Speaking of sick artist fits from upper Fifth Avenue museums:
The Neue Galerie offers a replica of Gustav Klimt’s artist smock in indigo linen with hand-embroidered epaulets, based on Moriz Nähr’s iconic 1911 photo of the artist and his cat, Katze:
Looking for the story on this Schiele portrait, it turns out Klimt’s friend/partner/muse Emilie Flöge operated a couture shop in Vienna that promoted the Reformkleidung, Reform Dress, a loose, flowing, and liberating fashion refutation of Edwardian-era corset-based dresses.
Gustav Klimt in his painting smock & Emilie Flöge in her Reform Dress, c. 1909, photo: Heinrich Böhler, via Klimt: Sonderausgabe
Whether for utility or poetry, the alt text has not sunk into the lower layers of Gagosian Quarterly. Editor Wyatt Allgeier’s interview with Nancy Spector about her Arthur Jafa/Richard Prince show, “Helter Skelter” has exactly one image with an alt tag. The rest are from the related articles links in the footer:
Video still of orange, glowing orb against black background
General Idea, AIDS (Reinhardt) #4, oil and beeswax on linen on panel, 60 x 60 in., selling at Phillips
General Idea made their first AIDS paintings based on Robert Indiana’s LOVE logo in 1987, in the same Poppy colors as the original. They made a series of Black AIDS paintings, also known as AIDS (Reinhardt), for a summer 1991 show at the Grey Gallery at NYU. Mitchell-Innes and Nash have one, #6, that seems nearly identical to AIDS (Reinhardt), #4, being sold at Phillips.
One or the other might be slightly more legible, or maybe that misses the point; even in the slow pan video in raking light, the Phillips but I expect the Phillips painting barely registers an incised outline of a letter, or a section delineated by slight changes in brushstrokes. It makes an actual Reinhardt seem like a landscape on a summer’s day by comparison. But #4 was also owned for a while by Joseph Kosuth, who we can trust knows his way around a monochrome black square.
Relistening to Christina Sharpe’s 2023 conversation with David Naimon on Between the Covers led me to the panel Sharpe organized at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Wu Tsang spoke of her silent film adaptation of MOBY DICK, or The Whale, and how she had been inspired to turn to the novel by C.L.R. James’s powerful 1953 essay, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, in which James countered the prevailing postwar literary establishment’s view of Moby Dick as a Cold War fable of Ishmaelian individualism and liberty triumphing over doomed Ahabian totalitarianism with an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist reading of Ahab as an oppressive captain of industry maniacally driving his multinational crew to destruction.
When Derek Jarman’s Blue premiered in the UK in September 1993, it was broadcast simultaneously on TV (Channel 4), and radio (BBC 3). Channel 4 produced a booklet of the film’s text in a letterpress edition of 2,000 [plus, perhaps, a limited edition with a signed monochrome screen print?], which was available for £3. Radio listeners could request a blue postcard to stare at during the broadcast.
The beautiful booklet is everywhere all the time. The postcard, not so much. Examples have been included in various Jarman-related exhibitions, but I suspect very few ever made it into the wild. There could be a swag closet at Basilisk Productions absolutely stuffed with unsent Blue postcards, or maybe they were used to take phone messages with a silver Sharpie. Anyway, I got one, and it’s sweet. A little glossy.
Though I once agonized over the correct aspect ratio for a Blue print, I never considered the postcard. It is A5, 148 x 210 mm, or √2:1, a ratio that has absolutely nothing to do with any screen, and everything to do with the ISO216 paper size standard. Whatever the original aspect ratio might be, it seems the correct ratio is whatever the format demands, whether film, video, radio, or print.
I am so psyched for this, a chance to talk with Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco about one of the most incredible catalogues I’ve seen, for one of the best shows in years: Felix Gonzalez-Torres Always To Return, at the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
The show closed last year, of course, but the catalogue is only just dropping now. Which might seem slow, but it’s certainly quicker than the catalogue for Specific Objects Without Specific Form, which took several years to be published. But like that book, I already find Always To Return to be one of the foundational texts to shaping our understanding of Gonzalez-Torres’ work and its evolution.
installation view, Charles Ray, Adam & Eve, 2023, two blocks of milled stainless steel; Christopher Wool, Crosstown Traffic, 2023, stone & glass mosaic
Every other time I’ve been by the blinds were down, blocking the Christopher Wool mosaic from view. I’m glad Wool made the effort to make a mosaic; it’s very well executed. Both the Wool and the Charles Ray are good, but also feel particularly unimpactful. Maybe it’s just me, and the moment.
Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp birthday cake and rotorelief-looking dishware, vers 196o, photo negative at the Centre Pompidou
I love everything about the Centre Pompidou’s let it all hang out presentation of photo negatives in their collection, except the lack of metadata, and the inability to right-click.
There are ten candles, and what looks to be the remnant of the number ten written in icing. Was this maybe his tenth summer back, so his last birthday, in 1968? Will this be one of the many mysteries Ann Temkin will solve for us later this year?
Pay some attention to the painting behind the man: a still from Heated Rivalry, Episode 4
I don’t even watch TV, and yet knew a couple of weeks ago that Heated Rivalry had broken containment. But I did not expect to ever find reason for it to end up here. And yet. The picture above is from the fourth episode of the six-part series, a sex-forward, gay hockey romance produced by a Canadian streaming service I’ve never heard of, using some undetermined amount of Canadian public media funding. It’s become explosively popular, and transformed its unknown leads from waiters into stars. But that’s not important now, or at least here.
two dudes…chillin’ on a sofa…five feet apart because their secret eight-year situationship is really not equipped to handle this kind of emotional complication rn, but one of them has a painting of both of them on his wall
What matters is that someone on Threads—if the post ever turns up in my instagram recommended grid again, I’ll credit them—posted the scene above, and noticed that the painting in between the two guys on the sofa is an abstracted version of the cover of the book from which Heated Rivalry is adapted:
So one guy in the secret eight-year situationship has a portrait of the two of them in a faceoff, hanging over his sofa—which could mean nothing. Honestly, I don’t know what it means, if it’s an actual plot point or just a production design easter egg. And if it was just a neat cover reference, I’d leave it floating on the internet.
Douglas Coupland, Thomas (Sunset), 2010, oil on canvas, 58 x 72 inches
But that painting is also similar in both form and approach to paintings by that most Canadian master of Canadian subjects, Douglas Coupland. In 2010 Coupland showed G72K10, a series of paintings geometrically abstracted from iconic landscapes by the Group of Seven, artists who formed the foundation of Canadian visual cultural identity in the early 20th century. “These are the images that the Canadian government officially used…to inculcate a sense of nationalism,” Coupland explained in 2012, “So when Canadians see my abstract works, they know they know what they’re seeing – they just don’t know why”
Tom Thomson, Sunset, 1915, oil on composite wood-pulp board, 21.6 x 26.7 cm, collection: National Gallery of Canada
Is this hockey player’s painting supposed to be a Douglas Coupland? The character is Russian and living in Boston, so probably not. But does that mean the production designers weren’t referencing Coupland, or at least inspired by Coupland’s work and approach? Even the most seemingly incongruous element, the wedges of gold leaf, echo elements in Coupland’s most recent iceberg paintings, in 2023.
Is that an orgy of hockey players? Two Douglas Coupland works installed in Citibank Place in Toronto in 2015, photo: ThePurpleScarf.ca
The show takes place over many years, and the scene above is in 2016. Which, for Toronto, was a Peak Douglas Coupland Art Moment. He’d just had two museum shows, and unveiled five public art commissions, including at least three new G7-related abstractions, in bank lobbies and plazas all over town.
Now popping geometric abstraction is not just Coupland’s; it’s a language employed by artists as varied as Odili Donald Odita and Dyani White Hawk. But the Canadian force is strong with this one. And Coupland’s low-key intense Canadian-ness seems to resonate with a show that itself has an exceptionally Canadian aura. It’d almost be weird if Coupland wasn’t a reference.
Photograph after Glenn Ligon (Double America, 2012, 36 x 120 in.), 2016, Diasec flush-mounted, 44 x 129 in. sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023. Were the power cables photoshopped out, or did Schreyer have them hidden in the wall?
Ian was skeeting about not having enough time to write properly about seeing Eric N. Mack’s shows at the Wexner in Columbus and the Academy of Arts & Letters in NYC. Which threw me off, tbqh, because I did not expect the epic timeline of Mack’s major career hits and deepcuts he whipped up for 202 Arts Review.
There are images and links galore, and it really does pull Mack’s public practice together in a way that makes a road trip to Columbus feel inevitable. Mack’s sculptural and painterly resonances have expanded from early DC encounters with the canvas-slash-textiles of Sam Gilliam and Kenneth Noland to Rauschenberg, Nengudi, Hammons, Genzken, and far beyond. But Mack’s work is also clearly, even primarily, about his own references and explorations.
Helen Molesworth describing the Wexner’s architecture as an argument in space finally made it make sense. Which makes the view from above of Mack’s commission, A Whole New Thing, after you climb the stairs, something of a revelation, or a reveal. It’s the opposite of a spoiler, though, because the approach and the movement through it, as seen in other of Ian’s photos, feels like three other works entirely.
In 1951 Philippe Halsman had seven nude women sit in the form of a human skull for a portrait he made of fascist cuddlebuddy Salvador Dalí. One of those women, the one seated on the center left, I believe, was Olga Bogach, who I happened to interview in 2007, at the encouragement of some relatives were looking to buy her apartment.
I later edited the interview and uploaded it to YouTube, where it sits quietly to this day. I just watched it again, though, and do like the fascinating story, of course, but also the moral nuances that pop up throughout. As Joan Didion did not say, we tell ourselves stories in order to sell our co-ops.
[The apartment deal didn’t happen for several nontrivial reasons, not the least of which was Olga’s complicated relationship with the co-op board, some of whom, it sometimes seemed, were thwarting a sale in order to get her apartment for themselves, on the cheap. But that is like five tangents from here.]
Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Skull), 2000, gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in., ed. 14/20, selling rn at Sotheby’s
The Halsman/Dalî connection was a surprise, because Piotr Uklanski’s own co-ed, self-portrait re-creation, Untitled (Skull) (2000), was an inadvertent guest at our wedding. Or at least the wedding party we had at Passerby, that overflowed into Gavin Brown’s Enterprise while Piotr’s show was on. Except for a sculpture that was a puddle of water in the center of the floor, which we mopped up, the rest of the show stayed. On one wall behind the dessert table was a giant, framed photo of Mt Vesuvius. But mounted on the main wall was a life-sized version of Untitled (Skull). Piotr’s outstretched arms and placid face—and a tangle of torsos and asses—all blend perfectly into every. single. photo. And not even like the background; our photographer shot black & white, and it often really did feel like these folks were right there, celebrating with us.
One of the few prints to turn up from the much smaller (14 x 11 in.) edition is finishing at Sotheby’s as I type this. It was great to see it again, and for a minute I did think of going for it. But then I figured, nah, let someone else have a chance; besides, we have like 300 pictures of it already.
I had to track down this photo from a 1986 New York Magazine feature and take a janky screenshot after seeing @haverst’s tumblr post of someone’s instagram post of photos of designer Willi Smith’s Lispenard St loft, designed with his friend Rosemary Peck.
Because those photos showed Dan Friedman’s Humanoid Folding Screen, but only a corner of Friedman’s Africa-shaped coffee table, and one of Christo & Jeanne Claude’s 1971 lithograph portfolio, (Some) Not Realized Projects. And they didn’t show the wooden shipping pallets Smith & Peck and some hired randos hauled up to the loft from Canal Street to use as coffee tables. [The Cooper Hewitt has a great Peck pic of one pallet. When I tell you they do not make pallets like they used to,]
Keith Haring, Untitled, Dec 1984, enamel on metal, originally 40 x 36 in. when its first owner Willi Smith hung it, and around 36 x 40 when Phillips sold it in London in 2019
And they didn’t show the enamel painting on a scavenged metal panel Keith Haring made for Smith on 31 December 1984, at a New Year’s Eve party, at all. [And which was hung sideways when it was sold at Phillips in 2019.]
As Jarrett Earnest presented in the Cooper Hewitt’s amazing COVID-era exhibition on Willi Smith, the designer had been friends with the Christo Jeanne Claudes since the early 1970s, and had collaborated with them on several of their most iconic projects. Smith made pink t-shirts and painter caps for the volunteers installing Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay in 1983, of which, more later.
It’s listed with a title, Fragile, 2018, which was the artist’s first artist alias when he was a teenager. But is described as an exhibition poster for Tillmans’ show of the same name, organized by ifa and the Goethe Institute, which toured Africa. The dates and venues are for the first stop, at the MACM in Kinshasa, DRC.
Which is all fine, except this is obviously an overprint of two of Tillmans’ most iconic pictures, Deer Hirsch (1995) and Dan (2008), with printer calibration marks and file names all around the border. If this is a printer proof, what is it proofing? Does Tillmans have a body of double-printed work? Given his propensity to print things, I’d be shocked if he didn’t.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Double Concorde Unique, offset print, 24.5 x 20.5 cm, no 12 of 129, sold at Lempertz
[And what do you know, he does? Double Concorde, 129 unique double-printed offset works, published by the Fondation Beyeler at the exact moment in Fall 2017 he was overprinting this poster.]
Anyway, what’s wilder is that it’s signed, and apparently numbered 51/300? It is definitely the case that the tabloid-style publication for Fragile included several fold-out posters. But this is not that. Was there really a signed poster edition for Kinshasa, and are the other 299 really all hiding offline all this time? Or was this some kind of one-off, which Tillmans signed to approve the colors, like that one epic Richter color proof?
To add some uncertainty, the Invaluable listing for the poster includes its signed and numbered info, while Bernaerts’ own website does not. [update it does now.] Perhaps it was updated to remove the suggestion that there are more of these wild, 2-for-1 Tillmanses out there.
I am slow, but the Ellsworth Kelly print that’s the first lot in Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s estate sale is even smaller than the smallest Kelly prints.Blue Curve, 1999, is just 8 x 6 inches. It was made as a benefit print for the Archives of American Art in a big edition, 220+38AP, so aggregated surface area-wise, it’s probably right in the middle.
Kelly was honored with a medal the AAA’s benefit gala in October 1999, which coincided with an exhibit of items from the artist’s archives in the Archives Gallery. The AAA had a gallery in the lobby of 1285 6th Avenue, the UBS Building with the Scott Burton street furniture.
