writing – Page 13

Chronology For, By Ad Reinhardt

How much of discovery is really just rediscovery? or learning remembering?

I was waiting to read how editor/art historian Barbara Rose had decided to model the chronology at the opening of her 1991 book, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, after the personal+historical “date” portraits of Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

1943 Refuses to help Arshile Gorky start a camouflage school.
1943 Wonders what Adolph Gottleib and Mark Rothko are up to when they announce, “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”
1943 Continues making paintings about nothing.
1944 Liberation of Paris

But then I scroll up and see that Reinhardt’s chronology was his own, and that he was constantly reworking it. The version Rose chose was published in the catalogue for Reinhardt’s 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum.

So Rose didn’t get it from Felix, but that means Felix must have gotten it from Reinhardt. And sure enough. I pulled down my special 1994 edition Art & Design, which served as the catalogue for the Camden Arts Center exhibition featuring Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. And there is Nancy Spector writing about Reinhardt’s influence, both direct, and refracted through the strategies and theories of the intervening generation of conceptualists:

Reinhard’s parodic biographical exercise was, at the time of its creation, interpreted as mere ‘documentation’, as tangential to his artistic enterprise. But, because of Conceptual art’s deployment of linguistic analysis and its use of language as a medium through which to demonstrate the discursive foundations of art, a younger generation inherited the freedom to use words as a viable alternative to image-making. Therefore, Gonzalez-Torres’ various inventories of disjunctive historical incidents and private moments, followed by the year of their occurrence, can and actually do constitute his art…these ‘date’ works use now conventional Conceptual strategies to mimic the idea of an ‘Artist’s’ chronology. More importantly, however, in the over-arching equivalency of everything listed in these works, Gonzalez-Torres is underscoring a crucial reality in today’s world: that the political cannot be divorced from the personal.

I think Reinhardt makes the same case; and I agree with Spector that Rose’s interpretation is incomplete, and that the extremely politically engaged Reinhardt did not mean for his chronology to reveal art to be “a matter of small consequence” when seen from “a perspective of world affairs.”
Spector suggests another reading, that “[Reinhardt’s] inclusion of cataclysmic world affairs in an ‘artist’s biography’…bespeaks the impossibility of divorcing cultural endeavours from the social and political context in which they are pursued.” [image: Untitled, 1988]
Now about that Arshile Gorky camouflage school…

The Greatest Camo Story Ever Told

Sure, there’s Dutch Camo Landscapes, and Razzle Dazzle, and the Civilian Camouflage Council, but it all pales in comparison to the truly epic WWII camo accomplishments of Jasper Maskelyne and The Magic Gang.
Maskelyne was a British magician-turned-Army camo mastermind who, in 1941, led a ragtag band of desert artists and illusionists who created a series of incredible camo techniques that protected Allied forces in North Africa from aerial reconnaissance and bombardment.
Using burlap and sticks, they disguised trucks as tanks, and tanks as trucks, and they created devices to enable tanks to cover their own tracks across the desert sands. But the most amazing achievements are in his 1949 memoirs, Magic – Top Secret where Maskelyne–whose grandfather, also a magician, invented the pay toilet–tells how he saved the port of Alexandria, Egypt from night bombing by building an elaborately lit decoy port, several miles away in the desert. Using incendiary devices and real anti-aircraft artillery, he and his Magic Gang fooled the German bombers with realistic-looking “hits” and return fire; and by morning, his crews would strew papier-mache rubble around the real port, giving simulated damage for the reconn pilots to report back. [below: a German spy photo of part of the port]

The success of the Alexandria decoy was only surpassed by Maskelyne’s brilliant [literally] strategy for protecting a vital supply route for the Allies, the Suez Canal. He designed “Dazzle Lights,” a rotating structure of made up of mirrors and 24 powerful anti-aircraft searchlights that, when set into motion, gave off a “Whirling Spray,”:

[Maskelyne] managed to create beams nine miles long, twenty-four of them from each searchlights [sic] … the magic mirrors were a success, and the next job was to get the device into mass production. With them, we made twenty-one searchlights serve for the entire one-hundred-mile length of the Suez Canal.

That’s right, the Suez Canal was saved from being bombed by the biggest lightshow in history: the 100-mile-long, Whirling Spray of almost two dozen Dazzle Lights.
How is it possible that I did not know this before now? Why is this miracle of modern warfare not taught in our military academies? Our elementary schools, even? How are these mindblowing aesthetic achievements not celebrated as a landmark in the history of art? Why is there no Bruckheimer movie, starring Josh Hartnett as the daring soldier magician? Maybe because the entire thing is bullshit.
In 2004, military historian and magician [seriously] Richard Stokes published the findings of his multi-year investigation into Maskelyne’s claims. They are gathered in the exhaustively paged website, MaskelyneMagic.com. Working with the magician’s son, he had access to Maskelyne’s archives and scrapbooks from the war. Stokes also cross-referenced official records, declassified intelligence reports, and consulted experts and historians in the North African war. And there is nothing in the historical record to support Maskelyne’s fantastical claims.
On Alexandria, the place where he said he built a decoy port doesn’t even exist; neither does the geography he describe match to any in the vicinity of the city. There are no pictures or corroborating eyewitness accounts, and no documentation.
On the Suez front, Stokes demolishes Maskelyne’s claim to have invented Dazzle Lights by pointing to similar, tank-based tactics under development since WWI. Again, no record of Dazzle Lights can be found in the historical source material, and extensive accounts of the actual defense of the Canal provide well-documented alternative explanations to Maskelyne’s. According to Stokes, Maskelyne didn’t actually come up with the Whirling Spray idea until 1942, after the aerial threat had subsided. And he quotes the illusionist’s son: “The ‘Dazzle Lights’ were an idea which was, I believe, constructed only in one prototype and tested on one occasion.”
Which appears to be the scene depicted in the photo gallery on Stokes’ site, where a searchlight is being outfitted with a faceted, mirrored cone extension:

Which means the photo below, showing an awesomely Duchampian folly, 18 flashlights on a turntable, is somewhat confusing to me:

But with a caption like, “The birth of artificial moonlight, 1942,” I’d think that Maskelyne’s imagined heroics are long overdue for [re-]creation.
The War Magician| “”Myth is invulnerable to mere facts” – Barthes [all images via MaskelyneMagic.com]
Previously: Bombardment Periphery, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles’s ‘wigwam’ of searchlights; Forrest Myers’ light pyramid

Non Realizzate: Proposta Per Un’Auraprogettazione

Apex Art just announced that Courtenay Finn and Gary Fogelson were selected for this year’s open curating slots. Finn’s proposal uses a work by Bruce Nauman as a jumping off point for a show about “the role of reading in artistic practice.” Fogelson’s will tell the incredible-sounding history of alternative, arts, and experimental filmmaking shown in the 1970s on Boston’s WBBI TV. Congratulations to both of them, and get cracking, time’s a wastin’!
I’d had an idea for a show percolating for a while, so I submitted it. As I re-read it now, it’s fascinating how much of it is stuff I’ve blogged about over the last couple of years. In a real sense, the blogging process was central to the development and coalescence of the show’s ideas, if not for the actual proposal, which I wrote up and submitted anonymously, as Apex Art requires.
It tied for 45th place out of 320 entries. 86th percentile, which is alright, I guess, in a B-show kind of way.
Anyway, it was inspired, as the title suggests, by Enzo Mari. It challenges the common conception of aura by applying Mari’s autoprogettazione reproduction strategy to instructions-based art practice.
And because it also includes references to the great gatherer of Unrealized Projects, Hans Ulrich Obrist, I thought I’d go ahead and share my proposal here. If you’re one of the 40 international, anonymous judges who rated it less than 4/5, I do hope you’ll drop me a line and tell me what might have improved it for you.
Many thanks to those folks who gave me feedback and art historical suggestions on the idea as I was putting it together, too. I don’t want to sound namedroppy–until we polish this bad boy up and put on this jargon-laden, Stingelpainting party somewhere else, then I’ll be thanking you often and loudly, I’m sure.

Proposta per un’auraprogettazione

A project for making easy-to-assemble furniture using rough boards and nails. An elementary technique to teach anyone to look at present production with a critical eye. (Anyone, apart from factories and traders, can use these designs to make them by themselves. The author hopes the idea will last into the future and asks those who build the furniture, and in particular, variations of it, to send photos to his studio…) – Enzo Mari, Proposta per un’autoprogettazione, Duchamp Center, Bologna, April 1974

Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura is commonly understood as a quality that distinguishes an original art object from its mechanical reproduction. Recent alternative readings [Samuel Weber, 1996], particularly of cinema–Benjamin’s archetypal medium of modernity–consider aura as something not lost in (re)production, but instead contingent upon it. Aura is generated through contextualized reception via dispersed, multiple ‘originals,’ as literary or musical aura is transmitted via books and scores.
When coupled with Benjamin’s functional reconfiguration of the distinction between author and reader [“through a highly specialized work process…the reader gains access to authorship”], production of an auratic artwork at a [spatial/temporal] remove from the artist herself becomes feasible. The instruction performs such a distancing function.
From Moholy-Nagy through Lewitt, artists have used instructions and plans to challenge the privileging of gesture and authorship. The emergence of Conceptual art saw the concurrent normalization of instruction-based practice and the “dematerialization of the art object” [Lucy Lippard, 1973].

Lippard’s own seminal exhibition 557,087 (Seattle, 1969) was executed remotely using artists’ instructions, which comprised the show’s catalogue. Similarly, Do It (1993-) an ongoing exhibition/archive by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, solicits, executes and disseminates instructions from contemporary artists. [“With Do It in hand, you will be able to make a work of (someone else’s) art yourself.”]
Despite their critique of object/market complicity, instructions are regularly sublimated by capitalist constructs [i.e., editioning, certificates of authenticity] that reassert control and facilitate commodification.
Authorization thus emerges as a crucial and highly contested point of inflection/exchange for instruction-based work. Only five of 168+ instructions in Do It generate objects. One, a Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy pour (1994), was problematized when the artist’s catalogue raisonné [Cantje, 1997] reclassified it as “non-work” and reconfigured fabrication authority only for Do It‘s curators, not its audience.

A more conceptually robust corollary is art that applies a model exemplified by the Italian designer Enzo Mari, whose 1974 exhibition/catalogue, Proposta per un’autoprogettazione, (Proposal for a self-project) included not just blueprints for making 16 pieces of furniture, but explicit authorization to do so.
Mari’s autoprogettazione structure synthesizes Benjamin’s potential for multiple, auratic originals with the critical empowerment of readers-qua-authors, consumers-qua-producers, viewers-qua-artists.

Auraprogettazione will be the first ever survey of this distinctive, exceptional genre: auratic objects, fabricated by whomever, in accordance with artists’ published instructions and authorization. Preliminary research has identified consonant works–painting, sculpture, photography, assemblage, clothing–by at least eleven artists: Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Stephen Kaltenbach, Lia Maisonnave/Ciclo de Arte Experimental, Yoko Ono, Tobias Rehberger, Rudolf Stingel, Joep van Lieshout, Franz West, Zhuang Da, and Andrea Zittel.
Alongside the ‘originals’ exhibition, the gallery may be activated as a site of open, facilitated art production, or as an aggregator/repository of audience-made originals. Additional artists may be solicited to create new, permissioned, instruction-based work. And as with Mari’s original, Auraprogettazione‘s publications in print and online will propagate instructions for the exhibited works.

The ‘Essential Triad’ & The ‘Right To Creativity’

It has been fun reading The New Art (1966), one of critic Gregory Battcock’s contemporary anthologies of critical art writing. Also sobering, how dated and/or blinkered many assumptions these pre-eminent minds operated under turned out to be. Not the least of which is the illustrious role of the critic himself, and I do mean him. Here are some choice quits from Battcock’s own introduction, which are not unrepresentative of the attitudes of many of the contributors:

Art is humanism and reality, and as such cannot be seen accurately in terms of the past. At this point, responsible criticism becomes absolutely essential. The critic has, as it were, to paint the painting anew and make it more acceptable, less of a threat than it often is. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the art of our time could not exist without the efforts of the critic. It is, however, to be remembered that words are ores and art is art; in presenting art, the critic cannot resate or reproduce it. All he can do is assume some of the concern for clarification in his effort to leave himself free to experiment as obscurely as he likes, unhampered by any need to compromise his integrity for the sake of public approval.
Objections to this state of affairs can logically be only of degree and not kind, since an art of total clarity wouldn’t be art, and would need no criticism at all…modern Art is a discipline, not a World’s Fair all three members of its essential triad– artist, critic, and viewer–obtain only such rewards as they are prepared to work for or for which they have the love to spare.

love that. Sounds pretty tough. Here’s another part about one of those marginal figures left out of the essential triad:

another characteristic aspect of the new criticism is revealed in the way it’s practitioners tend to review group or retrospective exhibitions almost solely in terms of the selectivity displayed by the person responsible for the show, while oaring little or no attention to the merit of the individual artworks or artists included. This peculiarity is very much a part of the new way of looking at art; the position of the curator or director is regarded as equivalent to that of the artists whose work he selects, since he is the creator of the exhibition, if not of the individual works within it. The critic’s own right to creativity comes through his relationship with the artist whom he alone fully understands, appreciates, and can interpret to others.

good times, good stuff.

‘There Was A Discussion’

‘There was a discussion January 1972’
That’s it. The complete documentation of one of the conversation works by Ian Wilson in the Panza Collection, as reproduced in Art of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies the second edition of the collection catalogue, published in 1999.
Only the caption lists the artist as Jan Wilson [ouch]. There are inventory numbers running from IW 1 [above] to IW 13, so it appears Panza and Wilson chatted quite a bit over the years. [At what point, I wonder, does being a conceptual artist working in the medium of conversation start to complicate your daily interactions with people? Are you like Midas, cursed to turn every topic you touch on into art?]
The catalogue includes Christopher Knight’s lengthy interview with Panza, but as mentioned before, it also includes a trove of documentation–sketches, working diagrams, specs, certificates, and invoices–for a great number of artists, including several pages of reproductions of instructions between Panza and Donald Judd concerning the fabrication of his pieces. Great stuff.

Hilton Kramer: TMI

God bless him, even if he’s on the wrong side of [most of the intervening 40 years of] contemporary art history, you gotta love Hilton Kramer’s eviscerating takedown of MoMA’s 1970 conceptualist exhibition, Information, curated by Kynaston McShine:

The exhibition is, in its way, amusing and amazing, but only because it upholds an attitude one had scarcely thought worth entertaining: an attitude toward the artistic process that is so over-weeningly intellectual that it is, in its feeble results, virtually mindless. Here all the detritus of modern printing and electronic communications media has been transformed by an international gaggle of demi-intellectuals into a low grade form of show business. It leaves one almost nostalgic for a good old-fashioned hand-made happening.

Though he only mentioned one artist by name in his NY Times review [Hans Haacke], Kramer did note the “great many blowups of junky photographic materials…of earthworks,” which I assume is a reference to the four Gianfranco Gorgoni photos that introduced the just-completed Spiral Jetty to the public.
Show at The Modern Raises Questions, July 2, 1970 [nyt archives]

Otto Piene’s More Sky

Alright, all y’all who didn’t tell me about Otto Piene’s classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?

Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a plea for more scope, more space for art–for making public property artful and making art public property–for freeing the arts from the tight economic bonds that give the curators and the collectors a near monopoly. He writes, “The artist-planner is needed. He can make a playground out of a heap of bent cans, he can make a park out of a desert, he can make a paradise out of a wasteland, if he accepts the challenge…. In order to enable artists of the future to take on planning and shaping tasks on a large scale, art education has to change completely. At this point art schools are still training object-makers who are expecting museums and collectors to buy their stuff….”
The first part of More Sky covers “things to do” arranged alphabetically, A-M (Piene will take up N-Z some other time.) Like city planning, clothing, collaboration, electronic music, elements, engineering or government, graffiti, graphics, green toad jelly.
All these notes cohere into a larger statement in support of an environmental art for social use, the interaction of art and architecture and the city and the open landscape, a total ecological and elemental aesthetics.
The last part of the book, “Wind Manual,” gives a practical demonstration of things to do in just one area. But it’s a big one–the whole sky–and a lot can be done in it, making use of the wind; making human clouds, rain, rainbows; and making things that fly and float. This section is made up almost entirely of full-color illustrations of some of the things that man the artist can do to purify the skies polluted by man the money-maker and rendered fearsome by man the war-maker. The illustrations show different kinds of flags, banners, ribbons, wind socks, wind sculptures, riggings, kids and other things.
The first part was written plain, in the Spring of 1970, with no trace of artspeak jargon. And the second is plainly drawn and colored. (Piene is more versatile than most contemporary artists: he can do his abstract light-ballet things, and he can span rivers with man-made rainbows, and he can draw a recognizable picture of a bull.) The “Wind Manual” was originally drawn for instant use in schools and colleges in Pittsburgh–it was created as part of a Piene-guided public art project called Citything Sky Ballet.
The MIT Press
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02142

Otto Piene’s More Sky is available the 1973 edition with the fun, blue cover, and a print-on-demand version with a boring black cover. So heads up when you buy. [amazon]

Works On Paper

Thanks to Judd [no relation] Tully, I pulled Martha Buskirk’s book, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art down again and was reminded of how awesome it is on the fascinating conflicts between Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Donald Judd [and Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre, and Bruce Nauman].
To one degree or another, these artists disputed Panza’s fabrication of their works from plans, schematics, and certificates he had bought. The most spectacular disagreement, where Judd took out ads and wrote manifestos disclaiming sculptures and installations which Panza had realized, seems the most cut & dry. On paper.
Buskirk goes through Panza’s archives at the Getty–and Christopher Knight’s collection catalogue–to show that “Judd signed a series of certificates that were remarkably broad in the latitude granted to Panza,” that authorized Panza and followers to reconstruct work for a variety of reasons, “as long as instructions and documentation provided by Judd were followed and either he or his estate was notified.” This even included the right to make “temporary exhibition copies, as long as the temporary copy was destroyed after the exhibition; and, most astonishingly, the right to recreate the work to save expense and difficulty in transportation as long as the original was then destroyed.” [emphasis, appropriately, in the original]
The questions seem inevitable, especially in an era when Panza was the first, earliest, only, or largest buyer of both Minimalist and conceptual work. In a 1990 interview, he even conflates the two: “Minimal art is closely connected to the project, and the collector has the right to produce it, but his freedom of interpretation is very limited. He must simply see to it that the fabrication conforms to the project.”
Knight’s collection catalogue, Art of the Sixties and Seventies, gets a special mention for making “a tacit argument for the connection between minimal and conceptual art by presenting both through an intermix of photographs of objects and installations and reproductions of plans, diagram, certificates, and other documentation.” The publication of which Judd also protested, it turns out.
I wonder how much these document-based conflicts are related to the particular circumstances of Panza’s collecting: remotely, en masse, via correspondence, and largely alone. He told Knight in 1985 [before these particular conflicts arose over a show at ACE Gallery in LA of Panza work that was fabricated locally instead of shipped] that he basically spent all his free time managing paperwork for his collection. It’s not surprising if it all starts to look conceptual at some point.
[I’d point out that Panza and Flavin, at least, eventually got square, at least judging by the presence of one of Panza’s pieces in Judd’s NGA retrospective.]

So, Shall I Call You Count Panza?

On 2nd, 3rd and 4th of April 1985, there was a discussion between Christopher Knight and Count [sic?!] Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. What was said remains in the collection of Christopher Knight. And in the Archives of American Art. And in this book. And a little bit in the Los Angeles Times.
An appreciation: Giuseppe Panza di Biumo [latimes]

The Name Is Dumas

Figure in Landscape, 2009
I’m probably enjoying reading the legal filings in Craig Robins’ lawsuit against David Zwirner a little too much. [Randy Kennedy’s got a nice summary in the NYT today; basically, Robins says Zwirner revealed a confidential sale of a Marlene Dumas painting, which landed the collector on the artist’s blacklist, which Zwirner said he’d fix and didn’t, and that Robins could choose some Dumases from the current show, which he couldn’t.]
I’ve got no horse in this race, and I’m not a fan of Marlene Dumas’s work. [Though I admit it’s hard to consider it separate from the uncritical adulation that accompanied the outsized market hype of the last few years. And I did find some of these new paintings–including the three Robins said he wanted to choose from–admirably Tuyman-esque.]
What I am is fascinated by the language and the assumptions of collecting [and buying and selling] art that underpin it. The overly precise, legalistic argumentation of the filings reveals just how dependent many of the art world’s core interactions are on elision, subjectivity, and intentional ambiguity.
First, from the amended/updated version of Robins’ original complaint:

10. Thereafter in early 2005, defendants [i.e., Zwirner] breached Agreement I [i.e., the confidential sale a couple of months earlier in October 2004] by disclosing to MD that plaintiff [Robins] had in fact sold “Reinhardt’s Daughter,” [right] which defendants ultimate, apologetically and unequivocally admitted when plaintiff called defendants out on the issue. MD then immediately placed plaintiff on her personal “blacklist”, i.e., that plaintiff would not be able to buy any MD artwork in the Primary Market. Plaintiff’s placement on MD’s blacklist was and is a direct result of defendants breach of the confidentiality of Agreement I. [p.4, emphasis added to signal points of amusement]

This is clearly, awesomely Dumas herself. Zwirner had no need to “call Robins out” on the sale; he was a party to it. So at some point, within weeks or months of the deal, Dumas confronted Robins about secretly selling her work. His unequivocal apologies notwithstanding, he landed himself on “her” blacklist.
But Dumas is not actually named in the lawsuit, only Zwirner [and his galleries/legal entities.] So the artist herself is not a “defendant,” but the language of the complaint seems to indicate that at one point, Robins considered making her one. So while he sold work secretly through another dealer not the artist’s, and then abjectly–and, it turns out, unsuccessfully–apologized when she called him out, at some point in the last few weeks between drafting his lawsuit and filing it, Robins came to appreciate that suing an artist for blacklisting him was probably not the most effective way to get off her blacklist. I would count this as progress.

Continue reading “The Name Is Dumas“

OG: Ono Grapefruit

Cross a first edition of Yoko Ono’s 1964 “event score”/instruction-based art book Grapefruit off my Ones I’ve Let Get Away list. Turns out it’s not just me:

There are no copies of the first (limited) edition of Grapefruit currently being offered in the marketplace. ABPC reports no copies at auction within the last thirty-five years. OCLC/KVK report only four copies in institutional holdings worldwide: At MOMA, U.C. – San Diego, Northwestern University, and the Library of Congress. What this tells us that all remaining copies are being closely held by private collectors. The book is exceedingly scarce in the marketplace.

Yeah, but. I’d also suspect a fair number of them didn’t survive long enough to be closely held. And she printed it in Tokyo, so I suspect there are a few in Japan that don’t show up in “the marketplace.”
Yoko Ono collects rare books [bookpatrol.net]
Grapefruit (book) [wikipedia]
The 1970 reissue of Grapefruit is pretty plentiful and cheap [amazon]
selected instruction pieces by Yoko Ono [a-i-u.net]

Finally, Primary Information’s Facsimile of Avalanche

You could argue that Primary Information’s facsimile editions of Avalanche, the awesome artist-run journal published in the mid-1970s by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, are only the 3rd and 4th greatest editions of Avalanche, after Wade Guyton &co’s bootleg photocopied version from a few years ago [#2] and a complete set of the originals [#1, obviously].
But as a haggle-weary collector and scourer of vintage Avalanches over the years, I would argue that the greatest version of Avalanche is the one you can actually get.
So for the moment, that is the 100 limited edition, boxed sets of all 13 issues, which come with certificates signed by both Bear and Sharp [signed, obviously, before Sharp died in 2008]. Did I say 100? It’s only been a couple of days and the first 40 are already gone.

Which means that in a couple of weeks, at the latest, the greatest version will be either the trade edition, set to drop later this year, or the few signed versions which will immediately pop up on the bookflipping market. So plan accordingly.
Avalanche Limited Edition, now $450-750 plus shipping [specificobject.com]

Who Knew There Was Writing Inside Those Aspen Magazines?

Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, “Configurations of the New World,”, papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as presented at the Aspen Design Conference. Here are a couple of quotes that caught my eye.
From “The Victory of Technique over Content,” a rumination/condemnation of the 1964 New York World’s Fair by architect and editor of Progressive Architecture, Jan C. Rowan:

The New York World’s Fair, in its planning, and its buildings, and its exhibits, shows us only what we already know: That we are creating very fast an ugly, inconvenient, depressing environment–full of gadgetry–that can occasionally hypnotize us through its razzle-dazzle and glitter, but, lacking any significant content, leaves us, in the long run, nervous, uneasy, and empty.

And from the late Interior Secretary and ur-environmentalist Stewart Udall’s optimistically titled essay, “The New Conservation Can Work,” comes this:

If we have reached the point where good design means efficiency, where investing in a good design or in a scheme of beauty is the best investment a businessman can make, we may have reached the point that Walter Gropius speculated on a few years ago when he said we wouldn’t really begin to build with greatness in this country until we had the right combination of politicians, artists, scientists, and enlightened businessmen. Maybe this is coming about.

Aspen 1, remember, was published in 1965, while the body of Park Avenue was still warm, with Gropius’s gargantuan urban disaster, the Pan Am Building, stuck in its heart. So maybe not.

Have You Seen Me?

Maybe that should be, “Hast du mich gesehen?”
Do you have Andrea Fraser’s Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:

I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER’S Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 soon after it was published in 1983. At the time, it was the most expensive book I had ever bought. I read it from cover to cover and made lots of notes in the margins. It had a profound influence on my development as an artist. Ten years later, I included my copy in Services, a project I organized with Helmut Draxler in Germany examining the social and economic conditions of post-studio art. It was stolen from the show. If whoever took the book is reading this now, I beg you to return it to me. It is something I treasured, and the loss of it still makes me sad.

Fraser doesn’t specify where her book was stolen. According to her writeup for the show, hosted at ada’web [whoa, blast from the past], the project originated in “Kunstraum der Universitat Luneburg, January 29 – February 20, 1994. It toured to Stuttgart, Munich, Geneva, Vienna, and Hasselt, Belgium.” According to Fraser’s post-exhibition assessment of the project [sic], the first stop was a seminar format, so I imagine the book was taken from one of the later, less populated venues.
In place of your stolen version, perhaps you would consider downloading a PDF of Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 from the other awesomely palindromic art website, Ubu? It doesn’t have Fraser’s marginalia, of course, but perhaps if you return it, she’d consider making a copy?
update: Wow, Fraser’s entire Artforum article on Asher is a great read. She makes a strong case for his comprehensive reimagining of artistic production outside the commodity-centered market model; she implicates art critics’ ignoring of economic aspects of artmaking and presentation as complicity with the market-centric system; and she delivers a thorough refutation of Benjamin Buchloh, a too-rare treat.

Waiting For Gopnik

Hello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art?
Never mind, Blake Gopnik is here to correct this unforgivable travesty of public relations and/or poor Nexis searching skillz:

It has been two decades since Remy’s stunning debut, and this article is the first one in the English-speaking world to try to take his measure.
“We are walking a line: ‘Is it art or design?’ ” Remy says. And they are walking it almost alone.

Yes, alone except for the designer of every single item between Milan, Miami, and Moss–and half the people who passed through Utrecht in the last twenty years! But please continue, o design historian!

Even most avant-garde designers have come up with new models for comfort and ease — turning away from Victorian velvet-on-oak, for instance, to embrace Bauhaus, then Danish modern. What few designers have done is work to abolish comfort itself as a design principle, in favor of objects that disconcert. That’s the Remy and Veenhuizen model.
…
You can still order one of Remy’s drawer-piles from the Dutch distributor Droog, which sponsored some of his early work and has become much better known than Remy himself.

“Distributor”? “sponsored”? Droog began as a design collective, with Remy as one of its early members. His drawer-piles [sic], aka the You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory bundled bureau, dated 1991 and exhibited in Droog’s Milan debut in 1993, was the collective’s signature design.
I don’t begrudge Remy or any early Droog participants for seeking to build their own brands outside the increasingly corporatized Droog umbrella. In the last several years, Remy’s been using language to distance Droog from his design and process, by saying they “commissioned” the dresser. Now it’s “sponsored.” But only someone completely ignorant of the history of design generally–and of Dutch design and Droog specifically–could write something as wrong as this.
Dutch design team Tejo Remy and Ren & [sic] Veenhuizen mount first U.S. ‘solo’ show [washpost]
image and completely contradictory explanation of Droog and Remy via moma.org