greg.org – Page 67 – the making of, by greg allen

Tiny Rachel Harrison 🇺🇸🍰

Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2004, mixed media, 2 3/4 x 2 3/4 x 2 in., to be auctioned June 4, 2021 at Stair Galleries

Here are some things that are larger than this untitled 2004 Rachel Harrison sculpture:
my iphone
my 15yo SonyEricsson k790i smartphone
a box of Altoids
a deck of cards
a Metrocard
a piece of grocery store sheet cake at a Fourth of July block party
a 4×6 inch snapshot overpainted by Gerhard Richter while he’s cleaning up at the end of squeegee day

Gerhard Richter, MV.101, 2011, overpainted photograph, 10 x 15 cm, image: gerhard-richter.com

Here are some things that are about the same size:
a piece of grocery store sheet cake at a Fourth of July block party where a lot more people showed up than expected, and there was only one cake, and they had to stretch it.
a little piece of polystyrene foam trimmed off the end of a larger sculpture, or maybe the leg, now laying around the studio where a work like Hey Joe [below] is being made.

Rachel Harrison, Hey Joe, 2004, mixed media, as seen in Latka/Latkas, Harrison’s 2004 show at Greene Naftali Gallery

That’s the second reference to works that sound like castoffs or afterthoughts of some ostensibly more important studio activity, but I do not think that’s what Untitled actually is. I count ten colors of paint, in multiple layers, on every sculpted surface, plus the bottom, plus some fur, and a flag. This is a little object that has seen some stuff. [update: I have heard from the successful buyer of this little object that the fur was dust–which, though also a sign that the work has not been overhandled, is hilarious and gross–and has been removed.]

Alberto Giacometti, Very Small Figurine, 1937-39, plaster with traces of pigment, 4.5 x 3 x 3.8 cm, seen at Tate, from one of the Fondations, I’m not getting involved

Here are some things that are about as small that have also seen some stuff:
a 1937-39 Giacometti literally titled Very Small Figurine, from the era when he supposedly said he fit all his sculptures into a matchbox as he fled across the Alps.

Jasper Johns, Flag (P56), 1958, silk printed flag, paraffin, in wooden frame, 2 3/4 x 3 3/4 in., via JJCR

And one of my absolute favorite things in the entire Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné, a tiny flag embedded in wax in a little frame, from 1958, which he gave to Merce Cunningham, and which had never been exhibited before 2014.

Whatever brought this Harrison into existence and out of the studio was not the market, or the demand for a show, but something else. Whether it was a private gesture or a gift or some daily or exceptional practice, I don’t know, but it is interesting. This is the point where I wonder if I should hold off on posting until I try to get this, or where I say, if I don’t get it, I invite whoever does to give it to me. I mean, it’s meant to be a gift, isn’t it?

June 4, 2021, Lot 670, Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2004, est. $1,500-3,000 [update: sold for $2,700, not to me] [stairgalleries]

‘Turn Feelings Into Things’, On Warhol’s Objects

Yet, in a way, abstract art tries to be an object which we can equate with the private feelings of the artist, the canvas being the arena on which these private feelings are acted out. Warhol presents objects which, in a sense, we can equate with public, communal feelings…In a way [Warhol’s works] might be said to objectify experience, turn feelings into things so we can deal with them.
Gene Swenson, unpublished draft, 1964 via sichel/oup

It’s awesome to hear about the experiences of people other than me who are now living with Facsimile Objects. I’m glad to know it’s not just me who finds them interesting.

Lately I’ve been thinking about them as objects, trying to explore the implications of the term and format I adopted semi-ironically from Gerhard Richter, who used it to explain the unsigned stacks of giclée on aluminum reproductions of paintings he began authorizing for museums as fundraising editions. [As their numbers and critical acceptance have grown, Richter has since classified them under the less obscure and/or more market-friendly term “prints.”]

Warhol was not on my mind, then, but like learning a new word and suddenly hearing it everywhere, I am now hypersensitized to any mention of objects or objecthood. And to asking, “But what does it MEAN [about MEEE]?”

Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021

Facsimile Objects Update

Dürer Facsimile Object (D3.38)? a FO of a 9×14.5 in. section of a Dürer, plus Vermeer Facsimile Object (V0.9)?, both at the newly reopened National Gallery, Washington, DC. Plus a FOOL FO (W1), positively glowing in the morning sun as it rests against its hand-stitched flannel packet

News from the Facsimile Objects front: barring any exceptional developments, the National Gallery in London will reopen on Monday (5/17), and so the Dürer there, the heavenly phenomenon on the back of the St. Jerome, will be visitable again. At that point, of course, the corresponding Facsimile Object (D1), will no longer be needed, and so will become unavailable. Get one while you can, I guess. The Karlsruhe agate-like painting on the back of Dürer’s Sad Jesus will, sadly, still be available, while Germany’s COVID numbers remain so high.

Recently I made a couple of Facsimile Objects related to works in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, which has been closed for several months. They will not be issued in any numbers, partly because the NGA just reopened. In fact, we were there yesterday, the first day back, when the shipment of test FOs arrived in the mail.

As you can see from the installation photo above, though, they look nice. Other than their uselessness, I’m pleased with how they turned out.

Better Read #035 – Cryptopunks Evening Sale

Lot 11A, May 9, 2021, estimate 7-9 million dollars. image: christies.com

If I knew what to make of this, I probably wouldn’t be selling FOOL-shaped mirrors and aluminum devotional jpgs for cowry shells.

Download Better Read #035– Cryptopunks Evening Sale, 13.2mb, mp3, 13:45 [greg.org]
Lot 11A Larva Labs, 9 Cryptopunks: 2, 532, 58, 30, 635, 602, 768, 603 and 757 [christies.com]

FOOL Facsimile Object

UPDATE: Wool’s BLUE FOOL sold on Nov. 17 for $950,000 before fees. FOOL Facsimile Object is no longer available, thank you all for your engagement.

Christopher Wool, Blue Fool (for Glenn O’Brien), 1990, 12 1/8 x 7 5/8 in., enamel on aluminum, image via: Simon Lee Gallery

Kenny Schachter is selling a sweet little Christopher Wool painting [update: it’s now at Phillips] that once belonged to Glenn O’Brien. It was a gift from the artist. The way Die Zeit heard O’Brien describe it in a 2014 puff piece, it was the priceless first prototype of Wool’s most famous body of work.

What O’Brien probably said was that it was a study for the giant four-letter enamel on panel paintings Wool made in 1990. Because he’d been making stencil-style text paintings since around 1987, when he’d famously said he was inspired by seeing
SEX
LUV
freshly stenciled on a white panel truck by a graffiti artist in the East Village.

The way Kenny tells the story, is that he was reminded of FOOL–which he bought from O’Brien in 2015–when he saw a similarly tiny text-on-aluminum Wool painting in a backroom at Miami Basel. It was $900,000, but was actually worth more like $2.5 million; a bargain even for Wool, who apparently bought it back.

If you are in the market for that piece–and you’d be a FOOL not to be; it is at once important, fantastic, and adorable–then you need read no further. You are set. You are good to go, and godspeed you. Despite his recent NFT hijinks, Kenny still loves that fiat money, and has surely earned this deal the hard way, on those mean Miami streets. Go cash him out. From here the discussion turns away from mad money and toward Facsimile Objects.

Days End Shoe Tree, 2021

David Hammons, Days End, 2021, awaiting shoes, image: whitney.org

If it’s really going to exist, what this new David Hammons sculpture needs is some old David Hammons. Let’s start by throwing 25 pairs of sneakers over the 8-inch steel beams, and then we can assess.

David Hammons’ Shoe Tree, 1981, on Richard Serra’s T.W.U., 1980, image: probably Dawoud Bey

Previously, related: Stop and Piss: David Hammons’ Pissed Off

Christopher Wool Richard Prince Joke Painting

Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, 1988, 80×60 in., enamel and flashe on aluminum and steel, image: maxhetzler.com

While looking around at early Christopher Wool text paintings, I just saw this. Maybe Wool’s collab with Felix Gonzalez-Torres just looms too large, but I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about his collaboration with Richard Prince.

In a 1997 interview quoted on Max Hetzler Gallery’s site, Wool makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world:

That was actually before he’d even made the jokes into paintings. He had just done the written, he would write me on paper. And, he proposed this collaboration. I know I’m really impressed with someone’s work, when I have that feeling, “Oh I wish I had done that.” And with the jokes that was really the case, I thought that was quite an exciting thing to be working on. So he gave me his repertoire and I made a couple of paintings, and that was our collaboration. I ended up doing “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name,” actually I chose the ones that fit into a painting the easiest, because it was really hard for me at the time to figure out how to make them. But they were all about change of identity, so it was kind of great. I titled it “My Name” and I felt like I was Richard Prince for a day. The other one was the psychiatrist one: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said ‘Tell me everything.’ Now he’s doing my act.” I titled that one “My Act”. So it was like I was doing Richard’s act.

I know the feeling.

Better Read #034 – Mike Kelley’s ‘Pay For Your Pleasure’

Mike Kelley, Pay For Your Pleasure, 1988, installation view, The Renaissance Society of Chicago

In 1988 Mike Kelley created Pay For Your Pleasure as one of three works for his show at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

It consisted of a hallway hung with 43 banners by a signpainter, depicting portraits of great men of arts and letters, plus a quote from each about the transgressive nature of creative genius. There was also one self-portrait by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who’d taken up painting in prison, and whose work was, controversially, garnering market and media attention. Sort of the George W. Bush of his day, except Gacy actually went to jail.

David Rimanelli posted this work on his Instagram recently, and it prompted me to revisit Kelley’s installation, and the quotes he assembled. The Renaissance Society’s documentation includes a text that rightly criticizes those in the spectacle-driven culture who turned a murderer into a celebrity artist. [The work mitigated its own centering of a Gacy painting by including donation boxes for victims’ rights organizations, though, if you think about it, that gesture only offloads the scale-balancing to the viewer.] but it seems oddly silent on what I think was Kelley’s most devastating critique, the consistency with which icons of white male-driven culture seek to excuse themselves from moral obligations to anyone but themselves.

The work was acquired by MoCA in Los Angeles in 1989, and hand to heart, the description is, “Oil on Tyvek, wood, an artwork made by a violent criminal in (location of exhibition), and two donation boxes.” Christopher Knight captured the damning site-specificity and guilt-assuaging in 1992. I would pay a hundred dollars to see this work in Dallas or DC with a W painting.

Listen to Better Read #034, the quotes from Mike Kelley’s 1988 installation, Pay For Your Pleasure [mp3, 8:37]

Mike Kelley: Three Projects, 1988 [renaissancesociety.org]
Mike Kelley, Pay For Your Pleasure (1988) [moca.org]

In The Manner of Giorgione

I am low-key transfixed by this painting, and not just because it barely manages to hold it together enough to meet the definition.

Rago is auctioning it on April 29 as part of a 2-day sale of the collection/inventory of Ira Spanierman, whose eponymous gallery was a leader in the field of American Art for decades. In fact, it feels like just yesterday when Doyle held multiple sales of Spanierman Gallery’s inventory–but it was 2012. Anyway I guess there was still more stuff.

Sol LeWitt Fold Piece, 1972

Sol LeWitt, Fold Piece, Sixteen Squares, 1972, 10.5 x 10.5 in., image via Hindman Auctions, where it will be sold May 4 (not April 9 as I first imagined somehow)

Without access to museums or galleries, I notice I have been looking at far more art via auction sites than is typical. I am OK with this.

Especially when it surfaces objects like this, a piece of square paper creased into sixteen smaller squares, by Sol LeWitt. It is signed and dated March 1971 on the front, 1972 on the Max Protetch label on the back, where it is called “Fold Piece” instead of “Folded Paper Piece,” an insignificant difference magnified in our Google-based world.

Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects IRL

AD FO (D1) & (D2), 2021, in their full, experiential glory, indexing the limits of digital image reproduction. Dye sublimation prints on aluminum, dimensions: 23 x 17 cm and 30 x 18.4 cm, ~~available separately or together, for now~~, each with a full-size, handmade certificate of authenticity

Do paintings, like people, have a fabricated online persona, and a different, “real” character offline? Or do paintings, like people, have one real existence, different aspects of which are manifested online and in the real world?

These Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects have been propped, taped, and laid out in front of me for a little more than a week now, and while I expected them to live different than their 500-yo painted counterparts, I am struck by how they also differ from their digital images.

Why Does The National Gallery (Still) Have This Benin Bronze Sculpture?

[October 11, 2022 update: the National Gallery returned this cock to Nigeria today, in a repatriation ceremony conducted along with the Smithsonian and RISD. The Art Newspaper reports that the decision to return this Benin bronze was approved by trustee vote in 2020. Excellent and quietly done, I guess this means nevermind!]

Benin bronzes have been in the news lately, and finally for a good reason: museums are finally starting to acknowledge their culpability in holding the thousands of Benin bronze sculptures and other royal artifacts that all made their way out of Africa the same way: via the British imperial troops’ so-called “punitive expedition” that destroyed the capital of the Kingdom of Benin, in present day Nigeria, in 1897.

Fowl, bronze & cast iron from the Kingdom of Benin, stolen in 1897, currently at the National Gallery

The British Museum and the Metropolitan each have hundreds of objects frankly labeled as the spoils of this massacre. Very unusually, and for absolutely no reason that I can find, the National Gallery of Art has exactly one: this c. 18th century Benin bronze rooster. Every couple of months for the last couple of years I’ve tried to uncover how this object got to the National Gallery, and why an African object would even be accepted, never mind kept, by a museum with no African art–and with almost no art beyond the European and American tradition. All I can figure is that this Benin bronze sculpture doesn’t belong at the National Gallery of Art, even if it weren’t stolen.

Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects

Verso: Heavenly Body, aka Cosmic Phenomenon, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, c. 1494-7, 23 x 17cm, oil on pearwood panel, collection: National Gallery, this low-res image, of the unframed panel, is via casaforte.blogspot.com, but originated on tumblr before 2013. I would really like to know the source, because the National Gallery’s image is cropped, and loses the wax seal in the upper right corner, as well as the general sense of objectness.

There are no more than two paintings by Albrecht Dürer in a public collection in the United Kingdom. One is this swirling, brushy depiction of an explosive, cosmic phenomenon on a small pearwood panel. The other, a meticulous devotional picture of St. Jerome in the wilderness, is on the other side of the same panel. The panel was only attributed to Dürer in 1957, and was acquired by the National Gallery in London in 1996.

Like all England’s museums, the National Gallery has been closed to visitors since December 2020, when a Tier 3 lockdown went into effect to reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. According to current government indicators, museums will remain closed until at least May 17. So assuming it’s really by him, England’s only Dürers will remain inaccessible for at least several more weeks.

While considering whether an Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Object could offer even a partial experiential hedge during this challenging, Dürerless time, another, similar Dürer suddenly became similarly inaccessible.

Albrecht Dürer, painting of a slice of agate, c. 1492, oil on panel, 30.1 x 18.4 cm, collection: kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de

Another small oil, c. 1492, depicts a swirling abstraction of sliced agate or other hardstone, painted with a transparency that permits the grain of the fir panel to show through. On the other side of this panel is another small devotional painting, a gold ground picture of Christ, Man of Sorrows, which was attributed to Dürer a few years before 1941, when the Nazis’ favorite art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt sold it to the Musée des Beaux Arts in occupied Strasbourg. It subsequently crossed the Rhine, and is now at the State Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, which was closed on March 22 when German health officials abruptly declared lockdowns to thwart a “third wave” of the pandemic. The government then changed some restrictions after a backlash, but I think the Kunsthalle is closed until at least April 18.

Verso: a flaming color spectacle? c.1492-3, oil on panel, 37x26cm, collection State Gallery in Karlsruhe, via Google, obv

“If a work is on Google Street View, does it even need a Facsimile Object?” is a question that came to mind. But then I wondered what would happen if these two works were decoupled from the paintings they are physically twinned with, the works they were fated to be “behind,” always understudied and overshadowed by? Facsimile Objects might hit different with this not-quite-a-pair. So let’s see.

Find The Lawrences: USCG Painting Photos @ Swann

It feels like a good time to be looking for lost Jacob Lawrence paintings. The publicity around the Metropolitan Museum’s show of his 1942-43 series The American Struggle has so far helped surface two of the original 30 works. Three more remain unlocated, and one of those is known only by its title.

See those four Jacob Lawrence paintings on the left that aren’t from The Migration Series? Coast Guard paintings. image: MoMA, 1944

Which is still more information than is known about the works Lawrence made next, in 1944-45, while serving as a combat artist for the US Coast Guard. Tallies differ, but Lawrence painted either 17 or 48 paintings in the Coast Guard, and all but three are lost. Images exist of twelve more, including the eight shown at MoMA in 1944. And except for a few mismatched titles, that’s it. Until now.

A group of 14 publicity photos for Lawrence’s 1944 MoMA show is up for sale at Swann Galleries next week in New York, and it includes pictures of four previously unknown Coast Guard paintings. Along with one photo that was first published in 2015, that makes five paintings which don’t appear in the artist’s 2000 catalogue raisonné. According to Swann, it appears none of the five were included in MoMA’s show.