Anna Cassel, No. 19. 11 April 1913, 1913, oil on canvas. 21 1/2 x 15 1/2″, image via artforum
The Artist Formerly Known As Hilma af Klint was a collective. Documents only discovered in 2021 show that af Klint’s major works were made with a co-equal collaborator (and likely former lover), Anna Cassel, and that together, they led a collective of at least 13 women to produce the paintings that have been considered af Klint’s visionary work alone.
The Artforum from the archives newsletter delivers the news with big how it started/how it’s going energy from Daniel Birnbaum, the art world’s most powerful Hilma af Klint whisperer.
Essential Design, Lot 128: That is not a Frank Gehry skateboard. image: wright20
I am officially on the record as a skeptic of artist skateboard collabs, but I can also say that no one wants there to be a Frank Gehry skateboard more than me.
This group of skate decks in next week’s Essential Design sale at Wright20, “is comprised of decks by AWS for Alien Workshop, Marc Johnson for Enjoi Skateboards, Rick McCrank and Eric Koston for Girl Skateboards, One Fifty One Skateboards, Frank Gehry, and Toy Machine. Printed manufacturer’s mark to six examples.”
New Museum Skateboard as product, 2014, and the SANAA building it echoes. image I was about to make ganked from 9yo artnet article instead.
And the only thing better than a Frank Gehry skateboard is a signed Frank Gehry skateboard. But again, no. This is the upside-down silhouette of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s of SANAA’s New Museum. It is the shape the museum uses as a logo, turned into a skateboard. The limited edition of 150, produced in 2014 by Chapman Skateboards, is still available in the New Museum’s shop.
Castator and Duff @ NuMu, 2012, published to Castator’s tumblr [rip], then published by Complex and blackholed once they wrung enough eyeballs out of it, recovered via the Internet Archive
The idea originated with a 2012 window installation by Canyon Castator and Richard Duff, who put the woeful off-the-rack Supreme artist collab skatedecks to shame with their janky, hand-chopped-and-reassembled New Museum board. Which I am now adding to my auction watch list.
Dorothy Dandridge and the headline, “The Man Who Found $10 Million” on the cover of the Nov. 1, 1954 issue of LIFE Magazine, and a half-page wide aerial photo tracing the path George Vick hiked up a canyon, then up a mountain face, to find a massive deposit of uranium, on p. 124 [via]
Speaking of the outer margins of Henry David Thoreau inspiration, in November 1954, LIFE Magazine published a massive feature on an ersatz uranium hunter named George Vick. At the age of 48, and after nine grueling months searching the Four Corners region of Colorado and Utah, Vick found a massive uranium deposit, which he sold to a mining company for $10 million. The LIFE cover line, “The Man Who Found $10 Million,” made him an instant target for people asking for a piece of that easy money. Vick moved to California and set up his own think tank for the nuclear future, which he called Walden West. Later, when the future looked bleak, he built an apocalypse-proof bunker mansion in British Columbia, which he called, of course, Walden North.
Robert Rauschenberg, Lincoln, 1958, 17 x 21 inches, collage of printed paper, handwritten paper, some dingy damask, a stamped metal tag, and paint on someone else’s canvas
Which all turns out to be the tangent here, because Robert Rauschenberg cut out the aerial photo of Vick’s treasure trail and, in 1958, working in the gap between LIFE and art, he collaged it to the center of a small combine titled, Lincoln. Lincoln is one of at least seven small combines Rauschenberg made in 1958, along with a similar number in 1957. [I wrote about another of these little personal combines, State, in 2020.]
Dan Graham, Children’s Day Care CD-Rom, Cartoon, Computer Screen Library Center, 1998, at Marian Goodman, image via @visitordesign
The Dan Graham tribute show at Marian Goodman looks fantastic; there’s a whole gallery of models/maquettes/studies, tiny little Dan Graham pavilions on pedestals that almost make me want to move to the country.
Visitor took this picture of one of what look like a mountain of gems: a 1998 model called Children’s Day Care CD-Rom, Cartoon, Computer Screen Library Center.
Nan Goldin, Brice Marden in his studio at Eagles Mere, PA, 1995. 10.5×17 in., via Gallery98
For the announcement of his third show of Brice Marden’s work, in October 1995-January 1996, Matthew Marks sent out a photo of the artist in his studio in Eagles Mere, PA, taken by another gallery artist, Nan Goldin.
I still have the catalogue for this show, but the announcement is long since gone. Marc Miller at Gallery98 currently has the above example for sale.
Richard Hamilton, A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein, 1964, 23×26 in, screenprint, given to Mark Lancaster and sold at Sotheby’s for $4,064.
During his 1963 visit to the US to see Duchamp’s Pasadena retrospective, Richard Hamilton also picked up a Roy Lichtenstein poster/lithograph from Castelli. When he got back to the UK, he enlarged a tiny section to make his own two-color print edition, A Little Bit of Roy Lichtenstein for…, which he liked to give away to friends.
In the eight years since an archival photo of a lone andiron at the Met attributed to Paul Revere—I’m struggling here to say exactly what it did. Diverted me onto a lyrical, conceptual mission? Transmuted itself into an artwork and me into an artist? Whatever, it changed my life. Point is, while I did not turn into some andiron freak, I did gain a somewhat heightened—heightened and specific—awareness of andirons in the world.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Bloodworks), 1992, four 11 x 9 inch drawings in colored pencil and graphite, or gouache and graphite, in the artist’s 12.5 x 10.5 inch frames, selling at Sotheby’s London on 18 Apr 2023
The Sammlung Goetz in Munich is selling stuff?1 Ingvild Goetz is the private museum OG. She’s has the Felix Gonzalez-Torres full stack: a stack, a billboard, a candy pour, a light string, an iconic and haunting photo, a text portrait, which has been installed in her Herzog & de Meuron building since the beginning, and she has—had—these early Bloodworks drawings.
Early in the sense that the lines on the handrawn grids still run “up.” In the book published alongside the artist’s MOCA/Hirshhorn/Renaissance Society show in 1994, Charles Merewhether wrote about these drawings under the heading, “The Line of Fortune”:
From 1988 on, Gonzalez-Torres has composed a series of drawings made of a single line running across a graph. In the earlier work the line ran upwards, and in the more recent down, as if charting the rise and fall of stocks, or sales of one commodity or another. The surplus value of labor, Marx might have called it, but the artist has chosen a different name, “Bloodwork.” The wavering line is not the abstract sign of market value, but of a different economy of fortune. By appropriating a minimalism of style, Gonzalez-Torres was reproducing the clinical character of medical charts of a body’s life. This was an economy of the body, with its line running upwards to indicate a healthy recovery, and down to mark its decline. And in reading such charts daily, so too the audience became its subject whose feeling of hope, of unhopeable hope, rises and falls.
The next Bloodwork drawing after these, a single graph on linen,“Untitled” (Bloodwork – False Hope), is the last one with an ascending line.
Despite their title these works have always felt depersonalized, even cool or cold, and shown in a large sequence, like 21 or 31 days, their similarity kind of defy close attention. But these, and earlier graphs on painted paper, feel like the opposite. Their precision and variation resonates with the time and experience of their making, on page after page in a spiral bound sketchbook.
In a 1991 interview Bob Nickas and Gonzalez-Torres talked about On Kawara’s date paintings in relation to these drawings. And that makes me wonder whether these graphs were a daily practice, an exercise, a routine or a respite, literal marks of the artist’s life and work.
1 Next morning update: A few weeks ago Goetz announced the sale of 49 pieces to fund a charity focused on elder poverty relief in Germany. According to the Die Welt article [shoutout A. G./@kios_que] above, Goetz has been donating and permanently loaning works to public collections since 2014. Mention of other charitable causes probably means additional sales from the 4,600 piece Sammlung are coming.
James Futcher of IKEA and Felix Hallwachs of Little Sun standing next to a guy holding the only SAMMANLÄNKAD LED solar lamp in the world, apparently, in Olafur Eliasson’s studio [via]
Almost a month since the hype machine was activated, and two weeks since it appeared at a few—but not all—Ikea stores in Europe, there is zero sign of the Little Sun X Ikea collab in the US. This post is just me screaming into roar of an offshore wind farm, trying and failing to shop our way out of this climate disaster.
“I have been long inquiring whether any remenant of the house at Walden remained, feeling that it would be a choice relic of axe strokes that were literally heard round the world,” wrote Yale professor Henry Seidel Canby in 1932.
Stud sections and nails from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, a gift of Henry Seidel Canby to the Yale Collections of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale’s Henry David Thoreau Collection is small but intense. Of sixteen items, seven are holographs, texts written in the author’s hand. There are pencils made by Thoreau’s father, and the label for a pencil box they might have c piome in. There are a couple of surveys the author made as part of his dreaded work. And there are two pieces of wood and two nails, which are reported to come from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. They were donated by Professor Canby.
There are two documents in the Collection pertaining to the material history of Thoreau’s cabin: One is the 1932 provenance statement accompanying the wood and nails by Canby, a noted Thoreau fanboy and biographer [who was called the “dean of American literary critics” in his bio in The Saturday Review, which he founded and edited for 12 years.] The other is a 1949 essay/survey of the cabin’s post-Walden history which its authors, two then-students, Francis Shelden and G. Peter Shiras called the first “exact, authenticated history of the Thoreau hut.”
America by Budweiser, available from Memorial Day thru Election Day, 2016.
Beginning the Spring of 2016 and running through the Fall, I put out Untitled (Free As In America), a series of Cady Noland sculptures replicated with the America beer cans that Anheuser-Busch InBev replaced Budweiser with in the run-up to the US presidential election. The concept was to remake any sculpture for only the cost of the raw materials it required.
Exactly none of these sculptures were realized in the window in which Budweiser’s America cans were available.
You see it. I’m not mentioning it or linking to it.
Now the window has reopened. As the right wing is consumed by its own flames of hate and violence, it seeks to transform that hate into consumption. Recognizing the futility of icing out the giant, international beer conglomerate for paying a trans woman to promote one of their products on her own social media channel, some grifter created an alternative: right-wing beer.
Cady Noland, This Piece Has No Title Yet, 1989, Budweiser and scaffolding and stuff, the Rubells
As long as this beer is actually for sale, then, I will make Untitled (Free As In America) sculptures available again. I will replicate any Cady Noland sculpture, replacing the Budweiser cans with perfect replicas of—when I started this post, it was going to be replicas of the grift beer. But no, it will be replicas of the 2016 America cans, made by the finest trans metallurgists and artists in the world. All proceeds beyond the production costs will be used to fund trans legal defense, health care, and emergency support services. Prices run from $100 million for a basket to $1 billion for a room-sized installation.
ONE DAY LATER UNBELIEVABLE UPDATE: In a statement literally titled, Our Responsibility To America, Anheuser-Busch InBev caves to trolls attacking their product and threatening humans with baseball bats. To update Cady Noland, “Violence has always been around. The seeming [systematization] of it now actually indicates the [work] of political organization representing different interests. ‘Inalienable rights’ become something so inane that they break down into men believing that they have the right to be superior to women (there’s someone lower on the ladder than they) so if a woman won’t date them any more they have a right to murder them.”
A FEW DAYS LATER UPDATE: I joked about it, but now other people investigating the grifter’s sourcing are saying it is actually likely the case that the rightwing grifterbeer is made in an Anheuser-Busch plant. It’s America all the way down.
On Tuesday, September 9, 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art enacted what historian Daniel J. Boorstin called a pseudo-event. It was intended to draw public attention to David Koch, a right-wing extremist whose inherited fossil fuel fortune funds a vast network of politicians, judges, lobbyists, and ideologues that has pursued power in its own service for decades.
A small fraction of his wealth, $65 million, was used to redo the plaza in front of the Met, where Koch was a trustee. The main feature is a pair of large, square, fountains of black granite, with circles of choreographed water jets. The fountains are ringed by a rough cut black granite seating ledge that bears the inscription, David H. Koch Plaza, in gilt letters.
Untitled (Koch Block), 2014 — ongoing, performance/condition, documented in 2018
In 2017 I made a work of an endless, collaborative performance of negation, where the Met’s millions of visitors and passersby, New Yorkers and outsiders alike, continuously sit in a way that blocks this aggrandizing, carved text from view. That piece is called Untitled (Koch Block), and it is still in process. Please join it whenever you’re nearby.
But there is another work, a predecessor, unearthed only recently, through a search for something else, I already forget what. On the 9th of September, the Metropolitan Museum invited the Kochs—David and his wife, Julia, whose first socialite outing in New York was co-chairing the Met Gala in 1997, a year after their marriage—to flip the switch on the fountain for the media assembled, and in the presence of local politicians and functionaries, museum leaders, neighborhood schoolchildren, and a youth chorus dressed in white and wearing red gloves, who sang a dissonant arrangement of “New York, New York.”
The Washingtonian notes that in addition to Supreme Court justices, Harlan Crow also collects Hitler paraphernalia. And yet Hitler manages to be only the second most shocking painter in this billionaire’s group show:
“I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” says one person who attended an event at [Clarence Thomas’s billionaire Harlan] Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous. “It would have been helpful to have someone explain the significance of all the items. Without that context, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.” One memorable aspect was the paintings: “something done by George W. Bush next to a Norman Rockwell next to one by Hitler.”
Previously: “Our Guernica, After Our Picasso” “As he explained to Jay Leno, the idea of taking up painting comes from Bush’s fantasy of being, or being compared to, Winston Churchill. Churchill painted. Of course, Hitler also painted. If painting makes Bush like Churchill, does it make him like Hitler, too? Is either association, when based on painting, more or less outrageous than the other?”
Lot 123: Oliver Herring, Untitled (Body Bag), 1995, knit mylar, 24 x 155 x 55 cm, at Wright20 Apr20
I feel like I lost track of Oliver Herring and his work after The Glitter1. But he’s going strong. And more to the point here, his knit mylar sculptures were a haunting and powerful presence in the 1990s, and they continue to exert an elegiac force.
Or maybe it’s seeing one called Untitled (Body Bag) that just hits a little harder. Herring began knitting mylar while still in grad school at Hunter, as a gender bending tribute to Ethyl Eichelberger, an iconic downtown drag artist and performer. Herring was at Wigstock in 1991 when Lady Bunny announced Eichelberger’s death by suicide after receiving an AIDS diagnosis. In 2014 Herring spoke on Clocktower Radio [mp3 hotlink, because Clocktower] about how knitting embodied time and mindlessness, giving him a chance to think and do simultaneously. He also talked about having to address the isolation that followed, and the inevitable end to the practice.
Herring’s move into video, performance, and community-based work makes for a quiet market for his objects. And part of me thinks I’m an idiot for posting about this before bidding on it, instead of after. But as someone who apparently needs to type to think, I’m not really in a spot to do different.
1 The Glitter: The last show I saw of Herring’s work as at Meulensteen, the guy who bought into and then bought out Max Protetch Gallery, where Herring showed in the ’90s. Herring’s show in October 2010, Areas for Action, was a month-long, free-form performance/making platform for serendipity, but in the societal frame of an eight-hour workday. What that that meant in practice was a performance-art-a-day calendar pad full of random nudity, body painting, and glitter. So much glitter. Protetch-turned-Meulensteen was on the east end of West 22nd street, and so everyone coming to Chelsea would start there, and trek the glitter down the street and into everyone else’s galleries. My strongest memory of that show, and of Meulensteen’s shortlived program, frankly, is hearing other dealers complaining about The Glitter. Kudos to Herring, though, for taking that concept on the road: glitterbomb and run beats glitterbomb and stay.
Jasper Johns has one of Barnett Newman’s first lithographs, Untitled, 1961, which Newman made at the urging of Cleve Gray, his artist friend who taught at Pratt.
Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983, 121 x 191 cm, collection: Whitney Museum
Johns included the Newman print as an element in several of his trompe l’oeil-style paintings in the 1980s. The first, I think—I will doublecheck the catalogue raisonné later; right now I’m just trying to procrastinate something else—was Racing Thoughts, in 1983. That painting is now at the Whitney.
