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If anyone’s life’s work could have at once so little and so much to show for it, it’s Agnes Martin. From Brian Droitcour for Artforum:

This brisk tour of Agnes Martin’s career–forty years in twenty drawings–is anchored by On a Clear Day, 1973, a series of prints offering thirty ways to regard the square.
…
In the 1970s, Martin pared down an already spare vocabulary. These prints are a glimpse of her shifting priorities, and the drawings around them protract that glimpse into a lifelong panorama.

From the gallery’s press release for the show, a little background:

In the late 1950’s Agnes Martin’s landscapes and biomorphic surrealist works transformed into abstraction and what would eventually become her signature examination of rectangular grids within a square format. Her work ranges from early tight grids to the opening up of forms to wider rectangles. Disillusioned with New York, Martin moved to New Mexico in 1967 and abandoned painting. When she resumed her work around 1974, the earlier primarily black and white palette modified to include monochromatic washes of subtle pastel colors, perhaps influenced by the New Mexico landscape. While Martin’s abstract repetitive forms have been associated with Minimalist style, she considered Minimalism impersonal and over-intellectual, preferring her work to be characterized as Abstract Expressionist due to its more personal and spiritual nature. Inspired by emerging concepts of Taoism and Zen Buddism in the 1950’s, Martin, like many of the Abstract Expressionists, sought a style that transcended the material world and spoke more of the mind and the experience of the sublime.

On A Clear Day was instrumental in Martin’s own retrospective re-evaluation of her work and was apparently a catalyst of sorts for her resumption of painting in 1974. For details, check out Lynne Cooke’s essay accompanying the Dia’s exhibition of pivotal paintings from 1974 – 1979.
Though it might be tempting, in the absence of any apparent content beyond the grids, to investigate and catalog the variations and details that were surely deliberate decisions on Martin’s part, Cooke argues that this is not what Martin was after when she began painting again:

her endeavor would not be to mobilize the viewer in a process of “looking for” but to immerse the solitary, stationary spectator in an indeterminate, luminous space, in attentive contemplation, “looking at.”

Brian Droitcour reviewing “Agnes Martin, Works On Paper” at Peter Blum Soho trough March 15 [artforum]
Peter Blum Gallery Soho [peterblumgallery]
“To The Islands, Agnes Martin Paintings, 1974-1979 [diacenter.org]
[image via portlandart.net]

As he was working on it the last few months, my friend John Powers kept hinting that his upcoming show would have a bit of the Deathstar and a bit of the disintegrating disco ball. He’s not kidding. The Force is strong with this one.
Empire, 45-in diameter, styrofoam and anodized aluminum, at Virgil de Voldere Gallery, the Chelsea Arts Bldg on 26th st through Mar. 29 [virgilgallery.com]
John Powers’ portfolio site [johnpowers.us]

Holy ^%$&! Man Smuggles Art To The &%#$ing Moon!
In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60’s bad boys Michael Heizer’s and Dennis Oppenheim’s desert drawings. He called them Moonworks.
Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.
I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA’s official channels were unsuccessful.
Myers revealed the exhibition’s existence to the New York Times, which published the story Nov. 22, 1969, two days after the Apollo 12 crew had left the moon–and the Intrepid–and two days before they arrived back on earth. Here’s the photo from the story:

According to Myers, who was involved with E.A.T. on the Pepsi Pavilion project at the time, the six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4″ x 1/2″ x 1/40″, with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.
According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg’s wavy line; Novros’ black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd’s 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, “the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art” [a sculpture which is in MoMA’s permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, “similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer.” Warhol’s contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as “a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature.”
Actually, it’s a drawing of a penis. Here are some other photos by Frosty Myers, published, I believe, with a 1985 Omni Magazine article by the arts writer Phoebe Hoban. That would be the Warhol Penis there in the upper right.

As the NASA spokesman told the Times when asked about the Museum infiltration, “I don’t know about it. If we had been asked, it sounds like something we’d have very much interested in [sic]. If it is true that they’ve succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art.”
[emphasis added for ironic amusement, though to Myers’ credit, it turned out to be a pretty good grouping of artists to have involved.]
But is it conceivable that someone could have smuggled dirty pictures onto a mission to the moon? Actually, yes. Even if Warhol hadn’t sent that penis to the moon, Apollo 12 would still have achieved the first known incident of lunar nudity.
The back-up crew for the A12 mission surreptitiously inserted reduced photos of Playboy centerfolds into the flight crew’s fireproof plastic cuff checklists which were only discovered about 2.5 hours into their first moon walk. [if you’re at work, that first link is to nasa.gov, and the second is to playboy.com. The same scans are available at both sites, though NASA has conveniently embedded theirs in a PDF.]

In addition to the six drawings, the Moon Museum also acquired a large collection of photographs; astronaut Alan Bean accidentally left several rolls of undeveloped film behind on the lunar surface. The checklists came back with the astronauts.
Related: Frosty Myers, the SoHo pioneer, had a retrospective exhibition last November-December at Friedman Benda Gallery in Chelsea. [friedmanbenda.com]
Also, he had a sitdown with my favorite crazy at The Grey Lady, design/home writer Joyce Wadler. [nyt]

LACMA director Michael Govan and photographer Terry Richardson–who looks great, by the way, has he had work done?–at the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum last week.
Broad and Butter [artforum]