the making of, by greg allen
It’s been a minute, but the latest edition of Phone It In: An Art Writing Mixtape is here. Thanks to all who called in to 34-SOUVENIR to share something you’ve read recently. As much as I could, I linked and namechecked people below.
It’s kind of wild how these end up reflecting a moment, even when they pull sources from across decades:
Continue reading “Phone It In, Vol. 002: An Art Writing Mixtape”The world’s going to hell. I’ve got a deadline piece I’m stuck on. And my Google Voice number is set to expire unless I use it. So there’s no better time to put out a call for you to call in and share a bit of art-related writing or text that’s sticking with you right now.
When I first tried this exercise last spring, I thought it’d be a great way to find amazing or thought-provoking writing people have been saving up. But I also found it a good way to share something as I came across it, just placing a quick call, and leaving a voicemail. So.
Call the greg.org voicemail at 34-SOUVENIR (347-688-3647) and leave a message with:
* your name or handle [optional],
* you reading one brief art-related text [e.g., a sentence or two, 200 hundred or so words, a paragraph max, not a whole thing]
* the writer and source.
You can quote yourself, and if you’re sitting on a gold mine of great texts, you can call more than once, but please keep it to one quote per call. And no slop, bots or twitter.
When I get enough recordings, I’ll compile them into one mixtape and put it out here. So your recording may be used [unless it’s hateful or absolutely sucks, obv, editor’s call], but any other info goes nowhere and nothing is done with it.
Call 34-SOUVENIR today, tonight, whenever you read something good.
Previously: Phone It In, Vol. 1: An Art Writing Mixtape
BLANKET READINGS
FRIDAY, OCT 24 @ 1PM
STAY FROSTY/ERIC DOERINGER’S FLEA MARKET
128th & Convent Ave
In addition to the softcover debut of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, the Stay Frosty event this weekend will also feature readings of several excerpts from the deposition, beginning at 1PM tomorrow, Friday, 10/24.
The excerpts vary in subject, but all are juicy, whether gossiply, legally, or art historically. They run from 5-10 pages, and participants will be able to choose to read the part of either the artist or the lawyers. I hope SAG/AFTRA has some waivers for this kind of thing, because I want to hear your best Richard Prince.
Look for the blanket!
Stay Frosty/Eric Doeringer’s Flea Market, 24-26 Oct 2025, at 128th & Convent Avenue, in Harlem
In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.
This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.
I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.
Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.
[next morning/evening update] I found a 2009 review of Carlson’s collection of Latin texts by Chris Given-Wilson that makes this accidental algorithmic pairing feels unexpectedly relevant. The embedded quote is from Carlson:
“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.
And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”
The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”
With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.
Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.
Buy The Second Deposition of Richard Prince in softcover on Amazon for $20 [amazon]
Buy one, two, or three copies of David R. Carlson’s, The Deposition of Richard II for $29.70 each, plus $13.44 shipping to the US [abebooks]
I’m not going to pretend it’s not about me, or my Project Echo satelloon in the Grand Palais,
or the Grand Palais then tweeting at me about Anish Kapoor’s giant inflatable Leviathan,
or about Léon Gimpel’s autochromes of air shows in the Grand Palais.
It is exactly about all of that, and also,
Imagine actually staging a balloon show in the Grand Palais, and deciding what the grandest, vastest art space in the world really needs is five, little Christmas ornament satelloons suspended over a field of temporary sheds, each containing its own Museum of Ice Cream-style balloon instagram spectacle. Does that feel insufficient? Yes? Should we add a light show turning them into disco balls? Should they rise and sink in sync to music? Should they invite Bella Hadid? It’s like, confronted with the central faiblesse of the aesthetic experience, Hyperstudio could only think to keep adding to it.
Look, I am fully aware that a sporadic series of blog posts over 18 years is no way to realize a 100-foot wide aluminum sphere sculpture exhibited in one of the most prominent art venues in the world. I get that. I’m glad the Grand Palais was at least aware.
But this is not just about me and my balloon. Kusama has been showing inflatable immersive environments for years, and she is not here in the Balloon Museum’s Euphoria. LVMH was fine to put dots all over their stores, but apparently did not see fit to underwrite her obliteration of and in the Grand Palais.
And then there’s Martin Creed, an Old Master of the contemporary balloon arts. For the Grand Palais he made, of course, Work no. 3883: Half the air in a given space (2024). And the space they gave was inside a f’ing greenhouse. The Balloon Museum was really given the biggest space in Paris to stage an exhibition of the most important balloon-based artwork of the age, and said, “Half the air in a given space? Sure thing, I give you an Amazon box with a balloon in it.”
A full one third of it is an auto-generated, unedited index, but at least it’s getting out there. People who don’t call it Kinko’s have no idea that it didn’t used to cost $30 to print a document.
…aaand the third Second Deposition of Richard Prince just arrived.
Here I am fiddling around with printers to make a paperback version, and he just ‘grams it out.
Of course, it IS his deposition.
For a couple of months now, Richard Prince has been showing Deposition (2025), the single channel video version of his second court-ordered deposition in a copyright infringement lawsuit, at Gavin Brown’s Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome. The show runs through this Friday, July 25, to andiamo!
In the mean time, though, S’AdS has posted an excerpt from the [200 page] transcript, where Prince discusses the development of his Cowboy photos. It’s very good stuff:
Continue reading “Richard Prince On Cowboys, From The Second Deposition”
I’ve had the tabs open, and I still lost track of the tenth anniversary of Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), the first work to be on view at the Metropolitan Museum. [There was an earlier performance that began as a tweet in 2014—and is ongoing, block a Koch today!]
Untitled (Andiron…) was an early part of a series of experiments with the concepts of appropriation, readymades, and the power (or not) of authorship: they’re declared works of art where I didn’t own or control the physical object or environment.
Continue reading “Ten Years Later: Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2015”Really, all it took was seeing the sonorous phrase—needlepoint kneelers—and I believed. It was on the cover of a privately published history of a parish’s longstanding ecclesiastical needlework program, which fashion prophet Rachel Tashjian-Wise revealed on a post while visiting family over the Christmas holidays.
Growing up near, even friendly with, but not in commune with the Episcopal Church, I was fascinated to find an entire world–or rather, a very specific and highly developed part of the world I’d previously never knew or imagined—of ecclesiastical needlework. It brings together faith and devotion, but also memory, community building, philanthropy, gender, class, and history, and that’s even before it gets to craft, technique, design, and the material. And it all plays out within the ecclesiastical, managerial, and social structures of the Church.
Basically, parishioners of a church donate time, talent, and resources, to creating handmade needlepoint cushion covers for the kneelers that line the pews of the church. In one place it may be the historic legacy of a dedicated crowdsourcing effort to beautify a new or rebuilt church, or a lifelong effort to memorialize someone. In another it could be a highly organized and socially prestigious fundraising activity. As with any such laborious handwork, needlepoint kneelers seem historically likely to reflect the value of the role, time, and taste of women in the community. It could be a sign of sacrifice or extreme privilege. [cf. prolific needlepointer HM ex-Queen Margrethe II of Denmark]
In the UK, needlepoint kneelers were apparently under threat, a dying art, according to someone who wrote a book about them. Things seem better in the US, a phrase I imagine I’ll be saying less and less going forward. It turns out our [sic] Episcopal church, the National Cathedral, has a needlework kneeler program.
And an epic post on the National Altar Guild Association’s blog about starting and operating a successful program feels like needlepoint kneelers, as an institution, remain sound. Besides the amazing new (to me) vocab, every observation or piece of advice from Bid Drake, “internationally known ecclesiastical needlepoint specialist [and] author of the Guide to Church Needlepoint Care and Maintenance” feels hard-won from direct experience: “I strongly suggest that you invite everyone in the congregation to help make the kneelers, then teach them Basketweave on small useful pieces like Chrismons, usher tabs, and collection plate silencers.” “If you only give out a third of the yarn with the canvas and tell the stitchers to take their pieces to the ‘Mistress of the Yarns’ when they need more, you will have an instant check on which pieces are being stitched, and which are buried in closets.” “Your local needlework shop should be able to suggest a finisher — one who loves and respects needlepoint, not an upholster who treats $4,000/yard needlepoint like $10 chintz.” [oof]
There’s so much about this cultural dynamic that fascinates me, and how it results in these highly specific objects. I’ve looked in the past without success for scholarly consideration of similar craft- and gender- and class-coded objects; who’d have thought that what was missing in my ersatz needlepoint history project was God. 🙏
Olafur Eliasson has created a work of light and handblown glass for the east windows of St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Greifswald, a Hanseatic city near the Baltic coast of Germany, which was the birthplace of Caspar David Friedrich. Originally built in the 14th century, the church was remade in the 19th century with woodwork by Friedrich’s brother, Christian Adolph, including the elaborate Gothic choir wall which closes off the windows from the rest of the interior.
The work is titled, Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light). Because the east window only catches the morning sun for a small portion of the day—and that portion is limited further by the building directly across the street—Eliasson installed a heliostat, a mirror that tracks the movement of the sun, on that building to reflect afternoon sun into the morning window.
When I first discussed with Olafur an idea for a work that involved a heliostat reflecting light into our north-facing apartment in New York, in 2003, [while I had the concept, he already knew what a heliostat was and where to get one], I imagined sunlight that doesn’t move around the room would become very unsettling.
So it is buck wild to see a similar setup behind the altar of a church, where it is intended to encourage “pause and reflection – aspects central to both the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Protestant spirituality.”
Or does an beam of sunlight coming at an uncharacteristic time into a building oriented so specifically have a different effect? The afternoon sun from the east can become a metaphor, or it can encourage pause and reflection on the human, artistic intervention that produced it, drawing viewers’ attention to the world outside the church.
Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light), 2024 [olafureliasson.net]
Isa Genzken’s first Weltempfänger/World Receiver, from 1982, is a readymade, a National Panasonic RF-9000 (SWL) shortwave listener. It is seen above, without the cover, installed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, as part of an exhibition of Genzken’s work from 1973 to 1983 [which the museum does not document hardly at all on their own site].
It was preceded by a series of works, large and small, that appropriated magazine advertisements for high-end audio equipment. And it was a precursor, if not the model, for the Weltempfängeren made out of concrete, which Genzken showed in 1986. Though I don’t know how that processed; it was beyond the scope of the Basel show, and is not detailed in Lisa Lee’s 2017 book, Sculpture as World Receiver.
It is also, on its own, perhaps the most highly considered SWL ever made, and the vintage radio and listening community are consistent in their praise and appreciation of it.
As for my own process, it is laid out here. I had considered making a readymade Genzken Weltempfänger would be easier than making a concrete Genzken Weltempfänger. And while that may still be true, it would also be hella more expensive.
Isa Genzken at Kunstmuseum Basel, 2020-21 [contemporaryartswitzerland]
The Walters Museum of Art translates Apkallu as a “winged genius”; other museums which have wall panels from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II describe Apkallu as a “sage,” or a “genie.” These ripped, winged humanoid figures stood at the entrance of doorways in the palace, offering blessings or protection to passersby with a pine cone dipped into a small bucket of anointing liquid.
There is obviously much that can be said about Apkulla style: the feathered or fishskin cloaks; the fringed kilts; the beards, the workout, the armbands; the daggers; the horned diadems; the earrings; the rosette-covered wristbands. For starters, let’s just look at the bucket, or as Reddit is fond of calling it, the Handbag of the Gods.
Continue reading “Apkullacore”
Claudio Santambrogio just pointed me to some great, moody photos Annabelle d’Huart made of Cy Twombly and his Roman studio in 1978. If only she had Horst’s agent, we would have all been swooning over these for decades, too.
Anyway among the images posted by @paintedout in 2017, is a pair of paintings from Twombly’s 10-panel epic cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam, which is in the Philadelphia Museum. Heroes of the Achaeans [left] and Achaeans in Battle, are at the Nos. 2 and 4 the cycle, and they both look pretty done.
In 2018, the Museum and Yale University Press published a monograph on Fifty Days, in which curator Carlos Basualdo interviewed d’Huart about her visit to Twombly’s studio. The Museum acquired five of d’Huart’s prints, including the image above.
This is the same book that classics scholar Richard Fletcher talked to Tyler Green about on an episode of MAN Podcast, which prompted the Twombly Foundation to send a cease & desist demanding Green delete images of the Fifty Days paintings they discussed from his website, which prompted me to make an artist book out of a print of the screencap of the podcast site. And which actually soured me on buying the book, so not being more familiar with d’Huart’s photos sooner is the result. I have now ordered it; let the healing begin, I guess.
[the healing update: I got the book; it is gorgeous. d’Huart was literally like, I decided to photograph Minimalists so I flew to New York I called the director of MoMA from JFK he said I can’t meet you today but come tomorrow for lunch then Leo Castelli gave me a desk in his office and introduced me to everyone and Cy and then I was staying with Balthus and his kids in Italy and said let’s have a dinner for Cy and that’s how I made these photos he loved them. I am not exaggerating if anything I’m understating.]
Annabelle d’Huart Twombly studio photos in the PMA [philamuseum.org]
When I said I can’t get autographs? I meant, unless conceptually.
Sitting with this unexpected Bach auction for a minute, I realized I actually do get autographs when they convey a meaning beyond, “This person signed this,” or “I met/corresponded with this person.”
Or when I project entirely subjective meaning onto them. Like when I found a souvenir towel from a Merce Cunningham performance on Broadway signed by Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg, and I conjured a “logic” for this object that involved getting Jasper Johns to sign it.
That “logic,” or the pretense of it, was predicated on Johns being the designer of the performance poster. But of course, there were multiple other logics possible, from the art historic to the romantic, to the starkly commemorative, forcing an object into existence that links these four men—physically, contractually, notationally, quasi-publicly, as if there weren’t already countless other products of their decades-long interactions, filling archives and beyond. Here the autograph functions as a singular piece of evidence, superficial and contrived, of some other form of more substantial cultural meaning. But when signs are few, signatures will do.
And of course, the significant emptiness can become the subject itself. Like in Rob Pruitt’s Signature Series, large-format autographs on Belgian linen he’s collected since the Pruitt-Early days. I remember several occasions when Rob would suddenly produce a big piece of linen and a fat Sharpie from his backpack, and turn around, offering his back as a writing surface when none other was available.
Autographs then became a project, an artistic practice, which art world celebrities and citizens alike could appreciate. I remember seeing a few loosies in the wild, but eventually, after years of accumulation, Pruitt showed The Signature Series en masse. And like Byron Kim’s skin tone monochromes, these accumulated markers of somebody else become a self-portrait of the artist moving through the world.
Now going back to Bach and his chopped up and shuffled autograph collection, it’s possible to interpolate meaning from the otherwise random-seeming clusters. Maybe the lots reflect the order in which Bach collected his autographs, a project of a lifetime sliced into tranches based on minimum viable auction estimate.
Rob Pruitt’s Signatures Series [luxembourgco]
Previously, related: Untitled (Merce at the Minskoff), 2015-2018
Reading Karen K. Ho’s report that a Warhol soup can painting had been forfeited as part of the settlement of the 1MDB/Jho Low money laundering and fraud case, I wondered what it looked like.
I haven’t found it yet, because while searching the Justice Dept.’s 280-page complaint from 2020 I was distracted by the corny corruption of Sotheby’s executives falling all over themselves to loan Jho Low untraceable funds against some of the nearly $200 million in artworks Low & co. hoovered up.
“Just wanted to bring you up to speed on the big loan opportunity,” wrote one Sotheby’s Financial executive to his colleagues in early 2014. “[The borrower] doesn’t want us to use his name in our communications, he wants to be referred to as ‘the client’ and we will refer to this transaction as project Cheetah (referring to the speed at which we are trying to move).”
And then I was distracted by another Warhol, not part of the loan collateral, and current status TBD, but it did come from Sotheby’s. Jho Low acquired Round Jackie (1964) in November 2013 for $1,055,000 from Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale in New York. It was one of two gold round Jackies that fabulist curator Sam Green sold to socialite Dodie Rosekrans. They both came up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2011; one sold for $3.7m, and this one didn’t sell. Which went unmentioned in 2013. Weird.
Anyway, Low gave Round Jackie to Swizz Beatz in early 2014, who hung it in New Jersey, then consigned it for sale somewhere before February 2020, when Vogue came for 73 Questions. The Justice Dept. came for it in July 2020, and it was sold at a US Marshals auction in February 2021. The price was $1.04 million.
As far as I know, Sturtevant never made a Jackie, so I will put this one on my to-do list.