THE
DAYS
OF
THIS
SOCIETY
IS NUMBERED
and unless we do something about it, that number is 250.
Country Over Party Cup
Category: dc
Der Schwerbelastungskörper und Die Schwerbelastungskörperaussichtsplattform
So a nazi-aping fascist’s monomaniacal proposal to build an arch on swampy riverfront is in the news. In 1941 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer got approval to build a giant triumphal arch on a main axis of a redesigned Berlin, and quickly built the Schwerbelastungskörper, or heavy load-bearing structure, to test the ability of the marshy soil to support such a ridiculously large structure. It was built with forced labor from captured French soldiers.
The Heavy Load-Bearing Structure is a cylindrical pressure body made of solid concrete 14 meters high, with a diameter of 21 meters. Its 11-meter diameter concrete base extends 18 meters deep. The 12,650 ton weight was calculated to approximate one of the arch’s four base legs.
The war diverted resources and attention from the arch and the redesign of Berlin, and the HLBS was left behind. Scientists and soil management technicians used the structure for data collection until 1983—postwar analysis showed the ground was too soft to have supported Hitler’s arch without major intervention, btw. And it became a historical monument in 1995, “the only tangible example of National Socialist urban planning.”
Now there is a visitor information center, monthly tours, and a Schwerbelastungskörperaussichtsplattform, a Heavy Load-Bearing Structure Viewing Platform, which looks exactly like what a visitor center for a useless nazi concrete plug should look like.
Lichtenstein Bomb Loving
In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein was one of over 400 artists who submitted a 2×2-ft artwork to be installed on Mark di Suvero’s Artists’ Tower of Protest, an anti-Vietnam war pop-up monument which was installed on a vacant lot on the corner of Sunset and La Cienaga in LA. The Peace Tower, as it came to be called, was criticized and attacked, and when the owner of the lot refused to extend the Artists’ Protest Committee’s three-month lease, the Tower was dimantled, and the paintings were sold off, wrapped in brown paper, in an anonymous fundraiser.
Though no museum wanted the Peace Tower itself, Lichtenstein’s painting, Atom Burst, of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb, found its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth by 1968. For some reason they don’t have a photo of it online, but Pioneer Works does. [Me, I signed away all proceeds from selling my blood plasma and my second born child to the Lichtenstein Foundation when I clicked on the painting’s Google result. At this point it’d probably be less hassle to post an Alamy stock photo of it.]
Meanwhile, I guess Roy liked the mushroom cloud enough to make another one for himself. Atomic Landscape (1966) stayed in the artist’s family until last year, when the estate sold it for $1.636 million.
It matters that it’s more a seascape. The images of massive mushroom clouds in the ocean, devoid of the devastation a nuclear bomb would wreak on a city, make it look kind of awesome. Lichtenstein only painted a mushroom cloud twice, but he made over 150 artworks of explosions; the man LOVED to interpret a cartoon explosion. One of the last ones he made was an explosion-shaped trophy for the New York State Governors’ Art Award in 1996. [Fun fact: After being asked to make more for 1997, the Lichtenstein Foundation writes that, “The New York State Council on the Arts confirms that the artist then tacitly agreed to have it reproduced annually.”]
Anyway, when the possibility of deranged despots using nuclear weapons in a failing war of belligerence is now not close enough to zero for disinterested discourse, aestheticizing their destructive power seems like a not such a great idea.
Catherine Opie Goes To Washington
“I did that big body of work, American Cities, for many years. And I’m definitely going to be going to DC to start again. DC needs to be photographed right now.”
TFW you’ve gone and done it, and now Catherine Opie has to come photograph your kakistocratic, militarized, depopulated cityscape for her 25-year-long series.
A Brush With… Catherine Opie [theartnewspaper]
Catherine Opie on her American Cities photos in 2006 [The Morning News]
Holping, Not Holping
“Thak you for holping us,” I guess an Afghan child wrote in September 2021, upon arriving in the US as part of Operation Allies Welcome, the program that evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with US and coalition occupation forces, who, along with their families, were facing imminent execution when the US began withdrawing from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Over 73,000 folks were granted Special Immigrant Visa status and settled in the US. Operation Welcome Allies was the military/civilian/private sector support campaign while their asylum claims were being processed.
This drawing caught my attention while passing through an otherwise emptied Dulles airport late the other night. To say there’s a Twombly-esque quality to it acknowledges the all-over-ness of the composition, while not doing justice to the style of the marks. Many feel to me like abstractions of Arabic writing elements, in the same way Twombly’s loops can feel like cursive Ls or Is. The fat Arabic text, written in outline but not completely filled in, helps with that reading. I cannot get a plausible translation, though, so if you have a suggestion, hmu.
Anyway, when I saw this, I wondered if the child whose life the US government had put in mortal danger, then saved, had since been kidnapped by the US government and thrown into a concentration camp or deported back to certain death.
Previously, related: Cy Twombly Not Writing
Paint Them All Yellow, Let Phillips Sort Them Out
A lot of bangers in the new issue of The Brooklyn Rail, but it’s bangers all the way down with this Rob Pruitt interview by Andrew Woolbright. Really thoughtful reflections on the Early days; the banal impossibility of grasping the passage of time; Cocaine Buffet (1998) as Dark Relational Aesthetics; and this heartwrenching and hilarious commentary on art and love:
Woolbright: Is there work that you make, other than the pandas, that feels vulnerable, or maybe that you’d even consider to be bad in some way?
Pruitt: Maybe the paintings that come up to auction? I always assume they are the worst paintings. Nobody can find enough love for them to keep them, right? My mother was a hoarder, and part of me too can’t let go of the unneeded things—even bad paintings. Even if I could buy the bad paintings back to save my own market, I wouldn’t be able to destroy them. I think I would need to invent a new project, like paint them all yellow or something. “These yellow paintings aren’t the bad paintings anymore, they’re perfectly new and fresh and ready for you to buy and love.”
Rob Pruitt with Andrew Woolbright, Feb 2026 [brooklynrail]
The Absence of Ice
When I think about getting rid of ICE, and about the threat our country is to Greenland, our other allies, and the habitable climate of the earth, I come back to the series of sculptures Olafur Eliasson made in 2015-2016.
To make The presence of absence, Eliasson collected fragments of ice from Greenlandic glaciers floating at sea, in this case, Nuuk Kangerlua, the large western fjord by Greenland’s capital, and cast them in concrete forms in his studio. “The melting glacier produced sounds like miniature explosions.” It took about a month, and left a physical memory of the ice, a void.
There’s a great video of the void from Eliasson’s 2016 show at neugerrimschneider in Berlin. [olafureliasson.net]
Fire and ICE
“Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood is named for Wendell Phillips, a fervent abolitionist. He was once asked why he couldn’t turn down the heat in his rhetoric: why are do you always have to be so firey? Phillips’ reply: ‘Yes, I’m on fire–because I have mountains of ice to melt!'”
The invocation of Phillips by composer and writer Frank Hudson has been doing numbers on Bluesky. It’s only one of a thread of posts about Minneapolis neighborhoods named after abolitionists.
As he writes in a recent blog post about having to set music aside to fight the forces of fascism and terror on the streets of his hometown, Hudson came to the Phillips quote the way so many have: it was a favorite of the late MN senator Paul Wellstone. He closed a March 2000 speech at an educators conference about the foundational importance to democracy of education with it:
That reminds me of a quote that has motivated me throughout my life. It is my favorite quote. It is from Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist from the 1840’s. At that time both political parties were very weary of the slavery issue and they weren’t sure how to confront it. But not Wendell, he just said slavery was a moral outrage, that it was unconscionable, and he wouldn’t equivocate. He wasn’t afraid to speak out.
After he gave a particularly fiery speech about abolition, a friend came up to him and said, “Wendell, why are you so on fire?”
And Wendell turned to his friend and said, “Brother May, I’m on fire because I have mountains of ice before me to melt.”
We have mountains of ice before us to melt. Thank you for your energy, your time, your love for children and your passion to do what is right. It has been an honor to be here.
And it was cited in memorials to Wellstone after his death in a plane crash in 2002.
I could not find Wellstone’s version of the exchange, though. But I did find Wendell Phillips repeating it in 1879—at the funeral of his longtime friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison:
He [Garrison] said to a friend who remonstrated with him on the heat and severity of his language, ‘Brother, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.’
Garrison co-founded and edited The Liberator, and founded—with Phillips and others—the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for full, immediate, and uncompensated emancipation of enslaved people in the US. It was Garrison’s call for full Black liberty and equality, grounded in the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence, that was considered unhelpfully extreme in the 1830s, when other early abolitionists were calling for gradual emancipation and the expulsion of Black people—both freed and enslaved—from the US.
The earliest mention of the story is from 1840, in a eulogy for the Rev. Charles Follen, who’d taken up the ministry after being fired from Harvard for his abolitionist views. Follen died in a fire on the steamship Lexington, and churches in Boston refused to host the Anti-Slavery Society’s memorial service for him:
He [Follen] knew that Mr. Garrison was incited to greater vehemence and severity by the coldness, and heartless indifference of almost all around him; and that nothing would so soon attemper his zeal, as to find himself supported, instead of opposed, by the wisest and best men in the community. He had heard and he felt the force of Mr. Garrison’s reply to an early friend, who was remonstrating with him on his violence of language. “Why,” said that friend, “you write as if you were all on fire.” “I have need to be all on fire,” was his solemn reply, “for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.”
That eulogy was delivered by Samuel Joseph May.
Brother May revealed himself as Garrison’s early friend in his 1869 memoir, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. It was not just the coldness and indifference of those around him that set Garrison afire, but it was also that. May was one of several friends who asked Garrison about turning down the rhetorical heat a bit:
“But,” said I, “some of the epithets, though not perhaps too severe, are not precisely applicable to the sin you denounce, and so may seem abusive.”
“Ah !” he rejoined, “until the term ‘slaveholder’ sends as deep a feeling of horror to the hearts of those who hear it applied to any one as the terms ‘robber,’ ‘pirate,’ ‘murderer’ do, we must use and multiply epithets when condemning the sin of him who is guilty of the ‘sum of all villanies.'”
“O” cried I, “my friend, do try to moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire.”
He stopped, laid his hand upon my shoulder with a kind but emphatic pressure, that I have felt ever since, and said slowly, with deep emotion, “Brother May, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” From that hour to this I have never said a word to Mr. Garrison in complaint of his style. I am more than half satisfied now that he was right then, and we who objected were mistaken. [paragraph breaks added]
Don’t call it genocide. Don’t call it fascism. Don’t call them nazis. Don’t call it an occupation. Don’t call it kidnapping. Don’t call it disappearing. Don’t call it white supremacism. Don’t call it terrorism. Don’t call it murder.
We have need to be all on fire, for there are mountains of ice about us to melt. We are here now with multiple people murdered by agents of the state, as evergrowing crowds fill the streets to take the places of the fallen and protect their neighbors in hiding. But the goal is the same as it has been for everyone who has caught the fire and passed it along to new generations who recognize its self-evident truth: equal liberty and equal justice for all. I really hope the fire this time does not take 30 years to do its thing.
The Angle of History
All these years, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) has been simultaneously over-quoted and under-read, to our peril:
One reason why fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth [🙃] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
…
[cuts section about the Klee which, not right now, Angel of History, Ima need you to focus!]
…
At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them.
somehow ambushing me in the appendix of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Always To Return catalogue, available in bookstores near me Sunday!
Disavow Disavow
The wild thing is that there was possibly as much as an entire decade in which Christopher Wool might have known that Ivanka Trump had bought one of his prints, and he might have just thought, “lol weird but whatever.”
And if he just stayed silent during the first administration, when Ivanka was in the White House, but the print wasn’t in her instagram feed, he could have just clammed up and let Richard Prince do all the disavowing.
But now, with her tryna be just a pensive bookfluencer in her DWR chair, dropping her reading list, while her civilian husband cuts a side deal with Putin her dad just [gestures to all this], does Wool feel a little different about his screenprinted exploration of the meaning of abstract painting being used as a backdrop for the regime? Or is it just par for the course? [@crampell.bsky.social via @chrisrusak.com]
[one google search later: oh right, we’ve all known since 2016. I guess Wool just decided to walk the Marfa desert and collect barbed wire about it.]
Better Read #042: Witnesses
Today is World AIDS Day.
In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts canceled a grant for an exhibition at Artists Space of artists responding to the AIDS crisis. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was organized by Nan Goldin, and the catalogue contained essays by Goldin, Linda Yablonsky, Cookie Mueller, and David Wojnarowicz. The Wojnarowicz essay’s political, non-artistic content, was the initial stated reason for the cancellation of the grant.
Artists Space has an extensive archive of the show, including the entire catalogue, and reporting and documentation of the NEA censorship scandal that engulfed it. David Wojnarowicz’s published statement about the grant cancellation is read here by a computer-generated voice.
Download Better Read #042: Wojnarowicz Witnesses, 20251201 [6:41 mp3, 6mb]
Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, Nov. 1989-Jan. 1990 [artistsspace.org]
When A Dick Keyed The Cock
Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph, The Cock (Kiss), 2002, was vandalized during an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2007, but the first mention I can find of the attack wasn’t until 2011, when Tillmans gave a lecture at the Royal Academy:
This photograph (The Cock (Kiss), 2002) of two guys kissing got slashed by a visitor at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington. I’m always aware that one should never take things for granted, never take liberties for granted. For hundreds and hundreds of years this was not normal, not acceptable, and this term of acceptable is really what I connect beauty to. So, sometimes I’m said to be turning everyday subject matter into beautiful things, and I find that a bit uncritical, unless it is connected to that beauty is of course always political, as in it describes what is acceptable or desirable in society. That is never fixed, and always needs reaffirming and defending.
The attack on The Cock (Kiss) has become part of the picture’s lore, repeated well beyond Tillmans’ own mentions. The image was shared widely online as a defiant response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub murders, something Tillmans’ publisher Phaidon wrote about within days of the shootings. In 2022 writer Douglas Stuart spoke with Tillmans about the photo, and the attack:
TILLMANS: I put it in my first American museum survey exhibition that toured from Chicago to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where the picture was attacked, slashed by somebody with a key, ripped. It came as a shock. But I’ve always been struck by the fact that you can show two men killing each other at three in the afternoon in any country in the world on public television, but you can’t show two men kissing each other.
STUART: Certainly, it’s an image that has been a call for solidarity and defiance in the queer community. It was an image that was actually so central to the writing of my book.
Stuart took inspiration from one of the The Cock (Kiss) kissers for a character in his YA novel, Young Mungo, both as a sweaty symbol of gay liberation and as an object of homophobic attack.
When homophobia seemed resurgent this past summer, the Smithsonian was being newly threatened, and beautiful things again needed defending, Tillmans mentioned the incident on Instagram. He said it was slashed, and removed from the show. I realized that though I’d seen the show multiple times, written about it, and even partied with Tillmans and the curators after the opening, I’d heard nothing at the time about the slashing, and remembered no public reporting on it, or even on the removal of a prominent work. Indeed, it seems it was never made public until Tillmans made it public.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which co-organized the Hirshhorn’s Tillmans show with the Hammer Museum, owns an edition of The Cock (Kiss). Was it the one attacked? There’s only an edition of 3+ 1AP. Is one lost? I wanted to look more closely into the attack, and the museum’s response to it. So I went into the exhibition files in the Smithsonian Archives.
Continue reading “When A Dick Keyed The Cock”Glenn Ligon, Condition Report
It took a lot of effort to not include it, but despite making the absolute best condition report-related artwork ever, Glenn Ligon really did not need to be dragged into a discussion of Ron Perelman’s art collection lawsuit.
The only reason I wouldn’t run into a burning house to save Condition Report (2000) is because it’s an edition of 20. But if you told me I could keep it, I would probably change.
These went almost instantly into museum collections. I am pretty sure Perelman didn’t get one. But the NGA wins, because they also have the original: the enamel painting Ligon made of the garbage workers protest sign he saw hanging in Congressman Charlie Rangel’s Harlem office as a student. He discussed all three works in 2013.
Condition Report, 2000 [glennligonstudio]
There. Are. FOUR. LIGHTS.
I went back to the National Gallery of Art today just to photograph the two major lighting WTF going on right now, but also to celebrate the return of Ellsworth Kelly’s Tiger, an early multi-canvas masterpiece from 1953. The work had suddenly disappeared from the 2023 Ellsworth Kelly show at Glenstone, without a word of explanation.
In completely unrelated news, I remember a few weeks ago talking with one of the conservators at the NGA who said how much Ellsworth loved the Gallery, and had even left a bunch of money to research the conservation of contemporary paintings. Which is good, because [counting Tiger as one,] they have 24 Kelly canvases.
Back to the photo, which also shows Lighting Situation #1, or 1-3: a gallery of three white hot Dan Flavin Tatlin Monuments throwing my ccd out of whack.
Which is fine. But there is a white walled gallery next to it, filled with white paintings. That is a Barnett Newman on the left, The Name II, 1950, very rarely seen. There’s also a Mary Corse, Robert Ryman, Freddy Rodriguez, and an Anne Truitt.
Truitt’s white acrylic and pencil on gesso Arundel XI painting suffers the worst. My phone camera is doing a lot of work here, and the painting is still almost unseeable.
You know, to see these photos of Lighting Situation #2, Yellow Gallery, I feel like I’m being a noodge; they really do seem to color correct a lot, even presenting the range of yellows Christo, Truitt, USCO, Kusama, and Mangold used.
Even Olafur’s got two different yellows, in the door and the orb. But it truly is the orb yellow that becomes a collaborator with every other work in the room; it’s really palpable. There is a similar circular pedestal being set up on the mezzanine right now; I wonder what they’ll hang above that one?
I really feel like I can see how these installations came together; the way the curators thought through the challenging situations these light-based objects present; and the factors that brought them to this spot in the first place. And it’s good to remember we really are all going through some stuff right now, as a city, a capital, a nation, and a world.
Vase Value
Träumendes Kind (Dreaming Baby), 2004, stood at the center of Isa Genzken’s first show with David Zwirner in New York, in the spring of 2005. Topped with a twig broom, a mighty bundle of sticks, some precariously shoved-together vases, a spraypainted baby, and a giant Halloween spider, it was the shaggiest of the nine messy, totemic sculptures that dominated the show. It’s probably where Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood saw it, but it’s not clear when she decided to include it and five other similar Genzkens in her 2006 survey exhibition of contemporary sculpture, The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas.
Traumendes Kind [minus the umlaut] was discussed at length in the show’s catalogue, where Ellegood celebrated “artists’ willingness to allow their work to suggest both a coming together and a falling apart.” And works whose “visible awkwardness or indeterminateness may take on structural manifestations in terms of delicacy, precariousness, and the periodic use of inherently unstable materials.” Yes, about that, actually,
In mid-October, a couple of weeks before the show, the Hirshhorn folks opened a large crate shipped from New York, and they found half the Genzken was missing. It turns out the mirror- and cherub-wrapped pedestal was in its own crate that didn’t make the trip. More importantly for this post, the half that did arrive was in pieces, rolling around on the bottom of the crate.
While looking for something else in the Hirshhorn archives I stumbled across the documentation of the resolution of Träumendes Kind‘s trauma: a thick folder of unredacted back & forth with the lender—gallerist Tim Nye, actually almost all of it was with his assistant—and Hirshhorn conservators, registrars, and curators, with occasional reply all’d interjections from the David Zwirner team and the Christian Scheidemann, contemporary art’s go-to conservator. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, but even for a show about sculptural uncertainty, it almost never gets mentioned or discussed in public. In this case, though, it’s all preserved for the nation by the Smithsonian.
tl;dr the sculpture’s fine ($35,000) and Nye’s fine ($30,000), but here’s what happened:
Continue reading “Vase Value”