For a brief shining moment in 2023, a website called depositionrow.com hosted the entire 6h42m42s video of Richard Prince’s deposition in the copyright infringement lawsuit over his Instagram New Portraits. And then it was gone.
Well, now you can watch it again. Starting today, it is playing on a computer on a table in a Janis Kounellis installation at Sant’Andrea di Scaphis in Rome, Gavin Brown’s deconsecrated side hustle. What are you waiting for?
Johns adding these little figures in Namuth & Weschler’s 1990 film, Jasper Johns: Take An Object
“I thought to add these little figures, which appear in a different drawing of mine, an old drawing. They’re in the bottom of Perilous Night, for John Cage.”
And little guys: Jasper Johns, The Seasons (ULAE 0249), 1990, intaglio, 50 1/4 x 44 1/2 in., ed. 50
Johns is talking to filmmaker Judith Weschler, who produced Jasper Johns: Take An Objectwith photographer Hans Namuth in 1990. The short film is bracketed by two extended scenes of Johns at work: in 1972, painting in his own studio, and in 1989, printmaking at ULAE.
In Summer 1963, amidst the scandals and arrests that marked the earliest screenings of Flaming Creatures, avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith was already at work on his second movie, Normal Love. Andy Warhol, who’d just bought his first movie camera, was filming the first rolls of Sleep at his dealer Eleanor Ward’s rented farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
On the weekend of 11 August, Jack Smith and the cast of his new feature film-in-progress, Normal Love, also turned up [in Old Lyme]; they were there to film the Cake Sequence from Normal Love, in which the cast dances on top of a giant wooden birthday cake designed by Claes Oldenburg, which they constructed in a meadow on Ward’s property (figure 1). Warhol appeared in the Cake Sequence of Normal Love. that’s him on the right (figure 2), in the dark glasses; on the left, you can see poet Diane di Prima, in the turban, and Mario Montez to her right. And he also shot one of his very first films of this event, a four-minute silent color reel titled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love,” probably on the same day.
Sally Mann photo of Cy Twombly’s Lexington Studio from Remembered Light
Looked through Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, Sally Mann’s 2016 book of photos of Twombly’s places, for the first time the other day, and saw this. A perfect little painting in a fat, baroque giltwood frame in his cluttered storefront studio.
But this is not just any perfect painting. [I don’t actually know what painting it is, tbh.] I just know it was a major plot [sic] in Tacita Dean’s 2011 film, Edwin Parker.
Maybe plot is a little strong. In her quiet, attentive film Dean doesn’t follow Twombly around so much as just be where he is, and observe. And for most of the film, he’s in this little studio. The first action or narrative drama, such as it is, involves a painting that has fallen out of this picture frame, and Twombly tries to fix it. The two men with him—first, Butch, his local assistant, and then Nicola Del Roscio—alternately hover and jump in to help with tape and a tape measure.
detail of a screenshot from Tacita Dean’s Edwin Parker, 2011
When I had a review copy of Edwin Parker like ten years ago, I got kind of fixated on this painting, wondering what it was, where it was, and taking grainy screencaps so that I could track it down.
When the Hirshhorn was wrapped in his giant curtained scrim, the swag and slightly lurid colors made me worry Twombly’s painting was by Nicholas Party. When I was making Facsimile Objects about inaccessible Dürers in German museums, I wondered if it was the freely painted verso of something more mundane.
Later in the film, Del Roscio is holding the blue & white painting up top, flipping it around, as Twombly says it’ll fit in the frame. It looks like it’s related to the series of paintings Twombly made for the Louvre in 2008, as part of his ceiling deal.
installation view of Cy Twombly’s Untitled I–IX, 2008, at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, screenshot via CNN
So the plot, such as it is, involves the swapping out of one painting for another. Technically, this climax does not happen in Edwin Parker; Del Roscio is only shown setting the little painting carefully against the wall.
Whether that makes Mann’s photo a spoiler, a sequel, or just a post-credits teaser, I cannot say. All I know is now I have two little paintings to track down.
I watched the Robert Irwin documentary, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and it is good. [It is currently on Kanopy for free, support your local public library.]
Some things stand out:
Irwin’s mystical-sounding development of his pursuit of perception was fascinating: posting up on Ibiza and not talking to anyone for eight months? wandering around the desert or whatever, painting dots for 16 hours/day, 7 days/wk? But he was not, in fact, alone in that pursuit. Some art world context would have been more helpful than repeating his refusal to allow his work to be photographed.
The Whitney installation was nice, but it felt somehow confusing, which is weird because there was even a real reinstallation of it, with footage and everything. The filmmakers did somehow manage to shoot other phenomenological aspects of other installations coherently.
Evelyn Hankins, who curated Irwin’s spectacular Hirshhorn retrospective, was thoughtful and present—but that show was somehow not, at all.
Which, wtf, the MCA San Diego’s masterpiece, 1° 2° 3° 4°, was done dirty here. Is it the ultimate “you had to be there” Irwin? Except for the Chinati building, which took up the last third of the film?
The dynamics of shooting and interviewing around Marfa and Chinati was weird. Marriane Stockebrand, the inviter, I guess, was everywhere, but Jennie Moore, the director who dragged that project across the finish line was airkissed in one crowd shot? Maybe that is #chinatiworldproblems, I guess I’ll demur. The weird caginess over whether he’d attend the 2016 ribboncutting was eerie, too; it made it sound like he died in production. [Spoiler: he stuck around for seven more years.]
For a documentary about perception and reproduction, it did shoot Irwin’s own dot paintings immaculately. But the shimmering moiré of halftone dots and pixels during pans across archival photos was hilariously distracting.
Seeing Arne Glimcher as a producer both makes sense and raises some flags, but how is that any different from anything the Glimchers have done all this time? It is what it is.
For such a singular thinker, who’d done so much work on his own mind and being, maybe give the film a title that reflects something he said, not just something he quoted?
Destroyed: Karen Kilimnik, The Great Hamptons Fire, 1995, 24 x 18 in., 0il on canvas, via 303gallery
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.
Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, in front of a painting by Robert Medley, photographed for World of Interiors in 1989 by John Vere Brown
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.”
screenshot from Part 5 of Logistics (2012), on YouTube
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.
2013 was my last exercise to understand how Jarman made Blue blue. Early live performances used a filmed loop of an Yves Klein painting. That was replaced by a blue gel. Rowland Wymer’s 2006 book said the blue was “electronically produced,” which, if the image above is to be accepted, means it was not filmed in camera, but on the film stock itself.
Perhaps it is far past time to make some actual inquiries instead of just poking around in books.
[a little later update: In 2014, Mason Yeaver-Lap wrote about Blue, “a film without film,” and how the Walker Art Center exhibited it on a loop in a gallery. Though the museum has a 35mm print, for conservation reasons, they went with, “a flickering projector (aided by a piece of kit called T’he Flicker-O-Meter,’ whose manual can be found in the Walker archives) [which] would beam through a projection window coated with a blue gel. This filmless projector would thus throw a perfectly IKB shade, accompanied by a CD dub of the soundtrack. Again, Blue was a film without film.”
FWIW, this blog post will be the second mention on the internet of the “Flicker-O-Meter. We’re gonna need to see that manual.
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 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…
Still from Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24, by Gerhard Richter & Corinna Belz, as introduced by Gagosian for an upcoming immersive installation in Rome, Dec. 2024.
As we try to make sense of wtf happened, and what the future holds, let me try to bring some clarity. As fields and factions drunk on their own importance clamor for dominance, let me try to bring a shared understanding.
So far there have been computer animations based on two Gerhard Richter paintings. They have followed the slicing and mirroring mathematical process of the artist’s Strip series (2009-2013). Richter provided the image to and they were made by filmmaker Corinna Belz. They have been accompanied by music commissioned from multiple composers.
The project having its “gallery debut” next month, which Gagosian Rome is pleased to announce, Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019–24), is of the second painting, Abstraktes Bild (CR 946-3), from 2016. It is, thought, the first to be presented as an immersive installation in film and sound, and the first to be sold, in an edition of eight. What is it, and how did it come to be?
still from Steve McQueen, Exodus, 1992-97, 1:05 super-8 loop, transferred to digital, ed. 4+1AP, image via Marian Goodman Gallery c.2011, on view through Summer 2025 at Dia Chelsea
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?
Before there was bluescreen or greenscreen, there was yellowscreen, and it was better.
beam splitter prism graphic, screenshot from Collision Crew
In the 1950s Petro Vlahos created an in-camera, sodium vapor process which filmed actors lit frontally with white light, against a monochrome backdrop, backlit by yellow sodium vapor lamps, using a beam splitting prism that recorded the color image and its monochromatic mask simultaneously on two reels of film. It is basically a dichroic version of Technicolor, invented by Wadsworth E. Pohl, which used prisms to split an image into three color-separated frames.
The three pieces they discuss and play, by Steve Reich, Julius Eastman, and Jason Moran, are all bangers of their kind. No spoilers, but Ligon’s made work related to a Reich text piece [above]; Moran scored a Ligon film, and it turns out Ligon and Eastman will be in a two-person show at 52 Walker in January.