I came across a mention of Len Lye’s spectacular-looking kinetic sculpture a couple of weeks ago, while reading 1965 coverage of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts. Sandwiched in between a photo of Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in a nude dancing embrace and a headless mannequin dangling on the set of a Eugene Ionesco play was an installation shot of Lye’s Zebra at the Albright-Knox: “It consists of a nine-foot rope of fiber glass which, when set in swirling motion by a motor, bends into constantly changing shapes.”
Lye’s kinetic works had been getting some traction in New York–the Govett Brewster Gallery in his home country of New Zealand begins its sculpture section with Harmonic (1959), another spinning work similar to Zebra, which was shown at MoMA in 1961. But according to his biographer Roger Horrocks, the Buffalo exhibition and the concurrent solo show at Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan were really his first chances to show multiple pieces at once.
Thanks to some steady evangelizing, some scholarship, technological advances that help realize–or keep running–his work, Lye has become something of a posthumous hero in New Zealand. There was a retrospective in Melbourne and New Plymouth NZ last year that included refabrications of several sculptures.
But Lye’s most frictionless path to history and fame is probably not his sculptures, but his films. He was probably the earliest practitioner of direct animation, drawing and scratching carefully synchronized abstractions and imagery onto celluloid as early as 1935, when Stan Brakhage was two years old.
Lye made A Colour Box as a pre-feature advertisement for the British General Postal Office. Other of his early animations were commercials, too. I’m so glad he did them, because they are awesome, but seriously, they seem like some of the most ineffective ads imaginable.
But as art and filmmaking, holy smokes. Just try, as you are mesmerized by all the separations and compositing and abstraction and color in Rainbow Dance, to remember that Lye made this in 1936:
He also made commercials using stop-action animation and puppetry, such as the rather incredible 1935 short for Shell, The Birth of the Robot, whose tiny kinetic figures and machines look like the missing link between Alexander Calder’s Circus and Ray and Charles Eames’s Solar Do-Nothing Machine:
It didn’t occur to me until just now, watching Trade Tattoo, a 1938 GPO short in which Lye incorporates both direct animation and coloring and found footage, but the saturated, post-production colors and the collage of abstraction and photo/film realism suddenly reminds me of Gilbert & George’s distinctive visual style.
I don’t know what WWII did to the GPO Film Unit’s output, but both Gilbert and George were born during the war, in the early 40s, and only George grew up in the UK. [Gilbert was born in Italy and moved to London to study.] Perhaps there was a Lye/GPO legacy lingering around St. Martins in the 60s. Or maybe it was all lava lamps and LSD. Who knows?
All of these YouTube clips, by the way, are from user BartConway, who turns out to be an OG filmsnob of the highest order, and thank heaven for it. He seems to be getting them from the BFI’s extraordinary-looking PAL DVD collection of works by the GPO Film Unit.
Category: art
‘The Oberlin Brillo Boxes’
How much of this is really unanticipated, unexpected, unsurprising, and ultimately, unauthorized?
The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College [no relation] has two Warhol Brillo Boxes from 1970. It describes them as “(enlarged refabrication of 1964 project).”
Then this:
Exhibitions
Warhol gave the Pasadena Art Museum one hundred boxes fabricated for the Andy Warhol exhibition, held 12 May – 21 June 1970. Oberlin’s boxes were among a group [!] of reserve boxes produced at this time but not exhibited. Nor have they subsequently been exhibited outside of the museum.
Literature
The Oberlin Brillo Boxes
None. [italics added]
Or as the Warhol Art Authentication Board described it in their letter to owners of Stockholm Style boxes, “Warhol agreed to have facsimile editions of his 1964 box sculptures produced.” Pasadena had theirs produced in May 1970 by the Jan Art Screen Processing Company, Pasadena. And Warhol subsequently donated the hundred to the museum.
Silkscreened Brillo exhibition poster, 1970, in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland]
Warhol’s decision to enlarge the boxes’ dimensions–the 1970 boxes are 20x20x17 in., compared to the 1964 boxes’ 17x17x14–and donate the results to a museum not only draws a distinction between two otherwise identical works, it preserves the value of the “originals” in the market. [Brillo Boxes were $300 each in 1964. And Gerard Malanga says Warhol was upset that almost all the box sculptures returned, unsold, from the Stable Gallery show. I’d expect more had sold by 1970, though, so there would be more collectors who would not want to see Warhol cranking out a hundred more here and a hundred more there as needed.]
But what of this “group of reserve boxes”? Oberlin’s dutiful report about not exhibiting them out of the museum, combined with no published citations of “The Oberlin Brillo Boxes” sure makes it sound like they exist apart from “authentic” Brillo Boxes. So where’d they come from?
Provenance
Gift of the artist to John Coplans (1970)
Lent to the museum by Coplans in January 1980, then given in memory of Ruth Roush in December 1980.
Coplans was not just an artist. He wrote about the 1962 Ferus Gallery show of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup paintings in a magazine he’d just co-founded, Artforum. [He became its editor in chief in 1971]. And he was a curator at the Pasadena Museum. In fact, he curated Warhol’s 1970 show. So he made the boxes. And kept the extras. At least some of them. [A 2005 Sotheby’s sale catalogue notes that 93 1964 boxes have been identified, along with 94 of a “presumed set of 100” from Stockholm, and a “set of 100” for Pasadena, “with an additional 16 identified to date.” So the answer, apparently, is 16.] [sept. 2011 update: apparently Sotheby’s has removed reference to the 2005 sale of a Stockholm Brillo box from their website.]
Now check this out:
For the 1970 retrospective of Warhol’s work at the Pasadena Art Museum, John Coplans suggested that Warhol make a set of 100 Brillo Soap Pad boxes based on his 1964 box. The entire set has remained in the museum’s collection (now known as the Norton Simon Museum). At the same time, Betty Asher suggested a set for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Using the same silkscreen printer as for the Brillo Soap Pad boxes, Warhol produced a set of 100 Kellogg’s Cornflakes boxes for LACMA. In both cases, the boxes were made a few inches larger to differentiate them from the 1964 versions.
Mrs. Asher was a collector and the assistant to curator Maurice Tuchman, as well as a member of the Contemporary Art Council whose mission was to bring new art to LACMA. The full set of boxes was included in the 1972 – 1973 show that inaugurated LACMA’s contemporary galleries and celebrated the work of the Contemporary Art Council.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art retains fifty-seven of the 1970 Kellogg’s Cornflakes boxes in their collection. Another ten boxes, including the present work, are known to be in collections outside of the museum.
That’s from the catalogue for Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale in May 2009, where a “Kellogg’s Cornflakes [Los Angeles Type]“ sold for $482,500. It’s listed as cat. no. 936.67 in the Warhol catalogue raissoné. [updated Sotheby’s link. -Sep 2011]
So Warhol authorized 100 Cornflakes. The Contemporary Art Council paid for fabrication. The “entire set” was exhibited in a 1972-3 show called “Ten Years of Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions: Inaugurating the New Contemporary Art Galleries,” yet the Warhol Authentication Board says these editions “were donated by Warhol to the museums.” And yet LACMA only has 57, with another 10 known to be on the loose. Doesn’t that leave 33 unaccounted for? And were there really only 100? [When this particular box sold at Sotheby’s in 1999, for $57,000, the catalogue entry said, “Andy Warhol created this work in 1970 in an edition of 100, through the Contemporary Art Council fund for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Approximately 60 boxes are extant, the majority of which are in the collection of [LACMA].” So it sounds like they’ve flushed out a few more in the intervening decade. Also worth noting, is that the provenance begins with LACMA. Were these taken in, then deaccessioned? How’d that go down?]
And except for the involvement of collectors [who are also volunteering as curatorial assistants while serving on museum auxiliary acquisition committees, and who are apparently skimming anywhere from 10 to 33 Warhols off the top], how are the LACMA edition overages a work, and the Pasadena/Oberlin is not? Is it because they’re above and beyond the documented/authorized 100? And yet they were given by the artist. And given by the recipient, within the Warhol’s lifetime, to a museum? A museum that had close ties with Warhol’s gallery? And in memory of another prominent collector of Warhol’s work?
When none of these boxes was worth very much [which is to say, for the first 30 years of their existence], this was all a quaint theoretical bauble. Which is now being used to determine whether a box should sell for $100,000, $500,000 or $1 million–or nothing.
Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1970 [oberlin.edu]
12 May 09, Lot 4: Andy Warhol, Kellogg’s Cornflakes [Los Angeles Type], est $200-300,000 [sothebys.com]
If You Love greg.org, You’ll Love History Detectives!
Wow, I knew about the Moon Museum segment because Jade Dellinger emailed about it. But I didn’t know the first episode of this season’s History Detectives also included a whole segment on satelloons and Project Echo. I love how they search for satelloons online–and then crop out the top few search results.
I guess if the Detectives suddenly discover an undocumented Richard Neutra house in Utah, I’ll have to start making some calls. Meanwhile, watch History Detectives on your local PBS station! I’m sure you’ll like it! [thanks cliff for the heads up]
On Gilbert & George
I didn’t make it the first time, of course, but I did see Gilbert & George’s reprise of “The Singing Sculpture” in 1991 at Sonnabend. It left a pretty deep impression on me in a way their photo compositions really haven’t. And there was always something about their conceptual conceit of being “living sculptures,” and not separating art and life that seemed a little precious.
But holy crap–no pun intended–have you seen these guys work? No wonder art and life aren’t separated, they have turned their entire life into the most systematic, all-encompassing, hyperefficient artmaking process I think I’ve ever seen or heard of.
I watched a 2000 interview/documentary/archive visit with them [“un film de Hans Ulrich Obrist,” seriously], and I imagined Hans Ulrich dying right there on the spot and going into archival heaven. It was that intense and organized and incredible. When Gilbert [the non-balding one] is talking, George is training his gaze straight into the camera, as if he were hammering the point home. It’s just–just watch it.
Fortunately, it sounds like the boys have finally gotten a little digitization in their process. Robert Ayers visited with them in 2007, and they now use a computer and a hi-res scanner to compose their images using the tens of thousands of photos they have taken and categorized and archived over the decades.
[One thing that I wonder about, from the movie: George holds up a model of an unidentified gallery which would house a show they’ve conceived of their entire 1977 series, Dirty Words Pictures, which to that point had never been seen together. The first person to identify the location would win “a special prize,” he said.
So how’d that turn out? Because less than two years later, the Serpentine did show the Dirty Words Pictures, but that gallery mockup doesn’t really remind me of the Serpentine.]
Anyway, if they weren’t interesting enough, in 1975, on the occasion of a show in Dusseldorf, they commissioned Gerhard Richter to paint their portrait. He ended up painting eight of them, using melanges and overlays of various photographs. Anthony d’Offay donated a pair to Tate Modern, where they are in the Richter Rooms. So strange, but the National Gallery of Australia’s, above, is even stranger.
The Secret Files of Gilbert & George (2000), 35min, dir. Hans-Ulrich Obrist [ubu.com]
[images: Gilbert, George, all 1975, all Gerhard Richter. Top: via Tate, above: via Gerhard-Richter.com]
FAZ Overpainted Of, By Gerhard Richter
According to the Gerhard Richter’s website, FAZ Overpainted, a 2002 squeegee paint-on-paper edition is
based on a photograph of a 2001 copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). The hand visible on the right is that of Richter. The photograph was taken for a FAZ advertising campaign with the slogan ‘There is always a clever head behind it’
Which would mean that Tante Marianne, his 1965 painting based on a photograph of the artist as an infant and his teenage aunt is not, as the Dresden’s Galerie Neue Meister claims, Richter’s only self-portrait, just his first.
[Ironically, the quickest recap I’ve found of Tante Marianne‘s devastating backstory is in Sotheby’s 2006 catalogue for the painting’s sale. Is it really true that Marianne’s death at the hands of the Nazi’ and Richter’s discovery of his first father-in-law’s involvement in the euthanasia programs that killed her only came to light in 2005? What does it mean that Richter painted this image, and then let the psychological timebomb of Marianne’s story sit, unexplicated, for 40 years? Was he just sure it’d come out, and he was willing to wait?]
Anyway, the Met has an incredible, painting-like photo self-portrait from 1966; there are three double-exposure, overpainted photographs called, Self-Portrait, Three Times from 1990; and two straight-up, bust-size self-portraits painted in 1996.
Meanwhile, I’m going to assume that FAZ Overpainted isn’t Richter’s only appearance in an ad, either, just his first. Especially if they have Banana Republic in Germany.
FAZ Overpainted appears in “Press Art,” an exhibition of print media-related works from the Annette & Peter Nobel Collection, at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. [via @gerhardrichter]
The International Symposium for Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes
The Moment has a Q&A with Mike Bidlo, whose work, Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964), 2005 is currently on view in the Lever House lobby:
Did you ever meet him [Warhol] more formally?
Yes, at a party at Jean-Michel Basquiat’s loft. There was a big group of people there, but I knew he knew who I was. It was a little awkward.
What about Gerard Malanga?
I was with him on a Brillo Box symposium in Nuremberg, Germany [in 1999] with Arthur Danto and others. He might come to the opening. To me he’s the expert.
Malanga is the expert because he, along with Billy Name, did much of the fabrication of those first Stable Gallery Brillo Boxes in 1964. But everyone knows that story. What I want to know about is this “Brillo Box Symposium.”
According to a footnote at warholstars.org, The International Symposium for Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes was held “under the auspices of the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Nuernberg, Friday, 19 November 1999.” Danto presumably discussed his 1998 paper, “The End of Art,” which took Brillo Boxes as the inflection point of a 3,000-year art historical cycle or something.
Malanga’s paper titled, “How we made the Brillo Boxes,” was reprinted in his 2002 book, Archiving Warhol. It provides the most familiar accounts of Malanga, Billy Name, and Warhol painting, turning, screening, and turning all seven varieties of the box sculptures in the first couple of months of 1964. [Four Stable Gallery boxes sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $973,000.]
But the 1964 Brillo Boxes aren’t the only ones Warhol made. Or Bidlo. Or–well, hold on. Back to The Moment:
If your Brillo Boxes shouldn’t be considered a simple substitute for the originals, what should New Yorkers be looking for?
There are so many more layers. When you start peeling back the layers you see that Warhol did all these different versions himself. There’s the Stockholm version, there’s the Pasadena, the original Stable gallery version. So really it’s about learning about the different providences [provenances? -ed.] of the piece, the situations that they were made for.
The image above is from the Tate Magazine, of Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1969), 1991, and is Bidlo’s replica of the 100 boxes Warhol authorized the Pasadena Museum to fabricate in 1969-70 [LACMA was allowed to refabricate 100 Kellogg’s boxes. Warhol donated both sets of boxes to the respective museums.]
And before that, there were the 100 boxes Warhol authorized Pontus Hulten and the Moderna Museet to make in Sweden for the 1968 show organized by Kasper Koenig. Or was it 500? Or was that 500 actual cardboard Brillo Boxes bought from the company and 100 wooden ones to fill in? Or 10?
Until 2007, everyone thought they kind of knew. Or they didn’t think much about it. Then some Swedish investigative journalists from Expressen reported that no wooden boxes were ever exhibited in 1968, only cardboard.
And the 94 1968 “Stockholm Type” Brillo Boxes which passed the Warhol Authentication Board’s test, and were accepted into the 2004 catalogue raisonne, were actually part of a batch of 105 boxes Hulten fabricated in 1990, three years after the artist’s death, in Malmo, Sweden. And that Hulten represented them as 1968 works in shows in St Petersburg and Copenhagen that year. And that he sold at least 40 of them in 1994 as 1968 works. [Does that include this group of 10?] And that he gave six of them to the Moderna Museet in 1995 as 1968 works.
Yow. “Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Pontus Hulten, Stockholm” – Christie’s, 1998.
The Authentication Board hastily examined the Stockholm Type boxes and issued a letter to owners, saying there were two types of Stockholm Box, one of which might actually have been made in 1968 or so. Maybe there are 10 of those. But there are no documents so far authorizing either those 10, or the 105 Hulten made, only the Stable Gallery and the Pasadena boxes, that’s it. So far. And yet they fully accepted the Stockholm Boxes, no sweat. At this point, the only thing the Warhol Foundation people are saying is that they had nothing to do with this mess.
But what in the world was Pontus Hulten thinking? I mean, come on, the guy’s a modern art museum demigod who founded the Moderna Museet, the Pompidou, and MoCA. It’s not like he really could have just thought, “What the hell, I’ll order me up 100 Brillo Boxes and start showing, selling, and donating them as if they’re from 1968.” Could he?
Did Hulten get authorization from Warhol in 1968, then not really use it [all], and just assume it was still valid? ArtNews quotes an unidentified source as saying that Hulten fabricated his 1990 boxes at the Malmo Konsthall with the help of its director [and Hulten’s friend] Björn Springfeldt. Surely he could characterize how he and Hulten talked about the motives and assumptions for the production. [Factcheck: ArtNews says Springfeldt was director of Malmo Konsthall in 1990 when these boxes were fabricated. Actually, he had quit in 1989, to become director of Moderna Museet. He succeeded Olle Granath, who had succeeded Hulten, and who had been a co-curator of the Warhol show, and who was directly involved in its installation. He also owns three Stockholm Style Brillo Boxes he says were made in 1968. If there’s anyone in the Swedish museum world not directly implicated in this story, would you please raise your hand?]
How different is Hulten’s situation from, say, Giuseppe Panza’s later controversies over authorization and remote fabrication of work by artists like Judd, Flavin, Andre, and Nauman? Does this Brillo Boxes question dovetail with the emergence of artists’ certificates and minimalist-style, no-artist’s-touch production? Are there other examples lurking out there where artists phoned a piece in, then didn’t actually get involved–or even see–the final product? I’m going to guess yes.
If ever there were a time for another Brillo Box Symposium, it’s right now.
“Andy Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes,” from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 2007 [myandywarhol.eu]
2007 Authentication Board letter explaining the history and production of Warhol’s box sculptures [zimblo.com]
Nice hustle, Art News: “The Brillo Box Scandal,” Nov. 2009 [artnews.com, link updated to archive.org Sept. 2016]
Mark Leckey’s In A Long Tail World @ICA
Last October, Mark Leckey presented In A Long Tail World at the ICA in London. From the writeups, it sounded like a cross between Chris Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Ted by way of the Guggenheim Las Vegas.
Leckey’s now loaded the whole thing onto YouTube, in six parts. Though he’s got a big, Laurie Anderson-y screensaver of an ending, my favorite segment is probably part 1, above. It includes both Leckey’s re-enactment of the earliest TV broadcasting experiment [a recap of his 2007 work, Felix Gets Broadcast] and his quotes from Charles Sirato’s Dimensionist Manifesto from 1936 which posited a new, dematerialized art with humans at the center.
If Leckey didn’t quite make the case that the Long Tail was the fulfillment of Sirato’s vision, it at least crossed its path. And it’s a good watch. [via gavin brown’s (!) blog]
The Planck All-Sky Survey
ESA has released images of the first all-sky survey from the Planck space observatory, which is currently in orbit around Lagrange-2, a balancing point between the gravitational exertions of the moon and the earth.
Planck rotates at a constant 1 RPM, and it continually repositioned to avoid the sun, enabling it to produce a full survey of the entire sky in about a year. This computer animation video demonstrates how the survey image was constructed:
When Planck’s data is added to the American Museum of Natural History’s Digital Universe Atlas, it should help fill in that gigantic torus marked, “empty areas we have yet to map.”
Planck all-sky image depicts galactic mist over the cosmic background [esa.int via javierest]
Scanning the microwave sky with Planck [esa.int]
The Hamamatsu Photonics R1449 And R3600 Photomultiplier Tubes
Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world’s largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the University of Tokyo in a mine in rural Japan.
Within a year, Hamamatsu had managed to design a 20-inch (50cm) PMT, and successfully manufactured it by 1981. It was dubbed the model R1449:
Because this was a 20-inch PMT, the biggest question was whether or not its cathode could be manufactured correctly. The days leading up to the completion of the first PMT were anxious. Moreover, in steps such as antimony evaporation, there was no other recourse but to rely on the eyes and judgment of those professionals performing the tube evacuation task. An ordinary PMT can be held in the worker’s hand throughout the production process, but the large 20-inch PMT first had to be secured in place. Then, the worker could perform his required tasks while walking around the outside of the PMT. The workers donned protective helmets equipped with explosion masks, mounted steps to the platform holding a large pumping bench, and began the final fabrication, which consisted of making the photocathode and sealing the PMT.
The color formed from oxygen discharge in the photocathode manufacturing process was visually attractive. When made to react with potassium after antimony evaporation, the tint immediately changed to an ideal color for a photocathode. Cheers arose from the staff gathered around the pumping bench, as it was a moment of high emotion for everyone.
Hamamatsu delivered 1,050 R1449 PMTs to Kamiokande, where they lined a giant tank of ultra-purified water 1,000 meters below the surface.
In 1987, the PMT array at Kamiokande detected for the first time neutrinos given off by a supernova. [It was a discovery for which Professor Masatoshi Koshiba [above], who spearheaded the Kamiokande research, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002. Those may be the two most awkwardly constructed sentences in this post.]
Meanwhile, an even larger detector was being planned for Kamiokande. Dubbed Super-K, the new tank, 39m high and 41m in diameter, would hold 50,000 tons of water and 11,200 PMTs. These new, improved PMTs, known as model R3600, were based on the R1449. They cover approximately 40% of the interior surface of the tank. Super-K began operations in 1996.
On November 12, 2001, as the tank was being refilled, a PMT imploded, sending a shock wave through the water, and causing a chain reaction which destroyed around 6,600 other PMTs.
The survivors were redistributed, protective acrylic shells were added, and research resumed. Beginning in 2005, newly manufactured R3600s were installed. The detector reopened in 2006 as Super-K-III.
According to reports at the time of the implosion, an R3600 cost around $3,000 new, an extremely reasonable price for such a magnificently crafted object. I would most definitely like one. Also a convenient display stand. Also, that tank is absolutely stunning. If I were a sculptor of shiny round objects of a hundred feet or more in diameter, I would find it hard to get out of bed in the morning knowing this exists.
20-Inch Photomultiplier Development Story [hamamatsu.com, the original Japanese version is a little more dramatic]
portrait of Prof. Koshiba hugging a Hamamatsu R3600 [u-tokyo.ac.jp]
hi-res images in the Super-Kamiokande photo album [ICCR at U-Tokyo]
Accident grounds neutrino lab [physicsworld]
The Rainbow Bombs
NPR’s Robert Krulwich had a fascinating story the other day that works even better online. Because there are slideshows and video footage of Starfish Prime, the hydrogen bomb the US detonated in space on July 9, 1962.
The launch occurred on Johnston Island in the South Pacific, and was part of an early test of ICBM technology–and an attempt to understand the weaponizing potential of the earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. Just in case Moscow was up to anything funny.
Scott Hansen pointed to Peter Kuran’s excellent-sounding documentaries about atomic testing, including Nukes in Space: The Rainbow Bombs.
Almost a thousand miles away, Hawaii had been primed for a potentially “dazzling” light show. NPR’s lead-in called it “the single greatest manmade light show America has ever created.”
And Starfish Prime delivered. Cecil Coale, who was involved with the launch and monitoring it from Johnston Island, described the flash that turned night to day and the ionizing rainbow that followed:
“It was like a flashbulb…then the sky turned green for a second.
then yellow and blue, “really vivid, unnatural bright color.”
Then red. “it wasn’t shimmering it was glowing red like a neon sign. Then it slowly disappeared, there wasn’t any sound to this at all, it was entirely visual…i think about this every day of my life.”
Listen to the Bomb Watchers [npr]
DOE library of historical nuclear test films of Operation Dominic, Operation Fishbowl, and Starfish Prime [doe.gov]
Blow
This FT essay by Daphne Guinness about buying Isabella Blow’s estate before it was dispersed at Christie’s is a wonderful, sad, incredible thing. [via @artnetdotcom]
All the way back in 2002, I overwrote a long post about Blow, Walter Benjamin, Bill Cunningham, fashion, and street photography. The occasion was Guy Trebay’s writing about street fashion.
Frankly, I’m surprised at how much of it I’d forgotten. Did Benjamin really call the flaneur “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers”?? That is awesome, I could totally use that!
What I’ve never forgotten, though, is Cunningham’s expertly serendipitous street photo of Isabella Blow blowing into a fashion show in Paris:
Decommission Commission: Harrier And Jaguar By Fiona Banner
Harrier and Jaguar, Fiona Banner’s commission for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries opened this week, and from the making of film and interview with the artist, it looks spectacular.
Banner has installed two decommissioned fighter jets–a BAe Sea Harrier XE695 and a SEPECAT Jaguar XZ118–in the grand neoclassical space. By altering each slightly, and by placing them in atypical, non-functional positions, the artist turned them into overwhelming, beautiful objects–sculptures–which nonetheless manage to retain all their original significance and meaning as highly advanced weapons of war.
The Harrier was covered with a delicately feathered matte wash and hung, nose down, just off the floor. It barely fits inside the limestone-clad hall. The SEPECAT Jaguar was stripped down to bare metal and polished to a mirror finish. It rests upside down, on its cockpit. Did I mention it looks spectacular?
With those reflections it generates, it’s like a 3D realspace version of Google’s distorted Street View portraits.
Video | Fiona Banner Harrier and Jaguar, 9’23” [tate channel]
Duveens Commission Series | Fiona Banner 2010, through 3 Jan. 2011 [tate.org.uk]
Olafur Street View
One of the simplest, best parts of Innen Stadt Außen [Inner City Out], Olafur Eliasson’s multiple public and museum projects in his adopted hometown of Berlin this year, is now online as a short film.
In what feels like the diametric opposite of Google’s Street View scanning, Olafur and his studio rigged a truck with a giant mirror and drove it around town. Part of me wants to not say what it is, but to let viewers figure it out. But the whole exhibition was promoted with photos of the truck. And I knew what it was, and I still was enthralled by every sequence and cut in the film.
Innen Stadt Aussen, from Studio Olafur Eliasson, 10’31” [vimeo via @grammar_police]
Someone Get Souren Melikian A Blogspot Account
Souren Melikian’s auction analysis for the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times is almost always entertainingly specious, but he is at his best/worst when he writes about contemporary art, about which he obviously knows nothing:
The next lot, “Cristina Passing By,” was the fun figure of a girl realistically painted in tissue paper on stainless steel signed by Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1968. It also far exceeded the high estimate, if at a modest level, when it brought £313,250. Much earlier than the Cattelan, it is more original.
But originality or creativity is hardly what motivates the buyers of contemporary art in its forms now promoted in the auction arena. What triggers a response is an easy, instantly perceived image — and the echo that it receives in the media. Like slogans in politics, the power of words repeated a hundred times generates success. Achievement has little relevance, if any at all.
Seriously, why does the Times keep publishing this untethered nonsense?
What does this even mean?? Novelty Sets Cheerful Tone for Christie’s Contemporary Auction [nyt]
Previously: The Eternal Sunshine of Souren Melikian’s Spotless Mind
Arshile Gorky Was An Expert Camoufleur
I like writing the word camofleur.
In response to the burning question [sic] that arose from Ad Reinhardt’s chronology, what was up with Arshile Gorky wanting to start a camouflage school in 1943?
Because everyone knows that Gorky was already teaching camouflage in 1942. He’d spent at least a year, and possibly longer, trying to get a camouflage class started, partly because he and other artists saw it as an alternative for getting called up in the draft. “Can’t fight, too busy camouflaging!”
This need intensified after Pearl Harbor, and even after Gorky was rejected by the draft board for being too old. But that was also because Gorky needed money, and a class of 20 students paying $15/each a month sounded very appealing.
[Hayden Herrera has a chapter called “Camouflage” in her 2005 biography, Arshile Gorky: Life and Work. Most of this info comes from there.]
In his prospectus, Gorky wrote, “What the enemy would destroy, however, he must first see. To confuse and paralyze this vision is the role of camouflage. Here the artist, and more particularly the modern artist, can fulfill a vital function, for opposed to this vision of destruction is a vision of creation…
“Mr. Gorky plans a studio workshop in which each student becomes a discoverer…” The coursework would include modern theory, scale modeling, and “abstract constructions.”
One of Gorky’s particular concerns was how colorblindness might thwart camouflage. He also, we read, had “a plan to camouflage the whole of New York City,” which he felt should be promoted heavily by the New York Times.
According to one of his most satisfied pupils, the then-future art dealer Betty Parsons, the class ran for from three to six months, and was highly popular. Of course, according to Harry Rand’s book, Gorky’s camo course “fared poorly.” If the goal was to provide a steady source of income, I guess these can both be true.
And that might explain Gorky seeking help from Reinhardt to revive or rework the camo school idea in 1943. In any case, Gorky’s eventual dealer, Julian Levy, said that camouflage was the key to the artist’s character, whatever that means.
Previously: Civilian Camouflage Council
image: Garden in Sochi, 1943, Arshile Gorky, via Tate, and Telegraph UK