Category: art

Who Knew There Was Writing Inside Those Aspen Magazines?

Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, “Configurations of the New World,”, papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as presented at the Aspen Design Conference. Here are a couple of quotes that caught my eye.
From “The Victory of Technique over Content,” a rumination/condemnation of the 1964 New York World’s Fair by architect and editor of Progressive Architecture, Jan C. Rowan:

The New York World’s Fair, in its planning, and its buildings, and its exhibits, shows us only what we already know: That we are creating very fast an ugly, inconvenient, depressing environment–full of gadgetry–that can occasionally hypnotize us through its razzle-dazzle and glitter, but, lacking any significant content, leaves us, in the long run, nervous, uneasy, and empty.

And from the late Interior Secretary and ur-environmentalist Stewart Udall’s optimistically titled essay, “The New Conservation Can Work,” comes this:

If we have reached the point where good design means efficiency, where investing in a good design or in a scheme of beauty is the best investment a businessman can make, we may have reached the point that Walter Gropius speculated on a few years ago when he said we wouldn’t really begin to build with greatness in this country until we had the right combination of politicians, artists, scientists, and enlightened businessmen. Maybe this is coming about.

Aspen 1, remember, was published in 1965, while the body of Park Avenue was still warm, with Gropius’s gargantuan urban disaster, the Pan Am Building, stuck in its heart. So maybe not.

‘Just Traces In The Snow In Winter’

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Dealer Leo Castelli in a December 1969 interview with Paul Cummings, discussing the early work of John Chamberlain:

Then before that, he had done those foam rubber sculptures, which were really very, very good. At that time, people were more squeamish about the durability of materials. Had he produced them now, they would have been an immense success. At that time, people just were very hesitant and very doubtful about getting things that they think or feared would disintegrate very rapidly. They turned out very well. Some people wouldn’t mind so much any more whether it would endure or disintegrate, because one has gotten used to works of art as just traces in the snow in winter.

Archives of American Art | Oral history interview with Leo Castelli, 1969 May 14-1973 June 8 [aaa.si.edu]
image: Lo-An, 1966, moca.org
Related? Aug 2008: The Making of a John Chamberlain sofa

In Xanadu Did Rauschenberg A Stately Parachute Deploy

It’s hard to say where the momentous awesomeness of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s 1963 Pop Art Festival first overwhelmed me.
When I learned that noted Pop Artist John Cage performed on opening night?
When I found out that Claes Oldenburg held an early Happening in the dry cleaners on P Street?
Or when I saw this picture from the gigantic dance extravaganza at the America on Wheels roller rink in Adams Morgan, organized by Billy Kluver, with Merce, Yvonne, and the Judson Dance Theatre?
rauschenberg_rollerskates.jpg
That is Robert Rauschenberg, on roller skates, with a parachute on his back, premiering his dance, Pelican, a tribute/homage to his heroes, the Wright Brothers.
Rauschenberg had been doing costumes and set design for Cunningham’s company for many years, but when the program for the Pop Art Festival performance listed him as a choreographer, he decided to roll with it, so to speak.
Well, it turns out Cage’s performance was a lecture; Oldenburg’s Happening was moved to the gallery; and this photo of Pelican is from 1965, by which point, Rauschenberg had more than a couple of days’ skating practice. But still, the magic lives on every time I go to that roller rink, which is now a Harris Teeter.
Update: Holy smokes, SFMOMA has a film clip. That’s Rauschenberg, Per Olof Ultvedt, and Merce Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown. The SI’s Eye Level blog has comments by Alice Denney on Rauschenberg’s DC forays.

image: Peter Moore, published in Mary Lynn Kotz’s 2004 Rauschenberg Art/Life, via warholstars.org

Have You Seen Me?

Maybe that should be, “Hast du mich gesehen?”
Do you have Andrea Fraser’s Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:

I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER’S Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 soon after it was published in 1983. At the time, it was the most expensive book I had ever bought. I read it from cover to cover and made lots of notes in the margins. It had a profound influence on my development as an artist. Ten years later, I included my copy in Services, a project I organized with Helmut Draxler in Germany examining the social and economic conditions of post-studio art. It was stolen from the show. If whoever took the book is reading this now, I beg you to return it to me. It is something I treasured, and the loss of it still makes me sad.

Fraser doesn’t specify where her book was stolen. According to her writeup for the show, hosted at ada’web [whoa, blast from the past], the project originated in “Kunstraum der Universitat Luneburg, January 29 – February 20, 1994. It toured to Stuttgart, Munich, Geneva, Vienna, and Hasselt, Belgium.” According to Fraser’s post-exhibition assessment of the project [sic], the first stop was a seminar format, so I imagine the book was taken from one of the later, less populated venues.
In place of your stolen version, perhaps you would consider downloading a PDF of Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 from the other awesomely palindromic art website, Ubu? It doesn’t have Fraser’s marginalia, of course, but perhaps if you return it, she’d consider making a copy?
update: Wow, Fraser’s entire Artforum article on Asher is a great read. She makes a strong case for his comprehensive reimagining of artistic production outside the commodity-centered market model; she implicates art critics’ ignoring of economic aspects of artmaking and presentation as complicity with the market-centric system; and she delivers a thorough refutation of Benjamin Buchloh, a too-rare treat.

How’d The National Gallery Get Such Awesome Barkley Hendricks Paintings?

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Seriously. It’s been eating at me for over a year.
Like everyone else who saw them in “Birth of the Cool,” Nasher Museum curator Trevor Schoonmaker’s retrospective, I was in awe of Barkely L. Hendricks’ straight-up full length portraits from the early 1970s, which were usually of folks who didn’t have many full length portraits painted of them.
Hendricks is a resolutely representational painter, which is not to say traditional; his figures float on empty white [or gold leaf] canvas. My favorites, like Sir Charles, aka Willie Harris, above, have a triptych/multiple exposure/montage composition. They’re not just portraits, they’re paintings, in a defiant, powerful sense.
In fact, Sir Charles, painted in 1972, won my first, second, and third vote in the winter of 2009 for paintings the Obamas should hang in the White House. You remember the criteria: the work had to be in a national museum, but borrowing it couldn’t remove it from public view.
Perfect, Sir Charles is owned by the National Gallery of Art, and the collection database showed it wasn’t on view [of course not, because it was traveling as a star of Hendricks’ show.]
And here’s where the double mystery kicked in: Sir Charles has NEVER been exhibited at the NGA. Neither has the other incredible Hendricks painting in the collection, George Jules Taylor, also 1972.
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How could this be? The National Gallery is cutting edge enough to acquire major works by The New Painting Hotness [sic] before he’s on the cover of Artforum, they make the rounds in one of the most admired museum shows of the year, and yet they never show them themselves? EVER?
[UPDATE: Uh, no. An unidentified reader has correct me, thankfully. The NGA’s location records for the Hendricks works do indeed show that they have been exhibited at various times in the Gallery. The online exhibition history apparently refers only to curated shows, in or out of the Gallery. For more details on this correction, check this post.]
The kicker, of course, was right there in the collection info page. The accession numbers for the two Hendricks paintings are 1973.19.1 and 1973.19.2, which means, obviously, that they were acquired new. In 1973, the National Gallery purchased a newly minted Yale MFA’s triple portrait of the corner drug dealer outside his New Haven studio. It completely blew my mind.
There had to be a story there, I figured, so I started digging. And came up nearly empty at every turn. I thought I’d just look in the NGA’s archive, but there was nothing there. Who was the curator savvy enough to find his or her way to Hendricks back then? No idea, it turns out the NGA did not even have a curator dedicated to modern and contemporary art until the 1980s.
The NGA website has basically everything that the institution knows about the paintings. Since I started asking around the NGA several months ago, the provenance info has been updated to say when they were acquired: May 1973. They came from the Kenmore Gallery in Philadelphia, where Hendricks had his first solo shows. They’re the only works in the collection with the credit line, “William C. Whitney Foundation.” Not a lot to work with.
But not nothing. William C. Whitney’s son Harry Payne Whitney’s wife Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the Whitney Museum, where Hendricks had been included in a major–and controversial–show in 1971, “Contemporary Black Artists in America.” The show had grown out of a compromise with the black art community, which, along with important groups like the Art Workers Coalition, had criticized the persistent absence of non-white artists in the museum’s collection and program. When the black advisers to the show’s white curator quit, a large group of artists withdrew and called for a boycott. A high profile museum show might explain how Hendricks got on the art world’s radar, but not how his work made it into the NGA.
Whitney Whitney Whitney. It turns out the William C. Whitney Foundation had been created, not by the Museum Whitneys, but by Harry’s sister, Dorothy Payne Whitney in honor of their father, but for the use of her son, Michael Whitney Straight. At least according to Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley.
Get out your foil hats and turn up Glenn Beck, because Quigley is the highly influential Georgetown history professor whose controversial writings on the history of Anglophile secret societies is the tenuous basis of classic rightwing conspiracy theory. Beginning in 1970, Quigley’s work was mutated, Pale Fire-style, by Beck’s favorite Mormon wingnut academic W. Cleon Skousen, into a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory between the Communists, JP Morgan, and everyone in between.
And guess who Mike Straight’s dad worked for? JP Morgan. And guess who Mike Straight was a spy for while he was at Cambridge in the 1930s, and later after he moved back to the US to work at the State Department? The Soviet Union.
His Communist sympathies didn’t last through the war, and when Straight was being considered for the head of the new National Endowment for the Arts the Kennedy Administration was planning, Straight came clean, exposing the rest of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Straight became the deputy head of the NEA, which didn’t require a Senate confirmation. And he wrote extensively, both about his own spy history, and about the formative people and stories of the NEA.
None of which sheds any light at all on the NGA and their Hendrickses.
Finally, after exhausting every potential archival source, I contacted Trevor Schoonmaker at Duke’s Nasher Museum. Who, it turned out, was just taking paternity leave, perhaps I’d rather talk to Barkley himself?
So a couple of weeks ago we set it up to chat on the phone. Here’s how it went down:
J. Carter Brown himself had gone to the Kenmore Gallery and asked Hendricks’ dealer Harry Kulkowitz to see some paintings for possible acquisition. The selections were made, and Kulkowitz and Hendricks brought the works to DC for consideration. “I went down with Harry, and it was a situation where the pieces were pretty large, and I had to design the stretcher to fold. So once we got down, i unfolded them and put them together. and that set the acquisition ball in motion.”
Brown apparently tapped Straight personally for the acquisition funds. I didn’t think to ask how much the Gallery paid, but Hendricks said in an interview last year that, “I had reached the $5,000 ceiling that black artists have, in 67 or 68. Someone said that once (that there is a $5,000 ceiling for black artists).” And when I asked Hendricks about the importance of being in the Whitney show, he laughed it off, saying that “Black people were fashionable at that time.”
Well, they’re kind of hot right now, too. “Birth of the Cool” wraps up at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston on April 18th. What better time for the National Gallery to finally celebrate its illustrious former director’s prescient acquisitions by finally showing a Hendricks painting or two [again, see correction above] in Washington DC?

Cage Match

I was reading Calvin Tomkins’ 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold’s giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works were breaking Important Art of The Future out of the twee confines of the gallery and museum. Or he was making quintessentially aggrandizing corporate lobby art, built-in Bertoias for barons and bankers.
lippold_the_globe.jpgMost of the article tells the crazy story of the creation and installation of Lippold’s best-known work, Apollo and Orpheus, which tumbles through the lobby of Philharmonic Hall [now Avery Fisher Hall] at Lincoln Center. But this remarkable bit is from May 1962, and the making of his most-seen work, The Globe [later changed to Flight], the shimmering, golden wire sculpture in the Vanderbilt Avenue lobby of the Emery Roth, Gropius & Belluschi’s Pan Am building [now Met Life] behind Grand Central Station:

Lippold was also engaged at this time in a curious negotiation with his Pan Am patrons. He had discovered that the building had been wired throughout for Muzak. Muzak has long been one of Lippold’s particular abominations, and, with his customary directness, he voiced his dismay at a cocktail party given by the late Erwin S. Wolfson, the New York investment builder who had largely conceived and financed the Pan Am Building. If the building had to have music at all, Lippold suggested jokingly, why not let him commission some contemporary music by John Cage? Wolfson floored him by saying, “Go ahead.” At the time, Lippold told a friend, “Wolfson belongs to the new breed of industrialists who respect artists. He trusts them, he’s willing to let them do what they want without interference. But, my God! Think of it! Cage is still too avant-garde for the concert halls, and here’s a chance for his music to be played to an audience of thousands and thousands a day! It will be the first time in history that music has been commissioned to go with architecture–or at least, the first time since the medieval cathedral Mass.” Wolfson said he would take care of persuading his board of directors, and Lippold got Cage started thinking about the project.

Not sure what’s more unsettling: the “new breed of industrialists” gladhanding, or the Richter-meets-Kinkade-style paradox of Cage doing Muzak.
But whaddya know, the project went forward. As one might have expected of an artist working in ambient sound, Cage had invested years of thought in solving The Muzak Problem. In his 1998 article in The Musical Quarterly on Cage’s approach to silence, Douglas Kahn makes an interesting analysis of Muzak’s connection to the development of Cage’s best-known composition, 4’33”. In a lecture he gave in 1948, four years before creating 4’33”, but which he never republished, Cage talked about another silent composition, Silent Prayer:…which would consist of 3 to 4-1/2 minutes of sustained silence (the maximum time being just three seconds short of 4’33”) to be played over the Muzak network.

Unlike the silence of 4’33”, in which not playing is the means for the audience to hear the sounds surrounding them, Kahn wrote that Cage saw Silent Prayer more like an intermission, a “reprieve” from Muzak’s unobtrusive yet pervasive performance.
He also makes a fascinating point about Duchamp’s readymades and the length of Silent Prayer [and, by a 3-second extension, 4’33”], which was based on the standard duration of commercial music.
Back to Pan Am. With the technical assistance of Bell Labs [Kluver? Anyone? Aha, Max Matthews. see the update below.] Cage’s Muzak project had made it to the “elaborate presentations” stage, and by August 12, 1962, the idea was fully developed enough for Raymond Ericson to report the details in the Times:

[Cage] decided to “make use of the things that were right there” in the lobby. This was to include the supply of Muzak, for which Pan Am had a contract; the necessary speakers in the walls, and a set-up of television screens with photo-electric cells for keeping an eye on the passers-by.
Mr. Cage devised a system whereby the people going through the lobby would activate the photo-electric cells. These in turn would release the Muzak music, which would become pulverized and filtered in the process. Even people getting in and out of elevators would have a part in producing the sound. Since the cells would never be activated in the same way, the results would be constantly in variation.

Rather than underscore the pervasiveness of Muzak by giving its unwilling audience a temporary reprieve, Cage would make the pedestrian throngs aware of their collective selves, by giving everyone the power to toggle the Muzak off and on.
Unfortunately, Wolfson, the new breed of industrialist, died in July, and the reason the Times was writing about Cage’s piece was because the old breed of board members had just rejected it. “As one vice president said: ‘The American business man and the esthete do not always see eye to eye.” Really.
Ericson’s kicker makes me want to head up to Bard and start digging through the archive at the John Cage Trust: Mr. Cage does not feel particularly disappointed in the failure of his plan. He believes his ideas are sufficiently in the air to be acted on someday.
UPDATE: Apparently, in the Spring 2008 issue of Representations, the University of California Press Journal, Herve Vanel wrote an article about Cage’s relationship with Muzak titled, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music.” which I would buy for something less than the $14 UCP is asking. [UPDATE UPDATE: it seems like I’m the only guy without a subscription, better get on board. Thanks to Douglas and Brian for loaning me their pdf version of Vanel’s article.]
Some interesting finds from Vanel’s paper: Cage had been thinking about a Muzak composition, called Muzak-Plus, in 1961, which I would imagine his friend Lippold would have known about. It was Bell Labs computer music pioneer Max Matthews who collaborated with Cage on the Pan Am Building, not Billy Kluver. But Matthews’ photo-electric switch and mixer design apparently resurfaced as a dance device in 1965 when Kluver participated in Variations V with Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and Stan VanDerBeek. Which is like the best Merce & John clip on YouTube.
On the downside, is that renovation related to the 2005 purchase of the Met Life building by Tishman Speyer? Or have security retrofits destroyed whatever spatial integrity the lobby had? Do we know need to wonder what a John Cage piece based on the random, unimpeded flow of crowds into a lobby would sound like before and after September 11?

What’s Happening? Claes Oldenburg’s Stars Via Time And Alice Denney

I’ve already mentioned the May 3, 1963 Time Magazine article about the Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s Pop Art Festival; it’s really not much, but it contains the most extensive contemporary account of Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 Happening, Stars. Here’s how they reported the grand finale:

Red Gee String.
As the evening wore on, slides of naked women were projected, suggesting that pornography has its place among the neo-Palladian splendors of the alabaster city. Waiters spilled bits of plastic from trays onto the audience. A woman came on wearing a shredded American flag on her head; her spine was as stiff as a flagpole. It had to be, since it was part of the monument to the victory at Iwo Jima, and three soldiers held her at the appropriate tilt. A 14-year-old boy in a Lincolnesque beard entered the room, was shown to his seat, and sat there waiting to be shot. Zow.
For the closing number, Miss Washington, stacked like the melon gallery, appeared in a mass of red taffeta. She pulled her rip cord, and there she stood–after all, it is the nation’s capital–not quite nude. An aw-gee string. A suggestion of red taffeta there-there and there.
She turned and bolted like a moose, followed by official Washington, gurgling hip-hip for happenings.

All these activities map very closely to Oldenburg’s script, which was transcribed and published with his Raw Notes in 1971. But these incomplete accounts generate as many questions as they answer about how Stars took shape, what actually happened, and what happened afterward as a result.
I finally decided to go to the source. Last week I spoke with Alice Denney, who organized the Pop Art Festival and curated the Popular Image show it accompanied. She was generous and awesome, and not a little bemused at my questions–or that I was asking them at all.
How many Happenings were there? When and why did the site move from the cleaners to the Gallery, and how did that affect it?

AD: We thought we could do it in the rug cleaning place on P Street, but a few days before, a couple of the trustees came in and said, “You couldn’t do it there, there’s no egress.” So we moved it.
…
[The content] didn’t change, even though the space was much tighter. We used the stairway so that Olga Kluver could come down.

Ah, so Olga Kluver was the one in the red taffeta dress. In 1963, though she was living with Billy Kluver, she still went by Olga Adorno. Kluver, of course, had helped organize another major event for the Festival, a multi-stage dance performance by the Judson folks at a roller skating rink in Adams Morgan. Meanwhile, in 1964, Andy Warhol threw a party to celebrate Adorno and Kluver’s marriage.
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Adorno appeared in at two of Warhol’s Screen Tests, ST184 and ST185, both in 1964. She also performed in Happenings by Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman. Apparently, Adorno’s still going strong, creating enigmatic performance works from her base in Nice, France. But back to Mrs Denney, who was the gallery staffer mentioned in Time as making blue ice cream and serving it on picnic plates, and whose son was the stand-in for Lincoln:

…It was all about Washington: the monuments, the dinner parties…
Everybody wanted to go, and all the fancy folks wanted to be in it.
But it was pretty much my gang of crazies, [Claes] didn’t want society ladies.

And it turned out to be quite popular. The reservations filled right up for all three Happenings [one on Wed., Apr 24, and two on the 25th]. Mrs Denney mentioned that in addition to performing in Stars, Claes’s first wife, Patty [Pat Muschinski], worked on many of Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and costumes, and wrote a memoir of the Happening for Art in America. And so the chain continues.

How Your Street View Panoramas Are Made

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I’ve been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it’s been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos.
Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a technique that maps coordinates onto an evenly spaced grid of latitude and longitude, which produces significant distortions, especially along the perimeter. Like how Antarctica ends up looking bigger than the rest of the continents put together. Flickr user swilsonmc’s images of flattened out Street View panoramas show the axis of distortion quite nicely.
I think there are other distorting elements in Street View, though; it appears that each panorama is anchored to a specific set of lat/long coordinates. [The Street View data layer on Google Earth shows this beautifully by plopping these 3D pano bubbles down on its own 3D landscape. (top) It’s like simulation-within-simulation. Also, they look like inverted satelloons, only they’re projecting back their surroundings from the center, rather than reflecting from the surface. I mean, just check out the highly reflective surface of the PAGEOS global mapping satellite for a minute. Am I right? Wait, did someone say mapping?]
Anyway, the panoramas pull together the best images of that spot, which are not necessarily taken at that spot. Google’s roving cameras are shooting constantly, so there images approaching and leaving a particular panorama site. This introduces multiple POV and perspectival distortions into a single panorama. Which can result in awesome, zig-zagging thickets of tree trunks, fence posts, stanchions, and disembodied pedestrians. And which all remind us that these panoramas are not photos, but photomontages.

But wait, that’s not all! swilsonmc also created a php script that turns every flattened Street View panorama into a frame of video. The flickr video above shows the trip up the Long Beach Freeway in LA, from Seal Beach to Glendale. It reads as a continuous trip, of course, but if you watch the traffic and the clouds, the other Street View distortion–time–so obvious it’s invisible, becomes clear: there are photos taken on different days.
Roland Barthes described photography as “the presence of a thing (at a certain past moment).” The always didactic John Berger said,

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen

and on the intrinsic temporal content of photography, he said, “This choice is not between photographing x and y: but between photographing at x moment and not at y moment.” I think it becomes clear that in the traditional, theoretical sense, whatever Google Street View images are, they are not photography.

greg.org’s Top One Tips For Making A Book Using Blurb.com’s BookSmart Tool

So the last couple of months, I’ve been working on an idea for book, and I wanted to see a mockup/proof. It’s mostly photographs/images, with a very text introduction, and I wanted only one image per spread, like a nice little monograph. Which means a lot of blank facing pages. Which is fine if you’re printing a run of books, even a small one. But it sucks if you use an on-demand printer, which usually start charging $1-1.50 for each page over, say 20.
I decided to use Blurb.com for the proof, partly because they offer a nice variety of formats and finishes, but also because their stepped pricing structure was quite reasonable. Also, their BookSmart tool is pretty flexible for putting the book together. There’s a large selection of page layouts, which I was able to pare down and edit to my own liking. So far so good.
Here’s my first and only tip for anyone thinking about using Blurb & BookSmart: BE $)(%ING SURE AND HAPPY WITH THE SIZE AND FORMAT OF YOUR BOOK, BECAUSE IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE IT, YOU’LL HAVE TO START OVER FROM $#*(%(ING SCRATCH. HOW THE HELL CAN SOMEONE CALL AN APPLICATION “BOOKSMART” WHEN IT IS TOO )($*#%ING STUPID TO BE ABLE TO ACCOMMODATE THE MOST BASIC CHANGE OPTION OF ALL?
So yeah, the proof arrives in a few days, we’ll see how it looks [besides, too big, obviously.]

On Being Ivan Karp In 1962

The Archive of American Art’s collection of transcripts of Paul Cummings’ interviews with art world figures is always good for a firsthand account and an interesting nugget or reflection. But I don’t think I’ve ever had quite the visceral reaction I got reading Ivan Karp’s account of the emergence of Pop Art in New York in 1961-2. At the time Karp was director of Leo Castelli Gallery. Roy Lichtenstein had just brought in some paintings done from comic books, which Karp and Castelli both found extremely unnerving. Here’s an extended excerpt, but you could really read almost anything and just be hit by the sense of discovery and amusement of Karp’s story:

But we kept I think four of them. And then Leo saw them and had his own set of reactions to them. Which was pretty startling. And we both were jolted. We thought well let’s look at them again; we’ll put them in the racks and we’ll take them out again and see how they feel as the days go by. I told you earlier in the tape about how other reactions were; we showed them to people who came into the gallery. And it was not good. It was a bad scene. There were really truly unpleasant moments there because people thought that if we’d show art like that it would be the end of our situation, that we were pushing things too hard. And we said, “No, no, it’s really an intelligent and original innovation. It’s peculiar and alien and strange and we’re going to look at them some more.” I don’t know if I told you that Warhol, who was a collector to a certain extent at that point, (I didn’t know who he was ) he came in with some young men who had also been buying works from me, and I remember Warhol bought a little Jasper Johns drawing for $350. What a beautiful drawing! Wow!
[ed note: The invoice for Wahol’s Johns drawing, Light Bulb, 1958, graphite wash, 6 1/2″ x 8 3/4″, dated 8 May 1961, is in the amount of $450, which Warhol paid in installments. Here’s the sketch; it was in Sotheby’s Warhol sale in 1988, and it was resold at Christie’s in 1998.]
johns_lightbulb_warhol.jpg
PAUL CUMMINGS: Warhol bought the drawing?
IVAN KARP: Warhol, yes. He came back the next week. And I said, “Oh, there’s a curious painter downstairs that I’d like you to look at; very strange.” (I didn’t know who Warhol was or what he did. All I knew was that he was a man with a crop of gray hair who came in an bought a Jasper Johns from me). He issued one of his curious little sounds like an astonished “Oh!” that he says every so often, which he still says in a state of astonishment. He said, “Good God” — or whatever he was exclaiming — “I’m doing something like this myself!!” He said, “What are these paintings doing here!” Whose work is this! What is this man! What is he thinking!” He was really shocked and at the same time he was appalled. And I think he was very troubled that somebody else was doing the same thing. And he asked me if I wouldn’t come to his studio and look at what he was doing. I said, “Do you mean to say that you’re really concerned with the same kind of images?” He said, “Yes. I actually am doing cartoon things and like commercial subjects. But they’re different, of course; they’re very different. Would you come and look?”

You know, it’s really too long for the front page, so I put the rest of it after the jump.

Continue reading “On Being Ivan Karp In 1962”

What’s Happening? Nina Burleigh Takes On Claes Oldenburg

In her 1998 biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Nina Burleigh used Stars, Claes Oldenburg’s Happening at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s 1963 Pop Art Festival, as a bellwether for sophisticated Georgetown/Washington’s temperament towards contemporary art. Here’s how Burleigh described the event [from p. 202]:

Stars: A Farce for Objects Designed by Claes Oldenburg and involving twenty-one players, the happening lampooned official Washington and satirized the capital’s iconography. One pieces was a huge sewn miniature of the Washington Monument moving around by means of seven people huddled inside. One scene involved a very well-endowed naked woman coming down some steps, and included such absurdities as a roller skater, a waiter carrying a tray and spilling colored foam rubber bits, a girl brushing her teeth, two men spraying room deodorant, a woman undulating inside two mattresses, a girl ironing, and a child dishing out blue frosting. It was accompanied by drumbeats and a rendition of “Sweet Leilani.” Each action was repeated twenty-four times. It was received with annoyance by the art critic for the Washington Evening Star, who found the whole evening tedious. The show, he wrote, “will be repeated and repeated and repeated tonight.”

Here’s another rendition of “Sweet Leilani,” by the incomparable Hawaiian duo Basil and Pat Henriques.

Waiting For Gopnik

tejo_remy_moma.jpgHello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art?
Never mind, Blake Gopnik is here to correct this unforgivable travesty of public relations and/or poor Nexis searching skillz:

It has been two decades since Remy’s stunning debut, and this article is the first one in the English-speaking world to try to take his measure.
“We are walking a line: ‘Is it art or design?’ ” Remy says. And they are walking it almost alone.

Yes, alone except for the designer of every single item between Milan, Miami, and Moss–and half the people who passed through Utrecht in the last twenty years! But please continue, o design historian!

Even most avant-garde designers have come up with new models for comfort and ease — turning away from Victorian velvet-on-oak, for instance, to embrace Bauhaus, then Danish modern. What few designers have done is work to abolish comfort itself as a design principle, in favor of objects that disconcert. That’s the Remy and Veenhuizen model.
…
You can still order one of Remy’s drawer-piles from the Dutch distributor Droog, which sponsored some of his early work and has become much better known than Remy himself.

llewelln_gopnik.jpg“Distributor”? “sponsored”? Droog began as a design collective, with Remy as one of its early members. His drawer-piles [sic], aka the You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory bundled bureau, dated 1991 and exhibited in Droog’s Milan debut in 1993, was the collective’s signature design.
I don’t begrudge Remy or any early Droog participants for seeking to build their own brands outside the increasingly corporatized Droog umbrella. In the last several years, Remy’s been using language to distance Droog from his design and process, by saying they “commissioned” the dresser. Now it’s “sponsored.” But only someone completely ignorant of the history of design generally–and of Dutch design and Droog specifically–could write something as wrong as this.
Dutch design team Tejo Remy and Ren & [sic] Veenhuizen mount first U.S. ‘solo’ show [washpost]
image and completely contradictory explanation of Droog and Remy via moma.org

What’s Happening? Art Buchwald Lunches With Claes Oldenburg

oldenburg_wapo_041663.jpg
The week before The Pop Art Festival in Washington DC, Art Buchwald had lunch with Claes Oldenburg, WGMA Assistant Director Alice Denney, and publicist John Mecklin. The topic was Oldenburg’s upcoming Happening, Stars. Buchwald wrote (in the first person plural) about the lunch in the April 16, 1963 edition of the Washington Post:

Pop art, in case you’re wondering, is the latest thing, in which artists use anything form comic strips to American flags to give a new concept to reality and illusion. (It’s more than that too, but we’re not sure how much more.)
…
“Mr. Oldenburg,” we said, “What is a Happening?”
“There is no definition. I don’t know myself what a Happening is. It’s putting all the elements and senses together and composing a picture. Sight, sound, smell, imagination. Everything plays a part.”
“I see,” we said. “How do you organize a Happening?”
“I buy things at the Goodwill Industries, the Salvation Army, and second-hand shops. Then I find a place to have a Happening in. It must have three-dimensional space and it’s best if the thing you find is characteristic of the composition you’re trying to create.
“Naturally,” we said. “Where is your Happening going to take place?”
“I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding the right spot. You see, at a Happening the place where you do it is as important as what you do. I found a rug cleaning shop which looked just perfect, since there was lots of junk in it. But the Fire Department wouldn’t let me use it. Fire Departments and Police Departments and vice squads give us the most trouble about our Happenings.”
“That’s because they’re square,” we said.
“So I’ve decided to give my Happening to the Washington Gallery itself. Now I know you’re going to say this violates the idea of holding a Happening in a typical place. But in this case the gallery is okay because the walls are white and it’s typical of the Washingtonian’s yearning for everything in the city to be white. Therefore it’s really a good place for a happening.”
…
As we left the restaurant we stopped by Mrs. Denney’s station wagon, which she had lent him to scout for things for the Happening. In the back were a baby carriage, six small footstools, a bird cage, a first-baseman’s mitt, a mirror, an iron bedstead, and two pairs of saddle shoes.
“What are you going to do with all that?” we asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Oldenburg said. “I might use them in the Happening and I might not. It all depends on how I feel.”

Photography Is Dead

In Frieze, Jennifer Allen [no relation] declares the death of photography. Film photography, that is:

Digitalization brings photography closer to cinema, too. The galloping horse that Eadweard Muybridge photo-graphed with 24 cameras can now be captured with one high-speed digital camera. While analogue cameras take five frames per second, the digital ‘burst mode’ can take 30 high-quality frames per second (and over 1,000 in lower quality). Photographers may keep their fingers on the button and choose the best frame later. In light of these developments, artists who made photographs look like film stills – Cindy Sherman in her series ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977-80) or Raymonde April in her series ‘Sans titre’ (Untitled, 1979-80) – anticipated the transformation of photography from a fleeting image to a moving one.
Yet, if a camera can take 1,000 frames per second, are the resulting images photographs, stills or clips? If an artist prints one frame selected from 1,000 is she a photographer or an editor? Words like ‘snapshot’ and brands like Kodak’s Instamatic cameras reflected the old desire to capture a moment that would otherwise disappear. With the speed and storage of today’s digital cameras, it becomes hard to miss any moment.

If photography actually is dead, I’d hope it’d get a little better sendoff. Allen’s onto something, but her piece ends before she’s even able to make an argument. The obsolescence of film- and chemical-based photo technology is undeniable–not that anyone’s denying it–but that means that photography’s really just as dead as the medium it once supposedly killed: painting.
Long Exposure [frieze.com]