President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 statement to the cosmos, above, was encoded as an image, like a photostat, on the Golden Record attached to the Voyager space probes. A similar statement image was included from Kurt Waldheim, then secretary general of the United Nations.
For whatever reason, neither image is included in the lists of 115 or 116 images that Carl Sagan and his committee selected for the Golden Record. According to Wikipedia, these are the 117th and 118th images on the record.
This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some–perhaps many–may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
The groundbreaking for the Yoshio Taniguchi addition to The Museum of Modern Art took place in May 2001 under a tent in the demolished Sculpture Garden, which had been repurposed as a staging area. I was sitting on the outer edge of the first bay of seats, stage right, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s security detail was standing behind me, on the aisle, while he was on the low dais with everyone. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi was on the far side of the arc of trustees and dignitaries. There were silver MoMA Builds hardhats and shovels for everyone, arranged in rows on edge of the dais next to the dirtbox.
David Rockefeller and Rudy Giuliani ceremonially breaking ground for MoMA’s renovation in May 2001. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi talks with Agnes Gund in the background, image: bizbash
When it came time to do the ceremonial groundbreaking, there was some not completely scripted bustling around, as everyone got their hardhats on, and when someone tried to hand a hardhat to the mayor, his security guards sprung forward and hissed to each other intensely: “Oh shit, not the hat, not the hat.” because Giuliani was still in his combover era. He ended up not wearing a hardhat.
After the photo-opp broke up and the mayor left, gladhanding and milling about began, and I grabbed one of the unclaimed hardhats from Taniguchi’s end of the dais. [A shovel seemed a bit much.]
Gothamist‘s November 2004 photo of the inaugural installation of the atrium, with Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk looking great, and Monet’s Water Lilies looking flat af
The dedication of the Taniguchi addition took place in November 2004 in the Marron Atrium. I brought the hardhat in my eight month-old daughter’s stroller. As the event was breaking up, I took her to meet the Taniguchis, and presented the hardhat to him to sign, which he graciously did. I’ll post a pic of it when I can.
This was originally called the Matisse Stairwell. My 2004 copy of this Timothy Hursley photo is 250 pixels wide.
The stairway with the window on the atrium; the separate window onto the atrium that gathers dust beautifully; the windows onto the city; the restored entrance of Goodwin & Stone’s building; the porches on the Garden; and the corner where he resolved Cesar Pelli’s otherwise unrooted tower in the lobby and the Garden, are my favorite elements of Taniguchi’s design. They’re all moments where Taniguchi sought to integrate his space and structure with its context and history.
The galleries have always been fine for me; I think I was cured of misplaced nostalgia for the Pelli-era or earlier galleries by a conversation with Terry Riley, where he relayed a conversation with Taniguchi. After the finalists had been selected, Riley suggested to Taniguchi that he reconsider his more reverential approach to the existing galleries. He showed plans of the evolving museum, and how the galleries echoed the dimensions and plans of the rowhouses that had been demolished with each expansion. This constraint was long gone, Riley showed, and the new building could—and should—take its program from the art and the curators who would use it. I remember thinking this was profound and correct. But over time, I’ve also come to recognize that those phantom townhouses didn’t just impact the floorplan, but the kinesthetic experience of viewing art in the spaces they influenced. MoMA’s galleries felt a certain way, and that has changed as the building and the institution evolved.
Taniguchi and Serra and St Thomas Church, 2005
Taniguchi delivered beautifully on what he was asked to do, opening up the museum to the city as a spectacular stage for the likes of Richard Serra and Marina Abramovic. It set the stage for what followed, too: the real estate maxxing, the Nouvel supertower, and Diller + Scofidio turning the townhouse-sized Folk Art Museum into a void. [No bronze tables yet, though.] I wonder how often Taniguchi visited.
Painting is not photography, so the date of 1930-40 for a painting that includes a reference to a broadway show that only ran in 1925 is plausible, given other evidence. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial
Maybe you’re different, but I confess, I never imagined Cy Twombly making sketches. Like his marks, or his line, which Barthes described as “without goal, without model, without telos,” his compositions always feel like they just happened, products of the moment of their execution.
Cy Twombly, Study for School of Athens (R0me), 1960, photo John Etter via Hauser & Wirth
He called some works studies, of course, but those always seemed like iterations, or versions, which were things he made a lot of. Hauser & Wirth brought one to Basel a few years back, and it very much feels like a version.
He also worked in series, groups, and it’s impossible not to imagine he mapped those out ahead of time, or at least planned them in some way.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial
But here are five what look like preparatory sketches on two sheets of little notebook paper. They are from 1961 and belonged to Robert William Burke, a dealer in Paris whose books from Twombly were inscribed to “Willie.” On the back of these sheets, though, Twombly dedicated them to “My K… 2” and “My K… 3,” and honestly, “Who is K?” is a less urgent question right now than, “So that means there’s also a 1?”
Actually, the real question is what these actually are. I don’t have Twombly’s complete oeuvre handy to see if these relate to some specific c. 1960-63 works, but I can’t find any that map to the narrative. And to the map. There is geography and place—landscape—in these sketches, with Mount Olympus towering over all. The last one looks like Mordor. It’s the one Burke apparently kept in the foyer.
Robert William Burke installation view, via Artcurial
There is also time, sequence: that top one literally goes left to right, start to end, with battles and places in between.
That Twombly planned, or worked out, or imagined, such traditional compositional structures for his paintings feels almost as anachronistic and radical as his antique, classical, and poetic references. Even if they get buried by his marks and signs, or even if they just remain in his head, or his eye.
Cy Twombly, V Day(s) Wait at Jianyuguan, 1980, one of only two images of one of only two copies of this artist book documented online, one at the Menil, and the one from whence I ganked this image, a 2023 catalogue by the London rare book dealer Reed Sims
In the fall of 1979 Cy Twombly traveled through the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, which seems unexpected, though probably not as unexpected as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. The suite of works on paper inspired, we’re told, by this trip, Five Days Wait at Jianyuguan, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Twombly also published a little artist book of the same name, a portfolio of sixteen mounted reproductions, in an edition of 50.
Jianyuguan, or Jianyu Pass, is a fortress at the western end of the Great Wall, , and the Silk Road’s historic gateway to China. For Chinese people, meanwhile, Jianyuguan evokes exile, where the desert awaits those expelled through the “gate to hell.”
Nothing in Twombly’s chronology or the texts for the Biennale works make mention of the artist going into China, and I cannot imagine a less plausible route into China for an American artist in 1979 than traveling overland from Khazakhstan, across the Gobi Desert, to Jianyuguan. The westbound route is even less plausible, and not just because what lay on the other side, Xinjiang province, was now a part of China.
It’s safe to assume, then, that Twombly was not the one doing the waiting. So this title, and perhaps all the works, reference a literary source, perhaps an adventurer’s travelogue from a bygone era. The titles of the various works in the portfolio do sound like captions: “Uygur taking tea on arrival”; “Harem”; “Leaving the land of men”; “Preparing for departure.” So maybe Twombly was referencing a set of images or illustrations.
And speaking of preparing for departure: the Jianyuguan works will be reunited for the first time since Venice, and the artist’s book will be reissued in facsimile (of a facsimile), for an exhibition next month at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. It seems likely that this will be the last exhibition in this soon-to-be-bygone space, as the building will become the headquarters of the Bloomberg Foundation.
[day after update: Claudio traced the Reed Sims example to the Paris estate auction of dealer and friend of Cy Robert William “Willie” Burke, where it sold for EUR1529. Nice return on a four-month investment.]
Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1398-1400, tempera and gold on poplar, 23 x 34 cm, put up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2005
In 1965, during its 50-year disappearance into a private collection beginning in 1929, this painting of Jerome in a stylized grotto-like cave was reattributed from Pietro Lorenzetti to Lorenzo Monaco, and proposed as one of five predella panels from an altarpiece/polyptych Lorenzo executed for a chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence between 1398 and 1400.
Piero di Giovanni’s Carmine Polyptych as it would look if everyone lent their pieces to the Galleria dell’Accademia like they were asked. via wikipedia
It turned up at Sotheby’s in 1988, then again in 2005, and was to be part of the first reuniting of the polyptych in the 2006 Lorenzo retrospective at the Galleria dell’Accademia. It didn’t sell, and I don’t know that it was lent to the show, but the wilderness geology of the various predella panels would look great together.
from Mark Leckey’s Carry me into the wilderness, 2022, via bandcamp
When Mark Leckey made a gold-ground painting for his 2022 audio work, Carry me into the wilderness, he gave a shout out to Lorenzo Monaco, where he got the cave, but he squared it up, and added a hilltop city or citadel. And the hermit saint who wasn’t there was Saint Anthony, the Desert Father and ur-Hermit. While the possible theological nuances of Leckey’s saintswapping are lost on me, I find this image of the empty hermit’s cave resonates with the central sample of Carry me into the wilderness: a recording Leckey made of himself being overcome by an instant of natural beauty while in a park during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. The liberated hermit here, was him, and us.
How can something feel completely otherworldly and viscerally, personally real at the same time? Or maybe it toggles back and forth, faster than a toggle, a vibration, a quantum state where quotidian sensation and transcendence are both present until the instant you take measure of it. And then you realize you’re in a darkened gallery, with several of Mark Leckey’s multichannel video and audio works looping around you at once.
And some of the things on the wall are paintings, icons, and some are monitors, and some are apertures. But then Leckey’s comment about icons collapses those distinctions: “they are not an image, or a picture, but a window through which we can mediate between material reality and disembodied realms, and between distant persons and ourselves.”
A fleeting credit title in one work and and the shoutout to the artist’s longrunning radio show orient Leckey’s Gladstone Gallery show toward music. But it’s only when I’m home that I realize how familiar some of the overwhelming elements of the installation are, and why: they include audio tracks on his Bandcamp and videos on his YouTube.
These platforms are as much studio as presentation, especially in the moment—2021-22—when the most intense experiences of the pandemic remained largely unprocessed, and normal [sic] life was still a tentative thing.
Screenshot from Mark Leckey’s Carry me into the wilderness, 2022, depicting an icon after Lorenzo Monaco, via youtube
Leckey’s show,3 Songs from the Liver, is at once an evocation of these moments and memories of trying to live and connect online while barely holding it together, and a rejoinder that physical experience and IRL encounters can be sublime, even sacred. For all their elegiac sense of having made it through the wilderness, the show’s visual references to 14th century painting also nod to the future. Taken together with the most disturbing sculpture/video from the present, it’s not clear whether Leckey sees another Renaissance awaiting us, or just wars, plagues, and tyranny. Maybe it’s both.
In 1993 Gabriel Orozco made sculptures by poking, clawing, and bending ceramic roof tiles on the Pottelberg factory floor in Coutrai, Belgium. Then they went into the kiln, fixing the artist’s slight gestures, marks, and even fingerprints forever. Or at least as long as you take care of them.
At least two variations resulted:
Pluie de Doigts (Rain of Fingers), was a group of sixteen flat, interlocking tiles, in which the main gesture was Orozco poking the clay with his fingers. Though a couple of the tiles show a little more aggressive manipulations, the overall effect of the stacked tiles is of the slightness of the raindrops’ traces.
Gabriel Orozco, Made in Belgium, 1993, terra cotta, one of 14, a 2023 gift of Howard and Donna Stone to the Art Institute of Chicago
There was also a group of fourteen half round tiles, with the title of the foundry’s stamp, Made in Belgium. They were each clenched in intimately ominous ways that evoked the clay lump of one of Orozco’s earliest masterworks, My Hands are My Heart (1991); and torqued into forms that Richard Serra would later explore in steel on another factory floor years later.
Gabriel Orozco, Made in Belgium, 1993, sold by the estate of Richard Anderson at Skinner in 2018
These were exhibited as an installation scattered across the floor of the vaulted cave of Chantal Crousel’s Paris gallery, but were sold individually, as unique editions.
So this body of objects is scattered, and their relationships and this installation, are basically lost. And the ostensibly more significant unique sculpture, which is fine but whose interventions are ultimately less interesting, is acquired by a privileged collector, and preserved and promoted—and is now to be purged.
This paradox is acute with Orozco’s work, which has often found extraordinary beauty in the most ephemeral gestures or fleeting observations that run counter to the market’s—and, frankly, institutions’—conflation of scale and effort with importance. While collectors were offered large, indistinguishable gold leafed paintings, Orozco’s tablesful of maquettes and tiny, perfect objects would only be sold en masse, to a museum. [Or a collector’s private museum, RIP.]
The Funeral was good, though, and its sense of being unresolved really comes through irl.
But the way bigger is better, and a unique [sic] work is privileged over an edition, is a real, net negative for artists who have some of their most important achievements in series or small works. I just saw a room at the Met filled with giant Manets, and all I got was a longing for a little dog. I bought the last of the Made in Belgium edition more than 25 years ago, and even on its own, it’s better than Rosa’s. She had some truly major Orozcos, and this ain’t one, but good luck Wednesday.
[update: congratulations to the $15k bidder who got them for $18,900 all in] Previously, related, but kind of cranky of me, tbqh: Gabriel Orozco at Documenta 11
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1992, billboard as installed in Copenhagen in 1992 for Paradise Europe, image: Bizart via Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
In July 1992 Felix Gonzalez-Torres showed “Untitled,” a photograph of a figure silhouetted against a curtained window, in Paradise Europe, a group exhibition in Copenhagen of 120 artist billboards organized by Bizart, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, and five galleries. [One, the local gallery, Stalke Out of Space, had already begun postering Copenhagen as an artistic practice and distribution platform in 1991, and was itself part of the exhibition, in addition to representing four of the artists. But let’s come back to that.]
Felix traveled to Copenhagen and presented a lecture there, which we know from a 1993 interview, published by A.R.T., when Tim Rollins mentions “grumbling” over “the lack of overt political or Latino content” in his work:
I had a problem just recently in Copenhagen where I went to give a lecture. A man in the audience immediately started talking about winning the battle for multiculturalism. I said: “Look, okay, first I have trouble with that kind of language about winning battles. That’s too male-oriented for me. That’s too macho, that’s too much about war.” Then he said something about numbers-a certain amount of women, a certain amount of Hispanics, etc. No, multiculturalism is not about numbers, it’s about inclusion. It’s about opening up the terms of the argument, opening up the terms of the discourse so that everybody can participate with equal footing. It’s not about naming two female, three Hispanics, four whites, five blacks… It’s not about quotas. Sometimes quotas are necessary when it comes to concrete things like businesses, but in culture it’s more complex. It’s about opening up the terms of argument, and it’s about re-addressing the issue of quality and who dictates and defines “quality.”
Now in the latest episode of The Art Newspaper’s podcast, A Brush With…, where Ben Luke interviewed Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, we learn that Michael was in the audience for Felix’s lecture. Michael, who still considered himself a poet on the threshold of being a fine artist, wrote to Felix, inviting him to dinner, “because I had a lot of questions about how to do art, and how to deal with identity in such a fantastic way, like he did.”
It’s a wonderful story which the super-prepared Luke had never heard, and which I, who’ve been immersed in these artists’ work for decades, had never heard, either. And yet it seems to have been profoundly important to Michael’s work: “We spent a long night where he generously gave me a lot of inspiration, and a lot of hope for continuing doing art projects.”
In the interview Michael didn’t mention the year, so I pulled that, and the show, from Felix’s exhibition history. Felix’s response to Rollins resonated anew with Elmgreen’s response to Josh Spero in the Financial Times in October:
He is slightly less delighted when I read out a quote from a 2002 review, which says — in an apparently supportive way — that Elmgreen & Dragset had staged “a ‘gay infiltration’ of minimalism’s famously macho high aesthetics”. “Minimalism has been infiltrated by queerness from the very start,” Elmgreen says. “I’m sorry, dear heterosexuals, but you can’t trademark minimalism as yours that will [then] be infiltrated by queers . . . You don’t need to accept being boxed in as a queer artist and having certain sets of aesthetics that are provided to you because you are not a heterosexual man.”
What I did not expect to find was the full artist list for Paradise Europe [pdf]: Lorna Simpson, Guillermo Paneque, Sean Landers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Emilio Fantin, Federico Guzman, Formento-Sossella, Tommaso Tozzi, Lars Bent Petersen, Stalke Out of Space, Alan Belcher, Olafur Eliasson, Lothar Hempel—and Elmgreen & Olesen.
poster for Paradise Europe, “Project No. 18” of Stalke Out Of Space, with billboards by artists Lars Bent Petersen, Olafur Eliasson, and Elmgreen & Olesen, published in Sam Jedig’s Flying Notes On ArtStamp.dk
So not only was Michael in the audience, he was in the show. And in a collaboration with, I think, Henrik Olesen. Olesen’s CV does not include this show, or any work before 1995. Elmgreen & Dragset, meanwhile, mark the beginning of their artistic collaboration to 1995, after becoming a couple in 1994.
Besides that Stalke poster above, the only other prominent online mention of Elmgreen & Olesen is of work held at the Esbjerg Kunstmuseum.
But as much as I want to know more about this collaboration and their work, I’m even more intrigued by the idea of Elmgreen— and Dragset—being inspired by Felix’s work. And not just because I have a work from the 1990s by them, that is a slide projection on a wall of the silhouette of a man. For years, I’d lowkey regretted not also buying the emptied pairs of jeans and underwear on the floor, which was in the same show. But now I think I’m good. And I want to dig that piece out of storage again.
Raymond Taylor, son of the third Mormon prophet John Taylor, holding the Dimick Huntington Cane in an undated photo, republished by Steven Barnett in “The Canes of the Martyrdom,” 1981
In June 1844, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, where they were being held in jail for treason. [Joseph, who in addition to being the founding president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was also the mayor of the Mormon-dominated city of Nauvoo, had destroyed the printing press of an anti-Mormon/anti-Smith newspaper and declared martial law. This led to his arrest for treason against the state of Illinois, but somehow none of that is particularly important to this blog post.]
The bodies of Joseph and Hyrum were brought back to Nauvoo, 22 miles away, in hastily constructed coffins of oak lumber. They were buried in a Smith family home, then moved to another site seven months later.
The blood-soaked wood from the temporary coffins was cut up and distributed to a few church leaders and friends of the Smiths by their widows, to be made into canes. When the bodies were reinterred, clippings of the Smiths’ hair were collected, distributed, and incorporated into the heads of some of the canes. These canes became known as Canes of the Martyrdom, and in a religious culture that officially eschews such things, they have become ersatz relics.
Inland Steel Building, 1958, Chicago, as documented in Aug 2022 by Google Streetview
While looking at Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building in Chicago, I was surprised to find curtains had been hung in its iconically transparent lobby.
Inland Steel Building, Lippold, and Gehry, as documented in Sept 2017 by Google Streetview
Installed between the 2017 and 2018 Streetview updates, the curtains entirely block the view of Radiant I, Richard Lippold’s perfect lobby art, a sculpture of webbed wire, steel, gold and copper, hovering above a reflecting pool. But I suspect that is just collateral visual damage, and they were really installed to block the view of the massive cast glass jumble of Frank Gehry’s security desk. Or perhaps they’re really just to give the security guards a bit of privacy in which to check their websites, and blocking the view of Gehry’s desk is just a bonus.
Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas Cathedral, Greifswald, Germany, image: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
Olafur Eliasson has created a work of light and handblown glass for the east windows of St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Greifswald, a Hanseatic city near the Baltic coast of Germany, which was the birthplace of Caspar David Friedrich. Originally built in the 14th century, the church was remade in the 19th century with woodwork by Friedrich’s brother, Christian Adolph, including the elaborate Gothic choir wall which closes off the windows from the rest of the interior.
The work is titled, Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light). Because the east window only catches the morning sun for a small portion of the day—and that portion is limited further by the building directly across the street—Eliasson installed a heliostat, a mirror that tracks the movement of the sun, on that building to reflect afternoon sun into the morning window.
Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, exterior view of the east facade of St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
When I first discussed with Olafur an idea for a work that involved a heliostat reflecting light into our north-facing apartment in New York, in 2003, [while I had the concept, he already knew what a heliostat was and where to get one], I imagined sunlight that doesn’t move around the room would become very unsettling.
So it is buck wild to see a similar setup behind the altar of a church, where it is intended to encourage “pause and reflection – aspects central to both the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Protestant spirituality.”
Or does an beam of sunlight coming at an uncharacteristic time into a building oriented so specifically have a different effect? The afternoon sun from the east can become a metaphor, or it can encourage pause and reflection on the human, artistic intervention that produced it, drawing viewers’ attention to the world outside the church.
Olafur Eliasson, Atlantis, 2003, photogravure on Hahnemühle, 34 x 68 cm plate on 54 x 84 cm sheet, ed. 35, produced in 2004 by Niels Borch Jensen Editions, image via olafureliasson.net
I don’t know why, but this early-ish Olafur Eliasson work popped into my head this morning: a pile of debris accumulated outside Eliasson’s studio near the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, which the artist sprayed regularly with water until it formed this mass of ice. Which, I never realized all this time, he photographed at night. Maybe it was called Atlantis because it was soon lost. Not clear whether it’d ship in time for Christmas, but you can check.
2013 was my last exercise to understand how Jarman made Blue blue. Early live performances used a filmed loop of an Yves Klein painting. That was replaced by a blue gel. Rowland Wymer’s 2006 book said the blue was “electronically produced,” which, if the image above is to be accepted, means it was not filmed in camera, but on the film stock itself.
Perhaps it is far past time to make some actual inquiries instead of just poking around in books.
[a little later update: In 2014, Mason Yeaver-Lap wrote about Blue, “a film without film,” and how the Walker Art Center exhibited it on a loop in a gallery. Though the museum has a 35mm print, for conservation reasons, they went with, “a flickering projector (aided by a piece of kit called T’he Flicker-O-Meter,’ whose manual can be found in the Walker archives) [which] would beam through a projection window coated with a blue gel. This filmless projector would thus throw a perfectly IKB shade, accompanied by a CD dub of the soundtrack. Again, Blue was a film without film.”
FWIW, this blog post will be the second mention on the internet of the “Flicker-O-Meter. We’re gonna need to see that manual.
![what happens when you want the unique work, the bigger work, instead of the edition, is you might end up with the more boring work, like rosa de la cruz [rip] did with this set of 16 terra cotta tiles which gabriel orozco poked with his finger a few times each. no disrepect, and these are definitely the best ones selling this week (december 2024), but the other ones are better](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/gabriel-orozco-pluie-delacruz-christies-2024-1024x732.jpg)
