richard hamilton – greg.org

Shame, OTOH

Richard Hamilton, *Kent State*, 1970, 13-stencil screenprint, 727×1020 mm, ed. 3034/5000, selling at Bonham’s 26 July 2024

Speaking of mediated political violence, in 1970 Richard Hamilton photographed a TV screen showing a BBC news report of the National Guard shooting at Kent State.

When he decided ‘that art could help to keep the shame in our minds,’ Hamilton made a 13-layer screenprint of an image of freshman Dean Kahler, who was left paralyzed by the gunshots. The print preserves the shape of the television screen and, published in a signed edition of 5,000 aspired to the ubiquitous reach of broadcast TV itself.

The example above, 3034/5000, is being sold—again—at Bonham’s with another Hamilton work, an offset print of Marcel Duchamp, at a slightly lower estimate than the last time.

A Kent State was also included in Galerie Buchholz’s 2022 show of Richard Hamilton works in New York. They’re always available for whatever people feel like paying at the moment. If only shame were so easy to come by.

A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein for Mark

Richard Hamilton, *A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein*, 1964, 23×26 in, screenprint, given to Mark Lancaster and sold at Sotheby’s for $4,064.

During his 1963 visit to the US to see Duchamp’s Pasadena retrospective, Richard Hamilton also picked up a Roy Lichtenstein poster/lithograph from Castelli. When he got back to the UK, he enlarged a tiny section to make his own two-color print edition, A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein for…, which he liked to give away to friends.

Today A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein for Mark sold at Sotheby’s, part of the collection of the artist Mark Lancaster, who studied with Hamilton, and who shot the photos for Hamilton’s translation of The Green Box. [His copy of it sold today, too.] Lancaster worked in Warhol’s Factory in 1964 while working on his dissertation on Stieglitz, and from 1972 until 1985, worked as Jasper Johns’ assistant and business manager [a lot of nice Johns prints in the sale, btw.] and as artistic director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He somehow survived all that and only died in 2021. Gary Comenas did an amazing interview with Mark Lancaster for warholstars.org in 2004.

Marcel Duchamp’s Slightly Smaller Banner

Duchamp Large Glass Printed Banner at the Hirshhorn Museum. Technically, this is the back, but the view with people through it was nice, and the opposite view, with stanchions across a doorway during a preview, was not.

When Pontus Hulten , and then Richard Hamilton wanted to show Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass but couldn’t, they made full-size replicas (actually Ulf Linde and Per Olof Ulfvedt made Hulten’s, based on photographs), which the artist eventually showed up and signed, “Certifié pour copie / conforme / Marcel Duchamp.”

And now those copies don’t travel, either. And there are other copies, but they’re non-conforme, I guess. So when the Hirshhorn Museum wanted to show the Large Glass in the context of related works from a large promised gift from Barbara and Aaron Levine, they faced a challenge.

Which was solved by an exhibition designer, who suggested printing a photo of the work at scale, and suspending it in the gallery. Acetate didn’t work. A free-floating polyester scrim didn’t work. But a scrim held taut with discrete cables and clamps worked just great. Evelyn Hankins, who curated the show, as well as the Hirshhorn’s recent Bob Irwin retrospective, which sent a giant, site-specific, taut scrim wall through the gallery, could only laugh.

Duchamp Large Glass banner detail, Hirshhorn Museum

I love it, so much that I want it. Unfortunately, the Association Marcel Duchamp does not want me to have it. Or anyone, for that matter. The Association, run by Duchamp’s (step-)grandchildren approved the Hirshhorn’s production of a banner (not a replica, and not, it turns out, full-size, but a couple of inches smaller) from the Philadelphia Museum’s (two-part, not entirely aligned) photodocumentation of the work, if they get it when the show’s over. The Hirshhorn, which will soon house one of the world’s major collections of minor Duchamps, prefers to be on good terms with the Duchamp estate rather than let me run out of the museum with the banner under my coat. Go figure.

STANCHION-FREE UPDATE: This looks very nice. esp. the opacity [image: thanks, mom]

Previously, related: After he interviewed Duchamp for the BBC Hamilton took home the full-scale transparency of the Large Glass they’d made. Later he not only made a replica of the Large Glass; he made a full-scale diagram edition of it, which is my favorite Large Glass replica of all. The Philadelphia Museum published a poster edition of it, and also, I just learned, a shower curtain, which is somehow a gift shop item but also in the collection. Putting the appropriate in appropriation since [checks notes to see when, exactly, the more uptight grandchildren took over the Association].

Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection is on view at the Hirshhorn through October 2020 [hirshhorn.si.edu]

Through The Large Glass: Richard Hamilton’s Reframing of Marcel Duchamp, by Bryony Bery [tate.org.uk]

Better Read #014: Richard Hamilton, Five Tyres Remoulded (1972)

Richard Hamilton invitation with 1951 Technique et Architecture illustration used for Five Tyres – abandoned (1964) and Five Tyres remoulded (1972)
Sometimes I hit a wall while writing, and retyping someone else’s text helps get me going again.
So here is another installment of Better Read, a series of mp3 files from greg.org in which an interesting, under-known, or hard-to-find art-related text is read by a computer.
This text by Richard Hamilton accompanies Five Tyres remoulded, 1972 relief and print edition created with Carl Solway and EYE Editions. Hamilton describes his attempt to replicate by hand a complicated photo illustration he’d clipped from a trade magazine. The image was from the 50s, the project began and was abandoned in 1963, then reinitiated in 1970 with the help of a computer. Besides the obviously interesting insights onto his own process, Hamilton’s text resonates with the history of early Pop, conceptual art, and even appropriation, as well as the inter-relation of art and technology.
Unless you had the portfolio itself, the text was only available in print in Studio International (1972, vol. 183, p. 276). Images of a first draft of the text were also included in a 2014 blog post by Carl Solway about his correspondence with Hamilton. So I’m sure having a computer-generated voice recording of it expands its availability tremendously.

Richard Hamilton, Dimensional Data, screen print on mylar, 60x85cm, from Five Tyres remoulded (1972), via swann

[2022 UPDATE: In September and October 2022, Galerie Buchholz included a Five Tyres remoulded portfolio in an exhibition of Hamilton’s work. The single text included in this work differs from the longer, two-part version from Solway’s archive. An image of the portfolio version is below.]

play or dl Be tter_Read_014_Richard_Hamilton_Five_Tyres_Remoulded_20170624.mp3 [dropbox greg.org, mp3 9:55, 14.3mb]
Related: Digging in the Archives: Richard Hamilton [solwaygallery.com]
Five Tyres remoulded (1972) [tate.org.uk]

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On Hamilton’s Large Glass: ‘History and materials change theoretically as well as physically.’

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Batchelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-23, reconstruction by Richard Hamilton 1965-6, lower panel remade 1985″ image:tate
The new issue of Tate Papers is out, and it includes a great article [actually a dissertation chapter] by Bryony Bery detailing the creation, authorship, history, and conservation of Richard Hamilton’s 1965-6 reconstruction of Duchamp’s Large Glass.

The task of organising a Duchamp retrospective outside America posed many problems for Hamilton. A high proportion of the artist’s extant work was fragile, lost, broken or unable to travel, making them, in one sense, prime candidates for replication. Reconstructing Duchamp’s Large Glass was, according to critic Michael Bracewell, ‘a technical and intellectual operation of staggering complexity – at once devoutly, almost perversely concerned with the practicalities of decipherment and craft, yet at the same time inhabiting empyrean realms of psychology, aesthetic philosophy and enacted myth’. Hamilton’s work remains a great accomplishment within twentieth-century art history. As a case study it is also an exceptional example of how replicas have been understood more recently in museums and the implications for conservation treatments today. It represents a prime example of the problems regarding the ethics and transparency of replicas, partly because it has been deemed more successful than other comparable examples. Indeed, as well as offering a new way of looking at or through the Large Glass, this paper has sought to demonstrate that replication itself is an historical problem, and that historical objects pose problems for and in replication.

I’ve been as beguiled by the recreations of Large Glass as I am by Duchamp’s original, not least because Duchamp signed and “certified” the first two-by Ulf Linde and Hamilton-as “copies conformes.” There are others out there, of course, and “as Duchamp expert Michael R. Taylor acknowledged in 1994, ‘there is nothing to suggest that this figure will not increase in the future’.”

Typo/Typography of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, 2001-2, but really 2003, ed. 5. image cropped from ag nsw
But Hamilton’s effort is singular, I think, for his long involvement with the artist, the work, the process, and the materials surrounding it. Hamilton translated The Green Box, created collaborative glass editions with Duchamp as part of the Large Glass production project. Also, Hamilton’s reproductions of Large Glass were used to create Jasper Johns & Duchamp’s props for the 1968 Merce Cunningham dance, Walkaround Time. And he went on to make full-scale, annotated diagram of Large Glass mounted on aluminum, which are just gorgeous, and which, since the edition of five [plus one, oh wait, there were two more editions of nine and five? what the] was snapped up by museums, I’ve been meaning to recreate myself someday somehow. Heads up, Michael R. Taylor.
Through The Large Glass: Richard Hamilton’s Reframing of Marcel Duchamp [tate.org.uk]
Typo Typography A Collaborative Print Studio Project [justpressp]
Previously, related:
Pour Copie Conforme
Johns, Merce, Duchamp: Walkaround Time
On Googling Richard Hamilton’s Map of Palestine

On Googling Richard Hamilton’s Maps of Palestine

I was looking around for something on Richard Hamilton this morning, when I Googled across a 2010 discussion between the artist and the human rights architect Eyal Weizman at Map Marathon, one of the Serpentine Gallery’s Marathon series. It was rather compelling for several reasons.
For one thing, their discussion of the political power of maps was frank and vivid in a way that I’m unaccustomed to in US media or art world forums. They talked specifically of Palestine & Israel, but I quickly took down two quotes that seemed very relevant to, of all things, Google:

the “double crime of colonialism is to colonize and to erase its own tracks” -Eyal Weizman paraphrasing Edward Said.
“All maps of a political kind have nothing to do with the people who occupy the territory being mapped.” -Richard Hamilton.

These both reminded me of Google Maps’ tendency I find so eerie, of Street View cameras and car/trikes to be erased from the panoramas. It turned out at the same time of Map Marathon, I had been working on this Walking Man project, where I followed the Google Trike through The Hague, its European debut, and collected the disembodied portrait fragments of the guy–who turned out to be a Google employee–walking alongside the entire trip.
It would have seemed a bit extreme at the time, but now it feels depressingly plausible, even urgent, to consider Google and its pervasive data collection as a political force and as a surveillance agent. Whatever the benefits of Google Maps–and they are real–we are still in the dark about just how transparent our information is, and how opaque the implications of Google’s deep information structure is. And we won’t know, and we won’t have open, informed debates and political discussion of it until our entire cultural landscape has been transformed by the company. And maybe not even then.

Richard Hamilton,Maps of Palestine, 2010
So this is what’s going through my head as Hamilton and Weizman discuss the artist’s contribution to the show, Maps of Palestine (2010), above. It was a pair of maps from 1947, and 2010, showing the shifts in political control between Israel and Palestine. It basically shows the impact of Israeli military retaliation in 1967 and subsequent settlement activity in occupied territory, and it appears to challenge the practicality of a two-state solution. [Indeed Weizman, upon whose groundbreaking crowdsourced mapping and analysis the newer map is based, believes only a one-state solution is feasible now, and that everyone’s just going to have to figure out how to get along. That’s a dark optimism of a sort, I guess.]
And then I start wondering, what, exactly, are these maps like? I mean, what did Hamilton actually make and show? Unsurprisingly, almost no one seemed able to talk about the maps as images or as objects; some people called them/it paintings, but nearly all the discussion was around their content and its meaning. Adrian Searle wrote about the Maps in The Guardian in the context of Hamilton’s art historical career and extensive political engagement. When a 4-map variation of Maps of Palestine was included in 4th Moscow Biennale, not only was there no image, or dimensions, the title and the very subject have been omitted. In the opening’s press announcement, director Peter Weibel stated, rather amazingly,

There will be quite a few so-called political works at the exhibition. For example, Gerhard Richter’s painting is not just a painting, it also refers to 09/11, and the piece by Richard Hamilton does not just show us a map of Israel, but it asks us questions about war.

Credit lines are a continuation of occupation by other means.

Maps of Palestine, 2011, 4th Moscow Biennale
see full-size img in Al-Madani’s flickr stream
The only image I can find online of the Moscow Maps is from flickr user Al-Madani, and it’s the first to show the work as a physical object. It curls up on the lower corners: an unmounted print of some kind.
It’s only after turning up Rachel Cooke’s interview with Hamilton in advance of his Serpentine show, “Modern Moral Matters,” which coincided with the Map Marathon, that I get my answer. Cooke’s entire anecdote is kind of golden, though:

Hamilton hands me a colour copy of a piece of new work that will hang at the Serpentine. It is a political piece, and consists of two maps: one of Israel/Palestine in 1947, one of Israel/Palestine in 2010, the point being that, in the second map, Palestine has shrunk to the size of a cornflake. I hold the image in my hands, and give it the attention befitting a new work by an artist of Hamilton’s reputation. In other words, I look at it very closely, and I notice something: on these maps Israel has been spelt ‘Isreal’. Slowly, my cogs turn. Hamilton loves wordplay. One of my favourite pieces of his is a certain iconic French ashtray subtly tweaked so that it says, not “Ricard”, but “Richard”. So presumably this, too, is a pun. But what does it mean? Is-real? Hmm. This must be a comment on the country’s controversial birth. Either that, or he wishes to suggest that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a nightmare – can it be real? – from which we will one day wake up. How clever.
“So what are you up to here?” I ask. “Why have you spelled Israel like this?”
Hamilton peers first at me then at the image. “How is it spelled?” he asks. I tell him how the word should be spelled and how he has spelled it.
There is a small silence. “Oh, dear,” says Hamilton. Rita Donagh gets up from her seat and comes round to look at the image over my shoulder. “Oh, dear,” she says. The misspelling is, it seems, just that: a mistake. It’s my turn now. “Oh, dear,” I say. “I’m so … sorry.” My cheeks are hot. Hamilton looks crestfallen. Donagh looks worried. “Can you change it?” I say, thinking that Hamilton works a lot with computers these days. “Not very easily,” he says. Oh, God. On the nerve-wracking eve of his new, big show, I have just told the 88-year old father of pop art that there is a mistake in one of his prints (this one is an inkjet solvent print). Why? Why did I do this? And how on earth will our conversation recover?
After a moment of perplexity, though, Hamilton starts to laugh. “Oh, well!” he says. “I’m sure there’s some way of sorting it out. Not to worry!”

So there we have it. Inkjet print. And from the image published above, it appears they reprinted it with the correct spelling. If only all the Israeli-Palestinian mapping problems could be resolved so quickly.
Also, I wonder if these maps will turn up in Hamilton’s Tate retrospective next month. UPDATE: YES IT WILL. [thanks to Tate Modern’s curators and communications folks for the update]
Map Marathon: Richard Hamilton & Eyal Weizman – Political Plastic [vimeo]
Map Marathon – 2010 [serpentinegalleries.org]
Modern Moral Matters | Richard Hamilton [serpentinegallery.org]
Richard Hamilton: A masterclass from the father of pop art [theguardian]

What Makes Today’s Amazon Chinese Paint Mill So Different, So Appealing?

Alright, I know it all looked like a black hole of boring embarrassment last week, but Amazon Art just broke through to the other side.

Artisoo Surrogate Painting [No. 783] – Oil painting reproduction 30” x 26” – Allan McCollum, $193
Kriston Capps and Joy Garnett were tweeting this link to what seems to be an Allan McCollum Surrogate Painting (No. 783), a 30×26-in original oil painting, offered on Amazon by a gallery called Artisoo–for $193. Kriston pointed out that Amazon’s gallery system has a forgery problem, or at least an authenticity problem. Which could very well be the case! But this is not why.
Because Allan McCollum’s Surrogate Paintings are not oil on canvas, but acrylic on plaster. Or as in the case of [No. 783], which was made in 1978, acrylic on wood. They’re painting-shaped sculptures, really. And what Artisoo is selling here is actually an original oil painting of the jpg reproduction of the McCollum. Artisoo is making an artwork that’s the picture of an artwork that the original artist hoped would help a gallery “become like a picture.”
Artisoo guarantees that your Surrogate Painting [No. 783] will be “100% hand-painted by our experienced artists. We stand by our top quality.” And you can order with confidence knowing that “The original motifs presented by Artisoo are created by artists from the most prestigious art schools and academies of fine arts. [emphasis added, because, ‘motifs’! -ed.]”
Chinese Paint Mill has appropriated Google Images and put it up for sale on Amazon. There are at least 18 other McCollum jpgs available as oil paintings. They all appear in the first page of the artist’s Google Image results. Artisoo currently offers 8,124 other paintings on Amazon, and unnumbered thousands more on their own website. In your choice of seven sizes.

It’s the fine art equivalent of LifeSphere, the Spamerican Apparel botcompany Babak Radboy wrote about that systematically turns every public domain image into every possible Zazzle product.
At least it’s trying to be. After a quick surf, I’d say that this Artisoo McCollum Surrogate Painting counts as a rare conceptual gem; easily 98% of the company’s merch is Chinese Paint Mill fluff. I’d call it pure over-the-sofa art, but that’d only account for one of the eight options in their Shop By Room function.
But there’s something sublime about the way a painting of a photograph of a minimalistic, monochromatic painted object encapsulates the entirety of orthodox post-war art history, collapses it, and drops it into the world’s biggest online vending machine. It’s painting pared down to its barest essence as a privileged cultural signifier: a decorative picture of whatever, made by hand. Painting sells its soul for Dino Sponges. But wait, there’s more!

Like any serious collector, I like to shop for my art alphabetically, which means the first post-war artist to emerge in Artisoo’s stable is Anne Truitt. Artisoo offers 62 paintings with an Anne Truitt “motif,” including installation shots of her trademark acrylic on poplar columns; monochromatic works on paper; sumi ink drawings; and even the barely visible washes of the Arundel paintings. Can’t wait to see how those come out.
Artisoo’s daring paintings, uh, interrogate the conventions of scale as deftly as the notion of medium, date, authorship, context, and form. At 30×10 inches, this painting of a Parva sculpture is easily three times the size of Truitt’s original.

Artisoo Signal – Oil painting reproduction 30” x 28” – Anne Truitt
In a move that feels appropriated from my own playbook, Artisoo even offers paintings of early works that Truitt destroyed, the aluminum sculptures she created in 1964 while living in Japan. Unlike Destroyed Richter Paintings, however, Artisoo’s Artisoo Signal – Oil painting reproduction 30” x 28” – Anne Truitt ($204) does not attempt to recreate the experience of being in the original’s presence; it promises only its own, bold self: a painting of a vintage Kodachrome of a nautically colored sculpture bathed in the light of Tokyo courtyard.
I’m on slow wireless at the moment, so I gave up hope of surfing through all 340 pages of Artisoo’s products, and instead started plugging in names of artists I liked, or rather, artists I’d like to see appropriated by Amazon Chinese Paint Mill. It didn’t really pan out. No Kosuth, no Andre, no Beuys, Lewitt, Gober, Sherman, Levine, Hesse, Newman or Prince, and no Richter. The company’s web-indexical curation strategy is clearly still a work in progress. There are several dozen Johnses on Artisoo.com, though. I wonder if I could order a copy of Flag in the exact dimensions of the Short Circuit original? Yes, there’s no Sturtevant.

Artisoo Abstract Painting – Oil painting reproduction 30” x 30” – Ad Reinhardt, $221
There are Alma Thomases, though. And 63 Calders. Would you like a painting of a stabile? Oh, nice, there are 50 Ad Reinhardts. Those ought to be interesting. Likewise the 23 Agnes Martins.

Artisoo Happy Valley – Oil painting reproduction 30” x 30” – Agnes Martin, $239
Here’s a standout, though, which reveals a lot about Artisoo’s practice. It’s a painting called, Http En Wikipedia Org Wiki File Hamilton Appealing2 Jpg 1956, and it comes 4x-36x larger than Richard Hamilton’s 10-inch paper collage.

Http En Wikipedia Org Wiki File Hamilton Appealing2 Jpg 1956 ($125-650)
Everything about Artisoo is so immediately and obviously fantastic, I almost don’t want to spoil it by seeing actual paintings. Almost.

Johns, Merce, Duchamp: Walkaround Time

image: walkerart.org
Welcome to one of the oldest tabs in my browser: the inflatable balloon set for Merce Cunningham’s 1968 piece, Walkaround Time, which is based on Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, which was made by the company’s artistic director at the time, Jasper Johns.
I’d backed into the pieces–seven cubes of silkscreen-and-paint on clear vinyl, reinforced with aluminum frames–a few months ago, and realized I’d seen them–and not thought much about them–at the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center in 2005.
Which I now regret, but which makes Merce’s title resonate a little more. Cunningham dancer and longtime collaborator Carolyn Brown explains that Walkaround Time was a reference to a particular kind of purposeless movement taken from ancient computer history, when “programmers walked about while waiting for their giant room-sized computers to complete their work.” It’s just taken me this long to appreciate–or even to see–the work. And for some great additional links to appear.
I can already tell this is going to go long.
03/2012 UPDATE: Unfortunately, none other than former MCDC stage manager Lew Lloyd informs me that the term “balloon” is not really accurate; they were transparent vinyl boxes fit onto armatures, which could be broken down for travel. Given my noted satelloon bias, I will still think of them as balloons in my heart. For the rest of you, though, remember: not balloons. [end update]

Continue reading “Johns, Merce, Duchamp: Walkaround Time”

Pour Copie Conforme

After bagging on Blake Gopnik’s comments on Marcel Duchamp playing the buyers of his readymades for fools, I started looking more closely at Duchamp’s actual statements and working process. It’s so easy to consider him as just a source of ideas, and to forget that in fact, he expended a great deal of effort and time on the creation of objects.
On the other hand, that dude would sign just about anything that wasn’t nailed down. Including readymades that were really made, or found, or bought, by others. All over the place. The only thing that stopped him, it seems, was Arturo Schwartz, who insisted Duchamp stop signing stuff to protect the value of the 1964 readymade editions.

One example: when the late photographer, painter, and avant garde filmmaker Dennis Hopper met Duchamp on the day of the opening of his 1963 retrospective in Pasadena, he grabbed a sign from the Hotel Green, where Duchamp was staying, and asked him to sign it. And he totally did.
Another, from Francis Naumann’s incredible practice history, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, which I picked up at the suggestion of John Powers [Naumann’s gallery was the site of that fantastic Duchamp chess show last year.]:

During the time of the Pasadena exhibition, Duchamp was invited to attend a breakfast in his honor at the home of Betty Asher, an important collector of contemporary art who lived in West Los Angeles. Among the thirty or more guests she invited, one of them, Irving Blum, then owner of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, asked Duchamp if he would consider signing a bottle rack he had found and purchased from a local thrift shop. Just in case the artist agreed, Blum brought the item along with him to the breakfast. When Blum asked, Duchamp responded: “Gladly,” whereupon Blum retrieved the work from the trunk of his car and Duchamp signed it on the bottom rung, adding the usual inscription, “pour copie conforme,” and the date: “1963-14”. When Blum was in the process of returning this treasured artifact to the trunk of his car, Richard Hamilton reportedly rushed out of the Asher house and quipped: “You are, of course, aware of the fact, Mr. Blum, that in order to devalue his work, Duchamp signs everything.” [p.235, emphasis added for the awesome parts]

Indeed, and one of the last things he signed was the replica of Bicycle Wheel which Hamilton had made, and had asked Duchamp to sign the next time he passed through London. [Blum donated his Bottle Rack, below, to the Norton Simon Museum in 1968 after Duchamp’s death.]

And Pontus Hulten told how Duchamp said the Modernamuseet could save money by making a bunch of readymade replicas for a show instead of shipping them: “Duchamp later signed everything. He loved the idea that an artwork could be repeated. He hated ‘original’ artworks with prices to match.” [p.213]
Which is making me nod and laugh out loud right now as I sit here, with a pile of pens, signing my name over and over and over on the stack of certificates for the edition I’m doing with 20×200.com, which is going to be announced very soon. Stay tuned.