a third of the total sale, which is sort of bonkers. But that’s not important now.
a Giacometti table in front of a painting by someone, who really knows who at this point, image via habituallychic
In this month’s Architectural Digest, after Givenchy’s passing, there are reminiscences from Venet and a bunch of their friends, including this:
[PHILIPPE] VENET: Hubert asked, “Why don’t we have some Giacometti?” We had just sold our chalet in Megève—I was a very good skier and served in a mountain patrol during my military service—so I said, “Why not?” When Christie’s auctioned our Giacomettis [in 2017], we had a ferronnier make us a copy of the octagonal table. There are many homemades at Le Jonchet: a “La Fresnaye,” a “Picasso” that Hubert drew. After selling the big Joan Miró in his atelier to the Pompidou, I told him, “We must make a Léger.” So we did a collage together.
[MOMA TRUSTEE MERCEDES] BASS: It’s very hard to tell the difference between their works and the real things, though they never copied; they made renditions. Most were wonderful collages: Hubert and Philippe would prepare the backgrounds, then cut the paper and create a collage of a painting.
AD captions this like it’s the replacement table, but this same photo shows up in that pre-auction HC post, so who knows? And if you can’t tell the difference… image:architecturaldigest.com
I love this have your cake and eat it, too, sell your tables and paintings and make them again–and still have people describing it in these equivocating terms about copies and renditions. Givenchy studied at the Beaux Arts, and his obituary in The Guardian described his retirement from fashion with, “He had long since set up an alternative life as an ‘amateur d’art.'”
If I’m reading AD’s caption right, that’s Givenchy’s Picasso on the left. The smaller Picasso behind it looks like Twombly’s Picasso, tho, so who knows? image:AD
So if your question is, would you rather have a Giacometti table in your chateau, or a surmoulage Giacomettian table in your chateau and EUR33 million, my question is, how close do you need to get to the table?
On a first visit to Eileen Gray’s masterpiece e-1027 since its restoration (still in progress), I was impressed by the details as much as the overall design. Gray’s house on the sea at Roquebrune Cap Martin, built in 1929 on the far side of Monaco, isn’t perfect, but it is extremely well thought through and basically marvelous.
The lights stood out. The front door, which is sort of a back door, and a patio where dinner was sometimes served.
Eileen Gray light fixture originally over Jean Badovici’s desk at E-1027
The lower bedroom for Jean Badovici, or for guests, which had this interesting construction over where his desk would be (the desk is out to improve circulation in the tiny space, which felt small even with just the six people on our tour.). In addition to light, the fixture was positioned to mirror and double the view of the Mediterranean from the bed. This use of mirrors and reflectivity is a feature throughout the house.
Mirror for shaving the back of one’s head, by Eileen Gray for Jean Badovici at E-1027
like I said. This shaving mirror in the corner of Badovici’s room has a light embedded, and another mirror on an articulated, chrome-plated arm, at Badovici’s request, so he could shave the back of his head. It’s a style that’s come around again.
These fixtures are all replications; the first and third pieces were long lost, but the original overhead light was stolen, probably to order, in 2003.
You’d think that as a parent, I’d be less surprised by now at the constant discoveries of the extent of my own ignorance.
And yet.
Last night, while surfing through the archive of the War Relocation Authority’s nearly 7,000 photos of WWII Japanese American internment camps for “furniture,” [right, I know.] I was confused by the number of search results that included George Nakashima and his daughter Mira.
Mira spends a lot of time with her father in the workshop, has learned to use a hammer, drill, end plane, scorns miniature tools.” image, Gretchen Van Tassel, via UCB
The internment camps only imprisoned Japanese Americans on the west coast; Nakashima, modernist woodworking master, lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania, so he should’ve been totally unaffected.
And it’s only then that I looked at Nakashima’s bio, and sure enough, the architect, his wife Marion, and his newborn daughter were expelled from Seattle and detained at Minidoka, Idaho in the Spring of 1942. It was only through the protracted petitions of Antonin Raymond, an architect and former employer, that the Nakashimas were able to leave the camp for Raymond’s farm in New Hope.
The picture above, by WRA photographer Francis Stewart, shows George Nakashima at Minidoka in the Fall of 1942, “Constructing and decorating model apartment to show possibilities using scrap materials.” Which, just. Wallpaper made from bookpages and blueprints and a proto-Conoid table made from prison scraps. This room should be in the Smithsonian.
The irony, if that’s the right word, is that it was at Minidoka that Nakashima met Gentaro Hikogawa, an issei hotel manager three years older than he, who’d immigrated from Shikoku to Tacoma. Hikogawa was also a master carpenter, who taught Nakashima Japanese joinery and rural handtool techniques that formed the foundation for Nakashima’s philosophy and later innovations.
Speaking of which, here are two photos of 3-yo Mira Nakashima posing next to two beds her father made, one for her, and one for her doll, in her bedroom in New Hope.
Liz Deschenes, Rates (Frames per Second), 2018, installation view at Miguel Abreu Gallery, image via CAD
Liz Deschenes’ current show at Miguel Abreu–both of them–is titled, Rates (Frames per Second). Deschenes’ series of photograms relate to the chronophotographic studies of motion of Étienne-Jules Marey.
The variously reflective texture of the photosensitive paper on display, coupled as the show unfolds with the widening individual panels comprising the works, affords a subtle sensation of gradual embodiment.
It’s interesting that the installation apparently culminates in the human-scale panels, because I assume you have to walk back out of the gallery, too.
In any case, they look gorgeous as usual, and the variations of widest ones even look baroque, relatively speaking, of course.
UPDATE: I have since heard that the works do not have an implied narrative. And that perhaps if there’s a sense of culmination in experiencing the show, it’s as much the 10 windows in the space, a found 10fps as any of the photogram series. This site specificity has now landed the show on my IRL list
St Paul’s Chapel celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2016. image: trinitywallstreet
Built in 1766, St. Paul’s Chapel is the oldest public building in New York City and has been in continuous operation for over 250 years. When its sister parish Trinity Church (built 1698) burned down in 1776, St. Paul’s Chapel served as the primary place of worship for the likes of George Washington while Trinity was rebuilt. This august, historic, sacred space contains one of the two earliest public depictions of The Great Seal of The United States, of which visitors to this site have so recently read.
And St. Paul’s Church is also the place where my critique of the impertinent treatment and presentation of The Great Seal gets laughed out of town like a mobbed up president’s stooge claiming attorney-client privilege.
The Great Seal of the United States painting and friends, St Paul’s Chapel c.2013, image: pastinthepresent
Behold the wide shot of the painting of The Great Seal hanging in its original spot, over the Washington Family Pew (reconstructed to some non-original spec, apparently some time after the radiators went in), and sandwiched in between World Trade Center Relief Swag exhibitions made of PVC jungle gym and clip-on tracklights? Are these original, historic exhibition fixtures made by first responders in October 2001?
#neverforget? no problem! what is this? c. 2013, image via pastinthepresent
Is it still there? Because this photo was taken in 2013 by historian/blogger Michael Lynch. So maybe it’s gone? I honestly don’t know whether to scream or ask for their fabricator’s contact info, whether to help one of the richest parishes in the country Kickstart some proper vitrines or take a vow to never show work again without a PVC kiosk.
But Professor Lynch is not through. He also went to Federal Hall, the site (but not the building) of George Washington’s inauguration on April 30, 1789. I have stood on the porch of Federal Hall. I have seen a musical version of the life of JP Morgan performed on the steps of Federal Hall. I have gone to the gym many times across the street from Federal Hall, but somehow I have never been inside Federal Hall.
Fragment of Federal Hall 1.0 Balcony on view at Federal Hall 2.0, c. 2013, image: pastinthepresent
So I have not known about the slab of the balcony from the original Federal Hall, which is on display there. The National Park Service calls it a balcony, but looking at this engraving of Washington’s inauguration, I might call it a loggia.
Federal Hall, Seat of Congress, 1789 engraving by Amos Doolittle of Washington’s inauguration, image via wikipedia
Anyway, despite being the site of the 1st Congress, the formation of the United States, the adoption of the Bill of Rights, and Washington’s inauguration, Federal Hall went back to being City Hall when the capital decamped to Philadelphia in 1790. And then New York City tore that place down in 1812 when they built their new City Hall.
Pay no attention to the little cart behind the blue curtain. Also, elevator out of service, probably. image: intro-ny
Fragments of the building were saved, including this piece of brownstone from the loggia, which apparently went on display at Bellevue Hospital until it was returned in 1889, for the centennial. And it was given a coat of concrete, so they could carve it. And it was put in a frame on little wheels so it could be rolled around. Oops, it broke. At least now we can see the actual stone under the concrete skin, the part where the concrete repair came off also.
Here is a concrete-coated-and-carved piece of stone which you can barely see the original of, which used to be on the building here, till we tore it down, and anyway, George Washington probably stood on this to found our country. Or near it, it’s really hard to say. But this is how we do, and it apparently always has been.
fragment of the balustrade of the original Federal Hall where G. Washington was inaugurated, painted wrought iron, later oak base, collection: NYHS
Fragments of the building were saved. In a minute I have found another: the balustrade of the balcony where Washington was inaugurated. It, too, went to Bellevue, where it was incorporated into a portico. Perhaps this stone was, too? Anyway, in 1883 the balustrade went to the New York Historical Society, where it remains. [Interesting. A 1917 catalogue of Old New York views distinguishes between the NYHS and Bellevue balustrades.] It is positively lyrical. Was it by Pierre l’Enfant, who was commissioned to renovate Federal Hall in 1788? Yes. It is dated 1788-89. Thirteen arrows. Wrought iron painted yellow-gold. The New York Historical Society was headquartered in Federal Hall in 1809 and took the city’s donation of some of the original furniture.
fragment of a painted silk flag flown at George Washington’s inauguration, Apr. 30, 1789, collection: NYHS
David Hammons & Albert Alston, House of the Future, 1991, photographed in 2006 by ksenia_n
In 1991 the artist David Hammons was invited by Mary Jane Jacobs to create a site-specific work in Charleston, South Carolina for a new, visual arts program linked to the Spoleto Festival. Jacobs had patterned the exhibition, “Places With A Past”, after the Skulptur Projekt Münster. Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti hated the whole thing; the exhibition divided the board and got the director fired (he came back a couple of years later, after Menotti quit), but the show’s art historical reputation has only grown.
That said, Hammons’ is the only one of 61 installations left standing, thanks in large part to his early decision to collaborate with Albert Alston, a local builder, who seems to have maintained and championed the work over the ensuing 27 years.
Hammons and Alston built House Of The Future on a vacant, city-owned lot on Charleston’s segregated East Side using architectural fragments and materials from renovation and demolition projects nearby. It is a 6×20-foot teaching model of Charleston’s signature style, with labels for each component. At some point, a young, local artist used the ground floor as studio space, and Alston oversaw other public programmatic uses. On the back of the House, Hammons painted a quote from African American writer Ishmael Reed:
The Afro-American has become heir to the myths that it is better to be poor than rich, lower class than middle or upper, easy going rather than industrious, extravagant rather than thrifty, and athletic rather than academic.
[Though Reed gets–and takes–credit for the quote, it seems that it actually originates with musician/composer/sociologist Ortiz Walton. Reed quoted Walton’s critical history of cultural exploitation, Music: Black, White & Blue in a 1973 review for Black World Magazine. Reed & Walton seem to have been frequent collaborators and interlocutors, so maybe this is one more of those Hammons/Alston situations. In any case, the quote itself was criticized by some in the community, and it has disappeared and reappeared from the wall of House Of The Future with various repaintings. According to an unrelated 1995 lawsuit by a disgruntled muralist, though, it was integral to the community’s embrace of the installation that helped preserve it after the Spoleto Festival ended.]
Oh, say, can you see?
At some point after the May 1991 opening of “Places With A Past”, Hammons’ second element was realized kitty corner from House of The Future. America Street is a small, grassy bump of a park on another vacant lot, where Hammons’ iconic African American Flag flies from atop a 40-foot pole. A black and white photo of a group of children looking up, as if at the flag, filled a sidewalk-scale billboard that had previously featured ads for liquor and Newports. From this 1996 account of the Spoleto fallout over “Places With A Past”, it sounds like the works survived some entropy, if not straightup neglect. But both the flag and the picture have been replaced over the years.
Hammons’ America Street, January 2017Detail of David Hammons’ America Street, 1991, a billboard photo of local kids looking up, img: gsv, jan 2017
I have not visited Hammons’ piece(s), except in Google Street View. The first thing I noticed was they differed in appearance from the historical photos. I realized GSV’s own decade of historical imagery is useful here, for marking the changes this tiny house and its neighborhood have undergone.
Clicking through the changes wrought by time on a piece of Southern vernacular architecture, I immediately thought of the work of my late neighbor, the photographer William Christenberry. He would travel back to his native Alabama year after year for decades, photographing the same houses, churches, and stores, usually documenting their deterioration and subsumption by kudzu.
William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1983, image: Hemphill
What I was seeing in Hammons’ and Alston’s piece was the opposite: a structure built from the castoffs of renovation and gentrification, surviving thanks to a small but persistent maintenance effort. And through it all, year in and year out, no matter the storms or racial strife that battered some other flags in South Carolina, Hammons’ star-spangled banner is still there.
In the spirit of Christenberry, I decided to make some historic GSV printsets [prints of screenshots; GSV is a screen medium] of Hammons’ and Alston’s House Of The Future and America Street. I’ve followed Christenberry’s format, but I’m skipping the traditional photographer’s approach of making editions of a bajillion in a thousand sizes. Each set of 7-9 images is printed small (8×10 in.), in an edition of 2, plus 1 AP: one for you, one for the museum, one for me. Because srsly, why overthink it? If anyone actually wants to buy them, I turn into some kind of crazed Amazon artworker pick&packing prints all day? Hard pass right now, thanks. If you don’t move in time to get it, just make your own.
