It’s kind of a hectic week, and there are artists I don’t know in The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series and will catch up with afterward, but Thursday May 15’s hero-packed conversation about the Artists Speak Report commissioned by Anonymous Was A Woman is a must-join.
Primary Information: Buy Things, Send Cash
“For about a year,” Gober explained in 1990, “between 1982 and 1983, I painted on a small board. Over this board I had mounted my camera, and as I changed the painting I would take slides of the process. So that in the end nothing remained but the photographic record of a painting metamorphosing.”
Gober first showed Slides of a Changing Painting as a 3-screen slide projection work for just one week [??] in May 1984, at Paula Cooper Gallery. I saw the work first at the Walker Art Center. It’s been central to major retrospectives of Gober’s work, and to understanding his larger project, many, many seeds of which are contained in the Slides.
But it’s the extraordinary book version of Slides of a Changing Painting, coming out in a few days from Primary Information, that has been looming so large in my present. It was shipped early to annual subscribers, and it gives an unprecedented chance to see Slides slowly, one phase at a time, in a way that the actual work avoids by design. But the sheer heft and density of the book— it is small, beautiful, and nothing but images—also gives a chance to get lost in the world Gober painted into—and then out of—existence.
Slides of a Changing Painting is somehow just $30, and it’s $25 on pre-order, but it feels like it should be $50 or $100. Which, about that. Executive director Matthew Walker just sent out an email announcing that Primary Information is one of the many arts non-profit organizations that suddenly had their NEA grant canceled, blowing a $40,000 mid-year hole in their tiny budget.
For nearly 20 years, Primary Information has been publishing and republishing highly important artist texts, bringing them back into the discussion at cost. They have an entire slate of books to come. So when you order, if you’re able, why not pay double, or triple, of 10x, with a donation at checkout, and help keep Primary Information’s work going? Or buy some solid and yet not exorbitant fundraising editions. Or just straight-up slip them a tax-deductible donation.
Pausing The Pod for Neptune Frost
I’ve been working my way back through David Naimon’s Between the Covers, and was listening to a 2023 conversation about translation and African language with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, when I had to pause the pod’ for Neptune Frost. The 2021 Afrofuturist musical was made in Rwanda by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman in February & March 2020, escaping a global pandemic shutdown by four days, like the Deathstar plans leaving Scarif.
The 2022 US trailer from Kino Lorber is kind of choppy, and more about the film’s critical reception, while the earlier, 2021 Directors’ Fortnight trailer gives more of a sense of the film’s atmosphere.
Uzeyman and Williams’ conversation with Eugene Hernandez at the 2021 NYFF gives a sense of the project’s origin, their artistic influences, and the euphoria of pulling it all off.
Hang Together: White Columns 2025 Print Portfolio Just Dropped
The White Columns 2025 Print Portfolio just dropped, and it looks like a thousand bucks. Each. And yet it’s only a thousand bucks for the whole thing. If ever there was a portfolio designed to hang together instead of hanging separately, it’s this one. With Tabboo!’s sun and Ann Craven’s moon; and Craven’s moon and whatever is radiating on the right side of Arthur Simms’ triptych. And the way Simms’ framed head or whatever resonate with Sam McKinniss’s Luigi mugshot. But most of all,
the way McKinniss’s Luigis and Rachel Harrison’s DeKooning Woman & Amy Winehouse just feel like a call to action. So act now, gallerists are standing by.
Simone Prouvé’s Jean Prouvé Table
See, maybe not this one specifically, but this is the kind of FrankenProuvé collab vision I’m talking about.
It sounds like Simone Prouvé made this dining table by taking a base from her father, reinforcing it with an iron frame [which is now rusting], and putting a laminated glass and woven steel top of her own, based on an idea from “self-described Goth” architect Odile Decq, for whom Prouvé wove a steel facade for MACRO in Rome. So that’s around 2006-7.
27 May 2025, Lot 84, Table de salle à manger, est EUR500-800 [artcurial]
Jean Prouvé’s Kit of Jean Prouvé Parts
What’s even more intriguing than Jean Prouvé’s [Daughter’s] Jean Prouvé sideboard is the next lot in the Artcurial sale: a bunch of Prouvé parts.
What could you make with a sliding sideboard door, five shelf/plates, and four drawer/boxes, toute from la famille Prouvé? I am seriously tempted to cook something up.
27 Mai 2025, Lot 32, Jean Prouvé, Ensemble d’éléments en metail, EUR800-1000 [artcurial]
Jean Prouvé’s Jean Prouvé Sideboard
This « tout aluminium n. 151 » Prouvé sideboard is being sold among a bunch of textile and other design objects from Simone Prouvé, Jean’s daughter. So it could have only ever been hers and still accurately described as “Famille de l’artiste, puis par descendance.”
But it cannot be the case that she had to buy it retail, right? And just because Artcurial is only going with the date it was designed, and the EUR60-80,000 estimate seems low [sic], I’m—caveat emptor—sticking with this title format.
27 Mai 2025, Lot 31a, Jean Prouvé Bahut « tout aluminium n. 151 » [artcurial via @pwlanier]
Previously, related:
Eileen Gray’s Eileen Gray Table
Gio Ponti’s Gio Ponti Shelf
Koyo Kouoh RIP
Extraordinary and sad news, that Koyo Kouoh, most recently of Zeitz MOCAA, and the curator of the next Venice Biennale, has died. Aruna d’Souza posted the Zeitz MOCAA Instagram announcement on bluesky.
Having never seen a show of Kouoh’s, I found the most insight and inspiration from her two-part interview in 2024 with Charlotte Burns for Schwartzman &’s What if…!? podcast. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.
Just a person of extraordinary and urgent thinking and action, now gone.
The Art World: What If…?! Season 2, 9, Koyo Kouoh, Part 1 [schwartzmanand]
The Art World: What If…?! Season 2, 10, Koyo Kouoh, Part 2
James Lee Byars Dog Cage
In a way, it’s the quintessential experience of James Lee Byars’ art: clicking through a letter to Sam Wagstaff, written three words at a time on an endless stack of envelopes grabbed? left over? from the Green Gallery, where he showed in 1967, piecing together a plea to stage a museum show of a room—just a small one, though—entirely covered in gold, “A state of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything. Love B.”
Then the next page in the digitized archive is this:
followed by this:
And now I don’t know whether to keep trying to decipher Byars’ five sizes and orientations of abbreviation-filled handwriting; to scour the world for my own archival photo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Imperial cloisonné dog cage; or to just head straight to Philadelphia.
So for now, I’m rereading a bunch of Byars recollections from the 2014 retrospective at MoMA PS1, and just blogging it out.
Previously, related? Marie Antoinette’s Dog House
James Lee Byars Did Not Cast The First Stone
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
That dinner plate-sized, Junior Mint-shaped Galactic Senate hoverpod-shaped James Lee Byars sculpture that the American Medical Association bought from Robert Mapplethorpe’s estate auction is NOT untitled, it is NOT undated, and it is NOT made of lacquered bronze.
It’s Seven Oranges, Matthew. How Much Could It Cost? $40,000?
Every time I worry this site is just becoming an Ellsworth Kelly fanblog, I recommit to myself to stop posting Kellys when they start going downhill.
That moment is not yet. This 1966 drawing, Seven Oranges, which was a standout in a standout show of plant drawings at Matthew Marks in 2017, is for sale next week at Phillips. I assume whoever bought it is dead or dead broke, because why would you ever just decide to give this up? And for what? $40,000?
[update: did not sell, but on the bright side, they get to keep it. ]
Somehow Pompon Returned
It shouldn’t need explaining, but @punk-raphaelite’s reblog of @lamignonette’s collection of lapdog-shaped meringues and pastries put me in a Pompon mood.
After rereading that post and reliving that bonkers 2023 Pompon moment, I thought to check in on the current state of the Pomponiverse. Has even one scintilla of evidence or scholarly discussion turnd up to support the antique dealers’ story that Jacques Barthélémy De Lamarre was painting Marie-Antoinette’s favorite dog?
Désolé, mais non, it has not. But another Pompon has.
Continue reading “Somehow Pompon Returned”MORE Richard Prince Posters
Early in 2017 I wrote about how Richard Prince was using the Instagram grid to gang images and to stage temporary exhibitions. One I screenshot was of a set of photos he called New Posters; it was made of vintage ads for Marboro Posters, alongside his own blurred Trump poster.
Somehow, even though I considered the possibility of IRL posters at the time, I only just now realized Prince did make a New Poster. Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, was published as a small screenprinted edition by MOREpublishers of Belgium.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, ed. 25, sold out [morepublishers.be]
Previously, related: Marboro Man: New Posters by Richard Prince
Repeat After Venice: Open Group @ 601Artspace
Somehow the Ukrainian art collective OPEN GROUP’s powerful installation from the Polish Pavilion at Venice last year is being restaged in New York City, starting tomorrow, Thursday May 8th. The somehow is impresaria Magda Sawon, who has arranged with 601Artspace’s David Howe to show Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024), and Untitled (2015 — ongoing), two works that relate to the ongoing impact on Ukrainians of the fight against the Russian invasion.
OPEN GROUP was a last minute addition to the Biennale, after Poland’s rightwing government was ousted, the Polish Pavilion’s rightwing curator and artists followed. Curator Marta Czyż rapidly invited OPEN GROUP instead.
After the opening Thursday, Czyż and Sawon will give a public walkthrough of the show, in two adjacent 601Artspace spaces, on Friday evening. There is also a talk planned for Saturday the 10th, with Czyż, OPEN GROUP, and Columbia professor Mark Lila. [Obviously it will not be at Columbia.]
OPEN GROUP (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga), 9 May – 22 June 2025 at 601Artspace [601artspace]
The Monochrome Billboard Book Project
Jonathan Monk’s Billboard Book Project with Three Star Books has at least four iterations. It is a billboard entirely about the making of itself, both as a billboard and as a book. The first iteration’s billboard appeared in “Week 47 of Year 2009” in Paris, while the limited edition book, made of cut down billboards—and documentation of an installed billboard—is dated January 2010. Which makes the subthemes project management and the hermeneutics of verb tenses.
Also:
Three Star Books announces an immediate and surprising sequel to “The Billboard Book Project (Paris)”…During Monk’s recent sojourn for the launch of this project, the artist noticed that posters in the Paris Métro were occasionally covered with green printed paper during the interval between commercial advertisements.
The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book is a companion book—though in a much smaller edition, so a companion to only a fraction—of offset printed monochrome green billboards.
There were The Billboard Book Projects in London and New York after this, and I’m happy for all involved. But it’s no disrespect to say—and I’m sure the fifteen people or institutions who own both Paris volumes will back me up on this—The Green Book is the project’s greatest aesthetic success.
Jonathan Monk at Three Star Books [threestarbooks]
Previously, related: Jonathan Monk Brooklyn Heights Streetview
Previously, unexpectedly related: Krisjan Gudmundsson, 200 Pages on Barnett Newman, 2001