art – Page 145 – greg.org

Some Nude Paik

UbuWeb’s tweet about Nam June Paik’s music reminds me it’s long past time to post this hilarious story of Paik’s 1965 Fluxus-style performance in Reykjavik, where he and Charlotte Moorman nearly capsized Iceland’s nascent new music movement. Artnews.is quotes a morning-after review of the scandalous concert:

“The Korean played the piano with a pacifier in his mouth, smeared himself in foam, splashed around in a washtub full of water and drank water from his shoe … The woman played the cello and then climbed up into an barrel and disappeared into it. A while later she came out of the barrel, soaking wet, and started playing the piano again. At that point the Korean dropped his pants on stage…

And then things really got out of hand.
Nam June Paik Shocks Icelandic Audience in 1965 [artnews.is]

Richard Prints At 20×200’s Booth At The Affordable Art Fair

Sure, you can get it for free right here, in all its original jpeg glory, but if you want to see the velvety printed goodness of Untitled (300×404) in person, you should head to 20×200’s booth at the Affordable Art Fair, which opens in Manhattan tonight through the weekend.
Jen Bekman’s got a couple of print and collecting discussions scheduled, and there’s a framing primer–and a few spots left to reserve in the 20×200.com pop-up framing shop. Check the 20×200 blog for all the details.
Visit 20×200 THIS Weekend at the Affordable Art Fair in NYC! [20×200.com]
Previously: Untitled (300×404) the making of
300×404 @ 20×200!

The Palomar Sky Survey-I, The Makers Of

As longer-term readers of greg.org know, I am slowly trying to locate an original copy of the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, an 1870-plate portrait/catalogue of the visible universe [or the universe visible from the Palomar Observatory, anyway] taken at Caltech in the early 1950s. Then I will also print one. There are also loose vintage prints to be found.
Anyway, in the process, I’ve been documenting bits of the history of the making of the NGS-POSS I. [A second sky survey, the POSS-II, was made beginning in the late 1980s.] It’s almost embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to look into who actually made it, took the pictures, checked them, made the prints.
After the jump, then, a brief history of the making of POSS-I, as presented by Neill Reid and S. Djorgovski in the proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s 1992 conference, Sky Surveys, Protostars to Protogalaxies:

Continue reading “The Palomar Sky Survey-I, The Makers Of”

Model Dome Home

This is so awesome, a dome home that doesn’t leak:

Lot: 207 R. Buckminster Fuller
Geodesic Home model
Pease Woodworking Company
USA, c. 1960
mixed media
13 dia x 7 h inches
Pease Woodworking Company was licensed by Fuller to manufacture prefabricated geodesic dome buildings. This model was a salesman sample for a structure marketed as a home.
Estimate: $1,000-1,500It’s at Wright20’s Design auction Oct. 12. [wright20 via an ambitious project collapsing, who has been en fuego lately]

Hand Held Day: Time Mirror Displacement by Gary Beydler

Holy smokes, Gary Beydler. A Los Angeles experimental filmmaker whose 1974 time-lapse silent short, Hand Held Day, was just mentioned by Steve Roden. It’s incredible.
Youtube user austinstein posted this version in 2007, before Beydler’s too-small body of work was restored, so the color is awful, but you can get the idea. Over the course of a day, Beydler shot two rolls of Kodachrome film in the Arizona desert, with the camera pointed east, and the mirror pointed west. The sun and sky did the rest.

On his blog Preservation Insanity, Mark T told the story of taking a leap of faith and restoring Beydler’s last film, Venice Pier, sight unseen in 2007. It’s an journey down the pier, shot in out-of-sync time lapse over the course of a year. It sounds beautiful. Unfortunately, Mark’s blog post was prompted by news of Beydler’s death in January 2010.
To Gary Beydler [preservation insanity]
four of Gary Beydler’s films are available for rent via Canyon Cinema [canyoncinema.com]

Four Color Process

Trying to clear some browser tabs. From John Hilgart, the guy who brought the world Comic Book Cartography, comes his next foray into the overlooked, undersung details of comics history, Four Color Process. It’s an incredibly beautiful collection of vintage comic book scans made with an eye to the unique aesthetic qualities of the cheap, obsolete, half-tone printing process.

For a while, I’d always considered it more an exercise in artful magnifying and cropping, but a post a couple of weeks ago changed my mind. In discussing some psychedelic examples from 1968 of Jim Steranko’s groundbreaking work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Hilgart writes:

Perhaps a great artist, but not a realistic illustrator, Steranko tended to emphasize the flatness of comics even when he piled on the detail. It is design not illusion, dynamic yet inorganic.
All of these factors make Steranko a fascinating case when considering four-color process in the history of comic books. He clearly had an interest in solid colors, embracing rather than running from the limited building blocks of the process. He also freely acknowledged the divide (and the arbitrary yet essential relationship) between the line art and the lurid color that process printing smacked down on top of it. Many of his panels use color as an illustrative element, completely separate from the black ink beneath it. His art was only “finished” in the printed comic book itself.
Steranko’s early work systematically exploits the same aesthetic forces that the 4CP gallery foregrounds as defining elements of mid-Century comic books generally. In 2010, when vintage comic book art is reproduced in crisp, acid-free, book format, the original reproduction of Steranko’s art begins to look and feel closer to fine art lithography. Forty-year-old pulpy reproductions may in fact be the definitive editions, anything else being a cheap approximation. [emphasis added]

This resonated with something a friend said to me about my recent looks into early Lichtenstein paintings and the unusual seascapes collaged from reflective materials. And not because dots is dots. Just the opposite. He mentioned seeing a bunch of early, large Lichtenstein paintings recently and being struck by how “Op” they are, in that they induce all sorts of optical effects of moire-like shimmering, etc. He noted that because this aspect of the work is dependent on experiencing the painting in person, and is totally lost in reproduction, that it’s rarely discussed or acknowledged by critics and historians. [Which makes right now a good time to take Roberta Smith’s advice and see the wealth of Lichtensteins on view in New York right now, especially the early drawings show at the Morgan Library, which is a tour de force of Ben-Day dotsmanship.]
In case anyone needs more convincing, Hilgart went on to post a pair of images, one vintage and 4cp, and the other contemporary and digitally remastered. The differences are alarming. And though I could see an artist’s point who preferred a higher-resolution, more refined reproduction, the lost historical accuracy is undeniable.
This morning, the kid was trying to memorize a phone number, and I found myself explaining area codes to her. How they’re linked to a city or a whole state, even, and how you can tell where a phone number’s from. And then I stopped short trying to explain why New York City got 212, because I realized that without a rotary phone handy, there’s no way she’d get that it was the quickest number to dial. And of course, then there’s number portability, and overlays, and speed dial, and is she even ever going to need to memorize a phone number anyway? But that doesn’t negate the real history and context behind them.
Jim Steranko and Four-Color Process, 1968 [4cp.posterous.com via khoi]

How To Make A Degas Bronze Modèle

So I just got Odd Man In, Suzanne Muchnic’s 1998 bio of Norton Simon, and yeah, the Pasadena Art Museum was a mess, and Simon’s takeover of it was pretty stunning. But Muchnic portrays it as of a piece with Simon’s bold, intense dealmaking style. Fine.
And while much is made of Simon’s art churning, his passion comes through most clearly on the work of Edgar Degas. Odd Man In tells the gripping tale of Simon’s 1976 purchase of an entire set of 72 unique Degas bronzes, which had been forgotten and ignored in the foundry owner’s basement for over half a century. [Is this a commonly known story? Hmm, now that I mention it, I think I have seen Gary Arseneau’s extraordinary and incendiary condemnation of all Degas bronzes as fakes being foisted on an ignorant, taxpaying, museum-going public by a massive art world conspiracy before.]
Around 150 wax and plastiline figures–dancers, nudes, and horses–were found in Degas’ studio after his death. 74, plus that one with the tutu, were approved for casting. Two of those were lost. Degas’ heirs authorized 22 casts of each figure, made between 1919-1932, which included one complete set for the family, and one for Adrien Hebrard, the foundry owner. But there was another:

Degas’ waxes were too fragile to be used repeatedly to create an edition, so [master craftsman] Albino Palazzolo carefully made gelatine molds of the sculptures and used each mold to make one very fine wax cast. The wax casts in turn were used to produce the master set of bronze, or modèles. All subsequent casts were made from the modèles.
Although Degas’ modèles are marked as such, there are other ways to distinguish them from second-generation casts [i.e., the ones everyone knew until that point.] The modèles have more surface detail and evidence of the artist’s hand, and there is a difference in size: They are between 1.5 to 3 percent larger than later edditions, an effect of the contraction of metal during the casting process Degas’ modèles also have marks where gelatin molds were cut away, which can be seen under magnification, and traces of gelatin and clay can sometimes be found in the crevices of the sculptures and under the base.

You know, talk about the age of mechanical reproduction. This is where I have to marvel at the layers of translation and intermediation in making something like a bronze cast–and of their inevitable impact on what we see. I’ve looked at those Degas bronzes at the Met a hundred times, at least, without the slightest notion of this process or its implications. And I’ve toggled almost without thinking between Giacometti’s bronzes and a painted plaster original like, say, the one in the Menil. Anyway.
The modèles were immediately recognized as authentic; it turned out that they had actually been mentioned exactly once in print. Palazzolo discussed them in 1955 in an Art News interview, but after that, “the possibility of their existence had apparently been forgotten.”

Grande Arabesque, First Time, No. 18 modèle, via nortonsimon.org]
The London dealer Martin Summers gave Simon first crack at the modèles for a price of $2 million. Summers wanted Simon to come to London to see the works, then as the dealer’s deadline approached, Simon called him at home before dawn and grilled him one last time:

“You have bronze No. 18?” Simon persisted, referring to a 19 1/4-inch-tall figure, Grande Arabesque, First Time, one of which he already owned.
“If you go to the airport now, you can catch the 8:15 flight to Los Angeles,” Simon said. “Bring No. 18 with you. I’ll meet you in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 8 o’clock tonight.”
Grabbing his passport and packing the sculpture with a change of clothes in a carry-on bag, Summers headed toward the airport. His flight was delayed, but he reached the hotel only about five minutes late. He found Simon waiting with [curator Darryl] Isley. They were sitting in a booth with Simon’s No. 18 on the table. Simon ordered a round of drinks and guacamole, and got down to business.
When Summers lifted the statue out of his bag, Simon grabbed it and thrust his bronze at Summers. “They don’t even compare,” Simon said derisively, insisting his was better.
But he was only being contrary. When Summers called his bluff and said, “No, they don’t compare at all because yours is a fake,” Simon soon backed down. He could see that his own sculpture lacked detail that gave the modèle a far greater sense of life. Indeed, as he learned later, the figure he owned wasn’t even a second-generation cast. It was an unauthorized cast of a second-generation sculpture and thus of little or no value.

Needless to say, Simon bought the set, plus that ballerina with a tutu, which turned out not to be the modèle after all, but that’s a whole other story.
And of course, when they turned up in 1955, so they’re in the National Gallery. But that’s another story, too, and since my copy of Mellon’s memoir is in New York, it’ll have to wait.

Teeny Tiny Kelly

Tyler thought the inadvertent awesomeness of this Hirshhorn photo of Ellsworth Kelly’s Red Yellow Blue V (1968) was right up my alley. And he’s right. It is awesome enough to make me think the photographer might have been especially advertent when placing that color key.
Also nice: somehow I never noticed that when you load a jpg in Firefox, it uses the image itself as the favicon in the tab.

Jerry Hall Says Goodbye To Middle-Aged Joys

Ed Ruscha is the most handsome ‘cowboy’ artist I’ve ever seen. I think his paintings are not only beautiful to look at but also have a sad, poetic and painfully truthful commentary on America… He is a true American hero: the lonesome cowboy pointing a finger at our consumerist greed.

That’s Jerry Hall talking to British Vogue last year on the occasion of Ruscha’s first painting UK retrospective at Southbank Centre.

It’s not clear to me when she met Ruscha, though the current issue of Sotheby’s At Auction says she “often hangs out with” him in LA. And on October 23, 2003, at least, she was close enough to the artist for him to put this ol’ General Tools 837 6-inch contour gauge against her lips. And she was wise enough to get him to sign it.
Oct. 16, Lot 286: PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF JERRY HALL
EDWARD RUSCHA, est. 25,000-35,000 GBP [sothebys.com]

An Incomplete History Of The Gala-As-Art Movement

The movement predates his arrival, but on a sunny Sunday in September, with the wave of relational aesthetics breaking against the rocky Malibu cliffs beneath his feet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jeffrey Deitch powerfully proclaimed his institution’s support for the Gala-as-Art.
For the benefit of those who are too poor, cheap, uninfluential, or uninvitable, here is a brief look at the genre. But first a little context:

Doug Aitken was speaking at MoCA’s “Salons by the Shore,” a brunch series conceived and organized by trustee [and Gala co-chair] Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, which was held in a location that saves trustees from having to schlep all the way downtown on the weekend: the 5-acre Malibu home of [fellow co-chair] Nancy and Howard Marks. The artist presented a history of his work, which Jeffrey Deitch bracketed with discussions about Aitken’s plans for his “commission” to create a “social sculpture,” i.e., the 31st Annual Gala. On their blog, MoCA calls this work, The Artist’s Museum Happening, but The Art Newspaper reports it “will be an immersive project called We.”

Galas. The conventions and codes of the charity gala are long-established and provide many occasions for reflection and interpretation: committees; giant tents; decorations; hors d’oeuvres and cocktails; ten-person tables positioned according to price; elaborate centerpieces; agonized-over food; a chain of congratulatory speeches; entertainment; dancing; favors and gift bags; armies of temporary staff.

These elements become familiar to regular galagoers. [I confess, I’m an inveterate museum gala attendee and sometime committee member, primarily in New York.] Sometimes that familiarity can breed, if not contempt, then perhaps a little disappointment, weariness, or sniffy ennui. Or it can provide comfort, a sense of stability, and continuity. The calendar is full of galas, and any number of worthy causes must compete, not necessarily for money, but for the time, attention, and enthusiasm of the donor population. And so benefit committees and event chairs are deeply attuned to the nuances and details of their gala. From long experience, they know what works, what doesn’t, what sticks in the memory, and what loosens the pursestrings even further.

It’s an elaborate social ritual where very rich people gather to celebrate their success, their status, their society, their taste, their generosity–and their passion for whatever deeply important and worthy endeavor is being supported that evening. Because the underlying, overarching justification of these events, remember, is to raise the money.

As such, it is an entirely valid set of subjects for artists who are interested in issues of social discourse, performance and spectacle [Jessica Craig-Martin’s photos of invisible gala awkwardness are classics, for example] as well as those who investigate or critique institutions, their influence, and their biases. Gala culture serves as a mode of creative expression for those within it. It is influenced by and affects art. And it has crossed the conceptual threshold and become art itself.

Eraser, 1998, production still

Some artists attune their practice to the world around themselves. In describing his transformative visit to the volcanic ash-covered capital of Montserrat [which resulted in his incredible, 7-channel installation Eraser, 1998] Aitken said, “it just became this kind of journey into minimalism for me, and in that sense, I was interested in working in a very proactive way, of going to different parts of the world, and really kind of putting yourself in a situation that was outside of the studio, that was outside of traditional artmaking. And of allowing the landscape and whatever you’d found to try and create something.” When that world is full of billionaires, house-and-art collectors, philanthropy professionals, a globeful of biennials and art fairs, and elaborate museum parties, is it at all surprising that an artist’s work can invariably begin to reflect his luxurious situation? A number of artists’ practices come immediately to mind:

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s meals and transformations of gallery space into gathering space. Tom Marioni’s 40-years project, Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, the latest iteration of which took place at the Hammer, just a few days before MoCA’s Salon. Andrea Fraser’s docent tours, but especially her 2001 piece Official Welcome [a private commission, btw], where she performs all the characters in a string of introductions to an art event, and then strips down to a thong and heels to declare her art work.

Carsten Höller’s $800/night Revolving Hotel Room in the Guggenheim rotunda which was booked solid by museum donors and insiders before it was ever announced to the public.

Besides getting Jeff Koons to decorate his yacht, Dakis Joannou, through his Deste Foundation, commissioned what amounted to a private gala; a collaborative project by Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton that culminated in a four-day happening on Hydra with 300 art world friends in dinner and procession, a herd of goats, and a shark in an undersea glass coffin.

Takashi Murakami’s collection for Louis Vuitton is a watershed of sorts. And of a piece with his inclusion of a Vuitton boutique in his MoCA retrospective.

Murakami is an example of an artist engaging directly with elements of the gala. In addition to decorating the tent with the same flowered wallpaper used in the galleries, each place setting had a matching Kaikai Kiki placemat for a gift/party favor. [right, image of TM, Pharrell, Kanye, Nigo and placemat, and white guy, via bbc (2019 updated link to archive.org] When, during the dancing, Naomi Campbell, egged on by Tom Ford, began gathering up a set of twelve from unattended seats, a black-tie placemat riot broke out. [The frenzy was repeated at the show’s Brooklyn Museum incarnation, with the role of placemat-hoarding diva played by Borough president Marty Markowitz’s wife.]

For the closing gala for The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramovic provided both a participatory/performative experience and an object/edition. For dessert, guests received edible gold leaf to apply to their lips, so they’d match their little replica of Marina’s lips, cast in dark chocolate & gold leaf by the “food-as-art” specialists at Kreemart.

[image, one among many at whitewallmag.com]

And performance is an important vector here. In 2006, Lali [now Spartacus] Chetwynd restaged the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball as a costumed conversation within Rem Koolhaas’s inflatable Serpentine Pavilion [below].

Any Hamptons summerer will know, or at least know of, Robert Wilson’s annual Watermill Arts Center Gala, an art event which has been critically overlooked for years, either because it’s summer, and critics are off the clock, or because it’s just theater, or just Wilson’s eccentricity, or just whimsy or a sideshow, and why bother?

But Wilson is an old hand. If there’s a leading gala art artist, at least until Aitken’s arrival, it’s probably Francesco Vezzoli. In 2007 Vezzoli infuriatingly upended museum VIP convention when he taped–with Doug Aitken’s DP, apparently–a reading of a Pirandello play in the Guggenheim. Not that anyone paid attention to the play, of course; accounts of the event almost all focused on the interminable delays, the impatient walkouts, and the seemingly arbitrary door policy that left boldface names standing in line for hours. It’s still not clear whether that was all intentional–or even the entire point. And if it was, it’s not clear that the audience was sufficiently appreciative of the brutal experiential buzzkill that Vezzoli’s work induced. Or maybe it’s just a New York thing.

New York’s gala art does seem to have more of an edge. Consider the work by gala art’s rising star, Jennifer Rubell. It’s worth noting that, while they are extremely active as collectors, the Rubells have never been voracious gala-goers. So the gluttonous orgies of food and drink Rubell has staged for Performa 09 and the Brooklyn Museum’s Late Warhol show have a bit of a joke’s-on-them, catering-as-institutional-critique feel about them.

[via]

Last year Vezzoli produced the entertainment portion of MoCA’s Gala. The Bolshoi danced while a masked Vezzoli sat mime-embroidering in front of Lady Gaga, wearing a Frank Gehry hat, playing a Damien Hirst butterfly piano. Which certainly looked enough like art to bring $450,000 at the Gala’s auction. And all this before Deitch came to town.

So what’s different now? I see three things that alter the context of MoCA’s Gala this year: Aitken’s intervening in the entire event, and he’s demanded there be “no compromise to his artistic integrity.” And Aitken is not calling the Gala a gala, but a Happening, which, wow. And for his part, Deitch pulls out the rhetorical stops, describing the project as the pinnacle of Aitken’s career, “not just a Happening, but an artwork that pulls together elements of everything you’ve done.”

Besides Aitken’s seeming ambivalence at Deitch’s showman’s patter, I think my favorite moment in his Malibu speech is when he tries to rally his polite, checkwriting crowd to his cause: “We’re hijacking the Gala,” he cries, “and turning it into a Happening.”
Beat.
“And I hope everyone in this room is with us.”
Beat.
“No more galas! Let’s bring it back. Let’s bring it back–someplace.”
And so on the one hand, we have a Happening being staged as a $4 million gathering of celebrities and billionaires, with the intent, it seems, to create some “moments that are filled with content,” and “the immediacy of pure conversation.” With Devendra Banhart. And possibly Franz West on the drum table. Also an artist’s book. Perhaps it’s a return to the art-for-and-with-artists ethos of the Happenings as they were conceived by folks like Allan Kaprow.

But Deitch sees a bigger picture:

JD: maybe you should talk about the Happening, because it has become.
Not just a Happening, but an artwork that pulls together elements of everything you’ve done.
DA: Yeah, yeah.
JD: So the film work, the music work, operatic work,
DA: Yeah i do think–I’m glad Jeffrey reined me in a bit here, so we can–
JD: First, this has been just. Extraordinary.
[applause]
JD: What a remarkable body of work. You told me once about how it started in this windowless loft on Broadway New York. [? -ed.]
DA: Yeah, yeah.
JD: And this is an amazing artistic journey from that windowless loft, where you were making sculpture,
to a whole new way to make a work of art.
This key word is “immersive,” where the viewer is really part of the experience, and doesn’t just look at the work, but FEELS the work, is INSIDE the work.
And that’s a good way to get into what we’re talking about with the Happening.
Because there’ll be one thousand of us.
Inside this work.

Now that’s a journey. Someplace, it seems, is right inside, with us.

On The Making Of The Lost Biennale Machines Of Daniel Libeskind

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Hal Laessig, a Newark architect, developer, and artist who was a graduate student of Daniel Libeskind’s at Cranbrook, and who came back to build three fantastical, fantasy machines for LIbeskind’s contribution to the 1986 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Aldo Rossi. Titled “Three Lessons of Architecture,” the show was an argument-by-metaphorical-object about the post-structuralist concept of architecture-as-text. But the three machines were anything but fantasies: they were incredibly complex, and laboriously and meticulously designed and constructed from the barest possible historical references.

The Reading Machine [l] and The Memory Machine [c] were both based on the 16th century proposals: the former, a design for a multi-book “Reading Wheel” by Agostino Ramelli, and the latter a complete reimagining of the backstage apparatus for Giulio Camillo’s “Memory Theatre.” The machine Laessig worked on, The Writing Machine [r], is commonly described as a realization of an early 20th century concept by Raymond Roussel, but Laessig explained that the actual design originated with a satirical auto-writing machine in Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century classic, Gulliver’s Travels. [See this earlier post for more discussion of the Swift reference.]
Anyway, here is the rest of my conversation with Laessig, which I found to be awesome and hilarious, probably because I didn’t go to architecture school. The tales of Cranbrook in the 80s and Libeskind as a teacher are almost as interesting as the crazy story of the machines themselves–and the indentured servant grad students who built them. [An editorial note: I didn’t take notes during my own talking, so I’ve paraphrased and compiled Laessig’s comments a bit to help the chronological flow.]
G.O: How did you get involved with making these machines for Libeskind in the first place?
H.L: I went to Cranbrook to get my masters in architecture when Daniel Libeskind was there. After I graduated in ’84, he called to say he’d been invited by Aldo Rossi to do an entry for the Biennale.
The first idea was to get all his past grad students to come to Cranbook to charrette and figure out what to do. But nobody besides me wanted to come back, so we didn’t do that. Then he said he’d already figured out what to do, and that he’d have the students build it.

Continue reading “On The Making Of The Lost Biennale Machines Of Daniel Libeskind”

Shocked, Shocked To Find Marketing In Here. At Gagosian.

Jerry, Jerry Jerry:

Once upon a time in the nineties, art that wanted to be complicit with the system, that tried to lure collectors as it criticized the artist-dealer-buyer complex, had an edgy Trojan-horse coerciveness. A lot of people got rich creating a gigantic industry of artists, dealers, and curators who’d do almost anything for the limelight. By now, Colen’s high/low art–paintings made of cheesy materials; kicked-over tricked-out motorcycles; those skateboard ramps–is not only lazy thinking. It is old-fashioned art about old-fashioned ideas about commodity-art-about-art that no one cares about anymore. At this point, continuing to follow in the footsteps of Warhol, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons appears derivative, completely mechanical, and possibly corrupt. Colen fetishizes a moment that no longer exists, and behaves like nothing’s changed. People seem scared to say a lot of this art is bad; it’s as if they fear being uninvited, cast out from the circle of social light.

Actually, the 90s was when Deitch went bankrupt trying to fabricate Koons’s balloon dogs and got bought by Sotheby’s. When Prince couldn’t sell a joke painting for a dollar. And when Murakami and I would stand around speaking Japanese at Marianne’s nearly empty openings in SoHo. [Actually, that was 1999.]
The period you’re describing was in 2007: “To his credit, Murakami’s eagerness to outmarket everyone makes artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons seem decorous by comparison.”
And 2008: “Money has made more art possible, but it has not make art better. It made some artists — notably Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and maybe Piotr Uklanski — shallower.”
And 2009: “Most of Pinault’s art is about the market, and is made by market darlings: Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Rudolf Stingel, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Takashi Murakami.”

Daniel Libeskind And The Grand Academy Of Lagado

God bless the Internet and all who surf upon her. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I thought was an esoteric topic, even for greg.org: the fantastical lost machines from “Three Lessons of Architecture,” Daniel Libeskind’s exhibition at the 1986 Venice Architecture Biennale.

And yet, within hours of posting about them, I got an email from one of the guys who had been Libeskind’s grad student at Cranbrook and who had built and installed the machines. Hal Laessig is now artist/architect/developer in Newark, and he was gracious enough to share his stories from the “Three Lessons” project, and from Libeskind-era Cranbrook. They range from insightful to hilarious to outrageous, and I’m working on putting our interview together right now.
In the mean time, here’s a clarification about the references for the machine Laessig oversaw, the Writing Machine, which I had incorrectly described as being inspired by Raymond Roussel’s Reading Machine.
As it’s described here, at the very bottom of this ancient article on hypertext, the Reading Machine Roussel exhibited in 1937 was basically a book on a Rolodex. Color-coded tabs helped the reader navigate through multiple layers of cross-references and footnotes. Interesting, but nothing at all to do with the form of Libeskind’s version, which took its inspiration from somewhere else entirely.

Continue reading “Daniel Libeskind And The Grand Academy Of Lagado”

Must Credit greg.org!!

Hey you people, with your dying print venues, muscling in on my action!
“A visit to the show might end with a broad smile at three paintings by Arcimboldo (pronounced Arch-im-BOLD-o)” – Blake Gopnik, Washington Post
“In the current show Mr. Colen (pronounced CO-lin) has made the mistake of ignoring…” – Roberta Smith, NY Times
Nonetheless, they’ve been added to the list.

The Unoriginal Copy

Dear Art World,
Please arrange the following on a 2×2 grid for me? Or maybe a spectrum? Because I cannot:
Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), which I quite like, but:

Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching (2007) and his cinematic projections on the Last Supper.
Philip Haas’s 2009 filmic re-creations of five paintings from the Kimbell Museum:

The Laguna Beach Festival of the Arts’ Pageant of the Masters tableaux vivants (1933-present):

Seward Johnson’s bronze re-creations of well-known paintings (1994- too long), such as those shown at the Corcoran in 2003:

And his blown-up re-creation of Grant Woods’ American Gothic (2009):

And the gigantic fiberglass WTF of Philip Haas’s Arcimboldo-ish sculpture that was being installed at the National Gallery the other day?

Having recently made some copies of someone else’s art myself, I really want to know. Because if this is where it leads, I’ll just go back to finance right now.