Category: making movies

While promoting her personal style memoir published in 2015, Chlöe Sevigny told the story of how the first painting she bought, Karen Kilimnik’s The Great Hamptons Fire (1995) burned up in the second of two supposedly mysterious house fires of then-methhead writer/director Harmony Korine. Getting an unspun account of Y2k-era Korine and his fires has been difficult; by 2008, all he knew was, he woke up, and the house was gone [twice.] by 2019, the fires are just a line in Chris Black’s cute puff piece.

In her sadface emoji shoutout to Sevigny’s story—while blurbing Kilimnik’s current show at Gladstone—publicist Kaitlin Phillips linked to a scraped version of the story on a defunct Russian art dealer blog rather than to the original magazine. [Maybe because their image of the painting hadn’t disappeared.]

Anyway, the painting was in Kilimnik’s 1995 show at 303 Gallery, her third, which opened on Halloween, three months after Kids, and while the F/W95 Jil Sander campaign featuring Amber Valletta she’d based the painting on was still in print. The ICA show she loaned it to was called, “Belladonna,” a group show of women artists that opened in early 1997. In addition to Sevigny’s Kilimnik, Korine’s Connecticut fire destroyed the footage for Fight Harm, an in-process project where Harmony’d get the crap beat out of him by passersby, and Leo DiCaprio or David Blaine would film it. That pushes the date past 1999.

If we are to understand the story and the timeline, though, Sevigny either put the painting in Korine’s care before the first fire in New York, and left it with him, OR she gave it to him after he’d already burned down one house. All so that more people could see it, in Korine’s suburban drug den. I, too, am sad this beautiful early Kilimnik was destroyed, but it seems like Sevigny is leaving out some key aspects to this story.

The World of Interiors has run the same story about visiting Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage three times: the first was in 1989. The second was in June 2019, and ngl, I can’t figure the hook. Jarman’s partner Keith Collins had died the year before, so the cottage was in limbo, but the Art Fund campaign to rescue it wouldn’t come until 2020. There was a restoration of The Garden (1990), and an exhibition of paintings he made at Dungeness that spring, but neither seems big enough. I just saw it trending in a sidebar, but it turns out the third time was last February, the 30th anniversary of Jarman’s death. So bless the editors and algorithms of World of Interiors, I guess.

What caught my attention was the large painting over Jarman’s sofa, in a style like none of his other works. Which makes sense, since it was not by Jarman, but by Robert Medley. The painting “is entitled Sebastiane, and is autobiographical in the sense that Robert was in the film of that name that Derek made in 1974.”

Logistics (2012) is a 37-day-long film by Erika Magnussen and Daniel Andersson that tracks in real time the route of a cheap, electronic pedometer from its warehouse in central Sweden back to its factory in Shenzhen. While it does answer the question of where the stuff in our world comes from, it is primarily concerned with how it gets to us, via truck, train, ports, and most of all, container ships.

Logistics first screened in Uppsala in 2012 and has streamed on various platforms, but since Spring 2024, it has been available on YouTube in 107 8-hour segments. It feels right at home.

I cannot believe I missed this 1989 publicity photo on ebay of Nam June Paik posing in front of the original installation of Fin de Siecle II.

Paik created it for a show at the Whitney, “Image World: Art and Media Culture.” According to the caption, “The art is made up of more than 300 television sets and controlled by a digital computer. The sculpture features music and synchronized images of rock star David Bowie.”

Which, well, yes, and,

What an amazingly clipped description.

The Whitney acquired it in 1993, but never showed it. When they decided to show it again in 2019, it turned out nearly a third of the hardware was inoperable and unusable. [The keyframe on the conservation video below shows the original configuration.]

It’s now listed as having “207 video monitors in scaffolding and seven video channels.” Also mentioned are the other video sources, including Rebecca Allen’s Kraftwerk animations; video by Paik’s assistant Paul Perrin accompanied by Philip Glass; Merce Cunningham; Joseph Beuys; and Gera. Most are Paik-related or Paik-adjacent, which makes the whole work feel, along with everything else, a little like a self-portrait.

In November 2014 Kara Walker opened a show at Sikkema Jenkins titled Afterword, that included works related to Walker’s summer masterpiece, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, the giant African sugar sphinx installed in the disused sugar factory on the Brooklyn waterfront.

In addition to watercolor studies and renderings of A Subtlety, Walker also showed An Audience, a 27-minute video of audience reactions to the sculpture. It was recorded by six cameras during the crowded final hours of the last hot, July day of the installation.

This show came to mind because the rich colors of Walker’s 2014 watercolors felt connected to the even more baroque colors of the watercolors in Walker’s current exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, whose abbreviated title is The High and Soft Laughter…

And I had never realized that any of An Audience was visible online.

As I’ve said here before, Exodus, a one-minute loop of Super 8 film that follows a pair of Black men through a crowded London street in 1992, is one of my favorite Steve McQueen works ever. And now everyone can see how it holds up, because it’s on view at Dia in Chelsea for a year.

While trying to find images of McQueen’s new photos, also on view, I came across old photos of his I’d forgotten. At Marian Goodman in November 2001, McQueen showed a video of himself, partly visible, sitting on a hotel bed, bathed in the light of a French TV news report of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Titled Illuminer, it was one of the first works by a contemporary artist to contend with the world taking shape after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

But in that show was also a pair of large photographs that looked like the Milky Way but were actually of asphalt and steam. That kind of instant zoom in and out of perspective, or perception, makes sense in that show. Anyway, turns out the ed. 1 of those photos were sold in 2021 at Phillips. Can you even get 50-inch C-prints made anymore?

Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea, 20 Sept 2024-Summer 2025 [diaart.org via mgg]
Previously, related, from 2011: Exodus, 1997, Steve McQueen

When it came out in 1996, everyone who didn’t get an actual laserdisc edition wanted a bootleg copy of Cremaster 2. I wanted a belt buckle even more.

My queries at Gladstone amounted to nothing except the offer to buy an unrecognizable photo edition. So I plotted how to get a bootleg buckle made.

Would Mortenson Silver & Saddles of Santa Fe, who were credited with the extensive silver engraving in the film, make an extra one on the side? I ultimately decided not to ask.

But watching Cremaster 2 again last night—someone has uploaded the entire Cremaster Cycle to the Internet Archive, along with Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018)—I was struck again by the film’s particular beauty. And I wanted a buckle all over again.

Maybe it is too far back, but Mortenson’s doesn’t mention Barney or Cremaster props on their custom commissions page. But they do note the custom buckles the CEO of Outback Steakhouse commissioned as gifts for Princes Charles, William and Harry at a charity polo tournament he organized, probably in 2002 or 2003.

If I had a nickel for every artist documentary made from well within the circle of subjectivity that caught me off guard with the nuances of the artist’s funerary arrangements, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s wild that it’s happened twice.

In 2007 Rainer Judd and Karen Bernstein co-directed Marfa Voices, a documentary about Donald Judd’s life and work in west Texas that emerged from the Judd Foundation’s Oral History Project. Among those who shared their stories were friends and colleagues who attended Judd’s funeral up Pinto Canyon in 1994, including the bagpiper, Joe Brady, Jr.

It probably could go without saying that Judd was buried in the most pristine of pine boxes, but it is remarkable to actually see it nonetheless.