RP I’m misinformed about style. I always thought it had to do with being able to wear the same kind of a jacket for ten years. I don’t know. What I wonder is . . . is it possible to have style and be unreasonable at the same time?
BK I think unreasonableness can mean any number of possible locations nearer or further away from the idea of reason. Because many of these positions are already coded, their shock value is tempered by style. A lot of times the idea of transgression really turns on a romantic conception of otherness; of a rebellion already tolerated. You know, the charming rogue, the picaresque cuteness of the bull in the china shop and in the art world, badness invades the atelier. Driving limos through heavy neighborhoods to look at the graffiti. Unstylish unreasonableness may be limited to the categories of the insane and the unpleasant (the poor, the unbeautiful, the unempowered). The non-romanticism of these kinds of otherness makes them unsightly and “vulgar” considerations for the polite company of international bohemia.
This image of limos driving “through heavy neighborhoods to look at the graffiti” is great in itself, but it also reminded me of an anecdote from, of all people, Jasper Johns.
Jasper Johns, Harlem Light, 1967, image “taken. It’s not mine.”
It’s about the genesis of a motif that first appears in a 1967 painting, Harlem Light [above]. Here’s the version from Michael Crichton’s 1977 catalogue for Johns’ Whitney retrospective, which is still the most engrossing Johns book I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a lot:
Johns was taking a taxi to the airport, traveling through Harlem, when he passed a small store which had a wall painted to resemble flagstones. He decided it would appear in his next painting. Some weeks later when he began the painting, he asked David Whitney to find the flagstone wall, and photograph it. Whitney returned to say he could not find the wall anywhere. Johns himself then looked for the wall, driving back and forth across Harlem, searching for what he had briefly seen. He never found it, and finally had to conclude that it had been painted over or demolished. Thus he was obliged to re-create the flagstone wall from memory. This distressed him. “What I had hoped to do was an exact copy of the wall. It was red, black, and gray, but I’m sure that it didn’t look like what I did. But I did my best.”
Explaining further, he said: “Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me. They–whoever painted the wall–had an idea; I doubt that whatever they did had to conform to anything except their own pleasure. I wanted to use that design. The trouble is that when you start to work, you can’t eliminate your own sophistication. If I could have traced it, I would have felt secure that I had it right. Because what’s interesting to e is the fact that it isn’t designed, but taken. It’s not mine.”
Crichton goes on to discuss the “small differences” that go unnoticed, and which are lost in creating from scratch. And of flagstones, like flags, an ideal Johnsian image,” which are found and known and abstract and concrete. Seriously, I could just keep quoting from that book all day.
But instead, I’m going to try to make sense of Kruger’s next sentence, “Unstylish unreasonableness may be limited to the categories of the insane and the unpleasant (the poor, the unbeautiful, the unempowered).”
Untitled, 2004, Agnes Martin’s last painting. Image via Phaidon
The visits that maybe stick in the mind are the ones where she would show me four versions of a single painting and she’d say to me. ‘I think this is the best one, what do you think?’ Invariably there was so little difference between them, it was so hard to say, they were all really beautiful. And then she’d say OK we’re gonna keep that one and we’re going to cut up the others. And I would help with a knife slice up the paintings. Those are the studio visits that I think are the sharpest, helping her destroy the work.
What goes through your mind the first time you hear something like that?
It’s her work, and I’m a co-worker in the art field. . . but yeah. It is brutal. I was there at the end of her life and she said ‘go down to the studio, there are three paintings. Hanging on the wall is the one I want to keep, I want you to destroy the other two.’ So I went down to the studio. The two paintings she wanted me to destroy were magnificent – absolutely perfect. The one on the wall was a very stormy painting, unlike anything that she had made since the 60s. I certainly didn’t want to destroy those two spectacular paintings but I did. I sliced them to ribbons and put them in the trash. When I came back. She said, ‘did you do it?’ I said, ‘I did it.’ And that was that. Our last conversation.
Arne Glimcher, in a Q&A published last month by Phaidon.
The Q&A is timed to the publication of Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher, an extraordinary collection of Martin’s writings and correspondence, many works, and Glimcher’s own snapshots and notes. He would take extensive notes during his studio visits with Martin in New Mexico, and then transcribe them on the plane home.
He expands on Martin’s last request to destroy some of her work in March 2004:
A mystique exists that Agnes painted very few works but in actuality, she painted almost daily when inspired and that was with some frequency. However, only a relatively small amount of works exist from such a long and productive life because she destroyed most of the works she produced. Probably no artist has ever been a better editor than Agnes Martin. The rejected paintings were shredded with a mat knife. As she grew older, during the last few years, she enlisted the help of friends (myself included) to destroy the unacceptable works, as it was very hard to cut through the thick primed linen fabric. When I once asked her why she was destroying a particularly delicate and beautiful work, she said, ‘It’s too aggressive, and there’s a mistake.’ Most often that referred to a pooling of colour in one of the works that made the brushstrokes discontinuous. The mistake became an unwanted ‘focus’ in a non-compositional painting, which disturbed its serenity. Trumpet, 1967, an earlier last painting by Agnes Martin, image via zwirnerandwirth
I drove to the studio where I found three grey paintings, all of which were beautiful. Using her mat knife, I reluctantly shredded two and spared the one that hung on the wall. It was unique, expressionistically painted with stormy grey asymmetrical brushstrokes covering the surface. Five thin pencil lines visually grounded the passionate wash to the canvas. There is only one other painting with such an expressionistic asymmetrical handling of brush work. It is called Trumpet and was painted in 1967, just before she took her long hiatus and first departure from painting. On first glance, in this last painting, Agnes appears to have taken a new direction. Comparing Untitled (2004) with Trumpet, it is clear that it was not so much a change in style as it was coming full circle home.
The two that I had to destroy were very dissimilar from the one that was left, which you saw the picture of. They were much more rigorous; they were less emotional paintings. They looked more like the 70s than they did the 90s, or the late work. They seemed to be a little bit out of context, but perfect paintings, really exquisite paintings. So I took the box cutter and sliced them to ribbons.
It’s been a while since I had a good old-fashioned photomuralling around here, and this one comes from an unexpected source: John Cage. Mostly.
I’d seen installation photos before of MAC Lyon’s Cage’s Satie: Composition for Museum , an exhibition curated by Laura Kuhn from the John Cage Trust. The show includes several composition-related installations, and a gallery dedicated to The First Meeting of the Satie Society, (1985-1992),
Cage’s stunning late-life collaborative merger of poetry, performance, visual art, sculpture, and music. This work was conceived as a collection of “presents” for Erik Satie, an invitation by John Cage to his esteemed artist friends to fill a Marcel Duchamp-inspired cracked glass valise with words and images bound into eight hand made books. Contributors in the visual aspects include Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Cage himself.
[I wrote about this Satie-inspired project last year.]
But it wasn’t until Alex Ross posted the top image that I realized what these giant wall pieces were: they’re large-scale photos of close-ups of various texts imprinted on the steel Satie Society valise. That’s the title, obviously. Here’s another, “Some artists apparently want to be buried alive.” which, hmm. I can’t find any mention of the quote online, but given that it’s incised on an indeterminate handful of mostly unpublished metal boxes scattered to the collecting winds, I guess that’s not a surprise.
What is a bit surprising, though, is the visual boldness of the photos, which really dominate an otherwise spare, small-scale show in a vast space. As nice as they look, I guess they’re an exhibition design, not things. Except, of course, that they are.
There’s this atypical situation that I keep coming back to, the objects and artifacts of Cage. Things that, if he’d had a more materialist view of art, we might be able to consider from the perspective of art, if not to actually call them art objects.
This awkwardness is reinforced in a way by the surprisingly traditionalist view of artmaking that Cage held onto, at least for himself. However experimental or avant-garde his process–feather paintings, smoke drawings, a few prints, even this slightly affected Duchamp-related valise–the results were modest and old-school.
I guess I’m wondering, fantasizing, plotting, for a more interesting way to be a Cage collector when the available works, such as they are, are not that compelling. So I have questions about them, yes, but I also find these giant photo mural prints kind of sexy.
Painting from life: Life Magazine, image: gagosian
In trying to figure out the why, no seriously, WHY? of Bob Dylan’s second [!] painting exhibition at Gagosian [!?], Gallerist NY’s Michael Miller was left with the same Only Possible Explanation that’s been dogging me since the musician’s first baffling Gagosian gig in October 2011:
All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using “Bob Dylan” as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.
Exactly! It makes perfect sense. Explains everything. Clear as day. All evidence points to it. Every piece of evidence there is. I will go so far as to say that wars have been started with less evidence than this. If Richard Prince were Iraq, we’d have invaded him and pulled him out of his Dylanholes by now, is what I’m saying.
Let’s look at the facts. Or rather, let’s look at the facts while entertaining the possibility that Prince is performing as Dylan the visual artist.
The 2011 show, The Asia Series, were originally presented as–and understood as–a tour documentary. We’re on the bus, walking the street, just hanging, seeing the world as Dylan sees it:
He often draws and paints while on tour, and his motifs bear corresponding impressions of the many different environments and people that he encounters. A keen observer, Dylan works from real life to depict everyday phenomena in such a way that they appear fresh, new, and mysterious.
And if this fantasy come true weren’t enough, Dylan’s real life turns out to be as exotic and mysterious as we’d always imagined The Orient to be:
The Asia Series, a visual journal of his travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea, comprises firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape, which can be clearly identified by title and specific cultural details, such as Mae Ling, Cockfight, The Bridge, and Hunan Province. Conversely, there are more cryptic paintings often of personalities and situations, such Big Brother and Opium, or LeBelle Cascade, which looks like a riff on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe but which is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo-opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade.
That was the setup, the view that held for the first few days before Dylan’s paintings were revealed to be copies, tracings of old photographs. Whether the source was as famous as Henri Cartier-Bresson, as prominent as a new Magnum photo [licensed, apparently, after the fact], or as anonymous and obscure as a collection of 19th century, hand-tinted lantern slides scanned and uploaded to flickr, they had two things in common: 1) they were entirely unacknowledged, and 2) they were thoroughly and inevitably trackable.
In fact, Dylanologists were already on the case; they’d puzzled over the sudden change in Dylan’s painting style as evidenced by the images Gagosian was teasing the show with: a 1966 LIFE magazine cover slightly altered with “pulp references,” and a scene in an opium den which was quickly traced to a 1915 Leon Busy photo by the curator of the Opium Museum.
screenshot from amy crehore’s blog, via expectingrain
And then the plagiarizingshit hit the fan. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but the media freakout over Dylan’s Asia Series paintings was so out of proportion to their obvious reality, it seemed staged.
both above from Okinawa Soba’s flickr stream
Instead, it’s the kind of thief/appropriation/credit criticism that has followed Dylan throughout his entire career. Which should give him and Prince something to talk about.
“Welcome to Bob Dylan’s world, Soba-san!” [image: expectingrain.com]
After the photo-based painting controversy broke, Gagosian tweaked the press release: “Dylan works from real life” became “Dylan is inspired by everyday phenomena,” and “a visual journal of his travels” became “a visual reflection,” which is no longer considered “firsthand.” But then, in these mediated days, what is? La Belle Cascade, dylan, gagosian via nybooks
I think the key to Dylan’s show is to be found here, in the reality gap between how something is “billed” or presented, and how it is received. Because as Dylan turns out to have told MoMA Chief Curator-turned-Gagosian adviser John Elderfield in the show’s catalogue interview, photographs are part of real life:
A number of the paintings–such as Emperor, La Belle Cascade, Cock Fight, and Shanghai–show very complex scenes. Were these done from sketches, or do you paint from photographs–or from drawings made from photographs–some of the time?
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind-the-curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
But besides the knack for appropriation-fueled outrage, what does any of this have to do with Richard Prince?
It’s true that the outsized criticism of Dylan’s photo-based painting struck me as ridiculous at the time, Fall 2011, when the Cariou v. Prince verdict and appeal were getting increased attention, and when the Corinna Belz’ documentary Gerhard Richter Painting and Richter’s retrospective were both receiving rapturous acclaim. Oh, and when John “yes, that John, right in the middle of it all,” Elderfield was taking his victory lap at MoMA with the last and greatest painting show of his career, the Willem de Kooning retrospective.
And I knew that Prince was involved–maybe implicated was the better word–because I saw he’d written a piece in the Asia Series catalogue, in which he mentioned D.H. Lawrence’s paintings, and compared Dylan’s La Belle Cascade to–holy crap–Cezanne’s Bathers:
The paintings that Dylan showed me out in L.A. were paintings from his travels in Asia. Some of them looked too big for him to have painted them while he was there, so maybe he had done them from memory or a photograph or a sketch or a drawing. I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask a lot of things. I didn’t need to. I just enjoyed the experience. I liked a painting called La Belle Cascade because it looked to me like one of Cézanne’s Bathers. And Cézanne’s Bathers are some of my favorite works of art
And when that essay was republished on the NY Review of Books after the controversy broke, I started wondering about the possible differences between “Dylan’s paintings” and “The paintings Dylan showed me,” and this equivocation about Dylan’s studio suddenly seemed a lot less benign than it had previously:
Dylan’s studio. I think it was Dylan’s studio. I’m still not sure. It didn’t look like any artist’s studio I’d ever been in.
Someone was working to not be pinned down. Prince knew what was up, and so, for that matter, did Elderfield. And so did anyone who looked at a 4-ft, vintage photo-based painting and wondered how the hell anyone, much less Bob Dylan, ever painted it on a Thai tour bus.
But it wasn’t until a few months later, when I was deep in my own Destroyed Richter Paintings project, and I unrolled the first shipment of canvases from Chinese Paint Mill, that I recognized the painting style–as Bob Dylan’s. The same flatness, the same traced-over-projection line, the same filled-in spaces. Whether he’d ordered them from Chinese Paint Mill or from somewhere/one else, it now seemed obvious that Dylan did not paint his paintings.
Not that outsourcing his fabrication would grant Dylan anything greater than general admission at the contemporary art ball. Fling an iPhone in Chelsea, and you’re bound to hit an outsourcer, a fabricator, or both. These paintings aren’t any less “Dylan’s” or “Dylans” for having been painted by someone else. And are they any more Prince’s or Princes for him having made them? Or having them made? Are those Koonses actually Sarah Morrises? Are those Morrises actually by [names of her painters who call to chat and dish redacted]? That Richter painting Kippenberger table: was or is? Construction with J.J. Flag or Short Circuit?
As long as Dylan signs his paintings–whoops, he doesn’t–well, as long as they’re presented as his, under his name.
And he’s obviously on board with the project. If not, who would have engineered it? At Gagosian? Would Prince have claimed to have visited Dylan’s studio [sic] if it hadn’t happened? Well, yes. But would Elderfield have claimed to have interviewed him? And written two essays for two shows? For a Henry Codax-style, ghost Dylan?
This past Summer, while working on a live restaging of Prince’s Canal Zone lawsuit, I started to sense that outsourcing, or hands-off production, was as important to his own practice as appropriation itself. The hand-off of his Cowboys film to commercial processors was an early example. It stuck when he testified about not meeting a now-grown Brooke Shields in 2005 when Sante D’Orazio shot her for a recreation of Spiritual America [above]:
Q. You just weren’t there?
A. I just–well, I wasn’t there by purpose.
Q. Okay. What was the purpose?
A. To transform the image.
Q. The photo–
A. Yes.
Q.–that Mr. D’Orazio took?
A. Yes. [M]y not being there is a transformative–the absence of the author is I believe a way to transform an image.
[Prince noted that his “contribution” also included selection, or “editing” D’Orazio’s 300 shots down to the one that would get printed. And then he showed it, as an unpublicized surprise, to guests at a private dinner held in the Rivington St. storefront where the original Spiritual America was first shown.] Untitled (Original), 2010, image: fultonryder
In his Fall 2009 deposition Prince also testified of tracking down the original illustrations used for pulp fiction book covers, such as those used in his Nurse paintings. He’d begun pairing these drawings & paintings with the books themselves. Untitled (Original), as the series is called, are featured at Fulton Ryder, Prince’s bookstore. Where, upon close inspection, it is immediately obvious that “the originals” in Untitled (Original)s are actually copies of the covers, which he has created. Or has had created. Commissioned.
And the Charlie Company paintings [above] he showed in St. Barth at the Eden Roc hotel in 2008? Same thing. They look like reworked details and collages of various he-man adventure pulp covers? But they’re not paint on inkjet, but acrylic on canvas. Different process. Entirely fabricated, Princes painted to order.
Which all brings us to this year’s Dylan show at Gagosian, improbable under the most craven, degraded, celebrity-worshipping cultural best circumstances, Revisionist Art. I confess, I haven’t seen the paintings in person, but from the artists I know who have seen them, I’m better off for it. [I will get to the show, though, before it closes.] Playboy Magazine, Sharon Stone, 2011-12, image: gagosian
As image/objects, these large, supposedly “silkscreen on canvas” paintings are apparently jaw-droppingly awful. One person called them “wretched,” and couldn’t begin to see how they were silkscreened at all. The only explanation he could come up with was “silkscreen” as a technically accurate description of the 4-color Photoshop separation & printing process. They’re cheap and dead. As objects. And they’re puerile and unfunny and lame as content. Which makes them all the more befuddling and exasperating in their hallowed–or at least blue-chip–context.
Prince had written of the Asia paintings, “I think [they] are good paintings. They’re workmanlike and they do their job.” For the new show, this assessment serves as a lowered bar not to cleared, but to be mamboed under.
And all of which makes me even more certain of Prince’s involvement in Dylan’s painting project, and which makes me suspect that this reaction, the very experience of the paintings and the show, is the artist[s’] central focus.
In such a view, address labels for “Richard Staehung” and “Ricardo Wellhung” are not just sophomoric jokes, they’re signatures. By the guy who makes joke paintings. And autographs.
Bob Dylan with guitar and harmonica, signed photo, dated 1/22/03, POR, via fultonryder
And then you start seeing Prince connections everywhere. The model, for instance, on the mockup cover of Playboy looks like she was photographed en route to an OCTPFAS read-in at “Mr. P’s” shop.
Over the summer, Fulton Ryder’s blog featured this Birdtalk, Prince’s term for the short appropriated texts and aphorisms he’s published throughout his career:
Daniel Boorstin says in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America: that American life is becoming increasingly organized at every level, and that spontaneous events are being replaced by “pseudo-events”. We find ourselves in a situation where we accept reality as it is reported rather than as it really is: “We become so accustomed to our illusions, our images, that we mistake them for reality.” – Birdtalk
And this Fulton Ryder grouping was posted in September and again in November, just before Dylan’s opening. The titles displayed could be a poetic artist statement for the show:
Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
Wallace Berman Verifax C[ollages]*
De Kooning Recent Paintings
D.H. Lawrence’s Paintings
Fuck You
A magazine of the arts
Easy Guitar & Harmonica Edition * few days later update: I realize I’d skipped the Berman reference, which is nuts, because Berman’s Verifax collages are ground zero here. Here’s another one, connecting Lawrence, The Band, and the NY punk era that is Prince’s psychic hometown. To quotethe man himself,
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
To be honest, I looked at John Dogg and Howard Johnson, and, I thought Bob Dylan was just Prince’s giant middle finger to the screwed up art system that doesn’t give enough of a damn to look at what it’s buying and selling and fawning over. Not just the death of the author, but his murder, and the propping up of the author’s corpse, Weekend At Bernie’s-style, in order to keep cashing his checks.
A magazine of the arts: Revisionist Art images ganked from some Danish Dylan messageboard
But then as I was walking it back, trying to see, if not why, then where and when a Prince-for-Dylan relationship might have begun, I hit 2007, the year of Dylan’s first art exhibitions [of overpainted printouts of scans of pages from Drawn Blank, a 1994 book of tour sketches, which, mhmm]. And also the year of Todd Haynes’ remarkable movie I’m Not There, where six different actors portray six different Dylans and various times of his life.
Haynes spent seven years on the project, and a surprising amount of it feels captured in Robert Sullivan’s 2007 tagalong for the New York Times, which is one of the most sensitive and insightful making of stories I’ve ever read.
And I’ll steal Sullivan’s amazing hook here because it’ll only make you want to read the whole thing. It’s about being on the set for the identical mug shots of the Dylans which open the film [they’re in the trailer, too, above]:
Then Haynes took [Ben] Whishaw’s seat on the empty set and, in the video monitor, happened to perfectly align his head with those of all of his Dylans. When I stepped from the wings to look through the camera itself, I saw, in one semimystical, semirevealing moment, the artist as one with the artist he was trying to artificially reassemble.
Because Todd Haynes’ Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan.
I think that’s what Prince is trying to do here. To be Dylan, to make a show and art that is what Dylan is all about. To make something real, whatever it takes, in the middle of a screwed up world. To confound and infuriate as you create, and to transform yourself in the process. And suddenly the answer to “Why??” becomes so crystal clear, I’m embarrassed to have even asked: “Because he could, and given the chance, you would, too.”
After I started taking this speculation seriously, and researching and relooking–I guess I could have started with this, but then where’s the fun?–I’ve been sort of, I don’t know, reached out to. [Not by the artist(s), who, how would you be able to believe either one in a situation like this? They’d just add one more refraction of ambiguity.] And holy smokes, people. About this one thing, at least, Prince’s centrality to Dylan’s paintings and shows, I don’t wonder anymore. How Many Paintings Can One Man Make Before He Decides to Stick to Music? Bob Dylan Gets a Second Show at Gagosian [galleristny] John Elderfield Interview with Bob Dylan, Spring 2011 [bobdylan] The Asia Series discussion on Dylan fan site Expecting Rain [36 pgs] [expectingrain] Deciphering the Asia Series: Dylan, Duchamp and the letter from Woody [swarmuth]
Eastman Johnson, Negro Life in the South, 1859, NYHS
Just getting in touch with my black roots, putting a stake in the ground here on part of Eleanor Jones Harvey’s discussion with Tyler Green about her show, “The Civil War and American Art,” which just opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
About 43:00 into the show, Harvey talks about Eastman Johnson’s 1859 painting [above], Negro Life In The South. Which she argues is a critique of slavery via a complicated, carefully articulated exposure of the South’s precarious and untenable concept of race and power. It’s basically a beautiful mosaic of skin tones resulting from generations of interracial sexual relationships.
Harvey calls attention to the two women, one white-skinned, one darker, stepping tentatively through the door on the right, and the precarity of passing, the risk that if a master’s light-skinned daughter’s slave parentage were found out, then her life, her rights, her freedom, all that the front house represents, would be taken away.
“To my mind,” says Harvey, “what Eastman Johnson has done is, on the eve of civil war, painted a referendum on skin color as an arbiter of your legal status: At what point on a sliding scale, from white to black, do you segue from being a person to being property?”
It’s this clash of a binary and a spectrum that caught me short and made the challenges of multi-racial ancestry in American history much more crucial and much less abstract or academic. It’s the kind of thing that even if by 1859 they were well within the color scale of the main house, my descended-from-a-17th-century-free-African-Virginian Mozingo ancestors would have spent over 250 years internalizing. MAN Podcast Ep. 54: American Art & The Civil War [manpodcast.com]
Previously: It’s A Mozingo Thing
Barnett Newman, 18 Cantos, image via portlandart.net
Barnett Newman, from the statement included in 18 Cantos, a set of lithographs produced in 1963-4 with ULAE:
I must explain that I had no plan to make a portfolio of “prints.” I am not a printmaker. Nor did I intend to make a “set” by introducing superficial variety. These cantos arose from a compelling necessity–the result of grappling with the instrument.
To me that is what lithography is. It is an instrument. It is not a “medium”; it is not a poor man’s substitute for painting or for drawing. Nor do I consider it to be a kind of translation of something from one medium to another. For me, it is an instrument that one plays. It is like a piano or an orchestra; and as with an instrument, it interprets. And as in all the interpretive arts, so in lithography, creation is joined with the “playing”–in this case not of bow and string but of stone and press. The definition of lithograph is that it is writing on stone. But unlike Gertrude Stein’s rose, the stone is not a stone. The stone is a piece of paper.
I have been captivated by the things that happen in playing this litho instrument, the choices that develop when changing a color of the paper size. I have “played” hoping to evoke every possible instrumental lick. The prints really started as three, grew to seven, then eleven, then fourteen, and finished as eighteen. Here are the cantos, eighteen of them, each one different in form, mood, color, beat, scale, and key. There are no cadenzas. Each is separate. Each can stand by itself. But its fullest meaning, ti seems to me, is when it is seen together with the others.
I joked about 18 Cantos this morning; it’s one of my absolute favorite print works ever. [And no, I don’t have a copy, so no, I will not be breaking it up and giving it away to random Twitter followers.]
But it just occurred to me that Newman’s perception of the lithograph stone as an instrument to be played, not a medium to be translated, is very similar to Richard Prince’s early approach to photography.
Here’s just one example from Prince’s Canal Zone deposition, when questioned about a 2003 Artforum Q&A where he said he “played the camera”:
I was extremely–to tell you the truth, I was extremely conservative, on the other hand, in terms of my artistic attitude.
And I knew that in order to maybe discover something new I had to change a bit and take on another persona. And I felt that by playing, quote, as I said in the interview, the camera, just like a punk rock guitarist who picks up a guitar, seven days later he’s playing on stage. He doesn’t know how to play the guitar, but it’s his inability which shines through, which is really exciting. And the fact that he’s not a virtuoso–it’s the very limitations I think that make–can actually make great art.
flag dimensions: 17.75″ x 29.5″, image: Jeff R. Bridgman American Antiques via 1stdibs
Speaking of sweet flags, Andy from reference library sent along this amazing, pre-Johnsian artifact from York, PA antiques dealer Jeff R. Bridgman.
It’s a salesman sample flag, seven parade flags in graduated sizes, sewn together for convenient comparison shopping. The 48-star design and textile quality suggests WWI-era; Bridgman’s description suggests that Jasper Johns must have seen one of these sample sets somewhere before. But then, that’s just what a guy charged with selling it to you would say… In any case, awesome. 48 Star Parade Flag Salesman’s Sample, POR [1stdibs via reference library]
Big Hole, 1994, 90x130cm, apparently did not sell at Christie’s day sale in Nov. 2007. It’s inscribed, “This can be hung in any of four directions” on the back.
I can’t remember where I last saw Cady Noland’s flag, Big Hole, but I remember where I saw it first: at Paula Cooper’s gallery in SoHo, in the Spring of 1994. It says #1 of 1, but I remember there being more than one flag. It was like the 10th most interesting thing in that show at the time, and I didn’t give it much thought, but now… Maybe I saw it again last fall, on Joshua Abelow’s blog. Which would have been when I was in flag mode, sweating harder about finishing the saga of the missing Jasper Johns Flag painting.
It definitely made me want to start silkscreening stuff on aluminum.
Now about that Johns Flag… FIFTEEN MONTHS AND FIVE MINUTES LATER UPDATE: LOL, no way, here’s the Gallery Beat crew’s visit to this Noland show. With Joe, Paul H-O and Walter Robinson, plus a cameo by Holland Cotter, and–someone should ask James Kalm if their shitty guerrilla camerawork was his inspiration. But whatever, thanks fellas, it’s the best we’ve got now:
In the 4th part of his video walkthrough of MoMA’s Willem de Kooning retrospective, James Kalm has an extended clip of curator John Elderfield talking with Glenn Lowry about how the artist’s late paintings relate to his earlier work.
Elderfield stays pretty broad, arguing that the works are valid and important, and that Gary Garrels’ and Rob Storr’s earlier MoMA show ably made their case. Which all sounds good to me. [While noting that “the topologies of the paintings are very reminiscent of earlier pictures,” Elderfield apparently felt that a press preview was not the right context for expanding on de Kooning’s practice of tracing details of earlier paintings which his assistants had projected onto primed canvases.]
What struck me now, though, was his discussion of how the marks in de Kooning’s 80s paintings were the result of his elimination of subjectivity. Elderfield told how de Kooning “fell into a sort of trough” after seeing a hugely successful show in 1978 of his large, gestural abstractions made in 1975-7, which were in the preceding gallery. “There could have been three times that number in the exhibition,” Elderfield said,” with no drop in quality or achievement…de Kooning had said he ‘felt he could do no wrong,’ which for him, was the point at which he had to stop doing them.”
It’s an interesting idea, and it reminds me of how much I loved those 70s paintings, and losing myself in those big, sinuously virtuosic brushstrokes. It’s really too bad Kalm’s woozy, wandering camera eye is one of the few ways left to take in that gallery.
Still from Corinna Belz’ Gerhard Richter Painting
It also reminds me how much those de Koonings reminded me of the early states of Richter’s squeegee paintings. This concept of Richter painting and then overpainting as a transformative, not destructive, technique was what first got me looking at Richter’s destroyed paintings. [That, and Erased de Kooning Drawing, of course.]
Now it strikes me how the two painters share the urge to resist habit and ease. Richter picked up the squeegee in part to counter intentionality and the mastered brushstroke. If de Kooning was resisting the same thing when he changed up his approach after 1980, maybe there’s something to be discovered by seeing these two painters’ works together.
20×200.com is starting their WTF Cyber Monday sale early, at 4AM Eastern, with an eye-popping 40% off on prints and frames, as detailed above. The discount ticks down a bit throughout the day, until it reaches a still-totally-respectable 25% off by 4PM.
The discounts apply to orders over $100, so for example a framed 14×11 edition of Untitled (300 x 404), below, would be $111 instead of $185. And one of the five remaining 30×24″ prints, would be $720 vs $1,200.
There are, of course, many other excellent prints available, too.
You can’t even get discounts like that at Basel Miami Beach, people. It is serious Crazy Eddie days over there.
We can’t really control when an idea will come to us, or when it might subsequently feel significant, more than a fleeting whim. But we can decide when we make it known. And when we should maybe just shut the hell up about it for a while because seriously, people.
So one day, while driving and explaining to the kid the difference between a car logo and a hood ornament, and how sometimes, people put their own hood ornaments on their cars, usually Jeep Wagoneers, it hit me: artist-designed hood ornaments.
I mean, why should the vinyl wrap industry have all the art car fun?
They’d be awesome little sculptures, made in limited editions. Maybe they could be chromed steel, but they could just as easily be something else: acrylic. Resin. Cast glass. Wood, I suppose. They could be made or readymade. There must be some kind of universal [or relatively so] base attachment mechanism.
Oh, what an interesting context for artists to engage.
And that was that. Until the next day, when the new Artforum arrived. And there on page 52 was Alison Gingeras’ remembrance of visits with the late Franz West who, despite not driving himself, “had a crazy obsession with luxury cars.”
[See more images at basis-wien.at.]
She told of a November 2001 museum performance in Vienna, Aktion PAR BLEU (Le Limousine Bleu), where West used a watering can to pour candy pink housepaint on a maroon Maserati Quattroporte.
And how West was thrilled about having traded a work for a vintage Rolls Royce:
By the time I got to see his prized chariot, it wasn’t just a Rolls–it had been Westified. He swapped out the Spirit of Ecstasy…for one of his suggestive sculptures rendered in miniature. The view out the front windshield was now accented by a brownish abstract squiggle, which resembled a cross between poop and a penis. In fact, he made a few of these hood ornaments and stored them in the glove box: different colors and forms that he switched out on the daily ride to his Esteplatz studio, depending on his mood.
Which gets at the reality of how people often treat their cars as extensions of themselves, projections of their identity; or conversely, how cars are perceived–and created and marketed–as public embodiments of their occupants’ identity. West’s little artworks went into the world just ahead of him, altering his interactions with it.
With Gingeras’ story as the greatest proof of concept ever–no other mentions of West’s hood ornaments turned up online–I resolved to blog it up pronto. And then Hurricane Sandy started closing in.
image: Casey Neistat’s instagram
And small blessings, I didn’t get around to mentioning it during the uneasy joking-in-advance period. And it was forgotten completely, and it wasn’t until just now, as I re-read Gingeras’ focus on luxury cars, that I even made a connection to the emotional peculiarities of seeing tree-crushed Range Rovers or submerged Bentleys in Sandy’s photostream. I’m not sure why that is.
Anyway, hood ornaments by artists.
In the Fall of 1953, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, fast friends and mutual admirers from Black Mountain, collaborated on an artwork. Cage had already been studying with DT Suzuki and had been discussing Zen in great depth with Rauschenberg. Which dialogue had led, the summer before at Black Mountain, Rauschenberg to make his White Paintings, and to Cage and others to orchestrate Theater Piece No. 1 and to compose 4’33”. Rauschenberg had already stayed at Cage’s loft while his new Fulton St. studio was being fumigated, where he’d surprised Cage by painting the painting Cage got from Rauschenberg’s 1951 show at Betty Parsons completely black. Untitled (John Cage, Black Mountain), 1952, photo: Robert Rauschenberg
For the work that came to be known as Automobile Tire Print, Rauschenberg pasted 20 sheets of drawing paper into a scroll, which he laid down on an empty Fulton St one Sunday, and he inked the rear tire while Cage drove his Model A in a straight line along the paper. [Cage drove the Model A to Black Mountain, above. Apparently, Kaprow had a Model A, too.] Michael Kimmelman is fond of noticing the similarity between the long, lone mark made by moving through space and Barnett Newman’s “zips,” which Rauschenberg would have seen at Parsons’ gallery in 1951 and 1952.
In the catalogue for his 1991 show Rauschenberg in the 50s,, Walter Hopps links Automobile Tire Print in time, medium, and concept to another major collaborative work on paper, Erased de Kooning Drawing. It turns out that for the first decade-plus after their creation, neither work was exhibited publicly, and both were known largely by word of mouth. They were discussed without being seen; as the product–or to use Harold Rosenberg’s influential 1952 term, the “residue”–of process, their physical state was secondary. Which let Hopps and others interpret and present them as precursors of Conceptual Art once such a thing came into existence.
Hopps says that Automobile Tire Print was “maintained as a scroll” which was eventually mounted on fabric for preservation. Since it was first exhibited in the 70s [and yes, I guess I’ll have to start digging into this history now, too], the work has been unfurled to various lengths. [Above, from Hopps’ 1976 show at the Smithsonian] Since Hopps, and definitely since SFMOMA’s acquisition of the piece in 1998, it has been completely unfurled.
The accounts, even the descriptions of the work, vary. Hopps said it’s ink. Rauschenberg said it was “house paint,” like the black paint he was using at the time on his Black Paintings. And that he poured it out on the street in front of Cage’s tire.
In that SFMOMA video, Bob told David Ross that he asked his friend to help execute his idea. Cage “was the printer,” Ross suggested, “the printer and the press,” said the artist. Without entirely contradicting that view, Cage wrote in 1961 in Silence, “I know he put the paint on the tires. And he unrolled the paper on the city street. But which one of us drove the car?”
Perhaps ambiguous authorship is just one more way Automobile Tire Print is like Erased deKooning Drawing, a work in which the central, conceptually transformational contribution of Jasper Johns had been willfully omitted for more than four decades.
Not that these questions of credit and origin give BMW any cover at all on their mindblowing direct marketing campaign “marking the momentous occasion” of the 40th anniversary of the M Motorsports car series.
The company that regularly puts artists in the promotional driver’s seat on its Art Car series completely fails to mention either Rauschenberg or Cage in the video for the M Print project, which is essentially a cover version, or a re-performance, of Automobile Tire Print starring the M6 sports coupe. The resulting prints were then cut into postcard size, and sent to new and prospective owners.
[FWIW, BMW also blanked a living artist, using the donut-spinning M6 (below) to re-enact Greeting Card, Aaron Young’s 2007 Park Avenue Armory motorcycle tire painting project. I’m sure if there were another car-related performance art project ransackable enough, BMW’s agency would have turned that one into postcards, too.]
I guess it’s possible to look at this as a glass half full situation, that the indexical Zen performative aesthetic of Cage & Rauschenberg has, sixty years later, gone mainstream. Or at least turned into a PR stunt to sell $100,000 sports cars.
The only way this ends well is if it spawns a cars-meets-Fluxus fauxreality TV show on the History Channel. John and Bob would surely be delighted. The BMW M6 Creates Its Own Direct Mail [fastcocreate.com] BMW M Presents: The Making of an M Print [youtube]
Previously, unexpectedly related: greg.org coverage of John Cage’s VW bus and of the unexamined making of Erased de Kooning Drawing
I don’t remember the inflationary period, 2011, Don Edler, image via
What with the title taken from the famous Jasper Johns quote and all, I was interested to read the dialogue/press release between the artists in Freight + Volume’s upcoming show, “Do Something (Else) To It.”
The artists are Don Edler, George Jenne, and Andrew Smenos. The opening is rescheduled for the 29th.
The show will be about process, and, as Edler says, “transformation and translation.” His mention of a plywood sofa sent me searching for images of his work, and that’s where I found I don’t remember the inflationary period, above. The 2011 sculpture consists of a molded acrylic sheet partially lined with foil, which rests on a found scrapwood table painted with pink latex. Given Edler’s stated interest in cosmology, I’ll guess the title is a reference to the universe before the economy. Untitled, 2001, Wade Guyton, image via phillips de pury
But what caught my eye in all this, and the reason I’m posting it, even though I imagine it has little or nothing to do with Edler’s practice, is the formal similarities between this one sculpture and some early works by Wade Guyton.
Back in 2001 or so, some of the first sculptures Wade showed were made from smoked & mirrored acrylic. The most prominent was a tower-like structure, 8-9 feet high, in a summer group show at Gavin Brown [Actually, that was 2002]. But there were also smaller ones, tabletop sized, which were perched, Brancusi-style, on found tables. I saw one at Bellwether in Brooklyn in 2000.
Another one I’ve seen, from 2001, turned up last year at Phillips in London. It had been bought locally from an Austrian show. The images of Edler’s sculpture just reminded me of the [c. 2001] photos of Guyton’s piece.
Until this summer, when I visited Wade’s studio, I’d always thought that these bases were made, not found. Not tables, but “table-like scuptures.” The first sculpture of Wade’s I’d ever seen was a large cubic form made from parquet floor tiles, so I’d always assumed he’d made everything. When I mentioned this to him, he just laughed and laughed.
Also, it really bummed me out–and it’s crazy to think about it now, considering–to learn how, because of space and money, much of his early work got tossed out. Maybe it’s time to bring some of that stuff, up to say, the HDTS era back somehow. I mean, really, there oughta be a retrospective or something.
On July 11, 2006, on the floor of the US House of Representatives, Congressman Steve King, Republican from Iowa, presented a model of “a fence and a wall” he had designed. It was a site-specific proposal, to be located on the US-Mexico border.
The fence/wall could be built, Mr. King explained, using a slipform machine to lay a concrete foundation in a 5-foot deep trench cut into the desert floor, a gesture that immediately brings to mind the Earth Art interventions of Michael Heizer. Pre-cast concrete panels, Post-minimalist readymades 10 feet wide and 13 feet high, could be dropped in with a crane.
“Our little construction company,” Mr. King said, referring to the King Construction Company, which he founded, and which was then being run by his son, “could build a mile a day of this, once you got the system going.”
Mr. King demonstrated the construction of the wall using his tabletop model, made of cardboard boxes, silver-painted wood slats, and a couple of feet of coiled wire [representing the wall’s crown of concertina wire, which would be electrified “with the kind of current that would not kill somebody…we do that with livestock all the time.”]
It’s true that the remarkable simplicity of the design and the economy of the materials resonate the work of Richard Tuttle. But in the scale and especially the form, King seems to be making a conscious reference to the early work of Anne Truitt. Seven, 1962, image: annetruitt.org
Obviously, at some point after his arrival in Washington in 2003, King studied the iconic Truitts in local collections: the highly fence-like First (1961) [at the Baltimore Museum] and slab-on-plinth structures like Insurrection (1962) [at the Corcoran]. But even I was surprised to see King make such an explicit homage to Truitt’s Seven (1962) [above, collection of the artist’s estate].
Much like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, King conceived of his site-specific fence/wall to be temporary, at least conceptually:
You could take it back down. If somehow they got their economy working and got their laws working in Mexico we could pull this back out just as easy as we could put it in. We could open it up again or we could open it up and let livestock run through there, whatever we choose.
Whatever we choose. Thus the fence/wall becomes a symbol of American freedom.
According to the Congressional Record, Mr. King, appearing as an expert witness, exhibited his Study For A Fence And A Wall again a week later, in a joint hearing of the House Committees of Homeland Security and Government Reform.
The current whereabouts of King’s model is not immediately clear, but I guess I could call about it. Meanwhile, I would love to see this work realized at full scale, if only temporarily, where it was conceived: right here in Washington DC. Perhaps in the National Gallery’s sculpture garden, or along one of the sketchier sections of Pennsylvania Avenue, where dangerous elements threaten Our Freedoms. January 2017 inevitable update: Oh how we did not need to worry that this work might not have survived. On Jan. 13 Congressman King tweeted out a photo with it, and the new appointee for DHS. Study was installed on his coffee table in his office. It will be noted that it has a new base, set in unpainted wood feet, presumably a pair. The articulation of the wall at the ground and the underground footing are now fully visible. The box representing the desert floor, and the notch, where “you put a trench in the desert floor.” are not seen. What was once site-specific is now available for installation anywhere, I guess. Though it’s really tough to say at the moment.
One of the things I found so fascinating about the Cariou v. Prince case is the language. The juxtaposition of the ambiguities and subjectivities of art, the calculated omissions of the art market, and the adversarial formalism and ritual of the legal context.
That comes to a head in Prince’s deposition transcript, which is this kind of amazing text and performance in one. People objecting to things, people repeating or parsing questions, spelling out names with the consciousness that the purpose is to put something on a record–the record–for later use.
And out of it all, art history inevitably or inadvertently emerges, and a window opens onto something–I was going to type reality, but that’s probably naive. It’s information, information pulled and distorted by the constraints and confrontations of the deposition process. Which fits the form of the genre, the medium.
The deposition transcript Gallerist posted yesterday from Larry Gagosian, in the suit over the Cowles Lichtenstsein is another example, just a great read. Unlike Prince, and unlike Gagosian’s Cariou deposition, it’s a real pageturner, combative, tense, a bit suspenseful, maybe with some setups that you think are corny, but yet, in the deposition setting, they still end up working. And even some twists at the end. [My only real complaint: I hate scribd. Just hate it. It’s as much a reason for doing a book in the first place, because I hate using scribd so much.]
Anyway, point is, while reading through the hilarious transcript of a preliminary scheduling hearing in the contract/infringement/revenge/divorce case of Burch v. Burch, the chatty judge, Chancellor Leo Strine, wrapped up with an insight on depositions that is a piece of poetry itself:
THE COURT: Okay. Then don’t — then don’t worry. What I’m saying is it could be — if you can all get the depositions done in 62.3 hours on each side, you should.
But a hundred hours is just an artificial thing.
I also don’t know — for example, depositions are often longer than they should be, not
because the person is taking a long time asking questions, because somebody says “Objection.”
Mr. Abrams knows that the real reasons why the board did this were blank and blank and blank. And it’s distracting the witness from the fact that they’re blank and blank and blank, and the witness’ inability to answer for himself blank and blank and blank and blank has now been corrected by me, indicating that the real reasons he did what he did is blank and blank. I mean, I’ve seen plenty — everybody in Chancery has seen plenty of transcripts — and you’ve been at those depositions — where, frankly, it’s much more from the obstreperous defense side than there is from the asking side.
In fact, during his deposition, Gagosian actually stops his lawyer, the estimable Hollis Gonerka Bart, a couple of times to ask, “What does that mean, by the way? Can I ask you what that means when you say ‘Objection to form’?”
I can tell you that by the end of the live staging of Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta this summer, “Objection to form” meant everyone took a drink. To the obstreperous defense.
