greg.org – Page 163 – the making of, by greg allen

Jasper Johns’ ‘Short Circuit’ Flag: One Place It Isn’t

After a brief break, during which I briefly pwned Miami Art Basel, the search for the Jasper Johns flag painting which was included in Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 combine-painting Short Circuit [above], continues.
Actually, because I had to carry on the oddball contents of the gift bags I did for my #rank presentation, I went to the airport freakishly early and ended up with extra lounge time, which let me read through all the details and footnotes in my pristine, OG copy [apparently from the library of Artforum!] of Dr. Roberta Bernstein’s definitive 1985 dissertation-cum-catalogue raisonné, Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974, “The Changing Focus of the Eye.”
Only guess what, it wasn’t there. Not a mention, not a photo, not a footnote, not a trace.
[UPDATE: Since posting this in December, I have communicated with Dr. Bernstein about the Short Circuit flag and its absence from her thesis, as well as its status in her forthcoming Johns catalogue raisonne. Scroll down for her gracious and informative reply.]

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Dance + The Whole World = The Whole World

Via Ubu comes a provocative essay, “Constructed Anarchy,” from the poet and John Cage critic Marjorie Perloff. She takes the death of Merce Cunningham and the company’s plans to dissolve after a worldwide farewell tour as an opportunity to ask a tough question of Cunningham’s and Cage’s philosophy: basically, if art is life, what happens to it after you’re dead?

When in June 2010 I had the chance to see Roaratorio performed at the Disney Concert Hall–a beautiful Roaratorio but no longer graced by the presence on stage of Merce or by the actual speaking voice of John Cage–what seemed especially remarkable was the tight formal structure of a composition once billed (both in its radio and dance incarnations) as an anarchic Irish Circus, bursting with random sounds and unforeseen events. For, however differential the leg, arm, and torso movements of the individual dancers (sometimes in pairs or threes, sometimes alone), all are metonymically related in a network of family resemblances, and all are, as the charts show, mathematically organized. Yet wasn’t it Cage who defined his music as “purposeless play”–“not an attempt to bring order out of chaos . . . but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord”? And wasn’t it Cunningham who insisted that dance “is not meant to represent something else, whether psychological, literary, or aesthetic. It relates much more to everyday experience, daily life, watching people as they move in the streets”?
The very life we’re living: the Gelassenheit so seemingly central to Cage-Cunningham was hardly anarchic, much less unpredictable. But their own statements, and hence the critical writings about their work, have regularly insisted on what Joan Retallack, in her seminal series of conversations with Cage, calls “an aesthetic pragmatics of everyday life.” “[Cage] told me,” she recalls in her Introduction, that “the art that he valued was not separated from the rest of life. . . . The so-called gap between art and life didn’t have to exist” (Musicage xix-xx). And Cunningham repeatedly made the same point, using traditional ballet as contrast.

Or that’s how it used to be.

It sounds convincing: to see RainForest or Roadrunners, Channels/ Inserts or Beach Birds, is to perceive that there is no central focus or storyline, no prima ballerina flanked by a corps de ballet, no symmetry or detectable unifying principle. But if the dancers are free to introduce their own variations and tempo, if the piece is as non-hierarchical and collaborative as Merce suggests, why has each work (dance and music) been plotted out geometrically and arithmetically? Why have the dancers received so much less acclaim than Cunningham himself, in his role as director /producer /choreographer? And why has the decision been made that the ensemble will not be able to function without him? Similar questions can be put about Cage’s work: is his recorded voice reading Roaratorio essential to the work? Can a “decentered” Cage Musicircus perform without Cage?
The more we probe such Cunningham-Cage concepts as “free form” or “anarchy,” the more apparent it becomes that theirs is an anarchy that is carefully simulated. Their works are by no means “happenings,” in Allan Kaprow’s sense of the word, nor is Cunningham producing performance art.
As in Duchamp’s case, no “accident” is really accidental, and discipline is central. [emphasis added because, yow, kinda harsh]

Perloff’s argument is definitely worth a read, and she had a front row seat–and she quotes longtime Merce collaborator Carolyn Brown and others–on Merce and Cage’s egos and steely artistic wills, which seem to undermine a carefully cultivated [or at least prevailing] laissez-faire, see-what-happens image.
But I’m just half-informed enough to take issue with Perloff’s takedown. She sets up seeming contradictions between professions of randomness and artistic control, but I think that’s false and unfair. Cage wasn’t an evangelist for randomness, nor for anarchy, but for chance and chance operations. And there’s a meaningful difference that I suspect Perloff knows well.
Randomness is whatever happens, but chance operations is a tool for determining what happens. Perhaps Cage and Cunningham’s meant their obliteration of the distinction between art and life, between music and sound, between dance and movement, to be a production strategy for the artist, not a life strategy the audience.
Constructed Anarchy [lanaturnerjournal.com via ubu]
Interesting/related, and the 2nd time in 2 days to see Cage compared to Warhol: Ubu founder Kenneth Goldsmith’s 1992 review of Perloff’s first posthumous Cage essay. [electronic poetry center]

Bruce Weber’s Next Book Will Be Titled, Let Me Help You Out Of Those Wet Things

In my talk at #rank in Miami Friday, I called for more scholarship on the growing genre of yacht art. Which, via this NY Times Style section slideshow caption, now includes at least one work of hybridized performance/~~institutional~~ book party critique by the artist Al Czervik:

During a high school band performance at the Bruce Weber and Andre Balazs party at the Standard Hotel, a massive yacht passed the dock, sending three enormous waves crashing up through the dock, drenching the guests.

Until Taiwanese animated news comes up with something, this youtube video will have to do.

Johns, Merce, Duchamp: Walkaround Time

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

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‘It Gets Better’ Doesn’t Mean The Bullying Stops

I recently went with my daughters to see “Hide/Seek” at The National Portrait Gallery. They’re 2 and 6, so most of the content of the show is way over their heads. [Much of the work, like the vintage photographs, was literally over their heads.]

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ shiny, multi-colored candy pour, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) was an immediate and repeated hit. As my kids were going back for “just one more piece,” I laughed with other visitors at the sign the museum had posted next to it, warning that these small candies might pose a choke hazard.
At first I was going to write that we mostly stuck to the bright, colorful works, but that’s not correct. While a giant camo Warhol was front and center, and the kids both recognized it immediately, I didn’t think either one would be ready for the most colorful work in the show, A.A. Bronson’s massive, epic portrait of his AIDS-ravaged partner Felix’s body. Fortunately, the curators had placed it in its own semi-enclosed niche, to the side. It was a careful presentation of a devastating and important work, thoughtfully non-confrontational without seeming sequestered or hidden.

We saw Jasper Johns’ face on a plate. Larry Rivers’ giant nude portrait of Frank O’Hara, which was hard to miss, of course. We played I Spy with some of Marsden Hartley’s elements–the ship, the waves, the bells, the sun &moon, the shark–in his Memorial for Hart Crane. The older kid read the title, so we talked about the painting for his friend who drowned. I couldn’t not tell her that Crane had jumped from the ship, not fallen. No, I didn’t know why, except that he must have been very, very sad and thought that his life was so bad, it’d be better to be dead. Which we decided did not make sense and was not true.
We saw the lady in the tuxedo and laughed at the very idea that long ago, some people thought only men could do things like work, or vote, or paint. And that there were things people thought only women do that men shouldn’t–like pose nude for a painting [gesture to giant, nude Frank O’Hara].
We talked about David Wojnarowicz’s self-portrait, above. And that when he knew he was dying, he made a picture that looked like he was buried. Or maybe it looked like he was coming out of the ground.
There were two small video monitors and a touchscreen, which attracted the 2yo like a giant iPad, but we didn’t come to a museum to watch TV [this time.] One turns out to have been an excerpt from the David Wojnarowicz film, A Fire In My Belly, which the NPG just censored on the demand of William Donohue of the Catholic League, the self-appointed arbiter of offenses to Christian sensibilities. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives seized on the work and the show and demanded the Smithsonian cancel it immediately.
Pulling Wojnarowicz’s work in the face of such bullying is a breathtakingly cowardly betrayal by the museum, one which either ignores or mocks the artist’s own work and history. That it’s happening on World AIDS Day, that Wojnarowicz’ work is singled out for silencing on what used to be called A Day Without Art, is deeply offensive and damaging to the artist, the show, the curators, the museum, and to the principles of our country.
From Michael Kimmelman’s obituary for Wojnarowicz in 1992:

Like the artist himself, his art never pulled punches. Mr. Wojnarowicz gained the national spotlight in 1989, when the National Endowment for the Arts decided to rescind money for a catalogue to an exhibition about AIDS because of an essay in which he attacked various public figures. The endowment reversed itself. It also supported a 10-year retrospective of his work that was organized at the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, Ill., which included a catalogue that reproduced the essay.
Mr. Wojnarowicz was in the news again after the American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., an antipornography lobbying group, and its leader, the Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, issued a pamphlet criticizing the endowment. The pamphlet included photographs cropped from works by Mr. Wojnarowicz that included sexual images. The artist sued the organization for misrepresenting him and damaging his reputation. In 1990, a Federal District Court judge in New York ruled in his favor and ordered that the organization publish and distribute a correction. Mr. Wojnarowicz was the only artist to challenge Mr. Wildmon in court.

If the exact same people and groups attack the exact same artists and institutions and outcome is actually more punitive–remember, the NEA reversed itself and Wojnarowicz stood up to his critics and won–how can we call it progress? It doesn’t get better by itself.
update: Incredible. Tyler’s confirmed [2024: link updated] that it was Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough who ordered the Wojnarowicz video pulled. From the way it went down, it sounds like he censored the video over the objections of the NPG staff–and without even watching it himself. Not that the content is at all obscene or even offensive. To anyone whose job isn’t professional offensetaker, that is.

Henri LaChambre And His Nancy Balloon

Rather than post this beautifully composed 1895 photo of Henri LaChambre’s rather awesome gas balloon inflated at Nancy, I should’ve freakin’ bought it by now.
Of course, my problem is that, now that I’ve seen it, I’ve filed it away for future flea market reference, where I’m sure I’ll just stumble upon a photomural-sized print of it for a euro.
Anonymous – Henri Lachambre and His Balloon at Nancy, France, $450 [vintageworks.net, thanks to whoever sent this to me, I forget, sorry]
Previously: Les Ballons du Grand Palais

Drawing About Architecture About Music

I’ve got a lot of browser tabs to clear before I head to Miami.

Am I not listening or looking in the right place, or is there really not enough discussion about MoCA’s exhibition of drawings by the composer/architect/polymath Iannis Xenakis?
Xenakis was a longtime collaborator with Le Corbusier. Philipp Oswalt credits him with the introduction of light and projection as tools and “subject[s] of architecture” in the dramatic chapel of the convent at La Tourette.
Tools which would come in handy in the multimedia Poeme Electronique, whose film projection cones and soundscapes drove the form of the 1958 Philips Pavilion [top].

Anyway, the drawings include musical scores, which sometimes appear interchangeable with Xenakis’ schematics and sketches for his later independent installations, including the Polytope for Montreal, above, an abstract light and sound environment, which he created around the time of Expo 67. The Xenakis archive is at the National Library in France. Not sure how accessible it is, but LA might be the best/easiest shot.
Related: Philips Pavilion models spotted in Amsterdam

‘Relational Aesthetics For The Rich’ – Friday 12/3, 1PM In Miami

It’s less than a week away, and I can’t believe I haven’t hyped it yet:
I’m giving a presentation this Friday in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach titled, “Relational Aesthetics For The Rich, Or A Brief History Of The Gala As Art.”
It’s based on this similarly titled blog post, which pulls together a lot of things I’ve been fascinated by over the years, but which was inspired by MoCA’s Annual Gala, which the museum relabeled “a Happening,” and which they turned over to Doug Aitken to design as an artwork.
At least that was Jeffrey Deitch’s original pitch; the results–and the history and context of museum gala art–turn out to be a little more complex.
Anyway, the talk is part of #rank, a program put together by Bill Powhida and Jen Dalton, which will be held at SEVEN, the shared exhibition and program space in Wynwood organized by a group of awesome New York dealers.
There are so many people to thank, starting with Magda Sawon from Postmasters and artist Michelle Vaughan, who are the honorary co-chairs of the presentation. And there are the gift bag sponsors, of course, who will be announced soon. I hope.
The gig goes down at 1pm, and it should be available for live streaming online, in case you are too busy making acquisitions at ABMB or something. But then you won’t get a gift bag…

Jean Nouvel Should Build A Better Bedouin Tent

At least now we know what NY Times museum building critic Nicolai Ourossoff has been up to lately.
Just as I am thinking I need to add Saadiyat Island and the names of the grand new patrons of the arts from Qatar and Abu Dhabi to the greg.org art world pronunciation guide, I find a few things blocking my view of Our Glorious Cosmopolitan Future.
Since at least as far back as Rem Koolhaas bold, neo-Nixonian embrace of CCTV, a policy of architectural engagement has liberated our Western starchitects from the tyranny of conscience, of having to think or worry about the political or ethical unpleasantness of their state clients. I guess that exemption extends to our Western, liberal institutions, too–our Louvres, our Guggenheims, our NYUs, our Georgetowns.
But seeing as how I am not in one of these cultural oases and thus am not at risk of getting fired, deported, or arrested, I’ll just put some of the problematic parts in bold:
The consultant who works in fear of losing his/her job:

“There are religious extremists everywhere in the Middle East — even here,” said an Arab consultant who has worked on several developments and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired. The sheik, this person said, believes the cosmopolitan influences of the projects may help “open up the minds of these younger Emiratis before they go down that road.”

The international museum franchises walled off in hermetic playgrounds for the ruling class:

The new museums will be embedded in a kind of suburban opulence that can be found all over the Middle East, but rarely in such isolation and on such an expansive scale as in Abu Dhabi. The concrete frames of a new St. Regis hotel and resort and a Park Hyatt are rising just down the coast from the museum district, along Saadiyat Beach. Nearby, a 2,000-home walled community is going up along an 18-hole golf course designed by Gary Player, to be joined eventually by several more luxury residential developments and two marinas for hundreds of yachts. A tram will loop around Saadiyat, connecting these developments to the museums.

But wait, didn’t Jean Nouvel just say he’d “always wanted” to “make the museum part of the city, not just a building?”
The temporary workers’ paradise that doesn’t actually exist yet, except as a tourist stop for foreign reporters:

In some sense this village embodies a version of the cosmopolitanism Abu Dhabi says it is trying to create. But even if it is completed as planned, it will house only a small fraction of the city’s hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers; the rest will presumably live in cramped quarters in the city’s industrial sector or in faraway desert encampments. And once the museums are completed, a spokesman for the government development agency told me, it will be bulldozed to make room for more hotels and luxury housing.

And the kicker:

Even many educated Arabs in and outside Qatar — among the museums’ target audience — see a disturbing inconsistency in these grand plans.
“Some have lived here 50 years,” said Fares Braizat, a Jordanian professor at Qatar University who has been working on a census of foreign nationals. “They speak Arabic with a Qatari dialect, but they are still not allowed Qatari citizenship” or any of the enviable perks that go with it: free education and health care, interest-free government loans, preference in hiring, a sense of equality.

Here I would have to take issue with Mr. Ouroussoff’s characterization. Whatever feeling a Qatari citizen derives from his large, exclusive bundle of “enviable perks,” a “sense of equality” is clearly not among them.

But it’s not all bad. There’s something about Qatar’s National Museum that gives me hope:

Inside, displays of tents, fabrics, saddles and other objects, as well as enormous video screens that will immerse the visitor in the experience of the desert, are meant to convey both the humble origins of Qatar’s royal family and the nobility of Bedouin life.

If we can get work through our tribalistic present, beyond both Qatar’s exploitative foreign worker practices and American jingoist sneers at the mere mention of Al Jazeera, maybe there will be a shared, globalized, nomadic future where the humble nobility of Bedouin life is celebrated as an aspirational ideal, not just an exotic throwback. Maybe a culture rooted in hospitality and mutual responsibility that subsumes, or at least reconciles the twin forces of rootless disconnection and nationalism which shape each individual’s worldview.
I’m not sure where billion-dollar museums shaped like falconry hoods or hyper-magnified sand crystals will fit in such a culture, but maybe that’s the point.
Building Museums, and a Fresh Arab Identity [nyt]

They Don’t Want Any Fingerprints

Sforza to the end.
The AP caption: “John Scott cleans the podium on the stage in preparation for the groundbreaking ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010.” [daylife

This Flag Is My Flag. This Flag Is Your Flag.

Something Holland Cotter wrote today made me really think: “Short Circuit is a sweet reminder of Rauschenberg’s collegial generosity; he believed in art making as a communal endeavor, and acted on that belief.”
Collegial generosity is certainly one way to look at it. Because Rauschenberg had exhibited in the Stable Gallery’s Second and Third Annuals, he was supposed to be able to select artists to show in the Fourth Annual. For whatever reason, though, in 1955 Eleanor Ward decided only Stable alumni would be allowed in that year, and so Rauschenberg’s picks–Short CircuitJasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Stan VanDerBeek, and Susan Weil–were rejected.
And so the story goes that Rauschenberg smuggled them into the show anyway, as elements in his own combine painting. [It’s not clear why VanDerBeek’s work wasn’t included; Cotter says he didn’t get a piece finished in time, but I’ve also read that VanDerBeek declined the combine invite.]
Rauschenberg invited the artists to, as Walter Hopps put it, “collaborate in his piece.” A generous gesture, to be sure, but also a complicated one.
Short Circuit triggers a whole host of questions that I find the quite interesting: What is the status and relationship of the artworks Rauschenberg incorporated into his combine-painting? Do they still function as autonomous works? If so, why? Are they substantively different from the other cultural detritus he used–newspapers, postcards, fabric, objects? If not, why not?
In the bluntest sense, these questions are answered by the invitation for the show, which mentions none of Rauschenberg’s three collaborators:

Rauschenberg’s generous inclusion of his ex-wife’s painting, his friend’s collage, and his partner’s iconic flag painting–oh, wait, that’s right, this was the first flag painting of Johns ever to be exhibited, and it was as an element of another artist’s work–and behind a door to boot. Did anyone in 1955 even know that Jasper Johns’ Flag wasn’t Robert Rauschenberg’s flag?
The story of Johns’ promethean debut at Castelli Gallery in 1958 is well known. In this 1969 telling of it to Paul Cumming, Castelli visits Rauschenberg’s studio in 1957, and then they pop down to Johns’ studio, which is full of targets and flags, and Castelli offers him a show on the spot. Which makes the cover of Art News and changes the New York art world overnight. But check this out:

Jasper Johns was a real discovery in a certain sense because, although he existed, not many people knew about him. I saw him for the first time in a show at the Jewish Museum. That was in March of 1957, and that was the Green Target that the Modern has now. I saw that green painting. It didn’t, of course, appear as a target to me at all. It was a green painting. I didn’t know that he was doing targets. Well, going around and seeing the familiar painters of that time…. It was a show that had been organized by Meyer Schapiro and other people. There was Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell, and, oh, all that younger generation. Well, I came across that green painting, and it made a tremendous impression on me right away. I looked at the name. The name didn’t mean anything to me. It seemed almost like an invented name–Jasper Johns.

[Emphasis added on the parts where, holy crap, two years after exhibiting Short Circuit, there’s still a question whether “Jasper Johns” exists.]

Johns had shown flags at Bonwit Teller [including White Flag, which he eventually gave to the Met], where he and Rauschenberg dressed windows under the commercial pseudonym Matson Jones. Except for a drawing in a group show, Johns only exhibited a flag painting under his own name in 1957, in a group show at Castelli a few weeks after their fateful studio visit.
Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit–and Johns’ first and most immediately important paintings of flags and targets–were created when the two artists were closest, and when Johns was essentially unknown. When the flag was stolen from Short Circuit, both artists were famous, and their split was so acrimonious, they were not speaking to each other.
These relationships and collaborations, these formative histories of the New York art world, and these contestations of autonomy, authorship, sourcing and appropriation all seem to converge on Short Circuit. And it makes me wonder, again in the bluntest terms, whose flag was it, and who was it stolen from?

Wait, What? I Thought Johns’ Flag Was Stolen From Short Circuit In 1967.

In his review of the Robert Rauschenberg show at Gagosian, where the work is somehow different because it is for sale, Holland Cotter explains Short Circuit‘s origin as an attempt to get his recommended artists’ work into the Stable Gallery’s group show, but then whoa:

Only Mr. Johns and Ms. Weil, Rauschenberg’s ex-wife, came through with work on time, so into the cabinet went a little painting by each And, with one significant change, those two paintings are still there: Mr. Johns’s picture, a mini-version of one of his soon-to-be famous flag images, was stolen in 1965 and replaced by an Elaine Sturtevant copy.

Really? 1965? But didn’t I just get finished explaining how it was actually stolen in 1967? Yes, yes I did.
Or so I thought.
I won’t dwell on the fact that, though they were extremely responsive and helpful, Gagosian had already told me neither they nor the Rauschenberg Foundation had any record or idea of when Johns’s Flag painting was stolen.
But as I was about to send in my correction to the Times, I re-read Walter Hopps’ 1976 account:

The original flag painted by Jasper Johns was subsequently stolen and was replaced by a replica painted by Elaine Sturdevant [sic] at the time of the exhibition “Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Collage,” held at the Finch College Museum of Art in March 1967.

And you know what, it might be possible that the “subsequently stolen” does not, in fact, refer to the March 1967 show, and that the Sturtevant replacement took place “at the time of exhibition.” That is a possible reading.
But it doesn’t change the fact that texts and critical coverage of the Finch show so far makes no mention of the theft, or the replacement. And that a year into the traveling exhibition, Short Circuit‘s cabinet doors, which visitors had been able to open, were now nailed shut.
I’d also add that while the 1976 catalogue text mentions the theft, the reproduction of Short Circuit seems to include the original Johns flag. It certainly does not depict the Sturtevant Johns Flag that’s in there now. It’s almost as if the Sturtevant replacement decision was made in time for the 1976 show/catalogue, but not in time to have it photographed. [Or maybe Rauschenberg and/or Hopps didn’t see a need to rephotograph it? Which would be a separate set of interesting issues.]
So either Cotter knows something, or he’s wrong, and is just latching onto 1965 as the theft & replacement date because that’s when Sturtevant first showed her Johns Flags. Either way, I’ve added him to the interview list.

Short Circuit 2: Wheeere’s Johnny?

Alright, the search is on; I’m working to trace the history of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 combine Short Circuit and especially to figure out what happened to Jasper Johns’ flag painting, and when and how Sturtevant’s flag painting got in there, and what all that means.
When I first wrote about Short Circuit last week, there was no date or story or anything about how the flag disappeared, only that it had been described as “stolen.”

In his 1997 Rauschenberg catalogue, Paul Schimmel had mentioned the Johns Flag–which, like a painting by Rauschenberg’s ex-wife Susan Weil, was incorporated into the combine behind two cupboard-style doors–had been stolen while the work was on exhibit. Now I’ve found out where and when that was, I think.
In 1976, Walter Hopps curated a Rauschenberg retrospective at the National Collection of Fine Arts, which is now the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art. From the catalogue:

The original flag painted by Jasper Johns was subsequently stolen and was replaced by a replica painted by Elaine Sturdevant [sic] at the time of the exhibition “Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Collage,” held at the Finch College Museum of Art in March 1967. In his statement for the exhibition catalogue, Rauschenberg commented, “This collage is a documentation of a particular event at a particular time and is still being affected. It is a double document.”
For Rauschenberg the work remains “a double document” of the past and the ongoing present. Recently, in commenting on the stolen encaustic, he has stated, “Some day I will paint the flag myself to try to rid the piece of the bad memories surrounding the theft. Even though Elaine Sturdevant did a beautiful job, I need the therapy.”

Much to unpack there, especially in that second quote. Wow.
But at least now we have a date and a place: Finch College Museum, March 1967. Finch was a women’s college on the Upper East Side. From the archival photos, the Museum looks like the basement floor in one of the school’s townhouses on East 78th Street [between Madison and Park]. In the 60’s, under the direction of Elayne Varian, the Finch Museum had a pretty advanced contemporary exhibition program.
[One of the top Google hits for Finch College turns out to be from Calvin Tomkins’ Rauschenberg bio. Legendary dealer Ivan Karp tells the story of how he was showing some girls from Finch around Castelli Gallery when Roy Lichtenstein walked in with his first comic panel paintings under his arm.]

“Art in Process” was an innovative series of exhibitions that placed sketches and models alongside finished works to examine the working practices of contemporary artists. An “Art in Process” show on Structure, for example, which went up in 1966 within months of the Jewish Museum’s seminal “Primary Structures” show, contained works by Lewitt, Judd, and Smithson, including the latter’s Enantiomorphic Chambers [on the right in the image above, via aaa.si.edu], which, ironically, was also lost.
Anyway, after its Spring 1967 debut at Finch, the Collage show traveled under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts. Though I can’t find the complete list of venues, in February 1968, it came to the Phillips in Washington, DC, where the Post’s sportswriter-turned-art-critic Paul Richard panned it by repeatedly dismissing collage as mindless random gluing and comparing it to the tacky “Snoopy’s valentines” everyone had just exchanged.

Except for Short Circuit, that is, which Richard called, “the best in the show.” Take note of his description, though, and that he specifically mentions reviewing all the extra documentation of the show in the Phillips back offices:

(When first exhibited, viewers could open the collage’s two hinged doors to discover two paintings, one a flag picture by Jasper Johns. They’re no longer visible. The doors have been nailed shut.)

No mention of the theft, the missing Johns, or any replacement. And the doors are shut on the paintings by the artist’s ex-wife and ex-partner. No musing, please!

Despite the mind-boggling variety of its components, the piece somehow holds together. The composition is bright and strong. It’s nice to think about (the viewer can muse on the various associations generated by relics of Miss [Judy] Garland, Lincoln and [John] Cage), but tracing the development of this work would be a hopeless task.

We shall see, Mr. Richard, we shall see.

The Photographic Book Series By Ofer Wolberger

Brooklyn-based photographer Ofer Wolberger is right in the middle of an interesting project: The Photographic Book Series, twelve limited edition artist books, each with a specific subject or theme. Sometimes he uses source photos, sometimes they’re [presumably] his own.
The newest volume, #7 – Covers, is actually a handmade book of photocopied hardcover books, and it’s definitely more interesting than it might sound. Part Nina Katchadourian, part Sigmar Polke, it’s really quite poetic and beautiful.

Another standout from the Series is #3 – Town, and I’m not just saying that in a “Look, shiny object!” way. But Town is a series of photos of a large silvered canvas/painting propped up on the edge of a gel-lit stage. Its nice combination of abstract and documentary makes it more Moholy-Nagy than Walead Beshty. And it makes me think it could have been shot after a Silver Clouds party at Warhol’s Factory. I.e., awesome.
Publications | Ofer Wolberger [oferwolberger.com]
Book trailer for Covers from Ofer Wolberger [vimeo]

Please Sir, I’d Like Some Meer

Also up at Phillips today was this nice little [25x25cm] seascape, Meer (Sea), a 1973 offset print by Gerhard Richter.
Richter replaced the sky in one snapshot with the sea from another. This particular example sounds like it had some condition problems, but with an edition size of 250, plus a dozen or more proofs, I’m sure a better one is never too far away.
Meer (Sea), 1973 [gerhard-richter.com]
Related? Lichtenstein’s Electric Seascapes
Hiroshi Sugimoto