Sedia I parts, cut to measure by Platz Lumber, Ridgewood, NY, and screen printed by Boot-Boyz.biz
That Boot Boyz Biz’s flow of ideas and synthesis of meaning and circulation of dialogue could not ultimately be contained within the medium of the t-shirt should surprise no one, not even those who once imagined it infinite.
Last year the ideas of Dziga Vertov via Hito Steyerl, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and Susan Sontag were published in Enzo Mari autoprogettazione chair format [their second furniture drop]. You’ll have to do the work of assembly to see the results, but Boot Boyz have made sure the right parts are there, that they’ll fit together, and that it’ll look beautiful when you’re done.
Sedia, 2019, not available at Boot-Boyz.biz
Sedia I [boot-boyz.biz, thanks again, @stottleplex]
While we’re on the subject of writing quickly on matters of significant art that happened in the part about which I had absolutely no idea, please direct your attention to the Boot Boyz Biz, an anonymous bootlegging collective which has, since 2015, been publishing major art and design content, primarily in the medium of deeply researched and highly synthesized, extremely limited edition t-shirts. Which is the only reason, besides my willful neglect of the instagram platform, that I can come up with for my sleeping so hard and so long on them.
Anyway, the t-shirt drops are somehow surpassed only by the non-t-shirt drops, two of which I will highlight here:
One: last summer the Boot Boyz made a Tilted Arc Defense Fund tufted wool rug. I might say it’s more of a mat, but what matters is, it exists at all, unlike the Richard Serra sculpture it evokes, obv. It captures the view from the haters’ offices down to the plaza below, in tufted wool, tastefully tinted to evoke the fundraising poster that Serra and Friends put out.
For the 7 billion-plus of us who did not cop the rug, the sidebar of historical and theoretical research will have to suffice.
“Sometimes I put clothes on the sculptures,” is how David Hammons revealed a previously unpublic intervention to Public Art Fund curator Daniel S. Palmer, who in turn has revealed it to us in The New York Times T Magazine.
For five or so winters, beginning around 2007, Hammons wrapped warmer clothing around a 19th century statue in Brooklyn of a formerly enslaved woman standing at the feet of a sculpture of a much more warmly dressed white abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher.
At least, that’s the photo we see, of the action we know. “I put clothes on the sculptureS.” Where are the others?
How long will it take for us to get it through our heads that we are surrounded by David Hammons’ artworks we don’t even know about, and may only find out about years later, if we’re lucky?
Unless we can scan back through Instagram–2007? We need to look at flickr!–to see if anyone happened upon Hammons’ sculptural caregiving while walking the dog, and happened to take a picture. Some day maybe an algorithm will unearth unseen Hammonses from our global photographic record, like LIDAR mapping ancient cities in the jungle. But for now, we don’t even know who took the one photo we have.
Masonic Certificate by Paul Revere, Jr., printed in 1954, after the plate was given to the National Gallery of Art?
Before Sears scion Lessing Rosenwald donated the copper plate engraved on both sides by Paul Revere to the National Gallery of Art, he had around 24 copies of this Masonic certificate made. One sold in 2014 for a couple of hundred dollars.
But this print was made from the plate in 1954, the year after the National Gallery acquired it. And it came from the Rosenwald Collection, but not until 1980. So I guess Rosenwald wanted one more copy on the way out the door. When you’re a founding benefactor donating 22,000 objects, they let you do it.
Anyway, I want to make some, too. But for the moment, I’d settle for seeing the plate. The drawings are wonky, but the script is absolutely gorgeous.
installation shot of Jacob Kassay’s March 2009 solo show at Eleven Rivington, via 16 miles of string
Jacob Kassay’s silvered paintings appeared in early 2009, “elegantly abused luxury goods” whose distorting mirroring surfaces were instantly desirable to collectors. Then their glinting allure proved irresistible to financial speculators whose only lesson from the recent implosion of the global financial markets was that they’d never face any consequences.
Then and now, Kassay worked through the wave of flipper interest as it crested, crashed, and inevitably moved on to swamp the next young artist’s practice.
The untitled work at the literal center of the Eleven Rivington show comprises three silvered canvases, separated slightly by an unseen rock, resting on a wooden plinth.
Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA) October 18, 2020 Modern Art & Design
According to LA Modern’s provenance, it has changed hands once; the original 2009 buyer (from Florida, save that sales tax!) sold to someone in Los Angeles, who is now selling it.
It is not clear for how much this ur-Kassay changed hands–or when, but it was after trying to sell it for $150k in 2012, and certainly for more than the current estimate. This could be your chance, savvy connoisseur, to acquire a beautiful and historic work of the artist’s, restore balance to the force, and cause someone to lose a hundred thousand dollars, all at once.
May 2021 update: This major work appeared at auction again, at Rago, and because I was unable to keep track of what day it is, I missed it selling on May 19, where it sold for $4,550, including premium. I am hugely bummed to have not bought it, but applaud the connoisseur who did. Of course, if there’d been another bidder, the price would have been higher. Anyway, HMU, winner!
What was Andy Warhol painting red in 1984 that he cut the edge of off after stretching it, and then signed it?
Andy + I went to Sean Lennon’s birthday party in 1984 at Taverne on the Green. I think it was his ninth birthday. On the way there Andy gave me one of the “ties” he had brought to give to Sean. They were the discarded “trimmings” from the edges of his paintings. He called them “ties”, signed them, and gave several to Sean.
is a thing Keith Haring wrote on Febuary 7, 1989, four and a half years later, on the back of the Warhol “tie,” that his buddy Kermit Oswald had already framed and signed himself in 1988?
Oswald was a childhood friend of Haring, and they stayed tight. He’s been head of the Keith Haring Foundation for decades. He ran a framing and fabrication shop after moving to New York with/to see his buddy. He talks of basically curating/producing/installing Haring’s shows. And he also jointly signed a lot of Haring’s work. It’s interesting to see his contribution to, say, these early painted cutout figures from Haring’s first show at Tony Shafrazi being explicitly circumscribed to “providing the wood.” As if the guy who picked up the plywood always signing things as “Copyright me” is just how things work.
Isn’t it more logical that the guy with the woodshop cut the figure, the guy with the marker drew his design, and then the guy with the woodshop routed it out and painted it in–and then signed his name first?
Anyway, point is, the Haring market seems to tell itself an awful lot of stories to make itself feel good. But the Warhol signed garbage given to Keith in a cab and turned into A Work by Kermit which Keith documented and signed later market seems to be doing just fine. At the Haring Estate stoop sale last week, this thing got a title and sold for 40x its estimate. I’m sure Sean is rummaging through his closet as I type.
In early 2017, an editor I admire greatly asked me to write about the new aesthetic of presidential propaganda, a topic which has been a staple of this blog since White House advance man Scott Sforza transformed the September 11th attacks from Bush’s first great failure into his greatest pivot…for his even more devastating failures.
Anyway, point is, I was so traumatized by and angry at and afraid of what was coming, and how inadequate the standard tools of media critique felt, that I stumbled for months, and then ghosted them, and only too late apologized for failing to put this administration under the Sforzian lens. But of course, by then, we were all in it, and what was happening and what happened have indeed outstripped the norms we operated under.
And now here we are. At the pandemic, and the international crime, and the white supremacists, and the fascism, and the police violence, and the camps, and the deliberate destruction of government and public, and the fraud, and the religious extremists, and the armed vigilantes, and the elections, and now back this morning to the pandemic.
And here is a Reuters photo by Tom Brenner, taken at a campaign event in Jacksonville, Florida last week, which @corrine_perkins, @tomwhitephoto, and @brookpete daisychained into my Twitter feed this morning. It feels worth introducing into the flow of Sforzian imagery, but its impact is entirely of Brenner’s doing, not, obviously, its subject’s or his handlers’.
In the mid-1960s, with his arthritis acting up, and after decades of designing stage sets for the London theater, Oliver Messel began designing houses on Mustique for fancy people like Princess Margaret, the hard-partying sister to Queen Elizabeth, who’d married Messel’s nephew Antony Armstrong-Jones (aka Lord Snowdon)*.
Messel bought himself a house on Barbados, and renovated it into his Caribbean fantasy show palace with his partner of 30 years, Vagn Riis-Hansen. It would seem, by my rough calculations, at least, that Riis-Hansen spent most of that time embroidering this rug.
It is nine feet wide, and ten and a half feet long, and it is gros-point, a large-stitch needlework technique, made on four panels, each 30 inches wide. The pattern is inspired by Aubusson rugs of 18th century France.
Can you just get a pattern for making an Aubusson rug? Do you have one created after your own Aubusson and counted out? [Messel designed fabrics, scarves, and at least one unproduced Donegal carpet.] Do you stencil it onto the heavy grid of fabric that is your base? Do you complete each panel, and then stitch them together? Are they ever off by a row?
It is not that I, who have been typing on a computer for thirty years, am unfamiliar with tedious, repetitive, and precise handwork. But I am at a loss to picture Messel and Riis-Hansen entertaining the international jetset while also one of them is sewing a big-ass rug for days or nights on end. I feel like I’m missing some key details about the making of this rug.
OK, for starters, it looks like it was in Messel and Riis-Hansen’s apartment in London, which was published in Architectural Digest in 1963, and presumably photographed in 1962. It does not look new. This recap article on AD calls Riis-Hansen Messel’s lover AND manager**, since the 40s. Also, he was apparently, big, and gruff, and annoyed his in-laws and Cecil Beaton, who nicknamed him The Great Dane. And he still found time to embroider a giant carpet.
In 1978 Messel died, a year after Riis-Hansen, and Armstrong-Jones got the rug. In 2017, Armstrong-Jones died, and now anyone can get the rug, if they move in the next three days.
[update, somewhat related: In 2012 artist Matthew Smith created an exhibition and archival intervention at Nymans, the Messel family’s house to bring Messel and Riis-Hansen’s relationship into parity with the other family stories depicted at the National Trust property. (pdf)]
*Apparently Messel did not attend the 1960 wedding because he could not bring his partner. Or maybe his partner was busy sewing a massive rug. **Thinking of this while doing the dishes just now I remembered reading a memo from Walter Hopps in the Smithsonian archive of the 1976 Rauschenberg retrospective, saying that though the museum would cover the travel expenses of artists and their wives, they would not pay for Bob’s “friend.” [scare quotes in the original] Maybe if Messel and Riis-Hansen were traveling together in an era where their romantic relationship was literally a jailable offense, being a manager would offer all the explanation they’d ever need. ***Maybe this whole post is a misplaced over-reliance on one word, which feels inaccurate technically–does someone stitching a rug consider it weaving?–but which must reflect a received story, if not a history per se, of how this rug came to be, and why it was kept? Or maybe it’s just so obvious to anyone interested or involved that “woven” means “had woven,” and you’d have to be daft to entertain the notion that it should be considered literally? And what possibly could be going on in this, the approaching autumn of the Year of Our Lord 2020, that could possibly account for channeling this much mental space into the backstory of some knockoff Aubusson rug an ancient British playboy stashed away after cleaning out his gay uncles’ Barbadian retirement cottage? What, indeed.
Before anyone gives Cy Twombly on a dog crate the crown for greatest art in real estate listing photography, please check out the listing for the former Ice House of the Vanderbilt estate that was Dowling College, which went bankrupt in 2016 and was liquidated in 2018.
That is Cady Noland’s Tower of Terror (1993-94) in all its in situ glory. Can you even imagine? A pleasant walk past the massive, aluminum group stockade on the way to campus. I guess the bench was in the shed.
Cady Noland was not consulted and does not approve of these photos, but they have been certified by Douglas Elliman. The ice house sold for $376,938. The sculpture sold for $2,207,501. [Thanks greg.org reader dg]
That painting, no, the other one: Horst at the Palazzo Franchetti-Twombly, which is not the name, I know, but [points to wristwatch emoji], 1966
The subject of precariously perched Twomblys prompted Claudio Santambrogio to email, wondering about the painting on the left in this iconic 1966 Horst photo. Surely, it’s not a Twombly.
My first check, of Google, turns up many of the times this Vogue photoshoot of the House of Franchetti-Twombly has been re-published and discussed, and absolutely none of them have a caption or credit for this painting. This shoot is legendary, but atmospheric.
It is also marketable. I have not pinned down when it happened, but there is something swirling around the web in upscale, merchy places like 1stdibs and Artsy, called The Cy Twombly Rome Portfolio. Horst’s images, made for and owned by Condé Nast, are available in limited editions in various sizes, with the “authorization” of the Horst Estate. Interestingly, though, less than half the Twombly photos feature Twombly’s paintings. This feels like a mix of adding the entire contact sheet to the shopping cart, and the Twombly Foundation flexing its vetoing muscles.
Untitled #6, aka the Horst photo formerly known as Twombly’s Richter
Anyway, there is no such compunction to publishing the photo of Twombly’s Richter (Untitled #6), or a straight-on shot of this painting (Untitled #12). None of these photos have caption or credit information (or a Nicola Del Roscio to keep them in line.)
These installation composite credits showing your five-figure, five-foot-wide limited edition print of an outtake, tho, no problem: Design Credit: Elizabeth Roberts Architecture & Design, Photo Credit: Dustin Aksland. image via: 1stdibs
Next step: the date of the photo puts a pretty tight constraint on who it could be, and so does Twombly’s circulation pattern. So it’s probably someone he knows in Rome, and likely someone he knows from his gallery at the time, Galleria la Tartaruga. Janis Kounellis made stark black on blank/white paintings around this time, but his are more expressionistic and brushy. Oh wait, Twombly and Kounellis showed together at la Tartaruga in 1961. with Mario Schifano. Who absolutely made paintings like this from 1960-61.
So this is Twombly’s Schifano, which seems to have been mentioned by no one, ever. Was it so utterly obvious that it didn’t need mentioning? Did Mario Schifano have a boyfriend who took over a foundation mighty enough to make even Google blink?
Honestly, I cannot say what is more shocking to me at this point: to see a Twombly propped on a dog crate in the spare bedroom, or that someone selling an Upper East Side pre-war has not staged their apartment before putting it on the market. I am thus convinced this is an epic staging flex, the equivalent of sprinkling some hay on your Mercedes Gullwing and calling it a barn find. Or maybe it’s just an homage to the way Twombly installed his Richter. [s/o Katie via Andy]
A few weeks ago I spoke with Michael Shaw for his long-running art podcast, The Conversation. And when I say long-running, I mean both he’s been doing the podcast for a long time, and holy smokes, not only did we talk a long time, he got two whole episodes out of that content. (Granted the first part *does* have “meandering” right in the description.)
I’m kind of on a writing crunch at the moment, but I’ll circle back to add some links to posts/topics we discussed. (Or there’s a search bar?) Thanks, Michael, and enjoy, everyone!
Richardson Warhol Richardsons flanking a portrait of Richardson’s cat Lulu, image: The Art Newspaper
In 1973 John Richardson had his portrait as a middle-aged leather daddy painted by Andy Warhol. Warhol also photographed Richardson as a middle-aged Upper East Side art daddy. Both portraits were displayed prominently in Richardson’s loft on lower Fifth Avenue. Except the photo is an enlargement Richardson made from a Warhol Polaroid. And the painting, at least when Rizzoli and The Art Newspaper came to visit, was a giclée print Richardson had made, because he’d donated the painting to Tate Modern.
Richardson Warhol Richardson, 2017? 40×40 like Andy used to do, but giclée on canvas, in artist’s (sic) frame, lot 257, est. $2-4,000?? lmao [update: sold for $2,000!]
These, along with homemade collages of the Miros and surmoulages of the Giacometti furniture you cashed out, are my favorite categories of reproductions of art. Not only do they have to look like the artwork they look like, they have to stand in for them and actually do their work, like Hercules holding up the heavens for Atlas. Or like the Tethereds in Jordan Peele’s Us, which were created amidst power and privilege, share the aura of their originals, and occasionally take their place without anyone noticing–until they dramatically do.
That signature really is choice, tho: Richardson Warhol Richardson facsimile objet, before 2014? 17×14 in. photo in 24×20 in. artist’s frame, lot 258, est. $200-400 [update: sold for $1,200!]
Richardson welcomed these and many more doppelgängers into his well-appointed homes, the contents of which are now for sale, while their true natures are free for contemplation.
I have three deadlines at the moment, so of course I needed to take a couple of hours to tackle a project that has been on my to-do list for seven+ years: figuring out how to print the world’s greatest webpage at full-scale.
I hadn’t figured out how to print the Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide in the time between it first going viral and when its wonky html code finally got fixed a few years later. I bought myself some more time by publishing the original page on my site as a work, Untitled (embroidery trouble shooting guide), one of my collection of zombie art websites.
But I have always wanted to see it printed out. A book never turned out right, and the exponentially growing font size made a joke of any remotely normal printing process, even to look at it.
Today though, I decided to just print the webpage as a pdf, and see how big one sheet needed to be to hold it all. And it worked. From that, I figured out how big the font on the last line of text actually is. [I mentioned this triumph at dinner, and my wife just said, “Can’t you just calculate it from the code?” Reader, I married her.]
Study for Untitled (etsg), 2020, inkjet on paper? uv on vinyl? 175 x 330 feet, though, that I know
Anyway, the answer is a single page 175 feet tall and 330 feet wide, slightly larger than a football field. Rendered in 6,093 point font, the last, largest line of text is almost 85 inches tall.
Study for Untitled (These are some of the normal problems you may experience during the Embroidery Process.), 2020, inkjet on paper, 85×3927 in.
Surely, there is a 96-inch wide, 500-foot long roll of paper waiting to take this work. I do know a guy with an Epson printer; maybe I should just print it on primed Belgian linen folded in half instead.
Fake President, 2017, stamp and silkscreen on paper, 24×18″, $2000, ed. 250, published by Gemini GEL, at one point to benefit People for the American Way, though the Gemini site doesn’t mention that. PFAW’s website has them available, along with a Ruscha.
Richard Serra makes a lot of prints, and a lot of them are published as polit..ical fundraisers. They are collected here, mostly from Serra’s Gemini GEL page, where a lot of them are still available, even long after their specific election has passed.
[Caption ganked along with photo] NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: “Fake President” art work by Richard Serra the People For The American Way Event For Election 2018 on October 25, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for People for the American Way)
The most recent, published in October 2018, is the most atypical. Fake President commemorates Norman Lear’s 95th birthday, and was one of several works created to raise money for the People For the American Way, which Lear founded. The reflection in the Getty Images pic from the drop party–just two weeks before the election, so riding the wave, not making it, I guess–looks like a bronze plaque, or at least metallic foil, which would be weird and awesome. The force behind these prints, often part of portfolios, is Gemini G.E.L., which I assume means Sidney Felsen.
