“Reproduction du célébre tableau”, Alphonse Allais in 1897 reworking Paul Bilhaud’s monochrome joke painting from 1882
Thanks, @voorwerk, @doncalmecito, and @juancrodelo. Little did I know that the last time I gave much thought to the history of the monochrome, that history would soon be blown wide open? In 2020 it was a reconsideration of the racist graffiti found on Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which linked it to its supposed, satirical precursor, a portfolio of seven mdr titled monochrome artworks published by the famous Parisian funny guy Alphonse Allais on April Fool’s Day in 1897.
Cabin, October 14, 1979, photographed by Marian Zazeela, via Mela Foundation
First, La Monte Young is not related to Brigham Young. Not a grandson, not a great great nephew, not a third cousin, none of that. It was such a standard part of the composer’s Mormon roots origins that I assumed it had been checked, or that it had come from him. Brigham Young University musicologist Jeremy Grimshaw obliquely dismissed any connection in the foreword to his 2011 biography of Young, Draw A Straight Line And Follow It, only to somehow embrace it as confirmation of Young’s prophetic narrative. And it still persists, probably for reasons.
I mention Young’s genealogy because he cites childhood experiences in towns in rural Idaho founded by his Mormon pioneer ancestors as foundational to his most important musical innovations. The earliest sustained tone sounds Young recalls, he often recalls, included the droning hum of power lines and the electricity substation next to his grandfather’s gas station in Montpelier; and the winter wind whistling through the walls of the log cabin where he was born, five miles up the Bear Lake Valley in the tiny cheese-making enclave of Bern.
And I mention it now because according to Cameron Rowland’s Estate, Dia bought the cabin in 1979, “for La Monte Young historical site and museum. Birthplace of La Monte Young. Never used.” This was in January, just after closing on the second building in Marfa for Donald Judd, and just before buying 6 Harrison Street, a 45,000 sf building in Tribeca as a performance and rehearsal space for Young, Marian Zazeela, and Pandit Pran Nath. 6 Harrison was sold in 1985, during Dia’s first financial implosion. But Young and Zazeela’s New York City real estate is well known, or as well known as Dream House, the sine wave drone and light installation they’ve been performing in various locations since 1979.
2025 Google Streetview capture of the Bern cabin, which is actually two one-room cabins combined
It’s the cabin in Bern that seemed exceptional. Dia transferred ownership of it to Young and Zazeela’s Mela Foundation in 1993, amidst another of Dia’s spasms of financial upheaval and its separation from Dream House. It turns out Zazeela’s photo of the cabin on the Mela Foundation website, [top] was taken during a visit in 1979 on Young’s 44th birthday.
Trying to figure out what story a La Monte Young Birthplace Museum would tell, I did the most Mormon thing, and looked at his family history on FamilySearch.org. While people in the minimalist music and postwar avant-garde were confused about La Monte being related to Brigham, the Youngs posting decades of family photos and personal histories to their communal online genealogy network knew the whole family tree. There are letters where La Monte’s parents, Dennis Young and Mary Evelyn Grandy let relatives know that LaMonte and Zazeela will be joining them at family reunions in Idaho during the 1980s, the Dia era.
So it was just me, then, who was surprised to learn Young’s connection to Bern came from his father’s mother, who, like almost everyone else in Bern, was a Kunz. Dennis was 22 and Mary Evelyn was 19 when La Monte was born in 1935, and Dennis’s mother, Ella Grace Kunz Wilde, was married to her second husband (both named Leonard), and single-handedly running the Bern Cheese Factory. Wilde turned 800-900 pounds of milk/day into 80-90 pounds of cheese, in two log cabins built by her grandfather John Kunz in 1872. In the Salt Lake Tribune’s 1938 article, the cabins don’t look so different from the one the Youngs lived in. They were still there for the 1940 census, but decamped to Los Angeles in 1942, looking for work.
In a 1979 interview transcript with her aunt Florence Kunz Jenson, Mary Steck mentioned, I think, La Monte’s museum project: “Isn’t that little Bern Library or Bern Museum cute? It’s not much yet but I think it has the beginnings of something really special. I hope ( ?) keeps up with it.”
“He will, for as long as he’s alive, you know – and maybe it’s a good thing Warren’s involved. Warren’s a little younger than him.”
“Warren cares about it. I know he cares about it. He’s very proud of his heritage.”
Warren Kunz was Florence’s nephew, six years younger than La Monte, who sold the cabin to Dia. He died in 2017.
GSV of Bern
In Zazeela’s photo, the cabin looks like it’s in the absolute middle of nowhere, which may be how Bern feels compared to big towns like, say, Montpelier, or nearby Paris. But it’s right on the main road in town, across from the little LDS chapel, and next to the brick schoolhouse, built in 1921, whose roof has since collapsed. Google Streetview finally came to town last year, and captured the cabin’s next door neighbor storing parts for a project truck in front of it.
These days, adverse possession is probably low on the Mela Foundation’s list of concerns. A decade of funding shortfalls and the pandemic left Mela’s current Dream House installation, its performance program, and its archive in “existential” peril. Besides a general gofundme in 2020, Mela put out a fundraising plea in 2023 specifically to help make urgent repairs to the cabin’s roof. The “archival postcard” prints of Zazeela’s cabin photo, signed by Young, are still listed for sale on Mela’s site. Zazeela died in 2024. An email inquiry to Mela about the cabin’s status has so far received no response.
installation view, 2020-25, Tsurko Yamazaki, Shōhei Tomatsu, Jasper Johns, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, at MoMA, photo: Jonathan Muzikar for MoMA
From its acquisition in 2019 following the artist’s death until last year, Work, Tsuruko Yamazaki’s mesmerizing aniline dye on tin painting from 1957 was shown in a quietly bold installation about the moment of its creation.
Beginning in 1955, Yamazaki, one of the original Gutai artists, showed startling works made of tin containers cast off by the occupying US troops. Shōhei Tomatsu’s photos of occupied Japan from 1960 include some of those troops. Jasper Johns, meanwhile, made Flag beginning in 1954, after returning from a year in Japan, where he’d been drafted as one of those occupying soldiers.
Self portrait in Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Work, 1957, aniline dye on tin, 28 7/8 × 32 1/2 in., collection MoMA
Now, Yamazaki’s Work hangs in a gallery with more formalist resonances: postwar abstraction, messy process. It’s not easy to photograph, at least on its own; it always wants to implicate the viewer, too.
I went back to visit the group show some time after the opening. I took away one of the foam kickboards, which now seemed extraneous. The little constructions on the long plastic folding table had more room. Some olive oil from the little circle on the table had, over the intervening days, dripped and pooled neatly onto the polished concrete floor. Would it stain? It still looked right. While installing, I’d had the idea—unheard of—to pour this olive oil, almost hi-viz green, onto one of the little things. Was I ruining it? But it did look fantastic. And Marian was nothing but supportive. When I walked into the next gallery, edited kickboard in hand, she was there, smiling, standing next to another table of small assemblages, but not mine.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream so specific, or of such a situation. Writing it down now, it feels like I can recognize a bunch of the elements, though I also worry that I’m replacing things I can’t recall with references, like how memories are reconstructed anew each time you remember them. I can’t see the little sculptures almost at all.
And it seems like I dreamt remembering pouring the olive oil. I wrote that that detail was weird, notable, unusual, then specific, deleting each in turn, because I’m not sure it was any of those except specific, and the specificity was already dissipating.
Does it mean anything? Does it mean anything different because it’s a week after rethinking Johns and his dreaming? I can’t see the little sculptures almost at all now. Certainly not enough to wake up and decide to make them. I see that Rauschenberg tableful of scatole personale photo, or components of a Sarah Sze installation, or something larger than Yuji Agematsu normally makes, and can recognize only that neither was right.
Is that what Johns meant by examining his work and removing all the references to other people’s? If so, the only thing left blocking out the pleas of conservators, and pouring the most extra virgin olive oil I can find on a church table, as Marian Goodman looks on beatifically.
I finally got a copy of Estate (2024), Cameron Rowland’s publication for their Dia exhibition Properties. The book also has the title, Dia Art Center Real Estate 1974-2024, and it’s a pageturner. It includes both acquisitions and dispositions, which, for Dia, is like half the story.
And while I knew the general narrative around conflicts, like the whole Judd/Marfa/Chinati mess; and the never-quite-permament permanent home for LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Mela Foundation; and the way the building that’s now The Kitchen was originally going to be for Robert Whitman, seeing it play out in chronological, site-by-site transactional detail is still fascinating.
And then there are some surprises. Lke, I knew about buying thousands of acres within sight of Lightning Field, but I did not know Dia’s acquired 520 acres around Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, too. And I don’t think I’d ever heard about the Cy Twombly Museum, for which Dia bought a 3-story, beaux-arts building at 324 West 23rd St in 1980. Twombly had shown at Heiner Friedrich’s gallery since 1964. And in 1978 he showed Fifty Days at Iliam at the Lone Star Foundation, a de Menil/Friedrich joint for purchasing art that later consolidated with/into Dia, so I can see it happening.
The Cy Twombly Museum (RIP), 1980-86, 324 W 23, via Streeteasy
I guess it all imploded in 1983, with the Marfa suit. Friedrich and Dia were burning through Philippa de Menil’s Schlumberger shares, and in 1985 her mother Dominique staged an institutional intervention. The family took over Dia and put Philippa’s inheritance in a trust.
Dia ended up selling the not-Twombly Museum in 1986. (They bought it for $550k, and sold it for $1.675m. In 1988 it got turned into a horrible-looking condo tower with a Citibank.) To ease Twombly’s loss, Dia gave him a show in 1988 in Bridgehampton instead. The series of green paintings Twombly made in 1988 for Venice were conceived as a permanent installation, and the Menil, which opened in 1987, eventually came through. All in all, a surprisingly coherent moment. A Twombly Museum on 23rd St. would have been amazing, though, ngl.
Anyway, what’s also interesting is what is not included in Dia’s real estate portfolio, namely the Spiral Jetty and Depreciation, Rowland’s own 2018 project in Edisto, SC. Dia does own Spiral Jetty the artwork, but not the lakebed land, which is, of course, leased from the State of Utah. Ask me how I know. As for Depreciation, when Rowland acquired the one-acre site of former plantation and reparation land, he placed the title in a non-profit company he manages. Dia has a longterm stewardship agreement with the artist. But unlike any other art-related Dia property, it is meant to not be visited.
wait, you said you saw it in a dream? Jasper Johns, 24, with Flag and saw, the lean-in variation, 1955, photographed by Robert Rauschenberg, who had a combine upstairs called Rebus, via RRF
What if I’ve been wrong all along about the origin story of Jasper Johns’s Flag?
The first flag painting I did came in the Fifties when I was trying to become a painter, and I had been working in various…styles, I guess. Nothing seeming to mean much to me, except that one made a picture, there it was. And I one night dreamed that I had painted a flag of the United States of America and I got up the next morning and went out and bought materials and began to paint this flag.
That’s the longest version of the story I think I’ve seen, from a 1966 TV interview with curator Alan Solomon. When I put parts of the interview transcript online in 2011, I was skeptical of the dream story. Not that I didn’t believe it, or thought Johns wasn’t telling the truth, but that it seemed like he hinted at other possible stories, but was now sticking with the one no one could question or investigate.
There’s nothing more subjective and unassailable than a dream. It completely removes the historic or referential or metaphoric or biographical possibilities for painting a flag. Or rather, “this flag.”
But instead of holding out for a truer or more revealing alternative, long suppressed, maybe there’s value in taking Johns at his word, and accepting the dream story on its own terms. Because there is a natural follow-on question: “Why did you do what you dreamed you did?”
Gerhard Richter, Erster Blick, 2000, offset lithograph, 182 x 151 mm, mounted on board, ed. 16/100, published by Edition Staeck, selling 16 July 2026 at Wright20
In 2000 Gerhard Richter made Erster Blick, an offset edition of an enlarged newspaper clipping from 26 July 2000 reporting the Zentrum für Elektronische Korrelationen und Magnetismus at Universität Augsburg’s Institut für Physik’s first imaging of the interior of a silizium (silicon) atom.
greg.org Untitled (Erster Blick), 2016/2026, digital print and graphite on white bond, 386 x 273 mm (uncropped), signed, stamped, and numbered, ed. 100+20+10+6
In 2016, I made Untitled (Erster Blick), an edition in graphite on an enlarged newspaper article from the Zentrum’s press archive, to mark the occasion of one of Richter’s Erster Blick coming up for auction during Frieze London.
The edition, which matched Richter’s, of 100, plus 20 Roman numeral copies, plus 10 trial proofs, plus 6 other trial proofs, did not sell out before the Richter came up for sale. Which, it didn’t, turns out, but the print coming up next week, July 16, at Wright in Chicago, definitely will.
To mark this joyous event, I am reopening the Untitled (Erster Blick) edition, making it available until the close of bidding on the Chicago print. You can order it/them below.
A paper sculpture study of Why not Sneeze by Rrose Selavy, and accompanying labels
I forgot until I heard Michelle Kuo mention it again on Modern Art Notes Podcast, but one of the real discoveries of the Marcel Duchamp retrospective was the large vitrine stuffed with studies, preparatory materials, and extras from the Bôites-en-valise.
There are various photos and experiments with folded photo sculptures of Why Not Sneeze? by Rose Sélavy (1921), on the way to making the sliced, curved, pop-up book-style photo that ended up in the deluxe edition.
But there’s also a papier-mâché model of Fountain. Can you just see Duchamp carefully crafting this tiny toilet, with his little bowl of slop at his elbow, while nazis roam the streets of Paris?
But my favorite things, or the things I was most surprised to see, were the labels. Stacks of labels for every object in the Bôite. Oh, no, unused labels where there ended up being no place to put them. Like for Fountain.
Ironically, the clearest image I can immediately find that shows both the labels attached to the matted reproductions and the curved 3-D photo of Sneeze is at Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, where I decline to “rent this image file” of a 1941 work with a claimed copyright of 2023. Peggy Guggenheim, for whom Duchamp reserved ed. I/XX, and to whom Duchamp smuggled all the ingredients for 50 Bôites while posing as a cheese merchant, and who packed them with her collection for shipping to the US.
So thanks, at least, Peggy Guggenheim, for getting these graphic design is my passion labels out of Europe, and affording us the opportunity to deduce the specific functionalities of each line’s different typefaces. These might be what I, too, fiddle with making during a nazi occupation.
At first I thought the sunblasted video of Rick Owens’ 2027 collection, presented last week on the shadeless place of the Palais de Tokyo in the midst of the 40-degree Saharan omega heatdeath of Europe, felt like a prequel to Mad Max, with stranded club kids trudging through the desert, clinging to the increasingly tenuous expectation that there’ll be a gas station, and it’ll have gas.
As I was typing this out, I thought of a rebooted Gerry, Gus Van Sant’s near-wordless exploration of survival and the violent sublime, with the roles of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon replaced by 100 models.
But then I come back to Sand and Sea (Marina), the climate catastrophe opera installation at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where performers loll about on a doomed beach, only it’s restaged by the S&M goths scurrying under the glass floor of Anne Imhoff’s Faust in the German Pavilion the Biennale before.
Having experienced complicated awe at Owens’ similar show on the identical site in 2024, I have to say I had some concerns, stifled them, and now find it bleaker than I feared.
I think I made the mistake of listening to Dia’s 2025 Steve McQueen Bass Symposium while driving, instead of watching it. Now as I scrub back through to find various salient points again, I realize how integral so many of the images and video clips are. And above almost all, it’s just wild that the symposium was held in the Dia Beacon gallery surrounded by Warhol’s Shadows.
There’s so much to flag here in all three speakers’ talks: Solveig Nelson talks about Bass as a work of cinema—light and sound—and in the context of McQueen’s other artworks. This brings in Exodus (1992/97), one of McQueen’s instantly sublime films, but also some generative discussion of Derek Jarman’s Blue. I know I was driving, but when I say I was seated…
Then Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa goes deep on the interrelation between Bass and the works of Black artists in the galleries above, particularly Cameron Rowland—with shoutouts to Melvin Edwards and Senga Nengudi—and to the aggro video of Bruce Nauman.
And then Michael Veal zooms out, deciphering the linguistics of bass and African talking drums. I’m two hours in—I was not going to sit in the car for the 35-minute audience q&a, but I didn’t want to wait to post.
Chris Santa Maria’s photo from the Met’s Raphael show of two small devotional paintings by Raphael on the backs of two amazing paintings
I will not have seen the Raphael show before it closes tomorrow. But it wasn’t until twelve days ago, that the loss of this opportunity hit me, when @chrissantamaria posted photos of these freestanding side panels, reunited from a lost triptych.
[l] Raphael, Magdalene, verso, c. 1503, painted surface verso: 14 ¼ by 4 ⅝ in.; 36.2 by 11.7 cm, panel: 15 by 5 ¾ in.; 38.1 by 14.6 cm. [r] Raphael, St Catherine of Alexandria, verso, c. 1503, panel: 15 3/8 × 5 7/8 in.; 39 × 15 cm.
My interest was piqued and my lament intensified when I saw the backs. Though the frames are different, the verso of each panel is an inscribed roundel set into a variegated field of marble or hardstone. Is it? I mean, it honestly doesn’t even look like the grain of a stone at this point. The Magdalene panel on the left apparently includes a fingerprint, indicating Raphael’s technique of applying or working these painted surfaces by hand.
The trompe l’oeil inscriptions together form one entreaty: “NOS CUM PROLE PIA BENEDICAT VIRGO MARIA [May the Virgin Mary bless us with Her Offspring].”
The Mary Magdalene last sold in 2000 as a Saint Mary of Egypt, and has only one entry in its exhibition history: at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1983. In 1990 it was acquired by “a museum foundation,” and then went to a private New York collection, “probably in 1996.” This seems like information that could be known. Yet while the connoisseurial analysis of Christie’s 2000 lot essay for the Mary panel is extensive, the provenance is literally one guy.
Notably, it is the details of the reverse decoration and the measurement of the panels after both works passed through Christie’s (the St Catherine was sold there in 1991) that confirmed these to be side panels of a small triptych, and not fragments of a single, chopped up picture.
I will not see these versos [versi?] together, which is motivation enough to create facsimile objects of them.
Adequate reproductions of these lesser, minor, backs of the important Raphaels had proved difficult to find. Not for the Magdalene panel, obviously, which was well documented by Sotheby’s, even down to the dimensions of the painted areas vs the panel itself.
The Met’s thumbnail was useless, and the GNDM did not even have a photo of the verso, I thought. In response to my plea for visitor photos of the verso, greg.org hero Brian Hilley tracked down images online; it turns out the Galleria does publish it on their Italian site [though a hi-res image is only offered for the recto.]
Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects (D1) and (D2), both verso paintings obv
The Dürer Facsimile Objects made during the pandemic were conceived as surrogates for the inaccessible and underdocumented elements of these objects. They were time-limited to the moments when these Dürers were locked in empty museums. But seeing these Raphaels together will be impossible beginning on Monday, and for the knowable future. That kind of distorts the model.
Alberto Giacometti, Lacoön, after a statue in the Vatican Museums, 1952, ballpoint pen on paper, 11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in., collection the Giacometti Foundation, via Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s is selling a full-scale bronze cast of the Laocoön made in the early 19th century, when the statue had been looted by Napoleon and brought to Paris. But that’s not important now. Because look at this ballpoint pen drawing Alberto Giacometti made of the statue in 1952.
“Ever since I first saw reproductions of works of art—and this goes back to my earliest childhood, to my earliest memories—I felt an immediate desire to ‘copy’ all those that I liked best, and this delight in copying has never really again left me,” Giacometti said in “Notes on copies,” a text included in the posthumous 1967 publication, Le copie del passato, published in English as Alberto Giacometti: A Sketchbook of Interpretive Drawings. Some of Giacometti’s notebooks were exhibited in the Guggenheim’s 2018 retrospective
Sometimes I worry I just look too much at auctions, and that my blog is just filling up with free spon for luxury goods from big artists showing at megagalleries.
And then there’s now, when I checked the tabs I had opened for the things that looked interesting at Sotheby’s London yesterday, and literally none of it sold. People really are leaving the good stuff behind these days:
Passed: Jim Hodges, A Passing Gate (for Meredith), 2009, gold leaf on screenprint, each sheet 30 x 20 in., ed. 20 unique variants, did not sell at Sotheby’s yesterday
Gotta admit, I’d mostly watched this Jim Hodges edition on paper because unlike the other 19 in the edition, this one has been for sale so much. It’s one of those see-it-in-person situations, because it’s actually in a corner-mounted shadowbox. It’s got the gold you want from a Hodges. Maybe it holds the corner until you get a spider web.
Phyllida Barlow, untitled: chairs, 2012-13, timber, plywood, cement, plaster, polyurethane foam, sand, builder’s plaster, scrim, PVA and paint, each: 100 by 54 by 57 cm, did not sell at Sotheby’s
Truly I am glad for whatever Hauser & Wirth did to help Phyllida Barlow realize the ambitious and gloriously monumental sculptural projects she was so genius at. But we cannot ignore that she also made some of her greatest work while stuck at home, and from whatever she could scavenge. These chairs give off that domestic garbage era vibe in the best way. Even if they did come from Hauser & Wirth.
Sarah Sze, detail of Model for a Dangling Modifier, 2015, mixed media? come on, for GBP 50,000, tell me what’s in there: there’s glass, grass, twigs, handhewn matchsticks or something, clamps, tape, sugar packets, a mirror, a mailing tube, a wood shim, rubber bands, a brick of the kind your conservator’s warned you about, 154.9 by 76.2 by 45.7 cm, didn’t sell at Sotheby’s
And speaking of stuff from the bin, one of the things that’s most impressed me about Sarah Sze’s sculptural works is how infrequently they *have* come up at auction. I think once you learn how to live with one, you never want to let it go.
installation view of one floor of Sarah Sze’s 2015 exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair
Jacob Kassay, Untitled, 2007, vinyl on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 in., on view at Von Ammon in DC
Focus Group 5, a new group show at Von Ammon in Washington includes works of the moment, some of which are also throwbacks.
There are works by six artists: Liz Craft, Catharine Czudej, Ignacio Gatica, Tony Matelli, and Banks Violette, and three early works on paper by Jacob Kassay.
Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 2000, 11 x 7 1/2 in., acrylic and graphite on four sheets of plastic, collection the artist, on view at Craig Starr
Like Johns, Kassay was working with the flag as an image and an object for several years before he got massive art world attention. Unlike Johns’s, Kassay’s flags have been much less widely seen. Also, it’s not clear whether he’s left the motif behind.
Though it’s been lost in a hall of silvered mirrors since, when Kassay popped in 2009, a flag-related installation was like his only Google image. That massive textile work, draped like an awning, was made by sewing together four flags, minus the cantons, So where there were stars, there was a large, rectangular void.
I’d thought of this work recently, and tried to find an image of it. [I’d been reminded of it while seeing the extraordinary, striped tarp, with two cutouts for doors, that covers the repaired signage on the Kennedy Center.] While searching, I found another early Kassay on perforated paper, which upended what I understood and wrote about the incredible sculpture/painting from his breakout show at Eleven Rivington. So I have updated that post.
When he was announced as the US representative to the Venice Biennale, I first had to confirm that Alma Allen and I are not related. So I called my genealogy-fluent cousin in Heber, Utah, where Allen’s large, Mormon family was purportedly from, and she did the legwork, and asked around, and no.
I hadn’t thought of Allen or his work for a while, though I liked it in the early 2000s, when it was small, finely crafted elemental objets on the design blogs of shops in Silver Lake or whatever. Taking the US Pavilion gig now, in the utterly corrupt and degraded selection process, and signing onto the racist, exclusionist dogmas of this administration in doing so, is a complete abrogation of artistic integrity and human decency.
It’s un-American in the most principled sense, but also the kind of craven, delulu white guy move that seems to characterize this moment. Allen and curator Jeffrey Uslip really hit the bullshit bull’s eye with a pavilionful of generic, goldtone lobby art.
I’d been staying away from it all, after an initial burst of investigating when the WTF announcement dropped about Allen, Uslip, and the fake American Arts Conservancy (AAC). It really did feel like the patriotic thing was to just step back and let this ship sink on its own.
But Allen’s recent conspiracy complaints on Instagram, and subsequent reporting in Ocula are presenting false narratives about the whole process that no one seems to be addressing. So while I don’t know anything new about the supposed publicist bullying and blacklisting, I do think Allen is lame to think someone would have to be pressured or threatened into not wanting to do business with him anymore. Here’s what I do know to be wrong with his claim:
Allen says he was “one of five artists on a shortlist created by a committee of professionals” that included people from the NEA and two State Department organizations: the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and Art in Embassies. The NEA told Ocula no, they were not involved. ECA administers the grant. Before any of this happened, Art in Embassies had already been taken over by the same political appointee who went on to create the AAC.
So the “committee of professionals” was the political appointee who chose herself, and her instant zombie arts organization.
Ocula adds to reporting of the chaotic announcement/leak/rescinding/collapse last September of artist Robert Lazzarini’s proposal, with curator John Ravenal’s claim that the State Department initially asked them to partner with AAC when their original sponsor, the University of South Florida, dropped out. AAC, Ravenal said, “decided to instead sponsor another project.”
In other words, AAC was selected for the Biennale before the artist was. Because it is run by a political appointee, who took over the pavilion and the selection process that had long been led by a panel of outside art and museum experts. It’s a pattern of rejection of independent expertise, consolidation of control, and politicization that’s been happening all over the administration.
The reporting on the AAC and its complete lack of arts-related experience has focused narrowly on its founder’s artisanal pet food business. Which distracts from her one actual qualification: she is a Mar-a-Lago member. When the AAC first popped up, I found the founder in dozens of party photos for events at Mar-a-Lago: fashion shows, dog shelter benefits, lawn parties, benefit auctions, some absolutely cringe, giant Rolex sculpture show. She’s a party loyalist and a loyal partier, and she knew enough to choose the goldest possible option. And a white guy.
Which is the second part of Allen’s claim, that he was on “a shortlist” with three Black women—Julie Mehretu, Barbara Chase-Riboud and Kennedy Yanko—and William Eggleston. Let’s be real. None of those women would be picked, and none would say yes if they were.
Mehretu and Yanko were already selected by Koyo Kouoh for the actual Biennale. Both also have overlaps, if not connections, to Uslip, who worked at Mehretu’s early gallery, The Project, and in Yanko’s hometown of St. Louis. So this shortlist feels more like a Uslip wishlist, if not an entire fiction. AAC’s website listed Uslip as an advisor seemingly unrelated to the US Pavilion deal. Was he involved in meeting Lazzarini? Was the list just a feint, hiding the reality that he was calling maga-sympatico white guys until he found one who’d say yes?
Uslip has not, afaik, commented on any of this; instead he’s left Allen to sputter and flail alone.
![a wide solid black rectangle printed with an ornate line drawn frame and a title, based on the famous painting [sic] by bilhaud,](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Allais_Combat_de_nègres_dans_une_cave-1024x717.jpg)
