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Dead Artists: Collect’em All?

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.

27 Sept 2024, Lot 326: Benjamin Cottam, Yves Klein & Arshile Gorky (Dead Artists), 2002-03, est. $1,000-1,500 [update: sold nicely, not to me, enjoy!] [ragoarts]
Dead Artists [benjamincottam]

They Have Not Found The Magic Prism

Fig. 2 from Petro Vlahos’ 1964 patent [US3095304A] for making the beam splitting prism used in the sodium vapor process of image compositing

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.

Glenn Ligon: Music And The Stenciled Word

Glenn Ligon, *A Small Band (Primary Title)*, 2015, neon, with a text related to Steve Reich’s *Come Out*, installed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

I thought he might be talking about the new collection of writings and interviews that just dropped, and which I’m about a third of the way through, but no. Glenn Ligon’s conversation with Francesca Gavin on NTS.Live was mostly about music. And it turns out to be an unexpectedly interesting vector for his work.

The three pieces they discuss and play, by Steve Reich, Julius Eastman, and Jason Moran, are all bangers of their kind. No spoilers, but Ligon’s made work related to a Reich text piece [above]; Moran scored a Ligon film, and it turns out Ligon and Eastman will be in a two-person show at 52 Walker in January.

Rough Version w/Glenn Ligon, 27.08.2024 [nts.live]
Buy Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss From Rain; Writings and Interviews [hauserwirth, here’s the book trailer, btw]
Previously, related: NTS is also where Mark Leckey has a monthly show, new episode Sept. 3rd!

On And Beyond Sol LeWitt’s Other Memorials

This just in from Our Correspondent In Berlin: the recent blog post about Sol LeWitt’s Black Form — Memorial to the Missing Jews (1987/89) is as incomplete as it was unexpected. Let’s go in chronological order, and from what should have been most obvious.

Sol LeWitt, *Black Form – Dedicated To The Missing Jews*, 1987/89, painted concrete, Hamburg, via

It is not enough to site the 1987 sculpture in the context of a Germany—actually Germanies—that had yet to address the issue of memorials or counter-memorials to the Holocaust. Or even to note—which I didn’t—that the 1989 re-creation of Black Form in Hamburg was not only larger, but happened just as the Berlin Wall was taken down. And of course, Black Form has existed in Hamburg ever since.

What most needs correcting is the context of LeWitt’s statement, “This was the only political art that I made and the only political thing about it was the title, but I thought I owed it to the Germans – and the Jews – to make one comment.” And the perception of exceptionalism it gave to the Skulptur Projekte, and the constraint it put on the political and memorializing element of LeWitt’s work.

Because that LeWitt quote was from 2000. And while it may have been true that Black Form was the only political art he made to that point, it was not the last, either for the Germans or the Jews. And those later memorials were very much related to Black Form, and not just because of their titles.

Apkullacore

“Handbag of the Gods”: detail of a gypsum stone relief carving of an Apkulla, from the northwest palace of King Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, c BCE 883-859, acquired in 1921 for The Walters Art Museum, posted three years ago by @ymutate via @punk-raphaelite via @octavio-world

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.

Apkallu relief from Room G of the northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal II, collection: The Walters Museum of Art

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.

was gonna post about some building i saw on insta, but then i got on my laptop and saw more pics of it, and it looks like crap, so shoutout to the photographer who found one angle for it, i guess.

Death By Rivet Gun

From Sag Harbor to Monaco to Linz to Cologne to megagallery Los Angeles, the outlook of art world is pretty f’ing dire. Peoples’ critical faculties are failing them. But maybe that just vibes with the rest of the world rn.

five minutes later update: I just read the sentence, “An exceptional team led by Jeff Katzenberg springs into action to produce five weeks of riveting ‘content’ leading up to the Convention…

“America is riveted.”

El Arbol de Barbero

D245: Sketch for *The Barber’s Tree*, 1975, watercolor on paper, 22 1/4 x 30 1/4 in., collection of the artist, never been shown [at least through 2014], via JJCR-D

Maybe not being able to find the flagstones motif source, a Harlem wall glimpsed once through a taxi window and then lost, changed Jasper Johns’ approach a bit. Because by 1973, he did take note of the inspiration The Barber’s Tree. At least for the sketch [above], if not the painting, which turned out to be a mostly typical crosshatch motif executed in red and white.

And now we know what Johns knew.

Here is photographer Charles O’Rear’s image from “Mexico: The City That Founded A Nation,” a dispatch by Louis de la Haba and Albert Moldvay from the May 1973 issue of National Geographic.

It is small, and slight, but indeed eye-catching. It’s not clear who is responsible for this cringe caption, though, about “Indulging the national craze for color” and “The Mexicans’ passion for bright hues,” when every barber pole north of the border has the same color scheme.

What is notable, perhaps, is that Johns chose this painting—found, vernacular, and anonymous—only after seeing this on the preceding page:

Albert Moldvay’s spread of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ March of Humanity, one page before the anonymous barber painting a tree in Nat Geo May 1973.

Looking on the web for contemporary images of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ absolutely gargantuan mural, la Marcha de Humanidad, in what was supposed to be the auditorium for the Hotel de Mexico, I can’t see that anyone managed to capture it more fully than Albert Moldvay did in 1973. The Mexicans sure have a national craze for murals. Jasper Johns, not so much.

[Next morning update: Joke’s on me, it’s been on my shelf the whole time. While looking for an image of the 1975 painting The Barber’s Tree, I stumbled on it and O’Rear’s photo in Michael Crichton’s 1977 Whitney catalogue:

it was worth $6 to see it in color, I guess, and to discover the Siqueiros. But let’s be honest, without the intervening watercolor, this tree motif feels kind of far from Johns’ cross-hatches.

I’ve been saying it is barber pole-colored, but Crichton describes The Barber Tree (1975) as “flesh-and-blood colors.” Which, you’ll have to trust him, because the catalogue only had black & white images, and it was in the Ludwig’s collection until they donated it to the National Art Museum of China in 1996.

*The Barber’s Tree*, encaustic and collage on canvas, 34 x 54 in. (87 x 137.8 cm), snapped from the Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 3 (P196)

Now that they’re all together, maybe the overlapping structure of the cross-hatches is what carries through from the tree. Crichton noted Johns deployed different structures in the cross-hatch paintings of this period, 1973-76, including various degrees of mirroring or duplication. That is not what’s going on here.

Previously: Jasper Johns Drawings CR Driveby

MetGalliano

This one’s clearly on me. If I was going to write anything about the John Galliano documentary, I should have known to read more Rachel Tashjian-Wise than just Opulent Tips.

She reported on the documentary almost two months ago, and Macdonald told her the same fascinating-to-me thing he told Josh Slater-Williams, that Galliano’s Fall 2022 show was about being the subject of a documentary. Which, if you look at that show, is all kinds of problematic. But.

She also adds so much more context: that it was Anna Wintour who dangled a Galliano documentary on the hook for several years until a director—Macdonald—bit. And crucially, as I read it, that the whole thing pivoted on documentary’s backers at Dior—and LVMH.

The reputation being laundered by the documentary is not Galliano’s—or not just Galliano’s—but Galliano’s collections for Dior. So cooperating effusively was, Macdonald suggested, “a great way for them to say, ‘Okay, we’ve laid that to rest.’ And I think, so, for Dior and for John, I think that was their agenda.”

Galliano near the Met Gala but not at it, fitting Kim Kardashian into a Margiela dress, screenshot via Mikelle Street’s social media

“It is also, of course,” wrote Tashjian-Wise, “an agenda that allows them to make more money off Galliano-designed products.” And so it seems unsurprising that weeks after the documentary dropped, Galliano was declared “the real winner of the Met Gala.” Tashjian-Wise notes that Galliano dressed six celebrities for the Met Gala, including Kim Kardashian, and Zendaya—twice. The actress skipped the co-chairs receiving line at the top of the Met’s stairs to take a second lap outside, wearing a vintage Galliano-era Givenchy.

Both Tashjian-Wise and Chantal Fernandez at The Cut reported rumors that Galliano had been Anna Wintour’s and curator Andrew Bolton’s intended subject this year’s Costume Institute exhibition. After someone at the Met nixed the plan last year, Bolton had to throw together a collection exhibition about spring florals based on a dystopian Philip K. Dick story.

A Wintour-orchestrated, LVMH-sanctioned documentary. A triumphant LVMH-sponsored museum retrospective, and reported “suggestions” that Galliano would return to LVMH. The plan really was going to be, put the antisemitic outrage outrage to rest, and use the Met Gala to launch a rebooted Galliano. The world—and some museum trustees, apparently—have intervened, but it does cast a stark light on the Met Gala as a wholly instrumentalized tool of the luxury industry.

Fernandez’ article on Andrew Bolton gets into the Costume Institute’s weird governance and curatorial shenanigans, but we’ve never gotten a breakdown of the Met Gala’s actual value proposition as the the world’s most extravagant sponcon. It’s a Condé Nast-branded, pay-to-play fashion show, combined with a party giving Vogue advertisers both content opportunities and facetime with celebrities, and the venue gets a cut of the door. And we’re all either too starstruck or too grateful for the fundraising to acknowledge how, beneath the museum’s sheer veil of cultural credibility, the Met Gala is naked.

Does John Galliano deserve your forgiveness? [washingtonpost]
The real winner of the Met Gala was John Galliano [wapo]
Oh, beef: Balenciaga won the 2024 Met Gala [townandcountrymag]
The Met Gala’s Costume Drama [thecut]
Previously, related: On making a Galliano documentary
Great Artists Steal, Gala Artists Recycle

No Number/ Black/ No 1, 1969

Shoutout to @dailyrothko for bringing this darkest of all Rothkos to light.

Ink on paper, 42 x 50 inches, not titled, dated, or signed, but from 1969, referred to as 1969, and annotated on the back, “no number/ black/ no. 1” in two different corners. In the National Gallery’s collection since the Rothko kids’ gift in 1986, but I’m not sure it’s been shown. I, for one, would love to see it.

1969, 1969 [nga]

Matisse Chapel Facsimile Object

replica of Matisse’s Rosary Chapel in Vence installed at National Art Center Tokyo, via mon oncle

The exhibition, Henri Matisse: Forms in Freedom, at the National Art Center Tokyo includes a full-scale replica of la Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (1947-51). The experience incorporates simulated daylight on an accelerated loop, as if the replica stained glass windows were the ceiling of the mall at Caesar’s Palace.

photomural of Matisse’s tile Virgin & Child installed at National Art Center Tokyo, via mon oncle

In the caption Chie Sumiyoshi’s Mon Oncle article about the exhibit, it calls the above image a reproduction [再現] of a tile mural. But the only thing tiled here are the sheets of the photomural. The stained glass windows opposite, then, are also photos of the windows, and the wrought iron grates and landscaping behind them. Matisse’s candlesticks are on the replica altar, but Matisse’s crucifix is not.

Matisse’s Stations of the Cross in Vence, from a photo accompanying a 2013 review of a book by the longtime director of the Musée Matisse, in Architectural Review

I can find no images of a Tokyo replica of Matisse’s Stations of The Cross, which occupies the wall that would be directly next to the photographers of the images above. It is a tense and janky tangle that replaces a physical procession with a halting visual search for the next number and the next step. Matisse drew it at scale, with charcoal on the end of a bamboo pole. So the physical experience being replicated would have been not just that of a tourist, but of Matisse himself, standing in front of his work.

If I can find any relevant Brice Marden comments, or if someone gets married in there, I will update this post immediately.

マティスの仕事の集大成がここに, which I cannot help but read as, “Here is the culmination of Matisse’s job” [mononcle.art s/o 鈴木芳雄]
Henri Matisse: Forms In Freedom runs through 27 May 2024 [nact.jp]
Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence [wikipedia]

From The Border To The Sea

detail of satellite image of Gaza overlaid with destruction data via The Guardian

The commercial satellite data The Guardian used to document the Israeli destruction of neighborhoods, buildings, and fields in Gaza is almost a month old now.

The red grid certainly extends further south.

John Cage’s Truckera: The Making Of

From 1985-87 John Cage worked on one of his most ambitiously scaled projects ever, a full-scale opera created by chance operation. “Europera 1 & 2” debuted at the Frankfurt Oper in late 1987, and they have been an object of longtime interest and fascination on this blog. But because my interest was first in the visual and material aspects of the production—the props, the canvas flats with blown up vintage opera imagery—I missed a key sound element: “Truckera.”

“Truckera” was a 3-minute sound loop made of 101 opera LPs recorded in batches, and mixed down in layers into one “thick” truck-like sound. “Truckera” was to be played by the percussion section of the “Europera” orchestra. Which, fine.

What is wild, though, is that Cage produced “Truckera” live, on air, on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR, with a studioful of turntables and DAT decks and a team of dozens of audio engineers. It took almost three hours.

In between takes and mixes, Cage and host Brooke Wentz chat; Cage reads excerpts of collaged-together synopses from “Europera’s” 12 different programs; and they play recordings of various recent or related works. All the while, the sounds, cues, and logistical banter of audio production continue in the background [or whatever the Cagean equivalent is.]

At times the broadcast feels like, if not quite a Cagean composition, then definitely a Cagean performance, the kind of lecture/musical event Cage did often on college campuses. But it’s actually something rarer: a chance [sic] to eavesdrop on some central moments of Cage’s actual production.

This all comes up now because the Truckera broadcast was recorded, and rebroadcast, and rebroadcast again. WKCR aired it last September 5 to mark Cage’s birthday. And Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, just finished airing it—in three one-hour installments—on her weekly show, All Things Cage, on WXGC. I haven’t actually gotten through all three yet, but it’s already the best Cage recording I’ve heard this year.

All Things Cage on WXGC via Wavefarm:
30 Dec 2023: Opera Mix For and With John Cage (1987) Part I
06 Jan 2024: Opera Mix For and With John Cage (1987) Part II
13 Jan 2024: Opera Mix For and With John Cage (1987) Part III

From 356 Mission To Luna Luna

I woke up this morning thinking about the Boyle Heights anti-gentrification protests against 356 Mission, the studio/exhibition/performance space run by artist Laura Owens and bookstore owner Wendy Yao, with support from Gavin Brown, that preceded, if not precipitated, the project’s closure in 2018.

It’s just a couple of minutes walk from 356, south toward the Instagram Influencer Bridge, past the Explore Vatican Immersive Sistine Chapel Experience, to Luna Luna, the Artist Carnival Immersive Experience Drake just installed in a 60,000 square-foot soundstage that’s part of the 18-acre property being assembled by Anderson Real Estate, which owns and manages 4.5 million square feet of commercial properties in California, Hawaii, and the US Virgin Islands.

The Doors

an unidentified photo of Duchamp’s 1938 installation, with paintings hung on one of two revolving doors he put on either side of the perforated iron brazier that provided most of the light. ganked from Elena Filipovic’s dissertation

Another thing I learned from Christopher Murtha’s thesis on Sturtevant’s engagement with photography and installation in the making of her Duchamps works is about the doors.

Specifically, I never really noticed or heard that much about the revolving doors Marcel Duchamp used as exhibition devices in the 1938 Exposition internationale du surréalisme he designed/curated at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. As Murtha pointed out, Duchamp later considered other elements from the show to be artworks—1200 Coal Bags Suspended From The Ceiling Over a Stove, for example—but the doors didn’t get the same treatment. Despite, as I see below, Duchamp’s well-documented interest in doors—and Large Glass works that, you must admit, look rather doorish.