Robert Smithson, Underground Projection Room (Utah Museum Plan), 1971, graphite on paper, 9×11.75 inches, lot 145 @ LA Modern, 21 June 2023
According to the friend of my mom’s whose family used to own the ranch land on and around Rozel Point, the basalt-strewn hill above the Spiral Jetty is full of rattlesnake dens. I don’t know if Robert Smithson knew this when he picked the site, but I doubt it. He was more focused on the scenic qualities: the pink salt water of the Great Salt Lake, and the collapsed oil derrick a little further along the shore.
I’ve thought about it a lot, though, especially when I think about Smithson’s original plan to show the Spiral Jetty film on a continuous loop in an underground screening room on the site. A sketch for that idea (above) will be sold next week at LA Modern auction house.
Which is as good an occasion as any to propose that Smithson’s idea be realized. For the snakes.
greg.org, Study for Underground Projection Room For Snakes, 2023
As half the human population on earth knows, tiny flatscreens are a thing. And so is solar power. Smithson’s film, Spiral Jetty, is 36 minutes long and can easily fit on a micro SD card that plugs into an Arduino-compatible 60×94 pixel TinyScreen+, which can be lowered into the snake den.
The TinyScreen+ next to a US quarter, $39.95 at TinyCircuits.com
A small solar panel on the surface, connected to a battery connected to the Tinyscreen down below will keep the movie streaming endlessly, or until the heat death of the planet, whichever comes first. Before installing them for the snakes, I think I need to make a small edition of prototypes first. And to start by extracting out my copy of the film from the not-solid-state external drive. Fingers crossed that this project isn’t over before it starts
This pairing of two of Harvard men came to mind when I heard today of Ted Kaczynski’s death at the end of HK100. It’s a quote from Travis Diehl’s X-TRA review of Danh Vo’s 2018 Guggenheim show, Take My Breath Away.
It was part of Diehl’s discussion of an untitled Vo work from 2008 that comprises 14 schmoozy notes on White House stationery from Henry Kissinger to NY Post columnist Leonard Lyons. Most were about getting tickets to shows in New York: “You must be some kind of fiend. I would choose your ballets over contemplation of Cambodia any day—if only I were given the choice. Keep tempting me; one day perhaps I will succumb.”
Typing JULY IV MDCCLXXVI on index cards on Ted Kaczynski’s typewriter, photo: Nils Klinger
Vo, of course, also bought Kaczynski’s typewriter, which he turned into the 2011 work, Theodore Kaczynski’s Smith Corona Portable Typewriter, but only after using it to type invitation cards to his 2011 show at the Fredericianum in Kassel. The index cards, bearing the title of the show and the birthdate of the United States, “JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI,” were also included in an edition, Seasons Greetings, along with copies of Alston Chase’s book, Harvard and The Unabomber, distribution of which the university successfully thwarted.
[A few unsettling days later UPDATE: That Benning book, and especially Ault’s essay, reminded me of John Semley and Edward Millar’s 2021 essay on “Ted-pilled” Unabomber stans. They’re not only on TikTok. The blithe de-emphasis on Kaczynski’s calculatedly indiscriminate violence and murder in order “ya gotta hand it to him,” by both Benning AND Ault, is gross. Especially in the conflation of Kaczynski’s terrorism and Thoreau’s John Brown-ian anti-abolitionism. I guess we’ll find out how gross it all is if eco-terrorism joins fascist terrorism in our bright civilized future.]
I feel bad for dragging Alain into this, but I’m still trying to grapple with my own offhand comment—on a platform I am working to disengage from, about a column by a critic I avoid—which suddenly upended my perception of an artist I’ve actually liked. So rather than hash it out in a thread I’ll just end up deleting, I’m documenting it here and now.
When I first encountered Anselm Kiefer’s works, it was books, giant painted books, lead books, books with wings, and coming from a culture of metal books, I was taken in. The take on Kiefer then was his boldness in taking on the taboo subject of Germany’s Past.
By the time I saw Kiefers in person, though, it was 1993, he’d gone feral. His dealer Marian Goodman was left to exhibit a pile of paintings as they were found in his abandoned studio, along with a table full of ledger books the artist had been masturbating onto for twenty years. The gallery offered white library gloves to visitors who wanted to try unsticking the pages. So yeah, I guess there were signs that something was going on.
Even in this trauma-focused moment, childhood war trauma—for a German kid born in World War II—cannot be the sole explanation for the artist’s project, even if there were such a thing. But the phrase, “building toys from the rubble of his childhood home” suddenly feels expansive enough to snap a lifetime into focus. It’s a parameter that improves the fit of a model to the data that is Kiefer’s art. And yet it also feels like it’s not helping the work, just the opposite. I guess the best case scenario is Kiefer works toward a little more self-awareness and inner peace, and maybe the rest of us don’t have to have so much bombastic Kiefer works in our lives.
Look, I absolutely get it. If I was an architect, or even an architectural designer, and my husband just bought the Whitney Museum, I’d be psyched, too.
And if he and his company was getting roasted for it, and people were freaking out over Marcel Breuer’s iconic brut luxe spaces being gutted and turned into a showroom for NFTs and Kelly bags, I could imagine giving him a pep talk when he came home.
I could not imagine, however, paying to promote my Instagram post praising his “vision and determination.”
And I would not say in a promoted Instagram post, “As someone who has an architectural practice that values and specializes in preservation, conservation, and restoration, I see so much value in this stunning acquisition.” Especially if my little studio had previously made fixtures for my husband’s company’s showroom above its East Hampton real estate office, and I wanted to get a piece of that sweet Breuer gut job.
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Gaeta), 1989, acrylic and tempera on paper mounted on panel, 80 x 58 5/8 in., exhibited in “Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished,” Spring 2018 at Gagosian 21st St.
@wernerherzoghaircut had reblogged this Cy Twombly onto my tumblr dash, and it was so ravishing I had to go back and look at the show it appeared in again.
In March-April 2018, Mark Francis organized a significant show of Twombyl works on paper at Gagosian’s 21st Street site in New York, titled “In Beauty it is finished: Drawings 1951-2008.” The title came from a text element in a work in the show.
Screenshot of Untitled (Gaeta) installed at Gagosian, Spring 2018, via gagosian.com
The thing about Untitled (Gaeta) is how much it looks like a painting here, but how clearly it was a drawing in real life. Or rather, a work on paper; it is a giant, proud sheet floating in a shadowbox frame.
Which feels relevant to the text Twombly inscribed, a fragment of a poem by Archilochus, as translated by Guy Davenport:
Sarah Sze explaining Slice (2023), a site-specific work in the her Timelapse exhibition at the Guggenheim, in an Art21 documentary. image: art21.org
I still have to see Sarah Sze’s exhibition at the Guggenheim, Timelapse. Watching Ian Forster’s Art21 interview/documentary of Sze explaining her work as she makes it does not make it easy to wait.
A couple of weeks ago, Sze talked to Ben Luke for The Art Newspaper’s podcast about her Artangel commission, Metronome, which is installed in a South London railway station waiting room. Because of the pandemic, the timing for these two major shows slid on top of each other.
For both exhibitions Sze has created streams of video or audio content that slip and loop in a seemingly non-repeating way, creating seemingly random confluences and juxtapositions. In Forster’s footage, we see Sze’s images, but don’t hear about them. In Luke’s we hear her talking about her sources, but don’t see them.
A poster from “Untitled,” 1993, the endless stack of free posters Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Christopher Wool first made for Printed Matter as a fundraising edition [!] is being sold a “Poster for an exhibition” and an “offset print” from “a so-called ‘Stack’-work” by Christopher Wool. It would be, I believe, Wool’s first and only Stack-work.
sogenannte “Stack”-Arbeit, hmm?
Gonzalez-Torres’ stack piece made with an image of Wool’s painting is, of course, in the Sammlung Hoffmann in Mitte. So if you lose the auction, maybe just head into town one weekend and pick up an uncreased copy.
Max Schumann, Threat Level, 2023, 14-color screen print with unique handpainted embellishments, ed. 100 for Printed Matter
In case you were wondering if there’s anything he can’t do or hasn’t done, the answer is not yet. Outgoing director of Printed Matter, Max Schumann has produced two prints for the upcoming Spring Benefit Bash. Each 14-color silk screened print of flower arrangements is embellished by handpainted blossoms.
The pictures fit well within Schumann’s own longstanding “outsider painting practice,” as PM puts it. Though titles notwithstanding, they do also feel like the brightest quadrant of “the dark energy at the heart of American politics, capitalism, and consumerism” that is the subject of Schumann’s critique.
The larger print, We Will Attack, is an edition of 35, and the smaller one, Threat Level, above, is an edition of 100. They both look great, but I posted Threat Level because the email drop for the prints had an animated GIF of it, toggling between the printed and embellished state, and it looked awesome. I ended up deciding not to serve a giant gif from my server, though, thanks. Some of us are even more not-for-profit than Printed Matter these days.
Danh Vo, We The People (detail), 2011-2016, 200 x 120 x 280 cm, at Galerie Chantal Crousel’s presentation at Art Basel
One problem with Christie’s selling the Fra Angelico after Basel is that as soon as my Fra Angelico Gofundme reached 10% I’d siphon it off to buy this gorgeous piece of Danh Vo’s We The People at Chantal Crousel’s booth. I’m only posting it because I assume it’s already been snapped up by someone in an earlier timezone.
Michael Lobel posted this cursed image on social media the other day.
While he was visiting Washington DC in 1976, Andy Warhol photographed Henry Kissinger accosting actress-turned-icon-turned-DC wife Elizabeth Taylor Warner, who was then married to Virginia Republican senator John Warner.
In 1976 Kissinger was Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State.
Guido di Piero, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, posthumously known as Fra Angelico (Near Vicchio, circa 1395/1400-1455, Rome) The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and the Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross tempera on gold-ground poplar panel, arched, the original engaged frame regilded 25.1/8 x 15 in. (59.7 x 34.2 cm.) Estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000 at Christie’s London 6 July 2023
When I went to college I figured I wanted to be a banker, and since bankers collected art, I should study art history, to know what to collect. And so I studied Italian Renaissance painting. Which was fascinating and enthralling and transporting, but which is also the least collectible period of art imaginable. It’s even hard to see it in person.
So the idea of a 60cm tall painting by Fra Angelico being for sale is momentarily giving me pangs of regret for not sticking with banking. Anna Brady’s report on the Christie’s announcement has more detail about the painting, history, context, and scholarship than the Christie’s announcement itself, so that’s nice.
The painting of a crucifixion, dated roughly to 1419-1424, will be on view in New York from 10-14 June. Meanwhile, I’ve got about a month to scare up an extra £6 million. BRB.
NGL, it is wearying to keep wading into the legal minutiae, especially when it all feels like it’s missing what’s obvious. and. right. there. in. the. works. I guess it is literally just me. On the bright side, though, there’s a new deposition, which I am trying to get my hands on. Unlike the Cariou trial, only a very few pages have been excerpted so far, so no book. Yet. [Here’s a pdf of the filing, though, have fun.]
Anyway, point is, next week Phillips is selling a New Portrait that is new to me; it’s a poster? An edition? A takeaway? [Here it is on the floor, for drama.] Hard to say, frankly, but it is the Queen. And it came from Prince’s New Portraits show in London (at Gagosian’s Davies Street storefront) in 2015. Prince would make smaller proof editions for the Portrait subject, if they asked, and he did make variously sized Portraits later [see below], along with Instagram-related prints.
Installation shot of a gang of cash&carry-size New Portraits at Gagosian LA, 2020, via yt
The Queen Elizabeth portrait is an entire Prince joint, though. Like he did with his Family portfolio, Prince posted QEII’s coronation portrait to his own Instagram account, and started composing. The Brant Foundation must have had notifications turned on, to get their white power emoji in there within the four hours between posting and screenshotting.
It’s all long gone now, of course, like the Queen herself. This 22×15 inch poster, unsigned and unnumbered in an edition some places say is 500, others just don’t know, is the only artifact left to mark this historic Instagram moment.
Lot 171: Sturtevant, Oldenburg Store Objects, Bacon & Pat of Butter, 1967, being sold at Swann
I lost track of the Schwartzes selling Sturtevant’s Oldenburg Store Object, Pie Caseamidst the Pompon hype. It was one of the most prominent objects from Sturtevant’s April-til-June 1967 repetition of Oldenburg’s The Store, and it was being sold by some of the most important collectors of Sturtevant’s work. [Eugene organized the 1986 Sturtevant comeback show at White Columns that brought her work into the context of the appropriationist Pictures Generation.
Yellow Curve Cookie and hibiscus lemonade at Glenstone
Today is the 100th anniversary of Ellsworth Kelly’s birth. There is a lot of Kelly content you can consume to commemorate. The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation has an EK100 list of public events [most of which are past] and current exhibitions.
The Glenstone retrospective is, of course, amazing, but also closed today. Unless there a whisper network of private visits on days the museum is closed? I would certainly hope so.
Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim, 1996, image via guggenheim.org
If you can go back in time, definitely see the Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1996, one of the most phenomenal art experiences of my life and, along with the Dan Flavin installation and Hilma af Klint, one of the the greatest shows ever installed in that museum. The Guggenheim has resurfaced a nice 2004 Q&A with Kelly for EK100.
John Coplans’ 1969 Artforum cover essay is one of the first serious attempts to understand Kelly’s work on his own terms, and to recognize the foundational importance of his early work in France to his project.
Edgar Howard and Tom Piper’s 2007 documentary, Ellsworth Kelly: Fragmentsscreened a couple of weeks ago in Chatham, NY. Watching the trailer I recognized Kelly’s trip retracing his steps through Paris from the photos the studio posted on Instagram the other day:
Ellsworth Kelly seated under the Pont des Arts in 1949 and 2006, image via ig/ellsworthkellystudio
I also learned that he lived above our ice cream store? We rather ridiculously had Berthillon shipped to our wedding party in NYC. Anyway, Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments is on Vimeo in full.
screenshot of Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments (2007), dir. Edgar B. Howard and Tom Piper, which screened at the Crandell Theater in Chatham, NY on May 21.
Kelly’s oeuvre is very diverse, even though his mode of thinking allows for periodic returns, canceling any attempt at pinpointing a linear evolution. Better here to state his patience: very early on, he had understood the field of Modernism as an enterprise of motivation (it is against the arbitrariness and subjectivity of “invention”-as-expression that he had coined his various strategies); at the very beginning of his career, he had surveyed this field, seen both its limits and, within those, its vast expanse of fallow territory. Because he was alone then in envisioning all at once the many possibilities it could yield, he had accepted his historical task as that of tilling this land, digging out many unexpected treasures along the way.
Now, in a culmination of remembrances of his life and work—and his practice combining the two—I wonder about his relationship to time. To the way he found something from his own past to make work from in a certain present. How long did it take? When was it ready? How did he know? What did it need? What if the indexing of works to their archival, historical sources wasn’t an accounting tedium, but a way to understand and experience the work—and the life—more fully?
“Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made,” Kelly said, “and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added.” How long it would take, and when it would be made, he did not say.
Ellsworth Kelly, Seine, 1951, at the Philadelphia Museum, which is currently doing an EK100 show of drawings and other works related to reflection and water
Kelly never sat by the same Seine twice, but he did build bridges across time, between the things he saw, and the things he made, and those bridges are only beginning to be mapped.
