art – Page 144 – greg.org

Oh, The Places You Go, Little Brillo Box

Bob Adelman, Castelli’s house, 1965, fairly ganked and shrunk via corbis]
Now that they’re selling for a million dollars or whatever, it’s hard to imagine how Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures were perceived at the time they were made.
When they were lowly $300 sculptures, mechanically produced in seemingly endless supply, they were treated like furniture, traded and given away like party favors or the curatorial equivalent of hostess gifts. They were a medium of social, not economic currency. [At least not direct economic currency. Even from his early days as an illustrator, Warhol was already familiar with the art gift’s ingratiating self-promotion.]

The most common exhibition strategy for a Brillo Box was as a table. Two of the three Boxes I’ve seen in private collections were encased in Lucite and placed next to chairs. One had a lamp on it. The photo above [from janee’s flickr] shows what looks like a Stable Gallery box being used as a kid’s table in a San Francisco decorator showhouse. In 1988, Leo Castelli told New York Magazine he used two encased Brillo Boxes as side tables, but in 1965 when Factory photographer Bob Adelman snapped this picture at Castelli’s house, it was just the box and the phone. [See the full-size image at Corbis.]

Irving Sandler’s original Brillo Box, signed by its designer, Jim Harvey, image via]
The Warhol Authentication Board’s report on the Pontus Hulten affair captures both the gift and furniture aspects of the dozen or so Boxes made in 1968:

Of the six Stockholm type boxes known to exist, three were given to [curator and later museum director Ollie] Granath as “souvenirs” for having helped Hulten with the Moderna Museet exhibition. Hulten kept the other three for his own use; two served as bedside tables for his children. [pp.9-10]
…
Of the three that Hulten kept, one was later given to the silkscreener who made the Malmo type boxes. [p. 10]

[Hmm, I wonder if Castelli’s 1988 sale of his end table “to European collector” for $50,000 motivated Hulten to trade one of his own Stockholm type table/”souvenirs” in order to, uh, complete his edition?]
The report also mentions the 100 Pasadena type boxes, plus “as many as 16” additional Boxes identified in the CR that were “given as gifts or sold.” Two of those 16 are the Oberlin Brillo Boxes, [right] which Warhol gave to Pasadena Art Museum curator John Coplans, who later donated them to the college’s Allen Museum.
All this gifty goodness and casual domestic use leads me to speculate that LACMA’s “missing” Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes–10 known, plus at least 33 and maybe more, if they produced as many as Pasadena did–were treated as thank-you gifts to donors who paid for their fabrication, or were sold to “friends and family” of the museum. So keep your eye out.

Facture-Checking Warhol’s Brillo Boxes

The Brillo Box formerly known as Stockholm type, and formerly known as being by Andy Warhol, sold at Christie’s in 1998.
So awesome. The Beverly Hills art dealer Robert Shapazian’s bequest to the Huntingon Museum of 10 Brillo Boxes by Andy Warhol has brought the whole tangled Brillo Box versioning and authenticity debate back into the news. As the LA Times’ Christopher Knight reports, Shapazian’s Brillo Boxes include one 1964 Stable Gallery box–and nine Pontus Hulten Boxes, made by the legendary founding director of the Moderna Museet. And the Pompidou. And MoCA.
Until this summer, those nine would have been called Stockholm Type. But following the completion of the Warhol Authentication Board’s 2+year investigation and the release of their 27-page report [Jul 19, 2010 pdf via LA Times], the 105-120 or so Stockholm Types have been split into Stockholm Types and Malmo Types.
Hulten had somewhere between 10 and 12, but not more than 15, boxes made after his 1968 Warhol exhibition at the Moderna Museet closed. He did this, he said, because Warhol told him to “make them over there.” Hulten apparently pocketed that date and authorization. When, in 1990, he had 105 Boxes fabricated in Malmo for a series of exhibitions, he referred to an “old authorization.” The only thing missing, it seems, was documentary evidence of this readymaking on Warhol’s side.
There was extensive context provided to show that fabricating works was part of Hulten’s standard practice–he had replica Tatlins and replica Duchamps made, including, even, a Large Glass, which Duchamp later signed [as a “copie conforme”]. Hulten’s texts and statements show he considered Duchamp and Warhol as readymade brothers.

Following the logic of Duchamp and taking it to another power, Hulten interpreted Warhol’s 1964 Stable Gallery box sculptures not as factured works of art, but as repeatable, ready-made objects, that were interchangeable with real Brillo Soap Pads cartons or replicas.

And then the Board does what authentication boards do: it examines the physical details of each type of box, distinguishing Warhols based on the traditional notion of the character of their painted surface, or facture. Stockholm types were “painted and sanded multiple times to achieve a high degree of finish before they were printed,” but Malmo types “appear to have been painted with a roller.” Stockholm types have mitered corners, but Malmo types [and Stable Gallery types, for that matter] have abutted joints. Malmo types are made with a nail gun, Stockholm types were nailed by hand. And so on.
The conceptual difference between these two approaches to Warhol’s work is fascinating, and Hulten clearly felt justified and correct in the way he had his Brillo Boxes made. The fact that Hulten’s 1968 boxes were made in 1990 seems to have been more broadly known and accepted within the Scandinavian museum and art community. But he also did not have any problem “misrepresent[ing] the works and falsif[ying] their history” to the Estate, the Board, and the Catalogue Raisonne.
And so, the Board has reclassified all Hulten boxes as “exhibition related copies” [Stockholm] and “exhibition copies” [Malmo]. Any questions?

After 26 Years, The Smithsonian Will Put Alexander Calder’s Gwenfritz Back Where It Belongs.

What if they decided to put Tilted Arc back? What if the General Services Administration, and the Jacob Javits Federal Building folks called up Richard Serra and said, “You know what this Federal Plaza needs after all is a nice, long, angled slab of Cor-Ten steel”?
Would that be a shock? Would that be a story? A new day of some kind dawning? Because that’s what’s happening. Only it’s not New York, it’s Washington, DC. And it’s not Richard Serra, it’s Alexander Calder. And it’s not Tilted Arc, it’s Gwenfritz.

Gwenfritz displaced, image via si.edu’s Mitch Toda
In 1965, Mrs. Gwendolyn Cafritz convinced the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley that the first modern building going up on the National Mall–the Museum of History and Technology, now known as the National Museum of American History–needed some modern art to go with it. She offered her family’s support for a large, abstract fountain by Alexander Calder. After site visits and negotiations, the artist settled on a fountain jets-inspired sculpture in a reflecting pond. The Cafritz Foundation donated the $400,000 needed for a 40-foot high, black steel stabile [and its landscaping] on the west end of the museum.

Gwenfritz, c.1969, in the site Calder designed it for, via si.edu
At the dedication ceremony in June of 1969 [below], the Washington Post reported that Calder unexpectedly announced the name of the sculpture would be, The Caftolin. When her turn came to speak, Mrs Cafritz said no way, they were sticking with the first choice, The Gwenfritz, and that’s that. Obviously, no one objected.

via Washington Post, June 4, 1969
The Gwenfritz [not sure when the The disappeared] was Calder’s first major commission in Washington, one of his most important stabiles, and Washington’s first major modern and first major abstract public sculpture.
None of which seemed to slow down the Smithsonian which decided in 1983 to move the site-specific sculpture and replace it with a Victorian-era bandstand from the grounds of a Jacksonville, Illinois mental hospital. Or the Washington Fine Arts Commission which approved the move over the objections of–well, of almost no one, since Calder himself had died in 1976. The Washington Post did run an angry column by Robert Hilton Simmons, though, criticizing the trouncing of the artist’s intentions and the Museum’s claim that the sculpture’s new site, in a grove of trees on the corner of Constitution Ave & 14th Street, would “allow it to serve more fully as a focal point.”
The frictionless violation of Calder’s intentions was cited by public art experts as a direct precursor to the government’s accelerated actions in the Tilted Arc controversy beginning in 1984-5. And yet, in the absence of an outspoken artist, Gwenfritz has sat in its altered, degraded, and supposedly more “focal” site for 26 years and counting.
All of which makes Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik’s new video visit to Gwenfritz even more jawdropping than normal:

This is actually one of my favorite new discoveries in Washington. It’s by Alexander Calder. He made it in 1968, and it’s called Gwenfritz. Terrible name for a really amazing, magical work of art.

Rather than ask what it means that the Post’s art critic calls a 40-foot-tall Calder located at one of DC’s busiest intersections–across the street from both the White House and the Washington Monument– a “new discovery,” why don’t we just say it proves the paper’s 1984 argument about the invisibility of Gwenfritz‘s displaced site. [Or maybe Gopnik, like many, many Washingtonians, is essentially inured to monuments and outdoor sculpture. A fascinating theory, perhaps, for another post.]
And rather than mock, I’ll just note Gopnik’s proudly uninformed self-reflexivity, and his free-associative interpretations based on the sculpture’s maintenance issues. [“This seems so much a part of the period in which it was made, the tail end of American industry. You could call this a ‘Rust Belt Sculpture.'” Actually, it was born when Modernism was still the official symbol of America’s free and glorious future, and that its ex-pat creator had it made in France.] And his praise for the idyllic site and its relationship to the surrounding trees.

And his complete ignorance of the work’s context, history, or implications when he mentions in passing, “I think the Museum’s going to move this to a better site soon. That’s what I’ve heard.”
Oh?
Yes.
I called the press office today and confirmed that it is the Museum’s as-yet unannounced intention to return Gwenfritz to its original site. In August, the bandstand was dismantled in preparation for its triumphant return to Jacksonville. The date for Gwenfritz‘s return has not been set, but it will mostly likely take place after the Museum’s renovation of the west wing, or sometime between 2012 and 2014.
Or just in time for the 30th anniversary of its uprooting. You heard it here fir–let’s just say that’s what I heard.
Industrial Remnants [washingtonpost.com]

Going Long On Terry O’Shea

Terrance O’Shea, late 1960s, 11x11x2 slab of laminated plexiglass
This summer while poking around into the conflicted treatment of the Pasadena Art Museum’s Warhol Brillo Boxes, I found a tangential mystery: 10 or 30 or 40 or more Kellogg’s Corn Flake Boxes Warhol authorized for the LA County Museum of Art seem to be unaccounted for. Warhol “donated” 100 boxes in 1971; the donor/collectors on LACMA’s influential Contemporary Arts Council paid for the fabrication; but now the museum only has 57 in their collection, and at least ten have turned up in private collections and/or at auction.
Still haven’t figured that out. But one thing leads to another, and so I’m looking at the catalogue for the last known appearance of “all” the Warhol boxes, a 1973 show organized by Maurice Tuchman titled, Ten years of contemporary art council acquisitions, inaugurating the new contemporary art galleries, [left] and I see this title, how can I not?
Documentation of the Artist’s Act of Placing One of His Sculptures in the La Brea Tar Pit, 1971, by Terrance O’Shea.
And the work consists of a photograph–a 4×5 transparency, actually, and a notarized letter/certificate. And the sculpture is a Lucite-looking prism or wedge, and there’s no letter, and the LACMA website only has a thumbnail image of the letter, no text.
And the web searches for Terrance O’Shea are incredibly meager-to-nonexistent. Even though he was apparently the first LA plastics artist to win the museum’s [CAC-funded, btw] New Talent Purchase Award–in 1966.
But I turn out not to be the only guy looking at Terry O’Shea in 2010. The folks at Cardwell Jimmerson in Culver City had just restaged a pivotal 1971-2 CalArts exhibition titled, “The Last Plastics Show,” which had included O’Shea’s work. Both times. Here’s how their press release set it up:

By then [1972] the subject of plastic, resin and arious automobile-body technologies as expressed in California art had been thoroughly explored in multiple exhibitions up and down the west coast and extending east to Detroit and the Jewish Museum in New York. Moreover, the sunny technological optimism associated with California in the nineteen sixties had suddenly darkened; the hostile reception greeting LACMA’s 1971 blockbuster “Art and Technology” exhibition being a case in point. This was indeed the end of an era, as older art practices and institutions (plastics and Chouinard Art Institute, for instance) gave way to the new (Conceptualism and CalArts). It was in this historical context that the artist/curators Judy Chicago, Doug Edge, adn DeWain valentine gave the exhibition its decidedly self-mocking and surprisingly poignant title: “The Last Plastics Show.”

So I spoke with Tom Jimmerson, who gave me a brief sketch of O’Shea’s work and life. He was sort of an artist’s artist’s artist, it seems, difficult to work with, and yet friend to many. Apparently holding artspeak and underwear in equal disdain, O’Shea was known to suck in his gut and let his pants fall to the ground at openings when the conversation got too hi-falutin’.

Runes, 1968, Terry O’Shea
He made impossibly tiny works out of the shards of plastic he’d salvage from his buddies’ castings: intricate capsules, spheres, eventually some book-sized slabs, which he’d keep in black velvet bags and present with a magician’s flourish for the viewer to hold and manipulate. The gallery is working on an O’Shea show for 2011, Tom said, and it sounds fascinating.
But Tom didn’t know the details of the LACMA piece, or the story behind it. So he put me in touch with Doug Edge, one of O’Shea’s best friends [O’Shea himself died from complications associated with a life of heavy living], he’d know. And so he did. I just spoke with Edge the other day. Here’s how it went down:
In 1966, Terry went to see Maurice Tuchman and showed him his work, which he pulled out from one pocket after another. O’Shea was soon awarded the New Talent Award, which meant the museum would purchase a work for the collection. Only Tuchman or whoever never really followed up. Perhaps there was some ambiguity about the artist’s responsibility to produce or present options for the curator [or the collector’s committee] to choose from. Or maybe the museum was supposed to approach the artist, visit his studio. Either way, though there was, in fact, a sculpture–it was a clear, polished wedge with channels carefully routed out and filled in with colored resin, like all O’Shea’s sculptures, it was laboriously fabricated and detailed–the acquisition hung in the air until 1970.

On May 28 1970, O’Shea and two friends–Edge didn’t name names, but would only say that one was “a real big guy–went to the museum at about 2AM, and using the fence surrounding it in some sort of catapulting maneuver, Terry had his big friend heave the little wedge into the tar pit next to the museum.
Not that LACMA knew, of course. It wasn’t until many months later, perhaps precipitated by an administrator at the museum following up on an unfulfilled pledge of work, that O’Shea informed the museum that he had, in fact, delivered their work, and they were already, in fact, in possession of it.
He created a sculpture and then he–he didn’t destroy it, exactly; he “placed” it in a way that it can now only be experienced as a photograph.
This work lingered in my mind for a few months. But after seeing “The Original Copy,” Roxana Marcoci’s show of photography and sculpture at MoMA, I really picked up the pace on tracking down O’Shea’s LACMA work. Which seems almost entirely undiscussed in the art and art historical world. And yet, not only does Documentation of the Artist’s Act… fit Marcoci’s premise like a glove, but O’Shea himself was operating at a critical juncture in LA’s artistic history, a singular link between plastics and finish fetish–which he deployed toward his own, idiosyncratic ends–and the Conceptualist irreverence of, say a Nauman or an Oppenheim, or a Ruscha, who also happened to make a work involving LACMA and fiery destruction.
But anyway, keep that all in mind while reading O’Shea’s letter, which Edge graciously read to me over the phone. It’s after the jump, because even though I’ve found some other of O’Shea’s work that shows this LACMA piece was not just a one-off joke, it’s hard to imagine this post going even longer that it already has.

Continue reading “Going Long On Terry O’Shea”

Lowe’s Balloon Gas Generators: The Making Of

About this time last year, while pondering the ur-satelloons that were Prof. T.S.C. Lowe’s Civil War-era aerial reconnaissance balloons operated for the Union Army, I was struck by the idea of re-creating the rather awesome-sounding and -looking portable hydrogen gas generators [above] Lowe designed and had built at the Washington Navy Yard in the fall of 1861.
I’m glad to report that the research for that project is moving ahead, thanks to the accidental discovery of the apparently definitive history of their making in Frederick Stansbury Haydon’s 1940 tragically unfinished classic, Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies: With a Survey of Military Aeronautics Prior To 1861. As NASM Senior Curator Tom Crouch put it in his foreword to the 2000 reissue of the book, retitled as Military Ballooning During the Early Civil War,

Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies remains not only the basic account of the creation and early history of the Federal Balloon Corps, it is recognized as something of a minor classic of historical scholarship. While reviewer Paul Angle feared that readers would find the level of detail and sheer bulk of the documentation daunting, he also recognized it was “a study quite likely to be definitive.”
In fact it is Haydon’s uncompromising scholarly rigor and his attention to the smallest detail that gives the book its extraordinary power. The author tells us how much fabric was used to manufacture every balloon that saw federal service, and he provides the formula for the varnish used to seal the envelopes. He explains the technical details of the mobile gas generators that Lowe designed to inflate his balloons in the field and provides the precise cost of the rubber hose used in their construction. And what color were those generators? Light blue. Haydon found the receipt for the paint.

“Pale blue,” we read, “with bold black lettering bearing the legend, ‘Lowe’s Balloon Gas Generator,’ and a serial number.” Twelve were built and put into service.
Since he consulted a great number of historical artifacts without mentioning one, I must assume that no generator survived for Haydon to inspect.

Barcelona Pavilion Photomural

I’ve never done an actual, in-depth search for any, but I’ve always wondered what became of the giant photomurals architect Paul Rudolph used for the exhibition design of Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 MoMA show, Family of Man. [~~vintage scan above~~, from kelviin’s flickr set [correction: Olivier Lugon points out this image is actually from George Kidder Smith’s installation of another Steichen show at MoMA, Power In The Pacific, in 1945.]] I mean, part of me doesn’t want to find out they got tossed into the dumpster.
That was definitely on my mind this summer when a huge, wall-sized Ansel Adams photo sold for $518,000 at the Polaroid bankruptcy auction.
But at least someone was saving some of these things. Like this giant, three-panel photomural of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, which is coming up at auction in LA in a couple of weeks.

The mural was made for a 1969 Mies exhibition organized by LA architect Craig Ellwood [below is an image, from Ellwood’s monograph, of the show installed at LACMA.] Since the Barcelona Pavilion wasn’t rebuilt until the 1980s, the photo itself has to be from 1929-30. It’s from Mies’ own archive, but I’m not seeing who took it. Ellwood was a huge Mies fan, though, and this mural was in his collection until he passed away.

At $2,000-3,000, it’s priced more as an exhibition artifact than as a print. But that’s a thing about artifacts; these photomurals and giant prints seem to anticipate the wall-filling, painting-engaging future of contemporary photography, like how Cycladic art suddenly looks modern after Brancusi.
When/if any Family of Man pictures turn up, I think they should really be treated as deadweight which I’ll glady take off your hands for the cost of shipping.
update: which is pretty much what the mural sold for: just $1700.

Rodeo, Cowboy

Now I love me some rodeo, but primarily bull riding. It pains me to think how many rodeos I’ve missed at Madison Square Garden.
So seeing legendary Magnum photographer [wait, is there any other kind?] Ernst Haas’ 1957 photo of a bronc rider in MSG turn up at Phillips de Pury’s photo auction this week was a nice treat.
Of course, it’s an estate print, and I can’t quite tell why the estimate seems higher than most every size and edition option available for retail here.

It almost makes me want to see what a thumbnail edition looks like; why should Richard Prince provide all the fun, right? And no sooner do I say that, than a Prince triptych pops up in the auction catalogue: Untitled (Joke, Girlfriend, Cowboy), 2001 actually includes a motion-blurred image of a Marlboro Man riding his horse through the snow.
Of course, that edition, published by Hatje Cantz, looks like it’s still available in the primary market, too. And at a quarter the price. And the auction site even grabbed their jpeg from the publisher. I guess Phillips’ operating premise is that there’s still money to be made selling art to the Google-less. Good luck.

Robert Rauschenberg, Piece For Tropic, 1979, Edition Of 650,000

While pursuing his MFA at the University of Miami in 1976, artist Leo Rosenblatt created a printmaking process called Stat Art, “a technique incorporating drawing and mixed media on large sheets of commercial copy film in conjunction with light sensitive newspaper printing plates.
“Stat Art allowed unusually large runs of original lithographic art to be printed on large commercial newspaper presses with no image deterioration.”
Rosenblatt began working as the art director for Tropic Magazine, published on Sundays by the Miami Herald, where he continued his experiments with Stat Art, culminating in what he calls “the world’s largest edition of an original lithograph,” by the well-known Florida resident and prolific printmaker, Robert Rauschenberg. People Magazine was on the story:

On Dec. 30, 1979 the Miami Herald printed 650,000 Rauschenbergs as the cover of its Sunday magazine, Tropic. In essence an original lithograph, it showed images of south Florida. The artist went to the Herald pressroom and signed 150 of them, thus enhancing their value–and the jubilation of readers fortunate enough to find one on their doorstep.

650,000? Why, that’s almost as many prints as the rest of Rauschenberg’s editions combined!
Piece For Tropic was a full 13×21.5 sheet, wrapped around the magazine. Rosenblatt wrote an accompanying article introducing the lithograph and its concept.

Above, via Rosenblatt’s site, is Rauschenberg’s original black and white artwork for Piece For Tropic. Up top is an unsigned copy, framed in Lucite, and accompanied by Rosenblatt’s article, on eBay for $750. Even after 31 years, that seems ambitious for an edition of 650,000. Here’s one for $975 from a gallery.
The 150 subscribers who received a signed copy were selected at random from the Herald’s database; I haven’t found any mention of any signed examples from the edition appearing on the market. If your grandmother was a hoarder, though, you may be in luck.

What I Heard: Paul Richard

I just got back from hearing longtime Washington Post art critic Paul Richard speak at the National Gallery of Art. Richard is an excellent speaker and an alluring storyteller. His lecture, titled “What I Saw,” began with his move from scrappy beat reporter to dread-filled art critic in 1967.
Richard did an admirable job of illustrating his talk largely with artworks either from DC, or which had been shown in DC. A central, and astute, premise, which Richard used to pivot from his own inexperience to the non-academic, non-specialist enthusiasts who were his readers, to the four-decades-long wave of new museums and blockbuster exhibitions in DC was basically, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.”
And he’s right. Museums–like the one he was speaking in, of course, the alternative title of his lecture could have been, “What Museums Showed Me”–brought revelatory shows to Washington: Chinese Treasures and British Treasure House treasures, DaVinci treasures, tons and tons of treasures.
And Richard paid homage to Washington’s most cutting edge curator ever, Walter Hopps.
And yet. He wove his argument for universal “rhymes” and echoes in art across cultures and millennia, from IM Pei’s triangles to the Washington Monument’s capstone to prehistoric ochre carvings. He spoke reverently and fondly about Hopps, and the artists he met through Hopps, like Duchamp, Warhol, Kienholz, and Tony Smith. Which got us to about 1968.
But Richard showed exactly two works–Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost (1990) and Beverly Semmes’ Kimberly (1994), that were made after he became an art critic.
Which I guess is as accurate an account of the history of DC’s fraught, distant, marginalized relationship with contemporary art as anything else. Or at least of its newspaper and its museums.

Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures by Dharma Mittra

From the website of Sri Dharma Mittra, the Asana Yoga pioneer of Gramercy Park, and the Bernd & Hilla Becher of yogic typologies:

In 1984 Dharma completed the Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures, as an offering to his Guru, and for all Yoga aspirants. This original masterpiece was meticulously assembled from over 1,350 photographs of posture variations he took of himself, all hand done before the computer age. Over 300 of these postures that are very popular today are created by Sri Dharma (of which he will only say “came through” Divine intuition). It has been an invaluable teaching tool over the past decades. You will find it in just about every yoga school and Ashram worldwide including India.

And in Washington, DC, in Cleveland Park’s neighborhood framing shop, Frame Mart Gallery, where I just discovered this Ben-Day dotted, photocollaged masterpiece of the genre.
It’s the only one I’ve ever seen, but I still feel confident in declaring Dharma Mitra’s chart the most magnificent work of contemporary yogic collage art in the Western Hemisphere.

You can still purchase the Master Yoga Chart in three different sizes–though why anyone would get any size other than the gargantuan 43×60 inch version is beyond my understanding. If it turns out to be silkscreened, I might suggest the Master Yoga Chart sarong/wall textile as a perfect complement to, and not a replacement for, the printed poster.

Of course, Frame Art Gallery has a 43×60-in. version beautifully mounted and framed and ready to go, for an exceedingly reasonable price. They purchased a small number of them way back in the day, and this one remalns. For you, perhaps.

Ahnighito

I don’t know why, exactly, but as I was looking online for Zakaeuses this morning, the description of this early 18th century Inuit knife from the British Museum caught me off guard:

This type of knife was made and used by the Inughuit (Polar Inuit or Eskimo (uhh, sic)) of north-west Greenland. Similar pieces of iron were used to make all-purpose knives for butchering animals, preparing meat, eating and making tools.
This example was collected in 1818 during the search for the Northwest Passage by the explorer Sir John Ross (1777-1856). The Inuit told the expedition, through the Greenlandic interpreter and expedition artist Hans Zakaeus, that they believed that they lived alone in the world and thought Europeans were gods. [emphasis added]

Greenland’s Inuit used ivory and bone instead of wood, and they got all their metal from meteorites. The Cape York Meteorites, to be precise, which crashed into the earth around 10,000 years ago.

Explorer Robert Peary and his Inuit guide found three large fragments near Melville Bay: Ahnighito, or The Tent [above], weighs 31 metric tons, and was found on Disko Island. [Seriously.] Woman (3 tons) and Dog (400kg) were a few kilometers away on the mainland. Woman and Dog, especially, showed signs of being the primary source for Inuit iron for centuries. They were surrounded with more than 10,000 hammerstones, brought from hundreds of miles away, which were used to cut, chip, and drill off pieces of iron, which were then flattened into blades for knives, spears, and scrapers.

Peary had his wife with him during the expedition. When their daughter Marie Ahnighito Peary was born in Greenland in 1893, Inuit apparently traveled from all over to see the pink & blonde child, who they nicknamed The Snow Baby. In the midst of ongoing media buzz and snow baby merchandising craze, her mother Josephine Peary to publish a picture book, The Snow Baby in 1901.

I haven’t seen any mention of his asking permission, but after several years of effort, Peary moved the three meteorites to New York, and eventually sold them to the American Museum of Natural History. The pylons supporting Ahnighito run through the foundation of the building into the bedrock of Manhattan. Which, given the Upper West Side’s geography, is probably right there, but still. It’s basically as heavy as a decent Richard Serra Torqued Ellipse.
Lance with a blade made from meteoric iron [britishmuseum.org]
Greenland’s Meteorites [amnh.org]
Cape York Meteorites [wikipedia]
Account Of The Discovery And Bringing Home Of The “Saviksue” or Great Cape York Meteorites [niger-meteorite-recon.de]

When Copyright Pandas Attack

Hahahahahahawesome. Threadless pandaterrorists used facebook to plot a silent but hilarious panda-in at Gavin Brown yesterday to protest Rob Pruitt’s “alleged misappropriation [to put it mildly]” of a panda t-shirt design by Jimiyo and AJ Dimarucot.
Never mind that Rob “obviously appropriated” the design and transformed it significantly, this is exactly the sweetest response all the artists involved deserve. [via @analogc]

AP

It’s taken a while, mostly because I’ve been slack about following up on them, but the artist proofs from the 20×200.com edition of my print, Untitled (300×404), are in the mail and should be here very soon. I’ve seen the smaller sizes–they looked sweet enough for me to go ahead with the 20×200 edition–but it’s the largest sizes I’m most eager to see, especially the 30×40-inch print, which is the same size as Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), 2003. The next project will be to get the two works together, Untitled (300×404) and Untitled (Cowboy), and see them side by side. Which means tracking down the Princes in their natural habitats.
Untitled (Cowboy), 2003, is an edition of 2, with one AP. It’s Ektacolor [Ektacolor being a more marketable way of saying C-print] on board. I know the owner of one of the two editions. As it happens, Prince donated his AP to Tibet House, which auctioned it at Christie’s in 2004. [It was purchased for $298,700 by Michael Crichton, who died in 2008. It was sold again last May for $602,500.]
At first, I assumed that Prince’s work had been donated for a typical charity auction; in reality, that was the only piece in Christie’s contemporary evening sale to benefit Tibet House. Apparently, it was arranged by Tibet House’s art advisor, the independent curator/advisor Diego Cortez [the pseudonym of James Curtis], who is something of an artwork donation impresario. He also arranged for Prince to donate artwork to The Wooster Group, and he got Prince to design the poster for TWG’s production of Hamlet.

Ditto That

Huh, I didn’t notice that, but maybe I liked Ditto’s limited edition Why Shapes What? book so much because of its gorgeously saturated palette?
I wonder what Untitled (300×404) would look like stencil-printed on a Riso V8000? How would that even work? I will investigate.
Meanwhile, I hear from attendees that the known-to-be-beautiful 20×200.com prints of Untitled (300×404) do, in fact, look good at the Affordable Art Fair this weekend. As an added bonus: it’s being held indoors.

How To Make 4-Color Halftones

So after posting about Four-Color Process, I was looking around to see who is working to preserve this masterful, cheap, laborious-looking halftone printing process. I mean, we brought letterpress back, right?
Well. So far, on the printing front, I’m not quite seeing it; if there are artisanal small-press folks keeping true to the art and technique of old school, cheap, slightly sloppy, pulpy, CYMK, halftone/Ben-Day printing, I haven’t found them.
But it looks like there are book artists–some say illustrators, others hate the term graphic novels, and anyway, they’re not making comic books–who do use halftone techniques. [The only thing they have in common is a love of old dots and a bitterness toward Roy Lichtenstein.]

Just last month, in fact, artist Brian Fies published two lengthy tutorials on using Photoshop for creating halftone images. Having come up using halftone dots, and after skilfully deploying the consciously retro technique in his award-winning book, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, Fies is able to provide good historical info on how comic illustrations used to be created, and to show how he approximates the original feel using digital tools.
Fies’ technique successfully recreates the halftone style of vintage comics, but only up to the point of printing. One characteristic of crappy 4-color printing is the slight bleed or misalignment of color fields; with his digital perfection, Fies always 4-colors inside the lines.

The other veteran artist, Eddie Campbell, uses halftone sheets very expressively the way they were originally designed, within his analog drawing process. While the results still print up perfectly, Campbell’s conscious, persistent exploration of a seemingly obsolete medium is pretty sweet.
UPDATE: Here’s where I confess my “search” for 4cp didn’t yet actually involve asking any people who I thought might actually know about it. To wit, Andy from Reference Library informs me that the 15th issue of Dot Dot Dot, whose uncracked spine is looking at me right now from my shelf over there, even, apparently set off a bit of a print-on-demand lovewave towards the Risograph V8000 stencil printing machine, which “gives tumblr kids a way to experience registration, moiré, and the good old dot pattern.”
Also, Rollo Press and Ditto both do great Riso work. Below, a beautiful Riso spread from Ditto’s Why Shapes What, with artwork by Vanessa Billy.

Dots, Part 1; Dots, Part 2 [brianfies]
Zipatone-related posts from Eddie Campbell [eddiecampbell]