Richard Prince, untitled (Milton Berle), 2021. Inkjet on canvas, 100 × 46 1/4 inches. image: Richard Prince via georgiamuseum.org
The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens just opened, Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything, an exhibition of joke-related works that seems to focus on new work related to the original joke files of the 20th century comedian Milton Berle. [If you’re within six hours of Athens today, Feb. 21, the exhibition’s curator Shawnya Harris is giving a gallery talk at 2:00. So get going.]
Two 4-ft tall four cabinets of Milton Berle’s jokes, sold at Bonham’s in 2013. There were also two short cabinets and six banker’s boxes of “loose joke file material”
Over his eight decades in show business, Berle had collected, organized, and annotated thousands of jokes on 3×5 inch index cards. Prince acquired four file cabinets of Berle’s jokes from an auction in 2013.
In his second deposition, made in 2018 for the [recently settled] lawsuits over Instagram portraits, Prince talked at length about his use of jokes, and transforming something heard into something seen.
Richard Prince, untitled (Milton Berle), 2021. Inkjet on canvas, 118 3/4 × 55 1/4 inches image: Richard Prince via georgiamuseum.org
When I first saw these images, I figured that their elongated, portrait-style dimensions reflected a decade of Prince using an iPhone as a studio. But they also simultaneously read as landscapes, with joke mesas extending to a cropped out horizon, a western desert begging for a cowboy. Then I saw the file cabinets, and realized these images also map to their subject, and the experience of living with these physical objects made over decades from words, ideas and language.
screenshot of David Horvitz’ For Kiyoko (From, Amache), 2017, digital image via PAF
Yesterday, February 19th was the anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered the displacement and imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in remote detention sites around the western US. Artist David Horvitz marked the date on Instagram with a post about his grandparents, who met while incarcerated in Amache, Colorado.
Horvitz showed his photograph of the night sky as seen from Amache in a 2017 Public Art Fund exhibition on LinkNYC pylons. For Kiyoko (From Amache) depicted the same stars his grandmother might have seen, the same stars under which new groups of people in America were being threatened by the new government with kidnapping, detention, and deportation.
Horvitz’ website includes audio of a brief text about the making of this piece. The Public Art Fund’s page has an installation photo of the image in Herald Square, and the way it blends right in to the landscape is kind of unsettling rn.
[And DC]. I just drove so far I ran out of content, so I relistened to the David Zwirner podcast about Benjamin Binstock’s reattribution of several Johannes Vermeer paintings to his daughter Maria Vermeer. In the interim, I’ve also watched Binstock’s address of Lawrence Weschler’s 2013 symposium at the NY IFA to address the authorship theory. Which, also, it rests in large part on creating a chronology of Vermeer’s extant works, something that traditional Vermeer scholars have generally eschewed in favor of more arguable date ranges.
Here, meanwhile, is a timeline Binstock presented in 2013 of Vermeer’s production, to scale, with seven what he calls widely recognized “misfits” outlined in red.
It does seem wild that all the Maria Vermeer Theory paintings are in the US. The Kaplans’ Vermeer, long unknown to scholars and not really even seen until the 21st century, was bought by Steve Wynn at Sotheby’s in 2004, and its Vermeer attribution was only firmed up in the last 15 or so years. So very much in play, just as Maria’s name appeared in the discourse—and was ignored or dismissed.
Mike Kelley, More Tragic! More Plangent!…More Purple!, 1985 (Printed 1996), each 30×24 in. ektacolor on museum board. NGL, this framed grid from Sotheby’s in 2022 looks more accurate to me. This was Ed. 1/5; Elton’s is Ed. 4/5.
I want to find something more to post about these Mike Kelley photos than that he made them in 1985 by jankily rephotographing a Rothko catalogue; he published them in 1996, one of a couple of projects done with Patrick Painter; they were some of the half dozen or so works Elton John bought from Vaknin Schwartz, the once-hot Atlanta gallery down the street from his condo; and they’re one of a thousand other things he’s selling this week at Christie’s.
Gerhard Richter, Grauer Spiegel, 2021, 40×34 cm, pigment on bicoloured glass, ed 100+20AP, image via David Zwirner
Happy belated birthday, Gerhard Richter, who is apparently too busy painting, drawing, and collaging to update his website. The Grauer Spiegel (2021, No. 179, pigment on glass, ed. 100+20AP), included in Richter’s current show at David Zwirner in London is not there. It looks like the pigment is actually on the recto of the glass, a depiction of a mirror, not a mirror itself. But that’s just how it’s photographed. Installed at the Points of Resistance IV: Skills for Peace exhibition at Zionskirche in Berlin in 2022, its mirror nature was on full view.
In May 2023 University of Florida entomologist Akito Kawahara and nearly 90 collaborators published the findings of their massive, eight-year study of butterfly and moth evolution in Nature. greg.org hero Brian Sholis posted a recent article about Kawahara’s research in Smithsonian Magazine. He was inspired by his father, On Kawara:
When Kawahara was 4 years old, his parents noticed that he was scared of insects and would run away from them. To help him overcome this fear, his father started taking him for walks in the parks of suburban Tokyo, looking for insects, talking about insects and carrying a butterfly net. “I still remember the first butterfly I collected,” says Kawahara, his eyes brightening at the memory. “It was near my grandmother’s house. I remember the exact place where the butterfly landed. It was a snout butterfly. I had seen it in books, and now it landed right in front of me. I remember my hands shaking and my dad helping me to catch the butterfly.”
Kawahara still has that specimen in his personal collection in Tokyo, which now numbers between 5,000 and 10,000 and also serves as a remembrance of his father. In his youth, the family divided its time between Tokyo and New York—Kawahara attended schools in both cities—and on weekends, his father would take him on butterfly collecting trips. On Kawara also traveled extensively to create his art and sometimes brought his son along, plus their butterfly equipment. As a boy, Kawahara gathered specimens from Singapore, Hawaii, Alaska, California and all over Japan.
Stickers included in the catalogue for On Kawara: Date Paintings 1981-83…On Sundays, an exhibition at Galerie Watari in Tokyo, via Jonathan A. Hill Booksellers
Kawahara would have been 4 in 1983. The exhibition catalogue for Kawara’s fall 1983 exhibition at Galerie Watari in Tokyo includes a facsimile of his painting journal for the period between 1981-83, and three sheets of date painting stickers, to scale [above], including just five made in June, July, and August 1983.
The One Million Years Foundation, notes bookseller Jonathan A. Hill, no longer recognizes the catalogue as part of the artist’s printed oeuvre. But Kawara’s documentation of date painting production on his 100-year calendar does seem to confirm this number. And so now we see that on the other days of the Summer of 1983, the artist was laying the foundations of a major scientific breakthrough by hunting butterflies with his son.
detail of satellite image of Gaza overlaid with destruction data via The Guardian
The commercial satellite data The Guardian used to document the Israeli destruction of neighborhoods, buildings, and fields in Gaza is almost a month old now.
I haven’t even scrolled down to read the article, but this caption alone is already my favorite thing of the week. I hope Barbara Visser does a documentary on Richard Prince’s Instagram portraits next.
Lot 111: Chris Burden, Prelude to 220, or 110, 1971, 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 in., ed. 1/5, Feb. 21 at LA Modern
In his peak performance twink era, Chris Burden was not only putting his life on the line for his art, he was selling pictures of him doing it. Or trying to, anyway.
Lot 112: Chris Burden, Bed Piece, 1972, 10 1/2 x 13 1/2 in., ed. 2/5, Feb. 21 at LA Modern
In 1974 Burden released iconic documentary photos of three early performances in an edition of five: Prelude to 220, or 110 (1971), in which he was bolted to the floor next to buckets of water with live electric wires in them; Bed Piece (1972), where he stayed in bed in a gallery for three weeks; and 747 (1973), where he shot at an airplane flying overhead. According to Christie’s in 2000, beside the artist proof they were selling, only one other suite of vintage prints was sold.
Lot 110: Chris Burden, 747, 1971, 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 in., ed. 1/5, Feb. 21 at LA Modern
Does that mean except for two sets, the other editions of the prints were sold singly? Or that the rest of the edition wasn’t printed or sold until later? I don’t know.
But it does seem like these four prints at LA Modern were there at the beginning. Three are numbered 1/5, and one (Bed Piece) is 2/5. They were acquired by the same person directly from the artist in 1975. They originally turned up for sale together last summer at suite prices, but didn’t sell. Does that make them a suite or nah? Now they’re being sold separately. It’d be wild if they didn’t stay together, though. Burden collector, you know what you must do.
[day later update: hmm, LA Modern sold both ed. 4/5 ($94k in 2017) and ed. 5/5 ($81k in 2022) which were acquired directly from the artist and, if Christie’s is to be believed, were not vintage, but printed later to complete the edition? So maybe Burden collectors are already doing what they needed to keep the sets together. In 1974 Burden also published Chris Burden 1971-73, an artist book consisting of a binder of 53 8×10 photos and text documenting 23 performance works, in an edition of 50. Oddly, the Met’s copy, acquired in 1993, is catalogued with each of the performances separate.]
It’s like looking in a mirror: Maria? Vermeer Facsimile Object
Technically, it’d still be a Vermeer, then.
On the latest episode of the David Zwirner podcast, Helen Molesworth talks to Claudia Swan and Lawrence Weschler about last year’s Rijksmuseum Vermeer show.
It’s an oddly timed conversation, and one that feels especially absent from the hoopla during the show. Besides the uncritical euphoria of the blockbuster, which is fine, the only substantive scholarly takes I remember coming out were about rediscovering Vermeer’s crypto-Catholicism. So yes, a re-evaluation of Vermeer’s view and depiction of women and public/domestic life—arguably his main subject—would have been welcome.
As would, apparently, any discussion of one of Lawrence Weschler’s ongoing fascinations: the proposal floated by scholar Benjamin Binstock in 2008 that several paintings attributed to Johannes Vermeer were actually the work of his daughter Maria.
Since Binstock’s initial publication, Vermeer scholarship and science has shifted in ways that should accommodate his speculations, but somehow don’t. The biggest change, arguably, is the National Gallery’s reattribution of their Girl with a Flute to a “studio assistant” of Vermeer, even though Vermeer was known not to have any registered students or assistants. The only loophole for not registering an assistant with the painters guild, Binstock notes, is if they are a family member. He calls Girl with a Flute, a self-portrait. And since the NGA’s Girl with a Red Hat is of the same person, and also, unusually, on a panel, not canvas, it’s also a Maria Vermeer.
You can see where this could lead. And yet it doesn’t. Which is the subject of the Zwirner-hosted conversation.
A snail soup wagon of Halazon Tanger, photographed for World of Interiors by Roland Beaufre
OK maybe Hamish Bowles is not going to ruin World of Interiors yet/after all. Marie-France Boyer waxes poetic about the absolutely dripping Mercedes snailmobiles of Tangier, beautifully captured in Roland Beaufre’s photos. Mr. Mohamed Ayoub dreamed for years of such swag worthy of the snail soup he serves at night along the beachfront. Then he got his team together, and now there are three.
So while we’re all now plotting our trips to Tangier, Hamish is in a Condé boardroom getting grilled by Anna about how many Acrylic snail objets by Jonathan Adler he moved last month.
“If you purchase something, we may earn a commission.”
Decoupage what you know: HM Margrethe II of Denmark literally cutting out pictures of diamond jewelry to collage onto a classical portrait
This is a detail of a decoupage panel made by HM Margrethe II, now-former Queen of Denmark. It was the header image of Margrethe II of Denmark, Artist-Queen an exhibition of 60 artworks by the queen at the Musée Henri Martin in Cahors, in southern France. The queen’s late husband Prince Henrik was a French count whose family is from the region—people from Cahors are called Cadurciens—and the royal family owns a chateau and vineyard nearby.
the ignominy of ganking images of royal decoupage from pinterest
The queen has been making art at least since the 1970s, and she is quite active in several mediums, devoting at least one day a week to her practice. She just abdicated her day job, so perhaps she is in the studio even more now.
Margrethe’s art is in the news because a painting she made in 1988, the year she officially began exhibiting, is coming up for auction. This is apparently quite rare, because The Queen doesn’t sell work; sometimes she gives it as gifts. [This painting is being sold by the family of a former courtier.] Her paintings are probably never as interesting as the moment in which they are being made.
HM Margrethe II of Denmark, Juliette and the Sibyls of Verona, decoupage garbage can, n.d., photo: Berit Møller via kongehuset.dk
At least they’re not as interesting as this idea of The Queen using her art objects either as gifts or decorations. The website for the Danish Royal Family has a decent amount of information about her art practice. The decoupage items she makes by gluing images cut out from magazines decorate her palaces, hunting lodges, chateau, and yacht. All the guestrooms at Christian VII’s palace at Amalienborg, for example, “are furnished with a wastepaper basket decorated with The Queen’s découpage.” Decoupage is a very active process which benefits from a sense of composition and industriousness, both of which The Queen seems to have in abundance. The Queen decoupages in the opening credits of De Wilde Svaner, the 2009 film adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen tale for which she created the scenery and costumes.
HM Margrethe II of Denmark, Pillow for the Royal Yacht Dannebrog, 2003, embroidered textile, image: Iben Kaufmann vai kongehuset.dk
The Queen’s embroidery practice is very similar. She designs her own patterns or even stitches freely, without patterns, as she makes personal and household objects and gifts for family members, friends, and privileged subjects. Chairs
In one sense, this personal creative exercise, crafting nicknacks for yourself, your home, and your friends, feels like a carving out of a private space, a practice of respite and normalcy. But it is also very much the opposite: individual, domestic labor so time-intensive it gets stripped of any economic justification, and so falls/is elevated to emotional and relational tokens of interpersonal exchange, deployed by a monarch in service of the preservation and reinforcing of that monarchy’s power. The beloved queen of the people leaving her personal marks across the vast properties and resources at her—and her family’s—disposal, and cultivating networks of loyalty and influence by giving gifts of her time and artistic pursuits. Margrethe II is an artist, and her medium is Queen.
The Maison Margiela Artisanal show was fascinating and felt strong, of a piece, current if not exactly new. If anything, it echoed some of the trashy Belle Epoque collections Galliano did for Dior around 2000, maybe more unsettled, which is fair. Rewatching it on a big screen, a couple of things really jumped out:
The pieces made of stiffened, pleated/ruched silk, I assume, that resemble corrugated cardboard.
The little rover shooting on the far side of the underpass was far less noticeable at first than the interior camera operators.
[The way almost everyone in the audience was recording their own phone videos, OTOH, was inescapable.]
Oh yes, here are four people recording on their ph—WTF that person is wearing a literal bunny outfit. I know it is from the Fall 2022 Artisanal collection, but I do not care; I want to go back to not seeing it please.
Ditto the white beanie, bro. While we are trying to grasp a vision of a future teetering elegantly in front of us, this pickme white headgear keeps snapping us back to the past. Of course, the past is never past, not for culture, not for fashion, and not for Galliano.
Feb. 7, 2024, Lot 608, Society of the Cincinnati set of 12 plates, selling at the Potomack Company
Never imagined I’d be running a conceptual art and dishware blog, but here we are.
The Society of the Cincinnati is a hereditary organization founded in 1783 by Henry Knox so the officers of the American Revolution—and their descendants—could keep in touch. Around 5,500 men in the US and France were deemed eligible to join, and 2,150 joined within the first year. There are 13 affiliated societies in the US, plus one in France. George Washington was invited to be the first president.
Washington disapproved of the hereditary and primogeniture aspect of the Society, and so that section was stricken from the group’s founding articles. It was put back in after Washington’s death in 1799. [Alexander Hamilton was the second president.] Each eligible officer may be represented by one male living descendant at a time.
The Society of the Cincinnati has a giant palazzo on Massachusetts Avenue in Dupont Circle in DC. In 1960, this set of plates handpainted with the crest of the Society was produced by Delano Studios of Setauket, LI, a small porcelain painter which also made such dishes as the commemorative plate for Eisenhower’s 1953 Inauguration, and the Sayville Yacht Club’s 1967 Nationals.
They are now for sale, from the estate of Mrs Mary Lee Bowman of McLean, who passed away in late 2022. Bowman was a renowned hostess and supporter of the Virginia steeplechase, and a seven-time golf champion at the Chevy Chase Club, which inaugurated an annual women’s tournament, the Bowman Cup, in her honor.
In 1960 she married A. Smith Bowman, and moved to his family’s 7,240-acre farm, Sunset Hills, where his family operated what was long Virginia’s only legal whiskey distillery. The farm is now the city of Reston. Bowman was a descendant of Col. Abraham Bowman, who fought in the American Revolution. So maybe the plates were not Society of the Cincinnati swag, but were made as a wedding gift from/to a Society member. Mrs. Bowman is survived by several loving relatives, including her nephew Robert E. Lee, V.
