the making of, by greg allen
This is the one bag I actually kind of wanted from the sale of Andre Leon Talley’s estate. And yet it felt like it was so not his style. OTOH, “includes a Christie’s dustbag,” so they made it hard to resist. But it also included a VOGUE tote bag, which made it easier. RIP.
First of all, it seems buck wild that a spike from the Golden Spike ceremony marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad is even available for sale. Second, but really first, it is even wilder how hard the lot description for the spike rides for its urgent historical relevance right. now.
Maybe it helps that the spike, known as the Arizona Spike, is being sold in Christie’s “Exceptional Sale,” an off-season, cross-department assemblage of objets whose only obvious common thread is their uniqueness. But I’m hard-pressed to think of another auction text that makes a stronger case, not just for an object’s historical significance, but its contextualization in the current culture. It’s a text that belongs in a museum, like the spike itself.
Which, yeah, funny story. The spike is one of four [or seven, or maybe even eight, with at least one missing, this essay does have everything] made for the hastily organized 1869 ceremony, and is being sold by the Museum of the City of New York, where it was donated in 1943, by a New York descendant of Sidney Dillon, the Union Pacific executive and US Government defrauder who took the spike home from the hammering.
That defrauding’s in there, along with the delay to the ceremony when Dillon and other execs had their private rail car decoupled in Wyoming, and were held hostage by Union Pacific laborers who hadn’t been paid for five months. And the dispossession of Indian lands by the railroad grants. And the racist legislation banning immigration from China, where so many of the actual railroad workers came from. The same workers who got their due after several paragraphs detailing the preening rivalries and promotional dithering, including the Central Pacific’s Leland Stanford’s wiring his spike to the telegraph, so that his hammer blow would go out to the nation live–and then he missed:
The dignitaries soon left the scene while a Chinese crew replaced the ceremonial tie with a pine tie and common iron spikes — leading one journalist to declare, most appropriately, that in reality was not [the Union Pacific’s Dr. Thomas] Durant or Stanford, but rather it was the ‘Chinese who really laid the last tie and drove the last spike.'”
Anyway, the lot description and the feature article related to it are truly a journey. It addresses the spike’s provenance, trying to harmonize incomplete contemporary media references–a very Arizona Spike-ish spike was reportedly displayed in a San Francisco jewelry store weeks after Dillon presumably took the spike back east with him from Promontory, Utah–with family lore–from a family which included a namesake/great-grandson who became secretary of the Smithsonian. But it also puts the historic significance of the Golden Spike (or Last Spike) ceremony and the transcontinental railroad itself into both historic and contemporary context with amazing candor and rigor. What feels like it should be the rule for museums is, for an auction house, exceptional.
UPDATE: Sold for a hammer price of $1.8 million, $2.22 million with buyer’s premium. Excellent monetization, Museum of the City of New York!
The Execptional Sale, Lot 15: A Steel Railroad Spike Clad In Gold and Silver… [christies.com]
A Point of Acceleration: The Arizona Railroad Spike and the birth of modern America [christie’s magazine]
Took the kid to get her booster at the vacated H&M flagship in the emptied out World Market mall in Chevy Chase, once the most luxurious shopping neighborhood in Washington, which is now a retail wasteland on top of a Metro station over which nimbys are nonetheless gearing up to fight redevelopment. Across the street from the basement TJ Maxx in the closed Neiman Marcus mall, and kitty corner from the worst Michael’s in the world, in the basement, below the Booeymonger’s, which is below the Mattress Warehouse, which is below three levels of no-validation parking deck, remains the Roche Bobois showroom, where this Jean-Paul Gaultier Ben Hur chair was pushed, without hope, up against the emergency exit.
Which, tbh, didn’t only feel out of place, but out of time.
Continue reading “This is Fine. Gaultier Furniture”
I was absolutely certain I’d written about this, but I guess I’ve just been thinking about this wild Cartier necklace mounting, minus most of the diamonds, which the Doris Duke estate sold for $54,000 for 18 years. It was truly a standout in the auction of Duke’s jewelry.
The preposterously scaled necklace was purchased by Duke’s boyfriend, a couple of years before they got married. She raided the necklace over the years, and remounted 79 of the diamonds in other pieces, leaving a gorgeous, platinum husk.
A jewelry aficionado with an absurdly advanced appreciation of historical accuracy, and possessed of a conceptual sophistication rivaled only by their access to money, apparently spent years assembling period-correct cushion and Old European-cut stones to reconstitute Doris Duke’s Depression-era diamond fringe necklace. This zombie necklace was offered for sale at Christie’s in 2017, with an estimate of CHF 3-5 million. It did not sell, at least publicly.
Out of respect for the time and effort required to assemble them, I don’t want the diamonds to be released back into the wild; put them in a little bag. But definitely take them out, and let the necklace be restored to its perfect, skeletal state. It’s what Doris would have wanted.
via Prof. Erin Thompson comes the story of Katja Meirovsky, who in 1940 wore a red dress to her Berlin art school which she made by cutting the swastika off a stolen nazi flag. She became part of the Red Orchestra, the largest civilian resistance movement against Hitler. The group and its members are the subject of an exhibition at the German Resistance Memorial Center by artist Stefan Roloff, which Thompson reviewed at Hyperallergic.
In other problematic textile repurposing news, Droog designer Tejo Remy, who has always made custom Rag Chairs from the client’s bags of old clothes, has collaborated with Demna. Remy made Re-Benches out of deadstock and offcut fabric for Balenciaga, which were installed this month in ten boutiques worldwide. After two weeks on display, they went up for sale online. Artnet says the drop on the 22nd was a surprise, and sold out immediately. But there was time to put out press releases to the hypesphere. Balenciagattention was then promptly devoured by the rightwing vortex of shit, when online q-trolls fed the latest ad campaign through the p3do conspiracy outrage machine in the stupidest way possible. The company responded by loudly suing itself and its creative team.
None of which is the point here. The point is that Demna, too, is recycling. Remy made a Rag Chair last September at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs as a performance. He used linen panels left over from the exhibition, « Luxes », the hometown version of « Dix mille ans de luxe », with the Musée programmed for the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2019, sponsored by the Confédération Européenne du Lin et du Chanvre, the European Confederation of Flax and Hemp.
The video recap very much does not look like a performance, but it does work as a how-to for making your own Rag furniture. Whether you use the leftover scenery from your pandemic-era exhibitions or your bags of damning fits by suddenly outré designers, you can tell your own story! Or maybe you have a lead on those giant bins of cancelled Yeezy x Gap joints you can turn into at least ten of the dankest Rag Chairs ever.
Where has this Pierre Jeanneret teak and steel and glass bookcase been all my life? The Central State Library, you say? Can you loot three more to match?
Suddenly I’m rethinking my moral objections to the emptying of Chandigarh for the aesthetic enrichment of the bourgeoisie of the west. [oh wait, I already rethought it.]
[A couple of obsessed hours later update: there is another. A similar bookcase was sold at Christie’s in Paris in November 2021. It had the same estimate, was in what looks to be less attractive condition–and sold for EUR225,000.]
The lot essay says Jeanneret’s “crenelated shelves of the Central Library display case recall the undulating glass panels and alternating railings of the interior architecture he had designed.” Hmm. Here is a photo of the cases installed in the library.
Lot 270: Bibliothèque from the Central State Library, Chandigarh, est. $30-50,000 [UPDATE: sold for just $30,700!] [toomey]
Previously, very much related, in that they’re Chandigarh pieces I want: Chandigarh Find
At one point in the 1910s, before he was married, my great-grandfather Wilford “Bill” Hilton sold aluminum cookware door-to-door in southern Utah. That’s according to an undated note my great-grandmother Vera Snow wrote to accompany these drippy aluminum blobs. In the 1920s, when my grandmother Lora Hilton was a little girl, the note continued, she accidentally melted some of these leftover aluminum pots on the stove.
The resulting dripped and pooled forms were interesting enough for my great-grandmother, and then my grandmother, to save in a drawer for a hundred years. I’ve had them on the bookshelf for a couple of years now, trying to think of what to do with them. Mostly, I just look at them and think about these people who kept these things. Sometimes I think about trying to photograph them better.
Obviously, if asked, I would install gargantuan replicas of them on the plaza of the Seagram Building. I’m not naive.
Previously, related; Vera’s Rocks
With news that at least two of the five victims of the Colorado Springs terrorist attack on Club Q were trans, and that the shooter, apprehended by patrons of the gay club he attacked, is a member of the LDS Church, it’s important to note the impact of the Church’s own positions and rhetoric in stoking anti-LGBTQ hatred and violence among its members, and as part of an increasingly extremist network of right-wing religio-political groups around the world.
Whatever progress and enlightenment it has achieved, the LDS Church and its constituent communities are far too often a source of bigotry and pain and an unsafe space for queer members. And the Church’s treatment of trans members is even worse.
When one Church leader–a cousin, fwiw–quotes another calling for “musket fire” in defense of the Church’s anti-LGBTQ policies, and when racist, misogynistic, and homophobic harassment by extremist members goes unchecked, even unmentioned, the Church should recognize the impact this has: and that includes stoking the murderous violence that one member unleashed last weekend on his queer neighbors. It’s not as if the guy had to be a zealot hanging on every word; in this case, he apparently was not, but was raised up in it. And then he found more hate to reinforce and build on what he’d absorbed.
The point is, the organization that should be fostering love is seeding bigotry and lending credence to active agents of violence against LGBTQ people.
My great-grandmother Vera Hilton collected rocks. She lived near Topaz Mountain in central Utah, a site that gave the WWII Japanese-American detention camp its name, and would pick up rocks she found interesting. She had a rock tumbler. In the 1970s, when she was in her 80s, Vera went to Europe, to see one of her children then stationed in Germany with the US military, and she picked up rocks from places she visited.
When my grandmother, Vera’s oldest daughter, died last year, I took this collection, a 50+ year-old shirt cardboard with rocks taped to it from her house. It was in a plastic bag, but stored flat. I had no idea what to do with it, except to keep it.
For a year, I’ve had it undisturbed, waiting, as I tried to figure out how to stabilize and restore it. I took it out yesterday for the first time. Some rocks need re-placing. Some need placing. Some may have no place. There’s all the tape, of course, and the stains from it, which call for attention. I’ve researched conservation and cellophane tape, but now that I’ve sat with it, I’m not comfortable with just ditching or replacing the tape. Vera taped these rocks to a piece of cardboard and wrote captions for them. When that tape gave out, she put more tape on. Including a double-sided tape strip on the card underneath it, the rock from Dachau appears to have been taped three times.
Which, there is a rock from Dachau. What is going on with these rocks? There’s a row that looks like they went through the tumbler; a few geologically oriented samples, including three epidotes from various locales and a pencil eraser-size ruby crystal from the Filers, who ran a Mineral of the Month Club for science teachers out of Yucaipa, California. Then there are the rocks from Europe: Stockholm, Paris, Rome (Colosseum), Rothenburg, Nuremburg, and Dachau.
Based on tape residue and size, I think I re-placed the loose rocks correctly on this grid, but maybe not? There are some rocks that don’t seem to correspond to anything; do they go somewhere? Is there a hint of what they are that might hint at where they’re from, and where they go? Does this tell you, a geologist or mineral collector, or a student of souvenir practices, anything? HMU!
I’ve come to not expect deep meaning to result from saving or restoring this assemblage, but I’m nonetheless intrigued by what it is, and how it came together. I met my great-grandmother several times as a child. Having this thing she made, that she worked on for several years, apparently, and that my grandmother kept intact for decades, is an interesting experience precisely because it is so unprecious. We have quilts she stitched by hand which embody a similar amount of her time and attention, and yet this is the antithesis of an heirloom. For the moment, at least, I’m going to keep it around.
I love the idea that some furniture is “important.” This chest-on-chest has descended through some Philadelphia/New Jersey families since it was originally ordered sometime before the Revolutionary War, and those family connections are important, but not right here, not right now. The finish is old and excellent; the hardware is original; the elaborately carved cartouche is intact, and it’s all similar to similarly important pieces in important collections, but that is not really important right now, right here, either.
But because of all this, this chest was attributed to the most prominent Philadelphia cabinetmaker of the time, Thomas Affleck, one of the few guys in town known to have his own copy of Thomas Chippendale’s gentleman furniture pattern book.
But then when this thing came in, and came apart, this giant, gorgeous, script monogram JF was found carved in the top of the lower chest, invisible to anyone except the movers, or the maker. And so now this important chest-on-chest is attributed to John Folwell, another Philadelphia cabinetmaker, and its similarity should prompt a re-examination of the attribution of some of the other important furniture out there. I would like more things to have been elaborately and secretly inscribed by their makers, please.
Jan 21, 2021, Lot 34: The Important Stratton-Carpenter-Wheeler Family Chippendale Carved and Figured Mahogany Chest-on-Chest, cabinetwork attributed to John Folwell (w. 1762-1780); carving attributed to James Reynolds (w. 1766-1794), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, circa 1770, est. $50-100,000 [update: sold for $69k. nice.] [sothebys]
Previously, related attributed 18th century carved scripts: Paul Revere (attr.) Time Capsule Plaque, silver, engraved text
Tom Ford has introduced a wristwatch made of ocean plastic. The following are excerpts from the Departures Magazine marketing email for the watch which, at $995, somehow manages to seem simultaneously expensive and cheap:
The Impact of Ethical Luxury
“In my opinion, ethical luxury is the greatest luxury of all,” says iconic designer and creative director Tom Ford…When you purchase an Ocean Plastic Timepiece, you permanently remove the equivalent of 35 bottles of plastic waste from the ocean.The Tom Ford Ocean Plastic Timepiece is made from 100-percent ocean plastic collected in seas, along coastlines, and in uncontrolled landfills. Its material contains neither virgin plastics nor non-ocean-bound plastics, and is traceable to its collection source. The ocean plastic granules used in its production have been transported in a carbon-neutral manner, and have been compounded in a solar-powered Swiss facility. Additionally, all packaging is recyclable.
“It is incredibly appealing to know that you are not only wearing a high-quality product, but that by simply owning the product you are also taking direct action to improve the planet.”
I was going to post a photo of Ford modeling the watch, but who even cares at this point. It is a giant black watch with TOM FORD and OCEAN PLASTIC written on the face.
I love Pierre Jeanneret’s furniture for Chandigarh, and I hate the Chandigarh Furniture Industrial Complex. I am relieved that these objects that once were abandoned for scrap are now preserved, but I hate that the cultural context is being stripped away, and that for their value and significance to be recognized, they must be removed and fed through the luxury design machinery of the West. I love seeing this furniture aging and bearing its history, and I hate seeing it stripped and restored and altered into just one more must-have for some instagram junkie to stuff into their Axel Vervoordt McMonastery.
I love this stuff, and hate that I want it, but I’ve managed to deal because it’s not like there’s any OG Chandigarh furniture left anyway. Well, Patrick Parrish just kicked the leg off my precariously balanced chair. He is currently showing a collection of pristine, original condition Jeanneret furniture from Chandigarh which has been held for twelve years, and it is utterly exquisite. Everyone who’s ever stripped and dipped a teak armchair and tossed out a horsehair cushion should immediately feel waves of remorse for their design crimes.
Now I love this furniture, and I hate that you haven’t yet sent me $1.26 million so I can buy all 66 pieces for my McMonastery.
I am linking to Patrick’s Pierre Jeanneret Online Viewing Room because it is perfect. The show is IRL until Dec. 31st. There is a book forthcoming. [patrickparrish.com]
Amie Siegel’s Provenance was beautiful and devastating, but has also done nothing to stem the tide, or change the dynamic. [amiesiegel.net]
In the 17th century Sweden had the copper, and needed the silver, and its imperial war-making activities were constantly beholden to the exchange rate, and their monetary policy was in turn at the mercy of commodity prices for the metal their coins were made from.
In the middle of all this, someone had the idea to turn the plates of raw copper into actual coins by stamping them. This 14.5kg 8 daler plate is the second largest denomination. A 10 daler plate weighed in at 19.7kg.
Almost all these plate coins were melted down the second copper prices warranted, and it wasn’t until the 20th century that some examples were found in shipwrecks. About 50 of these bad boys exist, with 6–10 in private collections, which is why this coin is expected to trade at a 199,950 euro premium to the current value of the copper itself.
Oh wait, no, 6–10 examples from 1659, one of the 13 years 8 daler plate money was issued, are in private collections. I’ll let you connoisseurs sort out the price and rarity; I’ll stick to the oddity.
Holy smokes, they’re as big as a baking sheet.
Also, this 1660 8-daler sold for just EUR2430 in 2017, so maybe rarity by year is really important? Except the plate above is also from 1660, and sold for like EUR175,000 in 2016. These things don’t work as money, and they don’t work as speculative instruments, either.
Lot 105 Plate Money 8 daler SM 1659 (Karl X Gustav), Avesta. est SEK2-2.2M, around EUR200,000 [bukowskis.com]
related: 8-daler plate money c. 1658 [britishmuseum.org.uk]
Maybe it’s the fragility or the resilience or both, but I find the mends on this 100+year-old, embroidered, blue linen dress that Paul Poiret made for his wife and muse Denise to be very moving.
The upcoming auction at Augusta features several lots of Poiret from the family, which were originally sold at Drouot in 2005. The provenance is topped only by the combination of couture and boro.
Oct. 24, 2018 Lot 312:PAUL POIRET FOR DENISE P. EMBROIDERED DAY DRESS, c. 1911, est $1200-1500 [augusta-auction]
I’ll be honest, when I first heard that the ICE immigrant family detention centers full of Central American refugee kids and moms had animal-themed cell blocks like red bird and blue butterfly, I imagined they were using Eric Carle drawings, and I got a dark, blogging thrill.
But no. The South Texas Residential Center in Dilley, the largest family detention center in the world, run by the for-profit prison contractor, Corrections Corporation of America, was too cheap to license Carle’s work, and just used random clip art instead.
Also, the government’s punitive detention of these people is shameful, and it can’t end soon enough. Most of these families are fleeing war, violence, and abuse in their home countries and have already qualified for refugee hearings the US, but remain in these remote prisons, guarded by actual prison guards, temping in khakis and polo shirts, as a feeble deterrent to other refugees.
I resisted comparing ICE’s outsourced prisons to the desert detention centers Japanese-American families were forced into during WWII, even when I saw Bob Owen’s photo in the San Antonio Express News, which is a damningly straight-up evocation of Dorothea Lange’s photos of the War Relocation Authority’s internment camp at Manzanar, California.
Ansel Adams also took photos at Manzanar, which he published in a book, Born Free And Equal, alongside a text that reads today as disturbingly upbeat in its praise of the gumption and loyalty of American citizens forced into desert prisons. I’ve always viewed Adams’ project as a protest, a condemnation of the injustice visited upon Americans because of the racist fears of their neighbors and political leaders. But that is over-optimistic hindsight. Re-reading Adams’ text now is pretty depressing. To think that it’s all the Constitution and fundamental principle that wartime white America could handle at the time.
At least it helps make sense for how this country could get so cross-wise with its own professed ideals today; we really have not changed that much at all. And when I tried to put some evolved distance between the ironies of Adams’ treacly government-reviewed-and-approved fluffing and this account from inside Dilley, I couldn’t. So here it is:
While children wait for their mothers to talk to lawyers and legal aids, they are usually watching kids’ movies dubbed in Spanish, namely Rio or Frozen. The children of Dilley, like children everywhere, have taken to singing Frozen’s iconic song “Let It Go.”The Spanish-language refrain to the song “Libre soy! Libre soy!” translates to “I am free! I am free!” It’s an irony that makes the adults of Dilley uneasy. Mehta recalls one mother responding to her singing child under her breath: “Pero no lo somos” (But we aren’t).
Do you know the chorus of “Let it Go” in Spanish? I did not, but it is one helluva song for kids to be singing in a corporate prison in 2015:
Libre soy, libre soy
No puedo ocultarlo más
Libre soy, libre soy
Libertad sin vuelta atrás
Y firme así me quedo aquí
Libre soy, libre soy
El frío es parte también de míI am free, I am free
I can’t hide it anymore
I am free, I am free
Freedom without turning back
And I’m staying here, firm like this
I am free, I am free
The cold is also a part of me
‘Drink more water’: Horror stories from the medical ward of a Texas immigration detention center [fusion.net]
which is basically a re-reporting of this: Immigrant families in detention: A look inside one holding center [latimes]
Ansel Adams, Born Free And Equal, 1944 [loc.gov]
Related: Translating “Frozen” into Arabic [newyorker]
“Let it Go” in 25 languages [youtube]
[Originally published on Daddy Types on July 23, 2015 as Libre Soy, Libre Soy]