the making of, by greg allen
Well, the poster for the last Twombly show in Gagosian’s 980 Madison space sold out by lunchtime of the first day, if you’re wondering how the $20 Twombly fandom’s doing.
Cy Twombly, 23 January – 22 March 2025 [gagosian]
Previously, related: 35 Days Wait at 980 Madison
Speaking of Lutz Bacher, one of her greatest installations was a pair of works shown during the last few days of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Andrew Russeth wrote very movingly about it at the time. Alas, you cannot visit it as he recommends.
But on page 146 of the artist’s website [just keep clicking >] is a Seattle installation photo and a sound loop that gets about as close as you can rn to the Whitney show. And on page 129 is a video of what looks like Baseball: the making of.
The AMoM shirt from Nolen Strals and Soft Labor’s Sarah Hromack is now available in a limited edition of 50, with 100% of proceeds going to Grief & Hope’s GFM to support artists and art handlers who’ve suffered losses from the LA fires. There are less than 45 remaining.
AMoM: A benefit in support of artists and arts workers impacted by the LA fires [metalabel]
The World of Interiors has run the same story about visiting Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage three times: the first was in 1989. The second was in June 2019, and ngl, I can’t figure the hook. Jarman’s partner Keith Collins had died the year before, so the cottage was in limbo, but the Art Fund campaign to rescue it wouldn’t come until 2020. There was a restoration of The Garden (1990), and an exhibition of paintings he made at Dungeness that spring, but neither seems big enough. I just saw it trending in a sidebar, but it turns out the third time was last February, the 30th anniversary of Jarman’s death. So bless the editors and algorithms of World of Interiors, I guess.
What caught my attention was the large painting over Jarman’s sofa, in a style like none of his other works. Which makes sense, since it was not by Jarman, but by Robert Medley. The painting “is entitled Sebastiane, and is autobiographical in the sense that Robert was in the film of that name that Derek made in 1974.”
Continue reading “Robert Medley’s Sebastiane, Or An Autobiographical Incident”Each issue of the 1980s Eye Magazine had a different editor inviting artists to make a work, which would be copied and collated into a spiral-bound volume. Sometimes artists would submit an entire edition of prints, or objects, and some issues were published looseleaf, or in boxes.
There is no comprehensive archive of Eye Magazine. The largest holding I’ve found is in the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry at the University of Iowa, which has seven issues from between 1982 and 1986, including the most famous [sic] one, Cobalt Myth Mechanics, Eye No. 14, edited in 1986 by Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, otherwise known as Paul H-O. Earlier issues in the Sackner archive list edition sizes of 150 or 155. Cobalt Myth Mechanics is listed in Iowa as having a run of “around 200,” and all signed editions are numbered out of 200.
But an old eBay listing scraped by worthpoint quotes Paul H-O in a 2011 online text, now unfindable, as saying: “[the] binding process and handmade covers were, in fact, killing me… They were so labor intensive each copy averaged over two hours after collating so I produced the copies in small batches, and in fact never finished more than about 150.”
The 1987 announcement of Eye #14 in The Print Collectors’ Newsletter says the contributing artists all “share social concerns.” From H-O’s editiorial note: “Not one of the people who’ve made these pages is guilty of not caring about man’s fate.” MoMA reproduces 16 artist folios, but not the title pages or H-O’s text.
The point of all this is that Eye #14 includes two unique contributions from now-canonical artists, and one of them is also an art market star: Karen Finley, and David Hammons.
Continue reading “An Eye For A Hammons”At the beginning of the first Trump administration, I began a project to capture moments of historic significance “in the manner of the most relevant painter of the age, George W. Bush.” Well, that project got gigantic and depressing as hell very fast.
But nothing in the intervening years has changed my view, though, of George W. Bush, who, in addition to giving us this Supreme Court, remains the most relevant painter of our age.
I was not surprised, neither was I pleased—it’s not the kind of thing you can take much comfort in—to learn via Chris Rusak, that Bluesky art critic @dickius.bsky.social shared the same view.
Responding to a prompt for a painting of the age, dickius skeeted, “This painting by G. Walker Bush. It really captures an era defined by the worst people on earth getting away with their crimes — indeed, being rewarded for them.”
In February 2020, weeks after Biden’s inauguration, I went to see Bush’s paintings in person at the Kennedy Center. I wondered then about whether the world would be better off with more paintings like this in it. Today, I can’t imagine a better fit.
I’ve had the tabs open, and I still lost track of the tenth anniversary of Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), the first work to be on view at the Metropolitan Museum. [There was an earlier performance that began as a tweet in 2014—and is ongoing, block a Koch today!]
Untitled (Andiron…) was an early part of a series of experiments with the concepts of appropriation, readymades, and the power (or not) of authorship: they’re declared works of art where I didn’t own or control the physical object or environment.
Continue reading “Ten Years Later: Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2015”
On one of his tumblr speedruns through the treasure houses, art historian pwlanier stuck a red heart on this atmospheric painting of Niagara Falls by John Henry Twachtman. It’s in a private sale at Christie’s, and as the lately retired auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen would say, it’s a lovely thing.
I know almost nothing about Twachtman, except now I learn he visited Niagara twice and painted it multiple times. And this painting looks like it was made around the same vantage point as the one at the Smithsonian, but this tighter one, with less geology and more mist is more interesting.
More interesting still is the smaller Twachtman Niagara Falls painting Christie’s sold last October. It’s only 17 x 14, an even lovelier thing. It’s not quite as vibrant as the extremely similar one they sold in 2001. Was Twachtman in 1893 making studies of even the minutest changes in light on Niagara, like Monet was doing at Rouen Cathedral in 1892? Emerson is squealing, I’m sure.
Alas, he was not. Or not over this. Because though Niagara was Twachtman’s Rouen, that he painted at least fourteen variations of, this is the same painting. And whoever bought it in 2001 cleaned it with a scrub brush? Left it out in the sun for 23 years? I do not know. But I guess if you can wait 25 years, it’ll only get more ephemeral and atmospheric, and the price will continue to drop commensurately. Meanwhile, in the control group, the Brooklyn Museum is probably storing theirs in the dark.
Hmm, just when I think the narrative arc is complete, it seems the Christie’s painting was described in 2003 as turning up in an attic of a Twachtman family member, but the Christie’s provenance has 18 years of dealer and collector ownership befor then. Is that just the pace at which information trickles out among 19th century painting collectors?
What to do with this story from Sally Mann’s memoir?
Continue reading “Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall”Every time [Cy Twombly and I] would leave his house and catch a glimpse of the neighboring Reid White house behind the trees, one or the other of us would repeat our favorite line from a story my mother used to tell about the occupant of that house, Mrs. Breasted White. That’s what I swear I remember her saying: “Mrs. Breasted White.” But now, writing that name, it somehow seems highly improbable.
Anyway, we’d say the punch line, sometimes in unison, and then we would both howl with laughter, as if we had just heard it for the first time. Here’s how the story goes:
Really, all it took was seeing the sonorous phrase—needlepoint kneelers—and I believed. It was on the cover of a privately published history of a parish’s longstanding ecclesiastical needlework program, which fashion prophet Rachel Tashjian-Wise revealed on a post while visiting family over the Christmas holidays.
Growing up near, even friendly with, but not in commune with the Episcopal Church, I was fascinated to find an entire world–or rather, a very specific and highly developed part of the world I’d previously never knew or imagined—of ecclesiastical needlework. It brings together faith and devotion, but also memory, community building, philanthropy, gender, class, and history, and that’s even before it gets to craft, technique, design, and the material. And it all plays out within the ecclesiastical, managerial, and social structures of the Church.
Basically, parishioners of a church donate time, talent, and resources, to creating handmade needlepoint cushion covers for the kneelers that line the pews of the church. In one place it may be the historic legacy of a dedicated crowdsourcing effort to beautify a new or rebuilt church, or a lifelong effort to memorialize someone. In another it could be a highly organized and socially prestigious fundraising activity. As with any such laborious handwork, needlepoint kneelers seem historically likely to reflect the value of the role, time, and taste of women in the community. It could be a sign of sacrifice or extreme privilege. [cf. prolific needlepointer HM ex-Queen Margrethe II of Denmark]
In the UK, needlepoint kneelers were apparently under threat, a dying art, according to someone who wrote a book about them. Things seem better in the US, a phrase I imagine I’ll be saying less and less going forward. It turns out our [sic] Episcopal church, the National Cathedral, has a needlework kneeler program.
And an epic post on the National Altar Guild Association’s blog about starting and operating a successful program feels like needlepoint kneelers, as an institution, remain sound. Besides the amazing new (to me) vocab, every observation or piece of advice from Bid Drake, “internationally known ecclesiastical needlepoint specialist [and] author of the Guide to Church Needlepoint Care and Maintenance” feels hard-won from direct experience: “I strongly suggest that you invite everyone in the congregation to help make the kneelers, then teach them Basketweave on small useful pieces like Chrismons, usher tabs, and collection plate silencers.” “If you only give out a third of the yarn with the canvas and tell the stitchers to take their pieces to the ‘Mistress of the Yarns’ when they need more, you will have an instant check on which pieces are being stitched, and which are buried in closets.” “Your local needlework shop should be able to suggest a finisher — one who loves and respects needlepoint, not an upholster who treats $4,000/yard needlepoint like $10 chintz.” [oof]
There’s so much about this cultural dynamic that fascinates me, and how it results in these highly specific objects. I’ve looked in the past without success for scholarly consideration of similar craft- and gender- and class-coded objects; who’d have thought that what was missing in my ersatz needlepoint history project was God. 🙏
It feels like Susan Cianciolo is being constantly rediscovered, and every rediscovery is about how RUN, the garments she created in the late 1990s, are fresh and relevant for the moment. Is it all just, “well, it’s new to me,” from writers and curators, or is Cianciolo just getting hit periodically by the constantly roving trend spotlight of fashion? Because if you look at the timeline, Cianciolo has been booked and busy all along.
Her first show at Stuart Shave Modern Art in London was in 2017, when she was also in the Whitney Biennial. Her second, This is the New Earth: The Galactic Field, textile-based works made between 2019 and 2024, closes this week:
From Sicily to the Basque Country to Maine, Cianciolo has created these works using fabrics retrieved from the soil, recycled from her childhood, and gifted by friends. Cianciolo has worked with fabric for several decades, beginning with her fashion label RUN, to include embroidery and sewing as part of her extensive meditation practice.
Sewing and embroidery as an extensive meditation practice resonates with a presentation by Jeppe Ugelvig at a colloquium on memory, wear, imperfection, and the archive, held at the Museum at FIT in 2019. Ugelvig spoke of his experience curating Cianciolo’s work for a show at Bard in 2018.
Through a process of “recalibration and reordering,” Cianciolo constantly investigates her archive [sic] of materials, clothing, fragments, images, texts, and media, constantly reworking it into something new for exhibition or use. Cianciolo considers not just the aesthetic and material qualities of an element, but the associations, origin, and history.
Nothing is fixed until or unless it leaves her reach by being sold. [Right before his show opened, five scrapbooks Ugelvig had arranged to borrow were incorporated into a library and sold, so Cianciolo and her gallery provided five “just as amazing” replacements he nevertheless hadn’t seen before.]
The practice of exploring and expanding a material archive is intensified, Ugelvig explains, by its necessity: an accident in the early 2000s affected Cianciolo’s typical neurological process of accessing and making new memories. The materials, designs, and other archive elements function as prompts or anchors for the artist’s understanding of herself and her world. Memory and cognition become a physical process. Her works are histories of their own making, but they are also the coalescence of all the histories of their constituent elements. Until they’re not.
This is the New Earth: The Galactic Field, Susan Cianciolo for Stuart Shave–Modern Art, Nov 2024-Jan 2025 [modernart.net]
“Memory Garments: The Non-Archive of Susan Cianciolo” [youtube]
Previous memory-related objects: A Solicitation of Wood-Scraps and The One-Mat Room; Cy Twombly Relive The Moment
The thing that has stuck with me from the 1988 movie Beaches is Bette Midler’s character saying, “But enough about me; let’s talk about you. What do YOU think of me?”
In completely unrelated news, this season the St. Moritz location of Hauser & Wirth is staging Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin:
‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ traces the renowned artist’s connections to the country, which began in 1982 with his first show at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, returning over a dozen times to St. Moritz, Zurich, and Appenzell, as well as other places in Switzerland. The Engadin region in particular continued to fascinate Basquiat long after his return to New York, resulting in a body of work that captures his impressions of the Swiss Alpine landscape and culture through the lens of his highly distinctive and personal artistic language.
As if Bischofberger hadn’t done enough for the culture of Engadin by putting it on the back of Artforum every month, here is a whole show about an entire body of work Basquiat made on those mean straßen of S-chanf.
It feels comical to make a conceptual Basquiat T-shirt at this point, and anyway, a T-shirt with Skifahrer (Skier), 1983, on it has probably already come and gone at a Uniqlo popup in Samedan. Instead I would stitch a transparent document pouch between a pair of custom-dyed red flannel braces, and on Chalandamarz I’d put the exhibition catalogue on my chest like a breastplate and head into town with a cowbell, a whip, and a song.
I can’t believe I got to the end of this post without referencing Rob Storr’s description of Basquiat’s montage painting, The Dutch Settlers (1982) as “Eye Rap.” d’oh.
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin, 14 December 2024-29 March 2025 [hauserwirth via greg.org hero chris]
watch the trailer. watch the film. [youtube]
pre-order the catalogue [shop.hauserwirth]
While the arrival of Carlos Peris’s lovely book did not give me much to add on the subject of Cy Twombly’s photography, the arrival of Cy Twombly Homes & Studios has filled the content pipeline to overflowing.
First, don’t sleep on such a book when it first comes out; I missed the hardcover edition by my own negligence.
Second, Nicola Del Roscio is an international treasure, and he should not be forced to write to share his insights and experiences alongside Twombly; sit him down and record him talking, Hans Ulrich Obrist-style, for as long as it takes. For every buck wild story about how much Twombly loathed studio visits, and when a Qatari royal made an unexpected visit to Gaeta via helicopter, he scrambled to set up a decadent luncheon in the courtyard is included, how many treasures and priceless memories are left out?
We just need to get it all while we can, and while he can. [And while recounting this history, may someone will ask Nicola how, while making this book in the midst of the first public disclosures of sexual predation against him, it was decided to use Bruce Weber’s 1994 photo of Twombly’s studio for the frontispiece.]
Homes & Studios, 2019, contains fleeting mentions of the following (non-exhaustive): the palazzo purchased in Tonnicoda, which Twombly felt guilty for abandoning, so he named some works after it ; the castle Twombly almost impulse-bought in the name of either Nicola or his studio assistant Viorel. And at least the third cringe mention (all, I think, posthumous), of Twombly’s closeness with his former nanny, a Black woman named Lula. There is a dissertation or ten to be written about Twombly’s relationship to the South (and Rauschenberg and Johns, for that matter; Twombly told Sally Mann their joint biography should be called, Dickheads from Dixie. Mann also noted that Lula was barely a decade older than Cy; she began working for the Twomblys when she was just thirteen.)
Anyway, point is, my most urgent takeaway from Homes & Studios is that we need more information on Twombly’s Picassos: How many are there? And are they actually Picassos? Because the one above, in Deborah Turbeville’s 1991 photo from Bassano, captioned in 2020 as “Picasso drawing on Chair,” was revealed in 2023, at least, to be a 1985 drawing by Twombly, either of a Picasso or in Picasso’s mode. If this can be mislabeled as a Picasso, what about the others?
Continue reading “Cy Twombly Homes & Picassos”Last summer Copenhagen artist Henriette Heise held a seminar at the National Gallery of Denmark to consider artists’ late work. The artists ranged from Michelangelo to Lutz Bacher to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She discussed it with Pernille Albrethsen for Nordic Art Review:
When it comes right down to it, the late works are eyewitnesses from the edge, from the end of life. Many of them testify to a courage to dare to look at what scares us. We must somehow train ourselves to get better at going through changes without becoming paralysed, unable to act. I myself am of an age where I can remember the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Chernobyl accident, and other things. There are short periods of stability and then there are periods of great upheaval, such as the one we find ourselves in now. At present, I feel a great need to think about how I can use my voice in the current crisis without having to make art that has been somehow pre-ordered or could have been made by AI. So, yes, one of things I have learnt from many of the late works is a kind of unlearning, a resetting of what you think you know and think you can predict.
Quoting her takeaway here only makes me want to read and see it all; it sounds like it has only gotten more relevant in the six months since it happened.
How On Earth To Keep Going? [kunstkritikk.com]