making movies – greg.org

Nobody Expects The Roma Deposition

this altered version of Caravaggio's Deposition from the Vatican Museums in Roma is a cascade of mourning figures holding or looming over the dead but still absolutely caked up body of Our Lord, with an outsized clipped version of Richard Prince's under-oath face roughly pasted onto the main figure in the center, the one who is holding Jesus, but, importantly, also looking straight at the viewer. Obviously, since this is a picture about Prince's deposition in a lawsuit, the so-called correct thing would be to paste his face on Jesus's, and in less apocalyptic times, I might have, but [looks at the world] I'm not taking that chance rn

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?

prev: The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, 2023

Jasper Johns: Take An Object, Add Some Little Guys To It

a close up film frame grab of jasper johns touching up the corners of a copper intaglio plate sitting on a white worktable at ulae. the horizontal rectangular plate features three stick figures holding brushes, a motif johns first used 7 years earlier. via hans namuth and judith weschler's 1990 film, jasper johns: take an object — 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.”

Oh hey, look, it’s Jasper Johns in 1989 discussing the addition of his little stick figures to another work for what sounds like the first time since he used them in 1982.

jasper johns 1990 print, the seasons, is a jumble of elements from his painting series of the same name, rearranged into an interlocked cross form, with three tiny stick figures appended to the bottom. — 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 Object with 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.

Unfinished, Lost, Destroyed

a blurry 16mm film still of a crowd of pink people half dressed in pink, assembled atop a hexagonal platform draped with pink fabric and decorated around the edge with white, a sculpture of a birthday cake by claes and peggy oldenburg, who are on the cake with andy warhol and others, in a meadow of a farm in connecticut, shooting a film by jack smith. a thick wall of green trees is behind them. via callie angell and the jack smith archive, ultimately

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.

Twombly Cinematic Universe

this sally mann photo of cy twombly's studio is from 2011, probably. a densely calligraphed white on deep blue painting sits in a thick, old carved giltwood frame on a dark easel, next to a work table cluttered with mail, books, posters, acrylic paint jars, and a five-tiered square wedding cake of a twombly sculpture made out of white boxes with what looks like a caketopper-like figure in a chair, but is probably a blob of plaster-soaked rag. on one of the plinths of the sculpture rests a black an dwhite polaroid photo. two thin stalk-like sculpture elemtns rise behind the table, and the whole scene is blown out and backlit by the light coming through the thin accordion style blinds in the background. sally mann is a professional photographer so this is an artistic choice. it's not like she was going to tell twombly to relight or restage his studio. we're lucky to have this — 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.

a 12yo detail of a screenshot from tacita dean's 2011 film edwin parker is the interior of twombly's cluttered studio, where twombly, his back to the camera and wearing a camel colored corduroy jacket, is standing in front of a red green orange and black swagged painting which he's trying to reset in an old, carved giltwood frame sitting on an easel. A white guy in workwear and a baseball hat, twombly's driver and local assistant in lexington virginia whose name is literally butch, like, butch is his name, is standing to the left, not quite helping, but trying to be ready to help with some tape or whatever. a yellow measuring stick has been inserted behind the painting to wedge it into the frame, by nicola del roscio, twombly's companion or whatever, who understood that on the easel, there was nothing holding the painting in place.

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.

a screenshot from tacita dean's 2011 film edwin parker which shows twombly's storefront studio after the three men have gone outside, on their way to lunch. the jury-rigged painting with the tape measure sticking out is in the center right middle ground. the clutter of a table, with books and boxes and bags and the tiny head of a porcelain frog from a yard sale are out of focus in the lower foreground. a couple of white painted sculptures or sculptures in progress stick up like lone buildings in this messy skyline. the pleated accordion shades probably bought at walmart are down, the light is better than sally mann's photo, at least stereotypically better. — 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.

a google streetview screenshot of the back of a durer painting in the state museum in karlsruhe, germany, which is mounted on a white pedestal in a black and gold edged frame. the back of the painted panel is swirling red green pink blue, pale yellow, interpreted as a slice of agate, and I forget what's on the front. some devotional image of jesus [love him, don't get me wrong, but not the point rn] the gallery floor dominates the image; it is strip wood. the walls are pale grey with a dark grey stone baseboard. google streetview cruft and ui elements abound obv — gsv of a Dürer in Karlsruhe, via

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.

a woman in a black hijab walks with her phone outstretched, presumably filming or photographing as she walk along a series of cy twombly paintings on the white wall of the louvre abu dhabi. the paintings are vertical, larger than human scale, in deep dark blue with loose, thick gestural calligraphic loops and rows of marks in white. the nine paintings were bought by the louvre for the louvre abu dhabi, and then the louvre in paris had twombly make a blue ceiling mural for them. the image originally comes from cnn — 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.

About That Robert Irwin Documentary

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 Painting

a karen kilimnik painting, very brushy, of a bust of model amber valletta, with blonde, straight, shoulder length hair looking intently to her left, wearing a black top, neckline plunging out of the frame, so the dominant feature of the painting is the model's pale pink and beige flesh. the eyes are painted with more detail. the background is several shades of blue, and according to chloe sevigny who bought it, they represent the flames of the title, The great hamptons fire. image via 303 gallery. — 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.

Robert Medley’s Sebastiane, Or An Autobiographical Incident

filmmaker derek jarman sits on a sofa covered with purple velvet in the yellow painted living room of his cottage in 1989. he is white with black hair, wearing a denim shirt under a mushroom colored jacket. a book sits next to him on the sofa, and a large pale toned painting of a reclined nude white male figure with another male figure in a tunic in front of it, and sketched out crowds in the periphery. in the room, a plant sits on a low stool at the left, diamond pane cabinet windows inset into the wall on the right have a piece of driftwood studded with pebbles or something. the photo was taken for world of interiors magazine by john vere brown, and they have run it three times so far. — 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.”

Logistics in Reverse

a screenshot of logistics, a 2012 film that lasts 37 days, shows the bow of a ship with containers stacked variously in five rows, on a grey sea and under a lighter grey cloudy sky. two rain drops on the camera housing distort the light slightly. — 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.

Is This Really A Print Of Derek Jarman’s Blue?

a vertical strip of 35 millimeter film stock is entirely blue, with two white waveforms of an optical audio track running in black down the left side. sprocket holes punctuate either side of the film strip. this is apparently a piece of a print of derek jarman's monochrome blue film, Blue, made in 1993, as he was losing his sight as a side effect of aids and related medications.

Is this really a 35mm print of Derek Jarman’s Blue, no frames or nothin’?

Thanks to art historian A.V. Marraccini, I saw this Doc Films at the University of Chicago using this image to promote a screening of Blue this week.

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.

This really is my Saturday night. DVDBeaver has technical information on the various DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Blue, and the greatest set of screencaps the medium has ever produced.]

Previously, very related: International Jarman Blue

OG Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siecle II

1989 ap photo of artist nam june paik standing in front of his sculpture fin de siecle ii at the whitney museum. it is a wall of over 300 television sets in various sizes and grid configurations showing seven different channels of programming, but the caption only says its david bowie. popped up on ebay, then disappeared oh well

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.

Happy Kara Walker Video 10th Anniversary

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.

Richter Cinematic Universe [ed. 8]

a still of richter and belz's computer animated film, moving picture (946-3) shows mirrored and repeated vertical sections of a richter squeegee painting in reds pinks greens yellows, and some turquoise across the middle. the abstract and random squeegee marks become baroque geometric patterns when mirrored and morphed in varying widths, which is a technique richter began using in strip paintings from 2009-2012, and which he documented in a book, patterns, which provided the impetus for the film. this image is via gagosian, but it's the same one that's been circulating with the work since at least 2019 so — 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?

OG Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea

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.

Steve McQueen, *More*, 2001, c-print, each 33 1/4 x 50 in., ed 1/4+1AP, sold in 2021 at Phillips

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

They Have Not Found The Magic Prism

Fig. 2 from Petro Vlahos’ 1964 patent [US3095304A] for making the beam splitting prism used in the sodium vapor process of image compositing

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.

Glenn Ligon: Music And The Stenciled Word

Glenn Ligon, *A Small Band (Primary Title)*, 2015, neon, with a text related to Steve Reich’s *Come Out*, installed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

I thought he might be talking about the new collection of writings and interviews that just dropped, and which I’m about a third of the way through, but no. Glenn Ligon’s conversation with Francesca Gavin on NTS.Live was mostly about music. And it turns out to be an unexpectedly interesting vector for his work.

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.

Rough Version w/Glenn Ligon, 27.08.2024 [nts.live]
Buy Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss From Rain; Writings and Interviews [hauserwirth, here’s the book trailer, btw]
Previously, related: NTS is also where Mark Leckey has a monthly show, new episode Sept. 3rd!