Archival Bühler-Rose

At first glance intarsia is strange medium for portraiture, for immediacy, or for conveying information at all. But that is looking at it through the wrong end of the chronoscope. In his current show at New Discretions, I Want Your Skull, Michael Bühler-Rose uses this permanent—or at least persistent—medium to transform temporal and subjective content into objects for history.

Michael Bühler-Rose, Verso (R.R., Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1958), 2024, Wood Intarsia/Inlay: Padauk, Kadyakshe Ebony, Slate Matti, Slate matti dark, Jackfruit Wood, Orange Fruit Wood, Rosewood and Mukurche woods, 33.25 x 28.8 x 1.5 in., via newdiscretions

The large, multi-panel studiolo scene is familiar, partly because it consciously evokes the intarsia room-as-portrait of the 15th century Studiolo Gubbio at the Met, but also because Bühler-Rose has lately shown similar studiolo selfies, with different configurations of autobiographical objects.

The other three works feel like they’re doing something different. The one that caught my eye on Instagram [I have not seen the show irl yet] is the museum sticker-covered verso of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. As someone who’s been enthralled by the underseen backs of famous artworks—including this one—this feels like using intarsia’s excessive intricacy to right a historical wrong.

Puzzle for F.G.T. and R.L (Paris, Last time, 1989), 2024, Wood Intarsia/Inlay: Slate Matti, Ebony, Rubber Wood and Mukurche woods, 12.5 x 15.75 x 1.5 in., via newdiscretions

The other two works are the verso of a small Dali painting, and the front of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres puzzle, complete with puzzle pieces and plastic bag. Besides their relatively small scale, the main connection I see here is that both the artworks referenced sold at Christie’s in mid-May 2024. So intarsia turns a moment in time into timeless objects.

But maybe I’m overly fixated on differences when one clear similarity is right. there. Because all four works in Bühler-Rose’s show are based on photographs. The studiolo is self-evidently a composed still life. The Rauschenberg’s verso photo is a key part of its art historical record. The Felix puzzle is itself a transformation of a snapshot into an object, whose photograph is transformed in turn. And Dali’s verso picture, cropped for its inlay version, only turned up because the painting came up for sale. So photography put through its theorized paces.

And unlike other any other printing—or production—techniques, these photos have been fixed in a form we know could last 500 years, because it already has.

[A few hours later update: Bühler-Rose’s unparalleled side hustle, https://boot.foundation, will be having a bootlegs and books popup at Situations this Sunday, October 6th, from 12-6. A reminder to always check insta before posting.]

I Want Your Skull is at New Discretions at Situations’ 127 Henry Street location through 20 October 2024 [newdiscretions]
Studies for Studiolo, 2019 — [michaelbuhlerrose.com]
Studiolo Gubbio, c.1478-82 [metmuseum.org]

On Steve Reich’s Freehand Watermark Tracings and Patterns

Steve Reich, Freehand Watermark Tracing #1, 1978, soft ground etching, 10 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. on 17 x 14 sheet, ed. 25+10AP, from the collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

I wish I’d known about these before David Hudson posted one to wish Steve Reich a happy 88th birthday. Because I am transfixed.

Continue reading “On Steve Reich’s Freehand Watermark Tracings and Patterns”

Whoomp, There It Is: My Rabkin Interview Just Dropped

OK, I have not listened to it myself, but I can already tell from the links included in their post that they left in the part where I cried.

Aaand maybe where I said I quietly boycotted the Hirshhorn while it was wrapped in that Nicholas Party scrim. Love you guys!

[AFTER HEARING IT UPDATE: I llol’d that the Rabkin folks actually used the Hirshhorn clip to announce the interview on their Instagram. Love it. And I forgot that while I did acknowledge my pettiness, I also point out, I’m not wrong. Overall though, I think my favorite quote will be, “Again, with the Manet.” It feels undeniably weird to say, “listen to me!” but it actually turned out OK.]

Rabkin Interviews 2024: Greg Allen [rabkinfoundation.substack]

Veni, Viðey Vixi

nine tv-sized prints are interspersed with tall portrait style prints hang on the white wall of moma in 1991, all of jagged black forms inspired by the basalt columns of richard serra's afangar sculpture in iceland. the floor is a mottled pale grey and white marble I wish I'd managed to salvage when they built the taniguchi project.
installation view of Richard Serra: Afangar Icelandic Series, 1991-92, at MoMA, photo: Mali Olatunji

These Afangar Icelandic Series prints were the first Richard Serra prints I ever saw, and they left a deep impression. MoMA hung these rough, craggy prints off the lobby in late 1991, and they felt very much like prints about sculpture, which is something I’d never considered before. But I resolved to get some—which I’ve failed to do, not realizing that they’d sold out long before I knew they existed—and also to visit Afangar, the sculpture in Iceland they related to. Which only took four years.

four rough basalt columns stand in close pairs across a grassy island in iceland. water in the middleground and the mainland in the background. a richard serra sculpture called afangar on videy island.
Continue reading “Veni, Viðey Vixi”

Holland Cotter Rabkin Interview Dropped A Minute Ago

I got caught up on listening to it pretty quickly last week, but I have been slow to post a link to Holland Cotter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation executive director Mary Louise Schumacher.

Cotter talked about growing up free range in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and picked the Met for his workplace photo. Which after so many years at the Times, is probably the place he’s written about the most.

Cotter and Schumacher did not talk about his donation of the prize money to the the International Association of Art Critics and the Forge Project, to support emerging and Native American arts writing and fellowships, for which mad respect. [As ARTnews notes, the NY Times prohibits its full-time employees from accepting cash awards, and these days a full-time arts writing job is rarer than even the most generous awards.]

2024 Rabkin Foundation Award Recipient Holland Cotter [rabkinfoundation substack]

Genzken Die Welt Passed Me By

Front page of the 26 Nov 2016 edition of Die Welt, with pictures guest edited by Isa Genzken

The list of things I missed in mid-November 2016 continues to grow. The special issue of Die Welt edited by an artist that year was on 24 November, and the artist was Isa Genzken.

The paper that day only had five stories to use Genzken’s pictures on, and one of them was a feature on the artist herself. Notably, all Genzken’s roughly collaged pictures included photographs of herself, and one included her with her former teacher and husband, Gerhard Richter.

Front page of Gerhard Richter’s edition of Die Welt, 5 Oct 2012

For his Die Welt guest edit in October 2012, Richter included many travel-related snapshots, and few images of his artworks—among them pictures of his third student and wife Sabine Moritz.

screenshot of the Die Welt 2024 artist issue ad pitchdeck, showing the 14 previous artist issues

But this, I knew. The advertiser pitch deck for this year’s edition gave the whole rundown, most of which I also missed. From Baselitz, Rauch, Sherman and Schnabel to Koons, Wool, Murakami, Grosse and Kiefer, it’s enough to fill a private museum. The 2024 edition was two weeks ago. Tracey Emin, which I missed.

Maybe Genzken’s newspaper actually goes on a separate, shorter list of things I’m bummed I missed.

This Is Kasper König’s Welt

Ellsworth Kelly, Die Welt, 2011, offset on vellum, ed. 90/100+20AP, sold at Rago in 2021

On October 6, 2011, Munich newspaper Die Welt replaced all the pictures in their daily edition with Ellsworth Kellys. They also published a signed, limited edition reproduction of the front page on archival paper. Which stays brighter longer, which is nice. But it’s only printed on one sheet, on one side. And so it misses the entire point of the project, while replacing it with a picture souvenir.

Ellsworth Kelly, Die Welt, 06.10.2011, 57.5x40cm, selling 02 Oct 2024 at Van Ham

With this signed, dedicated copy of the actual paper being sold this week, Kelly gave Kasper König the best of both worlds. It was König’s invitation that led Kelly to make his first floor piece, Yellow Curve – Portikus (1990), the work which was re-realized at Glenstone in 2015. I guess they stayed in touch.

Sure König’s Welt already turning yellow, but it’s got eleven other Kellys inside it. And there’s even a recursive version of itself on the back. And Lufthansa knocking off Milton Glaser. AND Amanda Knox.

Ellsworth Kelly Unterwelt

And again, it’s an actual newspaper, not a picture of one. And that makes all the difference.

02 Oct 2024, Lot 146: Ellsworth Kelly, Die Welt, est EUR1000-1500 [update: sold for EUR5940, which is the most] [vanham]
Previously, related: I Wanna The Kelly Welt, Chico, An Everthinisinnit
Oh right, I saw it in person, and it rocked: Wade’s Welt, Excellent

Dazzle Painting Little Guys

One of the things they never tell you about the WWI dazzle ship painting thing is that it made it hard to tell how big a painting of a dazzle ship is.

I had to dig around in three years worth of National Gallery of Canada Instagram to find an installation image of Edward Wadsworth’s 3-meter tall Dazzleships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). So thank you, @arunprasaad, for your service.

Edward Wadsworth, Dazzleships in Dry Dock at Liverpool, 1919, 305 x 245 cm, National Gallery of Canada

I was wondering why Wadsworth painted this—I was about to say “so big,” but if you’d spent the war painting 2,000 actual ships, 10 feet would seem like a major downsizing. Oh hey, speaking of scale, he put Little Guys with brushes in there.

But I reading the 2015 Liverpool Biennial Journal about Dazzle and its history, I now understand that it was an awarded commission to commemorate the Canadian involvement in the war. And that the Memorial Committe basically said No Modernists, No Cubists. So Wadsworth, determined to revive the pre-war manifesto of the Vorticists, made a naturalistic painting of an abstract painting project.

Meanwhile, there was actually a time when the National Gallery emphasized the scale of their pictures (though tbh, that was partly to use square footage to justify the price they paid for their Barnett Newman.)

the main image circulating in 2013 of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, 1967, 18×8 ft, as installed at the National Gallery of Canada

Even a couple of years after Wadsworth, Gerald Murphy had no trouble in communicating the scale of his 18 x 12 foot lost masterpiece, Boatdeck (1924):

Gerald Murphy’s Boatdeck (1924) trolling the rest of the US room at the 1924 Salon des Independants

The scale of which, it must be said, is rather hard to gauge from a picture of the picture alone. I once missed an eBay auction for an old photo of Boatdeck by a day. I’ve been crushed ever since.

Gerald Murphy, Boatdeck, 1924, photo: Gerald & Sara Murphy Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale

Previously, related: A Domestic Proposal: at home with Voice of Fire
What I looked at today: Gerald Murphy; Giant Picasso Painting By Prince Alexander Schervachidze

This It could be Anthony d’Offay

Louise Lawler, It could be Anthony d’Offay, 1999/2000, 30×22 in., c-print on aluminum, ed. 3/5, selling where it was taken, at Christie’s, NY

At the New York preview for Christie’s Contemporary Evening Sale in May 1999, Louise Lawler made a photograph of a ghostly male figure with his hands behind his back, in front of Robert Gober’s Crib (1986) and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #48 (1979).

She titled the photo, It could be Anthony d’Offay, wrapping the presence of one of the 20th century art market’s most recognizable and powerful figures with a bit of ambiguity.

1999 turns out to be the period of time when two different women who worked for d’Offay’s gallery in London said he subjected them to repeated, unwanted sexual advances and abuse.

One woman, then 25 and hired in 1998 as d’Offay’s assistant, who received an undisclosed settlement after leaving the gallery in 2000, described her experience on what could even have been the trip photographed by Lawler:

“He started taking me for meetings and appointments outside the gallery. He would hold on to my arm or put his arm around me. I thought it was not quite right, but dared not voice my discomfort,” she said. Her concerns deepened when he informed her that he would like her to accompany him to New York. “That’s when things escalated. He grew more touchy, and would put his hand around my waist, very close to my bum. There was no sense of boundary in respect to personal space.”

This quote, the report of these two women, plus another who complained of sex pestery and professional coercion and retaliation by d’Offay in 2004, were first made public in 2018 by The Guardian. D’Offay denied the accusations.

2018 was when Trevor Traina, the collector who purchased ed. 3/5 of Lawler’s photo, began serving as Donald Trump’s ambassador to Austria. Traina’s grandfather had also been an ambassador to Austria, in the Eisenhower era. His mother Dede Wilsey, a noted San Francisco socialite and longtime Republican donor, famously took control of the deYoung and Fine Arts Museum in 2011, after the director’s death. Traina’s Lawler was exhibited at the FAMSF in 2012, in a show titled, Reel to Reel: Photographs from the Trevor Traina Collection.

Next week Traina is selling 132 works from his collection, including the Lawler, in a single owner sale at Christie’s. “As part of an exciting and innovative partnership,” Christie’s effused, “all lots from this auction will be presented on the blockchain and offered with an associated digital certificate of ownership exclusively included with a Kresus wallet.” Traina is the founder and CEO of Kresus.

Part of the genius of Lawler’s work stems from her sensitivity art’s context, and her ability to capture fleeting moments as it moves through the world. I think it’s hard to imagine another Lawler photo—or another example of this one—accruing as much 21st century history has this one has, even before it got put on the blockchain.

Kasper König’s Bookshelf, Birthday

Wolfgang Tillmans, Kasper König’s Bookshelf, 1995, 30×40 cm, ed. 10/10+1AP, selling König’s copy Oct. 1st, 2024 at Van Ham

There are some fascinating things in Kasper König’s collection, which is being auctioned at Van Ham in Cologne starting next week. Some weird things, too. One thread I see going through it is König, a hugely influential curator and museum director for decades, got many early works from artists who went on to greatness, early but not iconic.

A couple of pieces are both, though: like Wolfgang Tillmans’ 1995 photo of König’s bookshelf, which looks monumental, more like a Gursky than the Gurskys, but also offhand and intimate, like a Tillmans.

On Kawara, Today Series, 21 Nov.2003, 8×10 in., selling from Kasper König’s collection at Van Ham

Of course, the most early and most iconic work has to be On Kawara’s date painting from 1967. König’s early and unflagging enthusiasm for Kawara’s conceptual projects was instrumental to their acclaim. And that support manifests in another Today Series painting, 21 Nov. 2003, which was a gift from the artist for König’s 60th birthday.

Which, how does that work? I mean, I’m sure everyone shopping for a Date Painting quietly gravitates to a date that means something to them. But this is the opposite. Are König’s birthday and the moon landing the only two events explicitly commemorated by Date Paintings?

Bruce Hindsight Quality Foundation

Bruce High Quality Foundation, The View, 2013, bronze, acrylic and screenprint ink on canvas, 102 x 90 in., to be sold for whatever you got at Sotheby’s tomorrow, 25 Sept 2024

The middle of November 2016 was a rough time for a lot of people, but at least you didn’t flop trying to cash out on your 9-ft tall bronze silkscreened painting by an imaginary art bro collab of a fake statue of an emperor’s butt.

[Unless, of course, you are the owner of Bruce High Quality Foundation’s The View (2013), whose art advisor and auction experts had assured you that $60-70,000 was not an unreasonable expectation. Whoops. I hope you’ll share the insights you’ve gleaned from enjoying living with this prodigious painting for an extra 7.5 years.]

I honestly don’t know where we are on BHQF these days, but this certainly appears to be one of their works. The View is nominally of one of the greatest artworks in the world, the triumphal Roman equestrian bronze monument to Marcus Aurelius. But in fact, that Michelangelo base means it’s in the Campidoglio, not in the Capitoline Museum, so it is the 1981 replica. And though the proximate view the Bruces have given us is of the emperor’s and his horse’s ass, it remains for us to fill in the actual view beyond, which is of the city from the hill, across the piazza.

The View is for sale again tomorrow, Wednesday, with no reserve, and a 90%+ lower estimate. If you’re feeling lucky and have high ceilings, tomorrow could be your lucky day. The winning bid currently stands at $200. [15 minutes later update: and it is now $1,200. This post has awakened the greg.org mob of thousandaires.] [update: sold, for $2,160, so an $1800 bid?]

Jasper Johns Little Guys

Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks

I know I’m never going to get a tattoo, but that doesn’t stop me from making a shortlist of tattoos I’d get. And the top Jasper Johns entry on the list are these little guys, with their little rakes, or brooms, or brushes. They’ve been turning up in Johns’s work for decades. They were there in his last drawings show at Matthew Marks, and they’re there again now.

They’re being towered over by an inky armprint, a tracing of Grünewald’s fallen soldier, and torn sheets of John Cage’s pivotal score in a dark and ominous sky, but they’re not daunted. They’re just going about their work, setting the scale, completing the composition. [This watercolor from 1990 predates the first appearance of the little guys in a painting by two+ years, btw. Is this Little Guys: Origins?]

Untitled, 2019, Graphite on paper, six sheets, each: 8¼ × 6 in. via Matthew Marks

Here they are in 2019, in these little drawings, just as busy as ever, working on the skulls. The 1990 guys look drawn by hand, but these guys, and the skull, are clearly reproduced with some mechanical means. I haven’t seen the show yet to figure it out, but nothing could be more Johnsian. [Or haven’t I? I remembered the related prints, but forgot that these little drawings were included in his 2021 show.]

On one level they’re pure exercises in composition. They’re literally just lines. But I can’t not also think of them as little scenes; the grouping practically demands a narrative of some kind. Can you imagine Johns just making up little situations and stories for his little guys? It’s been decades now. Do they have names? Do they have lore?

Even as the autobiographical elements of Johns’s project move in and out of focus over the years, it still feels a little weird or retrograde to wonder such things. But it also feels OK to assume that motifs and figures and strategies recur for a reason; Johns is not some automaton, throwing the same five ingredients into the pot every day.

Until I hear different, then, I’m going to assume they’re these little guys, happily working and living inside Johns’s capital I:

Previously, related [and I love that they used a knee drawing on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, btw]: Taking A Knee; also Blackened Angel; also Little Johns

All The Gonzalez-Torreses In San Francisco

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Still Life), 1989, stack of light blue 8.5 x 11 in. paper with an ideal height of 6 in., as installed at Terrain Gallery in 1990, image: Armando Rascon via FG-T Fndn

I was going to write that in early 1990 Berkeley radiologist Robert Shimshak and his wife Marion Brenner bought all the Felix Gonzalez-Torres works in San Francisco. Which was three: two puzzles and a little stack. But that’s not quite true.

Those three were all included in a group show, This Symphony Will Remain Always Unfinished, organized by Armando Rascon at Terrain Gallery, the art space on Folsom Street he operated with Peter Wright. The show ran from 8 February through 10 March and included works by Gonzalez-Torres, Lucia Noquiera, Jessica Diamond, and Nayland Blake. [It took me a while to figure out that the show has lived in Felix’s exhibition history with an inverted title, This Symphony Will Always Remain Unfinished, while the other three artists and Rascon match the contemporaneous gallery listings.]

And it is true that the Shimshak/Brenners bought them, because they are now selling them all at Christie’s. The text on “Untitled” (Still Life), “Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Blue Flowers 1984 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1987 Interferon 1989 Ross 1984,” is nearly identical to Felix’s first frieze portrait, which he’d just exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in December 1989.

But as I was trying to figure out who else was in the Terrain show, and how Felix’s work came to be in Terrain’s show, which I’d understood was Felix’s first show in San Francisco, I discovered that it was not. The first show, that is.

In their 2016 AAA oral history with Alex Fialho, Nayland Blake talked at length about the contemporary art world’s recognition of a fuller range of art by queer artists and about the queer experience. While making and showing art themself, Blake was also working at the New Langton Arts, an artist-run space also on Folsom Street, where he met Felix and Julie Ault when they came to SF in 1989:

So I was working in a curatorial capacity, you know, I mean Armando at Terrain did, I think, Felix’s first show in San Francisco, but, you know, I included, you know, one of Felix’s stacks in a show, I think the next year, at New Langton. And so we were—so I mean in those situations when I was meeting with people about looking at artists that we could show or that we could bring in, I was also telling them about San Francisco artists.

But that show Blake curated, The Word: text – object – ontology, opened on 25 January 1990, and ran through 17 February. So not only was Blake the first to show Felix’s work in the Bay Area, for nine days in February 1990, there were four works by Felix on view within two blocks of Folsom Street.

[an hour later and after checking the David Deitcher interview tab I had open update: NEVER MIND] Blake was the first to show a Felix stack in the Bay Area, but he remembered correctly that it came a year after Armando Rascon. Because there was a whole other group show with Felix’s work at Terrain in January 1989: Matter/Antimatter: Defects in the Model included two photostats and a rub-on transfer work. In 2013 David Deitcher recalled this show was one of the first times he’d seen Felix’s work.]

“Untitled” (1989/90), installation view from Oct. 2015-Jan. 2016, at the Metropolitan Art Centre, Belfast, image: MAC, Belfast via FG-T Fndn

And the stack in Blake’s show, “Untitled” (1989/90), was actually a double stack, with two texts: “Somewhere better than this place” and “Nowhere better than this place.” And it was realized in two places at once: in the center of Felix’s inaugural show at Andrea Rosen’s new gallery in SoHo, which opened on 20 January, and then, five days later, in San Francisco. And it was certainly not bought by the Shimshak/Brenners, because it was bought by the de la Cruzes.

Unlike the de la Cruzes’ stacks, which have been shown a lot, both in Miami and on the road, “Untitled” (Still Life) has only been exhibited rarely, and off the beaten path. So Felix stack compleatists, beat a path to Christie’s this week, because “Untitled” (Still Life) goes on rare public view tomorrow (9/24).

1 Oct 2024, Lot 111: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Still Life), 1989;
Lot 112: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1988;
Lot 113: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Warm Water), 1988 [update: all sold for good prices][christies]