I went to the National Gallery of Art library wanting to know more about Bunny Mellon’s Rothkos and Jasper Johns’s little guys. But I left caring about nothing except this rack of Alma Thomas Pajama Pants.
Alma Thomas Pajama Pants
Category: dc
Donald Moffett Speaks To The Trees
Last fall I was caught off guard by Donald Moffett’s Lot 030323 (the golden bough), which was installed in NATURE CULT: TREMOR, a two-artist exhibition with Shaun Krupa at von ammon co in Washington DC. It stood out, literally, among new, biomorphically baroque iterations of Moffett’s more familiar paint-on-panel works. But even as I type this, I realize it was made of the same materials.
Pieces of salvaged lumber and driftwood were painted gold and bolted together in a totemic simulacrum of a tree, with an art book and two of Moffett’s [other?] paintings perched among its branches. The gesture felt akin to a Rachel Harrison sculpture, but in inverse, with the found objects serving as an armature for the made ones. It also reminded me of some past works of Robert Gober, Moffett’s partner, who made plinths of painted bronze cast from styrofoam blocks collected from the North Shore of Long Island.
Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023/24, will be on view, with some variations and an expanded date, for one more week in Rockland, Maine, where it anchors Moffett’s show, NATURE CULT, SEEDED, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The work in Maine now supports at least one different painting by Moffett—a throat-like orifice replaced by a perch-like birdhouse—and a different book, trading the 18th century botanical illustrations of Mark Catesby for the 19th century bespoke bovine portraits of Thomas Hewes Hinckley. The most substantive difference is the addition of what Brooklyn Rail reviewer Chris Crosman calls “a section” of the golden baugh: a driftwood limb that holds thirteen ex-libris copies of Jeff Goodell’s 2017 book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.
Continue reading “Donald Moffett Speaks To The Trees”From The Collection Of Kenneth Noland
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).]
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.
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.
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.
Stolen
In the summer of 1965 Jasper Johns’ flag painting was stolen from inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine Short Circuit.
This black & white photo of the work by Rudy Burckhardt was in the archive of the National Collection of Fine Art.
Mrs. Alito’s Other Other Flag
Previously, related: Untitled (Mrs. Alito’s Flag), 2021-24
Connecting The Dots
Reading Travis Diehl’s e-flux journal review of Arthur Jafa’s show at 52 Walker led me to Diehl’s road trip report in x-traonline of going to Cady Noland’s 2019 retrospective at MMK Frankfurt with Rasmund Røhling.
Which led to the recordings of the Cady Noland symposium convened at MMK on 27 April 2019.
Diehl also noted to Røhling that the Charlotte Posenenske sculpture and the Claes Oldenburg bacon soft sculpture included in the Noland show were very World Trade Center Twin Towers-coded. Also not to be a conspiracist or anything, but a Noland sculpture was also included in Peter Eleey’s September 11 show at MoMA PS1 in 2011.
Which led me to go searching for which Noland it was, and it of course, was the stanchion work, The American Trip (1988), which is more ambiguously political than MoMA’s other significant Noland, Tanya as Bandit (1989).
But none of that matters right now, because in looking through the installation shots, I was immediately sucked back in time by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ black-bordered stack of mourning surrounded by Jeremy Deller’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.
And that banner. 90 x 600 inches, it was obviously a full-scale recreation of Bush White House image maker Scott Sforza’s hubristic aircraft carrier banner from 2003.
But I never made the connection to its title or date: Unrealized Project for the Exterior of the Carnegie Museum, 2004-2011. So Deller wanted to hang this banner on the outside of the museum as part of Laura Hoptman’s Carnegie International, which opened in October 2004, just before the presidential election. How far along did this proposal get, I wonder? [Deller ended up showing war re-enactors on tiny televisions inserted into the Carnegie’s dollhouse dioramas, the diametric opposite, attention-wise, from a 50-foot banner.]
In Front Of Her Salad
On the metro in DC this afternoon, a woman was eating Caesar’s Salad out of a clamshell container with her fingers, her high-contrast makeup turning every chew into a kabuki-like gesture of meaning.
Then she got up, with her salad, and walked over to study the map. She then lost her balance, and dumped her salad all over the guy sitting next to the map. And then she fell down. Except for all this, she was fine. It was at once the wildest, most predictable, and most avoidable scene imaginable.
Then on the way back, a woman kept losing the lid to her beverage container, which rolled along the floor in whichever direction the train’s momentum dictated, causing bystanders to spring into action to capture it.
Happy Pride [In A Still-Functioning Legal System]
New York prosecutor Joshua Steinglass presented as evidence of Trump’s routine coverup and document fraud a falsified invoice for a shell company created to hide a different $125,000 hush money payment as an “Agreed upon ‘flat fee’ for advisory services.”
I post it here for the same reason Bump posted it at the Post: to praise Michael Cohen’s choice of clip art. It is a distorted rendition of 3-D Bar Graph Meeting, a stock image created by Scott Maxwell of Lumaxart. A version of it created on Christmas Day 2007 was uploaded the next day to flickr.
Though he’s moved his operation to Shutterstock, one of Maxwell’s last updates to his blogpost blog, The Gold Guys, was from 2017: a unified quorum of rainbow stick figures expelling a gold-plated wannabe king, and the word IMPEACH.
Untitled (Mrs. Alito’s Flag), 2021-24
We really are not in a good spot as a country right now, but at least we know more about the bad spot we’ve been in for a while.
No Number/ Black/ No 1, 1969
Shoutout to @dailyrothko for bringing this darkest of all Rothkos to light.
Ink on paper, 42 x 50 inches, not titled, dated, or signed, but from 1969, referred to as 1969, and annotated on the back, “no number/ black/ no. 1” in two different corners. In the National Gallery’s collection since the Rothko kids’ gift in 1986, but I’m not sure it’s been shown. I, for one, would love to see it.
1969, 1969 [nga]
A Kerry-Edwards 2004 Commemorative Mint Julep Cup
The Embassy Scroll by Lunt Silversmiths was the official silver pattern for U.S. embassies and consulates around the world.
Lunt also made commemorative mint julep cups, a form of gift that evolved in Kentuckian horse racing society.
This sterling silver commemorative mint julep cup was made by the Kerry Edwards 2004 campaign for the U.S. Presidency. “Together we made a difference/ With Appreciation/ John Kerry” is engraved on the verso.
If there was a difference made in the 2004 presidential election, it was the failure of a decorated war hero turned opponent to fend off the attacks of a draft dodger turned war criminal in the middle of an historically unpopular and unjust war.
The commemorative mint julep cup belonged to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and will be sold at the auction of her estate on May 7th, 2024, right after this monogrammed American Silver Covered Vegetable Dish.
John Edwards’ 2008 campaign for president was derailed by the revelation that he had a child with a webvideo documentarian after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Edwards also seduced Bunny Mellon to give him over seven hundred thousand dollars during his presidential race, but not as a campaign contribution. He used the money to cover up his affair. Lunt Silversmiths, a family business founded in 1902, sold its trademark to Reed & Barton in 2009 and was dissolved in bankruptcy. John Kerry became Secretary of State during Barack Obama’s second term. Albright died in 2022.
7 May 2024, Lot 138: A Kerry-Edwards 2004 Commemorative Mint Julep Cup, est. $300-500 [hindmanauctions]
Previously, related: George Washington’s Lace (and RBG’s silver collar)
Untitled (Love, Henry), 2018 –
The History of Tilted Arc Is Long
The General Services Administration commissioned Tilted Arc from Richard Serra in 1981 as part of a Percent for Art program. The GSA’s regional manager guided the campaign to have it removed in 1985. It was finally removed at night on March 15, 1989 after Serra’s contract- and free speech-related lawsuit was dismissed. The three Cor-Ten steel plates that comprised the sculpture were taken from the Javits Building plaza in lower Manhattan to a government-owned parking lot at 3rd Avenue & 29th St in Brooklyn. The site was adjacent to the Metropolitan Detention Center. In 1999 the Bureau of Prisons built a new joint on the site, and the pieces of Tilted Arc were sent to a GSA depot at Middle River, Maryland. And there they stayed, on a loading dock, stacked and separated by pressure-treated lumber, as the GSA put it, “indefinitely.”
Which is not the same as forever. The government sold the Middle River site, and Tilted Arc was moved to the GSA’s Fine Art Storage facility in Virginia in the summer of 2005. [18 pallets of relief sculpture molds by Ray Kaskey for the World War II Memorial were also moved, but in different trucks.] It remains there to this day. I saw it yesterday, in fact. [Tilted Arc, that is, not the molds.]
By at least 1993, the GSA conducted regular evaluations of the condition of the Tilted Arc plates. [From the 2001 email thread submitting the first report from Middle River: “The iron curtain is still here.” “Norman reports the sculpture is still on the loading dock and is fine.”] In 2004 it was noticed that they were rusting unevenly due, it was determined, to moisture being trapped in the lumber and held against the otherwise protective oxidized surface.
After an evaluation by McKay Lodge, an art conservation firm which has long held contracts to maintain GSA artworks around the country, GSA issued a statement of work [pdf] to “STABILIZE TILTED ARC.” I find the text below, giving background to the proposal, to be extremely helpful in seeing how the GSA views the artwork:
In 1968 GSA constructs the U.S. Customs Court and Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza, along lower Broadway in New York City. Due to prohibitive inflation and shifting policies within the agency, no public artwork is funded at the time of construction. In 1979, GSA authorizes the Art in Architecture Program to allocate funds for Richard Serra to create a public artwork for the Federal Plaza, on the corner site adjacent to the U.S. Customs Court and Federal Building (now named for Senator Jacob K. Javits). Serra’s sculpture, known as Tilted Arc, is installed on July 16, 1981.
The sculpture was looming and domineering, and an interesting study in the manipulation and compression of public space. Cast in steel, the arc stood 12′ high and 120′ long, and when it [was] on the plaza, it obscured all views of the city beyond the brown metallic wall. [sic obv]
GSA Dismantles Tilted Arc
In June of 1986, the National Endowment for the Arts announces that it will assist GSA to locate a new site for Tilted Arc. However, Serra adamantly reiterates that the sculpture is site-specific, and if moved will be rendered meaningless. [again, sic obv]
McKay Lodge proposed to treat the plates with a marine anti-corrosion film. They were unstacked, cleaned and sprayed, and restacked. The conservator’s report noted that “the predicted problem [uneven corrosion] had occurred to some extent, but pitting had not yet occurred to a degree that the steel would be permanently marred. Nevertheless, it revealed the importance of coating this steel if it is to be stored for years, and the work was performed just in time.”
McKay Lodge recommended reapplying the film as needed every 3-5 years, and to minimize exposure to rainwater by “fastening a covering of plywood over the length of the newly [re-]stacked steel plates and then tying over this waterproof tarps sufficiently fastened to avoid wind lifting.”
No one seemed to suggest researching how other Richard Serra sculptures fare while exposed to the elements, or how other Serra sculptures are stored. In 2009, while the GSA was in the process of spraying their steel plates, Serra himself stored sculptures outdoors, on the riverfront, in the Bronx, by keeping them upright. Just today Michelle Young wrote about visiting the Serra sculpture owned by the city of Paris, which is stored outdoors and upright at a municipal depot.
Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk’s foundational 1990 book, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents WAS Tilted Arc for me, so I FOIA’d Tilted Arc in 2015 because I’d wanted to see where it was, and what happened to it after it was removed. I also wondered if any consideration or analysis had been done relating to Tilted Arc in 2010, when the Jacob Javits Building plaza was being redesigned for the second time. [In 1997 Martha Schwartz’s sinuous bench maze replaced the planters and benches that had been scattered across the original architects’ plinth-with-fountain plaza.] The proposal documents from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, who was selected for the redesign, did not show any trace of historical review or evaluation of reinstalling Tilted Arc. The focus, if I recall, was on alleviating drainage and ventilation problems in the parking lot under the plaza.
When I went to see Tilted Arc‘s situation in 2015, it was indeed encased in an armature of some kind and wrapped in blue tarp. The warehouse complex felt obscure, but neither secret nor restricted. In the intervening years, development around the site has accelerated. There is a new Wegman’s nearby, and countless condo and office towers. The warehouse next to Tilted Arc‘s storage area is now a microbrewery, with outdoor seating. While I’ve been not disclosing its location all this time, I’ve heard from multiple people of their visits.
When I went yesterday, the tarp was off, the plywood was rotting and covered with fallen leaves. The protective coating that is supposed to cure to a white film when active was not visible to me. While ignoring the decades of Serra conservation experience now accumulated by museums and collectors around the world, GSA appears to not even be following their own basic policies to keep the work intact. Preserving Tilted Arc by clamming up and ignoring it is not working.
Preserve it for what, you ask? Didn’t Serra himself declare it destroyed? The actual answer to that is, yes, no, and we don’t know. In his introduction to The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, Serra quoted his own statement to a 1984 GSA hearing: “I want to make it perfectly clear that Tilted Arc was commissioned and designed for one particular site: Federal Plaza. It is a site-specific work and as such not to be relocated To remove the work is to destroy the work.” To which he added, “This has been accomplished; Tilted Arc is destroyed.”
So if the US Government put it back in Federal Plaza tomorrow, would it no longer be destroyed? What parameters of that site must be specified for Serra to have considered it a viable work again? Did he say? Did anyone think to ask? [Anyone besides me, I mean. In 2015 I suggested to a mutual friend that he ask Richard to at least document his intentions for Tilted Arc, in hope that it might ever be reinstalled some day. I don’t know if he did, but the time when we can’t ask anymore has come.]
Tilted Arc was removed because an art-hating judge, a Reagan appointee, and Rudy Giuliani wanted to score political points by destroying something that mattered to people they hated. The people angry at the government for chopping it up and destroying it were wrong; that government dismantled it the same way they installed it—look at those tongue & groove joints, it just slides apart!—and they’ve spent 35 years storing, moving, protecting and conserving the pieces of it.
To what end? Serra shut down the possibility of selling it off; no collector or institution would take a destroyed Serra […unless?] So why take this effort if not to preserve the possibility of reinstalling it? How does that play out? Serra himself was obviously never going to ask for it, but he’s gone now. The GSA seems uninterested to pursue it on their own. So who makes it happen? Are Serra collectors in a Whatsapp group chat right now trying to figure it out? Could you imagine a more fitting monument to billionaires colluding to get the government to do whatever they want than a resurrected Tilted Arc?
Or maybe it’s just a government that does its job, takes care of things, appreciates the arts, recognizes a sculpture’s significance, and creates the opportunity to do something better. The history of Tilted Arc is long, but it bends back toward Manhattan.
Uncut
Some people wanted to make art in the gap between life and art.
Some people, meanwhile, are interested in the gap between if you move it you destroy it and actually we didn’t cut it up because it has little tongues and grooves and just slots together.
Mourning Jan Palach by Josef Koudelka
I’m haunted by this image by Josef Koudelka, who photographed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and its aftermath. Jan Palach was a 21-year-old student who died in January 1969, after setting himself on fire in Wenceslas Square and running through the streets of Prague.
Koudelka made his photos secretly, under extraordinary and dangerous circumstances, but they always had a feeling of distant historicity. Then a couple of days ago Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old soldier in the US Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy near my house. He was protesting US involvement and support of genocide being committed against Palestinians in Gaza.
Koudelka’s image illustrates Masha Gessen’s New Yorker essay about the implications for the US and its political system for an American soldier to self-immolate in terrible protest against something even worse.
They Photoshopped Dianne Feinstein’s Pool
Dianne Feinstein’s house is for sale, and it includes a pool, where her aides probably said she went swimming every day.
Meanwhile, the ghost of Ellsworth Kelly says to expand the court.