Thanks to everyone who called in, and who shared the word about this little audio experiment, which I’ve called an anthology, a compilation, and now a mixtape. Phone It In, Vol. 1 [mp3] is also a reading list, with sources and links to the included quotes. As you’ll see from the playlist below, there are some classics, some fresh finds, and even a breaking news story.
Whatever it is, if you come across some art-related writing that sticks with you for whatever reason, please call and share a bit of it at 34-SOUVENIR, and I’ll bundle those up, too, and put them out here.
As I was putting the tracks together, I discovered that when I first downloaded the calls, I’d accidentally overwritten Carolina Miranda’s call over everyone who called after her. And for a minute I thought, her call is such a mic drop, I really should just go with that. Instead, I moved it to the end, one of the only chronological shifts in the compilation. [Miranda’s cold open is a lol clapback to my voicemail greeting, which I shortened from a full explanation of the project to “Whadja find??”]
Miranda’s quote, from Annie-B Parson, really laid bare the unspoken essence of what I was hoping for here: not just favorite line, or a moment of memorable or powerful writing, but something that you read now that had an impact now.
It feels like an impossible ask, or at least a daunting one, but I really wanted to hear examples, even snippets, where art-related writing mattered in this dire af moment. I think everyone came through, and I am psyched and grateful.
What’s a bit of art writing that you loved? That stuck with you? That made you think? That made you cringe? That made you want to see something? That made you want to say something? Something in a review? A critique? An essay? A blog post? A social media post? A press release? An auction catalogue? A wall text?
If you read an amazing, short piece of art-related writing recently, why not hold up to the light, so we can all marvel at it together?
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 the 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, I’ll edit them together and post a compilation here with links to the sources. Will that be in a day? A week? A month? Never because the idea of making a voice call is ridiculous? I have no idea!
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.
For mine I’m gonna go with either a couple of lines from My night with Cy, the notes Tacita Dean made while spending the night in the Menil’s Twombly galleries, which are inserted in Cy Dear, her new book from the Menil & MACK books, or nine words I could never have imagined before, and which I now can’t imagine being without: “This copy of Ulysses belongs to me, Marsden Hartley.”
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE: After living with this expectation for a few hours, I see that it cannot be a crowdsourced panning for art writing gold, which is anxious and stressful. Instead, I’m treating it as a note to myself, a way to mark, remember, and share a good quote or idea as I find them. So if you read something that makes you think, stop, lol, or smdh, take a second and share it by calling 34-SOUVENIR.]
Our oldest had to read Mansfield Park in 9th grade and very much did not like it, and so I’ve avoided it. Until I heard poet Dionne Brand talking about it with David Naimon on the Tin House podcast, Between The Covers. [youtube] Brand’s latest book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck, is a forensic return to a whole host of “classic” texts, including Austen’s Mansfield Park, that find Blackness where it has been omitted by the structures of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. But Brand goes beyond literary analysis to question the function of a novel, and how forms of writing—and thus thinking—perpetuate and protect the structures that spawned them.
[Dionne Brand] I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.
[Saidiya Hartman] I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful.
Even if I hadn’t heard Brand’s conversation, I like to think I’d have spotted the glaring anxieties of capitalism that obsess almost every character in Mansfield Park, as well as the many references to Antigua and, thus, the direct dependence on plantation slavery of the family’s fortunes—and their entire world. I’m only halfway through, and this book [Austen obv] is grim as hell.
Brand’s not through, though. Her and Hartman’s discussion of photography, visual art, aesthetics, and beauty continues to work away in my mind.
[meanwhile, in case you needed any evidence that this conversation happened in September: “Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)“
I’d seen Issey Miyake’s 132 5 Project clothes, but not the lamps. Now here is a lamp.
In 2010 Miyake and his Reality Lab groupies developed a collection of one-piece of recycled polyester textile, geometric origami-based garments, paying as much attention to how they looked folded flat as to how they worked on a body. Like his Pleats Please and APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) concepts, 123 5 was an experiment with material, process, and form without too much concern for how it looked on, because it always just looks like: whatever, you’re wearing Miyake.
[Looking now for an image to post, I can also say it didn’t matter to Miyake how it looked on a mannequin, in a photo, in a store, or what a press release said. The charitable explanation is that it privileges the physical experience with the product.]
Anyway, Miyake brought this folding-focused concept into a lighting collection at Artemide called IN-EI. Typically written as In’ei (陰翳), Miyake told Artemide it means “shadow, shadiness, nuance.” But the term is most directly associated with 陰翳礼讃 (In’ei Raisan), “In Praise of Shadows,” Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s foundational 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, which had a huge influence on Japan’s own sense of cultural exceptionalism vis à vis the Modernism of the West.
Another reference that is very unmentioned is Isamu Noguchi’s Akari series, which brought a modernist and modernizing sensibility to Japan’s long tradition of paper lanterns. Many of which also fold flat, obviously. My long-simmering fixation with the Akari arc from lamps to “light sculptures” is probably what made me notice this lamp in the first place. And seeing the stacked rhombus lamps in this Miyake boutique, it’s clear Noguchi was on Artemide’s mind, too.
Artemide and Issey Miyake, making sure “Each lampshade is created using 2 or 3D mathematic principals” since this pic was taken the NYC store in 2012. It was even stenciled on the wall lmao.
However long this cruise ship napkin-shaped table lamp was in production, I don’t know, but the IN-EI Collection currently only has four pieces in it, and this is currently not one of them. Its name, Hoshigame, translates as star tortoise, and yes, its shape does look like the shell of a Burmese Star Tortoise. So maybe in 2015, when the Kemono Friends manga dropped, and an Indian Star Tortoise was among the exotic animals in the magic zoo that turned into kawaii little girls, Artemide decided to quietly excuse itself from the search results.
As long as you know to search for Hoshigame, though, you will not need to rush to buy this one in Paris. Turns out they’re all over the place, at prices ranging from etsy cheap to 1st dibs ridiculous.
March 12, 2014, 12:20 PM: I swear, every one of these still lands this week, and lands different.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about twitter and social media for fifteen years, and the only thing I can come up with is, start a blog.
Whatever else it is, Twitter has been a source of language fascination for me. To see or share combinations of words of unexpected beauty, sublimity, stupidity, and criminality. I developed a practice of tweeting stuff without explanation or context–without original context, since the whole point was to hold up an object of text, or later, an image, or a combination of both, and present it in the context of the Twitter feed itself–that annoyed tf out of some people. I really tried to approach Twitter as an experiment, to see what would happen, or what worked and what didn’t. As time went on, Twitter’s own conventions coalesced, and even came to dominate information in the world, far beyond its own users’ spheres.
But that’s not important right now. One thing I started to do was to find meaning or resonance in groupings of tweets. Because they were in my timline, coming from people I’d chosen to follow, the synchronicities between adjacent tweets weren’t exactly random, but the more random and unrelated they seemed, the better. The connection didn’t need to be glaringly obvious, either, but an unusual, mundane word appearing in three unrelated tweets was as awesome as two rhyming images.
I developed rules for groupings: adjacency was a must; longer chains of tweets beat a pair; no retweets or manipulations by me. But in practice, I’d just screenshot’em all and figure I’d sort’em out later. And sometimes, when they ended up next to a gem, I couldn’t resist including my own tweets.
These groupings were made by others and me, and yet it seemed the only intentionality was in the finding. There was the sense, or perhaps the alluring suggestion, that beyond illuminating the contours of my own curatorial decisions, the groupings offered glimpses of a larger, unintended, collective meaning, like generative glitches in a (not the) matrix.
I tweeted some of these out as I’d find them, just a blip in the stream, but then I decided to collect them, to see what they could do together. So I started a tumblr, and after two tedious weeks of trying to capture the metadata embedded in each multitweet screenshot, I shelved it. But the screenshots have kept piling up.
Now with the actual destruction of Twitter looming, these shards feel possibly more relevant than they did, and so I’ve dusted off the tumblr and will keep posting these nice groupings, worrying less that they conform to my own arbitrary notions of multi-tweet poetic form, and instead being glad that they exist at all.
For no other reason than I can, here is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with every mention of Gatsby replaced by Greg. I should read this again; it has been a while.
Absolutely love this double exposure photo by Yayoi Kusama of her and an Infinity Net painting, c. 1960, via the MoMA catalogue.
If 4000+ words on Yayoi Kusama leaves you wanting more, here are some of the many sources I found useful in trying to understand and write about the artist and her work:
“SKY Unveils Artworks by Yayoi Kusama New York City, USA – 05.04.16 Photo – J Grassi” For a long time I worked to get the article to land on this photo, of two real estate developers unveiling their fresh, new Frieze Fair Kusama in the prop library of their huge rental building on 42nd and 11th or wherever. They have the only bronze pumpkin on public view in New York in the motor court, too.
At the end of February/the beginning of March, just as the Covid-19 pandemic started impacting the US, I was asked to make sense of the increasingly broad and intense interest in Yayoi Kusama and her work. As someone who’s looked at her work and tried to get smart about it for more than 25 years, I had tried to stop being surprised at how popular Kusama’s work has become–and I repeatedly failed. I just could not account for it. But I welcomed the challenge to figure it out.
Fortunately, there has been a surge of recent historical and academic interest, and a huge blind spot where Kusama’s Japanese career is concerned. So as museums and library shutdowns loomed, I dashed around town, taking snapshots of every Kusama-related publication the Smithsonian had: more than 1,500 pages, and then I started reading, and contacting scholars and curators and dealers, some of whom were very responsive to my inquiries. For their time and insights, I am very grateful. For those who did important work and never responded, I guess thanks for your work. For the unexpectedly large number of folks who did not respond at all, my interest is piqued.
The resulting article was published in the Summer issue of ARTnews, and is now available online. I’m fairly pleased with it, and am especially grateful to the editors at the magazine who helped guide and shape this look at an artist whose ambition and tenacity are absolutely unparalleled; Kusama has made transcendent, groundbreaking artwork while overcoming immense obstacles, both from within and without. I think her work holds a mirror up to the art world and how it’s changed in her 70+ year career.
I left the world of internet startups to begin making films in 2000, just as Creative Capital was launched, and I immediately aspired to work with them; their startup-like model that provided a network of professional community and in-kind support in addition to project funding seemed like an immediately obvious, logical win. As it happened, I never pursued funding from Creative Capital for any film projects, but they kept my interest and respect. [They had it even before I was awarded an Art Writers Grant for the blog, which Creative Capital administers alongside the Warhol Foundation.]
So I was psyched to be asked to look back and write about a year of operation for their 20th anniversary–and not just because it was a chance to write for the LA Review of Books, which I also admire. But it was, and I did. And now it’s out, and you can read it.
I think my penchant for archive diving and deep reads was one of the reasons they asked me, and it was enticing to study the 38 wildly varied projects Creative Capital funded in 2005. I came to see the exceptional impact of Creative Capital in supporting a specific grouping of proposals: ambitious, genre-defying projects by somewhat unproven artists, which ended up having an outsize influence on the trajectory of those artists’ careers. The artists I focused on–filmmaker Natalie Almada and artists Liz Cohen and Pablo Helguera–all made work that I cannot imagine getting funding from any other source, and it made a difference. Kickstarter later changed the funding environment, but Creative Capital still stands out for its deep in-kind support system. But that is all a different story, and I look forward to seeing who else is going to say what else next.
I’m slow to realize I’ve only been hyping this on Twitter, but I’m psyched that my essay on Sam Gilliam and his decades-long investigations of abstraction is out now in Art in America magazine.
When the editors asked me all the way back in June, the assignment was to interview the artist in his studio, a regular feature of the magazine. Gilliam had just opened a retrospective in Basel, and was working on a show in LA in the fall. When that show got pushed back, the interview request process got drawn out, and finally, I ended up going to Gilliam’s studio to talk about interviewing him, but very purposefully not interviewing.
He was a gracious and fascinating guy in the middle of a great deal of activity, and we figured it would be best to talk more at length after the show got pinned down. And then the show preparations intensified, and my deadline loomed, and I ended up writing a full-on essay rather than interviewing Gilliam. Which was the culmination of a months-long journey through his work, his career, and his life, digging through archives and clippings files and hours of earlier interview recordings.
My takeaway is utter respect for Gilliam’s work and his practice, which evinces the kind of fierce independence required to sustain six-plus decades of experimentation, only some of which happened in the spotlight of the mainstream art world. I find myself rewriting the essay right now, so just go ahead and read it; I left it all on the page.
In Bruce Hainley’s new essay on Cady Noland [Artforum Jan ’19, too short at 12 pages] I learned that the artist’s mom, Cornelia Langer Noland Reis, was the co-owner with Maria O’Leary of a world-focused jewelry and fashion boutique in Old Town, Alexandria known as Nuevo Mundo.
The image, with caption, at top, is from a 2015 remembrance of O’Leary, who was a life/style icon to the moms and daughters of Old Town. The image above was screencapped from a checklist of Robert Gober’s 2014 MoMA retrospective. It included a re-staging of his 1999 group show for which Cady Noland made Stand-In for a Stand-In, a cardboard version of a stock.
Applied Ballardianism, by Simon Sellars, published June 2018 by Urbanomic
This, the 23rd installment of Better Read, texts that are better read aloud by a computer, was inspired by a @ballardian tweet. It is the table of contents of Simon Sellars’ new sort-of-a-novel-sort-of-a-memoir, Applied Ballardianism, which is out this month from Urbanomic. As I type that out, I fear I transcribed it as Urbanomics. Fortunately, probably no one will listen to this. I should’ve kept my trap shut. [update: I did not.]
I was absolutely floored by this tiny quote from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 field interview with Cudjoe Lewis, who was one of the last known survivors of the last slave-ship to come to the United States. He arrived in the US from what is now Benin in 1859 or 1860, smuggled in on the Clotilde at the age of 19. His given name was Kossula.
“I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man?”
His head was bowed for a time. Then he lifted his wet face: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’ ”
Hurston spent three months interviewing Kossula, and even longer trying to get his history published. Because of her training an anthropologist she refused publishers’ demands that she rewrite Kossula’s vernacular testimony. 87 years later, it is being released for the first time, and I just bought it.
[This is where I originally expected this quick post to stop.]
Kossula was a leader of the community of Clotilde survivors who after attempting to return to Africa, created a settlement outside Mobile, Alabama called Africatown. In a 1914 book called Historic Sketches of the South, Emma Roche Langdon recounted the stories of the Clotilde’s voyage, the survivors, and their descendants. She spelled his name Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis.
Bronze bust of Cudjoe Lewis after Charles Rhodes’ carved wood original, some time before 2002, image via WKRG
In 1959, on the 100th anniversary of the Clotilde‘s arrival, the Progressive League of Plateau erected a memorial to Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis in front of the Union Baptist Church. The monument was created by Henry Williams, “a welder and history buff”, which is what they call someone who also saved and preserved the Africatown cemetery. On a pyramid of bricks made by Clotilde survivors sat a lengthy bust of Lewis by Charles Rhodes, a “young understudy” of Williams.
AP photo of the brick base of Cudjoe Lewis memorial in front of Union Baptist Church, Jan. 2002. image via Gadsden Times
The original was carved in wood, to be cast in bronze. When the bronze bust was ripped off the base and stolen in 2002, the pastor said it had been in front of the church for “about three decades.” Was he off by 15 years, or had it taken until the 1970s to make the cast of Rhodes’ sculpture?
unveiling of a new bust of Cudjo Lewis, 2008, at the Union Baptist Church, Africatown USA, AL, image via WKRG
In 2008 a new, similarly shaped sculpture was unveiled, though this picture from a local newscast shows it next to a wall, not on the brick pyramid, because it was installed at the Africatown Welcome Center alongside a bust of John Smith, a mayor of the nearby town of Prichard. The sculptures were donated by two filmmakers from Africa, Thomas Akodjinou from Benin and Felix Yao Amenyo Eklu from Togo, in 2007.
On his blog Akodjinou honored John Smith for his involvement in the Alabama Benin Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, which saw Africatown as an historic symbol of reconciliation between the two interconnected cultures.
Vandalized busts of John Smith (front) and Cudjo Lewis, and Robert Battles, executive director of the Africatown Welcome Center, Mar 2011, image via al.com
In March 2011, both sculptures were vandalized, with their heads ripped off. The sculptures were originally described as marble, but from the look of this painted and chipped base, I am doubtful.
John Smith & Cudjo Lewis busts as photographed in 2016 by Maarten Vanden Eynde, image: deltaworkers.org
The headless busts were still visible in 2016 when Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde visited Africatown. His account is disheartening, if not downright harrowing. Besides the historic cemetery, which is sinking, many of the structures and homes are run down or abandoned, and the area is threatened by surrounding industrial redevelopment. [Tho tbh, it looks kind of typical on GSV from 2011-2017.]
In 2016 sculptor April Livingston launched a GoFundMe to make a new bust, just the head this time, to be cast out of iron. It was bolted to the base in February 2017, when she promised the local news that she could cast a million more. Me, I’m most interested in the history of the previous three.
Sculptor April Livingston with her newly unveiled bust of Cudjoe Lewis, image: Gary Hadaway via UA
The editor of Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000-2015, Jennifer Liese, alerted me to Francesca Balboni’s CAA Review of the anthology, which includes a very nice mention of my Erased de Kooning Drawing posts.
For me, however, the good moments outweighed those that were less than stellar. The biggest revelation was Greg Allen’s idiosyncratically obsessive and meticulously researched blog posts on Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (2011–13). Allen seems to answer Mike Kelley’s assertion to artists in “Artist/Critic?” (2001, another highlight) that “historical writing” can no longer be the project only of the art historian, if we wish to “escape the present limitations of critical discourse” (33). Allen’s blog offers an instructive example of the kind of art histories we might pursue instead. Mariam Ghani’s “The Islands of Evasion: Notes on International Art English” (2013) is as incisive as it is readable, as she summarizes and responds to the heated critical debate around Alix Rule and David Levine’s essay “International Art English.” I also enjoyed many of the selections in “Artists Writing as Art,” especially a bureaucratic love letter to the Liverpool CCTV from Jill Magid’s surveillance performance One Cycle of Memory in the City of L. (2004) and the script for Andrea Fraser’s biting institutional critique Official Welcome (2001).
It is still a sufficiently rare occurrence for me to see such reactions to my work, and it has definitely not gotten old, especially on a rough news day. [Are there any other kind lately?] But it also energizes me to be read as in dialogue with Mike Kelley, and to be discussed in the context of such artists and writers as these folks. I still find Social Medium to be an invigorating read, and am still really grateful to Liese for including me in it.
