Lot 278: Charles Harlan, Bricks, May 2013, ed. 50+10 AP, from Invisible Exports’ Artist of The Month Club, selling 18 Apr 2024 at Wright20 [update: sold for $378]
Invisible Exports’ Artist of The Month Club ran for five years. It was a subscription that shipped an edition of 50 each month, each artist selected by a different curator. Charles Harlan’s Bricks were the May offering in the AMC’s last iteration, in 2013. He’d been selected by Adam Lindemann, in whose gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, Harlan had showed.
AMC had almost as many blogs as curators; Invisible Exports artist/AMC coordinator Michael Bilborough would unveil each month’s edition with an artist interview. Harlan’s interview was a YouTube video of the artist and the curator playing ping pong in Lindemann’s garage in Montauk. The 2014 Internet Archive capture of the AMC site seems the most stable source of info left, with all the 2013 editions, plus at least lists of all the artists and curators. Invisible Exports itself went on hiatus a few years ago [Benjamin Tischer followed it with New Discretions.] In the absence of a definitive or persistent source of information, Artist of the Month Club’s history relies on these bricks—and their accompanying certificate of authenticity—to be told. Turns out the past is also here, and is also unevenly distributed.
Martine Syms, Untitled (sic), signed poster for Most Days, with Paul Cowan, ed. 28/30, 16×20 in., issued by Mixed Media Recordings in 2014
This one goes out to the Martine Syms truheads. In 2013, Mixed Media Recordings launched a Kickstarter to press Most Days, a “Mundane Afrofuturist” album of Syms on one side and Milwaukee artist Paul Cowan on the other. The reward for the $100 tier was a signed edition of this silkscreened poster, a photo by Cat Roif.
Like a coward, I just got the album, with my unsigned, folded up poster in the sleeve. But now that one of the 30 signed posters—now reported to be offset printed—is coming up for auction, I’ll have a chance to upgrade without breaking the seal on my original vinyl.
Some people wanted to make art in the gap between life and art.
Some people, meanwhile, are interested in the gap between if you move it you destroy it and actually we didn’t cut it up because it has little tongues and grooves and just slots together.
Joshua Smith, Untitled (Forbidden Colors), 2024, via IG/@joshuasmith1983
Untitled (Forbidden Colors) has been realized again, this time as a work by Joshua Smith. The parallelogram of Los Angeles sunlight coming in might be my favorite thing about this photo, after the work itself. It would be great if it draws out the Felix Gonzalez-Torres original from MOCA’s storerooms, and even better if there can be a stop to the killings in Gaza.
Exterior of the Brick House at the Glass House, photo: Michael Biondi via Town & Country
As an architecture fan and a survivor of a visit with him to the Glass House, I feel like I can say it is really too bad Philip Johnson was such a Nazi. Because the ancillary content would have been amazing.
It is still so worth checking out Spencer Bailey’s report in Town & Country on the restoration of the Brick House. Though it is right in front of the Glass House, and connected to it underground—it contains all the plumbing and mechanicals that make the Glass House possible—the Brick House has never been open to the public.
Which is not the same as not open to visitors. The Brick House was originally conceived in 1949 as a three-bedroom guest house, but it was quickly remodeled. And as everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Andy Warhol to Paul Goldberger readily acknowledge, it was Johnson’s sex shack. And it seems like it was hopping.
The butch boudoir interior has been restored to its 50s Fortuny-draped glory; the library has its uncomfortable number of fascism-related titles; and the halls are filled with regular rotations from Johnson’s collection of modern art. And now it is finally open for visitors, both those who head back to the city before nightfall—Johnson’s favorite kind—and the special ones who stay over. Like the Glass House, the Brick House is available for fundraising sleepovers. The mind reels.
Matt Olsen calls these Rauschenberg Chairs, because they were realized by one of Robert Rauschenberg’s original fabricators. He was one of the first artist/designers to do a residency at Captiva, too, in 2013. So maybe there was some carefree hammock or sling inspo there on the deck, too; I have not asked.
RO/LU Primarily Primary chair, 2011, fir, textile, rope, image via Patrick Parrish
But I think he took the form with him to Florida. RO/LU showed fir and fur-based sling chairs in late 2011, with ropes holding up a wild felt seat element by Ashley Helvey. Their full title was Primarily / Primary (after Carol Bove, Scott Burton and Sol Le Witt), namechecking three artists that had been on/in their minds while making them.
It is unsurprising now, but a refreshing (re)discovery at the time that in exploring the gap between art and furniture, RO/LU would find Scott Burton.
RO/LU, Settee X Three (After BURTON Photo, In Private, Public + Secret), 2012, Lot 169 at Wright20
Which, now that I bring it up, I can’t not post the greatest Burton-referenced piece in the sale, this group of walnut forms called Settee X Three After BURTON Photo (Private, Public + Secret). I’ve been staring at the 360-degree photos, and the pull-aparts of the the four pieces for ages, and still cannot quite process or piece them together.
I first got to know RO/LU as a blog before I got to know them as people, and one of the most amazing things they did was experiment with moving from digital/visual contemplation to real world experience when so much of the culture was trying to do the opposite.
Scott Burton, Granite Settee, 1982-83, coll. DMA, photo: Mary Ann Sullivan via Sight Unseen
So an object (Private) that was produced by eyeballing an old photo of a Scott Burton granite settee at the Dallas Museum, that is temporarily cast in concrete on a Williamsburg sidewalk (Public), and replicated somewhere else (Secret), that you can only understand in person, feels very on the mark.
“His work titled 2022, a single forged steel round, which he placed in the center of our 20th Street gallery in the spring of 2022, was his last realized sculpture. The experience of exhibiting this work, which to me felt like a sort of closing statement, is unforgettable. It’s hard to overstate what we are all losing with his passing.”
Used to be that people would race to the comments to be the first one to post “First!” Not sure why this quote from David Zwirner’s heartfelt email announcing the death of Richard Serra two days after it was on the front page of the New York Times made me think of that, since that is clearly not what’s happening here.
While thinking of what book I would rebind as the Bible for a conceptual art project, I checked out the second Google result for David Hammons’ The Holy Bible: Old Testament (2002), in which a copy from the edition of 165, coming directly from the publisher, apparently did not sell at Phillips in 2009.
And I was so caught off guard by the boilerplate artist bio appended to the bottom of the page—a practice unique Phillips—that I have to reproduce it here:
Artist Biography David Hammons American • 1943
Few artists are afforded the liberty to dictate exhibition schedules and public appearances, but David Hammons eschews the spotlight and rebels against the conventions of the art world. Whether intentionally or not, Hammons creates works so laden with spell-binding metaphor that they have become symbols for movements both in the art world as well as in the public domain. (His now-iconic In the Hood sculpture has been used by Black Lives Matter activist group.)
Hammons doesn’t work in mediums or any formal or academic theory—he famously has said, “I can’t stand art actually.” Still, with controversial works including his PETA-paint-splashed Fur Coat sculpture, Hammons remains one of contemporary art’s most watched artists. Hammons also doesn’t frequently exhibit, and his last major gallery show, 2016’s “Five Decades,” only featured 34 works. With a controlled market, Hammons sawUntitled, a basketball hoop with dangling candelabra, achieve $8 million at Phillips in 2013.
These Donald Judd Tables, a screencap from youtube by the New York Times
The Judd Foundation has filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit against Kim Kardashian and Clemens Design, LA, for claiming in a video that tables and chairs in Kardashian’s office are the works of Donald Judd. Zachary Small broke the story for the NY Times:
“It is simply not true that Clements Design commissioned imitation Donald Judd tables,” wrote [Kardashian’s] lawyer, John Ulin, to the foundation, adding that the wood type and overall proportions were different. “They are different tables with different designs.”
But the foundation pointed to an invoice from Clements Design in which it described the furniture as “in the style of Donald Judd” and included an image owned by the Judd Foundation of the authentic dining set.
Indeed, the furniture Kardashian had copied, examples of which are at the Arena at Chinati and in the 2nd floor of 101 Spring Street, are made of 2-by pine board, which determines the dimensions. The copies are in plywood, which is not one of the 13 wood options for the authentic table.
“These Donald Judd tables”: Screenshot from Kim Kardashian’s YouTube, from the Judd Foundation complaint filed 27 Mar 2024
Like with Gwyneth with her fake Ruth Asawas, it really makes you wonder why people don’t just spend the few hundred thousand dollars to get the real thing.
[UPDATE: It’s because then she couldn’t use Judd’s name and designs for her own marketing clout. She literally cited Judd alongside collaborator/partner/employees Rick Owen & his wife Michele and Vanessa Beecroft, and then claimed her knockoffs were real. If it had been real Judd furniture, purchased through the same gallery, Salon94, where she got her Rick Owens, she would have had to agree to not use Judd’s names or objects in ad, promo, or marketing. If she’d accepted the foundation’s offer to replace the fakes with real furniture *at a discount* she couldn’t have used her office—explicitly designed to look like Chinati—for her content. Which defeats her entire point.]
If only she’d left it on the moodboard: screenshot from JF complaint comparing a widely published photo of the Arena at the Chinati Foundation and its two Judd table&chair installation with a screenshot from kimk’s video showing Clements Design knocked off the space, not just the furniture, and then kimk claimed it was real.
[UPDATE: Obviously I need someone who downloaded the video—oh hey it’s on the Internet Archive, thanks, Chris!—before it went private to send it to me. Also, why is the case—2:24-cv-02496, in the California Central District—not on PACER? Oh nvm, it is now. Perfect screenshots added.]
Robert Smithson and Richard Serra fixing the soon-to-be-Spiral Jetty, 1970. photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni
I’ll have more to post about Richard Serra in a bit; he was a foundational artist for my world, and I wish his people peace.
In the mean time, nothing quite shook my little art world like finding Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo’s article, “Spiral Jetty through the Camera’s Eye,” in 2010 in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Journal. [Which I see has been subsumed by Chicago and Jstored.] That’s where I first saw this Gorgoni photo of Serra at Rozel Point with Robert Smithson, trying to fix the jetty he’d just built in the Great Salt Lake.
Sturtevant exhibition catalogue from the Everson Museum 1973, designed with Judson Rosebush, offset printed to look like Xerox, image: Tim Byers Art Books, c. 2019 NYABF
This is the catalogue for Sturtevant’s first and only US museum show until her 2014 MoMA retrospective. It is from 1973. The show took place at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. The 104-page catalogue is offset print, but was designed to look like a sheaf of photocopies on regular 8.5 x 11 paper. Sturtevant had the concept, and Judson Rosebush helped design and execute it. While confounding the notion of copy and original, and the notion of books substituting for a seeing an exhibition, this design choice also echoes Seth Siegelaub’s 1968 conceptual exhibition in a catalogue, The Xerox Book.
“Elaine Sturtevant, grouping of 2 – hand-signed prints” is technically true, that there are two, they were printed, and someone signed them. but they are 11 x 8.5 in. pages from a book
But I don’t think people are chopping up The Xerox Book and forging Sol Lewitt’s signatures on his individual pages and trying to pass them off as actual prints. Oh. Maybe that’s only because there are so many color Lewitt catalogues they can chop up and forge signatures on and sell as actual prints.
The Everson catalogue’s all the Sturtevant there is, and it is definitely getting chopped up and turned into forged prints. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that if Sturtevant DID chop up her own catalogues, sign individual pages, and sell them off as prints—or trade individual pages for a cup of coffee at Fanelli’s or whatever—it’d be a helluva coincidence that they all turn up at the same three scammy regional auction houses whose entire LiveAuctioneers.com presence is flooded with similarly “signed” “offset” “original prints” from dozens of other artists.
At this point I think it’s obvious that we need a photocopy facsimile of Sturtevant’s Everson catalogue, so people can see what she did, and appreciate it for what it is, not what it isn’t.
André Derain, Matisse et Terrus, 1905, 40.3 x 54.3 cm, being sold by the family of Etienne Terrus at Christie’s Paris on 9 April 2024 [cropped to show the entire canvas minus the unfortunate frame]
It is amazing that a painting like this can be out there for 120 years, and just turn up one day at Christie’s or whatever. But that’s what happened. André Derain, then 25, made this portrait of his friends Henri Matisse and Etienne Terrus, a local artist, on the beach in Collioure the summer they invented what came to be called Fauvism.
Derain presumably gave it to Terrus—it has remained in the family of his sister until now—and so it was not included in the works he and Matisse took back to Paris, and showed to much sensation and acclaim at the Salon d’Automne. It has never been publicly exhibited or published, and except for one biographer’s mention in the 1950s, was left out of the art historical record.
But a very similar, slightly smaller Derain portrait of Matisse alone, at the same table, even wearing the same fit, has been in the Philadelphia Museum’s collection since 1952.
Christie’s sold a previously unknown Matisse from Terrus’s collection last fall, a small “proto-Fauvist” depiction of the Jardins de Luxembourg from 1902. And Terrus was the original owner of a small Collioure landscape by Matisse that had gone through the Wildensteins to Christie’s to Edgar Bronfman—and back to Christie’s in 2014. So it feels like someone should have known about this—and maybe they did. But they nevertheless sat in a safe for sixty years.
Otherwise the only marvel greater than the painting itself is how two agencies are ready to claim copyright on them both, 119 years after they were made, and 70 years after their maker’s death.
Manet’s White Lilacs, c 1882, would be 37.4 x 25 cm, from the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, as photographed and uploaded to wikimedia commons as lilia blanco by Sailko
I guess my reflexive response to a ravishing late Manet still life of flowers on social media is to hype it, and only then to wonder whether Manet really did paint to the edges in a way that cut his brushstrokes in half.
Reader, he did not.
Édouard Manet, die Fliederstrauß, c 1882, 54 x 42 cm, collection, Alte Nationalgalerie
In 2020 wikimedia superuser Sailko uploaded a 12mb photo they took in 2018 of the cropped hot center of Manet’s painting at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. What you lose in breadth is more than made up for by zooming into the detail of each brushstroke and hint of bare canvas in that vase. What’s most interesting is how Sailko’s crop propagates across the net, and the many wiki-scraping printed object providers out there. It’s enough to warm my facsimile objective heart. [s/o rg_bunny1 and jeanettehayes]
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, oil transfer on Japan paper mounted on engraving on cardboard, 31.8 x 24.2 cm, though Quaytman points out the Israel Museum’s given dimensions only relate to the top layer, so the engraving had not been considered as part of the work. photo: Elie Posner
Lot 14: Andirons, c. 1790-1810, formerly the property of the Brooklyn Museum, sold by Brunk
When David Platzker first sent me the link to the Brooklyn Museum’s recent deaccession auction, I immediately thought of the phrase, “museum quality.” It has long been used by dealers to sell an object of such stature, manufacture, and significance that it should be—or at least could be—in a museum. How does it work, though, for objects that a museum sells off? Is “museum quality” only now for objects a museum wants to keep? Are these now pieces of “former museum quality”? “Some museum quality”? “Almost museum quality”? Brooklyn Museum Quality.
This all came to a head on the first page, when I saw Lot 14, this pair of Federal engraved andirons, estimated to sell for $400-600. Three is a trend, I thought, as I indexed these in my mind against the andiron that started it all—a photo of a lone andiron that turned out to be part of a pair, which was donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1971 with an attribution to Paul Revere.
And the andirons sold by the Wolf Family last year that matched the Met’s in almost every physical detail, but which had an unbroken provenance and an origin and date that differed from the Met’s. What would these Brooklyn Museum andirons add to this situation, conceptually?
“one w/slightly loose construction and leans slightly to the left, old repair/reinforcement to base”
Their date, 1790-1810, and manufacture, “American,” take us away from more specific understanding, not toward it. While they are of an identical type, they are different in enough details—the engraving the swaglessness, the flanges, the feet—that even an amateur andironologist would not suggest they were made by the same hands, the same shop, or even in the same town.
And then there’s the provenance. Though the auctioneer made careful note of the andiron’s physical condition—”one with slightly loose construction and leans slightly to the left”? Who among us, amirite?—the only provenance information provided is the freshest: “Property of the Brooklyn Museum.” I mean, we can guess there’s no conservation history, but whatever object record, accession or donor data, or historical documentation the museum may have held for these andirons is not provided.
Someone clearly knew something, though. Because they paid $41,000 for these andirons, 100x their low estimate, and 5x the price of the perfectly provenanced Wolfs’. People are willing to pay for that Brooklyn Museum quality.
