the making of, by greg allen
On Tuesday, November 7, 2017, a Christie’s executive wrote, “Dear Jeffrey [Epstein], will you be coming into view our upcoming sales? Lots of exciting works worth viewing.”
Wednesday morning, he said he’d adjust his New York schedule, and she emailed right back, Great come before the weekend, “There is a large Twombly [Lot 15B] that is suitable for your large wall!”
Continue reading “‘decorative but not great’”
A lot of bangers in the new issue of The Brooklyn Rail, but it’s bangers all the way down with this Rob Pruitt interview by Andrew Woolbright. Really thoughtful reflections on the Early days; the banal impossibility of grasping the passage of time; Cocaine Buffet (1998) as Dark Relational Aesthetics; and this heartwrenching and hilarious commentary on art and love:
Woolbright: Is there work that you make, other than the pandas, that feels vulnerable, or maybe that you’d even consider to be bad in some way?
Pruitt: Maybe the paintings that come up to auction? I always assume they are the worst paintings. Nobody can find enough love for them to keep them, right? My mother was a hoarder, and part of me too can’t let go of the unneeded things—even bad paintings. Even if I could buy the bad paintings back to save my own market, I wouldn’t be able to destroy them. I think I would need to invent a new project, like paint them all yellow or something. “These yellow paintings aren’t the bad paintings anymore, they’re perfectly new and fresh and ready for you to buy and love.”
Rob Pruitt with Andrew Woolbright, Feb 2026 [brooklynrail]
Speaking of Ιλιάδα, Danh Vo is having a show at the Stedelijk called, πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα), and so far what we know is that Vo has turned his German farm into a sculpture factory where weather, vines, and native flowers do much of the work transforming medieval and classical leftovers.
I especially like this photo from Güldenhof because it’s so full of the intriguing, loaded pieces, the thin frames and blocks and shapes of McNamara wood that only fit exactly where they’re made to go. For sculptures where found objects purport to carry so much narrative weight, there’s a fascinating amount of craft and work encompassing them. And that only reveals itself within Vo’s precisely orchestrated spaces. And this “visual language grounded in displacement” flourishes in the archaeopunk idyll of Vo’s art hothouse commune.
Is a Hauser & Wirth franchise far off?
Danh Vo – πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) [pnevma (Elissa)] is on 14 February – 2 August 2026 [stedelijk via crousel]
I swear I saw someone posting Bronzino’s portrait of Ugolino Martelli on Bluesky this morning, and then posting about how the book on the table is The Iliad, in Greek, and how it’s open to Book IX, The Embassy of Achilles.
But after the flash of enlightenment that followed, and the wave of recognition crashed over me, and the swell of JLo redemption began to lift me up, by the time I switched tabs and actually found the scene in the 2015 thriller The Boy Next Door, where murderous stalker orphan high school student Ryan Guzman gives next door neighbor single mom one-night stand high school English teacher Jennifer Lopez a first edition of The Iliad that he bought at a garage sale for a dollar, the scroll had reloaded, the Bluesky posts had vanished, and no amount of searching could retrieve them.
And so I was like, great, now *I* have to be the guy to host this on *my* platform. But as I tried to screenshot it, the scene crumbled before my eyes. Because actually, there is no shot of Guzman/Iliad/JLo, or even Guzman/Iliad, just out-of-frame books or disembodied hands. Was it a problem with the prop? The coverage? Is that even Guzman’s hand in those reshoots? Is that even JLo?
The more I looked, the more I knew, the stupider I became. And NOW I began to worry, and to trace backwards, and to wonder, where the madness started to creep in? Was it at the very beginning? Was it when I saw a bound copy of The Iliad and thought, huh, what’s the deal with that?
It feels like I’ve fallen into Foucault’s Pendulum, and the undiscovered truth we all mocked so smugly since 2015, that JLo was right, was, for those with eyes to see, sitting there all along. The Iliad turns out to have been first published in Florence, Martelli’s home, in a year I cannot, for entirely other reasons, bring myself to mention on this internet, but suffice it to say our Ugolino’s grandfather Luigi d’Ugolino Martelli, who bought that sculpture of David, might have gone to the Iliad book launch party at the Medicis’.
The park series (1998) is one of Olafur Eliasson’s earlier photo grids. A topology rather than a taxonomy, it documents a series of views of a single site: Hellisgerði (Lava Cave), a public park built on lava formations in the Reykjavik suburb of Hafnarfjördur. I’d seen The park series at the Menil, but did not recognize the photo above as coming from the grid. I thought it might have been a janky, early pavilion of some kind. And maybe it is, who knows?
But this image is the cover of an artist book Eliasson created for a 1998 show at the Reykjavik Art Museum — Kjarvalsstaðir. It’s called Hellisgerði, and is the 24 photos of the park that became The park series grid [which was not in the show, btw.] This echoes another little artist book from 1998, Landscapes with Yellow Background, which contains all 30 pictures in The landscape series (1997).
Which, it took me a second to realize that the edition of The park series grid I’d seen—which had come up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2013—had 25 prints, not 24: a 5×5 grid instead of a 4 x 6.
The extra print is at the lower right cornes, at the end [sic]; the series is a sequence, laid out left to right, top to bottom. Does that correspond to the geography? Does it mark a path through or around the park? Grids often look like contact sheets, which have a sense of chronology, documentation of a photographer’s experience photographing. But there’s no reason to make that assumption here.
The way Jeanne-Claude’s NYT obituary tells it, her Bulgarian refugee husband Christo was already wrapping objects when they began their collaboration in 1962: “To avoid confusing dealers and the public, and to establish an artistic brand, they used only Christo’s name. In 1994 they retroactively applied the joint name “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” to all outdoor works and large-scale temporary indoor installations. Other works were credited to Christo alone.”
So this fascinating-looking Wrapped Toy Horse from 1963, the year before the duo moved from Paris to NYC, is Christo’s, and Jeanne-Claude is fine with that.
It is one of a whole slew of artworks, antiques, and design objects the eagle-eyed Patrick Parrish of Mondoblogo spotted on his turn through The Winter Show at the Armory. It was brought by private dealer Jonathan Boos who, as Parrish reveals, also had an incredible Ben Shahn painting.
I went to The Winter Show so you don’t have to [mondoblogo]
DID SOMEONE SAY STRIKE?
Mark Dion has been making prints to meet the moment. To coincide with his current show at Tanya Bonakdar in NYC, the gallery has pulled together an online exhibition of some of Dion’s most recent prints. The most topical ones are here: Resist Much, Obey Little, a larger screenprint that feels like a timely throwback from an older resistance; and On Oligarchy, a postcard-sized letterpress from our most recent guillotine era, last February, in both black and white.
Mark Dion New Prints, OVR [tanyabonakdargallery]
Woke up thinking about John Schabel for some reason, his Cities and Towns series of night landscape photographs from the western US, lit only by the light of a far off city. Or town. They’re extraordinary, large-format gelatin silver prints to get lost in front of.
John Schabel [johnschabel.net]
Gotta admit, 2025 was that kind of year, and I lost track of Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run exhibition, which I’d assumed ended in a tasty book. Turns out it up and moved to Marfa, the artist’s own [other] home. It’s installed for two whole years in two large gallery spaces, right in town, on Highland Avenue.
Mary Etherington’s review for Glasstire is a useful compare & contrast. One big specific difference may be due to ceiling height. Wool’s first foray into mosiac is shown in 16.5 x 11-ft portrait mode in Texas, while it was shown in 11×16.5 landscape in New York. Considering the 4x larger mosaic Wool made for Hudson Yards is also horizontal, the change doesn’t feel like a corrective as much as a variation.
The bigger difference is one Etherington works around to: the change in context. At first it seems obvious that means the difference between NYC’s sprawling, gutted skyscraper floor, and the adapted storefront white cubes in Marfa. And that compact blankness certainly intensifies the works’ relationships with each other vs the space.
Instead/also, it is Marfa and West Texas itself that makes the difference. I lol’d when Etherington literally called out Wool—again, a fairly longtime Marfa resident—for Marfa sculptural appropriation:
Pretty much everyone in Marfa has a collection of found wire. A visitor to Marfa picked up some cheese at the store and a little wire on the street, then posted it on social media. In New York, the smaller gauge wire sculptures felt out of place, too familiar. My dismissiveness was born of what felt like appropriation of the essence of Marfa. Don’t @ me.
What makes it click, though, is Wool’s installation of gigantized, wire-inspired sculptures in three scattered sites around town. So he’s not just taking from the Marfa found wire culture; he’s also giving back.
Disruption of Time & Place in the Classroom [glasstire]
See Stop Run still running [seestoprun]
Previously, related: Adam & Eve & Charles & Christopher
When I think about getting rid of ICE, and about the threat our country is to Greenland, our other allies, and the habitable climate of the earth, I come back to the series of sculptures Olafur Eliasson made in 2015-2016.
To make The presence of absence, Eliasson collected fragments of ice from Greenlandic glaciers floating at sea, in this case, Nuuk Kangerlua, the large western fjord by Greenland’s capital, and cast them in concrete forms in his studio. “The melting glacier produced sounds like miniature explosions.” It took about a month, and left a physical memory of the ice, a void.
There’s a great video of the void from Eliasson’s 2016 show at neugerrimschneider in Berlin. [olafureliasson.net]
I never really thought of David Diao as an sculptor, and though it really does feel like it belongs on the floor, technically, this unwelcome mat IS painted. Wright put it in their Chicago sale, but there’s nothing in Chicago in Diao’s 1990s exhibition history, so maybe it comes from a Chicago collector. Even with no info, it really does feel like it captures the moment right now.
But it still barely cracks my top five floor-related Diao works. In the early 2000s, Diao made a series of works called Perfect Arrangement, paintings exploring the found composition of Philip Johnson’s detailed schematic for positioning the furniture in the Glass House. He showed the works at Tanya Leighton in Berlin in 2008-09, and she brought one of the breakouts to Art Basel in 2015.
Perfect Arrangement at 1/4 Scale, 2005, is an edition with the floorplan cut into a 30 x 40 inch sheet of industrial felt. So rather than being a mat, it represents a carpet. And it very much goes on the wall.
Lot 235, 4 Feb 2026: David Diao, Untitled, 1996 [wright20]
David Diao, ‘Best Laid Plans’, Oct 2008-Jan 2009 [tanyaleighton]
Diao installed works at the Glass House during his 2014 retrospective at the Aldrich [theglasshouse.org]
Previously, related: Au Bout de la Nuit, Johnson’s lost Giacometti
In 2007 Roni Horn realized Vatnasafn/ Library of Water, a permanent sculptural and community project commissioned by Artangel. It’s located in a former library on a hill overlooking the port in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, a town of about 1,200 people halfway between Reykjavik and the Westfjords.
The centerpiece of Vatnasafn is Water, Selected, for which Horn collected melt water from 24 glaciers across Iceland, and installed it in a constellation of glass columns in the library’s main space. [There are two other components to the library: a text drawing on the floor of the space, and an archive of weather reports.]
The space hosts chess tournaments, community gatherings, and writer residencies. Which matters because the proceeds of the limited edition print Artangel published originally went to support the Vatnasafn programming. The map, annotated with the locations of the 24 glaciers sampled—including the one that had already melted away by the time the project was completed—is an edition of 150. If your main goal is a bargain, then roll your dice with the example coming up for sale next month. If you want to support the arts in Stykkishólmur, give Artangel a ring and see if they have any left.
[Wild bit of Stykkishólmur trivia: it was the childhood home of Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson, who emigrated with his parents to Winnipeg, then North Dakota, who then changed his name to [Edgar] Holger Cahill, temporarily stepped in for Alfred Barr as director of The Museum of Modern Art, and served as director of the Federal Art Project at the WPA, and who married Dorothy Miller, one of MoMA’s most influential curators.
Oh no, it was also the site of a fictitious US Marines landing in the 1986 Tom Clancy novel, Red Storm Rising, about a Soviet attempt to destroy NATO by invading Iceland. I want to know less about this now, please.]
All these years, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) has been simultaneously over-quoted and under-read, to our peril:
One reason why fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth [🙃] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
…
[cuts section about the Klee which, not right now, Angel of History, Ima need you to focus!]
…
At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them.
somehow ambushing me in the appendix of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Always To Return catalogue, available in bookstores near me Sunday!
One thing I love about this edition [which greg.org hero Matt tipped me off about] in Glenn Ligon’s new show of works on paper at Hauser & Wirth , is that Ligon did not use the digital image of the 1989 study from Punchlines, Sotheby’s themed online sale of Richard Prince jokes in December 2023 as the base for his hand-drawn redactions.
Ligon’s image of Prince’s printed, clipped, annotated, taped, three-layer study has different shadows along the edges of the collage, so a different lighting situation than when Sotheby’s photographed it. Did Ligon photograph it while on view? Did he buy it? That would be some praxis. [And with an edition of 25, a great ROI.]
The dimensions of Ligon’s edition and Prince’s study are identical—and I love how Ligon signs his in a way that echoes Prince. But that’s just the dimension of the sheet; in fact, Ligon is presenting his work, Punchline (2024), in an identical frame, too. The facsimile objecthood is strong with this one.
Except, of course, Ligon’s intervention completely transforms the work. It’s not that his crossouts eliminate the rape and racist jokes; you can still make them out, if you’re determined to. But he changes entirely the delivery and impact of the punchline [sic], which is not, of course, much of a punchline at all.
When I went looking to see if Prince ever made a painting with this double joke printed 16 inches wide, I didn’t find one. But I did find one of Prince’s joke sources: The Official Black Joke Book/The Official White Joke Book, a 1975 addition to a long series of Official [Some Target Group] Joke Books by Larry Wilde. [So far, the text of the hippie hitchhiker joke does not appear anywhere online outside of Prince’s own oeuvre.]
Ligon recomposes the text, but also reauthors it in ways that matter, and that highlight the mechanisms of appropriation. In his Cariou deposition Prince talks about wanting “to be a girlfriend,” wanting dreads and to be a Rasta he saw at a bar in St. Barth. And when he can’t, he says, “Maybe I should paint them. Maybe that’s a way to substitute that desire.” Now there’s a thread to pull on, which runs through Prince’s work, but also through the white male gaze culture he was soaking in and drawing from.
Text, appropriation, painting, history, racialized experience, queerness. This one print has me questioning whose tools are being used here, whose house is being dismantled, and what’s being built in its place. I’m not sure there’s another artist working now who could make so little into so much.
Glenn Ligon: Late at night, early in the morning, at noon, is at Hauser & Wirth @ the Roxy from 15 January until 4 April 2026 [hauserwirth]
Punchlines: 18 Jokes by Richard Prince, 15 Dec 2023, Lot 18 [sothebys]
Previously, related: On one of Ligon’s first text works, Untitled (A consciousness we all have…), 1988; Glenn Ligon’s XMEXXXX
‘Maybe I should paint them’
I realize that he spent twenty years working on Étant donnés, so why does it still surprise me that Marcel Duchamp sourced the door AND the bricks for the arch from BF Spain?
The door came from a town called La Bisbal, where Marcel and Teeny went doorscouting in the early 1960s, I guess? It was only in the summer of 1968, though, that Duchamp selected 150 bricks for the doorway arch, to be shipped to the US by a contractor in Cadaqués, his regular vacation spot. [Presumably, Duchamp was trying to match the crumbled brick wall already included in the work, which frames the nude mannequin and landscape. presumably brought back from Spain at some earlier date.
Until the bricks arrived, Duchamp put up a row of brick-shaped vinyl tiles as placeholders in the 11th St studio where the Étant donnés diorama was constructed (or reconstructed, because he’d already had to move it once).
Duchamp, of course, never took delivery of the bricks. He died in October 1968, and in anticipation of the disassembly and move of Étant donnés, Teeny had it photographed by Denise Browne Hare in December.
The bricks, meanwhile, went on their own convoluted journey, and the shipping and customs delays getting them caused weeks of drama for the Philadelphia Museum, which was rushing to secretly install the work before word got out—and before Teeny left to Spain for the summer.
It’s so chill now, but the entire saga of Étant donnés is buck wild, from the secrecy of its creation; the logistics of its acquisition and installation; the sheer institutional freakout over its existence, voyeur/creeper and nudity factors; and the paranoia and draconian constraints over its documentation and reproduction.
They all culminate in the tragicomedy of, of all people, Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp’s dealer and the editor of his catalogue raisonné, WHICH WAS READY TO GO, only finding out about the existence of Étant donnés as it was being dismantled in NYC and shipped to Philadelphia, and literally writing the CR text on it at the museum as soon as it opened to the public. He then proceeded to politely rage for permission to photograph the work for the second edition of the CR, which the museum was absolutely too terrified to do. Schwarz was forced to reproduce bootleg snapshots taken through the work’s peephole.
The sweet irony is that all this extraordinary detail is laid out in full in Michael R. Taylor’s 2009 book, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés. The Genesis, Construction, Installation, and Legacy of a Secret Masterwork, published on the work’s 40th anniversary by the Philadelphia Museum. I have a copy somewhere, but it’s so much easier to read on this heroic Slovenian artist’s website [shruggie emoji].