Last Sold: 8/6/2018, Zestimate®: None, Zillow screenshot
Until 2018 Edisto Island meant one thing in the contemporary art world. Then after, it meant another. Or rather, it meant two things. On August 6, 2018, Cameron Rowland bought an acre of land that had once been part of an enslaver’s plantation; then was part of a “forty acres and a mule” Freedmen’s reparations order; and then was almost immediately repossessed by the former enslavers. Rowland bought the land and placed restrictive covenants on its deed that remove any use or monetary value. The land and the deed constitute their work, Depreciation, and Dia just announced stewardship of it.
The work comprises the land and the deed, but that is not all. Depreciation is owned by 8060 Maxie Rd, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation Rowland established to execute the work. The company is named after the land’s address on a road named after the enslavers. Rowland maintains the corporation, and thus ownership of the work, and has put it on extended loan with Dia.
I think I understand most of the issues around the Restitution Study Group’s unsuccessful attempts to get an emergency restraining order to stop the official transfer of the Smithsonian’s Benin Bronzes to the Nigerian government–everything except the timing. Why is this storydropping now, almost two months after a judge denied the motion? The RSG is insisting reporters note that its lawsuit is still active, even though the judge’s refusal of the ERO seems to find every argument in the Smithsonian’s favor. Going public now is somehow part of a strategy to amend their complaint and add new theories to the public debate over what to do with Benin Bronzes. Or more interestingly, to add a new constituency to that public and new voices to that debate.
Cameron Rowland, Payroll, 2016, four tables with backstory, installed at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
A friend recently surprised me with his report from a tour of the art collection at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. It is frankly remarkable, thoughtful, and very up-to-date. It includes work by many well-known contemporary artists while mostly managing to avoid the sense of brand name-chasing vapidity that plagues many corporate collections. [There are Mark Grotjahn prints, tho.]
My friend’s stories of how people react to and deal with very contemporary art in the professional/academic setting of a business school are awesome, and go way beyond “Art? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯“. There’s the difficulty in filling a wall with SFW Wolfgang Tillmans; the Tacita Dean stills of disaster movie endings that are too depressing for the recruiting lounge, so they were moved to the PhD students’ offices; Claire Fontaine’s neon, “Foreigners Everywhere,” which is harsh enough in Chinese translation to make every prospective Chinese student uneasy. [Apparently only one artist with work in the collection has visited so far, which seems bonkers. It seems like an unusually engaging and sophisticated context for seeing art working beyond the white cube community.]
Attention: Do not clean these desks [which are art furniture]Anyway, my hands-down favorite piece has to be Cameron Rowland’s Payroll, which consists of four grimy desks the artist bought at government surplus auction from the NYC Office of Payroll Administration, after their own headcount had decreased by 41.
Rowland’s work forefronts the human implications of otherwise invisible elements of our capitalist, financial, and carceral systems with such effectiveness, I’m surprised he hasn’t been invited to lecture at the business school yet. He could also talk about requiring collectors to use the Projanksy/Siegelaub Artist’s Reserved Rights contract, or of renting his work instead of selling it.
The subtle tonal shifts between the requests to students and the instructions to maintenance staff should be the start of the school’s poetry collection.
After reading Tim Schneider’s recent article about the market views of Danh Vo’s work, I realized I hadn’t written about Vo’s Guggenheim show.
Tim’s point is well taken, and borne out in the show: Vo makes both sexy, shiny, collector bait (gold-leafed flags & alphabets, Statue of Liberty fragments) and meaning-laden but head-scratchingly unaesthetic cultural detritus (the stuffing from Robert McNamara’s chair, the Unabomber’s typewriter). The typical market dynamics of art stardom readily attend to the former, while posing a challenge to the latter.
Parts is parts: The White House Years of Robert McNamara, Lot 20, 23 October 2012 image: Sotheby’s
At least that’s how it looks on the secondary market. Vo’s global network of top-flight dealers know a thing or two about placing “difficult” work with “connoisseurs.” Those McNamara chairs, purchased at Sotheby’s for $146,000, were promptly stripped for parts, which were sold as separate works to nine of Marian Goodman’s most well-cultivated private and institutional clients. And some of the wonkiest Gothic and Hellenic scrap mashups with the grossest Exorcist titles are in the collection of Francois Pinault. Then Vo installed them in the Dogana alongside scrap metal rented [rented!] from Cameron Rowland and plastic tarps David Hammons dragged into Mnuchin’s joint from the street.
Two things that stuck with me from the Guggenheim, and any time I see one of Vo’s spare, deliberate installations: he makes almost as many objects as he shops, and he shops a lot.
Just a few of the editions, mostly photogravures, Danh Vo has produced with Niels Borch Jensen starting in 2010
Vo makes a lot of very interesting editions, which get equal treatment in his shows, even if they don’t garner equal attention. An easy place to start looking is the sheaf of photogravures Vo has produced with Niels Borch Jensen. There was a burst of activity in 2010, starting with Joseph Carrier’s photos of Vietnam; various family snapshots; and a candid photo of the artist who, at that moment, would have been his ex’s ex. Loaded/awkward. Anyway, seven of the 12 prints in the screencap above are in the show, and that’s still just the tip of an iceberg.
Danh Vo, Seasons Greetings, 2011, ed. 24, for the Fredericianum, image: newarteditions, which doesn’t have it.
The first Vo edition I regret not getting was Seasons Greetings, made for his show at the Fredericianum in Kassel. A gift box contains a T-shirt from the Statue of Liberty; a coffee mug with a Barbara Bush quote on it from the GHWB Library shop; a book about Ted Kaczynski Harvard sued out of print; and just when you think the loaded-souvenir-shopping-as-practice has gone too far, there is a card on which Vo typed out the name of the show, JULY, IV, MDCCLXXIV– using Kaczynski’s typewriter.
I started thinking about these editions because Tim Schneider hadn’t mentioned them, at least not directly. Tim broke out the auction performance for Vo’s works: of 52 pieces to come up for sale, 13 were not gilded cardboard or Statue of Liberty chunks, and 6 of these 13 were bought in. And two of those six, I realized, were the same piece.
Danh Vo, Untitled, 2009, two Imari plates previously owned by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, ed. 7/12, not sold by Blake Byrne at Phillips NY, Feb 2016.
Two examples of Untitled, 2009 (above), from an edition of 12, had come up for auction: one at Phillips in 2016, from Daniel Buchholz (est. $8,000-12,000); and another, from Bortolozzi, in Christie’s London in 2015 (est. £10,000 – £15,000). [Christie’s deletes webpages for unsold lots, so unless you have a print catalogue, or an artnet database, you’ll need an Internet Archive.]
Untitled (2009) in 2010, hanging in Danh Vo’s kitchen. He opened his apartment as a venue for the Berlin Biennale. image: kunsten.nu
When Vo turned his apartment into an exhibition site for the 2010 Berlin Biennale, they were hanging in the kitchen [above]. And before that, in a Summer group show in 2009, Daniel Buchholz showed them in Köln. That credit line also includes an auction catalogue for the estate of Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, which was unmentioned anywhere else.
Lot 3498: Lyman Lemnitzer’s Japanese dinnerware, as purchased in 2007 by Danh Vo for $625+premium, image:liveauctioneers.com
Which immediately got me wondering. And sure enough, there it is: 2007, Alderfer Auction in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. Among the various lots of Japanese Imari ware Gen. Lemnitzer had accumulated were twolots of twelve matching plates in slightly different sizes. They totaled, with premium, around $1200. Even as a barely emerging artist, I’m sure he netted out.
How low can you Vo? Lot 0402: 2pc Imari porcelain plates, looking very Vo-ish, sold for $60 in West Palm Beach, image: liveauctioneers.com
The super weird thing, though I didn’t know how weird yet, was that the day after I was searching for Vo’s 11-year-old sale, a near identical pair of Imari plates was coming up for auction in West Palm Beach. The pattern was identical, the marks identical, the sizes were very slightly different, but maybe not out of the auction houses’ margin of error. The auction estimate was $40-60. Even by the cruelest market calculus, that seemed like an unlikely price curve.
There must be thousands of plates like this, I thought, wrongly. A search through almost ten thousand auctions for Imari porcelain plates turned up only one that matched the Lemnitzer plates Vo bought and the two in front of me. [Sidebar: there is too much stuff in this world.] Could this pair be an overlooked Vo edition? If it was, could it be rescued? More interestingly, if it wasn’t, did it matter?
The auratic weight of provenance, history, culture, and memory are at the crux of Vo’s work. He buys the objects he buys because of these associations, and he puts them in an art context, where their backstory operates like an informational dye packet that explodes when you read a wall text, irrevocably staining the object in your mind, if not your eye. You can complain about the inertness or opacity of Vo’s objects, and their reliance on explanations, but I’m pretty sure he dgaf. And by the time you realize it, it’s already too late; Vo has changed the way you see–and think about–what he’s put before you.
So can that connection be severed? And if severed, can it be reattached? If it never existed, can it be conjured by an identical object? Vo spends an awful lot of time shopping. It’s probably the main part of his practice, besides chopping. These intangible issues, evocations, and associations hover around every transaction we make; it’s how brands work, how fashion works, how art works. Vo transposes his objects from one sphere–the historical, political, or personal–to another, but every time we trawl through eBay or a museum shop, so do we. Consumption and the mechanisms and networks of capitalism implicate us all.
Whether these Floridian plates once sat on the shelf of the American father of the Vietnam War is immaterial. Because now these plates evoke Danh Vo. And that is something.
If you bought these plates, please know that you only did so because the liveauctioneers app gave me the false impression that I had placed a winning bid, and then gave no warning before it closed the sale. While you enjoy your plates, I will enjoy thinking about them. [But if you want to unload them, HMU.]
