rh quaytman – greg.org

R.H. Quaytman Book Talk

A couple of weeks ago Miguel Abreu Gallery hosted a launch event for Book, the second volume of R.H. Quaytman’s catalogue raisonné/artist book, which covers her work through 2022.

I’ve always been interested in Quaytman’s accounts of being the child of a painter, and of inheriting the legacy—and full storage spaces—of her father Harvey Quaytman.

But that is not important now, because now all I want to hear about is the incredibly dynamic of being on a panel with your mom. Quaytman’s mother, the artist-turned-poet Susan Howe, absolutely ran away with this conversation, even as she managed to (mostly) keep the focus on her daughter and her book.

Which, she cannot believe she called her book Book, what was that about? Just when you think the family dynamic has ebbed, and the conversation has slipped back into typical panel mode, everyone jumps on the pile of discursive rubble trying to figure out what Benjamin meant with the Angel of History.

I hope there is a mother-daughter podcast in the works, because I’ve got $5/month burning a hole in my pocket rn.

R.H. Quaytman, Ones, Chapter 0.2, has been extended through July 12, 2025 [miguelabreugallery]
Previously, related: R.H. Quaytman, Paul Klee, and Martin Luther walk into a bar

R.H. Quaytman, Paul Klee & Martin Luther Walk Into A Bar

Paul Klee, *Angelus Novus*, 1920, oil transfer on Japan paper mounted on engraving on cardboard, 31.8 x 24.2 cm, though Quaytman points out the Israel Museum’s given dimensions only relate to the top layer, so the engraving had not been considered as part of the work. photo: Elie Posner

I’ve had some tabs open for six months about R.H. Quaytman’s work relating to her discovery of an 19th century etching of Martin Luther underneath Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus. That was when I saw a vitrine in Quaytman’s exhibition at Glenstone related to Ch. 29: Haqaq, Quaytman’s Nov. 2015 show at Miguel Abreu, which was a reworked version of her 2015 solo show at the Tel Aviv Museum.

I am trying to make some sense of them by neatly stacking this pile of rubble at the angel’s feet.

The Real World: Orchard

R.H. Quaytman, *Orchard Spreadsheet*, 2009, inkjet, ed. 10, 82×51 in., published by MER Paper Kunstahalle, Gent, which won Specific Object’s Publication of the Year

We had a small kid and were living in two cities, so I barely made it to a handful of their shows, but Orchard has always felt like one of the defining presences in my art life. I knew some of the members, so I felt drawn to it, but not well enough to really get sucked in, alas. It was new and wild—for being limited-term, historically aware, and not-so-commercial, which doesn’t seem like much to type it, but it was really a lot—and people were always talking about it.

But not like this. Frieze has an oral history of Orchard, and it blows my mind how conflicted and contentious it sounds:

R.H. Quaytman I remember there being two factions: the group that included me, Rhea [Anastas] and Andrea [Fraser]; and the one with Jeff [Preiss], Nicolás [Guagnini] and Karin [Schneider]. Nic had the idea to open an office; Andrea wanted to open a gallery and be the dealer. So, we ended up meeting.

This is the true story
of twelve art world people
who chose to start a gallery
work together
and fifteen years later
to find out what happens
when people stop being polite
and start getting real.

So to someone teetering on the other side of the fence from Orchard, none of the conflicts were apparent by the time they were all putting on their shows. It already felt so transparent at the time, that in 2009, when Rebecca Quaytman published Orchard Spreadsheet, a three-year ledger of the gallery’s finances—in reverse chronological order, like a blog—as a print edition, the only surprise was that, contrary to what my art star-fixated mind had originally assumed, it hadn’t been primarily underwritten by Dan Graham.

And while Quaytman’s work was the huge discovery for me from Orchard—and, it sounds like, for her, too—to learn Fraser wanted to “open a gallery and be the dealer” makes excruciatingly perfect sense.

If anything, her responses here still show her extraordinary awareness of how the dynamics and structures of art and art history operate, and that includes art magazine oral histories. Orchard felt like The Real Art World, and it was, but it was not only that, which feels worth remembering.

Remembering Orchard, New York’s Iconic Artist-Run Gallery [frieze]
Orchard [47orchard.org]
Orchard Spreadsheet, Specific Object’s 2009 Publication of The Year [specificobject]
Download a PDF version of Orchard Spreadsheet [specific object]

On The Nightmare Of The Rack

Kriston Capps’ tweet to Powhida about art and immortality instantly reminded me of RH Quaytman’s conversation with Steel Stillman, which ran in Art in America last summer, and which upended my own comfortable memory of first encountering Quaytman’s little storage rack sculpture back in 2008:

SS For “Ark, Chapter 10,” which was the three-person show you organized at the end of your time at Orchard, you made paintings that related to Orchard’s history, and displayed several of them on storage racks similar to ones you have here in your studio. The display of paintings became a sculpture [From One O to Another].
RHQ I felt I needed to acknowledge–within the structure of the pieces themselves–the fact that I would be showing my own works, becoming, in effect, my own dealer. The storage racks, like the racks in a typical gallery’s back room, enabled visitors to pull out the paintings the way a dealer might, when showing them to prospective clients.
SS The racks addressed the nightmare, which perhaps all artists have had, that their work will never be seen.
RHQ Making the storage-rack pieces reminded me of the trauma of putting my stepfather’s and father’s works in storage after they died. Those experiences and the questions they raised–about artists’ estates, and about the life of the work itself once the artist has gone–left a big impression on me.
SS In 2008, you made a book, Allegorical Decoys, whose centerpiece is an essay you wrote about the development of your work. Having been your own dealer, you became, in effect, your own historian and publisher.
RHQ I realized instinctively that, in some sense, the paintings wouldn’t exist unless they were written about and collected. Otherwise, they would be like trees falling in the forest with nobody there to hear them. Writing that essay was an opportunity not just to reflect on my practice, but to locate my work within a larger critical conversation on my own terms.

[image: [From One O to Another], via anaba]
Features | RH Quaytman, June 2010 [artinamericamagazine]
Previously, Jan. 2010: Nice Rack! RH Quaytman on MoMAPS1’s blog

Nice Rack! R.H. Quaytman On MoMA/PS1’s Blog

So jealous. MoMA bought R.H. Quaytman’s awesome little storage rack of paintings, Iamb: Chapter 12, Excerpts and Exceptions, with Painting Rack, which the artist filled over the course of eight years, and showed in 2009 at Miguel Abreu. [Abreu, whose whole program is pretty much en fuego, had two of my favorite shows last year: Quaytman’s and Liz Deschenes.]
Before that, she showed a storage rack full of paintings at Orchard [I miss them], in 2008, which is where Anaba got this photo. Then, it–or the show, anyway, was called Chapter 10, Ark, and it had more paintings in it, and you could pull them out like books. These racks are the most significant works of a blindingly smart artist whose paintings seem designed to actively thwart significance, at least individually.
P&S Curatorial Assistant Paulina Pobocha has a very nice writeup of it at Inside/Out, MoMA/PS1’s forum-style blog.
Few people know it, unfortunately, but MoMA was the first museum anywhere to have a blog. Back in 2004, while I was co-chair of the Jr. Associates, we pushed hard for over a year to get permission to start a blog for our group’s education and fundraising activities. There were even raging debates over whether we could call it a “blog.” [No, it turned out.] It went well while we had a Museum employee dedicated to it, but when she went to grad school, it kind of fizzled.
It’s good to see they’ve finally got some sweet blog momentum going.
R.H. Quaytman’s Storage Rack: An Archive of Images and Associations [moma.org]