the making of, by greg allen
This 2015 sculpture, Smooth Sailing (Tan) by Débora Delman, is as perfect as Gunther Sachs’ 1969 table by Allen Jones is repulsive.
Meanwhile, though the coffee table in which Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek was encased is nowhere to be found,
the purported glass dining table from John Hughes’ 1984 racist teen date rape comedy Sixteen Candles was sold at a COVID compliant estate sale in Highland Park in October 2020.
h/t @voorwerk
Even though it was a film [still], The Public Enemy (1931) that brought me to Three Centuries of American Art, MoMA’s ambitious 1938 Paris exhibition, I was not prepared to find an actual screening room at the end of the 85-pic slideshow of installation photos from the Musée du Jeu de Paume. But here it is.
Continue reading “OG MoMA Screening Room @Jeu de Paume”
Artist/hero Paul Soulellis has collected and posted all the title cards from Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film, Paris is Burning as part of an ongoing exploration of queer type. There are a lot more than I would have guessed.
All the title cards from Paris is Burning (1990) [are.na/paul-soulellis]
Previous, related Pepper Labeija respect in this house: Authenticity vs Realness
Previous, related Soulellis respect in this house: Untitled (Andiron…) in Library of the Printed Web
I watched Corinna Belz’s documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting today, thinking that the artist hard at work in his studio would clear my head, or at least distract me.
Then I was overwhelmed anew by an exchange with Belz as Richter is sorting through stacks of old photographs. As Richter held a snapshot of his middle-aged parents, Belz asked, “You left Dresden, East Germany, in 1961. Did you ever see them again?”
“No, never.” Richter replied. “I was a recognized refugee. A certified political refugee. And it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t get a permit…a travel permit for the East.
“Not until later, 1987, when I had an exhibition there. Then, with the ambassador, suddenly everything was possible.
“But by then they were all dead.”
“Did you realize in the 60s that you would never see them again?”
“No. Absolutely not. You think things will change and it won’t last. You don’t think people will grow old and die. When you leave them, they’re young.”
I knew this was here; I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and it inexorably changed the way I thought of Richter’s relationship to photographs, his subjects, and the arc of his entire project. A young artist becomes a refugee when his war-ravaged country splits apart, and he never sees his family again is not the Richter origin story we were used to. And Richter lost in sadness as his answers to the questions linger in his silence is not the icy master of critical detachment we’ve been taught.
But today, my ache over the career of this artist built on personal trauma that unfurled across the shifting fascist and imperial politics of the 20th century was overshadowed by my dread of the future. Because part of my processing today involved replaying with unwanted, fresh intensity the idea of leaving, of fleeing.
The questions of where? when? how? land differently than they did even yesterday. But at least I asked them. Am I ready to never see my parents again? wasn’t even a question I’d thought of. Neither, it turns out, did Richter.
As reported today on social media, Ubu has stopped adding things.
“As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active.
The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.”
Preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety, except, of course, when it’s not:
“Everything is downloadable on UbuWeb. Don’t trust the cloud, even UbuWeb’s cloud,” said UbuWeb as recently as January.
And as Kenneth Goldsmith said as recently as yesterday, “Let’s keep UbuWeb well alive!” and “Don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future.”
A .tar of the site would be really handy right about now.
Previously, related:
2014: 36 Links From My Life With Ubu; my Ubu Top Ten Sixteen
2006: Non-Sensical, Non-Site, Non Art? Smithson’s ‘Hotel Palenque’
Maybe it’ll take more than a few hours for Mickey Mouse to make a meaningful mark on the public domain. In the mean time, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law School has an extensive list of texts, art, films, music, and recordings that entered the public domain today.
Top on my list, at least, is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. And it’s interesting that both W.E.B. DuBois’ uplifting international romance Dark Princess and Claude McKay’s gritty street novel Home to Harlem are listed together; DuBois hated McKay’s book.
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is probably the most significant non-rodent-related film to be freed this year. And for music composition, it’s probably Mack the Knife, originally published as part of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (which is also now public domain.)
There are many, many more works in various copyright registries, most unknown, or underknown, and ready for rediscovery. Life starts at 95.
January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923! [law.duke.edu]
Previously, related: The Greg Gatsby, 2021
Never too much of Louise Lawler. This morning Andrew Russeth saw something on social media that reminded him of Lawler’s 1979 work, advertised above, A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture. The piece was presented in conjunction with Lawler’s first show. The first movie she showed without the picture was John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), but she likes for the movie to change each time it’s presented, and for the title to not be published in advance.
The most recent screenings I’m aware of were in 2017, during her retrospective at MoMA. I guess she doesn’t want the titles of the films screened archived, either.
Dave Dyment points to Bruce Hainley, who makes a very satisfying connection between A Movie Will Be Shown Without A Picture and the book work Lawler published the previous year, “a screenplay without a movie.” The book now known as Untitled (Black/White) was sold for either $4.95 or $100, depending on which price was circled. Dyment shows an example where someone requested Lawler to sign a cheaper version, which she called “perverse”—in the signed note she provided instead. The relevance of this anecdote will, I hope, only deepen in the coming days.
Robert Smithson, Underground Projection Room (Utah Museum Plan), 1971, graphite on paper, 9×11.75 inches, lot 145 @ LA Modern, 21 June 2023
According to the friend of my mom’s whose family used to own the ranch land on and around Rozel Point, the basalt-strewn hill above the Spiral Jetty is full of rattlesnake dens. I don’t know if Robert Smithson knew this when he picked the site, but I doubt it. He was more focused on the scenic qualities: the pink salt water of the Great Salt Lake, and the collapsed oil derrick a little further along the shore.
I’ve thought about it a lot, though, especially when I think about Smithson’s original plan to show the Spiral Jetty film on a continuous loop in an underground screening room on the site. A sketch for that idea (above) will be sold next week at LA Modern auction house.
Which is as good an occasion as any to propose that Smithson’s idea be realized. For the snakes.
As half the human population on earth knows, tiny flatscreens are a thing. And so is solar power. Smithson’s film, Spiral Jetty, is 36 minutes long and can easily fit on a micro SD card that plugs into an Arduino-compatible 60×94 pixel TinyScreen+, which can be lowered into the snake den.
A small solar panel on the surface, connected to a battery connected to the Tinyscreen down below will keep the movie streaming endlessly, or until the heat death of the planet, whichever comes first. Before installing them for the snakes, I think I need to make a small edition of prototypes first. And to start by extracting out my copy of the film from the not-solid-state external drive. Fingers crossed that this project isn’t over before it starts
With the opening of the Rijksmuseum’s massive show, it occurs to me that New York is at its lowest level of Vermeers in almost a hundred years.
Instead of eight (three at the Frick and five at the Met), there are only three (at the Met).
Meanwhile, all the Vermeers in DC are gone (four, including the one that the National Gallery says isn’t one anymore, but that the Rijksmuseum’s still down with.)
previously: All The Vermeers In New York (plus the one in Boston)
related: All The Vermeers In New York, 1990, directed by Jon Jost
An extraordinary disclosure coming in the media backdoor: Abbas Kiarostami, the late giant of Iranian filmmaking, reportedly stole the film Ten (10), which was nominated for the 2002 Palme d’Or at Cannes, from the young, female filmmaker who was its taxi-driving protagonist, Mania Akbari.
In a screenshots of a newsletter tweeted by Bulgarian film writer Yoana Pavlova (@roamingwords), Akbari writes that she conceived and shot the dashcam footage–which, famously, is almost all seemingly unscripted conversations between a taxi driver (Akbari) and her passengers.
Akbari showed this footage to Kiarostami, who asked to use it as inspiration for a script, but instead he edited it into the film known as 10. Then, Akbari writes, in a Q&A at Cannes, in her presence, he claimed full credit for the film, and that he directed Akbari through a hidden earpiece. Akbari says this is all entirely false, and that she has been dealing with the repercussions ever since.
Amina Maher, Akbari’s filmmaker daughter (who appeared in 10 as her young son) has herself addressed the sense of exploitation and violation she felt as a child who did not know she was being recorded (though presumably at the time, her mother, who was doing the recording, did. Maher’s website says she separated from her family at 15).
Maher and Akbari both assert that there was never any consent or contract between them, other family members who appear in the film, and Kiarostami, and have served notice to its producers and distributors to prevent its screening. It’s an extraordinary and shocking situation which Kiarostami’s people–he died in 2016–have yet to account for, afaik.
I’m now going to try to watch Kiarostami’s 2004 making of documentary, 10 on Ten, which also screened at Cannes. In that film, Kiarostami uses the same dashcam setup to deliver his digital filmmaking tips. It’s interesting that Manohla Dargis found it “tediously didactic” compared to Ten‘s original freshness. Maybe that’s because they were made by different people. [Turns out most of it is on YouTube.]
Congratulations to Spice DAO, which announced yesterday [sic] that they had successfully purchased a rare copy of a book containing the concept art and storyboard sketches for Alexander Jodorowsky’s legendary adaptation of Dune. The sale took place at Christie’s Paris on 21 November 2021, three days after Constitution DAO failed in its attempt to buy a printed copy of the US Constitution at Sotheby’s in New York.
Constitution DAO raised $47 million, only to be outbid by hedgie/collector Ken Griffin, whose privately negotiated guaranteed bid of basically $47 million and one dollars also included a rebate on the auction house’s premium, bringing his net to just $43 million. Spice DAO, no doubt quick learners, went into their auction for the EUR25,000 book with a EUR2.667 million bid, and managed to eke out a win.
Spice DAO’s purchase–technically, a private purchase and a transfer to the DAO, since Christie’s didn’t recognize the DAO–of Jodorowsky’s Dune bible was actually revealed last December, when it was still called Dune DAO. The story then was that these enthusiastic Dune fans were banding together to liberate the long-hidden copy of the lost, unmade masterpiece they’d gotten glimpses of in Jodorowsky’s Dune, a 2013 documentary directed by Frank Pavich. It was only when they tweeted their plans to,
“1. Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law)
2. Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service
3. Support derivative projects from the community”
that copyrightlulz twitter was like, “lmfao YEAH NO,” and the buyers of $11 million worth of Spice DAO tokens became aware of the limits of the blockchain’s ability to overcome all humanity’s problems.
So while the governance discord debates selling NFTs of scans of the pages of Copy Number 5, then burning the actual book so they won’t get sued for copyright infringement [0.<], I am ready to move forward with the Spice DAO Facsimile Object (S1).
As much as I thought I’d leave Facsimile Objects in 2021, I realize that the Spice DAO Community needs them. Spice DAO Facsimile Object (S1) presents a perfect, facsimile of Copy Number 5 of Michel Seydoux Presents Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune from Frank Herbert’s Novel. Design by Jean Giraud. Machines by Chris Foss. Special Effects by Dan O’Bannon. Dialogue by M. Demuth and A. Jodorowsky, as it was sold at Christie’s on November 21, 2021. Printed at full-size, in high-gloss dye sublimation pigment on an 11.5 x 15-inch aluminum panel, the Facsimile Object embodies the true octavo (210 x 295 mm) presence of this historic, physical, artifact. It is accompanied by a similarly full-scale, handmade certificate of authenticity, executed in ink on handmade Arches paper, signed, stamped and numbered, and will ship in a handmade case.
Unlike previous Facsimile Objects, which were created for the world, Spice DAO Facsimile Object (S1) is only available to verified hodlers of Spice DAO governance tokens. The first 10 verified orders will be priced at 0.5ETH, payable in USD at the ETH/USD price on coinbase for the date of purchase. After that, the price will increase to 1.0ETH. Availability of Spice DAO Facsimile Objects (S1) will continue until morale improves. DM or email to get started.
[update: the price of the Facsimile Object is after taxes. Whether you sell ETH to buy the Facsimile Object, at whatever your basis, or you use your pre-existing fiat is not relevant, and greg.org will not pay your capital gains taxes. Thank you for your understanding.]
I love Pierre Jeanneret’s furniture for Chandigarh, and I hate the Chandigarh Furniture Industrial Complex. I am relieved that these objects that once were abandoned for scrap are now preserved, but I hate that the cultural context is being stripped away, and that for their value and significance to be recognized, they must be removed and fed through the luxury design machinery of the West. I love seeing this furniture aging and bearing its history, and I hate seeing it stripped and restored and altered into just one more must-have for some instagram junkie to stuff into their Axel Vervoordt McMonastery.
I love this stuff, and hate that I want it, but I’ve managed to deal because it’s not like there’s any OG Chandigarh furniture left anyway. Well, Patrick Parrish just kicked the leg off my precariously balanced chair. He is currently showing a collection of pristine, original condition Jeanneret furniture from Chandigarh which has been held for twelve years, and it is utterly exquisite. Everyone who’s ever stripped and dipped a teak armchair and tossed out a horsehair cushion should immediately feel waves of remorse for their design crimes.
Now I love this furniture, and I hate that you haven’t yet sent me $1.26 million so I can buy all 66 pieces for my McMonastery.
I am linking to Patrick’s Pierre Jeanneret Online Viewing Room because it is perfect. The show is IRL until Dec. 31st. There is a book forthcoming. [patrickparrish.com]
Amie Siegel’s Provenance was beautiful and devastating, but has also done nothing to stem the tide, or change the dynamic. [amiesiegel.net]
I’ve been wanting to see Rirkrit Tiravanija’s film Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors since it came out in 2011. I’ve been sleeping on it/booked up with other stuff almost the whole time it’s been on view at the Hirshhorn, along side his curry and protest drawing piece, newly acquired, Who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green? Instead of mosaicing snippets from various visits, I wanted to see the whole thing in one sitting. Yesterday was the second to last day of the show, so I jammed downtown first thing.
Rirkrit and his dealer’s brother shot 16mm a week at a time, here and there, for two years, following the Chiang Mai farmer/laborer on his daily routine. He compared it to portraiture rather than narrative, and so I expected 2.5 hours of fly-on-the-wall footage, minus the walls.
It’s an extremely quiet, unassuming film, especially for a gallery setting. It does not grip or demand attention. So when I sat down on the Hirshhorn’s Miesian daybed in what turned out to be the middle of the film, I expected a bit of endurance and, frankly, escapism. Even a couple of weeks ago, Rirkrit had talked about Lung Neaw as a guy who’d helped build his studio, and who could be seen walking through the forest, foraging for wild eggplants. I imagined a shaman at one with nature who could free (or distract) me from the daily shitshow of the world we’ve created. It did not turn out that way. Continue reading “Escape And Curry Service”
