the making of, by greg allen
Here is what I learned from the catalogue for this Willem de Kooning survey exhibition about why is Joan Mitchell wearing the T-shirt? and why is the T-shirt?
Both catalogue texts, by the co-curators, University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art director Sanford Sivitz Shaman and Jack Cowart, of the St. Louis Art Museum, explain the reason for the show: despite the obsolescence of Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning’s work is still good.
Continue reading “de Kooning 1969-1978: No Labels”
As seen on tumblr, on November 2nd, US astronauts on the International Space Station lost control of a toolbox during a space walk. Known as a Crew Lock Bag, it is currently orbiting about 2-4 minutes ahead of the ISS, and is apparently bright enough to be seen from earth with binoculars or a telescope. The epic photo above is from the ISS.
If you’re like me, you’re wondering where to get one of these swag Crew Lock It Bags? In the Summer of 2019 NASA industrial designer Lily Douglas fabricated a CLB based on NASA’s technical drawings for a space-related display at the US embassy in Moscow. She documented the project and the piece here.
A CLB is about the size of a hi-top sneaker box. It is made from Nomex, woven glass, and Perspex, with some relatively obtainable-looking webbing and some fairly specific-looking hardware.
If this info isn’t enough to help you figure out how to score or make your own Crew Lock Box, you could always wait a few months, and one will fall from the sky.
The first show at the University of Northern Iowa’s Gallery of Art opened in October 1978. It was a ten-year survey of Willem de Kooning’s recent works. I am still trying to figure out what this show was and how this show happened.
Continue reading “De Kooning, 1969-1978”
As soon as I saw it in the Sotheby’s sale of Emily Fisher Landau’s collection, I added this quick, little watercolor version of Summer to my Little Johns list, iconic but intimate artworks Jasper Johns gave as gifts.
But though Landau was a friend and longtime supporter of Johns, she was not the gift’s original recipient. Johns gave the watercolor to Bill Katz, in October 1985, and Landau bought it from Katz in 1998.
Katz’s relationship with Johns goes back even farther than Landau’s, and over the years, he has designed multiple spaces—studios, homes, galleries, and exhibitions—for both of them. Which, more later, perhaps.
What I like about this watercolor is the date. Jasper Johns exhibited his four The Seasons paintings in early 1987, but they’d been seen by a few people, and talked about by many, and so their debut was hotly anticipated. Johns reportedly spent 18-months on a whole body of The Seasons work, including drawings and prints, alongside the large-scale paintings. [Landau’s copy of the ULAE prints sold this morning near the low estimate for this unique watercolor.]
This watercolor looks less like a study, and more like a documentation, with the key elements and composition mostly worked out, and sketched out very quickly. Yet a date of October 1985 means this watercolor was there right near the start of it all. And so was Katz.
I mean, I know why I didn’t buy it, but the rest of y’all, what’s going on? Admittedly, I also misremembered the estimate as $150-200k, when it was $200-300k. But I thought the EFL collection was under a global guarantee, which would give Sotheby’s the flexibility—and the incentive—to meet a bidder where they were. If they were there, I guess. This was somehow the only lot from EFL’s collection not to sell. Wild.
[May 2024 Update: The note for this sketch in Johns’ works on paper catalogue raisonné says it was a study for a print [ULAE 234] Johns made as the frontispiece of a book of poems by Wallace Stevens. Indeed, the sheet is very close to the dimensions of the book. Also, it came after Johns had completed only the first of what would become the Seasons paintings. Also, the silhouette was inspired by Picasso, of course, but was actually Johns’ cast shadow, traced by Julian Lethbridge in St. Martin, earlier in 1985. Except, wait, because though the prints and paintings don’t, there are a bunch of drawings where the “shadow” has his dick out, in a very much non-silhouetted way.]
When Guy Bloch-Champfort’s book, Joan Mitchell: By Her Friends* came out in English last summer, I—like everyone, I imagine—immediately wanted a souvenir t-shirt from the 1978 inaugural exhibition of The Gallery of Art at The University of Northern Iowa. Alas, my five-month search has been unsuccessful.
But now Joan Mitchell Season is upon us, and to celebrate, greg.org is offering a facsimile edition of Joan Mitchell’s most epic swag [above], screenprinted by hand on a light blue Hanes Authentic T-shirt, and accompanied by a numbered, signed, and stamped certificate of authenticity.
Continue reading “Joan Mitchell Season T-Shirt”
Of all the—
The library of Tama Art University in Tokyo, known as Tamabi, has digitized their collection of publications related to On Kawara. The On Kawara Db includes images and publication information for many exhibition catalogues, but also CD box sets of audio recordings of One Million Years performances. As in, each CD in a box set has an entry and a photo. But no audio.
Hundreds of Today Series paintings and boxes are included, I think from an 1993 exhibition in Bordeaux.
And michèle didier’s compilation editions of I GOT UP, I WENT, I MET, and I READ, covering every day from 1968 through 1979 are included, ALL 24 VOLUMES, ALL 16,962 PAGES. By date. I guess all that’s left is to digitize every page of the ONE MILLION YEARS volumes? I’ll keep checking back.
There are also an undetermined—but filterable and countable, be my guest and lmk—number of I AM STILL ALIVE telegrams. Fine, I counted, I got 204. I think they constitute the entirety of the 1978 Edition Rene Block catalogue, covering 1970-1977.
This project feels different after a month of watching Palestinians in Gaza post the same daily declarations to social media, until they don’t.
Thanks to Yoshi Hill of Jonathan A. Hill Bookseller for yet another On Kawara deep cut.
When the Manhattan Art Review posted this image of Eugène Atget’s c. 1899-1900 photo of a mitron, or baker’s boy, to social media, I did not think of MoMA’s four-show, four-year odyssey through Atget’s oeuvre, where John Szarkowski installed it together with Porteuse de pain, a photo taken in the same spot and the same light of a woman pushing a bread cart.
[Not to get all Errol Morris about it, but judging by the shadows of the trees, I’d say Atget photographed the mitron a few minutes before the porteuse. Also, I’d have to disagree with the catalogue where [Szarkowski?] says, “The basket on the head of the mitron is surely the same one that rests on top of the cart of the porteuse.” Uh, surely it is not?]
But none of that mattered; all I could think was to respect the drip. When they present me the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Lettres et Arts, I decided, I’d don my full mitron fit to the Elysée, where I’d thank Bill Cunningham for the workwear, Susan Cianciolo for the apron/skirt—and Berenice Abbott, for saving this whole body of work from la poubelle.
In an article in The New York Times about Israel’s attempts to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, Jerusalem Bureau chief Patrick Kingsley just called the 1948 Nakba—the murder and expulsion of Palestinians from lands that became Israel—a “migration.”
Which immediately conjures Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel masterpiece, The Migration Series, the 1940-41 epic that told a tale of “The Great Migration,” “the flight” of Black Americans out of the South “following the outbreak of World War I.”
Lawrence’s original title for his series was The Migration of The Negro. The title changed as language shifted with the political and cultural change. No one today would be confused by this, or by the changing implications of, “The Negro.” Yet the implications and complications of the term “Migration” are still rarely acknowledged.
“To me, migration means movement,” said Lawrence at some later point, according to the Phillips Collection, which acquired half the series. “There was conflict and struggle. But out of the struggle came a kind of power and even beauty. ‘And the migrants kept coming’ [the artist’s caption for the final panel, is a refrain of triumph over adversity. If it rings true for you today, then it must still strike a chord in our American experience.”
Perhaps hearing the 1948 Nakba called a “migration” in the midst of relentless violence on a massive scale, in the pursuit of another nakba, will shock people into recognition. That migration can also mean ethnic cleansing and genocide, and that it rings true today because it’s still endemic in our American experience, and there is not beauty in it.
There are two paper stack works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres where every sheet in the stack is a signed, numbered edition, and the whole thing constitutes one work. You can’t take those. [Though “Untitled”, from 1991, is made up of 161 signed prints from an edition of 250 the artist made with Public Art Fund in 1989, above. The other 89 prints, plus 10 APs, are all circulating as individual works, sold (and resold) separately.]
There is one paper stack work that was published as an edition of stacks: 17 8-inch tall stacks of embossed paper in archival boxes. You can’t take those, either. [Unless? HMU?]
And there are two classic paper stack works, with endless supplies of paper and ideal heights, etc., that were created as editions. Which is distinct from a stack being able to exist in two or more places at once; in this case, an edition is about the number of owners, not the number of stacks. One, “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.), is an edition of three, though there’s only one out there: the de la Cruzes gave one to what’s now ICA Miami, and the Raleses gave one to the NGA.
The other is “Untitled”, above, which is an edition of 1 plus an artist proof Felix gave to Michael Jenkins, an artist, friend and collaborator. [Their two-person show together in 1991 at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels included “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.) and Felix’s text portrait frieze of Jenkins, but not the stack they made together the year before with a naked sailor on it, “Untitled” (Join), which the Rubells whip out all the time.] Anyway, Chara Scheyer bought Jenkins’ little stack a while ago, and now it’s back. If there’s a more manageable stack out there, I haven’t seen it. [update: it was withdrawn!]
Whether the earliest drawings or the monochrome paintings, or anything in between or since, Richard Prince’s joke works were never meant to be funny. But this one feels like it got 100x more unfunny lately. Oh, to go back to the days when it could be the title of a publicity stunt auction instead of the harbinger and reminder of quotidian violence.
A hundred years ago or last February, who can even say at this point, Pace had a show of little platform/companion/interventions Richard Tuttle made for a series of Alexander Calder sculptures. My favorite from that show was a little pile of cubes Tuttle made for Little Mobile for Table’s Edge, a c. 1939 work with an unusual stabile/mobile dynamic of perching on the edge of a table.
However rare it was, it turns out Calder used this hanging-off-a-table mechanism at least one more time than I thought: in Boomerang on Table, a 1949 work that was acquired by Nelson Rockefeller. In the undated photo Sotheby’s published of Rockefeller’s modernist house in Seal Harbor, Maine, Boomerang is on the glass coffee table—perched on a tiny little stick. Maybe any Calder can hang off the table, if you try, and vice versa.
One thing I wonder about in the Sotheby’s sale: this Calder is listed as from the “Collection of Richard and Kathy Feld,” who bought the work at Rockefeller’s estate auction in 1980. And I’m sure that’s exactly who is selling it, not Richard and Kathy Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers and longtime MoMA trustee, respectively. There was a children’s clothing wholesaler and contemporary collector Richard Feld who gave the Times a couple of quotes about buying art in a bubble, and that was about it. No mention of his wife. But the catalogue’s been out a month; if Sotheby’s really had misspelled their own prominent client’s name, someone would have corrected it by now. Right?
Lot 109, 14 Nov 2023: Alexander Calder, Boomerang on Table, 1949, est. USD500-700,000 [update: sold for just $635,000] [sothebys]
Previously, related: Little Mobile for Tuttle Pyramid
This custom woven, 10-meter extension cord in an edition of 100 is absolutely one of my favorite Olafur Eliasson editions, because it is an extension cord.
I haven’t ever asked why it exists, but the title, 10 Meter Cable For All Colours and the date, 2004, suggest a connection to Olafur’s 2002 work, 360° room for all colours. This curving spatial structure is filled with red, green and blue lights that shift through all the colours. It was first shown in Paris in 2002, and then in the 2004 Your Lighthouse: Works of Light, 1991-2004 at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, which opened in the glare of Olafur’s Tate Turbine Hall project.
This unusual top-down installation view of a work which typically had a scrim ceiling shows not only the tightly packed lightbulbs in the wall, but also a thick bundle of extension cords to power them, running up and out of site.
While this work might account for why Olafur had several kilometers of electrical cable lying around the studio, it still doesn’t explain why there’s an edition. My guess would be that a few spools of leftover cable were transformed from surplus into artwork by whatever that mysterious process is, and they were given to employees, friends, and whoever. There is a whole body of this kind of small, interpersonal edition that grows out of the studio’s practice and relationships, and I think it’s just neat.
This example, for sale in a couple of weeks at Bruun-Rasmussen in Denmark, is ed. 4/100, perhaps from someone at the top of the artist’s list. [B-R offered ed. 1/100 in 2012, which was somehow not deluxe enough to reach the DKK 30000 estimate. The current example is expected to sell for DKK6000, under USD1000, which feels like the right balance of reasonable and ridiculous, but most importantly, not too expensive to put it right to actual use.]
“A rotating menu of soups served to Glenstone’s visitors” is a phrase that sticks with me from the text Glenstone director/co-founder Emily Wei Rales contributed to Fear Eats The Soul, a 2023 publication from the private museum in Potomac, Maryland.
In 2011 Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition of the same name at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise did not seem like the type of project to be easily collected. When the whole thing turned up in the older, smaller private museum building at Glenstone in 2019, I had to recognize “easily collected” was relative.
This book is a documentation of Glenstone’s 2019 installation of Fear Eats The Soul, including those elements of it which went unrealized [a performance of Rirkrit breaking through a cinderblock wall to reveal a stripped down Peugeot] due to the early pandemic shutdowns of March 2020. The full-scale plywood recreations of Gavin’s original Broome St. storefront were intact. Rather than leave their Gwathmey building unsecured and open to taggers, like on Greenwich St., the Raleses invited graffiti artists from the DMV to execute work in the space. Rather than sell T-shirts screenprinted to order—with proceeds paying the art students Rirkrit recuited for the show—Glenstone offered T-shirts in exchange for donations to local non-profits.
Continue reading “FEAR EATS THE SOUP”
General Idea made hundreds of handpainted porcelain sushi plates with the TV test pattern on them for their 1988 show at Spiral in Tokyo. They made 432 plates, in three grids of 144. [The work turned up at Miami Basel in 2019.] They also made an edition [MoMA says ed. 238; this guy explains it started as 300, but there was a lot of breakage.] which came in a cardboard box. The Stedelijk image is the best for getting a sense of what gorgeous objects these are, though it does make it easier to not read them as paintings.
Which is all useful context, I think, for this thick little painting, Black Trinitron #5, being sold next week at Doyle in New York. Sony had just introduced a Trinitron color TV where the screen was actually black, not grey, when it was turned off.
But that may not be important now, or then, for that matter. In 2020, another test pattern painting, Trinitron #15 (1987), turned up at Sotheby’s in Milan, that was not black.
These Trinitron paintings really get the collapse of painting and screen, the slight convexity of the cathode ray tube on the surface of the canvas, and the objectness of both painting and TV (though TVs were much deeper obv). But what they give is sushi plate edition, and the box the sushi plate edition comes in.
[a few minutes later update: If it hadn’t been prompted by seeing the Trinitron paintings, I could have titled this post, “General Idea Dishes?”]
And bought some stuff. And made some stuff. The press release discussed it in the context of hashtag collector, and Roberta Smith called it “a resonant portrait of the United States.” But Robert Gober’s exhibition at Demisch Danant, “Cows at a Pond,” felt like the self-portrait of an artist trying to live and work ethically in a present where the injustices and suffering of history repeat themselves. So I guess they’re both right.
I sat in Gober’s chair to read his notes—unfinished and unpublished, except, of course, for putting them in a show—of attending the art forgery lawsuit against Knoedler Gallery. One important observation was the purported shock at the naked fraud perpetrated by the “venerable” gallery, a term Gober remembered from the 2000-2001 coverage of the price-fixing crimes of two “venerable” auction houses: Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Continue reading “Robert Gober Has Seen Some Stuff”