the making of, by greg allen
In times like these I turn to mangling words of Samuel Beckett. “Édouard tried. Édouard failed. No Manet. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
[10/20 10/21 UPDATE: AND THE TIME TO FAIL AGAIN IS NOW. The link to purchase Manet Facsimile Objects (M2) & (M3) is was below.]
Lot. Number. One.
This is just a placeholder post because I really am deep in something else at the moment, but Tête du chien “Bob”, one of Manet’s awesomest dog portraits (it really is a small set of a very small list), will be sold next month at Christie’s. For forty years, it belonged to Ann & Gordon Getty, who loaned it just once? Really?? To the Getty. For the 2019 exhibition, Manet and Modern Beauty.
And now it will be sold.
“Bob” will be on view at Christie’s in New York for at most six days, October 15-20, and is the first lot in the first Getty sale the evening of the 20th. The estimate is $400-600,000, so in line with the result for Minnay last year.
There is drama, though it is resolved drama, around the provenance of “Bob”; the Getty Estate has made an agreement with the heirs of an earlier owner, Estella Katzenellenbogen, of Berlin and Santa Monica, who owned the painting at least until 1945, though she made it to the US by 1940. Whether the painting was left behind in Europe and then turned up at Carroll Carstairs Gallery in New York in 1947, or was the subject of some kind of ownership or consignment dispute before passing through Carstairs’ hands is not clear, but either way, the Katzenellenbogens are now cool with it.
Wait, there’s another?? “A second portrait of a dog by Manet, Le chien “Donki,” also owned by Ann and Gordon Getty, is being offered in the Old Masters, 19th and 20th Century Paintings Day Sale on October 21st.”
The next day! Le chien “Donki”, along with “Bob” and Minnay, are the three best Manet dogs. Granted, there are only eight, and this is not a hot or studied genre, like his late bouquet paintings, but maybe it should be. “Donki” has not been exhibited in almost 80 years.
[I do still think that says “Souki”, not “Donki,” but I accept that actual French people in the early 20th century read that as a “D”. I will also note that they read that as a “u”, not an “n”, and called him “Douki.” If I buy this painting, I will call it “Souki.”]
Frankly, I’ll be lucky to see them IRL. Preview times are the same, so for up to six days before the sales, both paintings should be on view in New York. It’s also possible they’ll be included on a Getty highlights tour to Shanghai, London, and Los Angeles. In the mean time, here is a pic of what they looked like in situ, from the incredible virtual tour of the Gettys’ maxed out San Francisco house:
We know that, at less than 13×10 in. for “Donki”, and like 10.75 x 8.25 in. for “Bob”, these are the perfect Manets to flee the Nazis with, should the need ever arise again.
The Ann & Gordon Getty Collection, 10 sales, 1,385 lots [Christies.com]
Previously, very much related: Manet Paints Dog
Édouard Manet Facsimile Object
I am kind of deep in an assignment, and so cannot really give the space right now to process the news of Jean-Luc Godard’s death and the impact of his work.
But as an absolute fan of Agnes Varda who has not seen Faces Places because I detest JR’s work, Manohla Dargis’s interpretation here of Godard’s refusal to even come to the door makes sense to me.
The beautiful, melancholic and now portentous video by Robert Luxemburg of Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville captured on Google Street View in 2013, set to music from Le Mepris, is the kind of cinematic world we all inhabit now. Of course, he is in it forever.
UPDATE: NEVERMIND.
I thought of the Fourth Plinth, empty. And the sixteen artists who’ve made sculptures to fill it, (counting Elmgreen and Dragset and the two who are in the queue).
Actually, I thought of the Corgis first. The Queen had had over 30 Corgis, most bred from a dog named Susan, who was given to her on her 18th birthday. Though the royal breeding operation had ceased, in 2022, The Queen still had at least two Corgis and a Dorgi, a dachshund/Corgi mix The Queen and her sister Margaret delighted in since an errant hookup in the 1970s, and which was facilitated, The Queen once actually explained, by the use of “a little brick.”
“The Queen is said to be unwilling to leave young dogs behind when she dies,” the BBC also blithely reported in June, so the thought of some household staff carrying out The Queen’s dying wish to have her dogs killed after her own death–even if it should be a shock–can’t be said to come as a surprise. People should know and remember that decision.
Which is when I thought of the Fourth Plinth. A dog killed and buried with its royal owner. A dog on a plinth. I thought of the Anubis Shrine unearthed in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
The Anubis statue was wrapped in a linen shirt which was from the seventh regnal year of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, according to an ink inscription on it. Underneath was a very fine linen gauze tied at the front of the neck. Over this were two thin floral collars of blue lotus and cornflowers, tied at the back of the neck.[4] Between the front legs sat an ivory writing palette inscribed with the name of Akhenaten’s eldest daughter, Meritaten.
Howard Carter documented in 1927.
No, that’s not the vibe. Anubis led the funeral procession of the pharoah, and, as was evident by the inscription on a “magic brick” of unfired clay found in front of the statue on its palanquin, was positioned to guard the Necropolis:
It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber, and who repel that one who would repel him with the desert flame. I have set aflame the desert (?), I have caused the path to be mistaken. I am for the protection of the deceased.
Plus, Anubis is too big. Corgis are small. Like canopic jar small.
And that is it. So when I looked for an image of the empty Fourth Plinth, I was also surprised to learn that “The Fourth Plinth is Reserved for The Queen.” Even in the mid-2000s, the group in charge of what it calls, “the most important public art commission in the world,” and even the Mayor of London himself were unaware of this plan to commission an equestrian statue of The Queen for the Fourth Plinth after her death. “It’s as if Boris was told the nuclear secret,” a source said to the Independent when the royal family’s plan was revealed to the then-mayor in 2008.
So since 1999 everyone involved in the Fourth Plinth has really just been running interference, keeping the plinth busy–and clear from any competing permanent proposals. Did Elmgreen & Dragset know? Did Hans Haacke?
So it’s been a fait all along, just waiting to be accompli. Fine. Just as long as when the statue of The Queen on horseback is finally unveiled, the edge of the Fourth Plinth is lined with canopic jar-sized memorials to the Corgis The Queen had killed at her death.
“Calder, you could give that son of a bitch four beer cans and he’d make a toy out of them and give them to the toddler son of the next door neighbor in Roxbury who helped build his studio and became a lifelong friend, and then eventually he’d sell ’em,” deKooning probably did not say, but yet, here we are.
14 Sept. 2022, Lot 122: Alexander Calder, Untitled (Pull Toy), 1955, est. $50-75,000 [ragoarts.com]
Three Untitled Projects, also known as Three Untitled Booklets, is considered Adrian Piper’s first exhibition. It was a site-specific exploration of identifying place, and it took the form of three mimeographed books, which she mailed to artists, curators, critics, and collectors in the Spring of 1969. In addition to the books, each recipient of the show got a list of all 162 locations for the show–the list of all the mailing’s recipients–with their name and location highlighted.
As David Platzker of Specific Objects wrote in the catalogue of the artist’s 2018 MoMA retrospective, Piper, a student at SVA, was hired as a secretary by Seth Siegelaub during his last gallery exhibition, in January 1969:
Piper, between her gallery responsibilities, clandestinely copied Siegelaub’s Rolodex, utilizing the dealer’s mailing list to distribute copies of her artist’s project, a set of three untitled books she intended as independent works titled Three Untitled Projects [for 0 to 9]: Some Areas in the New York Area (1969).
…
The triptych publication, in concert with its means of distribution, expanded on Adrian Piper’s inquiry into spatial relationships as fixed constructions defined by the limits of the human mind. By putting the project directly in the hands of her influential intended recipients, Piper utilized one of the significant strengths of artists’ books, which is to extend works of art to individuals—domestically and internationally—who might not otherwise see the work in a gallery setting. Piper’s project became a primary example of how publications traverse not just fixed locations, but the durational nature of presenting art in fixed locations.
I love that so much.
Piper was associated with 0 to 9, the art journal and artist publishing project of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, which ran for six issues and a supplement beginning in 1967 and ending in 1969. Which is wild; you’d think scoring Seth Siegelaub’s mailing list would set a mimeographed mail art operation up for life.
An edition of Three Untitled Projects will be included in an exhibition, whose title–I think it’s the title?–is a Judd quote: “I Can’t See How I Can Be Outside of the Society–So I Am Within It,” Specific Object at Susan Inglett Gallery, at the Independent 20th Century Fair in New York, 8-11 September, 2022.
I CAN’T SEE HOW I CAN BE OUTSIDE OF THE SOCIETY— SO I’M WITHIN IT. [specificobject]
Ugly Duckling Presse reissued 0 to 9 a few years ago as a single volume trade edition and in a signed, facsimile special edition. It does not include Three Untitled Projects. [uglyducklingpresse.org]
Friend and hero of the blog Christian Alborz Oldham has long been an insightful thinker and practitioner of ikebana and its relationship to contemporary developments in art, both in Japan and beyond. In late July and early August he curated an exhibition of archival photos of one of the masters of contemporary/freestyle ikebana, Kosen Ohtsubo, at Paid in Seattle. It was arranged in collaboration with the artist, his school Ryusei-ha, and Empty Gallery of Hong Kong, and is accompanied by an essay by Oldham, and archival writings and reviews of Ohtsubo’s work. The show’s closed now, but installation images are available, and open edition posters of a selection of the images are available via Device for US shipping.
Without getting too this-looks-like-that about it, the work above, Rock & Roll Radish Tower, suddenly reminded me of Yayoi Kusama’s work, especially the stuffed shadow boxes she made in the ’80s. I mean, the daikon’s phallic symbolism is as much a staple of Japanese culture as the daikon itself. There’s definitely enough to go around.
Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham Selections from the Photographic Archive of Kosen Ohtsubo, Presented by Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham, and in cooperation with Kosen Ohtsubo, Ryusei-ha, and Empty Gallery July 23 – August 6 [paid.exchange, that’s the url, not spon disclosure]
The Florida Man of museum scandals just keeps on going. The NY Times now reports the director of the Orlando Museum of Art and the chair of the board of trustees received a subpoena from the FBI for all communications relating to a group of fake Basquiats in 2021, months *before* the museum opened a show of the works. And instead of canceling the show, they covered up the subpoena, and swore the trustee running the finance committee to secrecy, and threatened any museum employee who talked or raised any objections with instant termination, and threatened *via email* the job of the art professor who objected to finding out her name was being used to authenticate the works she had never seen in person. And that is barely a third of wtf is in the latest article. Why did this backwater museum director ride so hard for these blatantly faked Basquiats in the first place, and why did he and his board chair make things a million times worse for themselves after they knew the jig was up?
An Orlando Museum’s Disputed Basquiats Are Gone. It’s Leadership Is, Too [nyt with the hard underselling headline]
Jacob Kassay, 'BRUSH', 2020 – Interview filmed in March 2022 at Art : Concept, Paris.
In March 2020, as was the custom of the time, Jacob Kassay did an OVR, with a show no one could see at Galerie Art Concept in Paris of 19th century bricks made in Buffalo. That was followed by a bigger show, F’O’O’T’A’G’E’, in the summer. This past March, he talked about them in a brief video, above, which, like the rest of this pandemic, feels like time and space have collapsed.
The project is balanced in the space between these quotes: “I mean, I am relying on the pretension of people knowing about my relationship to painting for these to operate in a certain way.” and “I don’t think I have the ego enough to say like, ‘Oh, this is a readymade.'”
The word “balance” suddenly made me think of another work of saliently stamped bricks, but since it dates from the year after Ana Mendieta’s death, I’m not going to mention it here.
Which has apparently been removed from Google Maps? [h/t @bbhilley]
Previously, related, from 2005 (!): Earth Art via Satellite
cf. Peter Morse’s early roundup of looking for Earth Art via Google Maps [archive.org link]
2002: arguing with the guy who wrote for Artforum about not being able to find the Spiral Jetty [sheesh, I was insufferable, but so was everybody else. 2002 really was another internet country.]
Searching for Isamu Noguchi ceiling is highly recommended.
In 1972, the Noguchi’s longtime collaborator, Masatoshi Izumi, built a house next to the artist’s at their stonecutting yard in Mure, Japan. Izumi, who descends from a long line of stonecutters, worked with a plan by architect Tadashi Yamamoto to realize Stone House. Jared Frank wrote about it for Cereal Magazine:
This salvaged cylinder [made from local aji stone, and the basalt core of the first sculpture Izumi and Noguchi created together] still bears the scars of its violent removal, and is the physical and spiritual core of Stone House. It supports a slender truss system that floats over the walls. Painted red at Noguchi’s urging, the grid is flagrantly hi-tech in contrast with the low-tech stonework. Equal parts Superstudio, Cedric Price, and Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964), Stone House is a compelling, one-of-a-kind synthesis of competing trends in late modernist thought and design. To this day it remains both timeless and distinctly 1972. Noguchi appropriately dubbed it a “modern temple.”
Here are more of Yoshihiro Makino’s photos of Stone House. And a 2018 tumblr post with photos from a Japanese magazine feature.
I went to Noguchi’s Museum and house in Mure when we went to Naoshima in 2006, but I did not know to put Stone House on the itinerary. [1 hour of google map searching later update: it is not next to Isamu-ya, Noguchi’s reconstructed Ed0-era house. I feel better about missing it.] [and one minute of googling a year later update: Izumi passed away in 2021.]
Since 2020, when the last of a series of worse real estate developers finally removed what was left of the site-specific waterfall and aluminum louvered ceiling Isamu Noguchi designed in 1957 for the lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue, we thought New York had lost its last Noguchi ceiling.
No. There is another.
The Art Newspaper reports that the Noguchi Museum will restore the artist’s studio and house in Long Island City, and open them to the public for the first time.
Included in that house–really, a living space carved out of a 3,200 sq-ft factory/studio–is a light-diffusing drop ceiling in the bedroom that reminds me of the Fifth Avenue installation. It’s visible in the photo up top by Hans Namuth, for a two-page NYT Mag feature on Noguchi’s novel live-work design, as clipped and saved by the Noguchi Museum.
Noguchi and a Japanese carpenter whose name only comes up in reference to this project, Yukio Madokoro, built a loft bedroom of polished fir plank flooring cantilevered across 6.5 ft high cinderblock walls. It is enclosed by fiberglass shoji panels, and lined with plywood and Transite walls. [Transite is a corrugated panel of asbestos concrete, so maybe go ahead and don’t restore those, Noguchi Museum?]
But “The unusual ceiling,” according to the Times, “is made of long cardboard mailing tubes. It covers fluorescent lights, giving a soft, over all glow of light” that complements the columnar paper lamp in the corner, which would “soon be available commercially.” Indeed it would. It would take a few more decades for Shigeru Ban to bring us cardboard tube architecture, though.
10 minutes later update: OK, it destroys the entire premise of this post, but there are two Noguchi ceilings in New York: one made, and one found. As Amy Hau’s history of the Noguchi Museum points out, the artist chose to keep the original industrial metal ceiling in the space that is now the museum shop/cafe.
With $4.5m funding boost, the Noguchi Museum will open the artist’s home and studio to the public [theartnewspaper]
Factory into Home (NYT Mag, Apr 8, 1962, illegible photos) [nyt]
Altered and Destroyed [noguchi.org]
Previously: Destroyed Noguchi Ceiling
I listen to Proof, a podcast about NFTs by entrepreneur/collector Kevin Rose, with co-host Derek Edwards Schloss. It emerges from a world full of bullshit as a sincere, well-versed discussion. But, ngl, sometimes I just sit back and soak in the vocab, letting the effusive wordstream wash over me.
The current episode features an absolutely en fuego conversation with another collector/investor Todd Goldberg, and it is just an all-cylinders-firing romp through the topics of smart investing during the crypto and NFT market collapse, and the embers of generative, on-chain innovation that will surely rise from the ashes to set the art world on fire anew. These guys are sharp, confident and on point the whole time, speedrunning a game I do not play.
And in this game is a place called Marfa, which inhabits the same X, Y, Z coordinates as the Marfa I am quite familiar with. Last year the generative art platform Art Blocks brought the NFT circus to town when founder Snowfro put on an IRL show in a gallery/space/house that is now their headquarters? Anyway, I was so fascinated by their description and experience of Marfa, I transcribed it below. It starts around 28:00, but seriously, however far you back it up for context, you’ll just find literary and informational gold.
Continue reading “Welcome To The Marfa of The Mined”
It’s weird to see a work of art without knowing the artist, and then to find out it’s by someone you know. The familiar overtakes the novel or, in the case of Publicon Station I, the lmao baffling. As soon as this gold leafed oar with a blue light bulb in its belly, standing in a geometric fabric-lined rhomboid cabinet was identified as a 1978 Robert Rauschenberg, its obviously a Rauschenberg, and from the 70s.
Publicons are a series of six wall-mounted sculpture editions Rauschenberg made with Gemini G.E.L. “Related to the Stations of the Cross”, the Rauschenberg Foundation explains, “the Publicons are cabinets, each of which opens to reveal an enshrined object. The title merges ‘icon,’ a reference to medieval reliquaries and Renaissance altarpieces, and ‘public,’ since sculptures can be manipulated by the viewer. “
Those religious references are all distinct, of course–stations, icons, reliquaries, altarpieces–and don’t neatly map to Publicons. My guess is Rauschenberg was not hung up on dogmatics of symbolism, narrative, or procession, &c.; he was going for a vibe.
There’s a common vocabulary of beige auto lacquer on the exterior, and geometric fabric panel collages on the interior. Three have lights: I, IV and V. Four have objects “enshrined” in them. The gold leafed oar feels the most religious; the mirror, wheel and dangling brick are all found in Rauschenberg’s earlier work. (Of course, what isn’t?)
Though their 1978 exhibition at Castelli Graphics did get a review in Artforum, not much seems to have been written about Publicons. Rauschenberg had bigger shows, and bigger work–and lots of it. In Artforum, Leo Rubinfien, always hard to please, wrote:
The central device with which the “Publicons” work is the difference between their blank and unyielding exteriors and their exuberant contents. Since they are modeled on icon cases, a hint of the sacred still adheres to them, reinforced by their individual titles—Station 1, Station II, etc. Thus one approaches and opens them a little cautiously, to find a crazy Pop/Surreal confusion inside. They are, in fact, as much jack-in-the-box as icon: Station I, when opened, reveals a canoe paddle covered with gold leaf, with a glowing blue light for a navel—it is as if the piece has stuck its tongue out at one for treating it respectfully.
I think a good part of what the “Publicons” are about is this mockery of their own audience of culture-lovers.
If it’s irony one seeks, one should look at the outside of the Publicons, not the interior. These aggressively blank, glossy boxes feel like a comment by Rauschenberg on an academic minimalism, deadpan sculpture with roots in the gestalt materialism of folks like Robert Morris or Donald Judd. The interiors of Publicons are exuberant in comparison to anything except other Rauschenbergs. They feel like the artist trying to relate, if not assimilate, to the art of his time.
Most reproductions of Publicons show only the most “interesting” part: the inside, and usually only one work. I wanted to see what could be seen by putting all the Publicons on one page, open and closed, in order, the way you might find them in a church gallery.
The Publicons contain as many references to Rauschenberg’s own work as they do to any religious mode. But maybe that misses the point; why couldn’t they instead reveal the reliquarian and altarpiece vibes of earlier combines, works where holy relics hide behind cabinet doors.
I’m not the biggest Thomas Eakins fan, but I did live in Philadelphia, so I’m at least familiar. I confess, I hadn’t really given him or his work much thought since his 1876 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, was the target of Alice Walton’s surreptitious Crystal Bridges acquisition spree in the mid 2000s. With the help of her secret art adviser, National Gallery of Art curator John Wilmerding, Walton scouted out the most important works of American art held by institutions who were financially vulnerable, indifferently managed, and/or unbound by professional museum ethics–and then she bought it in a flash. It was a shock tactic that worked–until it didn’t, in Philadelphia.
Continue reading “Parodies of The Gross Clinic”