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The Fake Warhol Lectures

So this week I gave a lecture about how collectors and the market get weird with art at the University of Utah. It was a lot of fun for me, and it seemed to go over alright. I took as a point of reference an earlier, well-known lecture at the UofU by Robert Smithson, the audio of which has posthumously been repackaged–without much justification, based on my research–into Hotel Palenque, a “multimedia installation” work that was purchased by the Guggenheim Museum.

It was only during a post-game wrapup with Prof. Monty Paret, the contemporary art historian who invited me, that I learned Hotel Palenque was only the university’s second most infamous artist lecture. After the famous Fake Andy Warhol lecture tour of 1967, that is.
In 1967, Warhol agreed to take a cross-country college lecture tour organized by the American Program Bureau. His appearance at the University of Utah was scheduled for October 2, and created “a mild furor,” according to the campus paper, The Daily Utah Chronicle. [One of Monty’s students, Michelle Condrat, researched the lecture history, including the series of articles of the Daily Chronicle’s investigation.]
From the lecture to the reception following, several people were suspicious that it was not, in fact, Warhol, but an impostor. The school held off on payment of the $1,000 speaking fee for several months. Then on January 31, 1968, after comparing photos of the U’s speaker with film footage of the artist, the Chronicle announced “Phony Warhol Suspected, Film Reveals Hoax On U”. It took about a week for Warhol–via then-manager Paul Morrissey–to come clean.
The impostor–who did not actually look anymore like Warhol than anyone with a shaggy silver ‘do and a pair of Wayfarers–turned out to be Allen Midgette, a young actor and Warhol posse member who appeared a couple of months later in Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. [Shooting for Lonesome Cowboys took place in Arizona at the end of January 1968, just as the UofU story picked up.] He appeared in the artist’s place at the University of Oregon; Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore.; and at the Univ. of Montana in Missoula.

The one-line mention of sending a double on a lecture tour is in Warhol’s art history bio, but I’ve never seen or heard any details of how the lectures appeared from the duped audience’s standpoint, nor how the impostor was unmasked, largely due to the doubts of people at the University of Utah and the investigations of the school paper.
The Chronicle articles are very focused on recognizing Warhol, getting Morrissey to come clean, and what should happen to the $1,000 fee. There’s very little about the content of the lecture or even about Warhol’s art generally beyond a couple of namechecks of Campbell’s Soup.
I’ll excerpt the Daily Chronicle articles below.

Continue reading “The Fake Warhol Lectures”

Get Me Chocolate Jesus’ Publicist

We had a four-hour layover at O’Hare yesterday, which was long enough to become thoroughly disgusted with CNN’s non-stop toggling between three major crises: what if that dude with the hair wins American Idol? the daily truck bombings in Iraq, and the Chocolate Jesus scandal. [The fourth piece in CNN’s rotation–how the Iraqi version of American Idol is bringing the country together–was obviously a feelgood story of hope.]
As disingenuously imaginary artistic affronts to religion go, Chocolate Jesus is definitely no elephant dung Madonna, not even a Piss Christ. The otherwise ignorable artist, Cosimo Cavallaro, is no Andre Serrano, much less Chris Ofili; his previous work seems muddled, messy, and unserious [or deathly self-serious, which amounts to the same thing.]
That said, even as my own religious self is discomfited, I think there could be some serious readings of the work appearing during this high season of hollow chocolate bunnies, but those critiques of commercialized Easter are irrelevant now, drowned out by the Catholic League’s self-(pre)serving venality.
But where was the outrage two months ago, when the same streetfront gallery, The Lab at the Roger Smith Hotel, showed “Detainee,” a performance by David Duckworth that criticized the US government’s sanctioning of torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq, Guantanamo, its network of secret CIA prisons, etc. etc.

In “Detainee,” the bound, gagged, and blindfolded artist was coated in red paint, then dragged across the floor to paint an American flag. The performance was repeated over several nights, Jan. 29-Feb. 2. [edited flash video is running on The Labs’ site.]
Duckworth’s piece is a clear reference to another transparently scandalous exploration of the exploitative dynamics of power, Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries,” performances in which the artist used nude female models slathered with his trademark blue paint as “living brushes,” sometimes with musical accompaniment.

“Detainee” has, at this moment, six citations on Google, including two from The Lab themselves. Not a peep of outrage from either patriotiness-loving demagogues or those zealots who “draw near to [Jesus] with their mouths.”
Either our media society is so sanguine about the idea of American torture that it’s not, in fact, outrageous any more, or Duckworth made a fatal mistake in the attention economy when he decided to keep his detainee jumpsuit on.
Detainee, by David Duckworth, Jan. 29 – Feb. 2, The Lab at Roger Smith [rogersmithnews.com]
Yves Klein Anthropométries [youtube]

Leaving On A Jet Plane, Speaking On Art Tuesday

Spiral Doily, found at the Sinclair Station, Corinne, UT, 2005

“Spiral Doily” postcard, Corinne, UT, 2005

Yow, didn’t realize how radio silent it’s been around here. I’ve been working on a couple of deadlines, one article I’ll go into later, and a lecture I’m just tightening up right now.
I’m heading off to Salt Lake City to speak at the University of Utah’s Visiting Artist [sic] Lecture Series. Given the venue, I’ll be talking a bit about Robert Smithson [who also rather famously gave a lecture at the school in 1972], the Spiral Jetty, and some of the stories and themes from both the blog here and my articles for the NY Times.
If I were pressed for a poetic theme, it’d be the mutable afterlife of a work of contemporary art. If I were presenting at CAA, I’d try to come up with a zingy title involving money. One thing that strikes me about most of the art historical world is the willful blindness on subjects of the market and its relationship to art and how it’s produced and consumed.
Once when I was talking to Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s, he used the term “economic curatorship,” something of an attention economy wherein works get greater attention and exposure precisely because of their prices. It’s an undeniable effect, but unless you’re an auctioneer, money is usually only mentioned in relation to art in an uncritically pejorative way.
This is all part of what I’m thinking about for the talk–the audience will include BFA and MFA students as well as art history folks, as well as my Utah relatives up to two or three times removed, I hear–how much of it goes in is still TBD.
If you’re the reader of greg.org who’s in Salt Lake City and who’s not related to me, you should feel free to come, too. Tuesday, Apr. 3 at 5pm, ART 158, in the Fine Art building, just between the library and the museum.
There’s some webcasting/podcasting/streaming element to it as well; as soon as I figure that out, I’ll post it here.

Whew: Olafur Eliasson’s Art Car For BMW

It had sparked one of those jump-the-shark anxiety attacks when I heard that one of the artists I most admire, Olafur Eliasson, had been commissioned to do an Art Car for BMW.
Even as it included such respected artists as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Jenny Holzer, BMW’s Art Car series has always epitomized the superficial lameness of corporate co-optation of artistic practice.
For someone as serious and critically engaged as Olafur to decorate a BMW–and not just any BMW, but a hydrogen-powered PR-mobile, the H2R, the promotion of which would only deflect attention from the German auto industry’s complicity in global climate change and their aggressive efforts to thwart greenhouse gas emissions cuts–well, I was worried. And the BMW press release didn’t help
But then I read an account of a speech Olafur just gave at the NAI in Rotterdam, where he talked about the car: “‘They are increasingly unhappy about it’, he says about his commissioner. But it is about the relation between the automotive industry and global warming.”
I guess I shouldn’t have worried. but still.
“It makes a difference to make art.” [eikongraphia via archinect, image via mwerks]

Hello? Christian Marclay, Please. Speaking.

So the Oscars. Did I just miss their press release warning that they were going to inject off-off-Broadway wacky juice into the show? Because after being numbed into catatonia by years of Debbie Allen, Debbie Allen manques, and Gil Coates’ Hollywood-snake-eating-its-tail directing, a simple heads up that they were going all avant garde would’ve been nice.
Never mind that both Will Ferrell’s weird musical number and Tom Hanks’ speech made reference to alcoholism. Plus there was Ellen’s rolling papers joke at the end. That’s mainstream.
What threw me–after the very existence of the non-relevant Ferrell song, that is–was that choir of sound effects people. Cool, sure, but WTF? Their multi-channel video backdrop made me think they were doing a live cover version of Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet.
Obviously the biggest Marclay cover version was that iPhone commercial, though. I’d say I hope he got royalties, but then, I wonder how much he paid to license those clips. Exactly. The proper course of action would have been for Apple’s agency to hire Marclay to do the commercial. Or actually, to do other commercials.
And speaking of commercials, did anyone else think of that VW shadow hands commercial during the Pilobolus numbers? Also, Pilobolus???
update: [d’oh, I see kottke‘s already got people working on the Marclay iPhone thing.]

Nailing The Armory

Paddy Johnson at ArtFagCity manages to capture the Armory Show and the entire art fair phenomenon in two sentences: “It’s hard to know what to think of anything. Everything looks like you should buy it.”
The Armory Show: New Digs, Same Fair [afc]

For The First Time, All Over Again

So Christie’s bought Haunch of Venison, which will open an outpost in Rockefeller Center, the spectacular, near-raw space where the Judd Foundation pieces were previewed? Great.
But is it, as the NYT calls it, “the first time, an auction house has acquired a gallery primarily to enter the market for new works by living artists”?
Have I just been in deep freeze, or didn’t Sotheby’s buy all–or was it half?–of Deitch in the late nineties for…one million dollars?

MoMA’s Feminist Future: A Picture Of Eileen Gray

WPS1 has posted the audio for MoMA’s recent symposium, “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” Listening to a panel discussion with no access to the visuals can be a tough sell, but the two talks I heard were frankly awesome:
Artist Coco Fusco’s performance as Sargeant Fusco sounded fierce and relevant, while the Guerrilla Girls, bless their hearts, sounded a bit out of touch.
The killer, though, is Beatriz Colomina’s discussion of Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. The thrust, if you will, of her presentation was that Corbu essentially raped Gray’s most important architectural work, E.1027, a house she built in Roquebrune/Cap Martin on the far side of Monaco, by putting murals depicting Algerian concubines throughout the house.
It’s obviously more complicated than that, and I find it remarkable that so little of what she talked about is generally known. I’ve heard people who should know better dismiss and diminish Gray’s work as recently as 2004.
Anyway, what’s also remarkable is that E1027 is still a deteriorating ruin. When I lived in Monaco in 1995-7 and set out to find it, no locals could figure out what I was talking about. The most comprehensive images I’ve seen from that era are on flickr, a photoset made by Daniel, an Irish architect, who hopped the fence in 1997 when the house was a squat [the last owner had been murdered a couple of months prior.]
I can’t find any images of Gray’s last house, Lou Perou, which was done near St Tropez, either. And I can’t find any word on the status of her own house, Tempe a Pailla, which was inland, up the mountains from Roquebrune & Menton in the village of Castellar. How is it that no modernist pilgrims have tracked and documented this stuff?
Listen to ‘The Feminist Future’ on WPS1 [wps1.org]
E1027: A Photoset by It’s Daniel [flickr]
update: Tropolist Chad points out that Colomina’s talk is an architectural classic. here’s the text of “Battle Lines: E.1027,” from 1995, for example, a lot of which she also presented at MoMA. As Chad puts it, “Of course, if I had to pick a dozen such texts to keep bandying about, that one would be near the top of the list. ” As Tropolism pointed out in Dec. 06, Colomina’s paper was also reprinted in the first issue of Pin-Up Magazine.
later update: Guy points out that Lou Perou is included in Caroline Constant’s 2000 monograph on Eileen Gray from Phaidon. I put it on my to-get list from the storage unit…

Proof of Concept: Il Heliostat di Viganella

The idea to use a large heliostat to deliver winter sunlight to a small village deep in a valley of the Italian Alps, was a success:

The mirror — 870 meters, or 2,900 feet, above Viganella and measuring 8 meters wide by 5 meters high — is motorized and constantly tracks the sun. Computer software tilts and turns the panels throughout the daylight hours to deflect the rays downward. But from Viganella’s main square, bathed in reflected sunlight, all that is visible of the false sun is a bright glare from the slope above.
“At first no one believed it could be possible, but I was certain. I have faith in physics,” said Giacomo Bonzani, an architect and sundial designer who came up with the idea of reflecting sunlight onto the square and made the necessary astronomical calculations. The project languished for a few years until funding — about €100,000, or $130,000 — came through last year from private and public sponsors.
The mirror was designed by Emilio Barlocco, an engineer whose company specializes in using reflected sunlight to light the entrances to highway tunnels. He read about Viganella’s plight on the front page of the Turin daily La Stampa and offered the village his expertise and services. “Whenever you do something for the first time, you’re either a pioneer or stupid,” he said. “We hope we’re the former.”
A concrete plinth was anchored to the rock face of the slope above Viganella to serve as the mirror’s base. The mirror panels were flown up by helicopter. The software that tracks the sun’s rotation is so sophisticated that the rays can be directed anywhere by the computer, which is in the town hall. “If the church or the bar in the town next door has an event, like a baptism, or a wedding, we can shoot the rays there,” Midali said. “It’s very versatile.”

When I first thought up a project to do this in 1999, even when I started talking to Olafur about it in 2003-4, I didn’t even know I was talking about a heliostat. But now with the Wikipedia, and the advent of the Solar Positioning Algorithm and the more comprehensive libnova celestial mechanics library–and the successful testing in Viganella, of course–my excuses for not building me one of these are rapidly diminishing.
Computer age brings sun to village in shadow of the Alps [iht via tmn]
Previously: On an Unrealized Art Project

Aqua Teen Hunger Farce

I was beginning to think everyone in Boston, and most everyone in the media, and most certainly everyone in the cable news industry, was a freakin’ idiot. [cf. nearly every angry, belligerent comment by an embarassed official; the smartass reporter asking the tagger when he was gonna get a haircut; the Department of Homeland Security reassuring us that there were “no credible reports of other devices being found elsewhere in the country.”]
But the Boston Globe’s Brainiac blog, co-written by Joshua Green, has saved the day, navigating a level-headed reportorial and analytical path through the fog of media. Good stuff.
Fortunately for Berdovsky and Stevens, the other level-headed Bostonian is the judge, who immediately questioned the applicability of the hoax-related statute. These charges will be dropped and the hysterical politico-media motivations behind them will be recognized. Eventually. Their haircut press conference was almost pitch-perfect. [In contrast, the sudden and total disappearance of Interference, Inc., the ATHF street agency, strikes me as kind of spineless.]

Meanwhile, even as I roll my eyes as the corporate co-optation of street art tactics, I have to admit, I love these Mooninites devices. They’re gorgeous. Graffiti Research Labs, which propagated the LED Throwies idea, took a swipe at the poseur-ish Interference. But I don’t think it’s really fair.
I’m reminded of something Marc Schiller, at Wooster Collective, told me when I wrote about corporate-sponsored street art in 2005 [oh, we were so innocent then]: “Once something’s out there, what matters is how well it’s done.” [nyt]

Ongoing Make coverage of the Mooninite devices, including beautiful closeups–and hopefully, someday, schematics and kits. [makezine]

Super Columbine Massacre NYT!

The constroversy over Peter Baxter’s decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance’s Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions.
This time, it’s not complaints by a sponsor, hypothetical complaints by a sponsor, or even his own personal distaste for the game. It was, as he explains to Heather Chaplin,

because of outraged phone calls and e-mail messages he’d been receiving from Utah residents and family members associated with the Columbine shooting. He was also acting on the advice of lawyers who warned him of the threat of civil suits if he showed the game.

Uh-huh.
Chaplin writes of SCMRPG!’s “champions” and “detractors,” which I think misses a major point. In the glare of attention and the fallout surrounding the game, and certainly around the decision to pull it. It’s pure media Heisenberg: as events unfolded and garnered more attention, everyone–Baxter, Danny Ledonne, the game’s creator, other designers who pulled their games in protest, and observer/critics–adjusted their own positions and justifications for their moral stances in light of what new had transpired.
Greg Costikyan posted a reader’s refutation of his legitimating defense/review of the game which is at once perceptive [and not just for using the twee critspeak, “games qua anything”] and entirely beside the point. Whatever Ledonne’s ex post facto interpretations of his game, the argument goes, his earliest discussions of it were not ironic metacommentary; they were the rantings of a dumbass who was wallowing in the Columbine killers’ actions. The game isn’t a self-consciously retro exploration of society, but an amateurish hack by a guy who didn’t know how to change the default settings on his RPG gamemaking software.
Conclusion: SCMRPG! sucks as a game and should never have been juried into the competition in the first place. Which sounds true, but irrelevant to this situation.
Sundance’s jury let in an exploitative, sensationalistic, controversy-seeking POS starring Dakota Fanning this year, but you didn’t see Redford pulling rank and yanking the film. It just got the critical drubbing it deserved and will presumably slip into oblivion as it should.
Instead, the fact that a POS like SCMRPG! got into the competition at all should spur debate over the critical standards for judging games, which seem poorly thought through at best. Get a smarter jury, one which isn’t just interested in flamethrowing qua flamethrowing by introducing a crap game to the competition.
But the combination of as-yet unformed critical consensus about what makes a “good” game or a game “good,” combined with Baxter/Slamdance’s knuckleheaded, ass-covering conservatism only strengthens the case that games need a new, different venue of their own. Whether it’s a festival, a competition, whatever, is up to the gameworld to decide.
As for SCMRPG!, I’m still inclined to cut Ladonne some slack. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone had turned tail after their musical Cannibal! was rejected from Sundance, there may never have been a South Park. And there may never have been a Slamdance, for that matter.
Artists are not always clear or conscious of what goes into their work, and they’re certainly not in control of the response it engenders when it gets into the world. Whatever the merit (or lack thereof) in SCMRPG!, it still resonates because of its uncanny similarity to a scene in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. The two killers-to-be are loafing around a basement bedroom. One plays the piano [fur Elise] and one plays an RPG on a laptop. It was an effortless kill’em game set in an empty desert.
The targets were dressed like the characters from Van Sant’s Gerry. After expressing surprise that anyone had noticed, the producer of Elephant, Dany Wolf, told me that they had to create their own game [using the Doom engine], because they couldn’t find a company who’d allow their video game to be used in the film.
Video Game Tests The Limits. The Limits Win. [nyt]

Lego Moholy-Nagy

Marcos Vilarino has recreated some early landmarks of modern photography in Lego, including this interpretation of Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Feininger’s “The Photojournalist” {note: it’s Andreas, not Lionel/Lyonel, who was a painter] and the world’s first photo, Niepce’s view out his window in 1826 [discussed previously.] [via kottke]

Agnes Martin Documentary at Film Forum

There are very few artists I’d like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist’s story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one can hold still, for fear, I guess, of boring the viewer, so there are invariably lots of slow pans, zooms in and out, dolly shots through empty galleries [if the budget’s high enough to lay track, though I’ve seen a cameraman improvise a dolly by sitting in a mail cart.]
And their ostensible populism usually results in a grating boosterism of PBS or the Hagiographic School, whereby the case must be made for the Artist As Genius. [Damn populist medium again, but the October-y intellectual monkey tricks of art critical dialogue never seem to find their way into documentaries. It’s as if everyone figures they need to dumb it down, or maybe it’s just impossible to edit paragraph-long sentences into anything remotely watchable.]
Which is all a long way around to saying that Agnes Martin is one artist I would love to see working and hear talking, and not just because I miss her in some irrational, oddly personal way. [I never met her.] I have some old lecture notes from a talk she gave at ICA or someplace, and they are windswept-free of pretense and the cruft of art criticism and history.
From the review of Mary Lance’s documentary, “Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World,” which she shot over four years, starting in 1998, Martin sounds like a refreshing, invigorating, and lucid counterpoint to the careerist whirl of the art world today. [And on top of that she sold tons of work.]
Anyway, Lance’s film opened yesterday at Film Forum, and it’s paired with a documentary about Kiki Smith. Lance will conduct a Q&A after the 8pm screening Friday [tomorrow].
Previously: Im Memoriam: Agnes Martin

What’s The Edition Size? Is It Available?

Awesome. Just. Awesome. A couple who lives in the Rockefeller Apartments across 54th St from MoMA was watching the museum test the projections for the their upcoming Doug Aitken installation.

Your Video Art Here [flickr via curbed]
One of my early formative MoMA shows was Gabriel Orozco’s Projects series in 1993, where he ran a scroll made of pages from the phone book down the center of the esclator handrails, and where he placed oranges in vases and cups in the windows of various Rockefeller Apartments residents.

A Day In The Office In The Gallery

For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil’s next project: “finding people who feel their lives have been ruined by appearing in reality television shows.”
Collins used the media hype around the Turner competition itself to garner the attention of his intended subject/collaborators. And according to the firsthand account of Lena Corner, one of the researchers, the strategy succeeded brilliantly.
She wrote about her experience of being on display while trying to actually get work done for The Independent last fall. It’s an uncanny parallel to the spectacle and exhibitionism Collins & Co. were researching, though fortunately for Corner she seems to have suffered no lingering effects.

Gillian, the cleaning supervisor, pops in. Apparently the cleaners have been too scared to empty our bin in case it’s an artwork. In 2004 German-born artist Gustav Metzger created a piece of “auto-destructive art” for the Tate. One element was a bag containing rubbish that he had collected from within the gallery, but a cleaner mistook it for a bag of rubbish and threw it out. Metzger declared the piece to be ruined. No wonder the cleaners are a little nervous.

Turner Prize: Inside one of the installations [independent.co.uk via cerealart’s blog]