the making of, by greg allen
If just 40,000 more of you buy a 2025 MacBook Air M4 on sale for a limited time, $200 off, in a variety of configurations, Jeff Bezos might give me enough nickels to buy this group of eighteen table boxes and a small car that belonged to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein.
Just checking out La Bourse’s presentation of two Arthur Jafa works, and I have now seen my first disclaimer about the musician whose work appears in Love is the Message, the Message is Death:
Love is the Message, the Message is Death is considered one of Arthur Jafa’s key works. Dating from 2016, it represents for the artist the affirmation of an African American identity, one of solidarity and confidence, while also showing and denouncing the violence that it has often faced.
It includes a piece of music titled Ultralight Beam from Kanye West’s album The Life of Pablo, which was released that same year. This composition, which combines gospel and R&B sounds, is an ode to spirituality, reconciliation, and the search for light, and it was praised as such by critics and a very wide audience upon its release. Arthur Jafa specifically chose this song for the values of hope and peace that it promotes.
Pinault Collection condemns Kanye West’s recent statements and actions in the strongest possible terms.
Are there others I have just not noticed? I confess, I had not looked. In any case, additional disclaimers will be documented here as they turn up.
Continue reading “An Anthology of Arthur Jafa Disclaimers”
In 2007 Salman Toor was a 24-yo student at Pratt when he made this portrait of Zohran Mamdani, who was then 14. Amitav Ghosh posted the pic on instagram after Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in NYC, which he celebrate with Mamdani’s parents, Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair.
From Artsy’s report, it sounds like the study was created in preparation of a larger family portrait. Toor is asked to do the corny thing of seeing the future in this portrait. Inshallah he wins, of course, but I do not go for this portraiture sorcery.
On the other hand, if you were to ask me if this looks like the portrait of a kid who told his mother to reject the offer to direct a Harry Potter movie and instead keep working on adapting a Jhumpa Lahiri novel about grieving over the loss of a far away family member, I would say “Absolutely, nailed it, 1000%.”
Jim Long’s Summer 2002 essay in the Brooklyn Rail on Barnett Newman’s crisis with painting in the mid-1950s, and the one painting he managed to make in two years, Uriel (1955), is great and insightful, but the last two paragraphs, one his, and one quoted from Newman, came out of nowhere and left me absolutely stunned:
“There is one more story that properly belongs to the period of Newman’s hardest struggles. In 1968, during the social and political events and dialogue, the publisher of Horizon Books asked Newman if he could publish a volume of his essays, notes, and statements. Newman replied that he would prefer it if Horizon would republish Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and that he would write an introduction, in the hope of making a contribution to the dialogue going on within the Left. Horizon agreed, and in Newman’s introduction he allowed himself only one small personal digression:
In the ’40s, when artists got together of an evening, there was always someone who insisted on playing surrealist games. I recall one evening when everyone in the room had to say what destroyed him. I remember what I said. I said that I felt destroyed by established institutions. I was surprised to hear one of the artists present say that what destroyed him were people. He was perhaps wiser than I, for I had to go through that Darwinian lesson. Looking back, I think we were both right, because only those people practice destruction and betrayal who hunger to accept completely the values of the establishment in which they seek a place. It’s the establishment that makes people predatory.
Uriel was purchased in 2021 by Ken Griffin, in a deal organized by James Meyer and Iwan Wirth, for an undisclosed nine-figure price.
From UVA anthropologist Ira Bashkow’s commentary on Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman’s “Decolonizing US Anthropology,” published in American Anthropologist in Feb. 2023:
In the late 1940s, anthropologists came into the sights of the anticommunist crusades known as McCarthyism. The AAA formed a committee to protect the individuals targeted by the McCarthyist witch hunts, but it was quickly undermined by the ultraconservative anthropologist George Peter Murdock, who got himself appointed as chair.2 Murdock denounced his own colleagues in a letter he wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to David Price’s (2004) historical research, we now know the identities of ten of the twelve anthropologists Murdock betrayed: Irving Goldman, Jules Henry, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Oscar Lewis, Richard Morgan, John Murra, Morris Siegel, Morris Swadesh, and Gene Weltfish. All but one was Jewish, and all were involved in antiracist activism, either by public writing, speaking, and broadcasting or by political advocacy and direct service (e.g., Gene Weltfish wrote an antiracist pamphlet with Ruth Benedict that was mass distributed and adapted in a union-produced short film; Richard Morgan, an archaeologist, was an NAACP member and active campaigner against race-restrictive real estate covenants in Columbus, Ohio).
The McCarthyists and FBI also persecuted Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Clair Drake, along with many other white anthropologists, such as Robert Armstrong, Cora Du Bois, Kathleen Gough, Jack Harris, Ruth Landes, Ashley Montagu, Philleo Nash, Marvin Opler, Paul Radin, Jerome Rauch, Earle Reynolds, Vera Rubin, Bernhard Stern, and George Stocking. Many lost their jobs and left anthropology. Many suffered distress, humiliation, and often financial ruin. Armstrong and Swadesh emigrated from the United States. Their examples spread fear, leading other anthropologists to censor themselves and steer clear of activism. This is undoubtedly part of why antiracist causes were largely “silenced” in US anthropology for years to come (Price 2004, 64, 71–75, 79, 110ff., 344–45; 2019, 15; see also Maxwell 2015; Stocking 2006, 129–31, 158–82).3
Remembering this can help us grasp the importance of preparing now to protect our fellow anthropologists, this time skillfully, from the neo-McCarthyist attacks being launched today against antiracist initiatives and teachers in US schools, universities, and companies. [paragraphing added to lure people to read it]
Look, I understand how reporting works, and why it’s being covered the way it is, because that is how the story got out, and that is who has gone on the record.
But as shocking and admirable as it seems that Amy Sherald canceled her retrospective’s appearance at the National Portrait Gallery, that is not the really important part.
The important and frankly dire thing is that the NPG, and the Smithsonian’s chancellor Lonnie Bunch, attempted to join Trump’s extremist movement to erase trans representation. They sought to censor one of Sherald’s paintings, of a trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty, remove it from the exhibition American Sublime—organized by SFMOMA and moving in a couple of weeks from the Whitney to, well, not the NPG now, so who knows?—and replace it, somehow, with a video of people debating or reacting to the painting? The painting they would refuse to show? And letting people decide for themselves whether trans people should exist?
The quote being attributed to Bunch, via Sherald, is that they didn’t want to “provoke” Trump by showing a work. So instead they join him by censoring it. This comes just weeks after Bunch and the board of regents also acceded to Trump’s calls to review Smithsonian exhibitions for unapproved ideologies. Like, I guess, the applicability of “with liberty and justice for all” to trans people.
Project 2025 calls for a takeover of the Smithsonian and the removal of Bunch, saying he’s not the right man for the job. Maybe he’s trying to prove to them that he is their guy after all. This immediately calls the resignation of NPG director Kim Sajet into question, too. When did all this censorship conversation go down? Why was Lonnie Bunch even weighing in on single artwork decisionmaking?
Sherald did the right thing when she needed to, exercising the power she has in the context where she has it. Every one of us should do the same. But what matters on a larger scale is that faced with the same situation, the people at the Smithsonian Institution betrayed their mission, their principles, trans people, and all of us.
A full one third of it is an auto-generated, unedited index, but at least it’s getting out there. People who don’t call it Kinko’s have no idea that it didn’t used to cost $30 to print a document.
…aaand the third Second Deposition of Richard Prince just arrived.
I don’t think about Mel Ramos too much, tbh, but when I do, it’s not his superheros that come to mind. Which is too bad, because, like, this painting of The Phantom from 1962 [1962!] is kind of fantastic. It feels like Ramos could have gone in a variety of directions from it, but opted for cleavage.
It looks like it really sucked to be The Phantom, slumped dejectedly in your flagstone armchair with your skulls, in your darkest room, being blasted by the light of what must have been the biggest TV you could get into your lair in 1962.
The Trickster, also from 1962, and on an identically sized canvas, turned sideways, feels like he just knocked off the jewelry store next to Wayne Thiebaud’s bakery. [Not only did The Trickster not sell when it came up at Bonhams in 2013, the lot right before it, a Warholian silver disaster-style diptych of Iwo Jima by Bruce High Quality Foundation, sold for $122,000, so the expectation, the illogic, and and the letdown must have been intense.]
1962 really was just cooking, painting-wise. 15 years after I first read it, I still marvel at Ivan Karp’s stories of how unsettling it was in 1962 to discover Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rosenquist all making similar kinds of cold, numb, paintings from comics and commercial imagery.
But Ramos wasn’t hanging out in the backroom at Castelli in 1962; when he made these he was 27 and teaching art in a high school in Sacramento. Today would have been his 90th birthday. What a world. [thanks to Peter Huestis for the birthday heads up]
Here I am fiddling around with printers to make a paperback version, and he just ‘grams it out.
Of course, it IS his deposition.
For a couple of months now, Richard Prince has been showing Deposition (2025), the single channel video version of his second court-ordered deposition in a copyright infringement lawsuit, at Gavin Brown’s Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome. The show runs through this Friday, July 25, to andiamo!
In the mean time, though, S’AdS has posted an excerpt from the [200 page] transcript, where Prince discusses the development of his Cowboy photos. It’s very good stuff:
Continue reading “Richard Prince On Cowboys, From The Second Deposition”
The murderer of US Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Allen R. Schindler had just pleaded guilty in a military court in Japan when Creative Time wheatpasted In Honor of Allen F. Schindler, Bureau’s poster diptych of the two sailors, all around New York City in the Summer of 1993. [J.N. Herlin has an archived press release.]
I realize though I’d seen the posters, and the basics of the situation, I’d never known the brutal details of Schindler’s killing. Or of the violent harassment Schindler experienced and tried to report, repeatedly, from the moment in late 1991 when he’d transferred to to the USS Belleau Wood until his murder October 27, 1992, days before Bill Clinton defeated George Bush in the US presidential election.
Clinton had campaigned to end the military’s ban on gay soldiers. Bush and his Defense Secretary, the draft dodger and parent of a gay child Dick Cheney, and many other Republican politicians, supported the ban, and fostered the atmosphere of homophobic violence and discrimination under the guise of military unity. Actually, gays were the real threat to this culture, they argued, what with the blackmail, and the AIDS.
I also did not realize the vast extent to which the US Navy abandoned and gaslit Schindler’s mother and family, and to which they covered up the culture of abusive bigotry encouraged by the officers on Schindler’s ship, and to which they obstructed investigations and attempts to seek accountability, much less reform. This all unfolded after the posters had gone up and worn down, after Clinton agreed to a compromise with the powerful and bigoted senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, the policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Bureau was the design studio of artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett, a continuation of sorts of Moffett’s involvement with the activist collective Gran Fury. At some point, or eventually, it all just became too much, too intense, too traumatic, and Moffett sought refuge in the studio, and in art, making abstract paintings. He seemed to address it in his 2019 Brooklyn Rail conversation with Dan Cameron, but rereading it now, it’s actually Cameron who does the talking, both questions and answers.
The way I’d remembered the posters installed was the way I’d remembered all Bureau’s posters, in an alternating grid, which was also how they were shown in 2013 at the New Museum’s NYC 1993 time capsule survey. I mention them now because a pair of posters just turned up in LA Modern’s post-Pride queer swag auction. But also because we live with one of Moffett’s earliest abstract paintings at the center of our home; we pass it hundreds of times each day. And its beauty now reminds me of the psychic cost Moffett paid to get to the place where he made it. Also, we’re entering an era where government-led bigotry and violence against its own people are expanding, and we need to remember how it went down before, and how to counter it.
See, that’s how you shoot a photo of a mirror artwork. The Kunstverein für die Rhineland und Westfalen, Düsseldorf showed us the way, way back in 2001, when they published Spiegelbild, Isa Genzken’s contribution to their bougie annual artist editions series for their members.
It’s been downhill ever since. Shooting mirrored artworks from behind a blank white scrim to eliminate any reflection or trace of presence is a sales tactic, like staging a house. This kind of market lubrication and context erasure betray the experience of any artwork; mirrors just make it obvious. But the impact remains, and spreads, and eventually we’re swamped by the art equivalent of white modern farmhouses with grey laminate floors, everything around us optimized for resale.
Looking up something else in the catalogue for Technics and Creativity II, MoMA’s 1971 exhibition about Gemini G.E.L.’s process, I was stopped in my scrolling tracks by this excellent full page photo of Ellsworth Kelly’s Mirrored Concorde.
It absolutely looked like the future. And in a sense, it was: Mirrored Concorde was an edition in progress, just entering production with an undetermined edition size. Which, hold that thought. But the image itself, with its dramatic lighting, refractions, and straightforward mirrored materiality really hit.
That’s not quite how the work has turned out, alas, though it’s still a beautiful thing. It seems like there were only 16 made by 1972, when the work was officially published: an edition of 12, plus two copies each for Kelly and Gemini.
Unlike the free sculpture above, the examples out in the world have various bases and pedestals that make me wonder if it’s a little top-heavy. Christie’s incorporated the base into the 50 7/8 in. height, but while they broke out the metal pieces, neither Brooke Alexander nor Matthew Marks included the base in the depth.
The truncated rectangular shape is one Kelly used as early as the 1950s; this one feels like it could be the hexagonal outline of a 3-D cube diagram. The mirror finish is very unusual in his work. After cutting, the 1-inch steel plate elements were ground, lapped, and polished on the sides and edges, then nickel- and chrome-plated. Which, I guess that’s ok, but could they not have just kept polishing? [Asked the guy who didn’t make one of these things, much less sixteen.]
Maybe Kelly did wonder the same thing, because the similarly scaled wall relief edition he made in 1985-86 Untitled (Gemini EK86-2128), was only polished, not plated. [It was only polished on the face and edges, though, and the steel is only 3/8-inch thick. There was also an edition with a sandblasted finish.] The shield shape was in heavy rotation; it showed up in paintings in the late 70s, and then a Cor-Ten steel relief in 1984, which TV producer Douglas Cramer owned.
So maybe I like the top pic so much because it actually feels like a mirror-finished object. Every other image of Mirrored Concorde makes it look like Featureless Matte Finish Concorde. Seeing James Mathews’ installation photo of the MoMA show, I can confirm.
Even on its wonky pedestal, behind its stanchion, and against its painted accent wall, Mirrored Concorde manages to look like a portal to another dimension. Because what it actually reflects is the world in front of it: the museum’s sculpture garden through the Philip Johnson addition’s windows, with one of Claes Oldenburg’s Ice Bag sculptures peeking its motorized head up. Let this be one more argument in support of photographing mirrors to look like mirrors.
I am slow, but the Ellsworth Kelly print that’s the first lot in Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s estate sale is even smaller than the smallest Kelly prints. Blue Curve, 1999, is just 8 x 6 inches. It was made as a benefit print for the Archives of American Art in a big edition, 220+38AP, so aggregated surface area-wise, it’s probably right in the middle.
Kelly was honored with a medal the AAA’s benefit gala in October 1999, which coincided with an exhibit of items from the artist’s archives in the Archives Gallery. The AAA had a gallery in the lobby of 1285 6th Avenue, the UBS Building with the Scott Burton street furniture.
“It’s the Lichtensteins’ tiny Ellsworth Kelly benefit print, Bonhams. What could it cost? $10?” [bonhams]
The house of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein has been emptied into the online showroom of Bonhams, where everything will sell this month. There are so many things that have a bit of excitement because they were the Lichtensteins’, like some rugs, chairs, dishware, books, but come on.
There is art they collected, nothing major, but still interesting. The drawing of his wife’s and the Lichtensteins’ heads sticking out of the water that Dan Flavin made from the shore in 1970. A photocopy edition? Ellsworth Kelly made about Paul Waldman, the artist husband of his Guggenheim curator Diane, who Roy once bought a house with in Southampton. The “DO NOT EVER WORK” brick Dorothy got from Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Chinese brick mill at the 2015 Venice Biennale, which I thought was an edition of 14,086, not 500. (I cannot tell you how much or why it bugs that no one mentions the Chinese characters are stamped backwards.)
But then there’s their Louise Lawler, a small photo, inscribed on the back: “Roy + Dorothy! M.C. + H.N.Y., L.L.” The edition number is 1/100, and it suddenly made me wish I’d been in the top 100 on Lawler’s Christmas card list in 1991.
According to its entry in the Roy Lichtenstein Catalogue Raisonné, that drawing, Xmas Ornament, 1963, was likely a gift from the artist to Emily & Burton Tremaine. Between 1973 and 1976, it rolled through six dealers, collectors, and auction houses before finding someone who wanted to keep it. Until November 1991, anyway, when Lawler photographed it at Sotheby’s. In those short weeks, did it all just come together with that euphoric satisfaction of finding the perfect gift for someone? Of course, she also did kind of plant a stake by declaring an edition of 100.
But maybe they weren’t all Christmas gifts after all. Marion Lambert’s AP2/10, with a new title, Mao and Ornament, and an impossible date of 1990/91 on the label, came from Metro Pictures. It was sold in 2021 to benefit charity. Ed. 40/100 was acquired from Metro Pictures in 1993. It didn’t sell in 2023 in Cincinnati. So plenty more out there for you, let this one go by, if not unnoticed, at least unbidden. I will take it for $10.
“It’s the Lichtensteins’ Lawler photo of a Lichtenstein, Bonhams. What could it cost? $10.” [bonhams]
William H. Johnson left South Carolina for New York when he was 17, and began studying painting at the National Academy of Design. He painted this self-portrait in his early 20s, giving himself lighter skin than in later portraits.
He went to Europe in 1926 to study modernism, married Danish artist Holcha Krake, and spent a decade working, showing, and traveling in Scandinavia. He painted several extraordinary, expressionistic views of Lofoten, Norway. These landscapes and his European-era figure paintings feel like they could have evolved from Soutine, or Hartley.
Johnson returned to NYC with Krake in 1938, and began painting in an African American vernacular mode that feels as close to Horace Pippin as to Picasso. After Krake’s death from cancer in 1944, Johnson moved back to Denmark, making American and African American history paintings for a while, but a mental health crisis led to his return to the States, the end of painting, and hospitalization until his death in 1970.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds over 1,000 works by Johnson, and has two dozen on view at the moment. The SAAM bio makes it sound like they rescued these works after Johnson’s death, but I think most, if not all, were donated upon the dissolution of the Harmon Foundation in 1967.
The Harmon Foundation was established by a white real estate developer named William Harmon to collect, promote, and exhibit art by Black artists. There are some problematics in the Harmon Foundation’s story—they removed portraits of W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson from exhibitions because of their communist sympathies, for example—and it’s not clear if Johnson’s reputation suffered from his association. It does feel like he’s been sort of stuck at one museum, though.
There’s a lot that doesn’t immediately make sense. But the most important thing—besides donating its large collection of art to HBCUs and the Smithsonian, and besides Johnson’s own work, of course—is that William Harmon created his foundation after years of pseudonymous philanthropy and non-predatory student loaning—under the name of an ancestor, Jedediah Tingle.