Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021
Coming Soon
For folks looking for less disturbing McDonald’s-related pictures at the moment, somehow Joel Meyerowitz, of all photographers, is here to oblige. [via @mlobelart.bsky.social]
Gonzalez-Torres Candy Porch, 2024
Ten days out, our neighbors have already put a bowl of candy on a table next to their front door. I am baffled. But as leaving piles of candy for the taking season approaches, I was hit by the idea of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy pour for Halloween. A Sturtevant show just opened in Paris, so I feel good about putting this out there while you people with porches still have time to shop for 175 ideal pounds of candy.
Sturtevant Zip Zap! 12 Oct – 21 Dec 2024 at Thaddeus Ropac [ropac.net]
Previously, related: How Does Sturtevant’s Candy Pour Work?
Look At This Scooter/Bench in Frank Gehry’s House
Via some content artnet was putting into an architecture vertical, I came across some content Frank was putting out in 2019 to boost the Gehry brand via a collab with his son Sam. It was a house in Santa Monica that started as a spec house, but which became an age-in-place reboot of Gehry’s own house.
Which is all fine, I’m just setting the context for why I’m only seeing this 5-yo Architectural Digest photo now. Ignore the Kermit green Steinway [or file it away for an obscene trend piece; it’s a thank you gift from Michael Eisner, for the pavilion Gehry made him in Aspen], and focus in on that scooter/bench.
It’s so sick it makes me want to restart my dadblog.
I can find no mention of it. I’d have guessed it was an offcut, but the dimensions look bigger than the fir beams in the house itself. Was it a sample? How did this come to be?
The closest analog I can find in Gehry’s oeuvre is just down the street in Venice, but ages ago: the giant wood block & roller skate legs on a modular conference table made for the fish room at Chiat/Day’s temporary warehouse/office in 1986. NGL, it feels like a stretch.
Step Inside Architect Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica Dream House [arch digest]
Just What Is It That Makes Today’s A Guide To Modern Camp Homes So Different, So Appealing?
The whole thing was unexpected, tbqh, but one of the surprise bonuses of the Rabkin Foundation writers award situation was meeting artist/photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki when he came to make my portrait. I asked him to bring a copy of his 2013-and-counting artist book, A Guide to Modern Camp Homes.
Modeled after Sears brochures for selling kit homes, Miyazaki’s Guide combines quotes from official notices and chirpy marketing with bright archival photos and renderings, as if racially segregated detention camps in the desert were the next step in the American Dream:
Customize Your Home
Your new home is unfurnished, aside from your bed frames, mattresses, and stove. You may wish to customize it with room partitions made from hanging sheets, and optional handmade items such as chairs, tables, shelves and window curtains. At some centers, large piles of discarded, green wood may remain from the home building process…
Where Sears would have run blurbs from satisfied customers, Miyazaki quotes the testimonies of former detainees, firsthand accounts of the sort gathered by Densho. In 2013 when he first conceived the Guide, I imagine the juxtaposition of deadpan form and horrible content was meant to foster a meaningful reflection on the wrongs that had been perpetrated by the US government against its own citizens.
The next dates on the Guide, though, are 2017 and 2024, when Muslim bans; refugee children imprisoned and separated from their families; genocide; and campaign promises of industrial-scale detentions and deportations were back. And the guy behind it all just compared the jail sentences of the rioters convicted in the 2021 coup attempt to the WWII detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans.
And so now Miyazaki’s Guide functions, not as a gentle appreciation of the experience of the artist’s family and the Japanese American community, but as evidence in itself. That even just a few years ago, we held the truths of the deep, unjust, racist, violations of peoples’ fundamental rights and liberties to be self-evident, and that was reason enough to never let them happen again.
Read Kevin J. Miyazaki’s A Guide to Modern Camp Homes [kevinmiyazaki.com]
Previously, related:
2003: I mean, just look how happy they were!
2010: Ansel Adams’ Japanese American Internment Camp Photos at MoMA [Shhh!]
2011: I Am An American
2015/18: A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X
Siddhartha Miter’s Rabkin Interview Dropped
I finished listening to Siddhartha Miter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation Executive Director Mary Louise Schumacher this morning, and it was insightful and sobering. They talked a lot about the art writing field and its precarity, and that was as depressing as you can imagine. But they also talked about the windows art writing affords into new, expanded views of the world, beyond the luxury object trade talk we’re inundated with, and it was awesome. Then I’ve been clicking through the sheer number of powerful pieces Miter has written about incredible artists, exhibitions, movements, and publications, and it’s extraordinary. A combination of vast treasure and barely scratching the world’s art surface.
If you need me, I’ll be filling up my reading list, starting with Jupiter Magazine, one of the art publications Miter namechecked. The theme of Jupiter’s latest issue, The Theater of Refusal, revisits and renews Charles Gaines’ foundational 1993 exhibition of contemporary Black art and its critical context. Its form was a series of readings and screenings throughout the summer, which I will now try to approximate in my head.
2024 Rabkin Interview with Siddhartha Miter [rabkinfoundation.substack]
Jupiter [jupiter-mag]
Cady Noland Pavilions
“Beginning October 17, and spanning three rooms of the Pavilions, Glenstone will share a presentation of works by Cady Noland. Developed in collaboration with the artist, this presentation will mark the first major survey by a U.S. museum of her decades-long career.”
Reader, the presentation has been marked. Last year I poured one out for anyone who’d hoped to buy a new Cady Noland work. But now I feel for anyone who’s been trying to buy a major Cady Noland the last 17 years. Because Glenstone got them all. Look at that map; Glenstone has Cady Nolands even Glenstone doesn’t know about.
Three of the six open pavilion spaces are Noland’s work. [The others are two galleries of works by Lorraine O’Grady and Melvin Edwards, and the little library.] The first thing you see as you go down the stairs is not a Noland sculpture, but a Noland architectural intervention. At first it read like an Ellsworth Kelly, if only because architecture-scale Kellys were just on view here. Up close, no, closer, inside it, it read like an Anne Truitt, of the back of the Anne Truitts that had backs.
The no photography proscription is excruciating, and I find myself trying to no spoilers my way through this post, as if it’s feasible to say, let’s discuss it after you’ve seen it. The artist adjusted the space to minimize distraction and focus attention on her work, and it works. They borrowed Clip-on Man. Charles Gatewood’s book with the source image is in the library.
The Raleses purportedly acquired Noland’s entire show last year at Gagosian, but it also somehow fills a space three times the size. There is a lot less tape, except when there isn’t.
There are pallet plinths that are not elements of the work, except when they are. There are foam and carpet blocks that precede an installation, except they’re still here. It’s at once pristine and provisional.
The paper labels remain on the white wall tires. You may not ride the tire swings. The internal gear to lift the massive stockade is freshly lubed, but the crank is padlocked. The chain that connected the bench is gone. Oozewald has its corrected and copyrighted stand. The wear on the corners of one (non-mirror-finish) aluminum panel propped on the floor is enough to make the owner of Cowboys Milking weep.
It’s like this survey surveys not only the range of Noland’s work as she made it, but as it was presented, processed and purchased since. Maybe being cast in acrylic and thoughtfully placed in the contemplative suburban art temple of benevolent billionaires is not, after all, all bad.
Painting On Sargent Dog Painting Violence
While looking for John Singer Sargent’s entangled octopus painting at the Smithsonian’s vast Photography Study Collection, I could not help but notice this painting he made of a dog. I really, really am not a dog painting guy, but apparently I am dog painted in Paris by one of two artists. Or three. Okay four, max.
Pointy was the dog of Louise and Valerie Burckhardt, the daughters of Swiss-American friends of the Sargent family, and Pointy (1881) is one of at least three works young Sargent made as a gift for the family. [It says “to my friend Louise” on the back.]
Make that four works. Sargent’s full-length portrait of Louise Burckhardt was a hit at the Salon of 1882. Sargent inscribed it, “to my friend Mrs. Burckhardt”. If auction lot texts are to be believed, Mrs Burckhardt was trying to spark a romance between the painter and his subject. Or maybe we only know this story because someone in Sargent’s publicity department told it. He never married because he was so dedicated to his work, insisted the family members and academics gatekeeping his CR.
Anyway, auction texts. The Burckhardts kept Pointy until 1991, when they sold it at Sotheby’s, and then it sold again in 2007 at Christie’s in an auction literally titled, “The Dog Sale,” which I am absolutely not clicking on.
Seeing it in color, it’s enough to know that the Grand Central Gallery, which hosted a Sargent’s greatest hits show in 1924, did not literally paint their copyright claim on the face of the picture after all. But it also makes me think that Sargent, whose elegant, eel-like initials J.S.S. are on the bottom right, did not paint POINTY on the top, either.
Look At Me Cryin’ In The McDonald’s
Just watch it.
19yo John Singer Sargent and The Two Octopi
Move over Turkey (1879), there’s a new favorite Sargent I’d never seen nor heard of in town.
Maybe Turkey can be my favorite Sargent I’ve ever seen, and Two Octopi can be my favorite Sargent I haven’t.
Sargent, a student at the Beaux-Arts, was 19 when he painted Two Octopi, a scene from the deck of a fishing boat in Brittany. The first paintings Sargent showed and sold were seaside scenes from Brittany, but that wasn’t until 2-3 years later. This is Sargent’s only documented oil from 1875.
In “John Singer Sargent’s ‘Devils'”, a 2011 essay for Gastronomica: The Journal for Food and Culture, emily arensman pins down the limited sourcing (a letter to Charles Knoedler only known through a citation in a 1942 Parke-Bernet catalogue) and some context. Was this painting in Sargent and the Sea, a 2009 exhibition at the Corcoran [which traveled to the Royal Academy] of the artist’s early, little-known marine works?
Meanwhile, though the discussion and quotes are mostly references to eels, Alison Mairi Syme’s mention of Two Octopi in her 2010 book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art, as a 19th-century queer-coded handshake, is now impossible to unconsider. And there was a fisherman involved in this picture, too.
[later in the day update]:
From the Juley Photos collection at the Smithsonian, we can see Sargent signed this work, titled simply Octopus, at least when the Juleys photographed it. The collector at the time was either a Connecticut painter or a Mayflower descendant, but perhaps not both.
There’s Still Some Art For Kamala
So far 105 artworks donated to the Artists for Kamala fundraising campaign have been sold. The remaining 67 works will remain available through October 18th. Because the purchases are subject to campaign donation laws, buyers must file donor statements. Also, they can’t be foreign nationals or lobbyists.
Also they may not want to be Republicans. 100% of the proceeds goes to the Harris Victory Fund, which allocates it to Harris for President, the DNC, and the state Democratic parties.
Interestingly, another edition of this Lawler is at Paula Cooper Gallery through October 26th, in a Flag-themed show. A portion of the proceeds from that show will go to America Votes, a coalition of GOTV and voting rights organizations.
Dianne Feinstein’s Earring
Dianne Feinstein’s incapacitated inaction at a critical moment in US history and her to retire from the Senate long after she lost the mental and physical capacity to function is a stain on her legacy.
If there’s anything to be noted about the sale of her personal collection of mid jewelry, maybe it’s the single Tiffany sapphire and diamond earring whose companion one could imagine was lost in a demented haze, or maybe even stolen by a careerist hanger-on in her waning days. Yes, buy this orphaned earring today, which is small enough to sew into the hem of your clothes if you find yourself fleeing across a border anytime soon.
Lot 2023, 15 Oct 2024: TIFFANY & CO.: PLATINUM, SAPPHIRE, AND DIAMOND SINGLE EARRING, currently $480 sold for $800 [bonhams]
Previously, related [and still for sale, btw]: They Photoshopped Dianne Feinstein’s Pool
Aquavit Would Like To Sell The Olafur Carpet
On The Politics Of Collecting
On the New Books Network podcast, library scientist Jen Hoyer has an invigorating conversation with Eunsong Kim about Kim’s new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Kim looks at the structural inequities of the systems that determine what gets preserved and valued: archives, museums, philanthropic ventures.
In the raking light of her critical literarary scholarship, Kim examines the contours of Henry Clay Frick’s art collecting after the 1892 Homestead Strike, and the intensive campaigns by Marcel Duchamp and the Arensbergs for the most advantageous museum placement of their collection. And much more!
New Books Network: Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting [newbooksnetwork]
The Politics of Collecting [dukeupress.edu]
Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins
I have reviewed the chronology of Jasper Johns’ stick figures, and it is long, and the literature, and it is sparse. The most extensive discussion I’ve found of them is from July 2020, when art historian Isabelle Loring Wallace explored figures and faces in Johns’ prints at the Walker Art Center. [The Walker has a complete run of Johns’ print works, which the artist has been topping up with gifts since 1987.]
Loring calls them both “A motif of unknown origin” and “a crudely rendered Picasso-inspired trio,” seeing a similarity to the figure in Picasso’s 1958 UNESCO mural, The Fall of Icarus. I don’t see it, but sure. Except while other Picasso references appear in Johns’ work sooner, this so-called Icarus doesn’t turn up in Johns’ work until 1992, a full decade after the stick figure trio.
Continue reading “Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins”Just The Tureen
Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine
[note: I’m still looking, but this was not their tureen.]