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On The Existence Of Duchamp

I finally picked up a copy of the exhibition catalogue for the 1973-4 Duchamp retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Here is the end of Hilton Kramer’s non-review of the show for the New York Times:

Miss d’Harnoncourt and Mr. McShine have, I must say, done a brilliant job in assembling the visual evidence and in marshaling an elaborate elucidation of its alleged meanings (in a massive volume of essays not yet published). To understand the history of modern art in any comprehensive way, one must see this exhibition, and to grasp the nature of the ideology that has dominated an important part of that history one must read the essays brought together in this forthcoming volume. But one must be prepared to examine a cadaver, and to read through a literature that assumes with absolute confidence that the subject is immortal. One must be prepared, on other words, for the greatest Duchampian joke of all.

I’m starting to think, I must say, that Hilton Kramer did not much care for Marcel Duchamp.

The Eternal Sunshine Of Souren Melikian’s Spotless Mind

I was going to call it a guilty pleasure, but entering Souren Melikian’s reality distortion field every weekend is clearly a vice.
Melikian covers the art world for the International Herald Tribune–which, for him, begins and ends at the auction house–and his byline always sits atop the upper right-hand corner of the NYTimes.com Arts page.
Though his topics are tied to the vagaries of the sales calendar–one week it’s Chinese jades in London, another contemporary art, this week it was Old Masters and French landscapes in New York–Melikian’s soaring optimism is untethered by context, history, inconvenient facts, or actual reporting. While he may actually attend some of the sales he covers–he may have his own desk at Drouot, for all I know–he could just as easily be writing about flipping through the Christie’s catalogue. The Pat Kiernan Reads The Morning Papers To You of the art world.
Whatever his technique, though, and no matter how poor Melikian’s subject is always, always the same: the booming market is full of connoisseurs, ready to throw caution to the wind in pursuit of an ever-dwindling inventory of masterpieces. Here’s the setup for today’s column, titled “Old Masters Set Off Intense Bidding”:

Buyers pounced on Old Master paintings this week with a determination that has not been witnessed at auction in a long time.
Two reasons combined to account for what felt at times like a rage to buy. The gloom induced by the recession is slowly receding and awareness that supplies are drying up is spreading fast.

That’s wonderful! Except that the next sentence–and most of the rest of the sales Melikian recounts–completely belie that upbeat thesis. Here’s the next sentence:

The scarcity of goods was actually made painfully obvious at Christie’s on Wednesday. The need to fill their catalogues with a minimum number of lots had apparently persuaded the departmental heads to accept too many second division works and to estimate them at levels more appropriate for gems.

Oh, you mean no good works, unrealistic estimates, and half the lots failing to sell. As for those pouncing bidders: “A single $6 million bid came in and the auctioneer wisely knocked down the Goltzius…” and “Where one might have expected competition to break out, only one hand went up.”
You can literally click on any of his articles and find a hilarious gem, but here are a couple of choice Melikian Musings from last fall’s contemporary sales, which, we were told, “revealed for the first time a deep interest in works on paper”:

The auction market is booming and, when it comes to contemporary art, it is charging on at an accelerated pace, as it did before the financial turmoil broke out in the autumn of 2008.
This week, those attending Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening sessions traditionally reserved for the most important works might have briefly thought that there never was a recession. No awareness of it appeared to linger in the bidders’ minds as they ran up paintings, drawings and sundry three-dimensional works to three times the estimate, or more…

Other large prices paid for works on paper confirmed that a new pattern was emerging. A typical exercise in random scribbling by Cy Twombly made $722,500, nearly double the high estimate. The sketch does not markedly differ from the nascent bouts of creativity of 4-year-olds expressing pencil in hand their joie de vivre. Interestingly, this similarity to early childhood artistic endeavor has no bearing on the price. Visual aesthetics are clearly not among the primary considerations driving contemporary art buyers.

Contemporary art loves you too, Souren. In my mind, I picture Melikian at a Paris salesroom, indistinguishable, in his double-breasted suit, combover, and excruciatingly coordinated tie-and-pocket-square combination, from the affectedly elegant antiquities dealers he’s chatting up. In other words, he embodies the International Herald Tribune of a certain age, the age before the Times gutted it, when the paper still mattered, when it served as the primary news source and the paper of record for a well-heeled, English-speaking, international touristocratic diaspora. No matter how bleak the news from a couple of days ago was, I’m sure Melikian’s perennially sunny shopping outlook held equal appeal for the Tribune’s antique-hunting readers and its antique-peddling advertisers.
So sure, I read him for the pointless outrage, but I also read him for the nostalgia. Just as they aren’t making any new Old Masters, they sure as hell aren’t making any new Souren Melikians.

In Your Face, Detroit!

The nightly LED show on the facade of the new Motor City Casino in Detroit [via sweet juniper]

Multiverse a now-permanent installation by Leo Villareal at the National Gallery of Art:

I think it’s clear that when it comes to this sort of thing, DC clearly has Detroit beat!

That’s What She Said

So I went to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian this morning to do a little research on the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Unfortunately, most of the WGMA’s archives are still at the Corcoran, which merged [ahem, subsumed or salvaged?] with the WGMA to save it in the late 60s.
Still, I did find another account of “the Gallery’s Wesselmann Incident,” as WGMA Chairman Julian Einenstein put it. And though it differs from the version Mary Meyer biographer Nina Burleigh heard from Alice Denney, it doesn’t necessarily contradict it.
In May 1963, Einenstein was told by James Truitt–yes, husband of, and a Gallery trustee, and someone who was very involved in its creation–that Art News would be running an editorial about the WGMA rejecting Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #21, above.
It turns out they were just running a letter from the artist, complaining about the situation, but before they knew that, Einenstein composed a letter to Art News editor Thomas Hess, giving him “the facts.” The letter was apparently never sent. [I’m not quoting at length here because I didn’t really pay attention to what restrictions I agreed to about publishing Archive material. The kid was getting a little antsy in her stroller, and I didn’t want to wear out her welcome.]
The whole thing went down in April. Einenstein framed the dispute as the result of “internecine warfare” between WGMA director Adelyn Breeskin, and the assistant director, Alice Denney, who was curating the show. Breeskin reportedly thought the painting of a nude figure with JFK was “in poor taste,” and rejected it. Einenstein said it was Breeskin’s decision to make.
Denney sought to reverse the decision “by both subtle and direct means. The pressure which she was able to apply was considerable,” leading Einenstein to call a full Board meeting. Eleven Board members then voted, not on whether the painting was appropriate or not, but on whether Breeskin had the authority to make the decision. They all affirmed she did, and #21 was out.
You can see how this version could mesh with Burleigh’s [which is Denney’s]. And it’s easy to imagine Einenstein’s description of Denney’s “considerable” pressure including getting Meyer to take the issue straight to JFK himself. What Einenstein didn’t mention, though, was that Breeskin had already told the Board she would be resigning. The folders for the months before and after the “Wesselmann Incident” are full of Einenstein’s letters soliciting recommendations for a replacement director.
Whether the Board was staying supportive of its director’s authority, even as she was on her way out, or whether some Trustees didn’t want the painting, but didn’t mind having Breeskin’s fingerprints on the knife, is still not clear. But I’m tempted to just say, “Forget it, Jake, It’s Washington.”

Danish Moisture Farmers

Ten years, people. That’s how long it took me to spot this. Ten. Years. What can I say, I got no excuse. I let you down.

Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999 [olafureliasson.net]
While I’m on the topic, my friend John Powers has been killing it with his new blog Star Wars Modern.
You may know him from such web awesomeness as Star Wars: A New Heap, which he published on Triple Canopy last year. Clearly, there’s more where that came from.

Nice Rack! R.H. Quaytman On MoMA/PS1’s Blog

So jealous. MoMA bought R.H. Quaytman’s awesome little storage rack of paintings, Iamb: Chapter 12, Excerpts and Exceptions, with Painting Rack, which the artist filled over the course of eight years, and showed in 2009 at Miguel Abreu. [Abreu, whose whole program is pretty much en fuego, had two of my favorite shows last year: Quaytman’s and Liz Deschenes.]
Before that, she showed a storage rack full of paintings at Orchard [I miss them], in 2008, which is where Anaba got this photo. Then, it–or the show, anyway, was called Chapter 10, Ark, and it had more paintings in it, and you could pull them out like books. These racks are the most significant works of a blindingly smart artist whose paintings seem designed to actively thwart significance, at least individually.
P&S Curatorial Assistant Paulina Pobocha has a very nice writeup of it at Inside/Out, MoMA/PS1’s forum-style blog.
Few people know it, unfortunately, but MoMA was the first museum anywhere to have a blog. Back in 2004, while I was co-chair of the Jr. Associates, we pushed hard for over a year to get permission to start a blog for our group’s education and fundraising activities. There were even raging debates over whether we could call it a “blog.” [No, it turned out.] It went well while we had a Museum employee dedicated to it, but when she went to grad school, it kind of fizzled.
It’s good to see they’ve finally got some sweet blog momentum going.
R.H. Quaytman’s Storage Rack: An Archive of Images and Associations [moma.org]

Temporary Waterfalls Return To Brooklyn

The BBC has nice footage of the mockup for Michael Arad’s World Trade Center Memorial waterfalls, which was constructed in Brooklyn last week. My impression: unexpectedly Olafur-esque.
Also, the [engineer?] guy saying it is to be an “Eternal Waterfall” that never gets turned off. Unless it gets cold or something. File that away for after the Memorial’s dedicated, when we will be able to see/hear if they actually turn the Eternal Waterfall on and off during operating hours, which will seem like the logical/inevitable thing to do.
9/11 waterfall design unveiled [bbc]
The East River School

Everyone’s An Earth Artist: Lamanites

I guess if God can appear to a backwoods New York farmboy, send an angel to groom him for four years, and then command him to translate a sheaf of golden plates into the Book of Mormon, He can also guide Robert Smithson to build the Spiral Jetty in Utah; lure me out to visit it within a couple of months of its reappearance in 1994; and start me a-bloggin’ years ago about Earth Art and Google Maps; so that, when it’s on Discovery Channel, there’ll be someone to point out that the Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in western Amazonia are–duh–Lamanite-era copies of Nephite-style forts.
But since that would require paying even a little attention or credence to the archaeology-based school of Book of Mormon apologists I’ll pass.
It’s enough for me to think of the headaches these earthworks will give to Michael Heizer.
‘Astonishing’ Ancient Amazon Civilization Discovery Detailed [discovery.com]
Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purús: a complex society in western Amazonia [antiquity.ac.uk]

Everyone’s An Earth Artist: Dolphins

I know dolphins are supposed to be super-intelligent and all, BUT. While this detournement of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty executed from rapidly dissipating, tail-agitated mud is passably performative, as a critique of entropy, it’s a little too pat and predictable. Back to the studio, dolphin!
Life: Bottlenose dolphins mud-ring feeding [youtube via, uhh..]

On Tom Wesselmann And The DC Dither

When DC art lecturer and blogger John Anderson emailed to ask if I’d heard about the scandal surrounding the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Tom Wesselmann, I was like, “Tom Wesselmann scandal? Do tell!”
He pointed me to Nina Burleigh’s account of it in A Very Private Woman, and now that I’ve read it, I’m kind of confused.
According to Burleigh, the problem involved Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #44, 1963 [top], which was included in Alice Denney’s “The Popular Image Exhibition” in April 1963. Several of the Gallery’s trustees previewed the show and “questioned the propriety of the collage” which included “a framed portrait of the president of the United States with the silhouetted nude body of a movie star,” who was interpreted to be the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe:

[The trustees] called for a personal meeting with Alice Denney. They demanded that she remove Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude No. 44 from the show. “It was ironic, because we all knew what was going on at the White House,” said Denney’s assistant at the time, Eleanor McPeck. “Kay Graham and Marie Harriman and some others insisted this picture be taken down and taken out of the show. The board was very conservative. They were simply not prepared for it.”
Alice Denney objected, but the board members were the museum’s financial lifeline. Reluctantly, the curator prepared to take the Wesselmann down. But behind the scenes the matter had come to presidential attention. Mary Meyer, by then one of the president’s occasional lovers and a confidante, told him about the little art imbroglio. She described the Wesselman collage with the Monroe nude beneath his official portrait. She told him about the ladies of the gallery board, all in a dither. The image of grande dames such as Marie Harriman scrambling to protect his reputation was too funny. The president laughed at the story and told Mary to tell the little Gallery of Modern Art that he wanted the Wesselmann to hang. The collage stayed in the show. [pp. 182-3, footnote: Alice Denney, Eleanor McPeck]

Which is awesome and hilarious, and it’s become a part of Wesselmann’s own story, too. But. That nude in Great American Nude #44, modeled after the artist’s wife Claire, is hardly Marilyn Monroe. And with that actual radiator, actual coat, and actual telephone that was wired to ring every six minutes, this thing is more a multimedia assemblage than a “collage.”
And as for JFK, I know JFK. JFK was a friend of mine. And you, head of a woman cropped from a Renoir painting, are no JFK.
All Burliegh’s descriptions of supposedly scandalous elements–the sitting president leering at a reclining nude–actually match up to an earlier Wesselmann, Great American Nude #21, painted in 1961 [below]. But that nude looks even less like Monroe than #44, who, you could at least imagine just had her dress blown off by a steam grate.

As the luck of the market would have it, both of these Wesselmanns have been resold in the last few years. Great American Nude #44 sold at Christie’s in 2002 for $944,500. “The Popular Image” is listed at the top of its exhibition history. Then in 2007, the Abrams publishing family sold Great American Nude #21 at Sotheby’s for $4.1 million. But there’s no mention of “The Popular Image” at all. After a 1962 exhibit at Tanager, Harry Abrams bought the picture in 1963 and didn’t show it publicly until 1976.
A press release for the Sotheby’s sale [pdf] boasted about #21‘s controversy:

Demonstrating the potent power of Wesselmann’s imagery, the work was censored from a 1963 exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art reportedly because the image of the President and a nude appeared together, perhaps with the Marilyn-like lips, a loaded reference to Kennedy, and Monroe, who was recently deceased. Wesselmann wrote a letter to the editor of Art News in the summer of 1963 against the museum’s decision to censor the work.

So what really happened? Was #21 in “The Popular Image” show, only to get pulled after all? Did word of JFK’s pillowtalk intervention come too late, or only after the fact? Or was #21 the image bandied about when deciding on Wesselmann’s inclusion in the show, but it was never at risk of actually making it in? And was #44 ever at risk of being pulled from the show? The only thing I know for sure is that despite some rock-solid sources, the Washington Post never mentioned the issue–or Wesselmann’s participation in the show–at all.

Mary Meyer, Proto-Minimalist?

I’ve been poking around to find examples of the artwork of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the Washington DC painter who was connected romantically to both Ken Noland and JFK. When her work is discussed at all, she’s generally been associated with the Washington Color School, typified by Noland’s and Morris Louis’s saturation techniques using liquid paint on unprimed canvas.
But that’s clearly not what’s going on in this work, Half Light, from 1964, the year she died. It is crisply painted geometric abstraction. If it resembles anything, it’s proto-Hard Edge-style Minimalism.

[2019 update IT IS NOT. According to Mollie Salah’s May 2019 lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Meyer did in fact use the archetypal WCS staining technique, figuring out how to control the edge of her paint. We need to see more even more!]

“This looks like that” is a pretty feeble art critical tool, I know, but it’s still fascinating to consider Meyer’s work when looking at, say, Carmen Herrera’s Rondo, which was made a year later in New York, and which entered the Hirshhorn’s collection in 2007, only after Herrera’s incredibly prescient-seeming work was “discovered” by the market in 2004.

Whatever the circumstances, contexts or differences between these two artists’ works, Herrera’s remarkable story serves as a reminder of just how incomplete our generally accepted notions of art history are, even–or especially–for the very recent past. And it also throws deserved doubt on the arbitrariness of amateur vs. professional, and successful vs failed when it comes to artistic production.
It’s impossible to say from one painting, of course, but do we know that Mary Meyer should not be considered one of most accomplished painters ever to work in Washington DC?
Half Light, 1964, donated in 1976 to the Smithsonian American Art Museum by Meyers’ sons [americanart.si.edu]
Rondo, 1965, Carmen Herrera, Hirshhorn Museum purchase, 2007 [hirshhorn.si.edu]

The Washington Wives School

You start pulling on a thread, and you never quite know what starts to come out. For some great stories about the Washington Gallery for Modern Art and “The Popular Image Exhibition,” reader JA suggested, I should really check out Nina Burleigh’s 1998 book, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. So I did, and wow. No kidding. But I’ll get to that.
In addition to conducting an affair with JFK and getting killed soon after his assassination, Mary Pinchot Meyer was also one of Anne Truitt’s best friends, Kenneth Noland’s lover for a fairly extended period, and a very serious painter herself.
As Burleigh describes it, Georgetown and DC’s insular, faux-hemian postwar art community–including the members of the nascent Washington Color School–provided the havens for Meyer’s emotionally rocky life. [There are no images in the book to support it, but Burleigh repeatedly hints Meyer’s own painting was central, if not formative, in the development of the Color Field School generally, and in Ken Noland’s adoption of his signature bulls-eye specifically. Timing and other people seem to disagree with this idea, ~~but I can’t immediately find any images of Meyer’s work.~~ (see new post above) I’ll have to come back to this.]
New art, whether it was Abstract Expressionism in the 50s or Pop Art in the 60s, was met with criticism and suspicion from even the most politically liberal of Washington’s fundamentally conservative, power-anxious, ruling class. And art and culture were strictly gendered at a deep level almost unimaginable today–or maybe not.
A couple of brief excerpts really captured the character and challenges of Truitt’s environment in a very unfamiliar way. For me it makes her creative and career accomplishments all the more remarkable to see more of the very specific local culture in which she was working.

Often the main ties between art and power were through the wives, many of whom either sat on gallery boards or were amateur artists themselves. For at time it seemed every other wife in Georgetown was either taking painting lessons or setting herself up in a studio, though most remained firmly in the dilettante class. Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was linked romantically with one of the Washington women who painted, Sarita Peet, who went on to marry artist Robert gates, one of Mary [Meyers’] teachers at American University. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson’s wife was a painter. Helen Stern, wife of lawyer Philip Stern and one of Mary’s closest friends, painted. The wife of Estes Kefauver, Nancy Pigot Kefauver, was a painter. [she was the one tapped by the Kennedys to create the Art In Embassies program. -ed.] Tony Pinchot Bradlee, Ben’s wife, eventually had her own show of sculptures. V.V. Rankine, the wife of a British speechwriter, shared studio space with Mary for a time. In a few years, Mary herself became one of the links between Washington artists and power politics.
Portraitist Marian Cannon Schlesinger, then married to Arthur Schlesinger, recalled that most Georgetowners were not all that interested in art but liked having artists in their midst to buttress their cultivated sensibility…
Marital ties between politics and the arts brought support to real artists who were struggling without money or personal connections. Having a cabinet secretary as a guest on the opening night of one’s show was all to the good. Better yet, the women’s husbands often had the money to buy the work…
Among serious artists, the capital was ruefully regarded as a backwater. New York was where they’d rather be. Washington did not provide much of a market for modern art, recalled Alice Denney, who handled the work of many of the big New York abstract artists in Washington. “I couldn’t sell a Jasper Johns then.” [p.154-5]

Whaddya know, the assistant director of the WGMA and the curator of “The Popular Image” had previously been a dealer. [Founded Jefferson Place Gallery, in fact, the Deitch Projects of its time and place.]
DC’s spirit of suspicion, amateurism and of dismissing artmaking as a wifely diversion reached a zenith/nadir in an event that sounds so much like a script for a Paul McCarthy video, I want to see it re-enacted:

By the late 1950s modern art was not regarded as subversive; rather it was just silly, or at best baffling. In 1961 the Washington wives of a group of scientists and diplomats won fifteen minutes of fame [sic] when they decided to become abstract artists during their regular bridge games. Those who took breaks from the card tables went into the kitchen and splattered canvases with kitchen items–flour, syrup, ketchup, house paint, and anything else that would stick. After a few months they showed their “paintings” to their husbands, who found them amusing, and to a few Washington galleries, who showed interest and offered to buy them. Then they broke the story to the Washington Evening Star, which covered their stunt with tongue-in-cheek glee. “An Artistic Slam,” said the headline. “Ten suburban bridge club women have pulled a fast one on modern art…Among them they have 37 children.” [p155-6]

Is it really that far off from Clement Greenberg’s description of Anne Truitt a couple of years later in Vogue?
update: Thanks to DC arts veteran and expert John Anderson for insights and corrections.

Anyone Tell Me About Vern Blosum?

As I’ve been digging into the history of modernism and contemporary art in Washington DC, one of the most prominent events I keep coming back to is “The Popular Image” and its performance companion, the “Pop Art Festival.”
Organized Alice Denney in the Spring of 1963 for the fledgling Washington Gallery of Modern Art, “The Popular Image Exhibition” was a very early exhibition of Pop Art, coming at the same time as the Guggenheim’s Pop/Object show [which, unlike the DC show, traveled around the US], and less than six months after Walter Hopps’ seminal “New Paintings of Common Objects” show in Pasadena. Alan Solomon, who wrote an essay for the DC catalogue, then reconfigured the show a bit that fall for the ICA in London [1], where it introduced the US variant of Pop to Europe.
I’m most fascinated with the Pop Art Festival, which included a Happening by Claes Oldenburg designed for a DuPont Circle dry cleaners; a sprawling Judson Church/Yvonne Rainer/Kluver/Who knows who else dance performance in an Adams Morgan rollerskating rink; and an opening night tape recording performance by renowned Pop Artist John Cage. I know, right? But let’s wait on that. There’s a mystery from the show first.
A Washington Post preview from April 14, 1963 titled, “Eruption of Pop Art Slated for This Week,” mentions an artist I’ve never heard of, and who I can’t find mentioned in any other reporting or reviews of the show: Verne Blossum.
“Verne Blossum, who is inspired by parking meters with red ‘violation’ flags,” is mentioned between Roy Lichtenstein, “who likes comic strips,” and Jim Dine, “who attaches a lawnmower to a canvas and paints around it.” Blossum’s painting [above], is reproduced alongside Large Campbell Peeling Can by Andy Warhol. So that’s a pretty nice grouping. And yet.
And yet, they spelled his name wrong, for one thing. It’s Vern Blosum.
In 1967, the NY Times reported that his parking meter paintings series, titled “Time Expired,” was the subject of questions at a lunchtime docent tour at MoMA. “It’s a series of time paintings culminating in a giant expiration,” he replied. But no work by Blosum appears in the Museum’s collection today.
In his Smithsonian archives interview in1972, Larry Aldrich also mentioned buying Blosum’s work, but none is listed in the Aldrich Museum’s collection database, either.
I mean, it sure seems like the guy was doing something right in the 1960s; his almost complete [apparent] disappearance–or at least his delayed re-indexing online–makes me want to find out more.
UPDATE: Woohoo, I’m hearing details from a couple of people, and am following some hot leads. This has the markings of a great story. Stay tuned.
[1] In his May 2009 dissertation at Case Western, titled “Just what was it that made US Art so Different, so appealing?” [pdf] Frank G. Spicer III notes that Blosum, George Brecht, and Robert Watts were in the DC incarnation of “The Popular Image,” but were not shown in London.

Never Mind! Bruce High Quality Foundation Made The Gate, But Not The Article

A little while back, when I realized that Bruce High Quality Foundation, the ambiguous, anonymous art collective and The New Hotness, were behind The Gate, I took them at their word and began to question whether what we knew or assumed about the project was true, misinformation, or both. As they put it,

When there are moments of clear misinformation, those are generally used to make people be more conscious of the potential that it’s all made up. They have a function so that you always know it has been written by someone somewhere.

Specifically, I wondered if the fantastic and seemingly serendipitous documentation of The Gate and the front page NY Times article by Randy Kennedy that followed were, if not fabricated, then at least planted, managed, manipulated or produced in some way by BHQF.
I should say that at the time, I was also writing arts features for the NYT. Though I don’t know Randy Kennedy personally, I have a huge admiration for his work. My questioning of how the The Gate story was presented should in no way be construed as casting doubt on Kennedy.
But just imagine a publicist were involved. And/or that the Brooklyn designers who photographed and witnessed The Gate were friends or even enlisted participants of BHQF members. The contours and details of Kennedy’s article could be entirely accurate, and from a journalistic standpoint, he’d be totally in the clear.
What would change is the perception and interpretation of BHQF and their work. What if Bruce–who, at the time, refused even to identify themselves as BHQF–had a publicist who helped them get their project into the NY Times? It’s as far-reaching as it is far-fetched.
More plausible, though, would be the idea of setting up not just the execution of The Gate, but its publicity. The Gate‘s $2,000 budget was a challenge to the conflation of budget and value in public art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates had been loudly–and, I argued, inaccurately–presented as a $20 million “gift” of the artists to the public. Robert Smithson’s widow Nancy Holt allowed his scruffy Floating Island to be realized posthumously with a $250,000 budget, which organizers touted as the “anti-Gates.”
This was the context for BHQF’s brilliant, absurdist, and flagrantly shoestring idea. But the question seems obvious, even intrinsic: if a floating gate chases a floating park and the Times doesn’t cover it, is it public art?
So anyway, I contacted the two designers who were the Times’ sources for the The Gate article, and I asked them more about their experience as BHQF’s first audience. Basically, it all checks out. Here are some excerpts from their email accounts:

Continue reading “Never Mind! Bruce High Quality Foundation Made The Gate, But Not The Article“

Mind The Storr: On Gerhard Richter’s September

Seriously, I could fall into Gerhard Richter’s website and not surface for days. There’s just so much stuff. And related stuff. And meta-stuff. Auction histories for specific works? Cross-referenced Atlas pages? It just goes on and on and on.
Recently, two interviews with Rob Storr were added: one is about Richter’s Cage Paintings, which Storr showed at the Venice Biennale in 2007, and which are now at the Tate. [It’s a comically great business model to make and sell giant series of paintings intact instead of slogging it out one by one.] There’s a lot of discussion and still photos of the making of palette knife & squeegee process for the abstract pictures–I always thought Richter only painted them on a table, but there he is on his ladder. And Storr has a thoroughly enjoyable smackdown of the fiercely “deterministic” Rosalind Krauss’s connection of Richter and Johns. I’d pay cash money to see that panel discussion.
Same day/same outfit is another video, Storr is in the office at Marian Goodman, discussing September, the small monitor/TV screen-sized painting of the World Trade Center attack that opened Richter’s latest show at the gallery. [Yeah, I know it was actually a photo of the painting.]
It’s funny, I’d conveniently forgotten how central war, destruction, civilian casualties, and terrorism have been to Ricther’s work and his experience. How does that happen? Anyway, it’s interesting stuff.
Gerhard-Richter.com [gerhard-richter.com]