James Bridle responds to the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s rescinding of an award because of Bridle’s public support of a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions that support genocide.
Getting Hannah Arendt quoted back at you should be a wakeup call for Germans, but I guess not yet.
Germany is far from alone in this situation. The far right, and the denial of genocide that accompanies it, are on the march everywhere. But the logic of Strike Germany is simple: if it is illegal in Germany to call for cultural change in Israel, then it becomes necessary to call for cultural change in Germany itself. Late enough to be ashamed, but never too late, I sign my name.
Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, 10 x 8 in., oil on canvas, [NOT?] being sold 20 Nov 2024 at Sotheby’s
In 1960, Leo Castelli’s gallery director Ivan Karp estimated that there were no more than fifteen people seriously collecting contemporary art. One of them was Al Ordover, who was one of the first people Karp took to Warhol’s studio.
Ordover bought this amazing little 1959 Jasper Johns painting, The Figure 8, from Castelli. One minute it’s obviously an 8, and the next it feels like it barely holds the 8 together.
Its only public exhibition was a December 1959 fundraising exhibition to benefit painter Nell Blaine, who had contracted polio during a summer trip to Mykonos. [Since vaccines are in the news, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, and was still in early distribution stages in 1959. Blaine’s paralysis left her in a wheelchair for life and unable to paint for several years.]
Why none of the history or context of this painting, as opposed to Johns’ use of numbers as a form/subject generally, is in Sotheby’s lot text, is a mystery to me. But with generalities, unrelated quotes, hyperbole, and a single jpeg are how six-figure paintings are sold these days, I guess. [update: OR NOT.]
Marsden Hartley, White Yucca (Memorial to Charles Kuntz), 1928-29, 31 3/4 x 25 3/4 in., selling today at Sotheby’s
After meeting him on the street in St Paul de Vence, Adelaide and Arlie Kuntz befriended Marsden Hartley and persuaded him to move to Aix-en-Provence with them in 1926. For the spring and summer of 1927, they painted together in Cezanne’s old studio, which was surrounded by flowering white yucca plants.
In 1928, Kuntz, 30, was killed in a motorcycle accident before ever having a public show of his work. For the remainder of Hartley’s life, Adelaide remained a significant patron of Hartley’s work, and some time around 1933, Hartley asked his dealer to get this painting to her.
In 2014, the Greenville County Museum of Art and Driscoll Babcock Gallery organized a two-artist show of Kuntz and Hartley, with works acquired from Kuntz’s daughter’s estate. She had long since sold off White Yucca. And Driscoll let his domain name expire.
[update: there were two other Hartley flower paintings at Sotheby’s today: some roses, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Pansies—not sure who that’s a portrait of.]
Isa Genzken’s first Weltempfänger/World Receiver, from 1982, is a readymade, a National Panasonic RF-9000 (SWL) shortwave listener. It is seen above, without the cover, installed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, as part of an exhibition of Genzken’s work from 1973 to 1983 [which the museum does not document hardly at all on their own site].
It was preceded by a series of works, large and small, that appropriated magazine advertisements for high-end audio equipment. And it was a precursor, if not the model, for the Weltempfängeren made out of concrete, which Genzken showed in 1986. Though I don’t know how that processed; it was beyond the scope of the Basel show, and is not detailed in Lisa Lee’s 2017 book, Sculpture as World Receiver.
It is also, on its own, perhaps the most highly considered SWL ever made, and the vintage radio and listening community are consistent in their praise and appreciation of it.
As for my own process, it is laid out here. I had considered making a readymade GenzkenWeltempfänger would be easier than making a concrete Genzken Weltempfänger. And while that may still be true, it would also be hella more expensive.
this installation photo by Mali Olatunji shows Scott Burton’s base/table/sculpture for these two sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, as well as, I believe, his brochure holders. image: moma.org
Looking for something with which to stay busy or distracted, I decided to record a reading of the brochure for Scott Burton’s 1989 Artist’s Choice exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, in which Burton rather boldly reconsidered the bases and pedestals of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures.
The kicker for anyone who got to the end of the mp3 was to be the last paragraph on the back of the brochure, where it explained that Burton installed some of Brancusi’s Birds on pedestal tables of his own design, and also created seating and brochure holders for the exhibition.
Well, between the untraceable static that appeared in the tracks with the computer-generated voice, my attempts to re-record the tainted sections by reading them myself in a breathy ASMR-style voice, and the jarring editing process in an app I really don’t like, and finally the way these two voices only serve to compound anxiety rather than alleviate it, I’m shelving the whole thing.
Read Burton’s brochure yourself. You shouldn’t need me to tell you It’s been on MoMA’s website since like 2017. Anyway, what I’d rather hear is Anne Umland’s take on this exhibit, which she organized while an assistant to Kirk Varnedoe.
Over the years as I’ve kept coming across David Hammons works, old and new, which hadn’t been publicly known, I try looking again for any info on one of his major public works—which also nobody knew.
In 1979 Hammons was one of a group of artists commissioned to make work for the big new airport under construction in Atlanta. Here is how ATL Airport Art describes it:
The initiative to display artworks at ATL originated in 1979, when the Domestic Terminal was constructed during Maynard Jackson’s first term as Mayor of Atlanta. In 1979-1980, the Airport commissioned and installed large-scale, permanent artworks by Curtis Patterson, David Hammons, Lynda Benglis, Benny Andrews, Sam Gilliam and others. The Airport received its first of two Governor’s Awards for the Arts for this series of commissions, but an ongoing program was not instituted and the artworks were not maintained.
Benny Andrews’ chronology says he made a 95-ft mural, as did 13 other artists. Indeed, here is a 35mm slide showing Benglis’s giant mural. But Patterson’s website includes a large bronze relief. [Two, actually; he made another after the first got remodeled out of place.] And the project has five folders in Gilliam’s archive. But I’ve never been able to find a photo or even a description of Hammons’ work, or news of its status. [Though I think now the Airport Art site makes it pretty clear these early works are gone.]
KJ: You did pieces for a while that had dowels with hair and pieces of records on them. Like the piece you did for the Atlanta Airport.
DH: Those pieces were all about making sure the black viewer had a reflection on himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it. Like looking at American Indian art or Egyptian art—you can try to fit yourself in it but it really doesn’t work. And that’s the beauty of looking at art from other cultures, that they’re not mirror reflections of your art. But in this country, if your art doesn’t reflect the status quo, well then you can forget it, financially and otherwise. I’ve always thought artists should concentrate on going against any kind of order, but here in New York, more than anywhere else, I don’t see any of that gut. It’s so hard to live in this city. The rent is so high, your shelter and eating, those necessities are so difficult, that’s what keeps the artist from being that maverick.
So dowels, records, and hair? You mean like the extraordinary sculpture that just turned up at Christie’s this month? Untitled (Flight Fantasy) is from 1978, and is made of spindly bamboo reeds piercing a broken record filled like a taco with unfired Georgia clay. It is on view right now.
David Hammons, Untitled (Flight Fantasy), 1978, bamboo, Georgia clay, record fragments, plaster, colored string and hair, 22 x 60 x 9 in., selling 21 Nov 2024 at Christie’s
This sculpture has been in the same collection since it was made. It’s very domestically scaled, and I am having a hard time imagining how it would scale up for an airport. And I’m having a hard time imagining how something so fugitive and delicate would survive in what soon became the world’s busiest airport. On the other hand, given what we know about the conservation of unfired clay, I’m having an easy time imagining why it’d longer exist.
Glenn Ligon, Untitled, 2024, digital pigment print on Hahnemulhe, 41.9 x 30.5 cm, ed. 30+15AP via curatingcambridge.co.uk
It’s a digital print based on one of his recent drawings he calls Kozo Drawings on his site, after the kind of paper (mulberry). In the edition description, they’re explained as frottage, graphite rubbings Ligon made of the craggy surface of his own paintings. In this case, it’s a painting of a text from James Baldwin.
For example: Glenn Ligon, Untitled #10, 2023, carbon and graphite on Kozo paper, 18 x 12 in., via glennligonstudio
There’s something interesting about Ligon adding another layer to the mediation of his text pictures, particularly when it depends on their [also] being an object. Then there’s something else when the rough, fragile, abradedd sheet is translated to an ultrasmooth print. It feels almost like a facsimile. [And speaking of which, I can’t lie, as interesting as the print and drawings are, it was the sleek black envelope the print ships in that pushed me over the blogging edge. I’ve been making janky versions for Facsimile Objects, and this looks so much sleeker.]
Ironically, the prints were produced at Griffin in NYC, but now will ship from the UK. All for a good cause, though.
Looks like more writeups of the Cady Noland installation at Glenstone are turning up—and more images of it are getting out. Ian Ware at 202 Arts Review has apparently found the same stash of Noland photos online—though he is more assiduous in his image copyright crediting than I was.
And that’s all reason enough to rejoice. But beyond that, Ware has a very interesting, site-specific take on Noland’s take on her works’ new home. He finds a relationship between the temporary walls Noland erected to block a distracting view of the museum’s pond, and the museum’s own temporary walls blocking off the building’s renovations.
He also sees in Noland’s alterations and additions to the installation a critique of the Raleses and their multibillion-dollar project. Here he draws on the larger context of the Raleses’ business dealings and Glenstone’s construction–and the lawsuits with its contractor that precipitated the current closure and renovations of the new museum building—and even some of the lurid investment shenanigans by the contractor’s family—a local real estate dynasty, apparently—that “may as well have been written for a tabloid delivered straight to Noland’s doorstep.”
What feels more resonant—and which I think takes more properly into consideration the involvement of Emily Wei Rales, in curating, collecting, and institution-building—is the exhibition of Noland’s work alongside the text collages of Lorraine O’Grady and the powerful sculptures of Melvin Edwards.
As someone who’s watched the Raleses develop their vision from various vantage points, I feel like they’ve been thoughtful to iterate away from the narrow trophyism of, say, the Fisher and Broad collections. The collecting path from Split/Rocker did not have to lead to Noland, or O’Grady, or Edwards, but here they are. If they do take a couple of hits from an artist they think is significant, I imagine they’d be undaunted, maybe even appreciative. Their venture faces more credibility risk from privileging artists’ approbation than from accommodating their critiques.
But this gets to the crux of Noland’s work today, when the poisonous forces of media, politics and power have outstripped everything she flagged back in the day. Can her new work make a similar impact to her earlier hits? Is that even something she considers? Or does the proliferation of objects trapped and neutralized in acrylic blocks, perched on industrial logistics flotsam target a new, contemporary source of dread we’re still too asleep to realize? And does this luxuriously contemplative installation help us to see, or does it sedate us?
John Perreault recounted the story in his 2005 review of Mike Bidlo’s Erased de Kooning Drawings show, but I think he got it from Robert Rosenblum’s catalogue essay, who got it from Bidlo himself: that Clyfford Still once submitted a blank canvas to a museum group show out of spite, and then Bidlo did it out of homage. Here is how Bidlo explained it to Rosenblum in 2003, in Artforum:
RR: And didn’t you also do some kind of performance/installation piece about a mythical Clyfford Still?
MB: Oh yeah, that was the show curated by Alan Jones. The piece was based on the time Clyfford Still was asked to take part in a museum exhibition of regional work from California. Still claimed he didn’t want to compete with other artists, so he suggested that his contribution be a six-by-ten-foot unprimed canvas. I found this story in the Metropolitan Museum’s Clyfford Still catalogue. The idea of the blank canvas fascinated me. So many other artists have used blank canvases to make aesthetic statements, but Still’s gesture seemed to be the most nihilistic, a true act of anti-art. When we installed the piece in the Philippe Briet Gallery in SoHo, I included the text from the catalogue in a frame next to the painting.
I couldn’t find the Met’s Still catalogue, but Rosenblum did, and said the show was a group show of large-scale drawing at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in 1949, and that Still sent a, “6-by-10-foot canvas blank as the fabric comes from the factory.”
But there is an earlier source for that quote, and it sounds like neither Bidlo nor Rosenblum knew of it, because it did not exactly go down that way.
It’s a letter Still wrote to Mark Rothko, a transcription of which is in the library of the Still Museum in Denver. [pdf] The letter is from December 1949, and includes a reference to “two days ago.” But there is also a “postcript” in which Still mentions repeating the tale “years later.” So did the show happen in 1950, or sometime closer to his arrival at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946?
Most of the story is Still mocking his colleagues’ efforts to supply a large drawing to the show, while refusing the invitation himself. Still didn’t show a blank canvas; he only threatened to:
Two days ago after a very sumptuous dinner at the Curator’s, the issue was revived. “All the show needs is a drawing by you, Clyff. That will really put it over. How about it, Clyff. Just a nice big drawing.”
“O.K. I’II give you a picture. After alI, this show to an artist of integrity can only be a gesture. Since it is made for a museum program, I will give you my gesture, my respect for the public art gallery working in these terms. I will give you my contempt for the whole business: a 6 x 10 foot canvas blank as the fabric comes from the factory.”
The matter was not mentioned again.
I don’t quite get how the postscript timing works—
Postscript: I told the story years later to Ed Cahill in New York City. He said, “I would have taken you up on that and hung your canvas.” I repIied, “I know you would have, Ed. That is why I wouldn’t have made even that offer to you.”
For his part, Bidlo was happy to contribute to a group show, which was titled, improbably “Clyfford Still: A Dialogue.” It was organized in October 1990, and Roberta Smith described Bidlo’s massive blank canvas as, “mostly as an accessory to a story of Still’s megalomania told in an accompanying wall label.” The fate of Bidlo’s Not Still is unknown to me at present.
After Picasso died in 1973, publishers in Berlin and Rome decided to capture the moment with a sprawling print portfolio project, Hommage à Picasso. It included 69 artists in six boxed volumes in red linen. Even though many of the 58 artists in the initial five volumes were Americans, there was also a separate 11-artist volume for America’s Hommage à Picasso—which included two works too big to fit in the box. There were also three artworks delivered in matching linen-covered tubes.
It’s really all over the place, and Hommage à Picasso‘s most accurate embodiment of Picasso’s influence on the 20th century art world is that it was almost entirely men (66), almost entirely white (65), and the portfolios that didn’t go to museums have often been broken up and stripped for parts. [Sotheby’s had a complete set in 2017, and Wettman sold a 54/58ths Hommage last May, with a complete America’s Hommage sold separately.]
The only reason I mention any of this is because in 1974, Walter de Maria was at Virginia Dwan’s ranch, working on the first version of Lightning Field. And I can only imagine him taking a break from precisely driving stainless steel spikes into New Mexico soil to make his contribution for America’s Hommage à Picasso portfolio:
Untitled, 1992, 14 x 11 in., acrylic & silkscreen on canvas, selling this month at Christie’s
Over the years, I’ve tried making some myself and used them as references for other works. Nothing profound to say here, I just really, really like Richard Prince’s little joke paintings.
I mean, they’re like trading cards
They also do remind me of John McWhinnie, who showed them, and was amazing, who always had discoveries, and is gone, which sucks. So maybe it’s weird that a monochrome joke painting can also be mournful, but here we are.
Alex Greenberg not only has a review of Glenstone’s Cady Noland exhibition, he breaks news about it. And he not only breaks news about it, HE HAS PICTURES. Run, click, don’t walk. I’ll wait.
OK, while I think he’s kind of overinterpreted the transgressive unavailability of those black palettes Noland has added to the room otherwise filled by the contents of the artist’s Gagosian show last year, Greenberger is right to notice the slipperiness of the exhibition checklist. There are objects that are on the map, but not on the works list. The stacked palettes are an “element” in this category, and so is another stack of aluminum objects—which turns out to be a 2024 work “on loan” from the artist [scare quotes in the original].
It’s been almost three weeks, and they have not “corrected” their information, and the Glenstone folks get a little coy when Greenberger asks if they will. Now Glenstone is a professionally run and thoughtful institution where the impact of subtle detail is not unappreciated. This incompleteness, this inaccuracy, is part of the encounter; this disconnect between what you see and what you’re told is part of the experience.
[December 2024 update: they have added the loaned work to the checklist. It is “‘Untitled’ 2024, metal crate, metal palettes, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.”]
Let me add another piece of info in turn, which I don’t know whether to believe myself, but that fits: Clip-On Man, the 1989 work at the pavilions’ entrance, listed as being from a “private collection,” is also a loan from the artist.
I read Sidetripping at Glenstone last time I was there, sitting on Martin Puryear’s elegant bench, facing a tastefully manicured wilderness. Gatewood revels in the underbelly of New Orleans as a degraded destination of American freakdom. Burroughs’ text is a highly baked, freeform riff on the photos, which Gatewood put in front of him while working on assignment for Rolling Stone. In subject, luridness, and bleakness, it felt like a touchstone for Noland’s entire project, if not a straight-up Rosetta Stone. I can see why she’d put that at the entrance of her show. [And name her previous show after it, and her book.]
[NEXT DAY UPDATE: I went back to Glenstone today to see this shiny stack I’d seen before, now disclosed to be a new work from the artist. This Pinkerton’s crate situation is a bit overdetermined, I think. There are actually two similar crates of stamped, galvanized sheet metal in the gallery, each with the name of a different regional dairy, and each threatening the involvement of the Pinkerton’s if you steal it. One looks like this, complete but very vintage. The one Alex says was cast certainly has a pristine finish. It could be sandblasted or remade, for sure. I did find a picture of the previously unacknowledged work on the internet:
a previously unacknowledged untitled artwork from 2024 by Cady Noland, seen in an uncredited photo found on the internet, also showing a pallet whose auratic status has yet to be disclosed.
That middle pallet is the one with the Amazon ASIN sticker still on it: the Vestil AP-ST-2424-SB, currently listed on AMZN as unavailable, though it can be easily found on other retail sites.
Speaking of Amazon and pallets, that black pallet in the background is of the type also mentioned in Alex’s review. It, too, is findable online, though maybe you need a commercial account to purchase it. I think the “violation of state law” thing is, like the Pinkerton’s warning, a boilerplate assertion of ownership for property that circulates unattended on these mean streets. A cattle brand for corporate assets.
On my way home, I had to return a cursed Amazon purchase, and so made a rare trip to a Whole Foods, where I was greeted by this:
While we wait to hear if these pallets, too, are a previously unacknowledged Cady Noland, we can bring their implication in the monopolistic retail/digital/content behemoth engulfing our world into the unsullied noncommercialism of the Glenstone installation. Also, if, looking back at the Gagosian show it felt like half the non-vintage elements were sourced at The Container Store, remember there is one in Chelsea, right next to a huge Whole Foods. Instead of an artist who has walked away from artmaking, we may have to reimagine Noland as someone making art from the churning world she passes through every day on her way to the gym.
I watched Corinna Belz’s documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting today, thinking that the artist hard at work in his studio would clear my head, or at least distract me.
Then I was overwhelmed anew by an exchange with Belz as Richter is sorting through stacks of old photographs. As Richter held a snapshot of his middle-aged parents, Belz asked, “You left Dresden, East Germany, in 1961. Did you ever see them again?”
“No, never.” Richter replied. “I was a recognized refugee. A certified political refugee. And it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t get a permit…a travel permit for the East.
“Not until later, 1987, when I had an exhibition there. Then, with the ambassador, suddenly everything was possible.
“But by then they were all dead.”
“Did you realize in the 60s that you would never see them again?”
“No. Absolutely not. You think things will change and it won’t last. You don’t think people will grow old and die. When you leave them, they’re young.”
I knew this was here; I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and it inexorably changed the way I thought of Richter’s relationship to photographs, his subjects, and the arc of his entire project. A young artist becomes a refugee when his war-ravaged country splits apart, and he never sees his family again is not the Richter origin story we were used to. And Richter lost in sadness as his answers to the questions linger in his silence is not the icy master of critical detachment we’ve been taught.
But today, my ache over the career of this artist built on personal trauma that unfurled across the shifting fascist and imperial politics of the 20th century was overshadowed by my dread of the future. Because part of my processing today involved replaying with unwanted, fresh intensity the idea of leaving, of fleeing.
The questions of where? when? how? land differently than they did even yesterday. But at least I asked them. Am I ready to never see my parents again? wasn’t even a question I’d thought of. Neither, it turns out, did Richter.
The anxiety I’m experiencing while imagining having to take care of the tin foil on this Isa Genzken sculpture is actually a welcome change from the anxiety I woke up with.
It seems odd that this is apparently not considered a Weltempfänger (World Receiver), even though it certainly looks Weltempfängerisch.
![clip-on man is a 1989 work by cady noland depicting a cropped photo of a wild drunk middle aged white guy in a dark suit with empty six pack rings clipped to his belt, a beer in his hand, and one left dangling in front of his crotch. the image is screenprinted in black on an aluminum panel, while a grid like a flimsy set of strainer bars sticks out on the right side, roughly forming a square. the work sits on a wood floor and leans against a white wall. the pic is via gagosian but the work is currently on loan from the artist [shhhh] to glenstone. the photo is by a guy named charles gatewood; he took it at mardi gras in the early 70s](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/noland-clip-on-man-beachpkg-gagosian.jpg)
