It’s 4AM, and I can’t go back to sleep because I’m replaying Kate Brown and Annie Armstrong’s conversation about Red Chip Art in my head and screaming at every other word. We’re clearly in a blind people and a painted Banksy elephant situation, so let me add another set of hands.
Armstrong and artnet can have full credit/blame for the term. But if it’s going to be a thing that we have to reorder our discourse around now, like Zombie Abstraction and the Cursed Vibe, let’s at least acknowledge the bleak reality: Red Chip Art is bigger, older, uglier, and more problematic than the Cybertruck it’s parading in on. And the forces that propel it are more entrenched in the so-called art world than many people want to admit.
Theo van Doesburg, Composition VIII (The Cow), 1918, oil on canvas, 37.5 x 63.5 cm, via MoMA
For a 20th century art history class once, I had to make a version of a work in the style of another work, so I decided to remake Guernica in de Stijl. I’d been inspired by Theo van Doesburg’s 1918 painting, Composition VIII (The Cow), which teetered on the edge of recognizable representation and de Stijl-ian abstraction, but tbh, I got the idea for Guernica because my textbook only had a black & white image of the cow, so van Doesburg’s color was completely lost to me.
Piet Mondrian, Vaces sur le pré, c. 1905, oil on canvas on board, 31 x 39 cm, via Christie’s Paris
None of this matters at all, but I suddenly thought of van Doesburg’s cow because I just saw this sick, little Mondrian painting of cows, which is coming up for sale in Paris in the morning.
groene koeien: Piet Mondrian green cows, detail, via Christie’s Paris
And just look at those cows. I haven’t seen a cow that green since the van Doesburg on my first trip to MoMA. That one on the left is as green as it is white. But even more than that, just look at those brushstrokes that make up those cows. Mondrian stood at the threshold of an entirely other abstraction in 1905. What would have happened if he’d gone that way instead?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.]
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
![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](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/durer-ecce-homo-verso-google-streetview-1024x717.jpg)
