I can’t quite say why, but I had a pretty intense Jon Jost phase when I first moved to New York. I saw his All The Vermeers In New York several times, lured in by the title, but kept there by the film’s demanding and precise construction, and its underlying art-vs-money themes. [That said, I don’t remember it too well; better add it to the rental queue.]
Anyway, I’m sure–pretty sure. kind of sure. hoping–that when the Whitney Museum put then-Vivendi/Universal chairman Jean-Marie Messier on its board in the late 1990’s, it was NOT it in the hope of adding one more Vermeer to New York City’s collection.
FBI looking at Messier as part of its investigation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, which netted someone a Vermeer and some Rembrandts [bostonherald.com]
All The Vermeers In New York[imdb.com, amazon]
FYI, New York’s Vermeers are at the Met [5] and the Frick [3]
Category: art
“Ladies, Step Away From The Bags”
Artforum’s gossip columnist Rhonda Lieberman wasn’t on the list for artfully poseurish artworld duo [Yvonne Force-Villareal and Sandra Hamburg] Mother, Inc.’s recent Fendi-sponsored CD listening party, so she traded a blowjob for entry. At least that’s how it reads.
A little context: Mother, Inc. started as backup singers for Fischerspooner. The title quote above comes from the oh-so-vigilant guards watching the sponsor’s display case.
Hot Commodities [artforum scene & herd]
Every Building On The Sunset Strip–And Then Some
When I saw Amazon’s A9 Local yellow pages feature, the first thing I thought of was Ed Ruscha’s 1966 artist book, Every Building on The Sunset Strip. It was the first Ruscha book I bought, and it makes me laugh to remember how I thought I paid too much for it way back when (it’s easily 10 times as expensive now).
Anyway, using Mikel Maron’s A9 whole-street-grabbing script, I tried all through that weekend to re-create Ruscha’s Sunset Strip. The result was a lot of technical annoyance.
First, starting from a given address, Maron’s script grabs an entire street–a damn big proposition in the case of Sunset Blvd. (Technically, The Strip itself is only a fragment, the section from Doheny to Crescent Heights, from Gil’s Liquors to the Virgin Megastore.)
Trying to save the giant series created some odd results: one seemingly random image would intersperse itself all the way along. After trying to edit this one out, the resulting series were suddenly non-continuous. Something odd was happening when I saved the series and then reconstituted it.
I hadn’t yet cropped the image series at the appropriate intersections, so I didn’t get to try knitting them together into two long panoramas. Actually, I found the A9 images’ redundancy kind of nice; the periodic picture-taking indirectly revealed the (non)movement of the traffic along the Strip.
Anyway, then I saw Jason pointing to Eric Etheridge’s discussion of Every Building, and I think, better to throw this out to the lazyweb and see if someone can tell me how to figure this out, or just do it and make their own selves net-famous.
Flavin-esque
No one rips off quicker than window dressers. They take next week’s ideas from last week’s paper, or they stop by the magazine stand on the way to Home Depot.
One Monday morning, I passed by Bergdorf’s on my way to work just as they were unveiling the new windows. I stopped dead in my tracks as, unbelievably, two artist friends’ works were ripped off at once: the backdrops were Stephen Hendee’s crystalline architectural forms made of foamcore and black tape, and the designers’ names were printed in the perspectival receding typeface of Ricci Albenda’s paintings. By no coincidence, both artists had been featured in a cover story in art/text magazine that had hit the stands just days before. I called both artists and their dealers that morning, and the whole shebang was gone by the next day.
So I’m a little less shocked, shocked, than Todd is to find out Saks Fifth Avenue windows are decorated with “Dan Flavin” fluorescent lights. I’m also sure that Flavin’d be rolling over in his grave, if only the last work he completed before he died wasn’t a Christmas light installation in the windows of the then-new Calvin Klein boutique on Madison.
Flavin on Fifth Avenue [fromthefloor]
Weird. Why have I written almost the exact phrase three times now? [google: “dan flavin” “calvin klein”]
Watch Regarding Clementine Close Tonight
The exhibition that Choire Sicha curated which inexplicably included me, Regarding Clementine, is closing this evening.
There’s a swanky beer bust [sic] from 6-8, a closing party, to which the less stalker-ish among you are definitely invited.
Clementine Gallery
526 W 26th St, Chelsea Arts Bldg, 2nd Floor
[note: For the more stalkerish, the address is 526 East 26th st, and it starts at midnight.]
Look At Me, I’m At Art Rotterdam 2005 Feb. 24 & 25
Assuming they don’t close down all discussions of art, film, and culture before I get there, I’ll be in Rotterdam, participating in a couple of panel discussions around the upcoming Art Rotterdam fair.
In one debate on Feb. 25, Saskia Bos, director of De Appel in Amsterdam, will moderate as we discuss private and public funding for the arts, particularly for museums. [I’m there to discuss my work at MoMA with the Junior Associates.]
Also on the panel:
Claudia Rech, Head of development Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy
Rainald Schumacher, Director Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany
Kees van Twist, Director Groninger Museum, Groningen, NL
Frank Lubbers, Vice-Director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL
The other one is still gelling, but I hope it doesn’t involve Islamic fundamentalists. More details soon.
Art Rotterdam 2005
Regard me at Regarding Clementine
I’m gonna be working at the Clementine Gallery as part of Choire’s show again today. If you’re in Chelsea, stop by and say hi.
Clementine Gallery, 526 W 26th st, Suite 211
Previously: Regarding greg.org at Regarding Clementine
On Smithson, Space & Time
Another cover from Life“the lunar surface photographed by the Apollo astronauts in 1969” yields a comparison to Smithson’s cover for Artforum published just a month later: a distribution of mirrors across a square of parched earth, one of a number of illustrations from his “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Placing these images together, which speaks to an argument about travel as a form of cultural repetition that suspends an experience of the present, demands a great deal of archival legwork on Reynolds’s part.
-Pamela M. Lee writing about new books about Robert Smithson in “The Cowboy in the Library,” published in the Dec/Jan 2005 Bookforum. She’s referring to Ann Reynold’s 2003 book, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, which draws intensively and creatively on Smithson’s archives at…the Smithsonian.
The image above is Moonworks, artist Craig Kalpakjian’s 2003 proposal for creating earthworks on the moon. Read about it in Issue Magazine. Craig’s got a show up through Saturday at Galerie Edward Mitterand in Geneva.
Lee continues:
In one of the most striking passages of art history I’ve read in a while, Roberts connects a Mannerist altarpiece Smithson studied at length with the abstract sculpture he began making in the mid-’60s, by bridging a discussion of Jacopo Pontormo’s Descent from the Cross, 1525-�28, a deposition image composed around the rotational forms of its sacral actors, to the spiraling forms and crystalline structures of works such as Gyrostasis, 1968. What connects them in Smithson’s oeuvre, Roberts argues, is their attitude toward the deposition of time: Pontormo’s languorous Christ now exhibits a “depositional temporality,” whereas the growth process of a crystal is itself called a “deposition.” It says something about Roberts’ gifts as a polemicist that she can make this leap wholly convincing for the reader. More art history should be written with the kind of imagination and verve displayed here.
Roberts is Jennifer Roberts, who wrote Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. Smithson’s sculpture Gyrostasis was recently on view at the Hirshhorn.
On Math & Art In France
Although Gustav Eiffel didn’t explicitly use one himself, an American engineering professor has come up with a mathematical expression for the shape of the Eiffel Tower, based on its creator’s own studies of wind resistance, torquing, and load transfer.
Which reminds me of the photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Fondation Cartier, Mathematical Forms. They are monumental images of beautiful, little plaster stereometric models, which were created in 19th and early 20th c. Germany to illustrate complex trigonometric formulas. Several were published in the NY Times Magazine last month.
Elegant shape of Eiffel Tower solved mathematically [PhysOrg.com, via archinect]
Etant Donne: Le Grande Verre by Hiroshi Sugimoto through Feb. 27 at the Fondation Cartier
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Mathematical Forms [NYT Mag]
From Anne Truitt’s Journal, ‘Prospect’
I just read this Friday night on the train. Seemed apt:
Brenda Richardson, deputy director of the Baltimore Museum, installed the exhibition there. We had agreed that she would install alone so when I walked into the rooms filled with work dating from First, 1961 to 1991, I had the delight of seeing it from an entirely fresh point of view. One of the trepidations I feel when my sculptures are exhibited is that they may be harmed: people like to touch their surfaces, they mar them without intending to. Brenda forfended this possibility by isolating groups of sculptures inside a designated pathway: they stood aloof from touch save by imagination. I had the happy feeling that the work was safe. [p. 146]
…
Some time ago a friend who had flown from his home in Boston down to Richmond wrote me a postcard to say that he had seen in a bank there a sculpture he instantly recognized as mine. Recently a little girl saw that same sculpture, Signal. It is a small column, 59 inches tall x 5 1/2 inches x 4 inches, painted in clear yellow, white and blue horizontal planes. It must have looked like a Maypole to this enthusiastic child: she ran to it, hugged it, swung around it–and scuffed it. I do so like her reaction, which mitigated the automatic spasm of anger I always feel when one of my pieces is damaged. The bank has sent me the sculpture for restoration. I am working on Signal now, with the good feeling that I can return it in pristine condition to a place where it apparently encounters appreciation.
Not all damage is that minor. A columnar structure running on a line of gravity from earth to sky is as intrinsically precarious as a human body; no matter how carefully weighted and how strongly constructed, it can be struck down. Knot, a column 81 inches x 8 inches x 8 inches, was recently so toppled. This sculpture had survived the Persian Gulf War in the basement of the American embassy in Tel Aviv, but last month a photographer backed into it and knocked it over. A representative of the U.S. State Department Art in Embassies program, under whose aegis Knot had been placed in Israel, was present the other day in the studio when I uncrated it. As I raised it to its full height over our heads, we heard loud cracks. The material wedged into a solid cradle at its base, ballast to prevent its tipping, must have been shattered by the force of its fall. To judge from the scars denting its pure yellow, white and black encircling colors, it probably dropped at so tipped an angle that it hit the floor twice. The Art in Embassies representative remarked that the Tel Aviv embassy has a marble floor. In any case, the internal damage is, for a variety of structural reasons, irreparable.
I have never been able to detach myself sufficiently to prevent a feeling of having been hurt myself when my work is damaged. I use the money I receive for restoration to make new work, but I never stop rather anxiously holding all my own work intact in my mind, hoping for its safety. In Knot‘s case, this attachment was augmented by the fact that it had traveled in a foam-lined bed inside a wooden crate beautifully made by an old friend. He had for many years packed my work. Last December, he was killed, senselessly gunned down in the street, instantly bereft of both dignity and life in yet another of the wanton murders that now characterize our urban area. His crate was perfect; it stands in my studio reminding me of him, and of Knot as it will never be again. [pp. 159-60]
Excerpts from Prospect: The Journey of An Artist, by Anne Truitt, whose sculpture, Catawba, was recently damaged at MoMA.
Combined With Archie Bunker’s Chair, They Cover The Full Spectrum
The Smithsonian, specifically the National Museum of The American Indian, accepted a gold record for “Y.M.C.A” from the Indian guy in the Village People. For all the disco celebration in the rotunda during the handover ceremony, it pales in comparison to the Washington Post writer’s own campiness.
Celebrity Artifact [WaPo, via Towleroad]
Marinetti, I know, but who’s Mussolini?
Jonathan Jones gives a brilliantly outraged review of a show of ‘Italian Aeropaintings,’ a Futurist subgenre which flourished in the 1930’s. The curators at the Estorick Collection say this work demonstrates “a passion for the new perspectives and vertiginous excitements of aviation – an innocent wonder we have lost in our age of routine civilian flight.”
What they don’t say, and what gets Jones so rightly worked up: ’30s Italy was ruled by fascists; the planes in the paintings are bombers; the Futurists–especially Marinetti–were friendly suck-up loyalists to Il Duce–who loved to fly and was photographed in his flight suit climbing out of a biplane. One 1937 painting, Aerial Mission, Jones deduces, may even refer to the bomber’s-eye view of the Luftwaffe’s Guernica carpetbombing experiment itself.
Yeah, funny how they forgot to mention all that. The Italian government is thanked for its deep and stalwart support of the show.
Birds of Prey [Guardian]
Fascism? What Fascism? [Estorick Collection]
Re-inventing the Lightbulb, 2/2: Stephen Flavin
img: Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961-1996
Stephen Flavin is the only child of Dan Flavin and his first wife, Sonja Severdija. Trained as a filmmaker, Stephen, who lived apart from his father since his parents divorce, began assisting his father’s company, Dan Flavin, Ltd, in 1992. His first efforts–producing the artist’s all-important certificates by computer (previously, they had been variously handwritten or typed) and converting the elaborate and disparate index-card-based inventory of works, which was split among several galleries, to an electronic database–have helped in efforts since his father’s death in 1996 to create a catalogue raisonne of the artist’s work.
Stephen Flavin has overseen the activities of his father’s estate since 1997. He is private and is generally satisfied to have others–such as Steve Morse, the estate’s studio director, or Dia experts such as Michael Govan or Tiffany Bell–speak publicly about Dan Flavin’s work. While my several attempts to contact Stephen before the article’s deadline were unsuccessful, he did call me shortly thereafter and graciously agreed to discuss his experience with the estate, his father’s work, and Dia:
Continue reading “Re-inventing the Lightbulb, 2/2: Stephen Flavin”
Re-inventing the Light Bulb, 1/2: Emily Rauh Pulitzer
Although they happened too late to make the article, I had some enlightening conversations with Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a collector and curator of Flavin’s work, and with the artist’s son, Stephen Flavin, who manages his father’s estate. They’re worth sharing here for the additional light they shed [sic] on Flavin’s legacy and the complexities and contradictions inherent in his deceptively simple work. I’ll post them separately, first Pulitzer.
Continue reading “Re-inventing the Light Bulb, 1/2: Emily Rauh Pulitzer”
Did Someone Say Art Market Bubble?
Richard Polsky does a round-up of the 2004 art market on Artnet and makes some predictions for 2005, and guess what? Of the dozens of artists he looks at, only four–Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (??) and Ross Bleckner–are anticipated to go down next year. Most are going up, or are predicted to be “status quo,” which I take to mean either “they’ll go up, but I don’t know why” or “they’ll go down, but I don’t want to piss off my dealer/artist/collector friends by saying so.”
Murakami and Nara are cheap/easy shots: their auction prices have been wild for a while. Bleckner’s market has been sort of sleepy for a while, so no one’s shocked by that. And Felix, he’s just wrong on that one: the work that came up this year was either atypical, or sold very well. Soon enough, people looking for good Felix’s will find there aren’t that many left. I think Polsky’s just being pissy.
In any case, his analysis reminds me of the i-banks’ stock recommendations during the bubble: all buys, no sells, with all arrows pointing up. And we know how that turned out.
Art Market Guide 2004 [artnet]