Category: art

I’m trying to figure out how I’ve lived ten years without a copy of Richard Serra Early Work in my life. [This doesn’t need to happen to you; today’s your last chance to get it for a dollar or whatever at Zwirner’s book sale.]

Anyway, in May 1970, after successfully installing twelve giant fir trees in the Pasadena Art Museum [Peter Plagens going there: “One does not have to be a dedicated Freudian to see the import of huge logs in one of the curved, pristine, uterine chambers of the PAM. Indeed, one has to work pretty hard to fend it off…”], Richard Serra went to Japan, to make work for the Tokyo Biennale ’70.

Attention outside Japan on the 10th Tokyo Biennale has picked up a bit—Tate did a symposium it apparently didn’t record in 2016—but there are no period texts about it in this 2014 Serra catalogue, and no mention at all beyond three photos. If I’m getting this right, Serra made his first embedded angled steel works in Japan: the To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted he dug into Ueno Park was a 130-in. diameter version of the steel circle he embedded in the street in the Bronx later that Fall. [Which is on the cover of the book, btw.] When the Biennale traveled to Kyoto, he made a 300-in. steel square, Untitled (Kyoto Square), in Okazaki Park.

I couldn’t find Kuwashi Maruyama’s photo [above] online, only the photo of Shigeo Anzaï which shows Serra laying out a circle with a string and some chalk. Starting with his documentary images of international artists at the Biennale, Anzaï was the Shunk AND Kender of 1970s avant-garde Japan. The print above surfaced when he showed them at White Rainbow in 2015-2016.

Tokyo Biennale ’70 is being reconsidered as an innovative success for curator Yusuke Nakahara’s choice to center artists [no nations, no pavilions]; to use a theme [“Between Man and Matter”] that put Japanese Gutai and Mono-ha artists in dialogue with international artists; and yet to not be too heavy-handed about it. Except that there were zero women; official photographer Anzaï all but ignored the Japanese artists; and almost every anecdote he tells is about something the artists wanted but were not allowed to do.

Christo was forbidden from wrapping something; Sol Lewitt was forbidden from painting on the wall, and on and on. Anzaï’s photo shows Serra trying to plant a tree inside an embedded steel ring in front of the museum, a plan that was rejected. He apparently decided to YOLO it, and installed the sculpture [top] somewhere else in the park, without permission, and without telling anyone where it was.

All of this is really a sidebar to the work Serra did manage to exhibit. A week before the Biennale opened, while Serra was onsite, the Kent State massacre happened. Serra and Carl Andre decided not to let the moment pass. The work they created, listed as “mixed media” in the Serra catalogue, was a wire service printout of John Filo’s photo of Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over the body of Jeffrey Miller; and a hand-painted sign in Japanese and English: “The pig will eat its children.” The two elements are taped side by side to the temporary pegboard wall used in the Biennale.

The Tokyo Museum Collection’s 2005 object listing for Kiyoji Ohtsuji’s 1970/2005 print lists it as “Richard Serra, The Pig Will Eats Its Children (political protest with Carl Andre).” The Serra catalogue caption just calls it a “collaboration with Carl Andre.”

What to make of it?Now, Serra’s worked with livestock before, and pigs specifically. But there is no way he’s not [also] thinking of the cops here, right? Again, zero mention in the catalogue, zero mention online. Oddly, one of the very few other references to this title is in a 2012 collaborative work in a 2017 show at Maureen Paley; Gardar Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon included a photo print on crushed aluminum of two parked Japanese riot police busses titled, The Pig Will Eat Its Children.

The Japanese connection makes me think they knew—Einarsson lives in Tokyo—or that there is a common reference. Though probably not Japanese. Serra & Andre’s Japanese text [豚はその子を食べてしまうだろう] reads like a literal translation, and the somewhat clunky painted version actually gets truncated. So it’s not a common saying. And anyway, dogs, not pigs, are the typical Japanese animal slang for police. So this is from the artist(s). Alas, they’re both dead now, so it’s a bummer that apparently no one in the last 10-50 years asked them about it. But don’t look at me; I only found out yesterday, and here I am.

Tokyo Biennale 70 as Contact Point [tate research]

“As a matter of fact, Hoffman’s name came up in the ride to Nevada pretty frequently. Serra had gone to school at Santa Barbara and, after Isla Vista, was having serious doubts about whether he was the most revolutionary¹ thing that ever came out of that campus. What, we argued, was the most revolutionary thing to do?

…

“We came back again to see the piece in the early morming, and Joan made a videotape of it. Then we left. On the ride back to Las Vegas we talked about the piece a lot, about politics not at all. It wasn’t as if the problem had gone away; it was, at least for me, as if revolutionary art is where you find it and that the question of what is revolutionary art isn’t too different, in the end, from the question of what is good art. Anyway, nobody mentioned Abbie Hoffman. We all got very happy. Serra wondered whether anyone in the ‘Information’ show had submitted a piece of paper that said: ‘Go to a mesa and dig a slot forty feet deep and one hundred feet long. Then go to the other side and dig a slot…’

…

“¹ ‘Revolution’ was the most often-used word I ran into this summer. Nobody used it to mean the transfer of political power from one class to another. Most of the time it seemed to refer to those activities which would most expeditiously bring America to her senses and force her to stop the war, end racism, and begin to take the lead among nations in rescuing the planet from the certain destruction toward which it is headed.”

[Excerpts from Philip Leider’s account of traveling with Joan Jonas and Richard Serra from Berkeley to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, published in Artforum (Sept. 1970) as “How I Spent My Summer Vacation or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah (Read about it in Artforum),” excerpted further from Richard Serra Early Work (Steidl/Zwirner, 2014), a book you have one more day to buy for $10 at the David Zwirner Books Summer Archive Sale.]

FWIW, I think the Isla Vista reference is to either the torching of a Bank of America building or the shooting by police of a UCSB student in the Spring of 1970.

I was just going to post the footnote of their road trip’s working definition of revolution, but every piece of context kept spiraling into a vortex of depressing relevance.

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.

Continue reading “Tabula Rasa: The Making Of”

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.]

Continue reading “Blank Ruled Pages In The Getty Museum Collection”

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!]