Category: art

Letters, manuscripts, books, I get, but autographs? I cannot even. Franz Peter Bach could, though. The July 24th auction of his autograph collection includes the following, almost surreal text:

He began collecting in the 1980s, from following music tours in Germany, as well as attending swap meets in Hanover, where as well as exchanging autographs, he was given addresses of celebrities, who he would then write to directly for signatures. His collection was meticulously collated, mostly in albums, and added to over many years. Authenticated prior to the sale by Adam Andrusier. Collated in a presentation album by Mr Bach, with tipped in photograph on opposing page. Following the sale, the autograph(s) will be removed and paired with the photograph, ready for collection / shipping.

Besides dismantling this guy’s meticulously collated collection, the autographs are being sold mostly in inexplicable and entertaining groups. The groups that include artist autographs are as follows:

Lot 51: Christopher Reeve, Francis Bacon, Liza Minelli, Bob Hope, Marsha Hunt, Tom Cruise, Burt Ward, and [Austrian actress] Eva May

Lot 53: Christopher Lee, [director] Ettore Scola, Karl Malden, Lynda Carter, [composer] Johann Maria Eduard Strauss III, and Cy Twombly

Lot 56: Shelley Winters, Lionel Messi, Gregory Peck, Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Don Ameche, Tippi Hedren, Anthony Perkins, and Olafur Eliasson.

Gerhard Richter and Leni Riefenstahl are each sold separately. The postcard with Leni’s autographs is pretty unflinching.

We used to be a real country, where artists made 6×9-ft unique screenprints of degraded prints of one of the world’s first photographs.

Tabula Rasa, the summer group show at Paula Cooper, takes its name from a series of four unique screenprints Sarah Charlesworth made in 1981, one of which is in the show. On the their pandemic-era blog, PCG Studio, the gallery has posted a series of photos showing the making of Tabula Rasa, as well as another rarely seen work in the show: Face/Surface, a 1976 collaboration between Charlesworth and her former teacher Joseph Kosuth.

Stephen Dean’s Prayer Mills are so ridiculously beautiful it’s ridiculous. The light hitting them will fill the space with polygons of color. As you move around them, the dichroic glass changes color like a tricked out Hyundai. And even just sitting there in the even, featureless confines of an auction listing, the wires of the postcard rack over, behind, and through the planes of color are like a Stuart Davis drawing. [When I pin down the closer reference I’m thinking of, I’ll add it here.]

Weirdly, I remembered them as Prayer Wheels, so I guess I was wrong about that.

Anyway, point is, this one’s selling next week at Christie’s—for at least $100.

10-17 July 2024, Lot 178: Stephen Dean, Prayer Mill, 2007, est. $7-10,000, no reserve [update: sold for $8,190] [christies]
Stephen Dean | Works | Prayer Mills [stephendean.com]

Yesterday on the good social media, I floated an idea about custom-printing an oilcloth for our table instead of stalemating over off-the-roll options. When I realized custom was even an option, my mind went first to Guyton/Walker, probably because tables, but also because their poppin’ designs feel like riffs on the most garish tropical oilcloth patterns out there already.

But then it occurred to me, what is a Wade Guyton painting but an artisanal and auratic, custom-printed textile? Which one would be best as a tablecloth? If process is the determinant, Gerhard Richter’s Strip paintings are also printed. But what isn’t these latter days of the flatbed picture plane?

I had the Felix Gonzalez-Torres catalogue raisonné out, and its all-over cover photos of candy suddenly felt like the perfect combination of representation and abstraction, object and pattern. But what color?

The Gonzalez-Torres image universe spilled out before me. Bead curtain? Death by Gun? [oof.] The dark surface of the sea? A bird in a cloudy sky? Black with a couple of lines of biography and historic events printed along one edge? Then I realized I already had a solution. Or at least an option.

Sure, we could print the entire image of footprints in the sand from “Untitled” (For Parkett 39). Or, we could use the eight screenprinted panels of the 3×7-meter billboard edition separately. Except they are mostly square, around 160 x 170 cm, each, plus some border/overlap. So on their own, they don’t fit our rectangular table. They would need to be pasted together in a vertical pair. Do they need to be laminated? Coated? Thrown over with a clear vinyl tablecloth like at Grandma’s? Beyond unworkable, it feels wrong. [lmao as if the whole idea isn’t bad enough.] I’ve taken my Parkett billboard sheets out like twice, and that billboard stock is thick; they are not your crafty mama’s butcher paper.

So printing it is, I guess.

I was unexpectedly giddy when Carolina Miranda posted on social media about the blank ruled page she came across in the collection of the Getty Museum.

I have since had tabs open for all the blank ruled pages in the Getty for several weeks now. There are fourteen. [Also there are 46 “blank pages,” which includes half-blank sheets.]

In 1981 sculptor Elyn Zimmerman proposed to polish a sliver of the 300 ft tall basalt cliffs of the Palisades in New Jersey to a mirror finish, so that it would reflect—depending on your angle—the Manhattan bank of the Hudson, the river itself, or the sky.

She showed the maquette of the Palisades Project [above] at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, which also commissioned a related sculpture, a dramatic, 8 x 21-foot freestanding wall of one polished and seven natural cleft granite slabs, for the museum entrance.

When the NY Times visited it in 1982, it was untitled. At some point, it became known as Palisades (1981), and in 1990 it was reinstalled at a winery in Napa with the artist’s involvement, and a reflecting pool, echoing the Hudson, perhaps, was added. It was sold in 2014, and it is now for sale again, this second, decidedly mid reflecting trough not included. Christie’s calls it Palisades Project both times.

Zimmerman’s original proposal had an undeniably thrilling aspect to it, a spectacular vision born of mind-freeing drives upstate. Of course, it was also impossible. The basalt of the Palisades does not polish to a mirror finish. No doubt realizing this at the time, Zimmerman’s Yonkers exhibit included an alternate proposal to mount a polished granite skin on the cliff face, at which point you might as well just stick an actual 300-ft tall mirror on there.

Thus, though that one piece could maybe use some polishing, Palisades Project [sic] survives as the ideal realization of the concept. Bidding starts at $100, plus shipping.

[update: holy smokes, it sold to the lone bidder for $126, this is epic, hmu lucky winner!]

Overnight on tumblr, @voorwerk sent me looking again to Blake Gopnik’s Warhol biography for clues about the freestanding silkscreen-on-plexiglas sculptures Warhol made from some of his film frames.

I didn’t find anything, but Gopnik’s account of Warhol’s Sidney Janis-related commissions did. Janis, a dealer and trustee at the Museum of Modern Art—a combination that museum ethical standards would eventually frown on—commissioned a dumb little portrait of himself using eight family photos, which he donated to MoMA sight unseen in 1967. Gopnik notes that Warhol also got MoMA to take one of the 8-ft tall screens of Janis’s headshot, which the artist had used to make a sprawling 7-panel mural. A mural Janis declined to either buy or donate. Sad!

Point is, Gopnik wrote that Warhol intended for the screen “to be displayed free-standing and lit from behind,” a request MoMA apparently ignored when they showed it in 1968, as part of Janis’s collection gift to the museum [above].

So not only do these see-through Plexi screenprint sculptures relate to the acetates Warhol used to make his screens, in their freestanding frames they could relate to the framed silkscreens themselves.

Previously, related: The Corktown Caper, a stolen Warhol Flowers screen