Surrender Dorothy, an artwork Banks Violette also said was not an artwork, 2026, painted plywood and aluminum, 70 x 93 x 48 in., via IG/banks_violette_616
Texting “Hi Banks! I hope you are well. Is that ‘Surrender Dorothy’ sign your piece? The owner of the property has asked me to help her sell it.” is a helluva way to try to simultaneously authenticate an artwork and get an OK to sell it. Especially when you know full well whose it is, and what it’s doing on the roof of the Williamsburg townhouse where your gallery partner’s staging a show in his other side hustle gallery with his other partner.
The texter is Caroline Snow, of the Dash Snows and Thurmans and de Menils, whose Snow Gallery was not formally involved in Beginning of (The End), the Banks Violette show Frank Haines organized at New Dracula Theater, an exhibition space and recording studio in Brooklyn he opened last year with fellow artist Chip Kolpen. Violette collages on aluminum hung inside; a video projection filled the garden shed out back, and a giant sign of aluminum and painted wood reading SURRENDER DOROTHY was perched on the roof.
Gerhard Richter, Erster Blick, 2000, offset lithograph, 182 x 151 mm, mounted on board, ed. 16/100, published by Edition Staeck, selling 16 July 2026 at Wright20
In 2000 Gerhard Richter made Erster Blick, an offset edition of an enlarged newspaper clipping from 26 July 2000 reporting the Zentrum für Elektronische Korrelationen und Magnetismus at Universität Augsburg’s Institut für Physik’s first imaging of the interior of a silizium (silicon) atom.
greg.org Untitled (Erster Blick), 2016/2026, digital print and graphite on white bond, 386 x 273 mm (uncropped), signed, stamped, and numbered, ed. 100+20+10+6
In 2016, I made Untitled (Erster Blick), an edition in graphite on an enlarged newspaper article from the Zentrum’s press archive, to mark the occasion of one of Richter’s Erster Blick coming up for auction during Frieze London.
The edition, which matched Richter’s, of 100, plus 20 Roman numeral copies, plus 10 trial proofs, plus 6 other trial proofs, did not sell out before the Richter came up for sale. Which, it didn’t, turns out, but the print coming up next week, July 16, at Wright in Chicago, definitely will.
To mark this joyous event, I am reopening the Untitled (Erster Blick) edition, making it available until the close of bidding on the Chicago print. You can order it/them below.
Last night Derek @dieworkwear compared the hydrogen peroxide-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a Rothko, and the uneven edges of blue and the center of algae green did feel Rothkovian.
Then @rabihalameddine said it looked more like a Barnett Newman to him, and I couldn’t unsee it. Or ignore it, especially when I knew just the Newman, and just what to do with it:
I really think I’ve been thinking about Junta Watanabe the wrong way.
For years since registering the domain name, I’ve imagined what a Junta Watanabe fashion line would look like. How to make it. How much or how little it should evoke CdG. How many or how few items to produce to make it work. How good or idiotic a few t-shirts would be. Should these pieces of clothing be mass or artisanal? Did Sterling Ruby validate clothes as art objects or ruin them?
eight Egyptian and Bangladeshi migrants getting taken by Italy to a detention center in Albania in Nov. 2024, via aia.al
Who should the clothing be for? The guerrillas or the junta? The idealistic junta or the power-mad monster junta? What if it’s conceived as critique, but ends up looking like prepper chic? Reactionary insurrectionistware? Half the looks I’d considered ironically a few years ago now appear on the ICE, who look like doughy Watchmen cosplayers.
Anyway, I think it’s all wrong, and I have to go back to the roots, to the MO for one of my first domain-inspired projects, mafiaboy.com. For that I was blogging without blog software, collecting links and lifestyle-related quotes from the investigation and trial of the Montreal teenager whose DDOS attack took down Yahoo! It was meant as a critique of the way hacker or script kiddie culture was conveyed in the media via pop cultural and fashion references. And because Mafiaboy was a minor, who couldn’t be named or depicted, these references took on outsized importance for courtroom reporters. And hilariously, I closed the loop when I got a check for like $48 from Rocawear for affiliate links to Mafiaboy’s satin bomber jacket.
The Givova Tuta Visa Triacetato 4S Unisex in Nero/Viola, EUR14,90 at Givova
Weird thing happened while processing Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 collection show at the Frick: I read the comments. If fashion week shows are still nominally for the industry, cruise/resort collection shows are for content and client service: spectacles presented in destinations to generate views and to reward high-value retail customers.
And so it was that LVMH’s YouTube livestream got almost 5 million views in two days. But not because it was advertised on a wraparound billboard at the Holland Tunnel. Like 90% of the first 200 comments were praising Felix, and thanking the True Prince of Vuitton for inviting them.
And because LVMH were speedrunning models through a museum in cringe Haring merchandise, I had one mononymical Felix in my mind—the art Felix—and didn’t even consider the KPop Felix—who didn’t even walk in the show, he just attended, and was barely visible for like five seconds, but who apparently sent a fifth of his 32 million Instagram followers to watch the show.
study for a worse idea, s/o @octavio-world. sorry to drag you into this, getty images’ arturo holmes
And for a moment, instead of a bodega bag-shaped silk tunic with Keith Haring’s dramatically self-elegiac Unfinished Painting on it, I envisioned a bodega bag-shaped silk tunic with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) on it, maybe executed in a pile of shimmering Swarovski crystal candy pieces. In case you thought luxury spectacles in the capital of capital couldn’t get any more descrative. Click here to pre-order.
Cy Twombly Facsimile Objects CT3 & CT4, 2026, dye sublimation prints on aluminum
A trip to Rimini was not on his chronology but Twombly’s photo of Miramare was from 2005, and I think his trips to Wal-Mart in Lexington were endless, but this one was from 2007. The range is incredible. NGL, these things are intoxicating.
Untitled (USS Sturtevant), 2026, engraved silver presentation trophy vase, 11.5 in. tall. photo via an auctioneer who believes in leaving the patina of neglect on [update: sold for $1,000]
If I were ever in the navy, I would serve on the USS Sturtevant, just for the swag.
Then after three years of command and successful torpedo destroyer training maneuvers off the coast of Virginia, maybe my fine crew would present me with an engraved silver trophy vase like the one they gave Lt Cmdr Freeland Allyn Daubin at the end of his command, a hundred years ago this summer.
But alas, the USS Sturtevant is no more. While patrolling the waters off Key West in 1942, the Sturtevant hit a mine the US Navy had not disclosed to itself, exploded, and sank, killing fifteen.
This trophy vase is being sold by the heirs of an antique store owner in Tampa, and the uncertainty about the weight of its weighted base vs the 10, 15, or 20 troy ounces of silver the auctioneer speculates it might yield when it is melted down.
If I were to make it into an artwork, a found readymade that namechecked one of Duchamp’s great interrogators and one of my own heroes, and which turned out to have a previously undiscovered familial connection to lay alongside Sturtevant’s ex-husband Ira, who went on to sexually revolutionize the world by introducing his next partner Meg Crane’s home pregnancy test to market, we could lock in a more prolonged cultural appreciation, for this battered uterus diagram-shaped trophy vase, if not a greater market value.
But a genealogical search yields no apparent relation between the home pregnancy test/conceptual artist-divorcing Sturtevants of New York and New England and the family of Ensign Albert Dillon Sturtevant of Washington DC, after whom the destroyer was named. And my art practice is unlikely to produce a five-figure object in the next two weeks. So unless and until I end up having to repeat this vase in the future, this blog post will soon be the only thing holding this concept together, and this will be [yet] an[other] artwork whose object has ceased to exist.
Cy Twombly Facsimile Objects CT1 and CT2, 2026, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 4.25 x 3.5 inches
I thought I’d try a little something, and then it turns out the minimum width for printing these is 4 inches, so I tried out two little somethings. I like them.
The thing about Twombly’s photos is that they’re rarely experienced as their original Polaroids; they’re either books–or, if you’re fancy—enlarged prints.
I think that’s changing a bit, but in the mean time, I wanted to see what they’re like at real size. They’re nice, and I could easily see why you’d want to collect’em all.
I saw “2 results for ‘the second deposition of richard prince'”? and then this loaded.
In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.
This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.
I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.
Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.
“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion. And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”
The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”
With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.
Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.
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.
Claes Oldenburg, Soft Fur Good Humors, 1963, fake fur, filling, enamel paint on wood, posted by @toytheatre via @octavio-world
When I saw these 1963 Claes Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humors on @toytheatre via @octavio-world‘s tumblr the other day, I thought they were perfect. But then I found out, from Barbara Rose’s 1969 MoMA catalogue, that they’re too small, just 19 x 9 1/2 x 2 inches each, barely the size of a placemat.
Claes Oldenburg’s too small Soft Fur Good Humors, 1963, as illustrated in the catalogue for Oldenburg’s 1969 exhibition at MoMA, curated by Barbara Rose
Oldenburg said that the inspiration came from seeing the fake fur at a fabric store, so maybe this is all he could get. Within a couple of years, though, he recognized that a Good Humor Bar sculpture should be bigger. He proposed one for the middle of Park Avenue, where the Pan-Am Building eventually went. Too big, tbqh.
Claes Oldenburg, Colossal Monument for Park Avenue, Good Humor Bar, 1965, liberated from p*nterest
In 1972, Oldenburg’s friend Michael Crichton commissioned Oldenburg to make a 3.6m tall version of his 1970 Soft Alphabet Good Humor Bar print, which, frankly, seems like a mistake, both in scale and subject. It looks like when you pop leftover mac & cheese out of the Tupperware. I hope he was handsomely paid, as was whoever sold it to Crystal Bridges.
Claes Oldenburg with Floor Cone, 1962, on top of his car at Dwan Gallery in LA in 1963, image via the artists’ studio via MoMA, Floor Cone is now at MoMA, obv
No, I think these Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humors should be at least as big as a sleeping bag, but not too big to fit on the roof of your VW. Floor Cone is 3.5m, almost the same size as the Crystal Bridges one, but good. And on the floor.
If each Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humor was roughly the size of the raft in Titanic. So depending on where you come down in that debate, four on the floor could fit between four and eight people. They would have roughly the same presence in a room as a Chamberlain F*****g Couch. Or two.
This feels like a needed corrective in the material record and a worthwhile work to realize.
Quartet in Black & Blue, 2025, dimensions variable, ed. 2+1AP
Whenever democracy dies in darkness, art struggles to be born. In darkness. Wait, what? Point is, now you and three friends can experience art together at home, or wherever your dark place is. There really are so many possibilities, and they’re increasing every day!
screenshot of Kriston Capps’ IG of an installation photo from the National Portrait Gallery of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ light string work, “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass), turned off. photo: Matailong Du/NPG
As my comment on Kriston Capps’ insta shows, it’s somehow always a surprise to see a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string with the lights off. My reaction led Kriston to doublecheck with the National Portrait Gallery whether it’d been OK to post [tl;dr it was, but hold on], and it sent me looking for more.
“Untitled” (Toronto) [on] and “Untitled” (Miami) [off], installed in 1992 at Andrea Rosen Gallery, image via FG-T Foundation
Of course, it goes back to the beginning, where they were shown on and off, side by side. Gonzalez-Torres’ whole point of his works was that the owner [or exhibitor] was to decide how to display them, and that includes whether to turn them on. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation has photos of an unlit “Untitled” (Tim Hotel), 1992, in a collector’s home, which feels like the normal, private state. Maybe it gets turned on for company, which raises the question of public vs. private presentation as well as space.
Because obviously, they look the sexiest when they’re on, and it’s understandable for curators of public exhibitions to want that glow. But that allure also underscores the impact and importance of seeing them turned off sometimes.
Study for Untitled (Joyce Hartley? James Marsden?) Or I should really just call it, “This copy of Ulysses belongs to me, Marsden Hartley,” 2025, prints of some kind, 4to, 242 x 190 mm
I have no idea why, maybe it’s the limpid blue of the unusually clean dust jacket, or the corny way he inscribed it with,
“This copy of Ulysses belongs to me, Marsden Hartley,”
But as soon as I saw it, I wanted to make a print diptych of the cover and limitation page of Hartley’s first edition copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
OK, this isn’t why why, but I’m pretty sure I would not have thought of it without seeing Robert Gober Potato Prints BTS.
Oh, interesting, that was within just a couple of days of seeing these 1920s Marsden Hartley paintings.
[Also, though Arches is obviously everywhere, Verge d’Arches seems to be a term or paper type only associated with Ulysses and like two other works. Is there a backstory there?]
