Art & Technology & Serra & Steel Mills

Visitor posted this comment from Richard Serra’s 1974 interview with Liza Bear, quoting his own statement from the catalogue for Maurice Tuchman’s 1970 show at LACMA, Art and Technology, about technology being “a form of toolmaking, body extension.” Also, “Technology is what we do to the Black Panthers and the Vietnamese.”

He goes on to say that “It reflects my political responsibility to the public–not that I have any idealistic notions of swaying the masses through television. I think commercial TV is basically show business, and that means show business is used to reflect corporate America’s interests.”
Of course, one of the criticisms leveled at Art & Technology was that it was using art to reflect those same corporate interests. Tuchman arranged for 64 men of the art and industry to pair up to produce artworks, which would be exhibited at the Museum, and also the US Pavilion at the Osaka 70 World’s Fair. The results were mixed at best.
Roy Lichtenstein worked with Paramount to make 35mm painting/film installations. Warhol made some wacky lenticular rain machine. Rauschenberg made a bubbling pool of lubricating mud. Tony Smith tried to make a cave from thousands of cardboard tetrahedrons. And all of it went down when opposition to the Vietnam war and Nixon and the Establishment were hitting new nadirs every day. If the show was meant to heal, bridge, transcend, or even paper over the cultural chasms between art and the American corporate machine, it has to be considered a failure.
And yet, somehow I hadn’t noticed this, and I can’t remember ever hearing it discussed, the work Richard Serra made for Art and Technology seems like some of the most crucial of his career. I’ll look again, but in terms of the artists’ own practice, I think Serra made what turns out to have been the most important art in the show.
Serra was, remarkably, the seventh artist Tuchman tried to match with Kaiser Steel Corp’s Fontana mill. [Among the first six attempted matches: Smithson and di Suvero, which, sure, but also Jules Olitski and Len Lye, which, what?] He proposed work that would “be related to both the physical properties of the site and the characteristics of the materials and processes concomitant to it.”
The three “categories” he envisioned were, casting, overlaying/stacking, and constructions.
And that’s just what he did. Serra worked nights with the crew assigned to him to get a feel for steel in its different forms, for the site, and for the processes available to manipulate the material. After several weeks working in the skullcracker yard, where scrap steel was moved around with a giant magnetic crane for reprocessing, he used the machinery to execute 12 different constructions [or 20, depending] within two intense, final weeks. “The procedure would be to erect a piece, and, if he considered it successful, to have it recorded photographically when possible. The structure was then dismantled.”
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Stacked Steels Slabs (Skullcracker Series), 1969, constructed at Kaiser Steel, Fontana, CA
The first of these pieces is probably the best-known, a leaning stack of sixteen 6-ton slabs of cast steel known as stools, the photo of which has circulated under the name, Stacked Steels Slabs (Skullcracker Series). These Skullcracker Series works became more structurally complex; Serra created loose piles of steel scrap, then propped large slabs against or on top of them.
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He made counter-balanced structures with plates jutting out in various directions. They remind me a bit of the block towers architect Eliot Noyes made to demonstrate balance in a 1955 educational film. I’m sure, of course, they were completely different.
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After a second, less successful stay in 1970, Serra agreed to return in the Spring of 1971 for the actual LACMA show. He would erect a Skullcracker Series at the museum, and also install “a piece related to his more recent thinking; the idea derived directly from what he had learned about steel at Kaiser.”
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His idea was to measure a site and install a steel plate, which would be cut along the edge of the ground, thereby taking the contour of the topography into which it had been installed.
Though the cutting is, I think, unique, a form of drawing, this creation of sculpture that marks the contours of a site is immediately, obviously recognizable as central to Serra’s work at the time. He was doing it at that exact moment in St. Louis with Pulitzer Piece, and in Ontario with Shift. And he says that it all came “directly from what he had learned about steel at Kaiser.” [Those links are both to Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes, who’s written one of the very few art-aware accounts of actually visiting Shift.]
Serra’s steel mill-based practice is something else that, in the intervening decades, has become central to Serra’s work. In interviews, it’s usually explained by biography, by early factory jobs in college. But those jobs didn’t get a mention in Tuchman’s Art & Technology catalogue, and Tuchman’s complicated show rarely gets credited for arranging the corporate collaboration at Kaiser Steel that gave Serra his first studio in a steel mill.
Previously, related: Stop & Piss: David Hammons’ Pissed Off

Gretchen Bender On ‘Art As Signs And Not As Valuable Objects’

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Gretchen Bender, Sensurround, 1983, silkscreen and c-print on tin
From Andrew Russeth comes Cindy Sherman’s 1987 interview with Gretchen Bender, published in BOMB Magazine:

CS There’s an article in an L.A. paper describing you as a TV terrorist, saying that you can attain a critical edge through overload.
GB Yeah. There are artists who talk of using silence as a weapon, an alternative and an act of resistance. That’s one end of it. I’ve gone in the opposite direction but with the same desire. I think it’s more important to mimic and provoke at this point.
CS Your theatrical pieces are counterpointed by the tin pieces, which ironically, make objects out of paradigms.
GB Either way, it’s only temporarily effective. Hans Haacke uses part of the dominant high culture to criticize the function of the whole system through his object/displays. The question is–how broadly effective do you want to be? That is a difficult question with artists. Artists can be confused about their situation as a powerless elite. We operate from the protective base of the art world, a situation in which we can develop ideas but a place from which it is complicated to launch media-related art work without it getting co-opted by the very structures it criticizes. Although I use those structures. I’m resisting one channel television because I haven’t figured out how to effectively communicate except in a theatrical setting.

Again, I started wanting to quote the silence and art’s engagement/fear of politics, and I didn’t want to stop reading. Plus, it’s all talking about the tin pieces:

CS You’ve been criticized for being high tech, which is another way of infiltrating popular culture–using the technology that they use.
GB It’s something visual artists tend to resist although that resistance is steadily breaking down. More artists are figuring out how to use computer technology . . . there’s so much that’s happening visually. It’s strange that the art world resists using the visual tools of our time. What’s that about? It is scary when you have this heritage that you invoke–art history.
CS It’s supposed to be more pure if you use materials like paint or make it all yourself or use another person to make it for you.
GB The art world is trying to protect this antiquated territory and what is most disturbing about switching over to the newer technologies is that there is no authority to invoke. There aren’t any guidelines to tell you that you’re making ‘good’ art. No one knows enough or understands enough. There’s so much experimentation to do, so many blind visual forays to risk, so many conceptual implications of the newer technologies to try to comprehend. Many artists aren’t willing to take those risks. You don’t know if you are going to be effective or not, if you are going to make silly or profound works. I think that’s what terrifies most artists and I think that’s why the art world is so slow to accept the culture of today.
CS You have used imagery from other people’s art work in some of your own pieces. I interpreted that as reducing expensive works of art by male artists–paintings–to this disposable imagery level.
GB I wanted to use the art as signs and not as valuable objects. I decided to combine those found art reproductions as one combines words in a language or even just parts of an alphabet. I saw them as a moving language. I have been working with the equivalent flow of television. Before that, I was actually dealing with the equivalent flow of art objects. What’s really being said? At the same time, I realized that because we had gotten so much of our art out of magazines and reproductions, we weren’t contemplating art anymore. So I made those tin pieces to be a scan. You couldn’t fall into the pieces and contemplate. I go into galleries to see shows, to be aware of what is going on and it takes three minutes to see a show. Where are we? And what are we doing? It’s our nervous system–the time we live in–it’s not about reverie.

GB Artists using media have taken on a more complicated position in the culture than painters. Painters like tradition. And I think it’s a hundred, or a thousand times more difficult for a painter to make politically engaged work. They know that if it smells like art and looks like art and tastes like art–it’s painting. There’s not much risk in the art world.
CS Especially now, it seems really dull right now.
GB At the same time, I constantly examine my . . . I’m still operating within the art world. There is that base. Maybe it’s a base to reaffirm your goals or your sanity in trying to develop ideas. You do have people who want to see you succeed in producing important work.

Silkscreen on sheet metal must have caught Cady Noland’s attention. BOMB Magazine: Gretchen Bender by Cindy Sherman [bombsite]

First You Get The Art. Then You Get The Power.

When I started transcribing this section of Mike Kelley’s 2004 Q&A with Gerry Fialka , I was only in it for the Duchamp and Cage. But I’m glad I stayed for the art, entertainment, and politics:

[49:31] Gerry Fialka: Duchamp said, “How do you make a piece of art that’s not a piece of art?” Well Cage did it with music, maybe 4’33”, [Kelley shaking head]
Mike Kelley: No,
GF: Well–
MK: Duchamp did never not make a piece of art, and Cage did never not make a piece of art. That’s a game they played, that’s a game they played to pretend they were doing something that wasn’t art. Of course it was art. What else was it?
GF: Well put, let me finish. And then Joyce wrote uh–
MK: Pshhh
GF: Finnegan’s Wake and invented the Internet, and disguised it as a book. And George Manupelli–
[Audience noise]
George Manupelli is someone we both encountered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who started the oldest experimental film festival in the world, the Ann Arbor F–
MK: The Ann Arbor Film Festival, which is, I tell you, I got my whole film education from that festival.
GF: It was a great place for me, too. to view experimental films
MK: They don’t do things like that anymore.
GF: And he had a piece called Film for Hooded Projector, so why is it important to shake up constructed belief systems, and do we need’em?
MK: Of course. Why else would you want art?
The only social function of art is to f things up. It has no other social function. Absolutely none. That’s why, if you merge it with the entertainment industry, make it about the desires of the masses, it doesn’t have any social function.
Also, what that idea about art–what separates it from politics, politics has a purpose. It’s about power relationships. Art doesn’t have anything about power relationships. It’s simply about fucking this up for the pure pleasure of fucking them up.
So it’s about formal–it’s about analysis, and formal, uh, uh, scrambling, and it both escapes the practicality of politics and the–what was the other side? I forget.
Audience: Entertainment.
MK: Eh?
Audience: Entertainment.
MK: Yeah, entertainment which is, drugging the masses. So art should be something in between that’s not practical in terms of power relationships, because it’s fantasy, but it allows for power. Because art allows for power shifts over a slow time because people’s minds change. Entertainment never changes people’s minds. It just drugs them to reality, and I completely agree with Marx in this, in this way.
So I’m, I’m against the idea of art being subsumed either into the political sphere, or into the entertainment sphere. I think it has to be a separate social entity, especially in America.
I think in Europe, social and class differences are different than they are here. But in America, since it’s such an anti-intellectual culture, it has to be a separate milieu, that’s purposely–um. What would I say? Purposely purposeless.
It has to be. Otherwise it has no social function.

Seeing Stars: These Two Interviews On Aperture Right Now

Oh, nothing, just my Q&A with Aperture editor Brian Sholis hanging there online next to THOMAS RUFF. Brian and I went back and forth, discussing the photographs in Exhibition Space and how they relate to art historical developments like conceptual photography and Minimalism.
Meanwhile, Michael Famighetti interviewed Ruff for Aperture’s upcoming Summer issue, and the photographer talked about the beginnings of his Sterne series, the giant photos made using imagery from the European Southern Observatory’s Southern Sky Survey. Ruff’s work was one of the triggers for my own interest in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, which was the ESO’s Northern predecessor. Anyway, I think this is the first he’s discussed the series’ origins in English:

MF: Could you talk about the role of research in your work? Where does a project begin?
TR: If I see an image that attracts, upsets, or astonishes me–one that stays in my mind for a long time–I begin working. This is the starting point of the research: 
I try to find out how the image was created and in what context–historical, political, or social–the image belongs. After clarifying these questions I begin to create “my own” image, the image I have in my mind, the image that was triggered by the image I saw. Sometimes it can be done in a straightforward way, with
 a camera, but sometimes you need to reflect on how you can manage to make this technically. For example, when I had the idea of photographing the night sky, I realized that with my small telescope, I had no chance of getting high-quality images of stars, so I looked for an observatory with a big telescope where 
I could take the photographs myself. 
But they wouldn’t let me in. So I had to give up the idea of being the author of the photograph, and worked with large-format negatives from the observatory’s archive.

Yes, authorship.
And speaking of authorship [and much more], in his talk with Jörg Colberg for Conscientious, Ruff mentioned authorship and his new show at David Zwirner:

JC: I was going to ask you about that, the idea of landscape photography. Scientific photographs, say the Mars rover images, in principle are landscape photographs along the lines of early survey landscape photography in the American West.
TR: That’s where it continues. On top of that, it’s also about automated photography, photographs made by robots. That’s all part of it, the surrender of authorship… Ma.r.s. contains a bit more authorship than Stars where all I did was to select the area and to do the cropping.

All I did? After all this time, do we find out is Ruff a traditionalist?
Thomas Ruff: Photograms for the new age [aperture.org]
Interview with Greg Allen [aperture.org]
Previously: Thomas Ruff’s Sterne

Makin’ Copies

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“Courtesy Flickr and the Artists; Illustration by BLOUIN ARTINFO”
The new issue of Aperture has a great discussion between Penelope Umbrico and Virginia Rutledge about one of my favorite WTF aspects of the Cariou v. Prince case: the fact that the primary visual evidence of copyright infringement used in court is not the paintings themselves, but photocopies. When the fair use/recontextualization/mediated imagery chips are down, the only thing being looked at is flattening, scale-destroying Xerox pairings made by a friend of Patrick Cariou.
Anyway, hot foot it over there right now, but before you go, just check out this amazingly dishonest image of a page from a book and a 6-ft painting. It’s “Courtesy Flickr and the Artists; Illustration by BLOUIN ARTINFO,” and accompanied a Julia Halperin story from last year wherein “BLOUIN ARTINFO analyzes how the Prince v. Cariou case has shaped views on the issue of appropriation.” Which, SRSLY, BLOUIN ARTNFO, analyze thyself.
It’s almost enough to make me start turning my pages from my copies of Cariou’s Yes Rasta book into tiny, exact collage replicas of Prince’s paintings. Stay tuned.
The Image World Is Flat: Penelope Umbrico in conversation with Virginia Rutledge [aperture.org]

Erased de Kooning Drawing In The House

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Last month, after putting together a list of all the times Johns and Rauschenberg mentioned working on each others’ work, and wondering, “SERIOUSLY, DOES NO ONE ASK FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS?” I decided to start asking follow-up questions.


In particular, I’ve been asking around, trying to document the early history of Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953-5). Remember, the first public exhibition of it wasn’t until 1964; its measurements seem to have changed over the years; and the first known image of it didn’t come until 1970.
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So I wondered how people knew or saw it in that first decade. And I really wanted to know whether folks knew that Johns had helped finish the work. Which, presumably, would only have happened while they were together, between 1954-59 or 1960 or so. Right?


And so far, my results are fascinating but mixed.


Johns told me that Erased de Kooning Drawing was actually included in a show in 1958, which was the impetus for his contribution. He helped conceive of the frame and label, and then drew the label while Bob got a store-bought frame.
The show was at Poindexter Gallery, a group drawing show in Dec 1958 – Jan 1959 Dec 1955-Jan 1956, turns out. Ellin Poindexter had been working with Charles Egan Gallery for a few months, but ended up opening her own space. This big group drawing show was one of her first.
Which is all HUGE, I figured. [Johns had a work in the show, too, apparently. A footnote in Fred Orton’s Figuring Jasper Johns mentions a Flag drawing with 64 stars, which seems like a lot of stars. It also seems not to exist anymore; so maybe Johns destroyed it. He didn’t say one way or the other.]
I went diving in the Poindexter Gallery papers at the Archives of American Art, but there’s nothing at all about the show. There is no documentation of it anywhere, that I can find. Well, that’s not quite true. Dore Ashton reviewed the show for the NY Times, but she didn’t mention Rauschenberg or Johns. I asked her if she remembered seeing Erased de Kooning Drawing in the show, and she didn’t. She didn’t recall the first time she saw the work, either, except that she did figure it was probably in Bob’s studio.
I asked around a bit more, looking for any documentation of this show–maybe one of the dozens of other artists has saved a checklist in a box somewhere? And it turns out I’m not the only person Johns has mentioned this exhibit to; it’s just that no one can find documentation to back it up.
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Which makes me realize that there is an entire layer of art historical information out there, stuff that people who know know, but can’t write about. I wonder how much of this information gets lost before it’s written or published or transmitted somehow.
Anyway, the other day, while surfing along through a Swann’s photo auction catalogue I came across the great Dan Budnick portrait of Johns from 1958. Budnick’s a Magnum photographer and still alive, and he was clearly on the scene at the right time. So I started poking around. And BAM.
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Budnick did take pictures of Rauschenberg, too. This Budnick photo of Bob in his studio, in fact, is listed as 1958. And what is that behind the car door? Does that not look like Erased de Kooning Drawing? In a mat and frame? Case closed. Also, check the frame profile; it IS different from the current one.
55-5
Except that that is not the Front Street studio; it’s Broadway. And so that is not 1958. It’s probably 1964-5. Because that’s when and where Alexander Lieberman took this very similar photo of Rauschenberg. [Which, amazingly, Matt from RO/LU had posted just a day or two before I found it. Eerie.]
Even though the photo of Merce dancing is tacked in the same place, Lieberman’s bigger shot doesn’t include Erased de Kooning Drawing. There’s an early 50’s painting from his Betty Parsons show in its place. [There’s also a little plastic American flag hanging to the left. A memento, perhaps?]
Which is all a way to say that if you–or more likely, your artist grandfather–was in this Poindexter Gallery show in 1958-9 1955-56, and has some checklists or installation photos, definitely drop a line.

[2023 checking back in update: In 2014 the Rauschenberg Foundation, following SFMOMA’s research, dated this Poindexter group drawing show to 1955-56. Though the Tworkov Estate chronology cited doesn’t actually reference the show, the earlier date aligns with the actual publication date of Ashton’s Times review. A good reminder to doublecheck info in old chronologies, and the conversational recollections of specific dates from decades before by living principals. Also, I spotted EdeKD in a 1954? photo at Fulton Street.]

Driving Taxis Through Heavy Neighborhoods To Look At The Paintings

Via the Hirshhorn via Art21 comes a nice two-way interview between Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, originally published in BOMB Magazine in 1982, that ends:

RP I’m misinformed about style. I always thought it had to do with being able to wear the same kind of a jacket for ten years. I don’t know. What I wonder is . . . is it possible to have style and be unreasonable at the same time?
BK I think unreasonableness can mean any number of possible locations nearer or further away from the idea of reason. Because many of these positions are already coded, their shock value is tempered by style. A lot of times the idea of transgression really turns on a romantic conception of otherness; of a rebellion already tolerated. You know, the charming rogue, the picaresque cuteness of the bull in the china shop and in the art world, badness invades the atelier. Driving limos through heavy neighborhoods to look at the graffiti. Unstylish unreasonableness may be limited to the categories of the insane and the unpleasant (the poor, the unbeautiful, the unempowered). The non-romanticism of these kinds of otherness makes them unsightly and “vulgar” considerations for the polite company of international bohemia.

This image of limos driving “through heavy neighborhoods to look at the graffiti” is great in itself, but it also reminded me of an anecdote from, of all people, Jasper Johns.
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Jasper Johns, Harlem Light, 1967, image “taken. It’s not mine.”
It’s about the genesis of a motif that first appears in a 1967 painting, Harlem Light [above]. Here’s the version from Michael Crichton’s 1977 catalogue for Johns’ Whitney retrospective, which is still the most engrossing Johns book I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a lot:

Johns was taking a taxi to the airport, traveling through Harlem, when he passed a small store which had a wall painted to resemble flagstones. He decided it would appear in his next painting. Some weeks later when he began the painting, he asked David Whitney to find the flagstone wall, and photograph it. Whitney returned to say he could not find the wall anywhere. Johns himself then looked for the wall, driving back and forth across Harlem, searching for what he had briefly seen. He never found it, and finally had to conclude that it had been painted over or demolished. Thus he was obliged to re-create the flagstone wall from memory. This distressed him. “What I had hoped to do was an exact copy of the wall. It was red, black, and gray, but I’m sure that it didn’t look like what I did. But I did my best.”
Explaining further, he said: “Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me. They–whoever painted the wall–had an idea; I doubt that whatever they did had to conform to anything except their own pleasure. I wanted to use that design. The trouble is that when you start to work, you can’t eliminate your own sophistication. If I could have traced it, I would have felt secure that I had it right. Because what’s interesting to e is the fact that it isn’t designed, but taken. It’s not mine.”

Crichton goes on to discuss the “small differences” that go unnoticed, and which are lost in creating from scratch. And of flagstones, like flags, an ideal Johnsian image,” which are found and known and abstract and concrete. Seriously, I could just keep quoting from that book all day.
But instead, I’m going to try to make sense of Kruger’s next sentence, “Unstylish unreasonableness may be limited to the categories of the insane and the unpleasant (the poor, the unbeautiful, the unempowered).”

Destroyed Agnes Martin Paintings

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Untitled, 2004, Agnes Martin’s last painting. Image via Phaidon

The visits that maybe stick in the mind are the ones where she would show me four versions of a single painting and she’d say to me. ‘I think this is the best one, what do you think?’ Invariably there was so little difference between them, it was so hard to say, they were all really beautiful. And then she’d say OK we’re gonna keep that one and we’re going to cut up the others. And I would help with a knife slice up the paintings. Those are the studio visits that I think are the sharpest, helping her destroy the work.

What goes through your mind the first time you hear something like that?

It’s her work, and I’m a co-worker in the art field. . . but yeah. It is brutal. I was there at the end of her life and she said ‘go down to the studio, there are three paintings. Hanging on the wall is the one I want to keep, I want you to destroy the other two.’ So I went down to the studio. The two paintings she wanted me to destroy were magnificent – absolutely perfect. The one on the wall was a very stormy painting, unlike anything that she had made since the 60s. I certainly didn’t want to destroy those two spectacular paintings but I did. I sliced them to ribbons and put them in the trash. When I came back. She said, ‘did you do it?’ I said, ‘I did it.’ And that was that. Our last conversation.

Arne Glimcher, in a Q&A published last month by Phaidon.
The Q&A is timed to the publication of Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher, an extraordinary collection of Martin’s writings and correspondence, many works, and Glimcher’s own snapshots and notes. He would take extensive notes during his studio visits with Martin in New Mexico, and then transcribe them on the plane home.
He expands on Martin’s last request to destroy some of her work in March 2004:

A mystique exists that Agnes painted very few works but in actuality, she painted almost daily when inspired and that was with some frequency. However, only a relatively small amount of works exist from such a long and productive life because she destroyed most of the works she produced. Probably no artist has ever been a better editor than Agnes Martin. The rejected paintings were shredded with a mat knife. As she grew older, during the last few years, she enlisted the help of friends (myself included) to destroy the unacceptable works, as it was very hard to cut through the thick primed linen fabric. When I once asked her why she was destroying a particularly delicate and beautiful work, she said, ‘It’s too aggressive, and there’s a mistake.’ Most often that referred to a pooling of colour in one of the works that made the brushstrokes discontinuous. The mistake became an unwanted ‘focus’ in a non-compositional painting, which disturbed its serenity.
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Trumpet, 1967, an earlier last painting by Agnes Martin, image via zwirnerandwirth
I drove to the studio where I found three grey paintings, all of which were beautiful. Using her mat knife, I reluctantly shredded two and spared the one that hung on the wall. It was unique, expressionistically painted with stormy grey asymmetrical brushstrokes covering the surface. Five thin pencil lines visually grounded the passionate wash to the canvas. There is only one other painting with such an expressionistic asymmetrical handling of brush work. It is called Trumpet and was painted in 1967, just before she took her long hiatus and first departure from painting. On first glance, in this last painting, Agnes appears to have taken a new direction. Comparing Untitled (2004) with Trumpet, it is clear that it was not so much a change in style as it was coming full circle home.

[2016 UPDATE: In 2013 Glimcher spoke with Tate Modern curator Frances Morris about his memoir, and the last audience question was about what the last two destroyed paintings looked like:

The two that I had to destroy were very dissimilar from the one that was left, which you saw the picture of. They were much more rigorous; they were less emotional paintings. They looked more like the 70s than they did the 90s, or the late work. They seemed to be a little bit out of context, but perfect paintings, really exquisite paintings. So I took the box cutter and sliced them to ribbons.

]
In reviewing “Five Decades,” a 10-painting Zwirner & Wirth survey in 2003, Holland Cotter called the artist’s practice, “a kind of yoga of painting.” I’m still trying to think it through, and understand why she destroyed so much of her work–or her paintings, really, and maybe that’s the difference–but perhaps it involves a kind of yoga of looking as well.
Buy Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher via Amazon [amazon]
Ten questions for Pace Gallery’s Arne Glimcher [phaidon via yhbhs]

Mozingo Life In The South

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Eastman Johnson, Negro Life in the South, 1859, NYHS
Just getting in touch with my black roots, putting a stake in the ground here on part of Eleanor Jones Harvey’s discussion with Tyler Green about her show, “The Civil War and American Art,” which just opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
About 43:00 into the show, Harvey talks about Eastman Johnson’s 1859 painting [above], Negro Life In The South. Which she argues is a critique of slavery via a complicated, carefully articulated exposure of the South’s precarious and untenable concept of race and power. It’s basically a beautiful mosaic of skin tones resulting from generations of interracial sexual relationships.
Harvey calls attention to the two women, one white-skinned, one darker, stepping tentatively through the door on the right, and the precarity of passing, the risk that if a master’s light-skinned daughter’s slave parentage were found out, then her life, her rights, her freedom, all that the front house represents, would be taken away.
“To my mind,” says Harvey, “what Eastman Johnson has done is, on the eve of civil war, painted a referendum on skin color as an arbiter of your legal status: At what point on a sliding scale, from white to black, do you segue from being a person to being property?”
It’s this clash of a binary and a spectrum that caught me short and made the challenges of multi-racial ancestry in American history much more crucial and much less abstract or academic. It’s the kind of thing that even if by 1859 they were well within the color scale of the main house, my descended-from-a-17th-century-free-African-Virginian Mozingo ancestors would have spent over 250 years internalizing.
MAN Podcast Ep. 54: American Art & The Civil War [manpodcast.com]
Previously: It’s A Mozingo Thing

Willem de Kooning Meant To Not Do That

In the 4th part of his video walkthrough of MoMA’s Willem de Kooning retrospective, James Kalm has an extended clip of curator John Elderfield talking with Glenn Lowry about how the artist’s late paintings relate to his earlier work.

Elderfield stays pretty broad, arguing that the works are valid and important, and that Gary Garrels’ and Rob Storr’s earlier MoMA show ably made their case. Which all sounds good to me. [While noting that “the topologies of the paintings are very reminiscent of earlier pictures,” Elderfield apparently felt that a press preview was not the right context for expanding on de Kooning’s practice of tracing details of earlier paintings which his assistants had projected onto primed canvases.]
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What struck me now, though, was his discussion of how the marks in de Kooning’s 80s paintings were the result of his elimination of subjectivity. Elderfield told how de Kooning “fell into a sort of trough” after seeing a hugely successful show in 1978 of his large, gestural abstractions made in 1975-7, which were in the preceding gallery. “There could have been three times that number in the exhibition,” Elderfield said,” with no drop in quality or achievement…de Kooning had said he ‘felt he could do no wrong,’ which for him, was the point at which he had to stop doing them.”
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It’s an interesting idea, and it reminds me of how much I loved those 70s paintings, and losing myself in those big, sinuously virtuosic brushstrokes. It’s really too bad Kalm’s woozy, wandering camera eye is one of the few ways left to take in that gallery.
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Still from Corinna Belz’ Gerhard Richter Painting
It also reminds me how much those de Koonings reminded me of the early states of Richter’s squeegee paintings. This concept of Richter painting and then overpainting as a transformative, not destructive, technique was what first got me looking at Richter’s destroyed paintings. [That, and Erased de Kooning Drawing, of course.]
Now it strikes me how the two painters share the urge to resist habit and ease. Richter picked up the squeegee in part to counter intentionality and the mastered brushstroke. If de Kooning was resisting the same thing when he changed up his approach after 1980, maybe there’s something to be discovered by seeing these two painters’ works together.

Blank And Blank And Blank

One of the things I found so fascinating about the Cariou v. Prince case is the language. The juxtaposition of the ambiguities and subjectivities of art, the calculated omissions of the art market, and the adversarial formalism and ritual of the legal context.
That comes to a head in Prince’s deposition transcript, which is this kind of amazing text and performance in one. People objecting to things, people repeating or parsing questions, spelling out names with the consciousness that the purpose is to put something on a record–the record–for later use.
And out of it all, art history inevitably or inadvertently emerges, and a window opens onto something–I was going to type reality, but that’s probably naive. It’s information, information pulled and distorted by the constraints and confrontations of the deposition process. Which fits the form of the genre, the medium.
The deposition transcript Gallerist posted yesterday from Larry Gagosian, in the suit over the Cowles Lichtenstsein is another example, just a great read. Unlike Prince, and unlike Gagosian’s Cariou deposition, it’s a real pageturner, combative, tense, a bit suspenseful, maybe with some setups that you think are corny, but yet, in the deposition setting, they still end up working. And even some twists at the end. [My only real complaint: I hate scribd. Just hate it. It’s as much a reason for doing a book in the first place, because I hate using scribd so much.]
Anyway, point is, while reading through the hilarious transcript of a preliminary scheduling hearing in the contract/infringement/revenge/divorce case of Burch v. Burch, the chatty judge, Chancellor Leo Strine, wrapped up with an insight on depositions that is a piece of poetry itself:

THE COURT: Okay. Then don’t — then don’t worry. What I’m saying is it could be — if you can all get the depositions done in 62.3 hours on each side, you should.
But a hundred hours is just an artificial thing.
I also don’t know — for example, depositions are often longer than they should be, not
because the person is taking a long time asking questions, because somebody says “Objection.”
Mr. Abrams knows that the real reasons why the board did this were blank and blank and blank. And it’s distracting the witness from the fact that they’re blank and blank and blank, and the witness’ inability to answer for himself blank and blank and blank and blank has now been corrected by me, indicating that the real reasons he did what he did is blank and blank. I mean, I’ve seen plenty — everybody in Chancery has seen plenty of transcripts — and you’ve been at those depositions — where, frankly, it’s much more from the obstreperous defense side than there is from the asking side.

In fact, during his deposition, Gagosian actually stops his lawyer, the estimable Hollis Gonerka Bart, a couple of times to ask, “What does that mean, by the way? Can I ask you what that means when you say ‘Objection to form’?”
I can tell you that by the end of the live staging of Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta this summer, “Objection to form” meant everyone took a drink. To the obstreperous defense.

Michelangelo Antonioni Made A Music Video And A Commercial.

OK, wow, so this is a music video by Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the first/few things he shot on video. It’s a song called “Fotoromanza” from “Puzzle,” the first hit album by the Italian pop singer Gianna Nannini. As you can tell just by looking at it, it’s from 1984:

Here is Antonioni discussing the music video with Aldo Tassone, in a 1985 interview that first ran in the French cinema magazine Positif, but which is published in English in The Antonioni Project’s 1995 compilation, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema

You have shot a feature film and a few shorts on video: how did you find that experience?
It was a very interesting experience, even if at the time, in 1980, the techniques of transferring videotape to film weren’t highly developed. The copy–on tape–of The Mistery of Oberwald is very beautiful. I don’t understand why the French television didn’t distribute it more widely. In America, the commercial I shot for the Renault 9 [!? -ed.] was judged the best commercial of the year. It cost eight hundred million lire to make. For the video I shot for the rock singer Gianna Nannini (the song is called “Fotoromanza”), I only had forty million lire to work with–and in fact I don’t much like the end result. To make intelligent videos you need seri­ous money.
I think video is the future of cinema. To shoot on video has so many advantages. To begin with, you have total control over color. The impor­tant thing is to work with a good group of technicians. Video reproduces what you put in front of the camera with almost total fidelity. The range of effects you can achieve is not even comparable to cinema. In the lab, you always have to compromise. On video, in contrast, you have complete control–you always know where you are because you can play it back at any stage, and if you don’t like it you can redo it.

The Internet tells me this is Antonioni’s spot for the Renault 9. Which looks to me like at least 600 million of those lire went to Jacques Tati:

Which, apologies to the professore, is only the second best driverless Renault commercial I’ve seen.

Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone drop mic and leave the stage.
[via @filmstudiesff and @Coburn73]
[2022 update: these links have been updated where possible, but at the moment I can’t find Antonioni’s Renault commercial online. Fortunately, this is the only bad thing to have happened on or related to the internet in the intervening 10 years.]

Ed Meneeley’s Photocopy Prints

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Illustration from Ed Meneeley’s Tender Buttons, 1964
You may know Edward Meneeley from such art historical blog posts as, “The guy who published the subscription art slide library and newsletter which Rauschenberg refused to allow to reproduce Short Circuit in 1962 because of the agreement Rauschenberg and Johns had come to after their messy breakup,” and “The guy who told me how Johns really transformed an erased de Kooning drawing into Erased De Kooning Drawing,” and “The guy who was hooking up with at least Bob at the time, yow, small world.”
But he also turns out to be one of the first artists to use the then-new technology of photocopying to make prints. Starting in 1964, when a friend took him to IBM’s offices, where he saw a copy machine for the first time.
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Edward Meneeley, IBM Drawings
Meneeley made three print portfolios using a photocopier: Tender Buttons (1965) [top] was a suite of illustrations for Gertrude Stein’s work of the same name. IBM Drawings (1966) was an exploration of the medium and its context, abstract, collaged images composed from computer tapes and other office ephemera that Meneeley found at hand. There was also a hairy, photocopied butt, presumably the artist’s.
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And then in 1968, the year Seth Siegelaub instigated his highly influential, photocopied-book-as-exhibition project, The Xerox Book, Meneeley made Portraits: People and Objects, which included a reassembled photo collage portrait of his friend Jasper Johns. But where Siegelaub and his crew were skewing to the conceptual aspects of copying, Meneeley was very attuned to the technical subtleties of photostatic reproduction, which he interpreted as a unique printmaking medium, an updated form of lithography.
Great stuff.
Edward Meneeley and the advent of the electrostatic artist’s print [rectoversoblog, which has many more images, not just the 2nd & 3rd images above]

The Secret Ingredient Turned Out To Be Infringiness

Brent-PrintedMatter
Well that cat’s out of the bag.
Joy Garnett posted audio from the Richard Prince Canal Zone discussion she, Chris Habib and I had Saturday night at Printed Matter. It’s available for streaming or download at the Internet Archive. OR for remixing, autotuning, and stop-action animating, whatever you want, since artpanelsjustwanttobefree it’s public domain.
It clocks in at almost an hour and a half, and who knows what you’ll find in there. I was too high on life and drunk on power–I was running the projector, too– to really remember what was said. Though I do remember something about megayachts, Perry Mason vs Law & Order; and wishing you were Rasta and/or punk. So really, something for everyone.
Many thanks to Chris and Joy, to Keith and Max and the PM Crew, and especially to the awesome and engaged audience. We’ll do it again for either the damages hearing or the Supreme Court phase.
Cariou v. Prince Meets Iron Chef, Discussion & Crit at Printed Matter, NYC [archive.org]
Joy Garnett’s flickr photoset clearly reveals I have no veto power over her photos of me [flickr]

RIP, Ivan Karp, And Thanks

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I’ll get back to the Rauschenberg thing in a bit, but it’s already been too long that I haven’t noted the passing of Ivan Karp. He had been an amazingly generous, interesting, and informative resource to me over the years I’ve been delving into the history of postwar art, always ready to share a story, or an opinion, a recollection, or a corrective. And I’m sad to think we won’t be having any more chats. My thoughts are with his family, and especially his wife, the artist and historian Marilynn Gelfman Karp, who has also been very thoughtful and generous with her insights and stories.
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An anecdote in Ivan’s NY Times obituary about how he and Marilynn met in what became an epicenter of the 1960s New York art world reminded me of a better version, from Ivan’s 1969 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art:

So kind of unknowingly the gallery by being what it was, an outgoing open place became a center of activity. People come in here and spend a lot of time. They’d meet each other. Every Saturday was an important event at the gallery. Dozens of people standing around in the back room discovering each other. There was a lot of romantic atmosphere. Always a lot of beautiful girls there. What always made the gallery activity worthwhile for me was the number of beautiful people and especially the beautiful girls who always came in. They were always particularly welcome; as they are to day still. That’s where I met my wife — at the gallery. She brought in slides and, in fact, brought in some paintings of an artist she was interested in. And I guess I was more interested in her than I was in the painter. But I think we did show the artist. And then I married his sponsor.

This painter was Vern Blosum. When I met Blosum almost 50 years later, it was clear he remembered the sting of losing his girlfriend as if it was yesterday.
For his part, when I called Ivan several years ago out of the blue and told him I wanted to talk with him about Vern Blosum, he just laughed and laughed. The jig was finally up.
images: Ivan and Marilynn Karp from their Screen Tests, ST171 and ST173, both 1964, obviously ganked from Callie Angell’s Warhol Screen Tests Catalogue Raisonne. Marilynn was also filmed for Warhol’s The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women.