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.
So “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, is unique, but it is not the only one. Now that it has sold“a serious hold” and a $US16m asking price, let’s take a look at the six [!] related works Felix Gonzalez-Torres made. And then decided were not works after all. What are they, where are they, and what is to be done with them?
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, in what I think is a dress rehearsal at Art Basel Unlimited, where it is being shown by Hauser & Wirth, not Zwirner & Rosen. via ig/hauserwirth
Hauser & Wirth showing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) at Art Basel Unlimited this week. Seeing a video on H&W’s insta of the dancer hopping off the platform and heading out of the halle, accompanied, like a Disneyland character, by a handler, reminds me of artist Pierre Bal-Blanc’s 1992 video work, Employment Contract.
Bal-Blanc was a go-go dancer for the 1992 installation of Felix’s work at the Kunstverein Hamburg, for a show called “Ethics and Aesthetics in times of AIDS.” Employment Contract is a wordless slice of Bal-Blanc’s life that happens to have a brief go-go dancing stint in the middle of it.
One of the tenets of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), reaffirmed just a couple of weeks ago when the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation published an in-process version of core tenets for the work, is that the dancer’s schedule is their own, and it is undisclosed. The dancer chooses whether to share their schedule with the exhibitor, and the exhibitor is to take care not to disclose it, and to provide adequate accomodations for the dancer to go about their business. From the viewing, and even the exhibiting standpoint, this work of Felix’s entails a high degree of uncertainty, and a very low probability at any one moment of there being a dancer dancing.
screenshot from Pierre Bal-Blanc’s Employment Contract (1992) via ubu
Bal-Blanc turns this sense of expectation entirely inside out. The video camera tracking him as he jogs through the streets of Hamburg gives no hint at all of what is to come; he’s just a guy, jogging, in jorts. The surreal absurdity of him walking into a museum, unlocking a supply closet, stripping down [to silver and black briefs, a kludgey two-tone outfit that would not pass muster with the Core Tenets crowd], and grooving in an empty gallery for several minutes, defies narrative logic. And yet he goes right on with it, and back out of the museum. All in a day’s work.
This question of context and expectation is one of the perennial sources of power for Felix’s work, especially this one. Encountering a go-go dancer in a museum might feel as disorienting as a pile of candy you can eat from. More than 30 years on, Hauser & Wirth’s instagram comments are somehow still full of people still confused or contemptuous of this work as art. And while art world folks have certainly consumed and processed Felix’s work fully, seeing this piece, from this gallery, at an art fair, the least wild thing about it is the dancer.
[next day update]: indeed, it looks like the Core Tenets got updated just in time, because the work that had been on “permanent loan” to the Museum St. Gallen is for sale by the Swiss collectors who’ve owned it all along. Donald Judd would not be surprised. It does make me want to take a new look at the five go-dancing platforms and lighted pedestals listed in the “non-works” section of the CR.
Porky Hefer, Endangered Blue Whale Hanging Chair, 2018, ed. 3/3 [so not so endangered then?] for sale on 11 June 2025 at Millea Bros
Look, it was already weird to have one nickel for every hanging endangered sea creature chair sculpture South African white guy Porky Hefer made for the Leo DiCaprio Foundation to show at Design Miami in 2018 auctioned my Millea Bros. that turned out to be from the asset liquidation portion of client funds-spending art adviser Lisa Schiff’s bankruptcy proceedings. So the very possibility that we might be at two nickels now is off the charts.
remember when wallpaper* ran this photo as part of their exclusive report on our culture’s greatest tastemakers assembling for an astroturf design fair in miami? thanks, james harris, for documenting this
And yet, there it was, hanging right in front of us—and behind the Endangered Orangutan Lounge Chair. Casual observers may think this Endangered Blue Whale Hanging Chair is just an Endagered Shark Hanging Chair with a slipcover. Connoisseurs will see it is covered in recycled t-shirt fabric handwoven to look and feel like your grandma’s bathmat. And conservators will note that the baleen curtain made of strings of beads are, according to the condition report, experiencing “active bead loss.” But honestly, who among us wouldn’t want to just curl up in the mouth of a whale for a few days? It worked great for Jonah. Eventually.
Also at Millea Bros [again] is another lot that I think must have come from Schiff: Sterling Ruby’s acid-washed denim flag, made in 2015 as a benefit edition for the Chinati Foundation. Is there any artwork that captures the moment better than an American flag ghost, with its estimate slashed in half since February, with the proceeds going to pay back some collector who got fleeced on the sale of an Adrian Ghenie painting?
In a way, it’s too bad it’s all being liquidated, because these two pieces—and Schiff’s art collection generally—are the fruit of her life as much as her crimes. They’re superlative examples of the kind of art that piles up along the way when you travel the circuit of art fairs, galas, and opening dinners. Fundraising editions and leftover PR pieces, artworks donated to benefit auctions, gift bag swag, and kickback pieces bought on heavy discount from the galleries where you bring your whales. All accumulated in the service of people with actual wealth—for whom the entire system exists—with their expropriated money.
Danh Vo, I M U U R 2, 2013, like 4,000 things that belonged to Martin Wong, collection Walker Art Center
Maybe all Schiff’s works could have been kept together as a more significant, cautionary gesamtkunstwerkdokument, like how Danh Vo turned all Martin Wong’s tchotchkes into an installation so it could be preserved—and acquired. A Schiff Study Collection would be a snapshot of this frenzied moment, now obviously over. But that would have required much more adventurousness on the part of her collector/investor/client/creditor/victims, who, never forget, were most interested in flipping Adrian Ghenie paintings.
Whenever I wonder why no one has ever reviewed or analyzed Cady Noland’s 2021 monograph, The Clip-On Method, I wonder if I’m the guy in the hot dog costume or the guy in the color-coordinated suit. I mean, I’ve read both volumes, and refer to them regularly for info and images, but I’ve never written about them, or what they contain, or what it means, and what it tells us about Noland and her practice and the world she sees.
Well, someone finally did, and the results are bleak as hell.
Garrett takes a long, close look at Noland’s work, but also a close read of her texts. He begins with her signature 1987/1992 essay on our culture of the psychopath, “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” which has been namechecked for years without, apparently, sinking in. But he then goes deep into the essays and papers Noland included in The Clip-On Method, key texts by sociologists Stephen N. Butler and Ethel Spector Person.
[brb gotta run to a lecture, but the Glenstone Noland exhibition closes tomorrow, so get going.]
