Burning Waymos, 2025, Sam McKinniss painting of a painting on a Waymo at Law & Order at Deitch
Sam McKinniss’s show, Law & Order, at Deitch, is so good, and it’s been extended. There’s a little postcard-sized booklet with a text by Todd von Ammon, too. “The artist does not copy the image, but performs cosmetic surgery on it…” I am cursing the expiring qr code link to the checklist, which I thought I so craftily saved, so who knows what this perfect little painting is called? [update: hero Ian who screenshot the checklist knows. thank you]
Actually, they start by lamenting the lack of issues or consensus of “ideas the community of artists was grappling with,” and then they go deep into what turns out to have been one of those big ideas: image vs. object, and the specific physical, psychological, and emotional experience an artwork can elicit. Which, it turns out, it intrinsic to how both artists work:
In 1995 Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake organized In A Different Light, one of the first exhibitions of 20th century art exploring the queer experience, at the Berkeley Art Museum.
The first section of the show was “Void,” with works “suggesting blankness, absence, and loss.” And the first work on the checklist—which I uploaded to the Internet Archive because it was somehow not there before—is David Tudor’s 1989 reconstruction of the score for John Cage’s 4’33”.
It’s one of the works which “suggest the emptiness of what might be called a state of ‘pre- being’ that precedes the birth of a new identity. Seen negatively, such works evoke the repressive alienation of the ‘closet.’ Seen in a more positive light, they represent a blank slate of unlimited possibility.”
Cage’s original score for 4’33” was dedicated to Tudor, who performed it in 1952. It was made in traditional Western musical notation, with a tempo and length to indicate the duration of each of the work’s three movements. Tudor gave the score back to Johns when he was preparing another copy, this time in graphic notation, which he dedicated to Irwin Kremen. Then Tudor’s copy was lost, and so Kremen’s copy, from 1953 is the earliest surviving score. David Platzker acquired it for MoMA in 2012.
the first movement of John Cage’s 4’33” in David Tudor’s 1989 reconstructed score, 12.5 x 9.3 in., via James Pritchett
Tudor’s reconstruction of the original 4’33” score seems related to the differences introduced in published versions. It measured 60 quarter notes at 4/4 time to be 2.5 cm, or roughly 1 inch of score, so the first 32 seconds of the 33 second movement fit on one 9.3-inch wide page. I think that makes Tudor’s score ten pages long. [Somehow Edition Peters needed the Getty’s help to recover this reconstruction for inclusion in the current, Cage Centennial edition of 4’33”. And they still reduced the page size and mooted Tudor’s calculations.]
Lemcke has made a lot of Cage-inspired work, particularly in Cage’s chance-operations texts and mesostic poems, but also involving the score of Perilous Night (1944), Cage’s pivotal chance-related composition for prepared piano, which also coincided with Cage’s pivot from his wife Xenia to Merce Cunningham. But I can’t find any mention of Lemcke doing an erased Cage score. And Lemcke’s work on the exhibition checklist, right next to Tudor’s, is Untitled (Performance Score for Percussion), 1977, which sounds related to a different series Lemcke was working on over several years.
I’ve reached out to confirm, but if an Erased Cage Score doesn’t exist already, it must be realized immediately, because it sounds absolutely obvious and fantastic. [a few minutes later update] Lemcke confirms that though Cage was an influence on his early work, and particularly his exploration of chance operations and graphic notation, the work shown at Berkeley was not 4’33” related, and he has not erased a Cage score. So now I will.
It would complete the circle, or perhaps spiral outward, from Rauschenberg’s early influence on Cage, who felt the White Paintings of 1951 gave him permission to write “the silent piece” he’d been contemplating for several years already. And the painting Rauschenberg gave to Cage, which he then overpainted black when he was crashing at Cage’s apartment.
From a more limited vantage point, this could have been seen as Blake misremembering, when it is clear that artist prophets walk among us, and they were manifesting Erased Cage Score into being. It should not have taken this long.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Still Life), 1989, stack of light blue 8.5 x 11 in. paper with an ideal height of 6 in., as installed at Terrain Gallery in 1990, image: Armando Rascon via FG-T Fndn
I was going to write that in early 1990 Berkeley radiologist Robert Shimshak and his wife Marion Brenner bought all the Felix Gonzalez-Torres works in San Francisco. Which was three: two puzzles and a little stack. But that’s not quite true.
Those three were all included in a group show, This Symphony Will Remain Always Unfinished, organized by Armando Rascon at Terrain Gallery, the art space on Folsom Street he operated with Peter Wright. The show ran from 8 February through 10 March and included works by Gonzalez-Torres, Lucia Noquiera, Jessica Diamond, and Nayland Blake. [It took me a while to figure out that the show has lived in Felix’s exhibition history with an inverted title, This Symphony Will Always Remain Unfinished, while the other three artists and Rascon match the contemporaneous gallery listings.]
And it is true that the Shimshak/Brenners bought them, because they are now sellingthemall at Christie’s. The text on “Untitled” (Still Life), “Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Blue Flowers 1984 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1987 Interferon 1989 Ross 1984,” is nearly identical to Felix’s first frieze portrait, which he’d just exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in December 1989.
But as I was trying to figure out who else was in the Terrain show, and how Felix’s work came to be in Terrain’s show, which I’d understood was Felix’s first show in San Francisco, I discovered that it was not. The first show, that is.
In their 2016 AAA oral history with Alex Fialho, Nayland Blake talked at length about the contemporary art world’s recognition of a fuller range of art by queer artists and about the queer experience. While making and showing art themself, Blake was also working at the New Langton Arts, an artist-run space also on Folsom Street, where he met Felix and Julie Ault when they came to SF in 1989:
So I was working in a curatorial capacity, you know, I mean Armando at Terrain did, I think, Felix’s first show in San Francisco, but, you know, I included, you know, one of Felix’s stacks in a show, I think the next year, at New Langton. And so we were—so I mean in those situations when I was meeting with people about looking at artists that we could show or that we could bring in, I was also telling them about San Francisco artists.
But that show Blake curated, The Word: text – object – ontology, opened on 25 January 1990, and ran through 17 February. So not only was Blake the first to show Felix’s work in the Bay Area, for nine days in February 1990, there were four works by Felix on view within two blocks of Folsom Street.
[an hour later and after checking the David Deitcher interview tab I had open update: NEVER MIND] Blake was the first to show a Felix stack in the Bay Area, but he remembered correctly that it came a year after Armando Rascon. Because there was a whole other group show with Felix’s work at Terrain in January 1989: Matter/Antimatter: Defects in the Model included two photostats and a rub-on transfer work. In 2013 David Deitcher recalled this show was one of the first times he’d seen Felix’s work.]
“Untitled” (1989/90), installation view from Oct. 2015-Jan. 2016, at the Metropolitan Art Centre, Belfast, image: MAC, Belfast via FG-T Fndn
And the stack in Blake’s show, “Untitled” (1989/90), was actually a double stack, with two texts: “Somewhere better than this place” and “Nowhere better than this place.” And it was realized in two places at once: in the center of Felix’s inaugural show at Andrea Rosen’s new gallery in SoHo, which opened on 20 January, and then, five days later, in San Francisco. And it was certainly not bought by the Shimshak/Brenners, because it was bought by the de la Cruzes.
Unlike the de la Cruzes’ stacks, which have been shown a lot, both in Miami and on the road, “Untitled” (Still Life) has only been exhibited rarely, and off the beaten path. So Felix stack compleatists, beat a path to Christie’s this week, because “Untitled” (Still Life) goes on rare public view tomorrow (9/24).
An intriguing work by Nayland Blake is coming up for auction. Double Restraint (1990) is a canvas and steel structure, object, sculpture, outfit? It’s a strait jacket built for two, but it hangs on the wall like a kinky Richard Tuttle.
The auction house says it’s from a prominent West Coast collection. When a Blake Double Restraint (1990) belonging to Ruth and Jacob Bloom was installed at the Hammer Museum in LA, it was apparently four feet taller and wider. Maybe it shrank in the wash? Are there two? From the buckles and hoods, they look like the same size.
Nayland Blake, Single Restraint, 1990, canvas and steel, 96 x 58 in., image: naylandblake.net
Blake’s 1990 show at Petersburg Gallery in SoHo included both [one of?] Double Restraint and Single Restraint (above). Whether they wrap up like a knuckle bandaid or a burrito, these Restraint works insinuate bodies that aren’t there, which could be either an invitation, a threat, or an elegy.
Domenico Veneziano/Washington Monument, 1984, newspaper on NGA postcard, via Peter Freeman back in the day
Though a couple we included in his Guggenheim retrospective in 1996, most of Kelly’s 400 or so postcards made between 1949 and 2005 have never been shown or published. Each venue will show a distinct selection of 150 of the works, and the catalogue reproduces 216 postcards at full scale. It is a veritable facsimile object blockbuster–but I still want to see the real things in person.
This tweet from artist Nayland Blake, who heads ICP-Bard’s advanced photography MFA program, has been sticking with me all day. Blake’s participating in a symposium Friday at Pratt with some other folks I know and respect a lot, on the nature and challenges of art school.
At first Blake’s panel topic, “What is the role of art school in a market driven art world?” sounds like appropriate self-flagellation, and since William Powhida’s also participating, I could imagine who’s wielding the whip. But Bill’s not just an iconoclast, and Blake’s tweet gives hope for a constructive panel, if not quite yet hope for a better world.
Davdi Ross is in the morning, and BHQFU is in the afternoon, so it sounds like a full day. I hope it’s streaming. Situation: Art School symposium at Pratt, March 6, 2015 [pratt.edu]
Nayland Blake just posted this on his always eye-opening tumblr Knee-deep in the Flooded Victory. Abstract in Concrete is a 10-minute short film by John Arvonio, which pairs reflections of neon signs in the rain puddles of Times Square with a jazz/classical score by Frank Fields. The date given on this recent YouTube upload is 1954. And it is credited to the United States Information Agency.
