Mirage is the name of the dress, Dior Haute Couture F/W 26-27 via Yahoo
“The airbrushed T-shirt version of the 1974 artwork Lynda Benglis ran as a two-page advertisement in Artforum that sparked an editorial protest and eventually led to the founding of October Magazine, printed as an almost unrecognizably ethereal palimpsest on a sheer, beaded, short-sleeved dress in Jonathan Anderson’s Benglis-inspired Dior Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026-27 collection? Yeah, yeah I am.”
“And are you wearing the—”
screenshot detail from the Dior Haute Couture F/W 26-27 show via
“The actual 1974 T-shirt, first issued as an edition of 25, but one of perhaps as many as 50 total, some of them framed, and each with different screenprint and airbrush variations, so it’s peeking out from under my strategically unbuttoned shirt? Yeah, yeah I am.”
Albrecht Dürer et al, The Triumph of Maximilian, 1515-17, printed 1799, collection NYPL
Rather than build an actual f’ing arch the Emperor Maximilian commissioned a monumental print arch, which could be reproduced and installed all over. It was the only of his grandiose print projects that was completed during his lifetime. Albrecht Dürer and a workshop of least four other artist/printers spent two years producing 198 woodblocks to print on 36 folio sheets (18 x 24 inches). The assembled image is 12 x 10 feet, and was printed in five editions, beginning in 1517. The first edition of around 700 was distributed to the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. The Fraktur typeface was commissioned for this print.
The New York Public Library says their The Triumph of Maximilian on view at 42nd Street at the moment, printed in 1799, is a third edition. But the third edition was printed in 1559; the edition printed in 1799 was the fourth, which sounds a little rough. [The NYPL item listing has this correct.] Nevertheless, it is on view, and should be seen before it goes into storage in October. [h/t @arthistory.bsky.social for the heads up].
Detail of the Met’s proof of Maximilian’s arch, with blank space, and the outline of Folio sheet 28.82.25
[A FEW MINUTES LATER UPDATE] In the three 16th century editions, the 24th panel of historical events was left blank. It was to contain an image of Maximilian’s tomb, which would be created, printed, and distributed for installation after his death.
Albrecht Dürer [sic], The blank 24th historical panel (1559) [sic] from the 1st edition [sic] of the Triumphal Arch, woodcut with traces of gilding and hand colouring, 258 x 159 mm, upside down at NGV
In the Met’s proof, that folio sheet includes the thick column at the center of the detail above, and two rows of scenes. The National Gallery of Victoria, meanwhile, has a 3rd edition of the Arch, printed in 1559, with the 24th panel replaced. But they also have the blank 24th panel [from a 1st edition?] The inclusion of a border likely means it was cut out of an assembled Arch, not from the sheet, and not, it seems, from their Arch, whose decorative border looks intact. Also, they show it upside down.
It would be my new favorite Dürer print, but the Met says only the column and the first two scenes on that sheet are by Dürer; the rest is by Hans Springinklee. So I guess it is my favorite Springinklee.
George Catlin, Floyd’s Grave, Where Lewis & Clark Buried Sergeant Floyd in 1804, 1932, oil on canvas, 11 1/4 x 14 3/8 in., collection SAAM
Had a fascinating conversation with a scholar working on early 19th century American painting, and we talked some about George Catlin. Though I’ve long been interested in Catlin’s unusual and sometimes problematic career, I did not know about this painting.
Catlin spent the 1830s exploring and painting Native American culture up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. His first trip was with William Clark, of Lewis & Clark. Which might be how he came to know this site, on the top of a hill above the Missouri, 1,200 miles north of St Louis, where Lewis & Clark buried Charles Floyd, who died just four months into their 1804 expedition. Catlin returned to it multiple times.
Louise Lawler, Truck, 1978, offset lithograph, 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in., a 2015 gift to MoMA from David Platzker and Susan Inglett
While studying MoMA’s Louise Lawlers the other day, this little snapshot-sized print loomed larger than it does in real life. At first Truck (1978) seems like basic street photography, out of step with the art-in-the-wild practice Lawler became known for.
But then you realize the truck that gives the photo its name is in front of MoMA. And that MoMA has Sol LeWitt banners on it. Because LeWitt’s first US retrospective opened on February 3rd. Those Lines in Four Directions read immediately as LeWitt, but they don’t map immediately onto any works in the show or the catalogue. Combined with the Museum’s name along the top, I expect these were ads, not works in themselves.
Louise Lawler, Volkswagen, 1978, offset lithograph, 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in., a 2015 gift to MoMA from David Platzker and Susan Inglett
The stripes sure reflect in the Harrison & Stone building’s glass panels, though. And for a second, it seems like they’ve gotten picked up by the protest signs on the street. Did LeWitt get picketed? No. Those are Daniel Buren stripes. And so 31yo Lawler has caught two of her [older] contemporaries in one shot on the street. Or, rather, two, since there’s a related picture calledVolkswagen.
In fact, though, it was a setup. By Lawler herself. In 1978 Lawler and artist Chris D’Arcangelo helped organize and document ten performance works Buren staged in New York City, Twelve Ballets: Ballets #8 à #19. A continuation of his 1975 performance, Seven Ballets in Manhattan, the first two, Ballets Nos 8 & 9, were staged by Buren himself in late 1977. After Buren left, John Weber Gallery managed the rest of the project, which involved a group of five performers holding Buren-striped signs walking—and getting photographed—along various routes through town. Ballet No. 11, which went through midtown, happened on Febrary 2nd. Lawler’s photos of each performance are on Buren’s website—except for the two she made for herself, I guess.
Daniel Buren, Ballet No. 11, 2 Feb 1978, Le long de la 5ème av., entre 6e av. (O-E.) et Lexington av. ; entre 42e rue et 53e rue (S-N.), New York, photographed by Louise Lawler, image via danielburen.com, where it has a massive copyright watermark, vive la France ig
Because now that we know they passed it, it seems like a choice that Buren’s photos don’t include MoMA, Even though 53rd Street & Sixth was the northwest corner corner of their route [a loop, I think, from 42nd & 6th, across 53rd to Lex, and then down to 4nd. Except Buren talks about walking along Fifth Avenue. idk] They do include the art protestors showing solidarity with some electricians picketing a jobsite, though. It’d be interesting to see Lawler’s contact sheets.
Until then, artist book dealer-turned-MoMA curator David Platzker does shed some light on Lawler’s process. His catalogue essay for MoMA’s 2017 Lawler show explores the development of the artist’s use of ephemera as an artistic medium. These two pictures—which he dates to Feb. 1st—were first printed as Kodak postcards, snapshots, then Lawler had them printed commercially. The examples Platzker and Susan Inglett donated to MoMA are from this offset run. With just the one word title and her name, date, and copyright on the back, they look like the barest definition of a postcard, and she apparently sent them out to people as such. Love that for her.
Installation view of Tracings and Arrangements, by Harrison Kinnane Smith, of works by Kinnane Smith [left wall] and Louise Lawler et al [right wall] at Emmelines
While working on the previous Louise Lawler post and revisiting Harrison Kinnane Smith’s Lawler-engaging show Tracings and Arrangements at Emmelines last spring, I dug up the images of the Permanent Art Collection of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns the Emmelines building now called 660 Fifth Avenue. The Lawler traced works on view at Emmelines, in the busy subway station in Brookfield’s basement, were identical to those owned by Brookfield, and installed out of public view, in 250 Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. Kinnane Smith’s own editions, also in the show, were made using the Brookfield documentary jpgs of the Lawler installations [above, left]
Lawler Guyton XX, arranged by Brookfield Properties, 2026, jpg
And that’s all setup for this image, which I found while rummaging through the rest of the deleted webpages of Brookfield Properties Permanent Art Collection, and which is also two works installed out of public view at 250 Vesey Street. I love this image and would Lawler the hell out of it.
I mean, I like the Wade Guyton Printed Matter fundraiser posters, too, and feel badly for the people in 2017 and 2015, respectively, who tried and failed to win the chance to buy them. Turns out Brookfield had a new building to fill with big, bold work on the cheap. But for all their wall power, they really come alive when photographed at a distorting angle in a generic conference room overflowing with other angles. I don’t know how it’ll look as a paperweight, but it feels like it would do very well traced.
Just in case Lawler wants to start appropriating images of installed art instead of shooting them herself, I’ll go slow, and try tracing it myself before searching for rogue coloring book illustrators.
So I take photos for reference, not really for publication, and the slight angle and the framing are just, sorry ig: Louise Lawler, Pollock and Tureen (Traced) 1984/2013, installed big at MoMA
Louise Lawler’s Pollock and Tureen (Traced), 1984/2013, is installed magnificently at MoMA right now, with three of Lawler’s paperweight photos round about. It’s a vinyl adhesive print of a vector file of an illustration by Jon Buller of Lawler’s iconic 1984 photo, Pollock and Tureen Arranged by Mr & Mrs Burton Tremaine, that invites consideration of all the mediations and transformations between an artwork and a viewer.
I kept thinking about Jasper Johns’s plaster casts while seeing the Duchamp show at MoMA, maybe because Duchamp made plaster casts of body parts, and some of the best ones belonged to Jasper Johns.
I’d hesitated to write about the mess created when Caroline Snow tried to sell a Banks Violette sign that he didn’t consider an artwork, without the authorization of the artist or his gallery, on behalf of a landlord who didn’t own it. I’m not a potstirrer. This is not a gossip blog, much. Mostly, I don’t want to make a messy situation worse for people caught up in it. And if they’re people I don’t know, I don’t want to add to their stress by reaching out/coldcalling/reporting it out.
THAT SAID. After writing about the original IG stories flareups and digging past Wet Paint’s reporting, it turns out I had an incomplete picture of the situation, and people familiar with the shitshow, and some of the people involved in it. Surprising no one, the whole problem tracks back to the flaky heiress and the landlord.
In an email Frank Haines corrected my characterization of New Dracula Theater as a side hustle to his work with Snow Gallery, when it was actually born from the ashes. He and Chip split with Snow in April 2025, saying the gallery was “a toxic workplace and the owner never left her bed.”
The landlord also never approved the SURRENDER DOROTHY sign, but did prevent the NDT artists from removing it when she pushed them out of the groundfloor apartment & garden. Ownership of the building recently switched to Renee D’Alto Citera, whose sister, and before that her brother, had owned the house.
I’d assumed things were chill with the landlord because in March 2025, Frank, Chip, and Caroline all donated to D’Alto Citera’s half marathon fundraiser. But given the Snow Gallery split above, it’s clear this info was out of date.
And so it is that after kicking out the artists and the gallery, the building’s owner felt entitled to the sign, too. Which, I don’t know enough about how tenant rights or property title transfers treat a borrowed sculpture installed on the roof. If the sign was just left behind, would D’Alto Citera be able to destroy it, and maybe even try keeping their deposit for her trouble? Maybe? But what if the tenants asked to take it with them, and she refused? She’s just seizing their stuff, no? Whatever she might think, the idea that it’d be her sign now seems like bullshit. And the idea that she could just expropriate an artwork is even more ridiculous.
So it is buck wild that this where gallerist Caroline Snow comes in. According to someone familiar with the timeline, the landlord approached Snow about selling her [sic] Banks Violette [sic] sculpture [sic] AFTER New Dracula Theater’s show ended, and the artists got pushed out. [I’m avoiding saying evicted, because I think it was messier than that.] So SURRENDER DOROTHY was not chilling on the roof; it had been seized.
And knowing this, Snow contacts Violette, who says the work is not for sale, and then who—as the chat screenshots show—said it was not even a work, and was intended to be destroyed. And THIS is when Snow is like, “Understood.” and puts it on Artsy. And after that, Violette’s dealer Todd Von Ammon tells her to take it down, which she only does AFTER the whole thing gets aired on Insta.
Through this whole saga, I’ve tried to figure out wtf Snow was thinking. And I kept coming back to The Great Gatsby, that Caroline Snow is a careless person who smashed up things and then retreated back into her money, and let other people clean up the mess she had made.
As I typed it out just now I remembered that Fitzgerald’s story, too, unfolded under a problematic billboard looming over a gritty Long Island highway. And now I definitely want to figure out what’s happened/happening with the sign.
Surrender Dorothy, an artwork Banks Violette also said was not an artwork, 2026, painted plywood and aluminum, 70 x 93 x 48 in., via IG/banks_violette_616
Texting “Hi Banks! I hope you are well. Is that ‘Surrender Dorothy’ sign your piece? The owner of the property has asked me to help her sell it.” is a helluva way to try to simultaneously authenticate an artwork and get an OK to sell it. Especially when you know full well whose it is, and what it’s doing on the roof of the Williamsburg townhouse where your gallery partner’s staging a show in his other side hustle gallery with his other partner.
The texter is Caroline Snow, of the Dash Snows and Thurmans and de Menils, whose Snow Gallery was not formally involved in Beginning of (The End), the Banks Violette show Frank Haines organized at New Dracula Theater, an exhibition space and recording studio in Brooklyn he opened last year with fellow artist Chip Kolpen. Violette collages on aluminum hung inside; a video projection filled the garden shed out back, and a giant sign of aluminum and painted wood reading SURRENDER DOROTHY was perched on the roof.
Yesterday Paul Soulellis posted “I feel so free,” the opening track of Madonna’s Confessions, time-stretched 800%, and now he’s posted the whole album. It runs 8.5 hours. I’m less than an hour into it, and Stretched Confessions is already album of the year.
As I wondered what ever happened since the amazing discovery five years ago of a 19th century monochrome and readymade that would overturn the entire timeline of the avant-garde, and why they hadn’t overturned the entire timeline of the avant-garde yet, I got an update from a greg.org reader in the French art world.
There turn out to be major questions about the provenance of the two, seventeen, or nineteen artworks found by Paris art dealer Johann Naldi, and in particular about his story of discovering them in a forgotten trunk and identifying them as lost works from the series of parodic l’Art Incohérents exhibitions of the 1880s and 1890s.
An extensive investigation published by Libération in 2022 [archive.is, and a youtube recap above] revealed that the actual owners of the objects are well-known antique dealers, who first reached out to the recognized scholar of les Incohérents—without any mention of the two most significant pieces, the Paul Bilhaud monochrome, and the purported Alphonse Allais readymade [sic]. Another collector recognized a print he’d tried to buy, but the dealers said it was reserved for a group they were assembling. When the collection turned up a couple of years later—with the monochrome and the window shade—it was purportedly in the dealers’ family for generations, and they had no idea what it was until Naldi came along.
There are other discrepancies with the historical record: the simple monochrome canvas doesn’t match any of the published descriptions of Bilhaud’s Combat… There is zero mention, ever, of Allais’ work, despite exhaustive coverage of seemingly every other minor thing Allais did or said. And the typeface on the label only came into use several years after 1882, when Bilhaud was reported to exhibit the work.
It’s all enough to cause one of the major art historians to withdraw from Naldi’s research project, and to quash interest in showing the Incohérents works in a museum. The Trésor National declaration instigated by the Musée d’Orsay in May 2021 as a means of preventing the works from being sold abroad, was in effect for only 30 months, so through November 2023. Now they’re presumably just for sale.
Johann Naldi and Michel Onfray on either side of a black monochrome purportedly by Paul Bilhaud via
And to top it all off, Naldi enlisted professional troll Michel Onfray to write about the artworks, with the point of taking down Duchamp and the avant-garde. Onfray is famously an atheist, anti-Freudian, philosopher who credits himself with taking down Christianity, Judaism and Islam, pyschoanalysis, AND Western philosophy, so why not take down modernism next?
“Reproduction du célébre tableau”, Alphonse Allais in 1897 reworking Paul Bilhaud’s monochrome joke painting from 1882
[UPDATE NOT SO FAST]
Thanks, @voorwerk, @doncalmecito, and @juancrodelo. Little did I know that the last time I gave much thought to the history of the monochrome, that history would soon be blown wide open? In 2020 it was a reconsideration of the racist graffiti found on Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which linked it to its supposed, satirical precursor, a portfolio of seven mdr titled monochrome artworks published by the famous Parisian funny guy Alphonse Allais on April Fool’s Day in 1897.
Cabin, October 14, 1979, photographed by Marian Zazeela, via Mela Foundation
First, La Monte Young is not related to Brigham Young. Not a grandson, not a great great nephew, not a third cousin, none of that. It was such a standard part of the composer’s Mormon roots origins that I assumed it had been checked, or that it had come from him. Brigham Young University musicologist Jeremy Grimshaw obliquely dismissed any connection in the foreword to his 2011 biography of Young, Draw A Straight Line And Follow It, only to somehow embrace it as confirmation of Young’s prophetic narrative. And it still persists, probably for reasons.
I mention Young’s genealogy because he cites childhood experiences in towns in rural Idaho founded by his Mormon pioneer ancestors as foundational to his most important musical innovations. The earliest sustained tone sounds Young recalls, he often recalls, included the droning hum of power lines and the electricity substation next to his grandfather’s gas station in Montpelier; and the winter wind whistling through the walls of the log cabin where he was born, five miles up the Bear Lake Valley in the tiny cheese-making enclave of Bern.
And I mention it now because according to Cameron Rowland’s Estate, Dia bought the cabin in 1979, “for La Monte Young historical site and museum. Birthplace of La Monte Young. Never used.” This was in January, just after closing on the second building in Marfa for Donald Judd, and just before buying 6 Harrison Street, a 45,000 sf building in Tribeca as a performance and rehearsal space for Young, Marian Zazeela, and Pandit Pran Nath. 6 Harrison was sold in 1985, during Dia’s first financial implosion. But Young and Zazeela’s New York City real estate is well known, or as well known as Dream House, the sine wave drone and light installation they’ve been performing in various locations since 1979.
2025 Google Streetview capture of the Bern cabin, which is actually two one-room cabins combined
It’s the cabin in Bern that seemed exceptional. Dia transferred ownership of it to Young and Zazeela’s MELA Foundation in 1993, amidst another of Dia’s spasms of financial upheaval and its separation from Dream House. It turns out Zazeela’s photo of the cabin on the MELA Foundation website, [top] was taken during a visit in 1979 on Young’s 44th birthday.
Trying to figure out what story a La Monte Young Birthplace Museum would tell, I did the most Mormon thing, and looked at his family history on FamilySearch.org. While people in the minimalist music and postwar avant-garde were confused about La Monte being related to Brigham, the Youngs posting decades of family photos and personal histories to their communal online genealogy network knew the whole family tree. There are letters where La Monte’s parents, Dennis Young and Mary Evelyn Grandy let relatives know that LaMonte and Zazeela will be joining them at family reunions in Idaho during the 1980s, the Dia era.
So it was just me, then, who was surprised to learn Young’s connection to Bern came from his father’s mother, who, like almost everyone else in Bern, was a Kunz. Dennis was 22 and Mary Evelyn was 19 when La Monte was born in 1935, and Dennis’s mother, Ella Grace Kunz Wilde, was married to her second husband (both named Leonard), and single-handedly running the Bern Cheese Factory. Wilde turned 800-900 pounds of milk/day into 80-90 pounds of cheese, in two log cabins built by her grandfather John Kunz in 1872. In the Salt Lake Tribune’s 1938 article, the cabins don’t look so different from the one the Youngs lived in. They were still there for the 1940 census, but decamped to Los Angeles in 1942, looking for work.
In a 1979 interview transcript with her aunt Florence Kunz Jenson, Mary Steck mentioned, I think, La Monte’s museum project: “Isn’t that little Bern Library or Bern Museum cute? It’s not much yet but I think it has the beginnings of something really special. I hope ( ?) keeps up with it.”
“He will, for as long as he’s alive, you know – and maybe it’s a good thing Warren’s involved. Warren’s a little younger than him.”
“Warren cares about it. I know he cares about it. He’s very proud of his heritage.”
Warren Kunz was Florence’s nephew, six years younger than La Monte, who sold the cabin to Dia. He died in 2017.
GSV of Bern
In Zazeela’s photo, the cabin looks like it’s in the absolute middle of nowhere, which may be how Bern feels compared to big towns like, say, Montpelier, or nearby Paris. But it’s right on the main road in town, across from the little LDS chapel, and next to the brick schoolhouse, built in 1921, whose roof has since collapsed. Google Streetview finally came to town last year, and captured the cabin’s next door neighbor storing parts for a project truck in front of it.
These days, adverse possession is probably low on the MELA Foundation’s list of concerns. A decade of funding shortfalls and the pandemic left Mela’s current Dream House installation, its performance program, and its archive in “existential” peril. Besides a general gofundme in 2020, MELA put out a fundraising plea in 2023 specifically to help make urgent repairs to the cabin’s roof. The “archival postcard” prints of Zazeela’s cabin photo, signed by Young, are still listed for sale on MELA’s site. Zazeela died in 2024. An email inquiry to MELA about the cabin’s status has so far received no response.
[few days later update] A representative of MELA kindly responded that there is no public program at or about the cabin, and the artist wishes people not to visit the site or engage any locals.
installation view, 2020-25, Tsurko Yamazaki, Shōhei Tomatsu, Jasper Johns, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, at MoMA, photo: Jonathan Muzikar for MoMA
From its acquisition in 2019 following the artist’s death until last year, Work, Tsuruko Yamazaki’s mesmerizing aniline dye on tin painting from 1957 was shown in a quietly bold installation about the moment of its creation.
Beginning in 1955, Yamazaki, one of the original Gutai artists, showed startling works made of tin containers cast off by the occupying US troops. Shōhei Tomatsu’s photos of occupied Japan from 1960 include some of those troops. Jasper Johns, meanwhile, made Flag beginning in 1954, after returning from a year in Japan, where he’d been drafted as one of those occupying soldiers.
Self portrait in Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Work, 1957, aniline dye on tin, 28 7/8 × 32 1/2 in., collection MoMA
Now, Yamazaki’s Work hangs in a gallery with more formalist resonances: postwar abstraction, messy process. It’s not easy to photograph, at least on its own; it always wants to implicate the viewer, too.
![a wide solid black rectangle printed with an ornate line drawn frame and a title, based on the famous painting [sic] by bilhaud,](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Allais_Combat_de_nègres_dans_une_cave-1024x717.jpg)
