Continue reading “Such Coup. Many Unconstitutional. So Thwart. [5 Feb — ongoing]”
Nobody Expects The Roma Deposition
![this altered version of Caravaggio's Deposition from the Vatican Museums in Roma is a cascade of mourning figures holding or looming over the dead but still absolutely caked up body of Our Lord, with an outsized clipped version of Richard Prince's under-oath face roughly pasted onto the main figure in the center, the one who is holding Jesus, but, importantly, also looking straight at the viewer. Obviously, since this is a picture about Prince's deposition in a lawsuit, the so-called correct thing would be to paste his face on Jesus's, and in less apocalyptic times, I might have, but [looks at the world] I'm not taking that chance rn](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/richard-prince-deposition-roma1-689x1024.jpeg)
For a brief shining moment in 2023, a website called depositionrow.com hosted the entire 6h42m42s video of Richard Prince’s deposition in the copyright infringement lawsuit over his Instagram New Portraits. And then it was gone.
Well, now you can watch it again. Starting today, it is playing on a computer on a table in a Janis Kounellis installation at Sant’Andrea di Scaphis in Rome, Gavin Brown’s deconsecrated side hustle. What are you waiting for?
Jasper Johns: Take An Object, Add Some Little Guys To It

“I thought to add these little figures, which appear in a different drawing of mine, an old drawing. They’re in the bottom of Perilous Night, for John Cage.”
Oh hey, look, it’s Jasper Johns in 1989 discussing the addition of his little stick figures to another work for what sounds like the first time since he used them in 1982.

Johns is talking to filmmaker Judith Weschler, who produced Jasper Johns: Take An Object with photographer Hans Namuth in 1990. The short film is bracketed by two extended scenes of Johns at work: in 1972, painting in his own studio, and in 1989, printmaking at ULAE.
Continue reading “Jasper Johns: Take An Object, Add Some Little Guys To It”Twombly Four Gators

You cannot fully understand Twombly’s art unless you know that there is gators.
Twombly went to Rauschenberg’s house in Captiva in November 1970 and made collages; in December 1971 and made prints, but those catalogues raisonnés were checked out, so who knows? In the winter of 1972, he made this collage as a Christmas present for Rauschenberg. It has four, possibly five, postcards of alligators on it.
I really didn’t think of collage as a Twombly thing. But it looks like a major part, maybe even most of his works on paper in the 1970s were collages. He collaged with catholic zeal: Leonardo images; mushrooms and natural history book illustrations; graph and drawing paper; fragments of other drawings; and, in Captiva, especially, touristy postcards.
Twombly’s lines here index the placement and width of the postcards, and of their crossed out captions, as if the composition is a conceptual schematic of itself. It’s still very much a drawing.
No King, 2025

I love No King. I love the flag. I love Verne Dawson, who painted this protest sign, and carried it in a massive protest. I love the millions and millions of people around the country who protest. I love Laura Hoptman who posted it on IG. I hate that instagram took their sweet time showing it to me ten days after Laura posted it, and Verne carried it. And I hate that there’s a guy trying to be a king, speedrunning the violations of human rights and liberty in the Declaration of Independence with such malevolence, that it compels so much effort to stop it. And I hate that it’ll take more effort, but here we are. No King.
Sardine Bed, F’ing Couches, Judd Table
Not everything is absolutely terrible.

For example, if I hadn’t gone to the Archives of American Art looking for information on Cy Twombly & Robert Rauschenberg’s two-artist show at Leo Castelli in 1974, I might not have found the September 1972 show at Castelli, Furniture Designed by Artists, which listed Twombly along with “Chamberlain, Judd, Lichtenstein, Morris, Stella [and] Warhol.”
TWOMBLY FURNITURE?? CLICK TO OPEN! Yeah so far, nothing, and the Warhol might be a Campbell’s Soup print on the wall. [Yeah, no, there is a typical Castelli invite for the show on ebay that lists six furniture artists: Chamberlain, Di Suvero, Judd, Lalanne, Rauschenberg, Charles Ross, and Gus Spear. Maybe everyone else was just art artists.]

But if I hadn’t clicked, I’d have definitely kept missing this Lalanne Sardine Bed. Which was a one-off, commissioned by the show’s organizer, Jane Holzer, of the Warhol Factory Jane Holzers, who at 31, had rebooted herself as an impresaria. Leo Castelli was apparently involved in her artist furniture startup Daedalus Concepts, which, except for the Times puff piece for this show, exists only in the provenance listings of of various John Chamberlain sofas.
Continue reading “Sardine Bed, F’ing Couches, Judd Table”Villa Jasper: He Sold The House in St Martin

Speaking of artists retreating to remote beaches, it turns out Jasper Johns, 94, sold his hilltop house and studio in St Martin early in the pandemic.
Johns began visiting St. Martin in 1968, two years after a fire destroyed his home and studio in Edisto, South Carolina. He bought a house in 1972, which he had nazi architect Philip Johnson renovate in 1980.
From Sotheby’s International Realty: “While major upgrades have been made to the property’s comfort and amenities, much care and attention was taken to ensure that Philip Johnson’s distinct minimalism and purity of line was preserved and that the soul of Jasper John’s [sic] house remain palpable.”
It is now called Villa Jasper, and is available for rent as part of the St. Martin Blue Luxury Villa Collection. If the flamingo in the pool is not new, we’ll have to significantly update our understanding of Johns’ home vibe.
This Post Is Actually Mostly About Bob Petersen

Bob Petersen: …is Columbia doing Cy Twombly?
Q: I don’t know. There’s a gallery at Columbia, but I don’t know.
Petersen: The oral history of Cy Twombly?
Q2: He died before—
Petersen: God, I have tons of stories from Cy.
Q: Oh, you mean as an oral history subject?
Petersen: Yes, right, just to record. God, Cy and Bob were of course so close.
In 1970 Robert Rauschenberg, 45, moved to Captiva, a Florida island only then only reached by ferry, and Gemini GEL printer Bob Petersen, 25, moved with him. They lived on the beach side of the wild, 16-acre property Rauschenberg had assembled, and eventually set up an experimental print foundry, Untitled Press, in a house on the other side. That’s where a bunch of artist friends stayed, including Cy and Nicola [that’s not in the Chronology], who started coming during the winters from 1971 through 1975.
Continue reading “This Post Is Actually Mostly About Bob Petersen”Unfinished, Lost, Destroyed

In Summer 1963, amidst the scandals and arrests that marked the earliest screenings of Flaming Creatures, avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith was already at work on his second movie, Normal Love. Andy Warhol, who’d just bought his first movie camera, was filming the first rolls of Sleep at his dealer Eleanor Ward’s rented farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Continue reading “Unfinished, Lost, Destroyed”On the weekend of 11 August, Jack Smith and the cast of his new feature film-in-progress, Normal Love, also turned up [in Old Lyme]; they were there to film the Cake Sequence from Normal Love, in which the cast dances on top of a giant wooden birthday cake designed by Claes Oldenburg, which they constructed in a meadow on Ward’s property (figure 1). Warhol appeared in the Cake Sequence of Normal Love. that’s him on the right (figure 2), in the dark glasses; on the left, you can see poet Diane di Prima, in the turban, and Mario Montez to her right. And he also shot one of his very first films of this event, a four-minute silent color reel titled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love,” probably on the same day.
Can’t Sleep, Red Chip

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.

Mondrian Green Cows

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.

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.

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?
10 Apr 2025, Lot 330, Piet Mondrian, Vaches sur le pré, est. EUR80-120,000 [update: market chaos can’t hold back green cow lovers. it sold for EUR138,600] [christies]
REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE.

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.
Continue reading “REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE.”Cy Twombly Post-It Notes

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.

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.

The Art of Spectacle Is Long But It Bends Toward Fascism

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.
Continue reading “The Art of Spectacle Is Long But It Bends Toward Fascism”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.

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]