greg.org – Page 131 – the making of, by greg allen

What I Looked At Today: Jean Arp

It’s funny, all this time I’ve been looking hard at the brushstrokes of modernism, abstraction, and monochrome, trying to figure out how they were made–and, thus, how I might make some paintings myself–and I’ve ignored Jean Arp.
When I started wanting to figure out how to do crisp abstraction, I went to look at Dove and Mondrian, only to find drawing & filling in. Sheeler’s precisionist paintings were actually paint-up-to-the-pencil-line sketches.

When I started wanting to figure out monochrome objects, I looked at Truitt in front of Kelly, and surprised myself to find brushstrokes just all over the damn place.
Still, Truitt’s still Truitt, and Kelly’s still Kelly. I was at the National Gallery yesterday, accompanying the kid’s field trip, and their Truitt is pretty slick. And of course, their Atrium Kelly seems fantastic, if hard to see from the ground.

Orange Diagonal, 2008, via matthewmarks.com
And Kelly, talking about his recent relief paintings, did tell Carol Vogel, “What I’ve made is real — underline the word real. It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.” Which I am totally onboard with.

But which also suddenly reminded me of something I’d read about Thomas Scheibitz a few years ago, from a 2008 show at the Camden Arts Centre:

Scheibitz has developed his own grammar for painting on sculpture, which like his paintings, bows simultaneously to a residual interest in illusionism and representation and at the same time relishes the drips, splashes and material traces that are the legacy of painterly modernism. Indeed the whole point of painted sculpture rests upon it being a real object in space, which simultaneously inhabits an “artificial world”, by virtue of its disguised and painted exterior and its imagined and constructed form. It therefore exists in that realm of “second nature” that Scheibitz describes as the location of his work: the paint helps to suggest that the sculpture has a correlative in the “real” world, while simultaneously undermining any such belief. [emphasis added]

Which at one point, I guess I thought I was onboard with, but now I guess I either don’t understand or believe anymore. About Scheibitz’s undermining, that is. Painted sculpture is just not not real; it’s paint. On sculpture. Paint on an object. If line or color vary from form, I don’t see why that has to be illusory or not “true to the material.” Can’t it look like one thing at first, until you look more closely? Tension or complexity is feature; it shouldn’t all boil down simply to instant perception. I think this is particularly true in Scheibitz’s case as well as Truitt’s and Kelly’s.

The Forest, detail, 1916, nga has no image
And finding myself with time to stare at Jean Arp’s painted reliefs yesterday doesn’t change that one bit. First off, they are fantastic. The surface is slick, smooth, pristine, nonpainterly.

Shirt Front and Fork, detail, 1922, for which nga also has no image?
Without planning to take up Arp in relation to Kelly, Scheibitz, or Truitt, I found myself impressed by these painted lines, painting on wood. They exist apart somehow from the painterly modernist practice of their time, and seemingly in transgression of sculptural modernism, and yet they’re real. Underlined.
I don’t really know much beyond the Mod101 slideshow blurb about Arp, but I guess I’ll start digging and looking.

Don’t Stop Until SOPA & PIPA Are Stopped

I’ve been using and working on the Internet for almost twenty years now. I’ve done start-ups and IPOs. I’ve worked for huge companies. I worked for Disney when they didn’t know the web from a CD-ROM. I have been involved and engaged with copyright and intellectual property law and their relationship to art and culture for over a decade.
So my opposition to the entertainment industry’s maximalist online power play, in the current form of two pieces of legislation being considered in the US Congress right now, SOPA and PIPA, is neither fleeting nor naive.
As many people with far greater expertise than I have discussed in great detail, these proposed laws are a grave threat to the Internet as a platform for economic, cultural, and political exchange. They are unnecessarily broad and ambiguous and give vast, new, unchecked power to corporations who have consistently lied and misrepresented their case and the supposed threat they face.
Stop SOPA and PIPA by calling your US Congressional representatives today, but also get smart on the issues surrounding these bills. And keep following them, and keep holding politicians and the companies they’re serving accountable, because this crap won’t end today or this week.
Public Knowledge primer and updates on SOPA & PIPA [publicknowledge.org]

Dutch Camo Landscape Painting Painting – 2

Another Sunday painting. Or another Sunday spent painting.

I did another round of taping off and painting on the Dutch Camo Landscape photo of Noordwijk today. The first time, I did two identical gray polygons This time, I did three, with different greys.
The taping is the most time-consuming aspect of the process, the mixing the most uncertain, and the painting itself the most anti-climactic.
Not really knowing anything about color systems or theory, I’m just eyeballing each match. At the moment, there’s something going on, I think, with the way the polys get grouped; I mix one grey, then change it for the next, and then the next. They end up being sequential in a way, related to each other, composed of the same constituent pigments. Until they’re not; the last poly was turning out to be not just lighter, but pinker, redder, and so I gambled and added a new paint, a single drop of red oxide, which blew the whole thing. It eventually came around, though.
Though I’m clearly counting on it somehow, I don’t know what’ll happen when I try to paint next to an already-painted polygon. I mean, on the one hand, I don’t know how paint will handle the tape. On the other, there’s a ridge there now. So I could just paint up to it. But that’d mean some edges will be taped and crisp, and others will be brushed.
At this point, I guess I’m still seeing if paint actually does what I think it’ll do when I do it.
In unrelated news, that brown poly in the center of the photo looks kind of like Iraq.

Rijksoverheid Rood 7: Roller

Well, that was a total surface disaster.
The size and disposability of this crappy little foam roller made it irresistible. The bubbly eggshell finish that even contains a few crumbs of foam made it a total failure putting paint down on the monochromes.
The instructions on the back are so specific, I was tempted to call following them a conceptual conceit:

Pour 1/2 inch of paint into tray

Roll back and forth on slanted section of paint tray to load roller thoroughly

When painting, increase pressure on roller as it dispenses paint to pull paint from inside the foam reservoir

Performance improves as roller becomes fully saturated with paint

Finish with light strokes

But no.
On the bright side, there aren’t any brushstrokes.
FEW HOURS LATER UPDATE: OK, maybe it’s not so bad. The eggshelling thing is a bit subdued, but there’s far less paint per coat with a roller, no drip, and it’s generally smoother overall. I think I will continue with them a bit and see how it sands and builds up.
Previously: Rijksoverheid Rood paintings: the making of

‘Bob Made It, But Jasper Made It Art.’

A couple of things that I still wonder about about Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing:
What did de Kooning think? The story of making it is always told by Rauschenberg, or from his side. Did de Kooning ever tell the story? Did he ever see the result? Or talk about it? Did anyone ever ask him about it? I’ve never found any reference at all.
When did Rauschenberg actually make it? ~~The date’s all over the map.~~ SFMOMA currently says it’s 1953. For a long time, it was dated 1953-55. James Meyer had it as 1951-2, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else put it that early. Even the extraordinary timeline in John Elderfield’s de Kooning retrospective catalogue has only the basics of Rauschenberg’s travel schedule and his account to go on [“Probably April or After,” it says, since April 1953 was when Rauschenberg returned from his European trip with Twombly.]
[UPDATENever mind. I got the EdKD dating ambiguity mixed up with Johns’ Flag, which has been variously dated between 1954 and ’56, whereas the date for EdKD has consistently been given as 1953 from its very earliest forays into the public view. Thanks to Sarah Roberts, research curator at SFMOMA, who took a moment from her multiyear project documenting Rauschenberg’s work, to point out my error.]
What did people at the time think? Who actually ever saw it? Even someone as early to the work as Leo Steinberg apparently only talked to Bob about it on the phone.
And what about Johns? Who knew about his involvement? What is up with that? For forty-plus years, while Rauschenberg claimed or let others write or publish that he came up with the title, and drew the hand-lettered label, Johns stayed silent about his role in the collaboration. But others surely knew, certainly in the early years when the work was taking shape.
Just before the holidays, I got in touch with Edward Meneeley, and artist and photographer who became friends with many artists and dealers in 1950s and 60s New York because he photographed their artwork. Meneeley created Portable Gallery, a subscription slide service that provided regular installments of art images to libraries, colleges, galleries, and collectors.
I found him because it was his monthly newsletter, Portable Gallery Bulletin, to which Jasper Johns wrote in 1962, explaining that it was artist’s prerogative, plus an agreement between himself and Rauschenberg, not “politics,” behind the refusal to let Portable Gallery publish and distribute slides of Short Circuit.
In a multi-chapter biography published online by Joel Finsel, Meneleey says that he was friends with both Johns and Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, and that he had an affair with the latter behind the former’s back. [He tells Finsel of Johns coming to his loft one morning looking for Rauschenberg, and inviting him in to talk about it, all the while Bob is hiding in Meneeley’s bedroom, eavesdropping on the conversation. Which sounds like a dick move to me, but there you go.]
Anyway, after talking to Meneeley for a while about Short Circuit–which he first saw in 1955, when it was first exhibited at the Stable Gallery–I asked him what people thought or said at the time about Erased de Kooning Drawing.
“Everyone at the Cedar Bar knew,” he told me, but they thought it was just a stunt, a joke. After finishing it, Rauschenberg didn’t do much with it or, as Meneeley put it, “he didn’t know what to do with it.” Until Jasper came along.
[Remember, Bob apparently acquired the original de Kooning sketch of a woman sometime after April 1953. He met and quickly became involved with Johns in the winter of 1954.]
In Meneeley’s recollection of the time, it was Jasper who basically saved Erased de Kooning Drawing from ending up as a barroom one-liner. He mounted it, gave it a title and a label, or really, a drawing of a label. “Bob made it,” Meneeley told me, “But Jasper made it art.”
Which is why I’m interested in hearing what people thought at the time it was made.

Erased De Kooning Drawing Is Bigger Than It Used To Be

Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, “drawing | traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame.” via SFMOMA
TIMELY BUT UNNECESSARY HOOK: LAST VISIT TO THE DE KOONING RETROSPECTIVE
Part of the reason I hustled back to MoMA Sunday was to look through the de Kooning retrospective from the perspective of his relationship to other artists [or really, vice versa].
Last summer, while mapping out the history of the reception of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, I thought Leo Steinberg got it the rightest when he called the work “a sort of collaboration” which treats erasure as generative, not destructive. And sure enough, de Kooning’s drawings and paintings of the 50s are filled with erasures, and smudges, and obliterations; they’re accepted as legitimate markmaking strategies. Which could make Rauschenberg’s project an extension or variation on de Kooning, not a patricidal, rebellious break, as it’s come down to us. There’s a continuity and dialogue right in front of us which we are not-told to ignore.
But while I’m glad to give attention to what I think are Steinberg’s and Tom Hess’s persuasive arguments about the deK/RR affinity, I don’t really have much to add to them.
MUCH OF WHAT WAS KNOWN AND THEN SAID ABOUT ERASED DE KOONING DRAWING TURNS OUT TO BE DIFFERENT OR YES, WRONG
What I’m still trying to pin down are the basics of Erased de Kooning Drawing‘s history. Because it’s become very clear that it has been presented and interpreted differently over time. It was not even exhibited until 10 years after it was made. Many prominent critics, especially those who considered it an ur-Conceptual masterpiece, seemingly wrote about it without seeing it. For decades, Rauschenberg claimed and everyone assumed, that he had created the work alone, but in 1999, when he gave EdeKD to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he revealed that Jasper Johns had given the work its title and had hand-drawn the “label.” And it turns out that Rauschenberg physically altered the work over the years, after exhibiting it at least twice, in ways that have never been addressed.
The Erased de Kooning Drawing we know is not just a drawing. According to SFMOMA’s complete description, it is comprised of “traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame.” To get the point across clearly, Rauschenberg wrote, “FRAME IS PART OF DRAWING“ [all caps and underlining in the original] on the paper backing.
But in Emile de Antonio’s 1970 film, Painters Painting, Erased de Kooning Drawing appears unframed and unmatted. The sheet with de Kooning’s original drawing is mounted on a longer piece of paper on which Johns [it turns out] drew the precise, label-like box of text.

Now I think the way it appeared in Painters Painting is how the artist meant for it to be seen. The earliest exhibition sticker on the back of EdeKD is from 1973. Which made me wonder if the work had even been shown before then. Finally, I found out. Yes. At least twice.
DO WE EVER CALL EDEKD PROTO-MINIMALIST?
In January 1964, Samuel Wagstaff organized “Black, White + Gray” at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The “Zeitgeist show,” to use James Meyer’s term, came to be considered the first museum exhibition of “minimalism,” and Wagstaff specifically asked Rauschenberg to provide “works that have no color…the sparser the better.”
WERE THERE EVER PHOTOS OR REPRODUCTIONS OF IT BEFORE 1976?
According to the exhibition checklist, Rauschenberg loaned exactly what the title called for: a black painting, a white painting, and a relatively gray work, Erased de Kooning Drawing. The registrar’s record [graciously investigated by Atheneum assistant archivist Ann Brandwein] indicates the work was unframed and unmatted, and that it measured 12×18 inches. [It was also valued at $1,200, but listed as “not for sale.”] There was no catalogue for the 4-week show [Jan 9 – Feb 9], and EdKD doesn’t appear in the few installation photos that survive.
But the piece did get noticed. In her review for The Hartford Times critic Florence Berkman wrote:

Perhaps the most unusual work is one called “Erased Drawing” [hmm] in which two leading artists, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg are involved.” Mr. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing, leaving enough of the design so that it can be seen in a strong light.

And soon after the Wadsworth show closed, on Feb. 29, 1964, Calvin Tomkins’ first long profile of Rauschenberg appeared in the New Yorker. It included the artist’s first published discussion of EdeKD. When Lawrence Alloway showed the work in his American Drawings survey at the Guggenheim that fall, he included the paragraph from Tomkins’ article in the catalogue checklist, the only piece to warrant [or maybe to require] an explanation:

American Drawings catalogue, p. 60, Sept 1964, curated by Lawrence Alloway via guggenheim.org
Of course, just a couple of months after I chased down and bought my own copy of the catalogue, the Guggenheim released an electronic version on their website.
The dimensions here are slightly different–16 3/4 x 13 3/8 inches–but the medium is the same: “pencil on paper.” Whatever their internal variations, though, the drawing’s 1965 dimensions differ significantly from its current, frame-like object state, which SFMOMA lists as 25.25 x 21.75 x 0.5 inches. Here’s a handy, pixels-per-inch graphic to show the relative sizes.

However it was perceived before the early 1970s, whether as patricidal Dadaist prank or Minimalist forebear, Erased de Kooning Drawing came to be seen as an uncannily prescient, process-oriented, Conceptual object. But that’s not just because the art world finally caught up with Rauschenberg, 20 years later. It’s because Rauschenberg himself reconceived and transformed the work in the wake of, or in response to, Conceptual Art.
Previous greg.org posts on Erased de Kooning Drawing

段ボールの村上

“@takashipom #EGO Takashi with H.E Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani” via @QatarMuseumsAut
I am in awe of the new, Povera-meets-Lars von Trier direction Takashi Murakami is taking his work. It’s like pure signifier now. A master’s bravura gesture. A late de Kooning brushstroke. A wax Degas dancer body fragment. A spray bottle-in-the-sun Olafur rainbow.

via
Of course, making a grand destination exhibition entirely out of cardboard and backdrop paper gestures is only possible because our visual memories have already been stuffed full of so much of the same high-production, branded, manically kawaii, visual overload cruft for so. many. years now.

via
I swear, I’m not angling for a junket when I say that the Qatar Museum Authority’s bold self-criticality and curatorial acumen is a groundbreaking model other world-class art institutions ignore at their own peril.

Artificial Snow

Oh man, JWZ’s digital TV plays analogue static when there’s no HDMI input:

Video static is caused by amplifying random radio white noise and feeding it to the input stage of a scanning electron gun. HDMI is digital and DRM’ed all the way through: there is no analog phase here at all!
This TV is playing a built-in MPEG of static, instead of just displaying solid blue or solid black like they used to do.
I think that’s kind of awesome. The map has become the territory.

Skeumorphantastic comments, too.
Snow Crash [Simulated] [jwz.org]

‘Imagine A World Of Spots.’

John, John, 1988, installed at Ann Temkin’s Color Chart show in 2008, via moma
Alright, before this thing gets too much farther, let’s check what we know. From the Gagosian Gallery exhibition page::

The exhibition will take place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on January 12, 2012. Most of the paintings are being lent by private individuals and public institutions, more than 150 different lenders from twenty countries. Conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” makes use of this demographic fact to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality.

Eleven galleries in eight cities. “More than 300 paintings,” exhibited, if I read this correctly, based in part on the locations of the lenders. I recall reading that around a third of the paintings will be for sale.
So the Spot Challenge could be a shopping trip for someone, someone looking for just the right spot painting. Which, interesting, they used to be [still are? are also?] called Pharmaceutical Paintings, and a 2006 Sotheby’s catalogue entry starts the series in 1991, not 1986. Writing for Tate Modern in 2009, Elizabeth Manchester noted that the series began with a definitive suddenness in 1988, at the Hirst-curated group show, Freeze.
She also says there were over 800 spot paintings at the time, and that, “In 2004 Hirst announced that he would end the series, soon.” Well, I believe there are now over 1,200, which seems to complicate the name of the 300-piece Gagosian show: “The Complete Spot Paintings.” Perhaps the clue is in a quote from the catalogue for Hirst’s 1996 Gagosian show:

I want them to be an endless series, but I don’t want to make an endless series. I want to imply an endless series … Imagine a world of spots. Every time I do a painting a square is cut out. They regenerate. They’re all connected … this is more sculpture than painting. I guess it’s infinity … I don’t like the idea of doing them forever because it implies that there is no escape. I like the idea of working it out of my system before I die. I like to imagine that art is more theatrical than real. So an involvement forever is real whereas an implied ‘forever’ is theatrical.

Maybe “Complete” is not “total,” but “finished.” Or maybe an implied finished.
But there’s plenty of time for this later, if necessary. Back to the Challenge. How, exactly, is this supposed to happen? Because Carol Vogel’s description is pretty vague:

unless a private plane is at your disposal, and money is no object, it’s anyone’s guess how much the airfare to tour the galleries would cost; some clever folks might be able to use air miles or get a lucky last-minute deal.

Plane, money, airfare, frequent flyer miles, luck. In fact, Vogel’s ruminations are each more unhelpful than the next.
In addition to money and means, to see all 11 shows, in 8 cities requires time. Sure, you might travel regularly along one or two axes between Gagosian-blessed cities–New York London, NYC-LA, London-Paris, LA-Hong Kong, even. But I’ll bet that no one not named Gagosian will already be in all those cities, plus Rome, Athens and Geneva, between next week and the end of February. So picking up these off-the beaten path galleries will require effort of anyone. Effort and time. And money, of course, but in this case, that’s a given, and so the real constraint is time, or time and money in just the right combination.

It’s possible that someone with an even slightly aggressive travel schedule already–say, Mr Zeitgeist, Tyler Brûlé–could simply add a weekend jaunt here and there to complete the Spot Challenge.
It’s also possible that someone with a plane and no plans for the next six weeks–the snow is pretty crappy in Aspen this year–could just decide to hit the road. Over, and over, and over. Thus the Spot Challenge is really a challenge to fill the vast emptiness of someone’s life, to provide purpose [sic of the biggest kind] to someone’s leisure time. It’s literally the answer for someone who doesn’t know what to do–not just with their money, but at all. If the spots weren’t so relentlessly, pharmaceutically happy, I’d say that was a little sad.
I’ve begun running the numbers and constructing itineraries, and Hirst is right, it is “pretty difficult to visit all the galleries.” Flying commercial, round-the-world, NYC-NYC, there’s really no way to hit all eleven sites in less than six days. Airfare alone is over $10,000. In coach, which, WTF. For a one-hour hop from Geneva to Paris it’s no big deal, but for the longhaul flights at least, you’d really want to fly business. At least.
Switching to a private jet can ease some hassle, and avoiding the security, check-in, and boarding rituals of the masses will certainly tighten up your time on the ground. But then when you try to pack a couple of cities into one day, you run into the constraints of the galleries themselves. Rome and Geneva don’t open til 11AM, but close at 7. London’s locations open at 10, but close at 6. Athens is 4 hours away and not open Saturday, except by appointment.
And there’s the key. When I started putting itineraries together, I treated the gallery hours as fixed. But what if they were a variable? So say total flight time is 40 hours. Give yourself 3 hours on the ground in each city: an hour each way for transport, plus an hour in each gallery [which means 5 hrs for NYC and 4 hrs for London].
Barring local airport restrictions, if it were possible to coordinate with the galleries so that they’d open for you as soon as you landed, day or night, whatever day of the week, you should be able to complete the Spot Challenge–and get home–in 66 hours, less than three full days. It’d be like an i-banking roadshow on steroids. Or pharmaceuticals.
LOL UPDATE: No sooner to I hit publish than I see Felix Salmon has calculated the total cost of the entire trip for a barely-fictional collector named Pictor Vinchuk. Awesome.
Though I’d suspect that the duration of his deluxe, 5-star scenario–19 days–would be the heaviest investment for our Mr. Vinchuk. Otherwise, if Damien Hirst can really compel a pack of oligarchs to move around the world for three weeks, visiting his seemingly indistinguishable shows, we have truly underestimated his power.
HIPSTER UPDATE: And now Jen Bostic weighs in with a very enticing Hipster/fashionista itinerary. No specific flight info, but there are nice, funky hotels all along the way–and it clocks in at just $13,000 and change–for two.
DUH UPDATE: It’s so obvious, and standing right in front of me, asking if I’d like a warm nut cup. The perfect demographic for dominating the Spot Challenge are flight attendants. International flight attendants with enough seniority to pick their routes would be at the top of the pyramid, of course. They could book the Hirst cities and fill their card without breaking a sweat. Those who can’t work their way to each Gagosian city can still jump seat their way around. [Assuming, probably incorrectly, that their time in between work flights is uncommitted.]
I’d love to see the travel workers who knit our global village together totally take over the Spot Challenge, and secure a high-ticket artwork they could flip easily. But of course, the larger the pool of Challengers, the larger the edition of “Personal Spot Prints,” and hence, the lower the value of each print. With a print factory like HIrst or Murakami, it should be possible to model the effect of dimensions, format, and edition size, to determine how quickly a work approaches £480, the retail price of a Hirst X Supreme skatedeck.

The Complete Spot Challenge

Oh, man, just last night I was goof-tweeting about this, and it turns out it’s already a thing. Registration for The Complete Spot Challenge starts tomorrow:

Visit all eleven Gagosian Gallery locations during the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 and receive a signed spot print by Damien Hirst, dedicated personally to you.
Registration begins on January 6 and ends on February 10, 2012.

Via Two Coats comes a link to a Carol Vogel story in the Times ~~from last month~~ [whoops, from Jan. 6. Note to self: 12 is the year now, not the month. -ed.] with a few details on the challenge:

To apply, they give their names, the dates their journeys begin and photo identification, like a passport or driver’s license.
Each registrant will then be issued a special “Spot challenge registration card,” with 11 empty circles. At each location the person shows identification and has the card specially stamped (each gallery has its own color) by one of the designated gallery officials. The contestant’s presence will be noted on a gallery database.
Asked how he came up with the idea, Mr. Hirst responded in an e-mail: “I figured it would be pretty difficult to visit all the galleries, and totally admirable if anyone managed it, so admirable in fact that I thought they would deserve a work of art, so we came up with the idea to do the challenge. I’d love it if people manage it. I remember the golden tickets in Willy Wonka, maybe it’s a bit like that.”

How awesome that he invokes the utterly deranged Willy Wonka for this thing, which goes beyond difficult; I think it’d positively hellish. Which is really perfect.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the art pilgrimage has been a key organizing principle of mine for most of my adult life. I’ve considered the personal experience of art, visiting it, going out of my way for it, making special trips for it, sacrificing for it, as a form of collecting, equal to or greater than actually buying works. There have been plenty of times too, when I’ve chosen to travel to see some art rather than buy some.
And I’ve done compleatist tours in the past. I traveled to the various locations of John Cage’s Rolywholyover and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ retrospective, and visited works I love when they’re installed in different locations. And let’s not even start on biennials and art fairs.
And now, Damien Hirst is turning the idea of a transformative art pilgrimage into a grueling, round-the-world race, with a “free” five-figure print at the finish line. It’s kind of despicably brilliant, really. Like a Black Friday riot for billionaires. Fantastic.
Obviously, I’ll be registering immediately.
UPDATE FROM THE REGISTRATION: the “Personal Spot Print”:

Acceptance and use of the Personal Spot Print constitutes permission (except where prohibited by law) to use your name, image, likeness and photograph (all at the discretion of the Sponsor) for future advertising, publicity in any and all media now or hereafter devised throughout the world in perpetuity, without additional compensation, notification or permission.

Damien Hirst Spot Challenge [gagosian.com/spotchallenge]

You’re Going To Love The Disco Ball Next To The Lawler.

It was a favorite in the Met’s Pictures Generation show. And I liked her recent, similar show at Metro Pictures. But hey-ho, how awesome does Louise Lawler’s show at Sprüth Magers look??
I mean, I might have been content to stop at the enlarged-to-fit, distorted vinyl mural of the oblique view of Gerhard Richter’s Staffel. But not Lawler.
From now on, I think the question demanded of any installation should be, “Why are you taking the giant disco ball out?”
No Drones, Louise Lawler, at Sprüth Magers in London through Dec. 23, 2011 [contemporaryartdaily.com, thanks andy]
Sprueth Magers London [spruethmagers.com]
Previously: last days of disco balls
Part disintegrating Deathstar, part disco ball

Jan Kaplicky Loved This Modular Construction System By, Uh,

I just pulled out some Future Systems books last night, and I’d forgotten how hard I’d fallen for them. And though I knew they were The Future at the time, it’s still pretty awesome/eerie how much our 2006 ended up looking like their 1993. It seems like Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete’s tenacious, visionary modernist pursuits, their interest in prefab and industrial manufacturing in architecture and energy efficiency, became dominant themes, even as FS’s own practice split apart with the end of its principals’ relationship.
The other thing that seems prescient, for better or worse, is Kaplicky’s voracious image consumption. Those little source/idea books Future Systems put out, filled with hundreds of photos and drawings culled from the seductive, Western “image cascade” that washed over Kaplicky after he left Communist Czechoslovakia, feel exactly like the world’s favoritest tumblr.
[Of course, they also feel like a conditioned response to the multiscreen info overload of capitalist love the Eameses made for exhibition in Moscow in the Cold War, and Kaplicky’s own “vast collection” echos the 310,000+ piece image archive Ray Eames donated to the Library of Congress.]
But that’s the good part. Future Systems also anticipated the thing that most annoys the hell out of me about Tumblr and FFFound and the entire world now, the carefree casualness with credit and sourcing.
By that I obviously don’t mean I have hangups with attribution, or–double obviously–copyright infringement. [The title page of one catalogue has this refreshing disclaimer, “All reasonable efforts have been made to trace the copyright holders of the photographs. The Publishers and Future Systems apologise to anyone who has not been reached.”] It’s just that when I see an image that interests me, I want to know more. I want context. Origin. History. Tangents. I want to learn things that don’t necessarily only involve how something looks.

So anyway, does anyone recognize this kind of awesome prefab construction system Kaplicky included in his Influences: A Visual Essay [on the top of page 28 of Marcus Field’s 1999 Future Systems monograph, btw]? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s some random Prouvé follower, but that doesn’t narrow it down.
UPDATE And we have a winner, Doug from Materiality Office has identified Fritz Haller as the designer of this steel frame building system, probably from a house in Solothurn, Germany. Many thanks!

The VW Years: Carolyn Brown, Part II

After processing the odd hippie hipness of the idea of John Cage driving Merce Cunningham and his dance company around the country in a VW Microbus, it was really dancer Carolyn Brown’s excellent memoir that persuaded me to see the bus as central to this incredible, historic period. So I’m going to quote from an extended section of Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage And Cunningham, and then expect everyone to go read it themselves. Because it’s an awesome tale of an exciting career. Brown really shows both self-reflection and an awareness of those around her. And those around her included some of the greatest artists of the last hundred years.
Anyway:

Continue reading “The VW Years: Carolyn Brown, Part II”

The VW Years: Carolyn Brown, Part I

Well first off, apologies to Remy Charlip. I’d said he was “a bit off on dates” when he wrote about touring with Merce in a VW Microbus driven by John Cage from 1956-61. When we know [sic] that Cage only bought the bus in 1959, after winning a stack of dough on a rigged Italian game show.
But now, who knows? Those dates match up perfectly with the memoir of Carolyn Brown, one of Merce’s first principal/partners, and, like Charlip, a member of the Company from the earliest Black Mountain College days.
In fact, the chapter of Chance and Circumstance which lent its title to this series of posts, “The VW Years,” begins in:

November 1956. John and Merce borrowed money to buy a Volkswagen Microbus, the vehicle that defined–willy-nilly–a classic era of the dance company’s history: the VW years. Our first VW-bus jaunt was crazily impractical, but according to a postcard sent to my parents, “a very happy trip.” To give two performances, we drove for two days and one-third of the way across the country and, although I don’t know how Merce was able to afford it, we stayed, for all the world like a professional dance company, in a big city hotel–the Roosevelt in downtown St. Louis. [p. 164]

What’s remarkable about these “VW Years” in the mid-50s was how little use the bus actually got. The centerpiece of the chapter is actually a groundbreaking Jan. 1957 performance at BAM that caused a downtown uproar–but which was followed by months-long stretches of absolutely nothing at all. The company performed so little in 1957 that Brown ended up joining the ballet corps at Radio City Music Hall, a grueling gig that left her exhausted and injured, but with money in the bank.
The detailed, finely, painfully felt atmosphere Brown conjures up is both eye-opening and engrossing; the rejection, ignoring crowds, poverty and hardship of this era of Merce & co’s career–indeed, of the whole downtown scene–seems hard to imagine from the comfortable, iconic present. And though I’m neither a big biography nor dance guy, I repeatedly found myself thrilled and literally laughing out loud at Brown’s stories.
The VW Years were also the Bob and Jap years, when Rauschenberg and Johns designed costumes and sets for the Company. In 1958, the two artists and Emile de Antonio produced a 20-year concert retrospective of John Cage’s work, followed in Feb. 1960 by a Manhattan performance for Merce’s company.
Merce worked out the program for what would turn out to be a “traumatic” New York performance on a tour through Illinois and Missouri:

After the eleven-day tour, six of them spent in the close quarters of our Volkswagen bus, everyone had or was getting a cold. In Viola [Farber]’s case the cold developed into bronchial pneumonia. By February 16 she was acutely ill. At the end of her umbrella solo in Antic Meet her legs were cramping so badly she barely made it into the wings. Merce, entering from the opposite side for his soft-shoe number, couldn’t help seeing her, on the floor in the wings, unable to walk, tears streaming down her face. Afterward he said that as he went through the motions of his solo his mind was racing: What happened? Will she be able to continue? What will we do if she can’t? At the intermission he picked her up in his arms and carried her upstairs to the women’s dressing room. The cramps finally subsided and she assured him she could continue. Cod knows how she got through Rune, but she did. [p. 260]

Brown is sympathetic but unflinching in her account of the difficulties of working with Cunningham, and of the toll the company’s lack of performances and new choreography took on Merce the dancer, who, in Brown’s telling, grew grim and depressed as he watched his peak physical years passing him by. By 1961, things were not quite so grim, with ten performances booked in nine states between February and April; which may make this the Golden VW Year:

I think Merce was even more relived than I to be touring with the full company, and his self-confidence seemed fully restored knowing that the company had been engaged on the basis of his reputation as dancer and choreographer rather than by avant-garde musical festivals based on John’s and David [Tudor]’s reputations. John and David were with us, of course, to play piano for Suite and Antic Meet. John, on leave from Wesleyan, also resumed his duties as chief chauffeur, cheerleader, guru, and gamesman. Once again, nine people tucked themselves into the Volkswagen Microbus, sometimes spending as many as eighteen out of twenty-four hours together. Singing, snoozing, reading, knitting, arguing, laughing, telling stories, playing games, munching, and sipping, we whiled away the hours and miles between New York City and De Kalb, Illinois, De Kalb and Lynchburg, Virginia…etc. We totaled six days and one full night on the road plus six hours in the air just to give four performances. Ridiculously long journeys. One performance we gave having had no sleep at all, dancing in Lynchburg, Virginia, on Tuesday night, then, after a party, driving all night to Richmond, Virginia, to catch a plane to Atlanta and another to Macon, where we performed Wednesday night after rehearsing in the afternoon. It was impractical. Exhausting. Wonderful. [pp. 313-4]

There’s one more excerpt which I’ll go ahead and quote from at length, where Brown really brings home the reason why I’ve become kind of fascinated with Cage’s VW bus in the first place. At 11PM, as the year ends, and Merce Cunningham Dance Company is performing for the last time at the Park Avenue Armory–and as I gave my tickets to these final Legacy Tour events to a good friend when I realized our travel schedule meant we couldn’t attend ourselves–and as Cage’s centennial year begins, I am looking forward to soaking in Brown’s insightful account of the scrappy, crazy, foundational era of the company and the artists in its orbit.

“The Final Bows: Merce Cunningham Dance Company, December 31, 2011” [@parkavearmory]

How Firm A Foundation

See, this is the kind of frugal Sforzian stagecraft that Mitt Romney learned from his Mormon pioneer ancestors: just use the replica sets from The Music Man and con a local into holding your chair!
There’s no trouble in Mason City with the end cut flooring, though; I’d totally vote for that.
Campaign Photo of the Day [MSNBC’s @JamilSmith via Yahoo News’s @Chris_Moody via NYT’s @nickconfessore [yahoo]
“You’ll feel as if you’d rented a video of the movie.” [themusicmansquare.org]