greg.org – Page 8 – the making of, by greg allen

REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE.

An eBay seller’s image of ZG 81 No. 2, Future Dread

The theme of the second issue published in 1981 of Rosetta Brooks’ edgy British art & culture tabloid ZG, was “Future Dread.” Dan Graham wrote about the fascistic and authoritarian aspects of the spectacular media favored by artists of the Pictures Generation in an essay titled, “The End of Liberalism.” At the top of Jean Fisher’s profile of Jenny Holzer titled, “The Will to Act,” was a disclosure: that an uncredited text published as an advertisement in ZG‘s previous issue was “not, as some seem to have believed, a proclamation of an ultra-right or ultra-left organization, but was a text piece” of Holzer’s. [From her series, Inflammatory Essays (1979–82).]

This reveal was revealed to me by Alexander Bigman’s Pictures of the Past: Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art (2024, really, bookshop.org? backordered?) [where he cites ZG 3 & 4; I think they started over each year, and 1980 had two issues. While zine scholars sort that out, I’ll follow the cover and say it was 81-1, “Image Culture” and 81-2.] Anyway, Bigman’s citation also gives only the first and last lines of Holzer’s anonymous text: “REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE…ONLY DIRE CIRCUMSTANCE CAN PRECIPITATE THE OVERTHROW OF OPPRESSORS” and “THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM.” And reader, if it was just that I found Holzer’s essay, this post could’ve been a skeet.

But I found the Holzer on Lorde’s back.

Cy Twombly Post-It Notes

a tight photograph of two pale yellow post-it notes on the edge of a white painted bookshelf, with a somewhat unruly stack of papers, and a curled open book or magazine in two stacks. there is a third post-it note cropped out to the left, illegible. the rectangular post-ot reads the soul we once had, in sprawling, loose, and not especially straight writing with a black pen. the right post-it is square, with the word remanence written twice in all caps, once above a bisecting line, where it kind of gets cramped toward the end, and once below it.
tacita dean photographed these post-it notes in the library slash bedroom of cy twombly in gaeta italy, in 2008. they were published in a cataloge in vienna in 2009 at mumok. — Tacita Dean, Gaeta, 2008, originally published in *Cy Twombly: States of Mind*, MUMOK 2009

Just thinking about Cy Twombly’s Post-it Notes this morning.

When Tacita Dean made her 2008 Gaeta photos from an exhibition catalogue essay into a gallery installation (2015), she printed this picture on one of the last giant sheets of Cibachrome paper. GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one, filled the south gallery of Dean’s Spring 2016 show at Marian Goodman Gallery.

a white gallery wall covered with a freely hung array of photographs by tacita dean, printed on various endangered photochemical papers, and mounted and framed in a variety of ways, all photos were taken in 2008 at cy twombly's house in gaeta, and picture closely observed details like books, post-it notes, the landscape of a tabletop, etc. as installed at marian goodman gallery in 2016. — Tacita Dean, *GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one* (detail), 2015, installation view from Marian Goodman Gallery, 2016

It’s also in the upper corner of the installation at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh, her show at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome in 2021-22.

a curved temporary wall sits toward the back of a seemingly low ceilinged exhibition space, sandwiched between concrete slab floors and a concrete beamed ceiling. the wall is filled with tacita dean photos of cy twombly's house in gaeta, printed in various sizes and formats, large and small, black and white, and in color, on a variety of endagered chemical photo papers. from the fondazione nicola del roscio, in 2021 — installation view of *Gaeta* (2015) at *Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh* at Fond. Nicola Del Roscio in 2021-22

The Art of Spectacle Is Long But It Bends Toward Fascism

a 1980s style thermal computer image is mostly dark blue and black, with an asymmetrical flare of red/orange/yellow in the center. thin skittles-green lines along the left and right edge confirm that this is not a digital image, but a painting of a digital image, 8 by 9 feet, and six inches thick, by jack goldstein, and it is for sale in april 2025 at phillips london, after having been flipped in october 2022 at lyon & trumbull. — Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1988, 84 x 96 x 6 fat inches of hi-viz green stretcher bar, for sale at Phillips 4/10

At this point Jack Goldstein paintings should come with a trigger warning.

Seeing this 1988 painting at Phillips reminded me of Michael Connor’s 2013 Rhizome interview with Lorne Lanning, who’d been Goldstein’s assistant during this era. Goldstein was deeply interested in painting spectacular images like the computers that generated them, and Lanning, then just 20, figured out how. It involved mind-blowing amounts of pre-mixing, taping, and airbrushing, building up the painted surface into a topographical relief map of color layers.

Johns Cicada On The Loose

With so much to worry about and so much to do about it These Days, sometimes you gotta just let some other things slide. Like until we get the rule of law back, and the government can’t just grab you off the street and yeet you to a jungle gulag with no recourse or due process, I’m gonna stop getting annoyed by people breaking up print portfolios and selling them for parts. Especially fundraising portfolios, which are sort of a grab bag to begin with.

a jasper johns cross hatch lithograph titled cicada is dominated by red, as several of the stones usually used for multiple overlapping colors were, in this case, used to print only shades of red. it's sick as hell tho, and the best print in a portfolio of eight snoozers, made in 1981 as a fundraiser for johns' foundation for contemporary performing arts. this copy is being sold without the rest of the portfolio at bonhams in april 2025 — Jasper Johns, *Cicada*, 1981, lithograph, 35 x 26 in. sheet, ed. 41/50+11AP is at Bonhams LA tomorrow, 4/8

Besides, this Jasper Johns lithograph, Cicada, is absolutely the best work in the Eight Lithographs to Benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc. portfolio. I mean, the other fellas’ prints are nice, but this is the one that pops out.

Obviously it’s the red. Johns made a whole series of Cicada screenprints in 1979-81, in eight different color variations, starting with the crosshatch classic, red/yellow/blue. And in 1981, he also made two larger lithograph Cicada prints. All somehow have identical crosshatch patterning, with different text format along the bottom edge. In addition to the red on the red stone, I think the FCA portfolio Cicada swaps in red for the black crosshatches that give the print its structure. The result: a lot of red. I like it.

8 Apr 2025, Lot 131, Jasper Johns, Cicada, 1981, est. $25-35,000 [update: unsold] [bonhams]

Riding Rail with Danez Smith & Jack Whitten

Just looking at the upcoming conversations in the Brooklyn Rail’s The New Social Environment series, and they are, as usual full of bangers. Me, I just booked into poet Danez Smith talking about their new book, Bluff, with Mananda Chaffa on Wednesday and a full-on roundtable on Jack Whitten with MoMA curator Michelle Kuo and assembled luminaries on Monday.

See the whole schedule and sign up for free. [brooklynrail.org]

I’m Not Afraid Of Correcting Mistakes

a dark, low-ceilinged gallery space with multiple rows of white steel columns cutting through it and a high gloss floor has at least five lightbox transparency artworks by donald moffett of photos overlaid with text on the left and back wall, but only the back wall is unobstructed enough to make out the content. and it is a white nude guy laying down who appears to be masturbating, with a blue background and a line of illegible white text. in the center foreground, spotlit from above, is a two foot high stack of red posters, which turned out to be a collaborative artwork between moffett and felix gonzalez-torres, which the latter later disavowed. moffett kept his text from the poster, though, which came from an earlier lightbox work. via the university of british columbia fine art gallery, found at the felix gonzalez torres foundation — installation view of Strange Ways: Here we come, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Donald Moffett, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Fine Art Gallery in November 1990, image via FG-T Fndn

Maybe it’s the passage of time, the advancement of discourse, the writing and thinking about it for so long, the engagement with the work and history of an artist who wrote so emphatically, that he’d always believed artists were allowed “to do whatever they please with their work.” Or maybe it’s the moment, when something I’ve seen and written about before looks different. And when something I’ve read a dozen times before finally sinks in, maybe because now I’ve had that same experience.

“I’m not afraid of making mistakes, I’m afraid of keeping them,” Felix Gonzalez Torres told Tim Rollins in 1993.

Andrea Rosen put that quote in context in her CR essay [pdf], and how Felix’s decision to not have a studio meant the first time he’d see a work realized was when he installed it in a gallery: “Putting the work in public immediately allowed him the opportunity to sense if he felt confident about his decisions. From time to time Felix would decide that he did not feel strongly enough about a piece to have it remain a work, even if it had already been exhibited.”

“Untitled” (The Neverending Self-Portrait)

a single line of pale silver painted text runs along the top of the wall at the national portrait gallery, picked out by a carefully aligned row of accent lighting. in the right corner a single swag of a lightstring arcs out of frame. felix gonzalez-torres' 1989 self-portrait, "untitled", in one of two simultaneous installations in the exhibit hilariously and falsely criticized for queer erasure — *“Untitled”* (1989), paint on wall, with exceptional accent lighting, at the National Portrait Gallery

We were in the neighborhood, and so we went back to see the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Which was the first time we spent time with “Untitled” (1989), a portrait work which appears twice, in two different configurations, in two different spots of the exhibition. [Technically, it’s in three spots: the work is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it’s been on view since December 2023.]

In the show it felt impossible to do more than sense the differences between the two installations. It seemed that, in the absence of a subject named in parentheses, this was a portrait of the artist himself, but the variety of posthumous additions made it non-obvious. So we left with questions: How was this portrait adapted for this dual/triple version? Besides the title, how [else] was it different from the others? If it was indeed a self-portrait, how did this portrait practice come to be?

Helpfully, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation collects documentation of each version as it is installed. As the first portrait [sic] that was, indeed, a self-portrait, which was in Andrea Rosen’s collection [The AIC got it in 2002], “Untitled” (1989) may be one of the most frequently exhibited; the documentation for [at least] 42 versions runs to 17 pages [pdf].

Twombly Cinematic Universe

this sally mann photo of cy twombly's studio is from 2011, probably. a densely calligraphed white on deep blue painting sits in a thick, old carved giltwood frame on a dark easel, next to a work table cluttered with mail, books, posters, acrylic paint jars, and a five-tiered square wedding cake of a twombly sculpture made out of white boxes with what looks like a caketopper-like figure in a chair, but is probably a blob of plaster-soaked rag. on one of the plinths of the sculpture rests a black an dwhite polaroid photo. two thin stalk-like sculpture elemtns rise behind the table, and the whole scene is blown out and backlit by the light coming through the thin accordion style blinds in the background. sally mann is a professional photographer so this is an artistic choice. it's not like she was going to tell twombly to relight or restage his studio. we're lucky to have this — Sally Mann photo of Cy Twombly’s Lexington Studio from *Remembered Light*

Looked through Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, Sally Mann’s 2016 book of photos of Twombly’s places, for the first time the other day, and saw this. A perfect little painting in a fat, baroque giltwood frame in his cluttered storefront studio.

But this is not just any perfect painting. [I don’t actually know what painting it is, tbh.] I just know it was a major plot [sic] in Tacita Dean’s 2011 film, Edwin Parker.

a 12yo detail of a screenshot from tacita dean's 2011 film edwin parker is the interior of twombly's cluttered studio, where twombly, his back to the camera and wearing a camel colored corduroy jacket, is standing in front of a red green orange and black swagged painting which he's trying to reset in an old, carved giltwood frame sitting on an easel. A white guy in workwear and a baseball hat, twombly's driver and local assistant in lexington virginia whose name is literally butch, like, butch is his name, is standing to the left, not quite helping, but trying to be ready to help with some tape or whatever. a yellow measuring stick has been inserted behind the painting to wedge it into the frame, by nicola del roscio, twombly's companion or whatever, who understood that on the easel, there was nothing holding the painting in place.

Maybe plot is a little strong. In her quiet, attentive film Dean doesn’t follow Twombly around so much as just be where he is, and observe. And for most of the film, he’s in this little studio. The first action or narrative drama, such as it is, involves a painting that has fallen out of this picture frame, and Twombly tries to fix it. The two men with him—first, Butch, his local assistant, and then Nicola Del Roscio—alternately hover and jump in to help with tape and a tape measure.

a screenshot from tacita dean's 2011 film edwin parker which shows twombly's storefront studio after the three men have gone outside, on their way to lunch. the jury-rigged painting with the tape measure sticking out is in the center right middle ground. the clutter of a table, with books and boxes and bags and the tiny head of a porcelain frog from a yard sale are out of focus in the lower foreground. a couple of white painted sculptures or sculptures in progress stick up like lone buildings in this messy skyline. the pleated accordion shades probably bought at walmart are down, the light is better than sally mann's photo, at least stereotypically better. — detail of a screenshot from Tacita Dean’s *Edwin Parker*, 2011

When I had a review copy of Edwin Parker like ten years ago, I got kind of fixated on this painting, wondering what it was, where it was, and taking grainy screencaps so that I could track it down.

When the Hirshhorn was wrapped in his giant curtained scrim, the swag and slightly lurid colors made me worry Twombly’s painting was by Nicholas Party. When I was making Facsimile Objects about inaccessible Dürers in German museums, I wondered if it was the freely painted verso of something more mundane.

a google streetview screenshot of the back of a durer painting in the state museum in karlsruhe, germany, which is mounted on a white pedestal in a black and gold edged frame. the back of the painted panel is swirling red green pink blue, pale yellow, interpreted as a slice of agate, and I forget what's on the front. some devotional image of jesus [love him, don't get me wrong, but not the point rn] the gallery floor dominates the image; it is strip wood. the walls are pale grey with a dark grey stone baseboard. google streetview cruft and ui elements abound obv — gsv of a Dürer in Karlsruhe, via

Later in the film, Del Roscio is holding the blue & white painting up top, flipping it around, as Twombly says it’ll fit in the frame. It looks like it’s related to the series of paintings Twombly made for the Louvre in 2008, as part of his ceiling deal.

a woman in a black hijab walks with her phone outstretched, presumably filming or photographing as she walk along a series of cy twombly paintings on the white wall of the louvre abu dhabi. the paintings are vertical, larger than human scale, in deep dark blue with loose, thick gestural calligraphic loops and rows of marks in white. the nine paintings were bought by the louvre for the louvre abu dhabi, and then the louvre in paris had twombly make a blue ceiling mural for them. the image originally comes from cnn — installation view of Cy Twombly’s *Untitled I–IX*, 2008, at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, screenshot via CNN

So the plot, such as it is, involves the swapping out of one painting for another. Technically, this climax does not happen in Edwin Parker; Del Roscio is only shown setting the little painting carefully against the wall.

Whether that makes Mann’s photo a spoiler, a sequel, or just a post-credits teaser, I cannot say. All I know is now I have two little paintings to track down.

Cy Twombly Worked-On Paper

a screenshot of a photo of a clear plastic box filled with tiny balls of rolled up paper, sitting on its lid in a featureless ground, a 1953 sculpture by cy twombly, as published in katie nesin's 2014 book, cy twombly's things, the original photo taken by nicola del roscio himself, amazingly, for the cy twombly foundation — Twombly, Get me some tissue: Cy Twombly, *Untitled*, 1953, paper balls in plastic box, tape, 1 7/8 x 3 1/4 x 2 5/8 in., as published in Katie Nesin’s *Cy Twombly’s Things* (2014, Yale Univ. Press), photo: Nicola Del Roscio himself [!]

A lot of Twombly tabs open, as is the custom. After watching Art Institute curator Katie Nesin’s lecture about it, I checked out her 2014 book, Cy Twombly’s Things, an art historical close read of the artist’s sculptures.

Nesin examines at great length Twombly’s practice of painting his sculptures. It’s something Twombly referenced in one of his few artist statements, and which curators addressed, too. I know what they all mean, I really do, and so do you, but it is really hard to read statements coming straight outta Lexington like, “The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear). Whiteness can be the classic sttae of the intellect, or a neo-romantic idea of remembrance—or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé. The exact implication may never be analyzed, but in that it persists as the landscape of my actions, it must imply more than mere selection.” And Kirk Varnedoe talking about “the increasing self-consciousness of his commitment to white,” and Nesin concluding “it is white’s susceptibility to contamination that remains the point,” in 2025 and think it all stays neatly contained in the art box.

Anywho, that’s a dissertation for another day. I mention it because Nesin traces the development of Twombly’s practice of painting his sculptures white with a picture of one of the few, early sculptures he didn’t paint white. Untitled (1953) is white on the inside. It’s a tiny plastic box filled with little rolled up balls of paper. Nesin argues that it’s also “derivative” because its size and nature refer to the scatole personali, the little fetish boxes, objects, and constructions Robert Rauschenberg showed in their two-person show in Florence in mid-March. [In a sharp detour from whiteness, Twombly showed geometric tapestries he constructed from textiles he bought in Tangier.] Which, yes, I see the connection.

robert rauschenberg's 1953 work Untitled Paper Painting was an 18 x 14 x 4 inch glass display case with a thin beveled wood base, filled with crumpled tissue paper that cy twombly said came from shoe boxes, sitting on a rough wood floor against a black background. the photo is from the rauschenberg foundation, the sculpture is lost or destroyed. perhaps by twombly tearing it up into little balls and putting it in his own box, who knows — Robert Rauschenberg, *Untitled (paper painting)*, 1953, 18x14x4 in., shoe box tissue paper, glass, wood base. lost or destroyed, or maybe rolled up into little balls in Twombly’s pocket

But there is a closer reference in 1953. In the then-couple’s Fulton Street studio, Robert Rauschenberg filled a glass case with tissue paper from shoe boxes and called it a paper painting. Did Twombly take some of Rauschenberg’s tissues and make them into balls he could keep in his pants? Did they make their his & his tissue boxes together? Whose personal fetish are we talking about, actually? While it’s impossible to say for sure who came first, it does seem likely these two came together.

Etel Adnan’s Language of Painting

a small etel adnan gouache painting of a dark red sphere, shaded in darker red and black along the lower and right edge to give it volume, in an unevenly watery square of light greens, in the center of an otherwise blank sheet of 10.5 by 14 inch paper, dated from the 1960s and signed Adnan in the lower left corner, it on view at galerie lelong in nyc until april 5, 2025 — Etel Adnan, Untitled (c. 1960s), Ink and gouache on paper. 10 ⅝ x 14 in., via Galerie Lelong

First things first, Galerie Lelong’s exhibition of Etel Adnan’s works on paper is on view for two more days, so get going.

I’ve been listening to Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s interview about Adnan on Bulaq, the podcast of Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey (ArabLit editor), and right around 24:00 Wilson-Goldie turns the question back to her book-centric hosts, to ask what they think the complicatedly multilingual Adnan meant by her statement that she “painted in Arabic.”

I would love to know more of the context in which she first said that. Wilson-Goldie, Lindsey, and Qualey talk about Adnan’s shifts from writing in French to English as her perspective and contact with French and US colonialism changed. But also how her return to Lebanon in the 1970s included a mutual embrace with the new Arabic poetry communities of the day.

I can absolutely see the appeal of a painting language that did not carry with it the political baggage, while also making an affirmative assertion of solidarity. Or maybe that characterizing painting as a language separate from the ones she used for writing helped justify it, or at least made it make sense within/alongside her multi-faceted, text-based practice. Or maybe it just gave her the psychological and linguistic space she needed for a personal expression. I’m trying to think of many novelist/poets who were also recognized for their painting, but ngl, my head is not primed for unfettered rumination on poetry today [noon]. Wonder why.

In any case, I feel like I have to rethink my understanding of Adnan’s work a bit precisely because I’d always read it—or seen it presented— as being an Arabic-inflected modernism being subsumed into the larger modernist project. And I have to consider that that could be just how it looks from my perspective in the distended belly of that empire.

[listened to the end of the podcast update: OK, so Adnan had various complex takes on what it meant, and why she did not, in fact, learn Arabic. And I wonder what it means that this was the language she analogized to her painting.]

Etel Adnan on Paper: 1961-2021 runs through Apr 5, 2025 [galerielelong]
Bulaq | Etel Adnan: ‘I write what I see, paint what I am’ [sowt/bulaq]
Whoops, missed Etel Adnan centenary show at White Cube [whitecube]
ArtSeen | Ann McCoy on Etel Adnan [brooklynrail]

Heading To Bassano, Wish You Were Here

The startlingly beautiful hues of a tropical Florida Sunset are depicted here in all their splendor and completeness that Cy Twombly didn’t need to add anything, not even his signature, via Maison d’Art

It’s the little differences. Where Marcel Duchamp’s letters to his collector friend Katherine Dreier are all, “shipping is $34, please send me $34,” Cy Twombly’s letters to his collector friend Reiner Speck are like, “we await you in the summer castle.” I have read the Twombly correspondence with noted urologist and Proust expert Herr Dr. Reiner Speck in the catalogue for Maison d’Art’s current exhibition, and here’s the expanded tl;dr:

Ellsworth & Kelly & Lorenzetti & Kubrick

tiger is a 1953 painting in five panels by ellsworth kelly, that forms a large square. the top quarter of the painting comprises three panels, yellow, pink and orange. the bottom 3/4 is two panels, white and black. A demarcation line at about 60% of the width of the work leaves the yellow and white panels to be the widest. this painting is in the collection of the national gallery of art, and has not been exhibited since 2023, when it disappeared midway through the kelly exhibition at glenstone. have any news? hmu — Have you seen me? Ellsworth Kelly, *Tiger*, 1953, oil on five canvases, collection, NGA

I was listening to a recording of Ellsworth Kelly’s 1999 Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and I have some questions. Some could probably be answered by a video of the lecture—more of a conversation, with curator Marla Prather—or with a review of Kelly literature I don’t have.

A Use Of Opulence Comes As Some Surprise

a jenny holzer bench from 2015 engraved with a truism, "the most profound things are inexpressible" in blue sodalite, which is intense blue with white and grey flakes and graining, really ostentatious, via glenstone — Blue sodalite in the Glenstone exhibition guide

I was not prepared to be taken out a Jenny Holzer exhibition, especially since her most recent show at the Guggenheim seemed so lost. But that was then and there, and this is here—in DC, at Glenstone—and now—in the midst of a fascist crime spree by and against the government.

a jenny holzer bench from 2019 engraved with a truism, "all things are delicately interconnected," in bvlgari blue marble, which is mostly blue and white grained in this photo, image via glenstone — from the Glenstone extended exhibition guide

It was not the merch in the tiny book nook. It was not the entire gallery of redaction paintings—enlarged, oil-on-linen facsimiles of damning documents of the torture and atrocities of Bush’s Iraq war—though I really do wish this country would not give Holzer quite so much content to work with. Turns out abuse of power comes as no surprise because it happens over and over and over.

a jenny holzer bench from 2023 engraved with a truism, "in a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy," in blue boquira quartzite, which is blue and grey grained, image via glenstone — from the Glenstone exhibition guide

It was the next gallery of the private museum sanctuary, with the large window onto an artfully crafted vista, where Holzer crashed a tsunami of opulence over my unsuspecting head. It was all benches and paintings, not an LED ticker or a bumper sticker in sight. The benches in Blue sodalite. Bulgari Blue marble. Blue Boquira quartzite. Persian travertine and Silver Wave marble. Paintings large and small, single and in rows, cinnabar and lacquer finishes covered in copper and gold leaf, glowing in the morning sun. The extravagance of Holzer’s materials was so relentless, it was wretched. The polish, the weight, the preciousness, the hand, the logistics, the overpowering beauty impossible to ignore.

seven gold leaf covered red paintings by jenny holzer, illegible at this distance or resolution, via guggenheim — Jenny Holzer, stake in the heart, 2024, gold leaf and oil on linen, each 3.5 x 2.5 ft, image via guggenheim

David Hammons Lights

a 1933 px wide screencap of an artforum jpg of a david hammons installation is all black, with a blurry lens flare of blue, with a center of white light, from a single blue flashlight of the sort hammons distributed to guests in a little basket at the gallery entrance. via ursula, the art magazine named after the mother/mother-in-law whose pharmaceutical fortune has underwritten the hauser & wirth gallery empire, a fitting tribute — Wait, Ursula made a screenshot of the installation image from the 2002 Artforum critics’ picks of David Hammons’ *Concerto in Black and Blue* instead of right-click-saving it? Now I feel like I’m betraying history by renaming the file.

How has there not been more Concerto in Black and Blue content floating around? Do people not go to Hauser & Wirth LA anymore? Is the glow of people recording themselves on their phones ruining it? David Hammons has restaged his epic 2002-3 work in LA. It’s on til ~~June~~ MAY 25. So grab a little flashlight and become the artwork.

a circal 2002 jpg, 400 x 301 pixels wide, of david hammons' concerto in black and blue, is a field of all black, with a single slightly refracted burst of blue light on the left edge, caused by one tiny blue flashlight of the kind handed out to gallery visitors. via artforum — oh wait, the original Artforum img is actually beautiful. 2012/12/picksimg_large-6.jpg, 400×301 px. I must make this a work.

Meanwhile, Ursula has a great essay by legendary filmmaker, gallerist and Hammons whisperer Linda Goode Bryant, who filmed the opening night of Concerto in Black and Blue at the vast NYC outpost of Ace Gallery:

He allowed me to be inside for the opening, to make a short film of what happened inside. And what people didn’t know is that David was actually in there himself that night. I only knew where he was because I had a microphone on him. But he was otherwise totally invisible, moving around among everyone else, watching what they did and what they made, present and at the same time absent.

LGB talks incisively about walking and seeing with the artist, and getting hints of how he sees and works. It confirms my theory/suspicion/last-ditch hope that we are in fact living in David Hammons’ world, and often just don’t realize it.

[MAY 2025 UPDATE?? IT REALLY TAKES UNTIL MAY?] Nereya Otieno’s review of Concerto in Black and Blue explains the online silence and invisibility of Hammons’ extraordinary show: You have to bag your phone to enter. She did manage to get installation shots, though. And in some places Hauser still says it runs through June 1, and others say May 25, so don’t get stuck missing it.

a screencap of a 2019 corey vs corey youtube video documenting a visit to the david hammons exhibition in la, where a floor lamp with a sothebys shopping bag for a lampshade stands in an otherwise empty corner of the vast gallery. youtube ux cruft and the cvc art tv watermark along the bottom of the img — Hammons Sotheby’s Bag Lamp coreyvscorey-screencap

Meanwhile, the book finally documenting Hammons’ sprawling 2019 show at H&W LA is out now, not in May, which means the lamp with the Flavin X Sotheby’s shopping bag lampshade I had to scavenge screenshots in the backgrounds of peoples’ youtube videos like a dog to see is now beautifully photographed on its own.

a spread from david hammons' 2025 book about his 2019 show at hauser & wirth LA as two installation photos: on the left, a thin, mid-20th century brass floorlamp stands in the corner of a white cube gallery, plugged into the wall. its traditional lampshade has been replaced by an upside down shopping bag with a dan flavin light grid on one side, the kind that would hold an auction catalogue, or a gift bag. on the right, a french antique style red upholstered fauteuil with the front legs cut off sits on its side underneath five large, vertical framed photos of white people sitting in the chair outdoors, in a parklike setting, using their own legs to complete it. from the hauser and wirth shop

A Walker in The City | Linda Goode Bryant [hauserwirth/ursula]
David Hammons, Concerto In Black And Blue, 18 Feb – ~~1 June~~ 25 May 2025 [hauserwirth la]

untitled_picksimg_large-6.jpg, 2025 [greg.org]
Previously, related: Untitled (unnamed.jpg), 2019
Previously, related jpg constraint, alternate naming convention: Untitled (300 x 404); Untitled (290 x 404)

Ellsworth Kelly Extra Small

a tiny ellsworth kelly print, red curve, has a red curve from the top left corner to about 40% of the way down the right edge. The bottom edge of the red shape is straight from the lower right corner up to about the middle of the left side. no print border, it goes right to the edges. love it. now. but didn't love it enough to buy it back in the day, alas. live and learn. — Ellsworth Kelly, Red Curve, 2006, lithograph, 12 x 6 3/4 in., ed. 100, plus 20 ap and 18 sp, this one via Bonham’s

While poking around the Gemini G.E.L. CR, I was surprised to find that River II (2005), one of Ellsworth Kelly’s superlong prints, was also his second to last print made with Gemini.

I’ll have to check the Kelly prints catalogue raisonné for details—the second edition was published in 2012, but Kelly sure seemed booked and busy right up to the end in 2015.

It’s also a surprise because the last print he made with Gemini was maybe his smallest ever. Red Curve (2006) is a single color lithograph, cropped so the shape goes right to the edges and the corners of the 12 x 6 3/4 inch sheet.

Red Curve was published for Kelly’s show at the Serpentine Gallery, a cheap, unframed edition of 100. I feel like it was easily under GBP1000, and at the time, it didn’t even seem real somehow. Now it is fascinating and formally intriguing, especially after the other full-bleed prints he’d just made, that resonate between print and object. Also it’s utterly adorable.

the glass walled entrance to joni weyl's gallery has ellsworth kelly painted in small all caps near the door handle. three of the smallest prints kelly made for gemini gel hang on the walls, and a fourth larger print is on the wall through the doorway. from left, red curve, blue thumb or whatever, and blue gray green red, four abutting blocks, are in simple white or natural frames. i swear, did they put the most stealable works in the entry just to tempt me?

[OK, close to the smallest but not the last: Blue Gray Green Red (2008) was part of the Gemini-organized Artists for Obama portfolio. Here they both are installed at Joni Weyl in 2019.]

later this afternoon update: I went through the CR, published in 2012, but it does end in 2008. I feel like if there were more prints coming, they could have fit them in. So what seems like the last last print for Kelly was a large (48 x 130 in.) version of Blue Gray Green Red. He went big, then he went home.

an ellsworth kelly print titled red curve in the shape of a guillotine blade, in a white matted natural frame, 10 x 7.5 inches, made for parkett and sold at rago in 2021 — Ellsworth Kelly, *Red Curve (for Parkett 56)*, 1999, 10 x 7 1/2 in., lithograph, ed. 70, this one sold by
Rago in 2021

The only smaller edition, though, might be Red Curve (1999), which he made for Parkett, which is 10 x 7 in. And for the 1973 Works By Artists in The New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio, Kelly made an untitled black on white screenprint that is 12 x 9 in. And while there are a couple of similarly sized Concorde etchings in the early 1980s, they’re on traditional, larger sheets.]

Rather than delve into why Kelly stopped, or what the very last prints mean, Richard Axsom, the prints CR editor, looked at what was there: a complete, ambitious, and exceptional project, and said, “River is a great summa to Kelly’s prints.”