art – Page 9 – greg.org

Robert Gober Potato Print

robert gober print of the lyrics to rogers & hammerstein's climb ev'ry mountain from the sound of music on white paper mounted on a light blue board in a white painted wood frame, from an edition of 15 on view at krakow witkin gallery. the text is printed in black, and the copyright notice at the bottom in red, using engraved potatoes. — Robert Gober, Untitled, 2011, potato print in artist’s mount and frame, 19 1/2 x 16 in., ed. 15, at Krakow Witkin Gallery

I’m repeatedly fascinated by how Robert Gober brings the same extraordinary production detail to his editions as to his sculptures. Sometimes the goal seems to be uncanny, handmade verisimilitude, as when he makes a receipt or a movie ticket stub. But Untitled (2011) is something else.

Untitled is a two-color potato print of the lyrics to the Rogers & Hammerstein song, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” from The Sound of Music, along with the copyright notice. It is mounted in an artist’s frame, so it is really an object, not just a print, but the primary point is, it is a potato print.

An example of the edition of 15 is on view in Boston at Krakow Witkin Gallery’s One Wall One Work series. The gallery also has published an extensive account of the production process, which could not be more different from the time you or I made a potato print at camp with a pen knife and tempera paint.

It involves freeze drying potato slabs, and infusing them with something solid enough to engrave the text with a CNC router. In the first step, it perhaps resembles Gober’s presentation of a bag of donuts. The latter engraving process feels like the kind of technical challenge a master printer would love. Then there’s preparing the paper, and bringing it all together.

Indeed, the whole process here, and its innocent childhood implications, seems to be as prominent as the subject and content itself. As the gallery puts it,

A potato print is a rudimentary printmaking technique often used by young students, using half of a potato rather than metal or stone plate. Gober has taken this makeshift single-use medium and refined it to such an extreme that he could create a highly detailed, illusionistic image repeatedly (in an edition of 15). The themes of ‘how what can work for children can also be used by adults’ and that ‘there can be creative solutions to seemingly insurmountable situations’ feel directly related to “The Sound of Music,” nostalgia in general, and the present moment.

[next morning update: the details of the production history and technique seem to originate in an uncredited document published in May 2024, as part of the Brooklyn auction of AP 1/5 from the edition. Thanks to @bbhilley.bsky.social for finding it.

2011010UntitledClimbEvryMountainFabricationHistory (1)Download

It now makes me wonder where it came from, and where it circulated. It contains much detail of the behind-the-scenes between the conservators, engravers, printers, and studio; was it provided to buyers by the gallery? Do the buyers of Gober’s work receive a packet of information to the inevitable question, “How’d he even do that?” Does there exist among Gober collectors a layer of intricate knowledge even beyond that gleaned by living with his work?

And I wasn’t going to get into it last night because of the sheer fascination of the potato, but the gallery’s mention of the careful reproduction of the copyright notice and the artist’s receipt of authorization from the Rogers & Hammerstein folks also appears in this production document. The exactness with which Gober, et al. observe the lyrics’ IP—and then document it—brings the whole cultural system of music publishing and performing into this work that was, again, printed with potato.]

One Wall, One Work: Robert Gober is on view through Dec. 7, 2024 [krakowwitkingallery via greg.org hero matt]

Taking And/Or Making A Breather

Martin Herbert on Marion Baruch:

In her studio, many dozens of these works, constituting acres of potential wall space, were folded into little boxes, closely stacked: the canny stratagems of an artist without much money, physical mobility, arm strength, storage space, or external expectations of what she should be doing, but with an inextinguishable urge to make art. I thought about that, afterward, whenever I saw a show where an artist had evidently been handed a large production budget and acquiesced to making more of the stuff that demonstrably sold.

The particular work he’s describing is made from the textile offcut/void/remains Italian fashion designers. Which is fascinating enough, but he also considers other artists not producing on an assembly line: Paul Chan, Duchamp, Bruce Connor, Sarah Rapson, Sara Deraedt. No one writes better than Martin Herbert about artists thwarting the art world in the name of art.

“You made me do this.” Martin Herbert [moussemagazine.it via geraldine]

OG Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siecle II

1989 ap photo of artist nam june paik standing in front of his sculpture fin de siecle ii at the whitney museum. it is a wall of over 300 television sets in various sizes and grid configurations showing seven different channels of programming, but the caption only says its david bowie. popped up on ebay, then disappeared oh well

I cannot believe I missed this 1989 publicity photo on ebay of Nam June Paik posing in front of the original installation of Fin de Siecle II.

Paik created it for a show at the Whitney, “Image World: Art and Media Culture.” According to the caption, “The art is made up of more than 300 television sets and controlled by a digital computer. The sculpture features music and synchronized images of rock star David Bowie.”

Which, well, yes, and,

What an amazingly clipped description.

The Whitney acquired it in 1993, but never showed it. When they decided to show it again in 2019, it turned out nearly a third of the hardware was inoperable and unusable. [The keyframe on the conservation video below shows the original configuration.]

It’s now listed as having “207 video monitors in scaffolding and seven video channels.” Also mentioned are the other video sources, including Rebecca Allen’s Kraftwerk animations; video by Paik’s assistant Paul Perrin accompanied by Philip Glass; Merce Cunningham; Joseph Beuys; and Gera. Most are Paik-related or Paik-adjacent, which makes the whole work feel, along with everything else, a little like a self-portrait.

Happy Kara Walker Video 10th Anniversary

In November 2014 Kara Walker opened a show at Sikkema Jenkins titled Afterword, that included works related to Walker’s summer masterpiece, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, the giant African sugar sphinx installed in the disused sugar factory on the Brooklyn waterfront.

In addition to watercolor studies and renderings of A Subtlety, Walker also showed An Audience, a 27-minute video of audience reactions to the sculpture. It was recorded by six cameras during the crowded final hours of the last hot, July day of the installation.

This show came to mind because the rich colors of Walker’s 2014 watercolors felt connected to the even more baroque colors of the watercolors in Walker’s current exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, whose abbreviated title is The High and Soft Laughter…

And I had never realized that any of An Audience was visible online.

All The Title Cards From Paris Is Burning

in this title card from paris is burning, pepper labeija's name is presented in all caps all white in the center of a field of black. via paul soulellis's what is queer type project

Artist/hero Paul Soulellis has collected and posted all the title cards from Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film, Paris is Burning as part of an ongoing exploration of queer type. There are a lot more than I would have guessed.

All the title cards from Paris is Burning (1990) [are.na/paul-soulellis]
Previous, related Pepper Labeija respect in this house: Authenticity vs Realness
Previous, related Soulellis respect in this house: Untitled (Andiron…) in Library of the Printed Web

Jenny Saville On Twombly Looking And Working

Via Wayne Bremser comes a shoutout to Cy Twombly’s Duchamp references, but not the ones I’d thought, and not where I’d expected it to come from.

In February 2024 Jenny Saville spoke on Twombly’s work and her connection to him at The Menil Collection. After acclimating to her regularly not mentioning the gallery she shared with Twombly, it turned out to be a fascinating talk, full of insights on painterly technique and reference and inspiration. Which, hold that thought.

At the moment cued above, though, Saville describes Twombly’s “banging together” of avant-garde modernism and the ancient world through “the Duchampian act of writing ‘APOLLO’ on a piece of paper or a canvas.” I’ll need to sit with it a minute, but I guess if anything can be a readymade, then so can the 4,000 years [sic] of human association with that word.

Saville’s illustrated discussion of Twombly is full of painterly details found in artists from Leonardo to Cézanne, and it feels rare to hear and see these references. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve felt Twombly’s painting and mark-making has been considered alone, if not sui generis, or in the context of his poetic sources, and not so much in relation to art of the world/past. Not for Saville, though.

a youtube screenshot of two brushy, obscured blobs, as jenny saville would call them, details from cy twombly paintings, and a detail of a brushy, blurry, atmospheric painting by turner of a dark cloud dumping rain into a darker sea, with jenny saville to the right in a little inset box, from her feb 2024 lecture at the menil collection in houston — screenhsot of Jenny Saville discussing Cy Twombly and Turner in February 2024 at The Menil Collection

One artist she comes back to more than any other is Turner, and the juxtapositions of Turner’s and Twombly’s atmospheric and spatial and abstract pursuits are fascinating.

Most of the talk is a close look/walkalong of the Menil’s Twombly centerpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). But she ends with an expansive read of a blackboard painting [Untitled, 1971] filled with figure eights descending from left to right, and she didn’t mention Duchamp. And it still made sense.

Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly [youtube, s/o @waynebremser]
Previously: Send More Twombly Duchamp Nudes

The Jamaican Astrophysicist Francis Williams

an 18th century portrait of francis williams, a Black Jamaican gentleman and Newtonian physicist in his study, with a landcape of Spanish Town in the window behind him. Williams wears a white wig and a blue and gold coat, and stands full length between his mahogany table and chair. there are globes on the table and floor, a wall of books, some identifiable by title for the first time, and newton's principia open on the table under his hand. a gold cord holding back a deep blue curtain turns out to be knotted in the orbit of halley's comet, which turns out to be visible at perigee in the dusk sky of the landscape. williams thus documented his observation and calculation of the comet's perigee, proving the newtonian model. the painting is at the v&a, and it is due for a major reinterpretation — William Williams, attr., *Francis Williams, The Scholar of Jamaica*, prob 1760, not c.1745, 66 x 50 cm, in the V&A

What an extraordinary piece of research, and an equally amazing finding.

For at least a century, an 18th century portrait in the V&A of a free, Black Jamaican man named Francis Williams was considered to be a racist caricature of Williams cosplaying as a gentleman. But after a team of experts and conservators imaged and studied the painting anew, Fara Dabhoiwala discovered Williams was demonstrating not only his rare mastery of then-new Newtonian astrophysics. He was documenting his observations and calculations of the first documented return in 1758 of Halley’s Comet, at a moment when he was one of the only people alive who’d known Newton and Halley at the time they’d first published their theories.

If this feels like a spoiler, you can still read Dabhoiwala’s account in the LRB to see how he pieced Williams’ history and the painting’s history together from the most hostile sources and the barest archival traces.

A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due [lrb.co.uk via @caleb.crain.bsky.social]

The Sounds Of Man

As I try to manage my news intake, I have been rescued and refreshed by First Light Radio, artist Man Bartlett’s monthly music show on East Village Radio. It’s live on the third Friday of the month, from 8-10AM, and the archive is growing, but it’s still early, so it’s small. Fortunately, there is a whole discography to fall back into. I confess, I’ve never opened my cassette tapes of any of the Space On Earth recordings; I just use the mp3 technology.

First Light Radio With Man, 3rd Friday, 8-10AM [eastvillageradio]
Man Bartlett [bandcamp]

The Lost Jasper Johns

As someone who spent more than two years tracking down the greatest lost Jasper Johns painting, you’d think I would have already identified all the other lost Johnses. But I had not.

Though the list of destroyed Johns works is certainly longer and more mysterious—the artist is famous for destroying things he made before 1954, and the fire in his Edisto Island, SC home in 1966 wiped out many works Johns kept for himself, including many early sketchbooks—there are not that many lost or missing Johns works. There are only four, and all date from 1955-64.

Besides the Flag (1955) inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine, Short Circuit (also 1955), and the Figure 4 (1959), there is another number painting, Figure 2 (1963, P138), whose trail goes cold after entering Karl Ströher’s collection in Darmstadt.

black and white photo of jasper johns' lost 1964 painting titled gastro after the name of the bar owned by miyagaki shoichiro and his wife kiyo, which is printed on the round coaster affixed to the 5-inch square canvas by brushy blobs and drips of encaustic. one of four missing or lost paintings by jasper johns, it disappeared when gastro closed in 1988. — Jasper Johns, Gastro (CR P138, 1964, 5 x 5 in., encaustic and collage on canvas,

But the last one, and the second most interesting lost Johns, is called Gastro. It’s one of four paintings Johns made during his stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1964. It is an encaustic collage of a coaster from the Bar Gastro [バーガストロ], which was a gift to the bar’s owners, Kiyo and Shōichirō Miyagaki. [宮垣昭一郎,キヨ] .

a group of japanese men in suits and one woman seated in a rock walled bar in harajuku in 1967, celebrating the completion of takiguchi shuzo's proof of poetic experiments: 1927-1937. looks like quite a party — Miyagaki Shōichirō [top row, right corner] and gang at a 1967 launch party for Takiguchi Shūzō’s Poetic Experiments: 1927-1937, photo: Funaga Mitsutoshi via Keio U

Gastro was a hub of the Tokyo contemporary art community, and I assume it was in Ginza, near Johns’ temporary studio at the Artists Hall. It was decorated with artworks by regulars, who were known as the Gastro-ren「ガストロ連」, or Gastro-gang. Johns must have become an honorary member, and his little painting, just five inches square, remained in Gastro until Shōichirō’s death in 1988. According to the CR, the whereabouts of the entire Gastro-ren art hoard is unknown.

Given the prominence of Miyagaki and other Gastro-ren members like poet-critic Takiguchi Shūzō, I’m surprised some enterprising art historian hasn’t tracked everything down yet, but here we are.

Johns Doing Numbers

As you might have guessed from the subject, the little 10 x 8 in. Jasper Johns Figure 8 painting that didn’t sell the other day was not part of a ten-painting series, but it was also not a one-off.

I had to wait till I got home to my catalogue raisonné to see that Johns made three or four related works around the same time in 1959.

Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes

a framed cy twombly work on paper, 30 x 40 inches, is a medium grey background with noticeable brushstrokes, and a cascade of figure eights and fragments thereof in white crayon, descending from the upper left to the lower right, the same direction as duchamp's nude descending a staircase, of which this was once considered a study, which would make it kind of figurative, which might explain why it was de-titled when it sold at sotheby's in nov 2024 — Cy Twombly, apparently not titled *Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase* after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s

When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.

marcel duchamp's nude descending a staircase tracks the cubist, overlapping, fractured motion of a human figure painted in beiges as it descends from upper left to lower right, against a darker brown background. at the philadelphia museum of art — Marcel Duchamp, *Nude Descending a Staircase* (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s

When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.

And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,

Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.

trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola Del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]

Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:

That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.

It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.

Hysterical Obedience

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.

James Bridle: ‘The Denial of Genocide Is on the March Everywhere’ [artreview]

Al Ordover’s Johns’s The Figure 8

a 10 by 8 inch painting of the figure eight in messily blended black, grey, and white, without a distinct background or foreground object, but an overall abstract painting that also happens to depict a figure 8, was made in 1959 by jasper johns, and is being sold in november 2024 at sothebys — 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.]

20 Nov 2024, Lot 34 : Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, est. $3-4m [sothebys]

Marsden Hartley’s White Yucca for Arlie Kuntz

a painting of a stalk of white yucca blossoms against a bright blue background, brushy, by marsden hartley — 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.]

19 Nov 2024, Lot 550: Marsden Hartley, White Yucca, est. $80-120,000, sold for $114,000 [sothebys]