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.]
Copy Number 4 of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s Dune Bible, printed in 1975, for sale at Christie’s Dec 2024
Nothing quite captured the hopes, dreams, ambition, and stupidity of the crypto moment like the 2021 acquisition by Dune DAO [aka Spice DAO] of Jodorowsky’s Dune Bible for EUR 2.67 million, more than 100x its estimate.
The Spice DAO epic involved Copy Number 5 of the Dune Bible, a nearly 300-page art and concept octavo, privately published in 1975. When it was sold in November 2021, Christie’s Paris surmised that there were likely only 10 to 20 copies produced, and only a fraction survived. Given its rarity, it was expected to sell for EUR25-35,000.
Now Copy Number 4 has appeared in an online auction at Christie’s London, with an estimate of GBP250-350,000. The way this price is at once a 90% discount and a 1000% markup really captures the lost surrealist magnificence of the Jodorowsky Dune vision. But the true magnificence comes from noting how Christie’s both copies large chunks of the 2021 lot essay, while assiduously not mentioning the previous sale, or indeed the production or existence of any other copies of the book.
Jasper Johns, Leo from The Leo Castelli 90th Birthday Portfolio, 1997/98, etching with aquatint, 45×30 cm plate on 37 x 27 in. sheet, ed. 90+17AP+?, this one from MoMA
While looking something else up at the Philadelphia Museum, I realized I’d missed a major appearance of the three stick figures I call Jasper Johns’ little guys: they make their astronomical—or astrological—debut in a print created in 1997 for Leo Castelli’s 90th birthday.
It was published by Jean-Christophe Castelli in a portfolio, and so wasn’t printed by Johns’s two major print foundries, Gemini GEL and ULAE, so I missed it in my survey. But it does really capture the way Johns expanded the ways he put them to work in his pictures. Beyond their function in his composition and scale, they also start to imply their own narrative, whether in a picture or as its audience.
Detail from Untitled (D587) showing those little guys doing something new, 1997, graphite, 15 3/4 x 20 1/4 in., via JJ Drawings CR
The idea of these stick figures under a night sky seems to first appear in 1997, and it would reappear often as Johns incorporated more astronomical imagery into his work. It really does give these little guys a primordial vibe, like they were here before us all.
Of course, while the sketch above has them looking at the Big Dipper or a spiral galaxy, in Leo from the Leo…, the little guys are looking at the constellation Leo. [Or most of it; the line that forms the lion’s back is missing.] Which maybe did not matter so much; Leo Castelli, born September 4th, was a Virgo.
[next day update: on bluesky Peter Huestis points to Sketch for Leo, a 1997 work on mylar, in the National Gallery. This is not in the drawings CR, I believe, but it’s perfect. It’s described as “charcoal transfer,” which I do not understand. It is not in reverse, so it is at least one step removed from the creation of the printing plates.]
Jasper Johns, “Sketch for Leo,” 1997, charcoal transfer, graphite, and red pencil on mylar, in the collection of the National Gallery from whence it cannot be downloaded.
Andrew Russeth’s photo of Francis Cape’s 2013 catalogue, We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from The Shakers to The Separatists of Zoar, via bluesky
I was surprised to have never heard of a book Andrew Russeth just called, “one of the great art books of this century.” Now I am enthralled with Francis Cape’s project, book, and exhibition of benches from America’s utopian societies.
Cape had begun researching, documenting, and reproducing examples of historical benches from several utopian communities in 2010, when Richard Torchia of Arcadia University learned of the project and proposed an exhibition.
Installation view of Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches at Arcadia University, 2012, photo: Greenhouse Media via Arcadia.edu
FC: I was and am interested in the intent the communes share, rather than their differences. They share [an emphasis on] communal living, and with that, they chose to value sharing over individual profit or pleasure. This required a degree of separation from the mainstream, so another thing [they have] in common is their setting themselves apart physically as well as in intent from that mainstream.
As to the transformative moment, it was more the visible moment in an ongoing transformative time. It began when Bush was re-elected in 2004, and I found I could not go on making art about art. The Bush White House’s use of language to conceal rather than to reveal led me reject all falsehood: false wood in the form of the mdf I had been using; cover ups in the form of painting; and most of all, illusion. I was talking with a colleague whose thesis is that artists have found illusion to be anathema since the early twentieth century. I guess I’m a late starter.
So for the benches to be real, they had to be sat upon . . . what better way [for them to be used] than to be shared while talking about sharing?
janky screenshot of Marsden Hartley, Fig Tree, 1926-27, 24 x 20 1/2 in., as reproduced in the exhibition catalogue for the Wadsworth Atheneum’s 2003 Hartley retrospective.
Marsden Hartley moved from Vence to Aix-en-Provence in 1926, at the invitation of the Kuntzes, and set to working in Cezanne’s old studio.
According to the chronology in Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser’s 2003 retrospective, which originated at the Wadsworth Atheneum, this is when Hartley began working on Fig Tree.
The Google Books preview does not include the text about Fig Tree, but earlier texts seem to date it earlier, to 1924, when Hartley was in New Mexico. I will need to find out more about this buck wild painting, which seems to have nothing to do with channeling Cezanne.
Benjamin Cottam, Yves Klein(Dead Artists), 2002-03, silverpoint, 11 x 9 cm, selling at 27 Sept 2024 at Rago Arts
Eventually, every artist will be a dead artist, but so far only a select few have been included in Benjamin Cottam’s Dead Artists Series. Done in silverpoint on a fine little card, the exquisitely ghostly little portraits are only the size of a fingernail.
Benjamin Cottam, Arshile Gorky (Dead Artists), 2002-03, silverpoint, 11 x 10 cm, selling at 27 Sept 2024 at Rago Arts
It feels like these two, Yves Klein and Arshile Gorky, fall into an exceptional category: artists whose deaths become a significant element of their art historical narrative.
Maybe that distinction is just me. Back in the day, in the thick of Cottam’s project, we got Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Eva Hesse. Looking through some of the other Dead Artists in the series, there are certainly plenty whose main qualification does seem to be that they were dead. [A lot of those are also just faces in a smudgy haze, with an even eerier vibe than these disembodied heads.]
Another criteria, though might be the availability of a suitable reference photo; when I asked the artist about a Felix Gonzalez-Torres, he looked around and the very few Felix pictures around at the time, and said it wouldn’t work.
So yeah, we have some of these, we love them, and these feel right in sync with those. So am I a dope for hyping them before scoring them? I guess I’d also be happy to see them spread around. Too may Dead Artists in one place might raise suspicions.
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.
