Sheila Hicks, Panel for the interior of Air France 747 upper deck lounge, 1969-77, silk on cotton, 51 3/4 × 157 × 2″, a 2017 gift to MoMA from Melvin Bedrick, the artist’s husband
Yesterday art historian Michael Lobel posted Sheila Hicks’ bas relief panel of embroidered silk, four meters wide, which MoMA says is the only survivor of the 19 panels Hicks made for Air France between 1969 and 1977. Lobel has jokingly assigned me the case for tracking down any other remaining panels. So instead of not finding one Jasper Johns Short Circuit flag, I can now not find eighteen back walls from the upper deck first class lounges of Air France’s first generation of Boeing 747s. I am ON it.
“For about a year,” Gober explained in 1990, “between 1982 and 1983, I painted on a small board. Over this board I had mounted my camera, and as I changed the painting I would take slides of the process. So that in the end nothing remained but the photographic record of a painting metamorphosing.”
Gober first showed Slides of a Changing Painting as a 3-screen slide projection work for just one week [??] in May 1984, at Paula Cooper Gallery. I saw the work first at the Walker Art Center. It’s been central to major retrospectives of Gober’s work, and to understanding his larger project, many, many seeds of which are contained in the Slides.
But it’s the extraordinary book version of Slides of a Changing Painting, coming out in a few days from Primary Information, that has been looming so large in my present. It was shipped early to annual subscribers, and it gives an unprecedented chance to see Slides slowly, one phase at a time, in a way that the actual work avoids by design. But the sheer heft and density of the book— it is small, beautiful, and nothing but images—also gives a chance to get lost in the world Gober painted into—and then out of—existence.
Slides of a Changing Painting is somehow just $30, and it’s $25 on pre-order, but it feels like it should be $50 or $100. Which, about that. Executive director Matthew Walker just sent out an email announcing that Primary Information is one of the many arts non-profit organizations that suddenly had their NEA grant canceled, blowing a $40,000 mid-year hole in their tiny budget.
For nearly 20 years, Primary Information has been publishing and republishing highly important artist texts, bringing them back into the discussion at cost. They have an entire slate of books to come. So when you order, if you’re able, why not pay double, or triple, of 10x, with a donation at checkout, and help keep Primary Information’s work going? Or buy some solid and yet not exorbitant fundraising editions. Or just straight-up slip them a tax-deductible donation.
White Columns 2025 Print Portfolio, silkscreen prints by [clockwise from top left] Sam McKinniss, Rachel Harrison, Ann Craven, Arthur Simms, and Tabboo!, dimensions variable, ed. 100, via whitecolumns.org
The White Columns 2025 Print Portfolio just dropped, and it looks like a thousand bucks. Each. And yet it’s only a thousand bucks for the whole thing. If ever there was a portfolio designed to hang together instead of hanging separately, it’s this one. With Tabboo!’s sun and Ann Craven’s moon; and Craven’s moon and whatever is radiating on the right side of Arthur Simms’ triptych. And the way Simms’ framed head or whatever resonate with Sam McKinniss’s Luigi mugshot. But most of all,
cheap Luigi is the new free Luigi: Sam McKinniss, no title, 2025, 12 x 19 in., signed and numbered ed. 100Rachel Harrison, no title, 2025, 24 x 28 1/2 in., stamped and numbered ed. 100
the way McKinniss’s Luigis and Rachel Harrison’s DeKooning Woman & Amy Winehouse just feel like a call to action. So act now, gallerists are standing by.
Prouvé X Prouvé dining table, 72 x 202 x 92 cm, painted steel, iron, stainless steel, laminated glass, from the estate of Simone Prouvé, selling 27 May 2025, Lot 84, at Artcurial
See, maybe not this one specifically, but this is the kind of FrankenProuvé collab vision I’m talking about.
It sounds like Simone Prouvé made this dining table by taking a base from her father, reinforcing it with an iron frame [which is now rusting], and putting a laminated glass and woven steel top of her own, based on an idea from “self-described Goth” architect Odile Decq, for whom Prouvé wove a steel facade for MACRO in Rome. So that’s around 2006-7.
What could you make with a sliding sideboard door, five shelf/plates, and four drawer/boxes, toute from la famille Prouvé? I am seriously tempted to cook something up.
This « tout aluminium n. 151 » Prouvé sideboard is being sold among a bunch of textile and other design objects from Simone Prouvé, Jean’s daughter. So it could have only ever been hers and still accurately described as “Famille de l’artiste, puis par descendance.”
But it cannot be the case that she had to buy it retail, right? And just because Artcurial is only going with the date it was designed, and the EUR60-80,000 estimate seems low [sic], I’m—caveat emptor—sticking with this title format.
Extraordinary and sad news, that Koyo Kouoh, most recently of Zeitz MOCAA, and the curator of the next Venice Biennale, has died. Aruna d’Souza posted the Zeitz MOCAA Instagram announcement on bluesky.
Having never seen a show of Kouoh’s, I found the most insight and inspiration from her two-partinterview in 2024 with Charlotte Burns for Schwartzman &’s What if…!? podcast. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.
Just a person of extraordinary and urgent thinking and action, now gone.
In a way, it’s the quintessential experience of James Lee Byars’ art: clicking through a letter to Sam Wagstaff, written three words at a time on an endless stack of envelopes grabbed? left over? from the Green Gallery, where he showed in 1967, piecing together a plea to stage a museum show of a room—just a small one, though—entirely covered in gold, “A state of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything. Love B.”
Then the next page in the digitized archive is this:
a jpg of a pdf of a scan of a press photo by a.j. wyatt of the philadelphia museum of art’s most important acquisition of 1964, a qianlong era (1736-95) cloisonné, jade, and gilt bronze dog cage, preserved in the Sam Wagstaff Papers as UAN AAA-wagssamu00041-000035 by the Archives of American Art
i have no idea: a jpg of a pdf of a scan of the back of the dog cage press photo, onto which james lee byars has written sam wagstaff a letter, or a note and a hundred annotations, or, i don’t even know where to start, you probably have to go straight to the Archives of American Art and examine UAN: AAA-wagssamu00041-000034 yourself in person. If you do figure it out, lmk
And now I don’t know whether to keep trying to decipher Byars’ five sizes and orientations of abbreviation-filled handwriting; to scour the world for my own archival photo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Imperial cloisonné dog cage; or to just head straight to Philadelphia.
Dog Cage (Goulong), Qianlong Dynasty (1736-95), brass, gilt, cloisonné, jade, 45 1/2 in. high, from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which somehow has negative object info on it
So for now, I’m rereading a bunch of Byars recollections from the 2014 retrospective at MoMA PS1, and just blogging it out.
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
That dinner plate-sized, Junior Mint-shaped Galactic Senate hoverpod-shaped James Lee Byars sculpture that the American Medical Association bought from Robert Mapplethorpe’s estate auction is NOT untitled, it is NOT undated, and it is NOT made of lacquered bronze.
After rereading that post and reliving that bonkers 2023 Pompon moment, I thought to check in on the current state of the Pomponiverse. Has even one scintilla of evidence or scholarly discussion turnd up to support the antique dealers’ story that Jacques Barthélémy De Lamarre was painting Marie-Antoinette’s favorite dog?
Désolé, mais non, it has not. But another Pompon has.
2017 screenshot of New Posters on Richard Prince’s IG grid [via]
Early in 2017 I wrote about how Richard Prince was using the Instagram grid to gang images and to stage temporary exhibitions. One I screenshot was of a set of photos he called New Posters; it was made of vintage ads for Marboro Posters, alongside his own blurred Trump poster.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, 98 x 68 cm, ed 25+5AP, via MOREpublishers
Somehow, even though I considered the possibility of IRL posters at the time, I only just now realized Prince did make a New Poster. Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, was published as a small screenprinted edition by MOREpublishers of Belgium.
an installation view of Open Group’s Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024), from the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2024, photo: Jacopo Salvi via 601Artspace
Somehow the Ukrainian art collective OPEN GROUP’s powerful installation from the Polish Pavilion at Venice last year is being restaged in New York City, starting tomorrow, Thursday May 8th. The somehow is impresaria Magda Sawon, who has arranged with 601Artspace’s David Howe to showRepeat After Me II (2022, 2024), and Untitled (2015 — ongoing), two works that relate to the ongoing impact on Ukrainians of the fight against the Russian invasion.
OPEN GROUP was a last minute addition to the Biennale, after Poland’s rightwing government was ousted, the Polish Pavilion’s rightwing curator and artists followed. Curator Marta Czyż rapidly invited OPEN GROUP instead.
After the opening Thursday, Czyż and Sawon will give a public walkthrough of the show, in two adjacent 601Artspace spaces, on Friday evening. There is also a talk planned for Saturday the 10th, with Czyż, OPEN GROUP, and Columbia professor Mark Lila. [Obviously it will not be at Columbia.]
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris), 2010, ed. 40, installation view at Three Star Books
Jonathan Monk’s Billboard Book Project with Three Star Books has at least four iterations. It is a billboard entirely about the making of itself, both as a billboard and as a book. The first iteration’s billboard appeared in “Week 47 of Year 2009” in Paris, while the limited edition book, made of cut down billboards—and documentation of an installed billboard—is dated January 2010. Which makes the subthemes project management and the hermeneutics of verb tenses.
Also:
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) – The Green Book, 2010, ed. 15, the colophon with signed photodocumentation, via Three Star Books
Three Star Books announces an immediate and surprising sequel to “The Billboard Book Project (Paris)”…During Monk’s recent sojourn for the launch of this project, the artist noticed that posters in the Paris Métro were occasionally covered with green printed paper during the interval between commercial advertisements.
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book, 2010, 26.5 x 43 cm, ed. 15, via Three Star Books
The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book is a companion book—though in a much smaller edition, so a companion to only a fraction—of offset printed monochrome green billboards.
There were The Billboard Book Projects in London and New York after this, and I’m happy for all involved. But it’s no disrespect to say—and I’m sure the fifteen people or institutions who own both Paris volumes will back me up on this—The Green Book is the project’s greatest aesthetic success.
