States of Change: Bangers For Democracy

Thomas Demand, Ballot, 2018, open edition digital print on 12 x 10 in. paper, via statesofchange.us

A lot of bangers in the mix at States of Change, a limited-duration, open edition photo print fundraiser to support State Voices, a growing coalition of grass roots organizations around the country that work to preserve and expand voting rights in the US.

A lot of really good artists have put in some very solid work for an important cause at a critical moment. But NGL, these kind of prints are nice, but small—digitally printed on 10×12 paper—and unsigned. So a little slight in themselves. But what they are designed for is to shake $100 or more needed dollars from you. So just pick your favorites and go for it, while you can.

States of Change is open through November 4, 2024, to US citizens and legal permanent residents. [statesofchange.us]

I Am An American

Dorothea Lange, 1941, caption: “Oakland, Calif., Mar. 1942. A large sign reading ‘I am an American’ placed in the window of a store, at [401 – 403 Eighth] and Franklin streets, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed following orders to persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas. The owner, a University of California graduate, will be housed with hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration of the war.” loc.gov, at least, for now

To recognize that censoring Dorothea Lange’s photos of American citizens being incarcerated without charge or cause by the US government because of their race has a long history absolutely does not help when they do it again.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “[U.S Archivist, Colleen] Shogan and her top advisers told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees. Shogan’s aides also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational materials, other current and former employees said.”

It’s among a whole host of controversial, conservative, and censorious demands Shogan and her team have made as part of the renovation of the National Archives Museum. Every reported change whitewashes American history with explicit conservative slants, and silences or erases non-white Americans.

Just as the racism-fueled shameful injustice of Japanese American incarceration during WWII was ordered by FDR, this cowardly censor running the Archives was appointed by Joe Biden.

[next day reactions update: via @shannonmattern.bsky.social comes Charles Pierce’s context-setting on Shogan’s pre-emptive cowardice in the face of, of all people, Josh Hawley]

Prevously, all too related:
2018: A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X
2011: I Am An American

Felix Gonzalez-Torres @ NPG

Selfie in “Untitled” (Fear), 1991, blue mirror, 30 5/8 x 25 7/8 in., embedded in the wall this time at the National Portrait Gallery

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, at and around the National Portrait Gallery is excellent in several precise and unexpected ways:

The inclusion of all 55 of the artist’s puzzle works [first shown like this at Art Basel 2019, including with five exhibition copies, which I didn’t know was a thing here.]

The inclusion of strong non-signature works like “Untitled” (Fear), above, and “Untitled” (A Portrait), the artist’s only video work.

The inclusion of two variants of the portrait [sic] of flowers on Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas’ grave. [n.b.: There are more.]

But the most intriguing and effective thing was the threading of Felix’s work throughout and among the collection of the NPG. It worked in small, even tiny ways, like reuniting a little Eakins portrait of an ancient Walt Whitman with a candy pour, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which had been shown together at the NPG’s 2010 Hide/Seek exhibition of queer portraiture.

But it hit hardest and most unexpectedly in the most intrusive installation: “Untitled” (Death by Gun), the stack of photos of Americans killed in one week of gun violence, on the floor of a heavily trafficked hall gallery, in front of two works that felt like the NPG’s 19th century bread and butter.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return installation view with “Untitled” (Death by Gun) installed in front of Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress at the National Portrait Gallery

The painting turns out to be Christian Schussele’s 1862 Men of Progress, an amalgamated portrait of various American inventors, including Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver pistol that made shooting people easier, quicker, and more convenient.

Catlin the celebrated Indian traveler and artist, firing his Colt repeating rifle before a tribe of Carib Indians in South America, c. 1855-60, installed at the National Portrait Gallery

Next to them [in a way I could have photographed all three together, had I only realized the complexity of the connection] is a print after a George Catlin painting, where the artist shows off a Colt rifle to a group of Carib Indians. Turns out that after the economic failure of his massive “Indian Gallery” project, Catlin accepted a commission for a series of paintings for an aggressive marketing campaign promoting Colt’s new guns. That went well. For the gunmakers, at least.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return runs through June 2025 or until the end of the republic, whichever comes first [npg]
Previously, related: on Hide/Seek and the controversies around its censorship

But I Think His Work Is Really Superior And Stands On Its Own

a murky brownish green painted diptych of two sheet of paper has the following text stenciled most legibly at the center, spanning both sheets, but also faintly at the top of the left sheet, and illegibly scrubbed out at the bottom of the left sheet. the quote reads, there is a consciousness we all have that he is a black american artist but i think his work is really superior and stands on its own. ned rifkin, then chief curator of the hirshhorn museum, said that in the ny times about martin puryear, in 1988, and glenn ligon made this painting out if it, and now it's in moma's collection
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (There is a consciousness we all have…), 1988, Oil, oilstick, pencil, and acrylic on two sheets of paper, 30 x 44 3/4 in., collection: MoMA

Some time in 1988 before November, Glenn Ligon made Untitled (I Am A Man), which is called his first painting of a selected text, based on a 1968 civil rights protest poster he’d seen as a student in the local office of Congressman Charlie Rangel.

In November 1988, Jamaica Art Center visual arts director Kellie Jones’ proposal of sculptor Martin Puryear to represent the US at the São Paulo Bienal was announced. Puryear was the first Black artist to represent the US at an international exhibition. [He went on to win the grand prize and a MacArthur that year.]

One of the ten members of the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, which made the selection, was Hirshhorn Museum chief curator Ned Rifkin, who actually said, to The New York Times, “There is a consciousness we all have that he is a black American artist, but I think his work is really superior and stands on its own.”

A textured dark painting with faded red and orange text that reads: "LANGUAGE To dream that you are learning or speaking a foreign language denotes that you will take a pleasant trip across the open country 291 It also denotes you will meet a dangerous enemy." The background appears to be layered with different shades of black and brown, giving it an aged and weathered look. This text is copied from the Whitney Museum, though I take issue with the interpretation of the painting as aged and weathered.
Glenn Ligon, No. 291 (Language), 1988, Oil, acrylic, oil stick, and graphite on paper, 30×22 in., a long promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau to the Whitney Museum, accessioned in 2024

Also in 1988 Ligon was working on stenciling found texts, on paper. Including quotes from “dreambook” pamphlets, street handouts that coupled dream interpretations with advertisement for an underground lottery his father worked at.

And also condescending quotes by major museum curators published in the newspaper. Untitled (There is a consciousness we all have…) comprises two sheets of the same size as the dreambook painting above. It shows an early example of Ligon stenciling a found text multiple times. In a composition similar to No. 291 (Language), faint and effaced versions of Rifkin’s quote can be seen on the top and bottom, respectively, of the left sheet, while the right sheet seems to bear traces of marks made by pushing the stencil itself.

So it is that I only heard of this quote, and this work, this morning, while reading Kriston Capps’ extended reflection on the Hirshhorn in the Washington Post occasioned by the museum’s 50th anniversary. Capps’ reference sent me on a search for the work and the quote, and the curator and the context.

And I thought this is how it must have felt to first encounter Ligon’s work. Much is made of Ligon’s choices of text and the resonance of their sources, but it feels worth noting how much of that information exists apart from his paintings. Though he eventually began mentioning titles in his own titles, early sources like dreambooks and Ned Rifkin were untraceable and unrecognizable, at least to someone who didn’t live them. So their first reference is Ligon, who put them there, not the source he got them from. Which makes Rifkin’s quote even more outraging, offensive—and, for a young Black artist reading it, dispiriting.

In 1991 Ned Rifkin left the Hirshhorn for the High Museum in Atlanta, and Ligon was in his first Whitney Biennial. In early 1993, presumably before he showed Notes on the Margin of The Black Book at the Whitney Biennial, the Hirshhorn acquired their only Ligon works to date: a door painting, Untitled (Black Like Me #2), and Untitled (Four Etchings), both from 1992. The painting was loaned to the White House for four years beginning in 2009. The National Gallery of Art acquired Untitled (I Am A Man) in 2012.

Déjà Lu: Andrea Fraser’s 2016 PDF Dropped

In 2018 Andrea Fraser published 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, a 933-page report documenting the 2016 political expenditures of all the trustees of 125 museums across the United States. More than half the $6.4 billion poured into the 2016 US elections came from just a few hundred people, and, Fraser finds, most of them also dominate the country’s art and cultural institutions.

It is described as “like a telephone book,” by which I hope they don’t mean “so obsolete half the people alive right now have never seen one.” Well, now’s your chance. Fraser’s 2016 has been released as a PDF, available at the Wattis Institute. It includes texts by Fraser and Jamie Stevens, who led a year-long season of events and exhibitions at the Wattis focused on Fraser’s work.

It is still available in print, too, and I hope a suitable number of copies will be secreted away around the globe to show future historians of the 21st century that at least some people were aware enough to put out exhaustive reports.

Andrea Fraser, 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, published by Westreich Wagner, CCA Wattis, and MIT Press, in PDF and print ($125) [wattis.org]
Previously, related: Why Does Andrea Fraser’s Work Make Me Cry?

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s A Guide To Modern Camp Homes So Different, So Appealing?

The whole thing was unexpected, tbqh, but one of the surprise bonuses of the Rabkin Foundation writers award situation was meeting artist/photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki when he came to make my portrait. I asked him to bring a copy of his 2013-and-counting artist book, A Guide to Modern Camp Homes.

Modeled after Sears brochures for selling kit homes, Miyazaki’s Guide combines quotes from official notices and chirpy marketing with bright archival photos and renderings, as if racially segregated detention camps in the desert were the next step in the American Dream:

Customize Your Home
Your new home is unfurnished, aside from your bed frames, mattresses, and stove. You may wish to customize it with room partitions made from hanging sheets, and optional handmade items such as chairs, tables, shelves and window curtains. At some centers, large piles of discarded, green wood may remain from the home building process…

Where Sears would have run blurbs from satisfied customers, Miyazaki quotes the testimonies of former detainees, firsthand accounts of the sort gathered by Densho. In 2013 when he first conceived the Guide, I imagine the juxtaposition of deadpan form and horrible content was meant to foster a meaningful reflection on the wrongs that had been perpetrated by the US government against its own citizens.

The next dates on the Guide, though, are 2017 and 2024, when Muslim bans; refugee children imprisoned and separated from their families; genocide; and campaign promises of industrial-scale detentions and deportations were back. And the guy behind it all just compared the jail sentences of the rioters convicted in the 2021 coup attempt to the WWII detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

And so now Miyazaki’s Guide functions, not as a gentle appreciation of the experience of the artist’s family and the Japanese American community, but as evidence in itself. That even just a few years ago, we held the truths of the deep, unjust, racist, violations of peoples’ fundamental rights and liberties to be self-evident, and that was reason enough to never let them happen again.

Read Kevin J. Miyazaki’s A Guide to Modern Camp Homes [kevinmiyazaki.com]
Previously, related:
2003: I mean, just look how happy they were!
2010: Ansel Adams’ Japanese American Internment Camp Photos at MoMA [Shhh!]
2011: I Am An American
2015/18: A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X

Cady Noland Pavilions

“Beginning October 17, and spanning three rooms of the Pavilions, Glenstone will share a presentation of works by Cady Noland. Developed in collaboration with the artist, this presentation will mark the first major survey by a U.S. museum of her decades-long career.”

Reader, the presentation has been marked. Last year I poured one out for anyone who’d hoped to buy a new Cady Noland work. But now I feel for anyone who’s been trying to buy a major Cady Noland the last 17 years.  Because Glenstone got them all. Look at that map; Glenstone has Cady Nolands even Glenstone doesn’t know about.

Three of the six open pavilion spaces are Noland’s work. [The others are two galleries of works by Lorraine O’Grady and Melvin Edwards, and the little library.] The first thing you see as you go down the stairs is not a Noland sculpture, but a Noland architectural intervention. At first it read like an Ellsworth Kelly, if only because architecture-scale Kellys were just on view here. Up close, no, closer, inside it, it read like an Anne Truitt, of the back of the Anne Truitts that had backs.

The no photography proscription is excruciating, and I find myself trying to no spoilers my way through this post, as if it’s feasible to say, let’s discuss it after you’ve seen it. The artist adjusted the space to minimize distraction and focus attention on her work, and it works. They borrowed Clip-on Man. Charles Gatewood’s book with the source image is in the library.

The Raleses purportedly acquired Noland’s entire show last year at Gagosian, but it also somehow fills a space three times the size. There is a lot less tape, except when there isn’t.

There are pallet plinths that are not elements of the work, except when they are. There are foam and carpet blocks that precede an installation, except they’re still here. It’s at once pristine and provisional.

The paper labels remain on the white wall tires. You may not ride the tire swings. The internal gear to lift the massive stockade is freshly lubed, but the crank is padlocked. The chain that connected the bench is gone. Oozewald has its corrected and copyrighted stand. The wear on the corners of one (non-mirror-finish) aluminum panel propped on the floor is enough to make the owner of Cowboys Milking weep.

It’s like this survey surveys not only the range of Noland’s work as she made it, but as it was presented, processed and purchased since. Maybe being cast in acrylic and thoughtfully placed in the contemplative suburban art temple of benevolent billionaires is not, after all, all bad.

There’s Still Some Art For Kamala

This is the Louise Lawler Democrats want: Three Flags (swiped and moving), 2022, dye sublimation print on museum box, 48 x 85 5/16 in., ed. 4/5+1AP

So far 105 artworks donated to the Artists for Kamala fundraising campaign have been sold. The remaining 67 works will remain available through October 18th. Because the purchases are subject to campaign donation laws, buyers must file donor statements. Also, they can’t be foreign nationals or lobbyists.

Also they may not want to be Republicans. 100% of the proceeds goes to the Harris Victory Fund, which allocates it to Harris for President, the DNC, and the state Democratic parties.

Interestingly, another edition of this Lawler is at Paula Cooper Gallery through October 26th, in a Flag-themed show. A portion of the proceeds from that show will go to America Votes, a coalition of GOTV and voting rights organizations.

Dianne Feinstein’s Earring

Dianne Feinstein’s incapacitated inaction at a critical moment in US history and her to retire from the Senate long after she lost the mental and physical capacity to function is a stain on her legacy.

If there’s anything to be noted about the sale of her personal collection of mid jewelry, maybe it’s the single Tiffany sapphire and diamond earring whose companion one could imagine was lost in a demented haze, or maybe even stolen by a careerist hanger-on in her waning days. Yes, buy this orphaned earring today, which is small enough to sew into the hem of your clothes if you find yourself fleeing across a border anytime soon.

Lot 2023, 15 Oct 2024: TIFFANY & CO.: PLATINUM, SAPPHIRE, AND DIAMOND SINGLE EARRING, currently $480 sold for $800 [bonhams]
Previously, related [and still for sale, btw]: They Photoshopped Dianne Feinstein’s Pool

Richard Serra Embossment

Richard Serra, F*** Helms, 1990, 14×15 in. sheet, via NGA/Gemini

Election season, when a man’s heart turns to thoughts of Gemini G.E.L. fundraising print portfolios. Or at least it used to.

Fortunately, longtime greg.org hero/reader Terry Wilfong emailed a keen observation about Richard Serra’s Afangar Viðey series prints that momentarily distracts from the genocidal, climate, and fascistic calamities afoot. Like me, Terry missed out on getting any little Viðey etchings, and was drawn to the print Serra made at the same moment for the Harvey Gantt Portfolio. [Gantt was the Black opponent to one of the Reagan era GOP’s biggest bigots, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.]

Terry noted that this print, titled F*** Helms, looked similar to the Viðey etchings, but it was a screenprint. It was not an etching, yet it had an embossed plate mark like an etching. What was going on there?

Continue reading “Richard Serra Embossment”

Whoomp, There It Is: My Rabkin Interview Just Dropped

OK, I have not listened to it myself, but I can already tell from the links included in their post that they left in the part where I cried.

Aaand maybe where I said I quietly boycotted the Hirshhorn while it was wrapped in that Nicholas Party scrim. Love you guys!

[AFTER HEARING IT UPDATE: I llol’d that the Rabkin folks actually used the Hirshhorn clip to announce the interview on their Instagram. Love it. And I forgot that while I did acknowledge my pettiness, I also point out, I’m not wrong. Overall though, I think my favorite quote will be, “Again, with the Manet.” It feels undeniably weird to say, “listen to me!” but it actually turned out OK.]

Rabkin Interviews 2024: Greg Allen [rabkinfoundation.substack]

Donald Moffett Speaks To The Trees

Donald Moffett’s Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023 installation view at von ammon co

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.

Donald Moffett NATURE CULT, SEEDED installation view of Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023/24 at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 2024, image CMCA via Brooklyn Rail

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).]

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.