Because the resulting work is dated 1990, I forget that the invitation by the National Gallery of Iceland to make a permanent public sculpture came in 1988, while Richard Serra was still in the throes of suing the US Government over the removal of Tilted Arc.
Anyway, I’ve been three times over the years to see Afangar, the series of nine pairs of basalt columns around the edge of Viðey Island in the harbor of Reyjkavik, and it works every time. Like the giant steel plates Serra installed in Qatar, the tops of the 18 columns are the same elevation around the edge, subtly marking the changes in topography.
And even though there are hundreds of them, somehow it’s been easier to see the sculpture in Iceland than to see the various prints Serra made of them. Of the five series and three prints, my favorites, in theory, are the tiniest ones, the Videy Afangar series, made on a series of deepcut, 4×6-in. copperplates. I say in theory because I think I’ve only ever seen the entire set of ten prints once, and never for sale, and have just spotted loosies online since, but never in person.
But the contrast between the scale of the image and its size, and the general monumentality of Serra, is really nice. They feel like they were taken straight from his sketchbooks.
If you ever get a chance to see Afangar in person, definitely do it, and if you ever have tips on seeing some related prints, definitely hmu.
Black Quasi Bricks, 2003, at neugerrimschneider, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
Scrolling in the Olafur Eliasson results on liveauctioneers for farflung oddities I’d missed, I came across this unexpected familiar item right in front of me that I’d also missed.
While I was trying to find Kenneth Noland’s big Olitski painting, the horribly lit one he hung behind his sectional sofa, I surfed across some other works from his collection. [update: Thanks to art historian Alex Grimley, who identifies this Olitski—one of several Noland owned—as Lavender Liner (1967).]
Anne Truitt, Morning Moon, 26 June 1969, around 97 x 20 x 20 in., acrylic on wood, formerly in the collection of Kenneth Noland, and sold by Bennington at Christie’s in 2019
One was Morning Moon (1969), a delicately colored column sculpture by Anne Truitt. Truitt and Noland were close friends in DC earlier in the 1950s and 1960s. She’d taken a life drawing class from him in the 50s, and when Noland left town in 1962 Truitt took over his studio, where she made much of her earliest breakthrough work. I don’t know what their relationship was like in 1969, though, or if it’s relevant that Noland appears to have bought Morning Moon, new, from Andre Emmerich, Truitt’s NY dealer. [Truitt had separated from her husband, and bought a house in which to raise her three kids, so maybe in 1969 she was not in a position to be giving large sculptures away.]
In 2001, just as Truitt’s importance in the history of 1960s art and Minimalism was gaining renewed attention, Noland donated Morning Moon to Bennington, where he (and Olitski, for that matter) long taught. Bennington didn’t seem to show it, though, until long after Truitt’s significance was fixed; and then they promptly sold it and a bunch of other art to fund some arts programming.
Kenneth Noland, Untitled, 1965, 64 in. square, acrylic on canvas, long in the artist’s family, and sold in 2019 at Christie’s
That same 2019 sale at Christie’s happened to include another work from Noland’s collection: his own. Noland left this popping 1965 painting to his last wife, Paige Rense, the editor of Architectural Digest. I can’t help but imagine an intense but balanced color combination like this appearing on a Truitt column.
Anne Truitt, Morning Choice, 1968, 72x14x14 in., acrylic on wood, collection: St Louis Art Museum
Morning Choice, from 1968, was one of the first column works Truitt made after returning to DC from Japan. Maybe the 60s really did just look like that, but these artists who’d worked alongside each other earlier seemed to still make work later in a way that still resonated. If we can ever unlock the Mary Pinchot Meyer vaults, it feels like between her, Truitt, and Noland, there’s a whole other Washington Color School story to be told.
Sol Lewitt’s Black Form – Dedicated To The Missing Jews, 1987, painted concrete block, installed at the Schloss Münster/University of Münster for Skulptur Projekte, photo: LWL/Rudolf Wakonigg
Thanks to baileybobbailey’s reblog of archiveofaffinities I became aware of what Sol Lewitt described as his only political work: Black Form — Dedicated to the Missing Jews, which was one of two works he installed at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987.
The sculpture, an elongated block of painted concrete bricks, was at the entrance to the University of Münster, in the Schloss Münster. Lewitt felt compelled to give a politically charged title referencing not the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, but the generations of descendants of those Jews, who would never be born, leaving a permanent void in German society.
Lewitt was ready to donate the work to the city, or the university, but it was perhaps ahead of its time; in a divided country where Holocaust memorials were not yet a thing, Lewitt’s Black Form generated tremendous controversy and critique. It was actually destroyed after the Sculpture Project ended—in 2023 Stefan Goebel wrote a fascinating blog post about Black Form‘s fate—and in 1989, Lewitt ended up donating another version of it to the city of Hamburg, which still stands.
Oddly/amazingly, a carved and painted wood replica of Black Form, dated 1985, so perhaps a maquette, turned up for sale in Hamburg. What has not turned up yet is discussion of the relationship between this early Holocaust memorial to the Missing Jews and Peter Eisenman’s (and, once, Richard Serra’s) Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe that was eventually built in Berlin.
People all over the world are saying, I’m sure, “Hey, Greg, doesn’t Mathieu Lehanneur’s giant silver inflatable Olympic cauldron lit by a simulated flame of LED & mist look an awful lot like Mark Leckey’s autobiographical installation at PS1 where he suspended your satelloon sculpture like a futuristic moon near sodium streetlit models of an electrical tower and underpass formative to memories of his youth that time?”
Mark Leckey’s MoMA PS1 installation of Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD (2015), which included Untitled (Satelloon), 2007, image: ig/365-days-in-nyc via
And to them I would say yes, yes it does.
Léon Gimpel photo of an epic air show Ballonscape in Paris, via
And while it also looks a lot like it in the daylight, I would point out that it looks even more like the balloonscapes photography pioneer Léon Gimpel used to capture around Paris, including at the airshows at the Grand Palais.
Léon Gimpel autochrome of balloons at the air show in the Grand Palais
As Lehanneur affirms, Paris is the city of love, the city of lights, and the city of balloons, all rolled up into one.
thanks to art historian Alex Grimley, we now know that this image was originally published in reverse.
Looking up the details of the c.1972 interior of Kenneth Noland’s Manhattan apartment, photographed for Vogue by Horst—he’s not just for Twombly anymore!—which Condé Nast is monetizing the crap out of, badly, I have found the following:
It was called a loft, but those ceilings feel kind of low. It was designed by Chessy Rayner and Mica Ertegun, whose lighting concepts embody their unfathomably deep hatred of painting. Their main victim, the large spray painting over the sofa, is by Jules Olitski. It’s 1972, so of course there’s also a Morris Louis painting, also uplit by cans on the floor, but it’s really not legible here. Rounding out the Bennington theme, the sculpture is by Anthony Caro. Noland would have been on his third marriage. Cady would have been 16.
But that’s not important now. Because the Wikipedia article section on Kenneth Noland’s influence has one fact, and it is that “In 1984, US menswear designer Alexander Julian incorporated Noland’s designs and coloring in his knitwear.” The citation is a 1984 article from the NYT Magazine about patterned knitwear, which simply states, “Alexander Julian, long an admirer of Kenneth Noland’s work, interpreted the artist’s graphic linear patterns into more than one of his sweaters.”
As this crap screenshot clearly demonstrates, the legacy of Julian, like Noland, a North Carolina native, whose innovations are centered on color and textile, is poorly served by a largely black & white print media landscape. And the vintage clothing market dgaf; 80s/90s is more than close enough to sell to people who weren’t alive in the 1900s.
screenshot of a rather Nolandish? sweater in Listening to Color (2006) via Alexander Julian’s Vimeo
But scrubbing past the Monet, Klee, and Kandisky references in the woozy jazzy 2006 documentary short made by the Aldrich Museum [?] yields this screenshot of a saxe-playing mannequin in Julian’s house wearing what I think is the 1984 sweater from the Noland namecheck. Actually, no, that is not it, but it is close, and the colors are rather Nolandish. Also, isn’t that Inigo’s father?
installation view of Kenneth Noland: Color and Shape, 1976-80, at Castelli Gallery, 2015
Here is a 2015 Castelli show of period Nolands, c. 1976-80, which show his color story at the time. In a 1992 profile about his new spread in Ridgefield, Connecticut (thus the Aldrich) which I could only find via newspapers.com, Julian explains how he got friendly with Noland when they were neighbors somewhere, and Noland made him a “tie” of an offcut edge of painting. [Which, 1984 was also when Andy Warhol and Keith Haring called the trimmed edge of a painting to Sean Lennon as a birthday present a “tie,” according to Haring and his buddy Oswald.]
I feel like this could be resolved, but it will take some primary source intervention. Meanwhile, that 1984 Times article also says Perry Ellis’s entire collection was “a singular salute” to Sonia Delaunay, and I’m sorry, but I was an impressionable child in North Carolina at the time and spent every cent I had on a handknit Perry Ellis sweater that year, with two cables down the front, and it was just burgundy. So this Delaunay connection will have to be unpacked in another post.
[update: Thanks to art historian Alex Grimley, who identifies this tragically lit but otherwise gorgeous Olitski as Lavender Liner (1967), which Noland bought from Emmerich in 1968. Of particular relevance among the other writings on Grimley’s site is a link to his Brooklyn Rail review of a 2023 exhibition at Pace that included Noland’s Plaid paintings.]
In a way, that’s a good description of how we put the exhibition together. There are many interconnected parts creating multiple storylines, which I think is much more how most artists work or at least how I work. Interviews are more about answers, and art is at its most interesting when it’s opening up new and old questions.
One of the more interesting topics are the typeface-based abstract illustrations images Wool contributed to What Just Happend, Richard Hell’s 2023 book of poetry and writing. It’s one of several collaborations Wool and Hell have made, and relates to some of Wool’s ULAE prints going back almost a decade.
Yo, Bomb says See Stop Run goes until “the end of July,” the 31st, but the See Stop Run internet website says it ends the 28th. Don’t get stuck outside, ppl.
“Handbag of the Gods”: detail of a gypsum stone relief carving of an Apkulla, from the northwest palace of King Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, c BCE 883-859, acquired in 1921 for The Walters Art Museum, posted three years ago by @ymutate via @punk-raphaelite via @octavio-world
The Walters Museum of Art translates Apkallu as a “winged genius”; other museums which have wall panels from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II describe Apkallu as a “sage,” or a “genie.” These ripped, winged humanoid figures stood at the entrance of doorways in the palace, offering blessings or protection to passersby with a pine cone dipped into a small bucket of anointing liquid.
Apkallu relief from Room G of the northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal II, collection: The Walters Museum of Art
There is obviously much that can be said about Apkulla style: the feathered or fishskin cloaks; the fringed kilts; the beards, the workout, the armbands; the daggers; the horned diadems; the earrings; the rosette-covered wristbands. For starters, let’s just look at the bucket, or as Reddit is fond of calling it, the Handbag of the Gods.
Some of the companies involved by the museum are as follows (quotes are from the Report itself): the Garrett Corporation (“has been designing high-performance jet engines for military aircraft”); General Electric (“has its own think tank, called TEMPO, which runs seminars on nuclear weapons”); Hewlett-Packard Company (“radar, guided-missile control”); Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Litton Industries (“builds submarines, amphibious assault ships, and advanced guidance and fire control systems”); Lockhead Norris Industries (“a major ordnance manufacturer since World War II”); North American Rockwell, and The Rand Corporation. In short, it is a rogue’s gallery of the violence industries. Subsidized decisively by the American government, they had grown to their present bulk through the business of slaying. The show epitomizes the fact that our most prominent visual artists had been offered an extremely direct contract to be of service to the prestige of these industries (in return for various hard and software) and had accepted. During the term of the project, there occurred the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Democratic Convention riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the invasion of Cambodia, and the student killings at Kent and Jackson State. While these convulsions were taking place, inflaming the radicalism of our youth and polarizing the country, the American artists did not hesitate to freeload at the trough of that techno-fascism that had inspired them.
Kozloff ends by comparing LACMA’s A&T report/catalogue to the Pentagon Papers. He makes no mention in his takedown of the Cowles Corporation, one of the major sponsors of the A&T Project, and the family company of Artforum publisher Charles Cowles. And until 2012, when he reflected on the essay anew, he gave artists no credit for either the critical statements they made in the report, or the “derisive” works they produced.
When it came out in 1996, everyone who didn’t get an actual laserdisc edition wanted a bootleg copy of Cremaster 2. I wanted a belt buckle even more.
My queries at Gladstone amounted to nothing except the offer to buy an unrecognizable photo edition. So I plotted how to get a bootleg buckle made.
Would Mortenson Silver & Saddles of Santa Fe, who were credited with the extensive silver engraving in the film, make an extra one on the side? I ultimately decided not to ask.
But watching Cremaster 2 again last night—someone has uploaded the entire Cremaster Cycle to the Internet Archive, along with Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018)—I was struck again by the film’s particular beauty. And I wanted a buckle all over again.
“So a cremaster is a muscle?” Prince Harry probably did not say. image: Mortenson’s Silver & Saddles
Maybe it is too far back, but Mortenson’s doesn’t mention Barney or Cremaster props on their custom commissions page. But they do note the custom buckles the CEO of Outback Steakhouse commissioned as gifts for Princes Charles, William and Harry at a charity polo tournament he organized, probably in 2002 or 2003.
In 2018, the Museum and Yale University Press published a monograph on Fifty Days, in which curator Carlos Basualdo interviewed d’Huart about her visit to Twombly’s studio. The Museum acquired five of d’Huart’s prints, including the image above.
Untitled (200 x 157), 2019, jpg, the Philadelphia Museum’s c.2019, 200px image of Twombly’s 10×12 ft Achaeans in Battle, 1978, expanded to 800px. They quietly got better since then, but still
[the healing update: I got the book; it is gorgeous. d’Huart was literally like, I decided to photograph Minimalists so I flew to New York I called the director of MoMA from JFK he said I can’t meet you today but come tomorrow for lunch then Leo Castelli gave me a desk in his office and introduced me to everyone and Cy and then I was staying with Balthus and his kids in Italy and said let’s have a dinner for Cy and that’s how I made these photos he loved them. I am not exaggerating if anything I’m understating.]
Bittern’s Wings, study showing both sides, 4 1/2 x 5 1 8 in., watercolor on vellum, coll. The Met
In 1919 the Metropolitan Museum bought this watercolor from British dealer Charles Elliott Norton as a c. 1515 Dürer. Probably because it had come from the estate of Charles Sackville Bale, whose collection of watercolors was sold after his death in 1880. And probably also because there is a big AD Albrecht Dürer monogram at the top.
Reader, it is not a Dürer, and the Met’s phrase now, “in the manner of Dürer,” even feels like a stretch. But “Sold to us as a Dürer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” is probably too much to expect the museum to say.
I’m trying to figure out how I’ve lived ten years without a copy of Richard Serra Early Work in my life. [This doesn’t need to happen to you; today’s your last chance to get it for a dollar or whatever at Zwirner’s book sale.]
Anyway, in May 1970, after successfully installing twelve giant fir trees in the Pasadena Art Museum [Peter Plagens going there: “One does not have to be a dedicated Freudian to see the import of huge logs in one of the curved, pristine, uterine chambers of the PAM. Indeed, one has to work pretty hard to fend it off…”], Richard Serra went to Japan, to make work for the Tokyo Biennale ’70.
Richard Serra Early Work, 2014, published by Steidl and David Zwirner Books, solid at any price, an absolute steal at $10
Attention outside Japan on the 10th Tokyo Biennale has picked up a bit—Tate did a symposium it apparently didn’t record in 2016—but there are no period texts about it in this 2014 Serra catalogue, and no mention at all beyond three photos. If I’m getting this right, Serra made his first embedded angled steel works in Japan: the To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted he dug into Ueno Park was a 130-in. diameter version of the steel circle he embedded in the street in the Bronx later that Fall. [Which is on the cover of the book, btw.] When the Biennale traveled to Kyoto, he made a 300-in. steel square, Untitled (Kyoto Square), in Okazaki Park.
Richard Serra’s To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, 1970, hot rolled steel, 130 in. diameter, as installed somewhere in Ueno Park as part of the Tokyo Biennale ’70 photo: Kuwashi Maruyama as published in Richard Serra Early Work (Steidl/Zwirner, 2014)
I couldn’t find Kuwashi Maruyama’s photo [above] online, only the photo of Shigeo Anzaï which shows Serra laying out a circle with a string and some chalk. Starting with his documentary images of international artists at the Biennale, Anzaï was the Shunk AND Kender of 1970s avant-garde Japan. The print above surfaced when he showed them at White Rainbow in 2015-2016.
Shigeo Anzaï photo of Richard Serra and a failed installation at the Tokyo Biennale ’70, image: White Rainbow via Anothermag
Tokyo Biennale ’70 is being reconsidered as an innovative success for curator Yusuke Nakahara’s choice to center artists [no nations, no pavilions]; to use a theme [“Between Man and Matter”] that put Japanese Gutai and Mono-ha artists in dialogue with international artists; and yet to not be too heavy-handed about it. Except that there were zero women; official photographer Anzaï all but ignored the Japanese artists; and almost every anecdote he tells is about something the artists wanted but were not allowed to do.
Christo was forbidden from wrapping something; Sol Lewitt was forbidden from painting on the wall, and on and on. Anzaï’s photo shows Serra trying to plant a tree inside an embedded steel ring in front of the museum, a plan that was rejected. He apparently decided to YOLO it, and installed the sculpture [top] somewhere else in the park, without permission, and without telling anyone where it was.
The Pig Will Eat Its Children, 1970, Richard Serra & Carl Andre collab at Tokyo Biennale ’70, dimensions unknown, photo: Shigeo Anzaï via Richard Serra Early Work (Steidl/Zwirner, 2014)
All of this is really a sidebar to the work Serra did manage to exhibit. A week before the Biennale opened, while Serra was onsite, the Kent State massacre happened. Serra and Carl Andre decided not to let the moment pass. The work they created, listed as “mixed media” in the Serra catalogue, was a wire service printout of John Filo’s photo of Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over the body of Jeffrey Miller; and a hand-painted sign in Japanese and English: “The pig will eat its children.” The two elements are taped side by side to the temporary pegboard wall used in the Biennale.
The Tokyo Museum Collection’s 2005 object listing for Kiyoji Ohtsuji’s 1970/2005 print lists it as “Richard Serra, The Pig Will Eats Its Children (political protest with Carl Andre).” The Serra catalogue caption just calls it a “collaboration with Carl Andre.”
1966 Time magazine photo of Richard Serra [r] and collaborator at Animal Habitats: Life and Stuffed, the artist’s first show, at Galleria La Salita, Rome
What to make of it?Now, Serra’s worked with livestock before, and pigs specifically. But there is no way he’s not [also] thinking of the cops here, right? Again, zero mention in the catalogue, zero mention online. Oddly, one of the very few other references to this title is in a 2012 collaborative work in a 2017 show at Maureen Paley; Gardar Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon included a photo print on crushed aluminum of two parked Japanese riot police busses titled, The Pig Will Eat Its Children.
Gardar Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon, The Pig Will Eat Its Children, 2012, c-print on aluminium, 154 × 119 cm, image: 2017 installation view at Maureen Paley
The Japanese connection makes me think they knew—Einarsson lives in Tokyo—or that there is a common reference. Though probably not Japanese. Serra & Andre’s Japanese text [豚はその子を食べてしまうだろう] reads like a literal translation, and the somewhat clunky painted version actually gets truncated. So it’s not a common saying. And anyway, dogs, not pigs, are the typical Japanese animal slang for police. So this is from the artist(s). Alas, they’re both dead now, so it’s a bummer that apparently no one in the last 10-50 years asked them about it. But don’t look at me; I only found out yesterday, and here I am.
“As a matter of fact, Hoffman’s name came up in the ride to Nevada pretty frequently. Serra had gone to school at Santa Barbara and, after Isla Vista, was having serious doubts about whether he was the most revolutionary1 thing that ever came out of that campus. What, we argued, was the most revolutionary thing to do?
…
“We came back again to see the piece in the early morming, and Joan made a videotape of it. Then we left. On the ride back to Las Vegas we talked about the piece a lot, about politics not at all. It wasn’t as if the problem had gone away; it was, at least for me, as if revolutionary art is where you find it and that the question of what is revolutionary art isn’t too different, in the end, from the question of what is good art. Anyway, nobody mentioned Abbie Hoffman. We all got very happy. Serra wondered whether anyone in the ‘Information’ show had submitted a piece of paper that said: ‘Go to a mesa and dig a slot forty feet deep and one hundred feet long. Then go to the other side and dig a slot…’
…
“1 ‘Revolution’ was the most often-used word I ran into this summer. Nobody used it to mean the transfer of political power from one class to another. Most of the time it seemed to refer to those activities which would most expeditiously bring America to her senses and force her to stop the war, end racism, and begin to take the lead among nations in rescuing the planet from the certain destruction toward which it is headed.”
FWIW, I think the Isla Vista reference is to either the torching of a Bank of America building or the shooting by police of a UCSB student in the Spring of 1970.
I was just going to post the footnote of their road trip’s working definition of revolution, but every piece of context kept spiraling into a vortex of depressing relevance.
Richard Hamilton, Kent State, 1970, 13-stencil screenprint, 727×1020 mm, ed. 3034/5000, selling at Bonham’s 26 July 2024
Speaking of mediated political violence, in 1970 Richard Hamilton photographed a TV screen showing a BBC news report of the National Guard shooting at Kent State.
When he decided ‘that art could help to keep the shame in our minds,’ Hamilton made a 13-layer screenprint of an image of freshman Dean Kahler, who was left paralyzed by the gunshots. The print preserves the shape of the television screen and, published in a signed edition of 5,000 aspired to the ubiquitous reach of broadcast TV itself.
The example above, 3034/5000, is being sold—again—at Bonham’s with another Hamilton work, an offset print of Marcel Duchamp, at a slightly lower estimate than the last time.
