February 3, 2012
This is utterly fantastic. It's Quebecois pianist/composer Marc-André Hamelin's 1991-4 work for two player pianos, "Circus Galop," and because it occasionally hits all 12 staves or 21 notes simultaneously, it is unplayable by humans. The boingboing headline is a bit...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:43 AM
I don't think Hirst's assistants would agree that spots aren't about time, but Karen Rosenberg's line in her On Kawara review is nice:Speaking broadly, you could say that one is about time and the other is about money. (Though,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:07 AM
February 1, 2012
I haven't yet decided whether to more proactively engage the growing numbers of people who use Google as medium or subject for their artmaking, or to forge ahead alone, buoyed up by the certainty of my own unequaled, Googly aesthetic...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:54 PM
Joerg tweeted last night about a "[DESTROYED]" 1982 Gerhard Richter candle painting, and heeyeahsure, I'll look at that. It turns out though, that the artist's own term is not entirely accurate. Because according to his website, the painting, 2 Candles...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
January 31, 2012
The stories of Jasper Johns' Flag is almost as famous as the artwork itself. In 1958, Leo Castelli had come for a studio visit with Robert Rauschenberg, only to find Jasper Johns' work there, and offer the younger, unknown...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
January 29, 2012
Alright, the mourning process seems to be ending, but the Guggenheim still hasn't posted video of the crazy/awesome/all over the place speeches from "The Last Word," the TED-like symposium marathon organized last weekend for the end of Maurizio Cattelan's "All."...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:19 PM
January 27, 2012
This 1963 episode of I've Got A Secret pops up periodically. From this week on Boing Boing to Alex Ross's 2007 blog post searching for Karl Schenzer. And it is, indeed, pretty interesting. John Cale was recently arrived in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:35 PM
Marine Hugonnier, Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly), The New York Times (Week of February 21st to February 27th 2005) Now this gets very interesting very quickly. Jason, a sharp-eyed greg.org reader in Paris, just sent along...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:42 PM
I stopped by a friend's studio yesterday--which was fantastic, btw--and as I was leaving, and I noticed the cool, old Ellsworth Kelly exhibition poster in the bathroom, I so I was all, have you seen the Kelly edition of Die...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:45 AM
January 25, 2012
Ausgezeichnet! To promote his two shows in Munich this fall/winter, at the Pinakothek and the Haus der Kunst [which closed this week, btw], the local paper die Welt published a special issue in which all photos were replaced by Ellsworth...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:37 PM
Basically, yeah, there was no way I could just let Daniel Barnes' hearsay claim that there's a secret text encoded in each of Damien Hirist's spot paintings go untested last night. But the mechanics of decoding a Hirst Code, if...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:15 AM
January 24, 2012
Alright, I think we finally may be onto something. I switched to a high-density foam roller for this next coat, and though it looks kind of eggshelly in the photo, it actually ends up drying to a smoother finish...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:58 PM
January 23, 2012
Speaking of texts written in entirely unlikely places... I really have no idea what to make of the kicker in Daniel Barnes' Artslant review of the Brittania St installation of Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings:As to be expected with...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:06 PM
There is much to do, and much to write, but it'll have to wait. Because right this minute, a copy of Moby Dick typed on six rolls of toilet paper is for sale on eBay:MY FRIEND AND I ONCE...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:04 PM
January 21, 2012
I've come across ads while surfing through New Yorkers from the 1950s, but this is one of the first times I've seen actual Pablo Picasso silk screened fabric turn up on eBay. And there's a whole 16-yard run of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:06 PM
January 20, 2012
It's funny, all this time I've been looking hard at the brushstrokes of modernism, abstraction, and monochrome, trying to figure out how they were made--and, thus, how I might make some paintings myself--and I've ignored Jean Arp. When I started...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:37 PM
January 15, 2012
Another Sunday painting. Or another Sunday spent painting. I did another round of taping off and painting on the Dutch Camo Landscape photo of Noordwijk today. The first time, I did two identical gray polygons This time, I did three,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:35 PM
January 14, 2012
Well, that was a total surface disaster. The size and disposability of this crappy little foam roller made it irresistible. The bubbly eggshell finish that even contains a few crumbs of foam made it a total failure putting paint...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
January 12, 2012
A couple of things that I still wonder about about Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing: What did de Kooning think? The story of making it is always told by Rauschenberg, or from his side. Did de Kooning ever tell the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
January 11, 2012
Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, "drawing | traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame." via SFMOMA TIMELY BUT UNNECESSARY HOOK: LAST VISIT TO THE DE KOONING RETROSPECTIVE Part of the reason I hustled back...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:50 PM
January 9, 2012
"@takashipom #EGO Takashi with H.E Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani" via @QatarMuseumsAut I am in awe of the new, Povera-meets-Lars von Trier direction Takashi Murakami is taking his work. It's like pure signifier now. A master's bravura...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:41 AM
January 6, 2012
John, John, 1988, installed at Ann Temkin's Color Chart show in 2008, via moma Alright, before this thing gets too much farther, let's check what we know. From the Gagosian Gallery exhibition page::The exhibition will take place at once...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:59 PM
January 5, 2012
Oh, man, just last night I was goof-tweeting about this, and it turns out it's already a thing. Registration for The Complete Spot Challenge starts tomorrow:Visit all eleven Gagosian Gallery locations during the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:55 PM
January 4, 2012
It was a favorite in the Met's Pictures Generation show. And I liked her recent, similar show at Metro Pictures. But hey-ho, how awesome does Louise Lawler's show at Sprüth Magers look?? I mean, I might have been content...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
January 1, 2012
After processing the odd hippie hipness of the idea of John Cage driving Merce Cunningham and his dance company around the country in a VW Microbus, it was really dancer Carolyn Brown's excellent memoir that persuaded me to see the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
December 29, 2011
The very special presentation of Merce & John: The VW Years will return after this brief announcement from holy crap, Richard Serra's suburban! Thanks, wary meyers! Now don't get all stalky. And stay tuned, eventually, finally, for Donald Judd's Land...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
December 23, 2011
Sometimes all Mark Grotjahn wants is to dance. Here are four five videos of those times, in chronological order: Nov. 2007: Jan. 2008: May 2008: Feb. 2011 [via artblogartblog]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
December 22, 2011
You know what I never got around to doing in 2010? Finishing the catalogue of all the designs created for the Alcoa Forecast ad campaign in the late 1950s. That was the postwar, civilian/consumer-oriented, Glorious Aluminum Future PR campaign that...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:53 PM
December 21, 2011
Electrum @ Reference with Hugh Scott Douglas, 2011 Oh, man, basically every thing in Ben Schumacher's shows and his source and reference material and his investigations and archive divings and whatever the hell else in his tumblrs is just...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:42 PM
The VW bus makes many appearances in John Cage's own writings, especially his tour diaries in Empty Words: Writings '73-78:After winning the mushroom quiz in Italy, I bought a Volkswagen microbus for the company. Joe's was open but said it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:59 PM
December 19, 2011
Let me tell you, spare, door-sized black & white prints in screen-like triptychs are not what I think of when I hear "Carlo Mollino" and "photography." [Google search possibly nsfw] But Becky Beasley's show "The Outside," at Francesca Minini...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:26 PM
[l to r] Viola Farber, Bruce King, Remy Charlip, Carolyn Brown & Merce Cunningham performing Nocturnes in 1956. photo CDF/Louis A. Stevenson, Jr. via the estate project Remy Charlip was an early collaborator in Merce Cunningham's orbit. Years before...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
December 17, 2011
John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg photographed in 1960 by Richard Avedon In a few days, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform for the last time. I have not been a close follower of Cunningham's work, except...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
While I was painting today, I first listened to a slightly underwhelming Q&A from MIT with Otto Piene and Hans Haacke, which was short, and so my iTunes started shuffling, which never happens. I don't really listen to music,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:01 PM
While moving some art around this week, I found a bag of acrylics I bought early last year, when I planned to paint the Dutch camo landscapes. Trying to figure out how to do it led me to start...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:10 PM
Since I appear to only be able to find the time bandwidth to paint on the weekend, sometime I might have to investigate terms that already haunt me anyway, like "weekend painter." At least I'm not painting on Sunday,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:01 PM
December 14, 2011
OK, here are some more details about how the crazy-awesome synthesizer/lightboard came together in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, courtesy of Ray Morton's 2007 book on the making of the film. Maybe not surprisingly, it grew and evolved along...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
I'm really bummed to have missed The Gifting of Bill Walton's Studio on December 4th, the extraordinary culmination of the ICA Philadelphia's memorial recreation/exhibit of the late local master's crowded workplace. As ICA blogger/curator Rachel Pastan tells it, the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
This is so awesome. I know there's no sound, but it seems like I can hear all those reality TV show team members' hearts beating. [Michael David Murphy via waxy]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:11 AM
December 12, 2011
I don't know what, if anything, these mean, but these two stories last week made me wonder about the relationship of art and politics and Washington DC as viewed from a political/media perspective. First up, and most disturbing, was the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:24 PM
The new issue of Public Art Dialogue is out--as you know, right?--and it includes an article by Drake University art historian Maura Lyons that looks at how Disney, photography, and Ken Burns altered the Gettysburg National Military Park. In the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
Here is a PBS Newshour Q&A with Steven Tepper, discussing his research into why art--or the arts, really, since he looks at theater, libraries, music, too--triggers protests in some communities at some times and not others. He found that...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
December 10, 2011
"Season 3, Episode 3: 'Golden Anniversary'" This is epic. Painting the key sweaters of The Cosby Show, one episode at a time, in chronological order. Which is awesome, not because it charts the evolution of the Cosby Sweater; any...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:34 PM
December 9, 2011
BELLMAC-32A Layout in the Ball Labs, Murray Hill Lobby, image: ieeeghn.org Look closely, at least until I can track down a larger version of this snapshot. Because it may be the world's largest plotter pen drawing. It's a 20x20-foot...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
December 8, 2011
A few months ago, I was asked to write something about Ray and Charles Eames by the folks at Humanities Magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH had provided some funding to Jason Cohn and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
Here's video of James Bridle giving a live, keynote speech version of his awesome tumblr, The New Aesthetic, at a web conference in Australia. Lots of good stuff, though not much that will be new to TNA followers. There are...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
December 7, 2011
Here's another recipe from John Cage, this one maybe from a stay in Ithaca? Before he went vegan, obviously. From Empty words: writings '73-'78, p. 91:Holiday Inn: Room 135. Four cups of ground walnuts; 4 cups of flour; 12 tablespoons...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
December 6, 2011
We took the family to Hillwood over the holidays. It's Marjorie Merriweather Post's house-turned-house museum, and it's kind of bizarre, frankly. Not seriously wack, but just a low-grade oddness which, who knows, maybe the passage of time and the accretion...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:17 PM
A little while ago, I got an email from LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, asking if it was alright to reference some photos I took a few years ago of unusually awesome modernist houses in Salt Lake City. She planned...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
December 5, 2011
The new issue of Cabinet arrived today [free with my new iPad case!], and it includes a fascinating article by Susan Schuppli about the 18 1/2-minutes of erased audiotape at the center of the Watergate scandal. Apparently, the National Archives...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:36 PM
December 2, 2011
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross posted this extraordinary video of Philip Glass and the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly outside Lincoln Center, where the Metropolitan Opera performed Satyagraha, the composer's 2008 production of his 1980 telling of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:00 PM
December 1, 2011
Whether you're sitting at home, poking at your remote to stretch, squash, and crop your Criterion movies; or preparing a video group show in Miami, Electronic Arts Intermix's High Definition Video Guide is an indispensable source of basic technical information:If...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:04 AM
November 29, 2011
Sebastian Errazuriz came up with the idea for his coke slab when he saw friends scratching out lines on a coffee table. The indentations make it so easy, a child could do it! It's so functional and brilliant, I'm...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:13 PM
November 27, 2011
One of the startling images Alan Taylor included from the EPA's DOCUMERICA collection is by Bruce McAllister. The caption:A train on the Southern Pacific Railroad passes a five-acre pond, which was used as a dump site by area commercial...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
November 26, 2011
Following on from the multiple installments of archival World War II images on hisphotoblog In Focus, Alan Taylor has assembled selections from another remarkable public photo archive, this time from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the early 1970s, the newly...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:41 PM
November 25, 2011
In what is probably the most ideologically analytical essay ever written about paperweights, curator Barbara Casavecchia notes that many of the 60 paperweights she selected from Enzo Mari's collection "are the product of a manual labor--serving as fragmented evidence of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:16 AM
November 23, 2011
(K-2-28) This is the first of our United States, Department of Commerce, Trade Fair domes. It was erected in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1957. The U.S. Department of Commerce came to me in an emergency and with a very small...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:37 PM
November 22, 2011
Apparently, as a state-of-the-art battleship in the US Navy during the 1920s, the USS Maryland was "in great demand for special occasions." Which might give a hint about why she was tricked out at some point in these dazzling...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
image via artreview Oh, man, oh, man. I think this clears up a lot. Finally, here is a quote that gives some insight on Rirkrit Tiravanija's approach to art objects and object-making. The artist is discussing the making of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
Looking through Social Photography II, Carriage Trade's second Phone Camera benefit auction, I find this photo by Sarina Basta, Zapata Headquarters, Cuernavaca, and I'm like, Zapata? I swear, I've seen this before. But not quite. In the Diego Rivera murals...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
I'm sure the original's long gone, but I want the Moog synthesizer-equipped lightboard from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The idea of communicating with extraterrestrials via "a basic tonal vocabulary" synched to a gridded light show is like...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:00 AM
November 19, 2011
Theoretically, I can get the prep and sanding and tacking and painting of a new coat, and the cleanup, and a bit of documentation, done in a little over an hour now. But I also find it takes a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:33 PM
November 18, 2011
gerhard richter, blood red mirror, cr736-3, 1991, image via gerhard-richter.com via jenettem's twitter/tumblr to cavetocanvas's tumblr You see the problem: this is exactly the effect I'm trying to get with my Rijksoverheid Rood paintings. Only with a brush. I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:50 PM
November 17, 2011
I confess, I haven't checked out Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds since the Terraserver era. But I just checked them out again on Google Maps, and I've gotta say: China has taken the lead in the awesome, Earth Art-like, military industrial...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
November 16, 2011
Byron Kim, Untitled (for S.B.), image via jamescohan.com Byron Kim's first show at James Cohan consists of large, nearly monochromatic paintings of the night sky in Brooklyn. Or perhaps they're of memories of the night sky in Brooklyn, or...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
There are so many fascinating things about the Gene Davis Giveaway, I almost don't know where to start. And I'm embarrassed to not have known about it sooner. Gene Davis Giveaway, or Give Away, or as it was called...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:27 AM
November 15, 2011
Gotta hand it to the Bloomberg Administration: scheduling the expulsion of the Occupy Wall Street protesters for the middle of the night, and then arresting and beating and harassing journalists covering the raid, thereby minimizing--but apparently not eliminating entirely--the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
November 14, 2011
How Ya Like Me Now?, a large painting of a white Jesse Jackson by David Hammons, was one of seven outdoor works in "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," an ambitious exhibition organized in the Fall of 1989...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:39 PM
These two quotes from Coco Fusco and Christian Haye's 1995 Frieze essays on David Hammons reminded me briefly of, say, gala artists and, say, Jacob Kassay, respectively:'Visual art may be the obdurately white and upper-middle class field of our culture....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:17 AM
November 13, 2011
OOPS! Never mind! In my dead-serious indignation, I had completely overlooked the potential of Marina Abramovic's MoCA Gala for pathetic comedy. Fortunately, we have Ryan Trecartin, who speaks diva absurdity fluently. Trecartin's livetweeted photo report from inside the tent is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:32 PM
November 12, 2011
At the invitation of Jeffrey Deitch, Yvonne Rainer has seen a rehearsal of Marina Abramovic's performance art project for this year's MoCA Los Angeles gala. And in a new letter to Deitch, she has refined and reiterated her condemnation of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:36 PM
November 11, 2011
Insurrection, 1962, image: corcoran.org I needed to see some hard-to-find Chris Burden catalogues--more on that later, but soon--and the quickest place I could find them was the Corcoran School's library. I called ahead, and they had them waiting for...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
November 10, 2011
You'd think I'd learn the importance of clearing browser tabs by now. I've had this eBay listing open for a couple of weeks now, thinking I'd buy it. And then last night I decided to pull the trigger. And...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
November 7, 2011
In 2005, designer Ian Adelman and his colleagues spotted The Gate chasing Robert Smithson's posthumously realized Floating Island. Adelman snapped a photo, which ended up on the front page of the New York Times. It was only revealed some...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
Paul Thek's birthday was last week, so I probably should have posted this photo of his re-creation of Tatlin's Monument to the Third International then. Thek installed this version of his Tower of Babel at his only US museum...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
Not sure what's cooler about JWZ's post about visiting the repurposed Christian Science church that is now The Internet Archive's San Franscisco Mothership: their slick and simple book digitizing station setup, or the "terracotta army of avatars of their long-term...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:41 AM
Sweet, near the end of World War I, Paris planned and began construction on a "Sham Paris," decoy trains, stations, avenues and factories, to confuse German aerial bombers. Above, a detail from the photo, "Luminous canvas on the ground...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
November 6, 2011
I count it as a matter of pride and oddly satisfying accomplishment to learn I'd been thinking some of the same things about the International Prototype Kilogram that Charles Ray was thinking about the International Prototype Kilogram. Picture Piece:...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:47 PM
November 5, 2011
The classic saying, so closely associated with the conservative icon economist Milton Friedman, just sort of came out last night during a brief Twitter discussion with Bill Powhida and Magda Sawon about what, exactly, my point is on Rirkrit...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:47 PM
November 4, 2011
For he that hath eyes and was paying attention last year, The Selby let him see. For the rest of us, the show at Sperone Westwater is the first time to see Tom Sachs' awesome Donald Judd furniture hacked...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
Thanks to Awl for reminding me that not everyone is not talking about Rirkrit Tiravanija's sexy, blingy objects. I'd found this last week, but it was crashing my browser, and it may do the same to yours, probably because it's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:29 PM
November 3, 2011
I've tweeted on this a bit already, but it's really worth repeating: Richard Prince's appeal of the Patrick Cariou copyright infringement decision is a really great read. The brief was filed last week, and I finally got around to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:34 PM
November 2, 2011
Punishment Park? How did I not know about Peter Watkins' incendiary 1971, anti-war, anti-fascist, faux-news documentary? I mean, it was the movie Rirkrit chose to broadcast on his unlicensed TV station in the Guggenheim. I sat in Anthology's rickety...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:07 PM
November 1, 2011
Just this morning, while I was watching Sarah Sze's 2010 lecture at the Smtihsonian American Art Museum, and she was showing videos of her installations for the first time [borrowed, with permission, she said, from various YouTube users, which is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:49 PM
October 31, 2011
Razzle dazzle camouflage painting was not, as the photographs would have you believe, entirely black and white. [For that matter, neither was WWI itself, but that is a matter for another day.] In any case, British camoufleur Norman Wilkinson...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:19 PM
I love a lot of Jason Rhoades' work, but only have a little. I wish I'd known about this sooner: Blue Room and Love Seat is an edition produced with 1301PE's Brian Butler in 1995, maybe when it was still...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:27 PM
A piece I left out of my Rirkrit's blingy objects post yesterday may be more important than I originally thought, and for more reasons than its shininess. Untitled 2005 (the air between the chain-link fence and the broken bicycle...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:27 PM
October 30, 2011
I've been writing this post in my head for months, years, even, but so many pieces have piled up in my browser tabs, it's slowing my computer down. And plus, this weekend MoMA announced that they acquired and will exhibit...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:40 PM
October 27, 2011
I'm so blown away by this. RO/LU's and welcomeprojects' project for this year's High Desert Test Sites was called Here There, There Here. To call it a contemporary nod to earthworks almost feels backward; it's like the earthworks movement...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:48 PM
October 26, 2011
Well that's kind of fantastic, like Victorian- era Rauschenberg. Apparently, to commemorate Her Majesty the Queen's to the Isle of Jersey, The Jersey Herald printed copies of the September 11, 1846 edition of the newspaper on silk panels, which were...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:18 AM
Huh. I guess Artforum's back-of-the-book review section does not purport to ignore the art market's overdetermining forces any more. Ben Carlson's review of Jacob Kassay's show this summer at L&M Arts in Los Angeles is framed around the burning...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:30 AM
October 23, 2011
Joie de Vivre, Mark di Suvero, Zuccotti Park, detail of image via ourtravelpics.com Or maybe #OccupyJoiedeVivre, then? Either way, please tell me I'm not the first or only one to think of this. Actually, please tell me someone's already...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:08 PM
October 21, 2011
See, this is why I wonder about whether Gerhard Richter, "shocked" by seeing Edward Steichen's MoMA exhibit Family of Man in West Berlin in 1955 while he was a student, ever went on to research Steichen's earlier photography exhibitions,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:48 PM
The Tate video of Nic Serota and his team in Gerhard Richter's studio is nice for many reasons: it includes some squeegee action scenes from Corrina Belz's Gerhard Richter Painting [which I'm trying to get a copy of; Is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:55 AM
October 20, 2011
I'm sure photomural historians out there are chuckling, wondering when I was finally going to catch up on this, but HOLY CRAP, PEOPLE! ANSEL ADAMS PHOTO MURALS! Alright, it's not quite so unknown. The Polaroid ransacking auction last year at...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:33 PM
October 15, 2011
Via Wayne Bremser comes this nice interview with Doug Rickard, who talks about his Google Street View photo project, A New American Picture. Rickard is in HERE, an exhibit of at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. [Bremser's notes...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:11 PM
October 14, 2011
ce ci n'est pas un Razzle Dazzle? Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Meschers, 1951, moma When tiny scans of Gwyneth Paltrow's Interview interview with Ellsworth Kelly first appeared on tumblr, the only thing you could read was his pullquote about...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
October 13, 2011
Hoo man, David has an interview with Ball and Nogue about their High Desert Test Site project which is called Yucca Crater, and which appears to be an earthwork, but is man-made. It's a tricked out plywood recreational structure...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
Karen Meyerhoff, Managing Director of Business Development at the Guggenheim Museum, and my new hero:People come to an art museum in part to be inspired by the works of art on view there. And we develop an emotional relationship with...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
October 12, 2011
This is pretty awesome. Or it was, for the second there when I first saw the thumbnail in the lot list and thought Maurizio was channeling Baldessari or Prince or whomever. It'd still make a nice painting, though. And it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:37 PM
October 11, 2011
It's all in the book, so you could definitely buy it and read about it in depth, but it didn't occur to me until Brian Dupont tweeted about it ["Aspen : #OccupyWallSt :: St. Barts : Canal Zone. Every apocalypse...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:56 PM
Ever since Wired's article on the history of the International Prototype Kilogram, or Le Grand K, and the debate over its replacement, I've been thinking I'd write something about them again. So I went back to reread my 2009 post...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
You know, for a couple of weeks now, I've had this thing Bomb Magazine tumbld sitting in my browser, some teaser for their archive about Richard Serra dangling a chicken in Rauschenberg's face at Yale, which, of course, he did,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
October 10, 2011
From the Frieze blog, the Goldsmiths brain trust answers the burning question, "How to get to Turbine Hall"?:'Eleven Statements Around Art Writing' is co-authored by the teaching team -Maria Fusco, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin and Yve Lomax - of MFA...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
I now know that the bubbles sand right out. But what I learned this time is the importance of checking to see if you missed any spots in your smooth, monochrome surfaces before you clean up your brush and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:57 PM
I was very saddened to learn that the great designer John Neuhart passed away last month. He and his wife and fellow designer Marilyn were early and influential colleagues of Ray and Charles Eames, and have been heavily involved...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:53 PM
If I've accomplished little else with my grandiose ambitions for my satelloon fetish, it has at least turned me into several people's go-to guy for odd projects involving shiny balls and/or large amounts of Mylar. So thanks Michael Dumontier...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
October 6, 2011
I'm bummed to miss it but "While You Wait," a group show organized by Brian Dupont in Extra Gallery, his Chelsea art firm's expropriated lobby is opening right now. [Spoiler alert on the venue's lobbyness? I can't quite tell,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:51 PM
October 5, 2011
At MoMA yesterday, I was talking about some Google Maps and Street View projects with a trustee, who was all, "There's an artist in the New Photography show that uses Google Maps, they're stunning!" And it only occurred to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
So I got the piece installed last night for "While You Wait...", organized by Brian Dupont. It really only works in the daylight, so I won't know yet how it actually looks, but it went in just as I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
For the record, I think a press conference is a pretty suboptimal forum for discussing art, even worse than for discussing film. So while I was first leaning towards laughing at Gerhard Richter's apparently gruff, uselessly short-for-a-sound-bite answers at yesterday's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
October 4, 2011
Holy smokes, The Brooklyn Rail reviewed Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta:Appropriation art is such an accepted part of the contemporary vernacular that some already find it passé--or at the very least no longer trendy. Gagosian isn't exactly at the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:51 AM
October 3, 2011
This interior shot of Fuller/Sadao's US Pavilion at Expo67 almost has it all: installation view of the giant paintings Lichtenstein, Newman, Warhol and Johns made for Alan Solomon's American Painting Now; plus a giant photomural of the moon, perfect...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
I'll probably write some more about Andy Warhol's Shadows, but I want to find more details about its creation and Heiner Friedrich's involvement. In the mean time, though, I just came across a 1985 Richard Serra quote from the Pratt...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:18 AM
October 1, 2011
Here's a look I'm calling Red Steel. The other side. These stalactites form after the panels are put away to dry, I guess by the paint settling across the surface. Then I have to sand them down before doing the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
September 30, 2011
Well, let's just get this out of the way: if you can only see one Warhol exhibition in Washington this year, see Shadows. The Warhol Headlines show is very slight. It's hard to call it a highlight, but a series...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
I-- hmm:Pointing out that the museum's difficulties in importing art duty free have arisen out of the present tariff law's definition of art, Mr Packard said that it was not the function of government to define art "any more than...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:03 AM
Kriston Capps' tweet to Powhida about art and immortality instantly reminded me of RH Quaytman's conversation with Steel Stillman, which ran in Art in America last summer, and which upended my own comfortable memory of first encountering Quaytman's little...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:38 AM
September 29, 2011
Mondo Patrick tipped me off to this a little while back, and for a while there, it was kind of turning my table world upside-down. It's an autoprogettazione table by Enzo Mari, of course, model 1123 xE, one of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
The story of Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space getting hung up at US Customs in 1926, which did not believe it was a work of art, is well-known. [Just for fun, here's a story about Richard Feigen smuggling a Brancusi...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:48 AM
September 28, 2011
"K32 HMS Helsingborg Anchored off Gotska Sandoen, cropped," wikipedia via tna Every time I go back to James Bridle's tumblr The New Aesthetic, I'm like, "The New Aesthetic! I'm soaking in it!" and remind myself to visit more often....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
Gerhard Richter: Peinture 2010-2011, installation view, Marian Goodman Paris, image via Yes, well. While everyone is transfixed with Gerhard Richter's c. 2009 on-camera squeegee technique, the artist himself has moved on to a schmear of the digital kind. Gerhard...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
September 27, 2011
I was stoked to see [thanks to Paul's link from the Walker's Off Center] that Trevor Paglen included Murmurs of Earth on the reading list he shared with art21. The book is the authoritative account of the making of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
Sometimes I really just am slow to put things together. I mean, I've written at length, ad nauseam, even, about the history of Mark Cross. Mondo-Blogo had a huge post months ago about what Superfreaks they are. There's the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:58 AM
September 26, 2011
I need a way to put the people in my Twitter feed in touch with each other. Because what are we fighting for, if not the right to all 50 flavors of Doritos?...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:10 PM
No disrespect for DPC and whoever else he sends off with The Digital, but Jill Krementz' photoreport from the Picasso to Koons: Artist as Jeweler show at the Museum of Arts and Design, or the MAD1 is the mad-funniest...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:42 PM
San Francisco collector Harry "Hunk" Anderson's 1973 letter to Leo Castelli is now in the Archives of American Art. I am going to take a wild guess and say that his awesome letterhead was designed by his good friend...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
September 22, 2011
In her post about how her Mario Kart reflexes started cropping up while she was driving a real car, Sally Adee introduced me to a new term, "everting," which William Gibson introduced in his 2007 novel, Spook Country, and which...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
September 21, 2011
Rirkrit Tiravanija, ink on paper, shown at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Nov-Dec 2008 as part of JG Reads, image: detail of a shot by James Nova from the opening. j-No has more images of two other dollar bill drawings....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:44 PM
September 20, 2011
Spectrum IV, 1967, image via moma Amazing how you can look at something so often, for so long, how you can like it, seek it out, even, follow it, poke around the awesome/odd parts, all without really realizing what...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
For his performance/project The Long Glance, Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan VanDyke spent 40 hours standing in front of and looking at Jackson Pollock's painting Convergence, 1952 at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. He carried this out over the course of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
September 19, 2011
As those who kindly email me about run-on italics--and those who don't--know, I don't actually visit this site site as often as I probably should. Which is part of the reason I didn't notice until just now this nice side-by-side...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
Cady Noland's Tanya as Bandit, 1989, General Idea, and Guerrilla Girls at MoMA, 2010, image via greeds Welcome to another installment of Things I've Been Meaning To Post For Months. Only this time, the longer I wait, the more...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
September 16, 2011
Once again, I'm getting burned for procrastinating on a project. And once again, I'm forced to reckon with how susceptible we are to the illusion a company can create of cultural stability and reliability, even as it constantly effects changes...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:14 PM
September 15, 2011
Gotta get a piece of that Gerhard Richter Painting. After completing a documentary about the artist's Cologne Cathedral stained glass windows in 2007, filmmaker Corinna Belz began working on another project, filming Richter at work in his studio. She...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:32 PM
image: nymag The awesomeness of David Byrne's giant, inflatable globe shoved under the High Line gives us a good chance to look back. To remember David Byrne's pioneering show of PowerPoint Art at Pace in 2003. And also to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
September 13, 2011
When is a Flavin not a Flavin? Lot 3 in the upcoming contemporary sale at Christie's London is a work by Dan Flavin, or at least part of one. Untitled (to Marianne II) is a signed diagram for a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:52 AM
September 10, 2011
My Suitor, Matt Connors, image: vwberlin FInally, images of Matt Connors' show, Line Breaks, which just opened at VeneKlasen Werner in Berlin. I've slowly/recently come to find his work rather captivating, and after he posted a teaser image or...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
It was the other night, while Googling around for Tris Vonna-Michell info, that I found my way back to Carefully Aimed Darts, an awesome art-related weblog which went dormant about a year and a half ago. And I remembered...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:12 PM
September 9, 2011
"You cannot imagine how happy I was to read your email." That was the almost-immediate reply to my request to stop by MoMA's Painting & Sculpture department to discuss Vern Blosum and to review the collection file for Time Expired,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
So, my mind is kind of blowing because Vern Blosum is in a show opening tomorrow. Blosum's work was included in some of the very first exhibitions of Pop Art in the early 1960s. His deadpan paintings of objects...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:24 PM
September 6, 2011
So you should really read Daniel Kasman's review of the Venice debut of Mark Lewis's awesome-sounding short film, Black MIrror At The National Gallery, because Kasman is sensitive to both the tone and surprise/reveal of the film in a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:58 PM
September 5, 2011
Another inadvertent Google find, also from the World War II School of propaganda art. In anticipation for an invasion of Japan, 1945 LIFE Magazine wanted to give the general public a fighter pilot's-eye view of ground attacks. Perhaps because...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
Instead of jumping to the first search result, Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button should go to something tangentially related but certifiably awesome and probably better than what you were looking for in the first place. For the first datapoint...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:02 PM
September 3, 2011
So. Found the local Pantone shop and brought home a liter of Hollandlac oil-based enamel in Rijksoverheid Rood, aka PMS 485c. Ordered some small galvannealed steel and white aluminum panels, both paint-ready, and cut as close to A4 as...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
September 2, 2011
Between 1981 and 1985, Paul Tschinkel and Marc H. Miller produced 17 episodes of ART/newyork, a subscription-based video magazine about contemporary art for use, incredibly, in public schools and libraries. Their 1982 interview with Richard Serra, a Yale classmate of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:30 PM
I am aware of the work of Pablo Neruda Gerhard Richter. I have not been reading Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007 straight through, of course, but it's been with me a lot lately. And it's kind of annoyed me that there...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:30 AM
September 1, 2011
Chiang Mai farmer/laborer Lung Neaw has worked with RIrkrit Tiravanija for several years now. He helped build the artist's house. Tiravanija's footage of him has appeared in various gallery and museum installations. And Saturday, Tiravanija's film, Lung Neaw Visits...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:58 PM
August 31, 2011
So lately, I've been thinking a lot about The Dutch, and their politics and art. The Rijkshuisstijl and 1 Logo Project, which redesigned and centralized the Dutch government's visual identity, which happened to coincide with political shifts to the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:57 PM
Sam Thorne in this Summer's Frieze looks at writers writing about looking at fictional art. He includes the hero [sic] of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the post-poststructuralist filmmaker James O. Incandenza, whose lost masterpiece gives the novel its title:Incandenza...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
August 30, 2011
I was intrigued by Roy Lichtenstein's Prop For A Film when it showed up last summer at Phillips in London. Obviously, the main thing was the work itself: a large [3.5 x 8 ft] abstract, shaped field of Ben-Day...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
August 26, 2011
People walking the city streets with made-on-the-spot chairs. First there was the Chaise Bordelaise. Then it was the Sedia Veneziana. And yet, though The Generator by Raumlabor has had two incarnations at Storefront for Art & Architecture this year,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
image: designboom Enzo Mari was brought in to design the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Vaudon-Vodun, African Voodoo Art from the Collection of Anne and Jacques Kerchache. It's simple and spectacular, and designboom has, as usual, rather comprehensive visual...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:10 PM
August 22, 2011
Oh brother, I have this giant post mostly written about how Leo Steinberg's awesome 1997 lecture Encounters With Rauschenberg includes all these references that show that, not only did he recognize the intimate interrelationships between Johns' and Rauschenberg's early...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:26 PM
August 19, 2011
The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security on the government's deployment of body scanner technology on streets and in roving vans. These are the three pages of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
August 18, 2011
Via Tyler Green comes another awesome installment of Alan Taylor's photoblogging journey through WWII for The Atlantic. This time, a selection of stunning Kodachrome transparencies made by the Office of War Information, selected from the Library of Congress's growing digitized...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
Fear not, I have not given up the search for the missing Jasper Johns Flag painting. The one which was in Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine, Short Circuit, a combine which was originally shown with the title, Construction with J.J. Flag....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
August 16, 2011
So wonderful. William Smith writes about visiting Robert Breer's home studio as part of Triple Canopy's publication in residency last Winter at MOCA Tucson. Which sounds like the awesomest boondoggle ever, btw: Breer famously composed most of his films one...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
The backlog around here is so big, I was joking with a friend this morning that I should rename the blog, "Things I've Been Meaning To Write About." But for some reason, I can't let another day go by...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:59 PM
August 15, 2011
I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated with the Netherlands, or more precisely, why it's the source/site/subject of so much of my art/object/image/culture interest. Maybe it's because of New York, which has always felt to me of a piece with...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:15 PM
August 14, 2011
I've had Michelle Kuo's interview with Robert Breer [artforum, nov 2010] open in my browser tabs for months now, ever since Steve Roden posted about his incredible little toy Float, which was sold at MoMA's gift shop in 1970,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:41 PM
Everyone was so hyped up about the extraordinary, long New Yorker feature detailing the hunting and killing of Osama Bin Laden, that well, obviously, I couldn't post about it at the time. But I was so pissed at Helmut Lang...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:18 PM
August 12, 2011
image: portlandart.net I confess, I was as taken as the next guy by the Shiny Object-ivity of Jacob Kassay's electroplated solo debut at Eleven Rivington in 2009. Next guys like Portland Art's Jeff Jahn, who wrote the show felt...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
August 3, 2011
Busy? Oh, yes! But never too busy to turn someone else's PDF into an artist book! When @borthwick tweeted this yesterday morning about "a spectacular calibration failure at Google Books" where "Beautiful, digital errors become art," I knew I'd have...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:19 AM
July 31, 2011
image: the legacy photo project Where'd I get this link to The Great Picture, the world's biggest photograph taken with the world's biggest camera? In 2006, a group of photographers working as part of The Legacy Project, which is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:42 PM
July 30, 2011
Robert Smithson, "Conversation in Salt Lake City," 1972:There's a word called entropy. These are kind of like entropic situations that hold themselves together. It's like the Spiral Jetty is physical enough to be able to withstand all these climate changes,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:16 PM
July 29, 2011
In the early Cold War of the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union countered American condemnation of its repressive actions in East Germany and Hungary with criticism of the US's internal policies of segregation and racial discrimination. Planners of the US...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:19 AM
July 27, 2011
What's the opposite of writer's block, the thing where you have so much damn good stuff to write about, you're paralyzed into inaction? Because that's what I've got, and August vacation voids or not, I just can't help it;...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
July 26, 2011
I'm looking into ways to paint on aluminum, and so I've come back to Gerhard Richter's 4900 Farben, which is made up of 196 Alu-dibond panels, each with 25 lacquered [aluminum?] squares mounted onto them. Whatever the exact process, they...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:31 PM
July 25, 2011
In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, 1961 I'm long overdue for updates on the search for the Jasper Johns Flag Painting that went missing from Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine, Short Circuit. I'll get to them...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:27 AM
July 16, 2011
Mirror Stratum, 1966, Robert Smithson, image via moma Robert Smithson's Mirror Stratum is a longtime favorite of mine. These crystalline and strata sculptures are like abstracted geological or topographical structures, which is awesome enough. But these mirror [there's at...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
July 14, 2011
The short answer is yes, Dave Hickey's writing was even more off-the-wall in the Seventies, and you really might just as well scroll straight down to the song. Otherwise, I just brought home a stack of old Art In Americas,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:26 AM
July 13, 2011
Underlying [literally] this whole Spiral Jetty situation is the fact that Smithson constructed the Jetty on so-called sovereign land, the land under a body of water--in this case, Great Salt Lake--that is claimed by the state under Public Trust doctrine....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:46 AM
July 10, 2011
As you might expect, I've been going deep into the history and context of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty lately. I'm in Salt Lake City right now, meeting folks and listening and trying to gather some firsthand perspectives on the issues...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
July 7, 2011
I've begun speaking to enough people on the ground that it wouldn't have gone unnoticed for much longer, but now word's got out that I've established a foundation to bid on the site of Robert Smtihson's Spiral Jetty, a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:45 PM
July 6, 2011
In the Spring of 1991, I was about nine months out of school, and six months into a new job. After striking up a conversation with a documentary film crew from NHK at Tennessee Mountain in SoHo, I'd bailed on...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:07 AM
July 5, 2011
Add Jonathan Monk to the list of artist Enzo Mari fans. For the Brussels gallery D&A Lab's show at Design Miami Basel Miami Wynwood Art Week Whatever Fair last month, Monk created Mari Thirteen, an edition of Mari's autoprogettazione...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:24 PM
July 4, 2011
I have no willpower. I was going to hold off posting about this incredible project found on an incredible blog until I happily scored the book, but I couldn't wait. Now I can only hope that my post will...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:11 PM
Doug Rickard, Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, 2008, "A New American Picture," via bremser Thanks to Joerg, I've had it in my browser tabs for almost a month now, meaning to write about it, but the TL;DR version is, Wayne Bremser's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
July 1, 2011
In May, Steve Roden wrote very nicely about Fionn Meade's "Time Again" show at Sculpture Center, especially the conversation between one of his paintings and a little-known photograph of Projecktion, a Blinky Palermo project from in 1971, in which...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:07 AM
June 30, 2011
As I mentioned the other day, I've been going through our storage space, getting these time capsule-like pops of memory from old files and boxes and stuff. One of the more unexpectedly unexpected encounters: print photos. I just don't have...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:21 AM
June 27, 2011
We're consolidating storage spaces between New York and Washington, and it's given me a chance to reorganize a bit. I found a couple of boxes my 1994 self apparently just threw stuff into, sealed up, and shipped off, almost...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:30 PM
Meridith Pingree ----- Blue Curtain Meridith Pingree's in a show right now at Freight + Volume. Thanks, Anaba for the heads up on this fascinating-looking work. It reminds me a bit of Rebecca Horn's work, which, frankly, I haven't seen...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
June 26, 2011
The near-universal consensus from the VIP opening was that the Italian Pavilion exhibition curated by art critic/Berlusconi apparatchik Vittorio Sgarbi was an unalloyed, over-politicized disaster. Yet so far, I have seen very little substantive criticism or engagement with it. Rome-based...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:41 PM
June 22, 2011
Robert Rauschenberg's massive 1970 silk screen edition, Currents sure is hard to miss. And not just because it's 18 meters long. MoMA's copy from the edition [of just six] has been wrapped around the corner of the second floor galleries...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:36 PM
Ro/Lu is en fuego these days, in case you didn't know, and I've been lucky enough to get warmed by their fire. First off, they've been doing this Simple Chair project, an exploration of how and where our stuff is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:06 PM
Last year about this time, after seeing Jeff Koons's BMW Art Car, I tossed off the idea that artists could be cranking out vinyl wraps as artworks. Which I will happily assume is why designboom and Porsche had this contest...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
June 20, 2011
After hipster bouncy castles and food truck happy hours, and shuffling like giddy commuters along a packed, 10-block-long sidewalk the size of a lesser tunnel passageway at Penn Station, I was forced the other night to contemplate the cheery,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:06 AM
June 19, 2011
I've been moving art and life at our storage unit in Long Island City several times the last couple of weeks, and it's given me time to really look. Look across the water to the most spectacular structures built...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:13 PM
I'm always thinking of the Danish artist collaborative Superflex in terms of media or information, action or activism. But they sure can make some fine-looking, seemingly commodifiable art objects, too. A few years ago, as part of their Copyshop...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
June 18, 2011
Away | Out, 2010, Seth Adeslberger via Seth Adelsberger's evocation of Erased de Kooning Drawing in this work on found paper manages to be both calculated and offhand. It was one of my favorites in "Out of Practice," Baltimore...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:56 AM
June 15, 2011
So when I first published the Richard Prince Canal Zone YES RASTA book in March, I got some nice responses from people, including a couple of folks who suggested I look at joining ABC, the Artists' Book Co-operative. ABC is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:29 PM
As part of their project Caché-Exposé, investigating the Netherlands' largely invisible detention and deportation system, the Amsterdam art & design collaborative Foundland documented obscure, anonymous detention sites around the country. Then they used a highly official, public system to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
June 14, 2011
I finally made it down to City Hall Park to see the Public Art Fund's installation of Sol Lewitt structures. Which, first or now, you must watch the discussion of working with Lewitt at the New School. Go ahead,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:13 AM
June 13, 2011
I love it when a plan comes together. Or at least when several subjects of interest converge unexpectedly. It seems the Dutch art world is about to be decimated by sudden and substantial government funding cuts and reorganizations. [for angry...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:04 PM
June 9, 2011
Short Circuit, Robert Rauschenberg, et al, via the estate/VAGA I always [well, for a weekend or two last December, anyway] figured I'd find the original Jasper Johns flag painting that was inside Rauschenberg's Short Circuit before the Combine was...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
June 8, 2011
Holy smokes, this is like something out of Land Art Kafka. Tyler Green points to a just-published report by the Salt Lake Tribune's Glen Warchol: the Utah Department of Natural Resources is claiming the Dia Foundation's 20-year lease on the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:44 PM
I found a beautiful and odd book the other day, Reflections: The Story of Water Pictures, published in 1936 by Marion Thayer MacMillan. While vacationing in the Indian territories surrounding Georgian Bay on Lake Ontario, soon after the end...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
June 7, 2011
Erased de Kooning Drawing as of 1999 at SFMOMA When we last left Erased de Kooning Drawing, the late, great Leo Steinberg had finally told his story about getting Rauschenberg on the phone in 1957 in order to sort...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:38 PM
June 6, 2011
Looking back at some of the other projects of FREE SOL LEWITT co-curator Daniel McClean, I have basically concluded that we have been walking in a weird parallel in the art world for ten-plus years, without ever actually meeting....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:48 PM
So everyone dutifully reproduced the press release about Craig Robins putting Buckminster Fuller's 24-foot version of the Fly's Eye Dome through a "historic restoration" by boat fabricator Goetz Composites, yet no one seems to have followed through with picture...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
US Pavilion at Jeshyn Fair, 1956, photo by James Cudney In the Spring of 1956, as the Jeshyn Fair celebrating Afghan independence approached, and the Soviets were well along in constructing a massive pavilion, US diplomats in Kabul thought...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:33 AM
June 5, 2011
So awesome, yet, so annoying. How did I not know of this? When it was going on? I was emailing with the Van Abbemuseum at the time about replicas of artworks, particularly their refabrications of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
June 4, 2011
Lee Krasner, Bird Talk, 1955, oil, paper, canvas on cotton duck Lesley Vance on Lee Krasner, in Artforum's artists on ab-ex feature: At one point in the early 1950s, Krasner grew dissatisfied with some drawings she had been working...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
June 3, 2011
You know what, it's the weekend. We can have two long Leo Steinberg-related posts at once. Read'em on the NetJets to Basel. Though he mentioned it in his most important piece of writing, which was also the most important piece...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:27 PM
So ultimately, Norman Mailer's off the hook. We know that when he wrote about Erased de Kooning Drawing in the 1970s, 1980s, Mailer fragged Rauschenberg for selling it--which he hadn't--as much as making it. And he got the title wrong:...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:38 PM
June 1, 2011
One of the more amusing Erased de Kooning references I've come across is from Norman Mailer. It's reproduced in his 2003 book, The Spooky Art: Thoughts On Writing, but it seems to date from either a 1984 lecture or even...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:04 PM
Oh, the Biennale! So many people asking you what you saw! So many names you just read on the page, or the label, or the banner, without pronouncing! I'll be adding some Venice Biennial names to the official greg.org art...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:07 AM
May 31, 2011
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, "drawing | traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame." via SFMOMA So the basic question, "What do we really know about Erased de Kooning Drawing and how...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:41 PM
May 30, 2011
So I try to take a break from this [now rather long] exploration of the history of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing by reading my Avalanche magazines. And there I find an announcement for Oh Dracula, a 1974...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
How do we know what we know, and when? For instance, we know that Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) is one of Robert Rauschenberg's most important, influential works. It's the kind of commonly accepted history that lands a piece in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:59 AM
Oh, yeah. With this awesome cheese grater screen, Mona Hatoum has just won a 10-year pass in my book; she can do whatever she wants. Oh, really? It's called Grater Divide? And it was made in 2002? Well, her 10-year-pass...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
I've always admired the series of site-specific Wall Works produced over the years by Edition Schellmann, even though I've never mustered the courage to buy one. Fear of commitment, I guess. Too nomadic. Well, no, that's not quite right....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:18 AM
May 26, 2011
I really need a photomurals tag at this point. The Kodak Colorama billboard was installed in the Great Hall of Grand Central Station from 1950 until around 1990, when the station began a long-overdue restoration. Anyway, 18x60 foot backlit,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:54 PM
May 24, 2011
O wow. Olafur Eliasson's Your Rainbow Panorama opens Thursday on the roof of ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. It's a 360-degree glass promenade which paints the cityscape with every color of the spectrum. Too bad the promenade roof's not...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:55 PM
May 23, 2011
On October 4th, 1994, at an artist panel discussion for MoMA's Cy Twombly retrospective, Richard Serra made an offhand comment about how "The last century of art has been based on a misreading of Cezanne." To a young, impressionable...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:41 PM
May 22, 2011
In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara, 1961, Art Institute of Chicago I've had a jpg of Jasper Johns' 1961 painting, In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara on my desktop for months now. It was one...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:36 PM
May 21, 2011
All this Rapture hype reminds me of this old school Elmgreen & Dragset piece from their Powerless Structures series. Even though I'm sure the Rapture people are sure the two guys not wearing these outfits are goin' straight to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
May 20, 2011
Andy helpfully pointed out this mirrored glass ball, which I'd missed in the catalogue for Phillips' upcoming design auction. Everyone knows the Bauhaus was a huge party school. And during the Winter 1929 semester, Oskar Schlemmer had put an...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:53 PM
May 19, 2011
Well this certainly wasn't in his MoMA retrospective. There are rubber and neon pieces dated from 1966-7, of course, and because they look prescient now, Benjamin Buchloh's catalogue essay discusses early Richard Serra sculptures like Doors and Trough Pieces as...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:00 AM
Von Heyl-bait: Spatial Force Construction, 1921, Lyubov Popova A couple of weeks ago Charline von Heyl made a refreshingly badass presentation on painting at the Hammer Museum. [It was organized by UCLA's art department.] The tenor was quite different,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
May 17, 2011
ArtCash by Rauschenberg (top) and Tom Gormley, via nymag Whatever else it was, Billy Kluver, Bob Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman's Experiments in Art & Technology was wildly successful at never selling out; the collaborative was constantly broke and getting...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
May 16, 2011
Police spraying protesters in Kampala, Uganda, May 10, 2011 [image james akena/reuters via cfr.org] I haven't been able to get these images out of my head since Brian Sholis pointed to them; they're stunning and disturbing at once. As...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
Richard Serra, The American Flag is not an object of worship, 1989, 288 x 376 cm One of the artworks ImClone CEO Sam Waksal bought from Gagosian but didn't pay sales tax on in 2000 was a huge, $350,000...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
May 15, 2011
I just watched Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror for the first time as an adult, basically; when I saw it in college, I had no clue and was bored out of my gourd by it. In fact, for a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:16 PM
You never know what you'll find digging around in archives, even your own. While looking back at greg.org posts about Alexander Payne and Dany Wolf, I bumped into this gem from 2003, the reconstructed list of artworks Sam Waksal bought...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:44 AM
May 14, 2011
In 1997 Douglas Gordon surreptitiously videotaped two hours of Andy Warhol's Empire during an installation in Berlin. He called it Bootleg (Empire):'I did a version of 'Empire', which was called 'Bootleg Empire', it is almost like the amateur version...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
May 13, 2011
Not quite sure what to make of this, but this image showed up this morning on the golden livestreaming page for Man Bartlett's piece, #140hBerlin. And though maybe he wasn't even born when it came out, it immediately made...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
Believe me, I know how this looks. But also this. Balloons and the Grand Palais go way back: And anyway also this, Leviathan has a groin vault: and is the venue for a concert performance by minimalist composer and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:35 AM
May 12, 2011
"One idea could be using mirrors so photographers could do their jobs out of the president's sight line, the White House's Earnest said." My mind is blown and I am still picking up the pieces after contemplating the possibility that...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:16 PM
Untitled (Point Break), 2010, Roe Ethridge, via andrewkreps This is in Le Luxe, Roe Ethridge's awesome show at Kreps, through July 3rd. Related: Crafting Genre: Kathryn Bigelow, a retrospective of the director's film titles, combined with her early videos,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
May 11, 2011
If my intermittent obsession with photomurals, and especially with the actual prints themselves, overlooked objects with a presence and character that feels now like a visual and experiential precursor to the monumental painting and photography of the contemporary era,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
Hm, OK. I think we're in the clear here, satelloon-wise. It is true that Anish Kapoor's Leviathan is inflated, and 35 meters tall. But when you enter the Grand Palais to see Leviathan, you enter Leviathan itself. It's a space,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:17 AM
May 6, 2011
Oh boy, here' we go again. As @BDPNT, @joygarnett, @robertpearre, @shelawterry, and @Copycense tweeted, "Welcome to Cariou's world." A leading origami artist, Dr. Robert Lang, has filed suit along with several other designers, charging Sarah Morris with copyright infringement...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
May 5, 2011
"THE WITNESS: This could be a cool book." - Richard Prince Deposition Transcript, p. 328 Dude, Richard Prince just blurbed my book. Between the lawyers on both sides of Cariou vs. Prince et al, about 275 pages of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
I've been thinking a lot lately of governments' relationships to modernism and, by extension, contemporary art, and the controversies that erupt around it. So I was kind of stoked to see the headline in The Art Newspaper, "Revealed: secrets of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
May 4, 2011
Tom McCormack's lengthy look at the contentious, suspicious history of US government support for the arts is worth reading for itself. But it also got me off my butt to write something that's been bugging me since attending the Smithsonian's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:22 PM
So all this time, I've assumed it's common knowledge that I am planning to recreate a satelloon and exhibit it in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. And if the curators of Monumenta, the annual contemporary art...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:00 AM
May 3, 2011
via Eyeteeth | "File under: This could be art" Can't tell you how awesome this is. I would pay cash money to see the biennial that shows it....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:12 PM
May 2, 2011
I'm getting pretty comfortable with my love affair/obsession with the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. I mean, it's got Buckminster Fuller; Alan Solomon curating gigantic paintings; photomurals; and satelloons, what's not to love, right? So seeing...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
Apparently the first footage released from inside Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was shot on an iPhone with Hipstamatic's new Luc Tuymans filter....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
April 29, 2011
Flipping through the lots for Christie's upcoming contemporary sale feels like diving into the greg.org archives. Besides the Rauschenberg combine coming out of the Ganz's closet, there's also: a great Johns White Numbers painting (1991) by Sturtevant. This text is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:15 PM
Christie's is selling The Tower, a 1957 combine by Robert Rauschenberg which Victor and Sally Ganz bought from Betty Parsons in 1976. The work is a double portrait assembled from found, painted objects and light bulbs, and was originally part...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
April 27, 2011
In 1989, a group of veteran activists organized the Berkeley Art Project to create a monument marking the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Mark Brest van Kempen's conceptual proposal won the elaborate national competition and dialogue. It is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:23 PM
In 1969, Rene Block in Berlin published Blaues Dreiecken, Blue Triangle, an instruction-based edition by Blinky Palermo. It includes a large triangular stencil, a tube of blue paint, a brush, and a print made with same. The instruction sheet reads,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
April 26, 2011
Mr. Kenyon Cox expresses the views of a sound artist and a rational human being in relation to the so-called art of the cubists and the futurists in an interview reported in the Magazine Section of THE SUNDAY TIMES....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
Everyone [sic] probably has the story tucked away in their head that science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was the father of the communications satellite. I only recently realized, though, that satellites have, if not a thousand, then at least...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:12 AM
I ♥ the fact that Switzerland had Thomas Hirschhorn make a series of stamps to mark his involvemente in the 2011 Venice Biennale almost as much as I ♥ Thomas Hirschhorn's stamps. Stamp | Crystal of Resistance [crystalofresistance.com]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:44 AM
April 25, 2011
Oh, RO/LU, you are so awesome for posting this. 9 Artists/ 9 Spaces was a public art exhibit organized in 1970 for the Minnesota States Art Council, while the Walker Art Center's new building was under construction. The concept of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:34 PM
Then please email me if you haven't already. greg at greg dot org Electronic or print, either one. Because I have something for you....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
Good grief. When McDonald's in the Louvre made a giant photomural wallpaper from a Jake Dobkin photo of REVS & COST tags, which was included in a Hugo Martinez book, did they bother to ask either REVS or COST...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
I've seen a million and one lawn ornaments without ever noticing any connection to satelloons. And then I saw this odd ball self-portrait of Edwaerd Muybridge last spring at the Corcoran [detail below], and I"m like, big shiny Victorian garden...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
April 24, 2011
Thomas Lawson's 2010 interview with Andrea Bowers is like five kinds of great. It concerns the works in her show at Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles, "The Political Landscape." Bowers' story of making a video piece about activist and Bush-era...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
April 22, 2011
You stumble upon something that Google doesn't know anything about, and you post about it, and then a while later, the other handful of people wondering about the same thing eventually email you, and you try to figure this...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
April 19, 2011
I've been meaning to post more about this for months, but now I'm glad I waited. In January curator/writer Pablo Leon de la Barra posted Google Street View photos of the Hotel Palenque on his blog, Centre For The...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:01 PM
Andrew Russeth has a great post about the making of Robert Irwin's Black Plane. As part of the Whitney's 1977 survey of the artist's work, Irwin had the museum staff paint the intersection of 42nd St & Fifth Avenue,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:09 PM
April 18, 2011
And speaking of Richard Serra. I can't figure out how James Meyer's 2004 Artforum essay on the problematics of size in contemporary sculpture got by me until now. It ends too soon, but it's pretty great. Beginning with the overwhelming...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
Richars Serra's work, and especially his drawings and sketches, have a pretty foundational place in my art worldview. So I'm stoked to see the Met's drawings retrospective, especially after Brian Dupont's process-oriented perspective on the work and the show. I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:13 PM
The curators of NIST's collection of historical and scientific artifacts have thrown open the racks in hopes of crowdsourcing the origins of some unknown pieces. On top of the list: this brass one foot scale, in a handy, fitted,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
Another book report just came in, this one from Andy: "Bonus: ups driver was smoking in the truck. Box smells like weed." Thanks for partaking!...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:00 PM
April 17, 2011
Though there was some buzz about the "Chinese Embassy" on 42nd Street, which is actually the UN Mission, I wasn't seeing anything in the twitterstream about the protesting the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei by restaging a global version...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:13 PM
April 16, 2011
What is the point of books if you're just going to store them out of sight? I mean, just look at the back cover of A.R.T. Press's 1992 interview of Vija Celmins by Chuck Close. If only I'd had this...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
April 15, 2011
I know what it is, and what it's for, and where it is, and what what. But still. In a year when politicians' considerations of art have had considerable impact on art, artists, and the art world, it is fascinating...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
April 14, 2011
As they say in Blurmany, this is ucking awesome. You, a new print by WIlliam Powhida at 20x200.com [20x200.com] Previously: Google Art Project, or Les Blurmoiselles d'Avignon Blurmany and the pixelated sublime...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:17 PM
April 13, 2011
You know how at the end of The Player, Griffin is talking on the car phone to his erstwhile rival-colleague Larry Levy, who's driving through Century City, on his way to an AA meeting? And Griffin says, "Gee, Larry, I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:45 AM
April 11, 2011
Barbara Rose called this partially obscured page of text "The most tantalizing fragment" visible in Jasper Johns' 1962 painting, Map, and speculated that it came from "probably ripped from a paperback book Johns had in his studio." The visible...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
April 8, 2011
Map, 1962, Jasper Johns, via moca.org For her contribution to the Jasper Johns Gray (2007) catalogue, Barbara Rose writes about the history and significance of Map, 1962, the artist's first big, gray masterpiece. Johns made it to raise money...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:12 PM
I kid about Jon Rafman, but it's out of love. Just check out this incredible pano of BF wherever stitched together from different CMYK separations. It could be a Rauschenberg or something. By which I mean it'd make a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:35 AM
April 7, 2011
You know, every once in a while, I think that it's crazy to be considering satelloons as art instead of what they really were--aestheticized objects designed to be seen and exhibited. And then I'll catch a glimpse of Expo...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:52 PM
This is basically the funniest Oskar Fischinger post you will ever read. Oskar Fischinger's Love Machine [lacmonfire]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:19 PM
April 6, 2011
This LACMA interview with Vija Celmins about her show there of early work is just great. [The show itself is great, too; it was first at the Menil.] No sooner did I watch it, than Celmins' name came up in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:01 PM
April 5, 2011
I'm trying to remember what made me think of this. I'm coming up blank. In 1995, Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger decided to work together to create space which facilitated longer-term contemplation. They called their...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
So I try to create a book with as little creative alteration as possible, to hew as closely as I can to the court documents themselves, without changing, editing, or annotating them at all. OK, so I weave images from...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:58 PM
Italics in original:Nan Rosenthal: Does the color gray carry for you a suggestion of ambiguity? Jasper Johns: Everything carries for me a suggestion of ambiguity. From the q&a in Jasper Johns Gray...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:40 PM
The Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet, image via national gallery Edouard Manet made three large paintings in 1867-8 on The Execution of Maximilian, a subject torn from the day's headlines, but which, because they were critical of Napoleon III's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:43 AM
April 4, 2011
Looks like Monday is Unboxing Day. Whether UPS or USPS, be sure to thank the union members who worked through the weekend to bring you your art nerdy books. The hardback with the current cover design [updated link, see...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:58 PM
April 3, 2011
image via Morioka Yoshitomo's online syllabus of Art & Technology I don't collect posters, I really don't. I just buy some. And then some more. But when I saw the description of this poster in the Getty's E.A.T. archive...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:26 PM
People often ask me, "What is it that makes your Google Street View Art so different, so appealing?" Actually, no one asks me that, they just send me "Hey, look!" emails with links to Jon Rafman and Michael Wolf. But...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:02 PM
When Kurt Schwitters died in 1948, his lawyer inherited the art the artist had held onto. After his death in 1956, it was dispersed. Sidney Janis bought this 1922 Kurt Schwitters Merz collage, titled er, and then promptly sold...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
April 2, 2011
Wow, can I just say that, when combined with the rapid production power of our digitized present, appropriation art is just awesome? I just got the first hardcover copies of the first version of the book I conceived of a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:37 PM
April 1, 2011
You know what, in my six days as a published author, out there flogging his book, I find myself thinking, again, of Cervantes and Don Quixote. I mean, I it really feels like I'm living in the Quixotian name I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
So I'm slowly making my way through the 35-page press release [!! those were the days, right?] for MoMA's 1968-9 exhibition, "The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age," which included a long-lost, recently stumbled-upon in a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:02 PM
I recently found a poster for a Pontus Hulten exhibition at Moderna Museet called "Utopier & Visioner, 1871-1981," which I think may have come from Billy Kluver's own collection. There's not much information online about the show with that title,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:45 PM
March 31, 2011
As I have tried to make sense of the Cariou v. Prince decision, to figure out how Judge Batts found it so easy to dismiss Prince's detailed explanation of his transformative ideas and process, I can come up with two...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
We know that Rob Pruitt made the chromed fiberglass figure for The Andy Monument by bodyscanning his friend and collector, the Cincinnati former car dealer Andy Stillpass. But am I the only one who thinks the sculpture's face, too,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:03 PM
I may be too late to see the Getty Research Institute's exhibit on postwar Japanese art, but I think it's also past time I hotfoot it out there and start digging through the E.A.T. archives. If there are more...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
March 29, 2011
I guess if you think about it, archivists really wouldn't think it's exciting, or even that amusing, when you tell a story that wrongly makes it sound like they've been taking smoke breaks for 25 years, leaving their random blogger...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
Before I talk about Microworld, the 1976 industrial film made for AT&T by Owen Murphy Productions, let me just state the obvious, and get it out of the way: We are long, long overdue for a comprehensive, scholarly retrospective...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:03 AM
March 28, 2011
Enough Prince! Let's talk about someone else! Richard Serra, for example. Bellamy, 2001, Richard Serra, image via gagosian.com Did you know--I did not, which is why I am kind of fascinated to mention it here--that one of Richard Serra's early...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:00 PM
Thanks for the support and feedback on the Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents &c., &c. book. [updated link info below] Some folks who ordered the electronic version--the first to get the compilation in their hands, since...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:22 PM
March 26, 2011
from greg.org: Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in hardcover, 290pp. $24.99 [updated link info below] Because really, why not? It's always bugged me when I read a news story about a legal case,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:38 PM
Has it already been two weeks since I went to Rirkrit's show at Gavin Brown? Sheesh. Despite being there on a Thursday, there was no soup, but there were T-shirts. Nick was cranking them out, and I wanted to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
March 24, 2011
What with all this Prince in my head, I start seeing and reading and remembering things in relation to the Canal Zone case. For instance: In conjuring up a meaning for Richard Prince's Canal Zone work that fit the crime...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:27 PM
March 23, 2011
Paddy and her commenters have already done a pretty good job sorting through the decision in the Cariou vs. Prince & Gagosian case, and there are other folks out there with far more expertise and time than I who...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:39 PM
Holy smokes, Richard Prince, Patrick Cariou, Larry Gagosian, Judge Batts, Bob Marley, Richard Serra [! I know, right?], Brooke Shields, $18 million in artwork, the fate of appropriation, the implosion of the gallery system, copyright apocalypse, there's so much...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:46 AM
March 22, 2011
Holy crap, I go away for a long weekend, and what happens? The death toll in Japan doubles, The number of meltdowns triples [or something], We are at war in Libya, The Death Star has the T-Mobile rebellion caught in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
March 16, 2011
So I guess you could argue--and you wouldn't be completely wrong--that no matter how many coats of hand-rubbed varnish it has, no matter how carefully calculated its design, or how flush its finishing nails, how stainless its many steel...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:02 PM
March 15, 2011
You know, I tried. I really tried, but there just are not enough hours in the day. You can all take down David Colman's John Currin & Rachel Feinstein Style section article yourselves. Lord knows everything but the headline--"Their Own...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
March 14, 2011
Have we considered Damien Hirst's vitrine sculptures from the Wunderkammer perspective? Because the giant grab-bag auction at Pierre Berge & Associes in Brussels is stuffed [heh] with disturbing taxidermy, eerie medical/scientific specimens, and elaborate butterfly displays. Yes, that is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
I totally remember seeing John Cage's The First Meeting of the Erik Satie Society in the summer of 1994. An unbound version was on view at the Fuller Building on 57th Street. Susan Sheehan Gallery. It was on during...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
March 13, 2011
I've written and been inspired by Ansel Adams' WWII Japanese-American internment camp photos for years, but inexplicably, I haven't looked closely at Dorothea Lange's. Paul has some intriguing examples at Eyeteeth. He also notes that Lange was actually covering...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:46 PM
March 9, 2011
I don't know how this slipped by me, but now it's going up for sale tomorrow at Christie's: a very early Jim Shaw pencil & airbrush drawing from 1981 with the obvious-now-that-you-mention-it title, Mormon Missionary and Prostitute Making Each...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
What's that, dear? Oh, nothing, just some legendary but unknown drafts for the first film adaptation of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, by veteran Hollywood screenwriter Benjamin Hecht. After reading various references to the early 60s script, Jeremy Duns decided to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:43 PM
March 8, 2011
Warm nostalgia apparently equals d-bag public access video + time. Reading Andrew's report from the Dependent Art Fair, I kept flashing back to the Gramercy, and all the art in the bathrooms, and on the beds, and the insanely crowded...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
March 7, 2011
Holy smokes. Of course you know that blogger/collector/scholar Jim Linderman published The Painted Backdrop: Behind the Sitter in American Tintype Photography 1860-1920. Which would make him the go-to guy for anyone with some actual, original, extraordinarily rare, painted 19th...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:47 AM
March 6, 2011
So awesome. Is there nothing that can't be made better by Rirkrit chroming the hell out of it? Fear Eats The Soul, Rirkrit Tiravanija, through April 16 at Gavin Brown's Enterprise [gavinbrown.biz] Awesome photo of chrome stainless steel Brillo...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:35 PM
March 4, 2011
Yeah, there's photomurals, but anyone who's spent some time poking around greg.org might have found my even longer-lasting photo obsession: the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey [see background and making of info here and here.] The idea is to take he...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:30 AM
March 3, 2011
So I'm searching through the New York Times archive, trying different combinations of keywords to find references to photomurals at the Museum of Modern Art, and I find this intriguing 1934 headline:TWO FORSAKE ART TO FOUND A PARTY; Museum Modernists...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:42 PM
March 2, 2011
In other seemingly obscure art historical news from 53rd Street: while Googling around on Compo Photocolor, I found this mention in a 1964 press release [pdf] from The Modern, which turns out to be a checklist for the newly...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:02 PM
When I first came across the pixelated Dutch landscapes on Google Maps , I imagined the polygonal camo distortions hovering over the sensitive sites. From the ground, I thought, maybe it looked like a Gerhard Richter overpainted snapshot. But now...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:36 PM
While trying to find out where and how to make a photomural, or at least how they used to make them, I found this slightly ridiculous 1966 Popular Science article about making photomurals in your very own home. And...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
March 1, 2011
The question or theme or whatever hadn't crystallized for me, but when Tyler linked to the previous two posts about Lt. Comm. Edward Steichen's wartime propaganda exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, he noted that "there's a lot...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
February 26, 2011
Looking through the installation photos for Road To Victory, Edward Steichen's 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I find myself asking two things: Who took these photos, and how did they make them? [Of course, my real...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:21 AM
February 24, 2011
So in my ersatz zigzagging through the history of photomurals, I kind of skipped from Edward Steichen's landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955, where Paul Rudolph deployed enlarged photo prints for content and experience, as well as architectural...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:56 PM
February 20, 2011
In 1909, balloonist/photographers André Schelcher and Albert Omer-Décugis took this picture from about 50m above the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is one of 40 images they published that year in a book titled, Paris vu en ballon...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
February 19, 2011
Oh no! I mean, oh yeah! Gerhard Richter did do other steel balls. At the end of his 1973 interview with Irmeline Lebeer, he complains about my favorites of his series, the grey monochromes:the only problem with them is that...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
Honestly, I don't know why I didn't see it before. The answer's staring me right in the face. And I was so close with the Serra, too. Annunciation After Titian, 343-1, 1973, Gerhard Richter [image via g-r] This morning I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
February 18, 2011
Frieze has been around 20 years? That's crazy. I feel so old. I'm really liking the dips into the archives by invited Big Thinkers. Jens Hoffmann's picks focus on biennials and such. My favorite has to be Jenny Liu's firsthand...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
It's true, I like Mason Williams' 1967 Bus for what it is. But right now I love it for how it was made, the whole ridiculous, unanticipated, dogged, improvised, and ultimately successful process: the 4x5 negative; the 16x20 print; the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:40 PM
My Twitter feed is so complicated right now....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:45 AM
February 17, 2011
A 1968 NY Times review of Robert Rauschenberg's giant Autobiography edition by Hilton Kramer was titled "Art: Over 53 Feet of Wall Decoration." And the abstract mentioned simultaneous installations at the Whitney and MoMA, so I was interested to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:13 PM
Air Training Corps cadets building recognition models, via CollectAir Looking for the "Plaster of Paris Aircraft Corp." and coming up empty [stay tuned], I did find plenty of aircraft made from Plaster of Paris: WWII-era recognition models used to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:44 AM
Wow, so I'm just throwing Jasper Johns' name into the archives of New York Magazine, and up pops this wild story from 1982 about Frank Waxman, a Philadelphia doctor who amassed a blue chip collection of tiny artworks by stealing...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:39 AM
February 16, 2011
Andy sent along this great ffffffound fffffflag picture, posted today on thekingof.tumblr. which reminds me of one of my favorite Johns riffs, the 2005 work by Jonathan Horowitz, Three Rainbow American Flags for Jasper in the Style of the Artist's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:06 PM
I think Robert Rauschenberg's Short Circuit was exhibited only twice in its original state: once in the Spring of 1955, in the Stable Gallery annual exhibition for which it was created, and once at the White Art Museum at...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:24 PM
I cannot believe this has under 1,000 views. I'm only about 8:00 into this YouTube video, and already, Viktor Pinchuk is my hero. While anyone with a yacht or a palazzo could assemble a tranche of the art world...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:43 AM
Johns, Flag: "American artist Jasper Johns has produced a distinguished body of work dealing with themes of perception and identity since the mid-1950s." -whitehouse.gov I've been trying to get a better sense of the first decade for Rauschenberg's Short...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:22 AM
February 14, 2011
During some recent archive dives, I've come across a ton of different letterheads. Apparently, people used to write letters to each other all the time, can you imagine? Must've taken forEVER. Anyway, one I particularly ilke is the United States...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:26 PM
So I'm reading along in my new copy of Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007--which is pretty awesome, and which does appear to supersede the artist's previous collected writings, The Daily Practice of Painting, which is good to know, but really, what...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:41 AM
February 13, 2011
Michael Wolf thought he would be provoking a heated response when he entered four of his series of Google Street View photos in the World Press Photo competition, and he was right. The "A Series of Unfortunate Events" project...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:27 PM
February 12, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, while stopping by the symposium attached to the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibition, I saw a huge, intriguing Robert Rauschenberg work, Visual Autobiography, in the lobby of the Patent Building auditorium. I noticed it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:21 PM
February 11, 2011
I'd say, "Adieu" or "Au revoir," but Janette Laverrière was as fierce an atheist as she was a communist, designer, and artist. So I'll just say I'm slow and sad to learn that Laverrière died last month at the age...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
One of my absolute favorite Steve McQueen films is one of the first ones I saw, a one-minute super-8 called Exodus. But until now, I'd never heard the making of story of this found scene. According to Carol Kino's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
February 10, 2011
Wall Text from MoMA's Picasso Guitars show, via @bryanthepainter I've been loving Bryan's tweets of the various pullquotes in MoMA's incredible Picasso Guitars show, but none more than this one from Andre Salmon in 1919, where Picasso apparently invented...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
Demonstration from a STASI disguise workshop, via Simon Menner If Germany's a little touchy about Google's Street View panopticon, maybe it has something to do with how, for the last half of the last century, half the country was...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:10 AM
February 8, 2011
Flag, 1954-55, via moma The creation myth for Jasper Johns' Flag is well-known, and well-told. Like Leo Castelli's story of discovering Johns' groundbreaking oeuvre, fully formed, while he and Rauschenberg were raiding the icebox, and how Johns' first show...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:28 PM
While poking around online about Tate Modern's version of the Gabriel Orozco retrospective, I found this rather incredible letter from 2009, written, apparently by Orozco himself, to his dealer Jose Kuri. The letter is an ostensibily-but-not-really private round in an...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
Sister Andreina holding Yves Klein's ex-voto for Santa Rita di Cascia in 1999, photo: David Bordes I get the sense that in the contemporary art world, an artist's religiosity or spirituality is often perceived as an obstacle, an eccentricity...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:38 AM
February 7, 2011
Now we're getting somewhere. James Davis was Tate Britain's pointman for the Google Art Project, and he gives an interesting behind-the-scenes account of getting locked in the museum with the Street View Cart overnight:[It] seemed to me to be...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:30 PM
Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps have been manufactured at the Ozeki Lantern Company in Gifu, Japan since 1951. They are contructed from paper and bamboo using the traditional techniques for which Gifu's lanternmakers are famous. In Japan. [via @freduarte via @langealexandra]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
February 6, 2011
Sometimes I can't tell when something is obvious, or when it's just obvious to me. But whichever this was, the idea came to me as soon as I figured out that the unidentified guy who was photographed at least...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:57 PM
February 5, 2011
Here's the introductory text I wrote last Spring for Walking Man - A Collaborative Self-Portrait With Google Street View. I made some proofs, but I'm still figuring out the best size. If I do decide to publish it, I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:31 PM
February 4, 2011
Last February, I realized that the subject of this awesome, distorted Google Street View portrait was not just a random pedestrian. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world have been photographed once by Google's roving,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:55 PM
February 3, 2011
May your wife have a cow every time....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
Hannibal Hanschke/dpa/picture-alliance/newscom via tpm Believe me, I've tried, but I can't look at this photo of protestors under a sodium streetlamp in Cairo and not see Olafur Eliasson's 2003 Turbine Hall installation, The Weather Project. image via mark barkaway's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
February 2, 2011
I took the kid to see Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Legacy Tour the other night. And as I'm reading up on the funding of the Trust that will oversee Merce's choreography after the company disbands, I found a mention...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
February 1, 2011
Though to a guy making something called Atlas in his spare time it still probably feels pretty empty and limited, Gerhard Richter's website is pretty expansive. Via Twitter, we learn that his web elves have just added a quotes section,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:55 PM
Nice, someone on the Google Art Project has a sense of art historical awareness, or at least a sense of humor. The gallery included in the British National Gallery contains Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Ambassadors, which is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
Alright, this is kind of killing me right now, not just with its awesomeness, but because I have been planning to do a very similar project, and also because like half my blog these days could be called Google...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
January 30, 2011
Last week in my interview with Mike Maizels for Pinkline Project, I'd mentioned how the Grand Palais in Paris would be an acceptable art venue for exhibiting my satelloon project. Not only was the grand nave one of the few...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
January 29, 2011
After dropping in on the National Portrait Gallery's daylong symposium [it's still going on, in fact] connected to Hide/Seek just now, and though I only saw two presentations, whoa--I feel like a cigarette. Jonathan Katz, co-curator of Hide/Seek, titled his...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:50 PM
So much history-making postwar art missing, so little time! The Pebble Beach Art Heist had gone cold for a while, but now, thanks to a new website ["made on a Mac"!] it is flaming back to life. And for the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:25 AM
January 28, 2011
Maybe it was me looking for Tacita Dean's Sound Mirrors that brought me there, but David Williams' 2009 post at Skywritings about Dean, Derek Jarman, Dungeness, gardens, Tehching Hsieh is pretty wonderful:Everything here has been found, salvaged, re-cycled from...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:46 PM
I've been kind of busy, and I didn't want to get fingerprints all over the signed edition, and my few original issues are in storage somewhere, so I'm really only now getting a look at Primary Information's beautiful facsimile...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:09 PM
January 27, 2011
John Powers just retweeted it now in parts, and he included it in his epic Star Wars Modern piece at Triple Canopy last year, but this quote from "American Painting During the Cold War," Max Kozloff's 1973 Artforum article, is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:38 AM
In reviewing Johan Grimonperez' 1997 film, Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., which was exhibited at Deitch, Ronald Jones underscores artists' failure to, well, to matter very much in contemporary culture. And he reminded me of this, which I had completely forgotten:Paul Goldberger's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:43 AM
January 26, 2011
Now we're getting somewhere, even if it's only to the library. Since the Finch College Museum was originally [and wrongly] fingered as the site of the theft of Johns' Flag from Rauschenberg's Short Circuit, I've been looking for months...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:36 AM
January 24, 2011
While I'm obviously no David Hockney, after a year or so, I see a Brushes trend emerging: people sitting in front of me. On the most recent one, I decided to pare it down. From the width of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:30 AM
January 22, 2011
If you can see the full text of "On Collaboration In Art," David Shapiro's conversation with John Cage, published in the Autumn 1985 issue, (No. 10) of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, perhaps you can tell me if it does, in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:29 PM
A little Saturday stenography. Alan Solomon wrote "The New Art," a catalogue essay for "The Popular Image," one of the first museum exhibitions of Pop Art, organized by Alice Denney in the spring of 1963 at the fledgling Washington Gallery...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
So I thought I'd check Jasper Johns' bibliography to see if there was a review for Alan Solomon's group exhibition at Cornell, which included Short Circuit. There was not, but after seeing the first entry for 1958, from Johns' hometown...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:33 AM
January 21, 2011
tiny detail of a Robert Rauschenberg registry, dated 1957-9, which I can't reproduce in full because of the terms of access to the Leo Castelli Gallery Archive at the Archives of American Art Another day back in the Leo...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:03 PM
January 19, 2011
I tried searching the 150,000 million images in the ETH Bibliothek photo archive, too, but I sure didn't come up with one of these: One thing's for sure, though: if I were ever to show some videos on little screens,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:53 PM
January 17, 2011
Huh, so I'm poking around online for info on the Saarinens' unrealized design for a Smithsonian Gallery of Art [above is a SI photo of the model, built in 1939 by Ray and Charles Eames, of all people, perched...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
You know what, it's been too long since we had a good, old-fashioned photomuralin' around these parts. And one that combines a bit of Google Maps-ready, roof-as-facade architecture? And camo? Even better. I only go to the Museum of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
January 16, 2011
Maybe it's the CSI-ification of everything, but as I dig through archives and piece together timelines, and interview people--oh, I haven't really mentioned the interviews, have I?--while trying to track down the story of Robert Rauschenberg's Short Circuit and its...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
January 14, 2011
This just in from the greg.org Department of Stunningly Beautiful Digitized Maps of The Netherlands: Bibliodyssey has some highlights from the National Library of the Netherlands' fresh upload one of the rarest and most beautiful atlases in history, mid-17th century...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:46 PM
January 13, 2011
So here is where, after a few months of searching, I basically get caught up to the editors of Johns' collected writings, who noted in 1996 that Johns' Flag painting disappeared from Leo Castelli's warehouse sometime "before June 8,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:24 PM
January 12, 2011
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991RB Before I knew you I saw something... You know what I'm going to say? FGT I dedicated a piece to Ross. RB Exactly. I thought, this is so sweet, I want to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
January 10, 2011
Compared to Germany's digital scrim effect, the Italian Google Street View opt-out regime is extraordinarily, even romantically, naturalistic. Haha, no. It's a photo from Elmar Haardt's careful and unassuming project documenting Bondeno, a seemingly unremarkable small town in Ferrara. [via...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:41 PM
January 5, 2011
One of the first Japanese sayings I learned was "Chiri mo tsumoreba, yama to naru," "Pile up dust and it becomes a mountain." At his incredible blog Four Color Process, John Hilgart continues to mine the gap between comic...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
January 4, 2011
Doug Ashford ended the 2009 presentation I just posted about, "Abstraction as the onset of the real," with a slide of this beautiful painting, Untitled, 1950 (May 20) by Myron Stout. Washburn Gallery had a sweet little early Stout...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
I'm still trying to figure out quite what he said, but whatever it is, Doug Ashford said the hell out of it. Forget speaking or writing like this, I wish I could even think like this. Brains back on, people!...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
Maybe it was the news, or those long family car rides over Christmas with his cousin's evangelical radio station going the whole way. But Frank Wick has of late been considering The Big Questions of Life, questions such as,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:26 AM
January 3, 2011
Holy smokes, it's been 15 months since I found the Dutch Camo Landscapes on Google Maps; just over a year since I started systematically screengrabbing them; a little less than a year since Google's particularly beautiful Delaunay triangulation distortion...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:54 AM
January 2, 2011
A dismal, depressing subject can be made enjoyable by great writing. And the spirits can be lifted by an awesome photo at the end. These are my takeaways from Richard Hendy's travel/history/economics/politics/apocalyptic decline essay on Amakusa, a hardscrabble group...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:33 PM
December 21, 2010
It's exactly the kind of scribbled note I dug through five boxes of Smithsonian archival material hoping to find: "Someone may have loc. stolen ptg. So Charles will talk to Bob about it." Well, I talked to Charles about it....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
December 20, 2010
So much to blog, so little time. I may have to institute a new practice of dumping my interesting-looking browser tabs if I don't write about or use them within a month, or blogging about them. For example, ever since...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:10 AM
December 19, 2010
You know, some things have just been bugging me about this Blake Gopnik/Washington Post situation. I deeply don't care about Gopnik in a gossipy way. I suppose if I were pressed, I'd be generically glad for him now that it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:23 PM
December 17, 2010
Did I mention that I got a copy of the 316-pg instruction manual for Lego Set 10179-1: The Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon? It is worth every penny. It is a thing of beauty. And gigantic, the first coffee table LEGO...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
I didn't realize how closely the Modern's 1932 Murals and Photomurals exhibition and the anti-communist controversy it provoked dovetailed with the far better known confrontation over Diego Rivera's rejected and destroyed commission at Rockefeller Center. Rivera had a hugely...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
December 15, 2010
I've been deep in the commercial letterpress lately, and neglecting my Ant Farm. Fortunately, Mondo Blogo is there to bring me back in line, with this awesome poster the Farmers made for 20:20 Vision, their show at CAMH. 20:20...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
December 14, 2010
New York, montage photomural, Berenice Abbott, all images via moma's 1932 catalogue I've been meaning to post this for a couple of months, but with museum censorship battles and political mural controversies in the news, what better time, right?...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:45 PM
The Gala As Art, greg.org, at #rank 2010 from greg allen on Vimeo. Here's the narrated slideshow I did at #rank during Art Basel Miami Beach. Many thanks to Jen and Bill for inviting me, to Magda for instigating, to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
December 12, 2010
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a sweet Struth photo of the Cologne Cathedral, and somehow, Gerhard Richter's pixel-style stained glass window is not the most awesome thing about it. Also, is that a mop on that ledge in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:47 PM
December 11, 2010
I'm trying to imagine this happening today, or this century--or last, for that matter--and I just can't. The best account of it I've found is from Calvin Tomkins' 1964 New Yorker profile of Rauschenberg, so I'll just quote him:[Rauschenberg and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
I realize I only tweeted it, and that doesn't count, so I'll say it here: Nick Stillman's essay about Chris Burden's television-based work at East of Borneo is great stuff:Velvet Water feels like the culmination of a thread that began...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
The New Yorker obsoleted my old New Yorker Magazine Database by finally letting Google index their website and adding a search function, and making their archive available online, and that's as it should be. But whenever I browse the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
December 10, 2010
I love it when a tossed-off plan comes together. In this case, it's the idea of artist-designed vinyl car wraps. And camo. The Times had a great story about auto spyshots, and the increasing use of camouflage vinyl wraps...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
December 9, 2010
There's some interesting background info as well, but the big news [sic] today in piecing together the history of Rauschenberg's Short Circuit is that Finch College is off the hook--and Holland Cotter is right after all....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:04 PM
Does an Anglo calling The Hague "Den Haag" sound as obnoxious as one calling Florence "Firenze" or Milan "Milano"? This is not a rhetorical question. I really need to know. Celestial Vault in 1996, James Turrell, image via: stroom.nl...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
December 8, 2010
It's crazy sometimes how long it takes to see what's right in front of your face. I've been thisclose to artist James Seawright's kinetic and electronic sculptures over the last couple of years, and yet I only really discovered...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
I was nervous, I admit, but I really had a blast last week giving my Gala As Art presentation last week at #rank. The crowd was great; the other #rank folks I met were nice, with interesting projects and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:04 PM
December 7, 2010
After a brief break, during which I briefly pwned Miami Art Basel, the search for the Jasper Johns flag painting which was included in Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine-painting Short Circuit [above], continues. Actually, because I had to carry on...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:56 PM
December 6, 2010
Via Ubu comes a provocative essay, "Constructed Anarchy," from the poet and John Cage critic Marjorie Perloff. She takes the death of Merce Cunningham and the company's plans to dissolve after a worldwide farewell tour as an opportunity to ask...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:37 PM
In my talk at #rank in Miami Friday, I called for more scholarship on the growing genre of yacht art. Which, via this NY Times Style section slideshow caption, now includes at least one work of hybridized performance/institutional book party...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:18 AM
December 5, 2010
image: walkerart.org Welcome to one of the oldest tabs in my browser: the inflatable balloon set for Merce Cunningham's 1968 piece, Walkaround Time, which is based on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, which was made by the company's artistic director...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
December 1, 2010
I recently went with my daughters to see "Hide/Seek" at The National Portrait Gallery. They're 2 and 6, so most of the content of the show is way over their heads. [Much of the work, like the vintage photographs,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:24 AM
November 30, 2010
Rather than post this beautifully composed 1895 photo of Henri LaChambre's rather awesome gas balloon inflated at Nancy, I should've freakin' bought it by now. Of course, my problem is that, now that I've seen it, I've filed it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:59 AM
I've got a lot of browser tabs to clear before I head to Miami. Am I not listening or looking in the right place, or is there really not enough discussion about MoCA's exhibition of drawings by the composer/architect/polymath Iannis...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
November 28, 2010
It's less than a week away, and I can't believe I haven't hyped it yet: I'm giving a presentation this Friday in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach titled, "Relational Aesthetics For The Rich, Or A Brief History Of The...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:18 AM
November 27, 2010
At least now we know what NY Times museum building critic Nicolai Ourossoff has been up to lately. Just as I am thinking I need to add Saadiyat Island and the names of the grand new patrons of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
Something Holland Cotter wrote today made me really think: "Short Circuit is a sweet reminder of Rauschenberg's collegial generosity; he believed in art making as a communal endeavor, and acted on that belief." Collegial generosity is certainly one way...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:11 AM
November 26, 2010
In his review of the Robert Rauschenberg show at Gagosian, where the work is somehow different because it is for sale, Holland Cotter explains Short Circuit's origin as an attempt to get his recommended artists' work into the Stable Gallery's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:43 PM
November 24, 2010
Alright, the search is on; I'm working to trace the history of Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine Short Circuit and especially to figure out what happened to Jasper Johns' flag painting, and when and how Sturtevant's flag painting got in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:15 PM
November 23, 2010
Brooklyn-based photographer Ofer Wolberger is right in the middle of an interesting project: The Photographic Book Series, twelve limited edition artist books, each with a specific subject or theme. Sometimes he uses source photos, sometimes they're [presumably] his own....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:38 PM
November 21, 2010
Also up at Phillips today was this nice little [25x25cm] seascape, Meer (Sea), a 1973 offset print by Gerhard Richter. Richter replaced the sky in one snapshot with the sea from another. This particular example sounds like it had...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:42 PM
An interesting curatorial pairing where you'd least expect it: deep in the middle a random, Sunday afternoon print sale at Phillips de Pury. Lot 327: Washington Monument, is an unnumbered edition sliced up from a wallpaper Andy Warhol made...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:19 PM
More of Germany is appearing on Google Street View, and we can start to see what 240,000 blurred out residences looks like in a country of 8 million-plus: a lot. Far from being a marginalized fraction, the blurred structures...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:57 AM
November 18, 2010
I don't know why I do it either, but here is Washington Post arts blogger Blake Gopnik ruminating on just what it is that makes Arshile Gorky's paintings so upbeat, so appealing:The most striking thing about this AbEx show...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
November 16, 2010
The Rauschenberg show at Gagosian is pretty incredible, but then again, I've had Walter Hopps' incredible show of Rauschenberg's 50s work imprinted on my brain from day one. Anyway, here's a little art history mystery about one of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:31 PM
November 13, 2010
Christoph Brech is the master of the meaningful tight shot. In Sea Force One, he focuses in on a pair of workers in a small boat who are scrubbing the hull of Francois Pinault's black yacht in front of Punta...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:55 AM
November 12, 2010
We go to History with the culture we have, not the culture you want, or might wish to have at a later time. 316 pages. 136 Mb PDF download. Not including the copyright notices, well under 1,000 words. I can't...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:27 AM
Remind me again where I got the idea to buy Susie Linfield's new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence? I ordered it two weeks ago, but it just arrived yesterday, which turns out to be too long after...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:35 AM
November 11, 2010
So fantastic. When I started digging around a bit on its history, I just assumed Jean Tinguely's kinetic masterpiece, Homage to New York, would itself be the most interesting find. Not quite. After making a name for himself in Europe...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:19 AM
November 10, 2010
Our stop at the Stedelijk over the weekend gave me On Kawara on the brain. Which makes me sad to have missed the San Francisco Art Institute's show this summer, On Kawara: Pure Consciousness In 19 Kindergartens. It was about...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:34 AM
Now I knew George Catlin did some bird's eye views, but I did not realize he also did some Bird's Eye Views. This is one of the latter, an 18-inch gouache from 1827, Bird's Eye View of Niagara Falls....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:43 AM
I am aware of the argument that because a) I have never spoken to anyone at the Smithsonian1 about this show, it follows that, b) the specific venue, date, and funding for this show being, to say the least,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:24 AM
"Good for any part of the country." I love it. And not just because it reminds me of one of my favorite Olafur photogrids: The Landscape Series, 1997, horribly hung in an image by Christies....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:12 AM
November 9, 2010
Looking at objects and vintage photos in isolation, it blows my mind that Enzo Mari is somehow not a famous, formative artist, but only [sic] a designer. How did that happen? Did he make all his work in secret? Did...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
November 8, 2010
When we last considered the techno-militartistic merits of pre-WWII era sound location devices, I wondered where to start. And now I know: the Netherlands. I'm not sure why, but it was acoustic locator-palooza over there. On the wall of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
The last time we were in Holland for a Museum Night, it was in Rotterdam, and it was an infuriating mess. All the museums in the city stay open until 2AM and program special activities and events. In 2005,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:25 AM
November 5, 2010
I don't know why i ended up with so many art projects in and about The Hague this year, but there you are, or here I am, really. It's one of the most interesting places on Google's green Earth. Anywhay,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
November 3, 2010
Look, I don't doubt that Enzo Mari hates the art world as much as he hates design. Even more, probably, since he's a faithful communist in an era when--Picasso bedamned--it's really hard out there in the art market for...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:04 AM
November 1, 2010
I'm feeling more serious about turning Richard Neutra's Cyclorama building at Gettysburg into an educational monument to the wounded and a wheelchair-accessible battlefield observation platform. War becomes history, reduced to its most basic contours, a date, a bodycount, and a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:45 AM
October 29, 2010
"...how, slowly and patiently, Mr. Lamson, wearing welder's goggles, moves his drawing machine along." William Lamson's show at The Boiler, "A Line Describing The Sun," got a nice review from Ken Johnson in the Times today. The 2-channel video...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:04 AM
October 27, 2010
Though I had considered entering, and I'd sampled a few of the 125 videos on the shortlist, I had planned to not write about the YouTube Play Biennial at the Guggenheim. But then reps from a couple of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:55 PM
October 26, 2010
Holy smokes, experiential science artist Nelly Ben Hayoun has re-created Japan's Super Kamiokande neutrino detection facility as a Disneyland ride. Visitors in white Tyvek bunny suits are guided by an actual particle physicist through a boat ride tunnel where...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:53 AM
October 25, 2010
The close follower of the Warhol Brillo Box saga will surely find amusement in the details of Lot 137: a Pasadena Type box that once belonged to Warhol's early early LA dealer Irving Blum at Christie's upcoming Morning After...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:05 PM
Holy smokes, the auction's normal size, but the catalogue for Christie's upcoming contemporary evening sale is huge. And some interesting stuff. This late Rothko, Black on Gray (1969-70), for example. In his biography of the artist, Jimmy Breslin referred...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
October 24, 2010
Someday this will all look and sound really coherent, I swear. But for going on, wow, 20 years, some of the most powerfully influential photos for me have been the images Ansel Adams took at Manzanar, the desert prison...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
My recent photomural binge has flushed out some interesting comments and suggestions, including one from Craig about the use of a photomural as a key interior design element in Woody Allen's 1980 film, Stardust Memories. Allen's character, filmmaker Sandy...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:54 PM
October 20, 2010
One of the most incredible works of visionary art in Washington DC is James Hampton's The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly. Hampton, an African American WWII veteran and janitor at the General Services...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:13 PM
October 19, 2010
While I've mentioned it on my Twitter feed--the 500 people who read this blog are the same 500 who follow me there, right? @CheapDrugs4U?--I should say here, too, that I have been invited by the folks at 24|7 Creative, a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:10 PM
Worlds Fairs turned out to be the perfect venue for photomurals--they were catchy, usually didactic, packed a visual punch, and got the point across to the shuffling masses. And at least in the 1930s, they looked like the future....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
October 18, 2010
image: vintage silver gelatin print, signed, Ezra Stoller, 1939, via morehousegallery Do turning back another chapter or two in the history of enlarged pictures, photomurals, and photomontages, where do they turn up the most [besides/before the Museum of Modern...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:36 PM
I'm on a bit of a photomural binge at the moment. In email, Dr. Olivier Lugon, he of the awesome article about Stephen Shore's Signs of Life photomurals, points out two things about Edward Steichen [and, let's give the man...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:20 AM
October 16, 2010
So yes, I've got a million other things to do, but thanks to this Mies thing being auctioned, and Michael Lobel's article on the the photography and scale--and by implication, photography and painting, pace Chevrier's forme tableau--I'm become slightly...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:29 PM
October 15, 2010
Hah, it didn't occur to me until I started looking into the history of photomurals, and--thanks to Michael Lobel's great exploration of contemporary photography and scale in the new Artforum--I sucked it up and started reading Michael Fried's new book...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:27 PM
October 13, 2010
Christian Viveros-Faune's ruthless smackdown of the Luxembourg & Dayan show of Jeff Koons' porny 1990 Made In Heaven series is an acid, but necessary reminder of how economically and critically disastrous the early 1990s were for the artist. [Though I'm...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
So I think I had a breakthrough in figuring out the details of Jeff Koons' Wall Street Era. I just wrote a post about it. It is so long. So I put it below....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:10 PM
The other weekend, I pigeonholed former Washington Post art critic Paul Richard after his talk, titled "What I Saw," at the National Gallery of Art. I said that I'd been interested to hear his take on public art over his...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
October 12, 2010
Here are some things I find I have kept open for several days or weeks, which I guess is one measure of how they are sticking with me: Andrew Russeth's look into the market and objects of Marcel Duchamp is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:56 PM
October 11, 2010
Karen Green has a show of her most recent art work at the Space Art Gallery in South Pasadena. Thematically, it is similar to her show last year:The work of making the pieces in "Latent Learning Experiments," Ms. Green said,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
October 8, 2010
Bob Adelman, Castelli's house, 1965, fairly ganked and shrunk via corbis] Now that they're selling for a million dollars or whatever, it's hard to imagine how Warhol's Brillo Box sculptures were perceived at the time they were made. When...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:14 AM
The Brillo Box formerly known as Stockholm type, and formerly known as being by Andy Warhol, sold at Christie's in 1998. So awesome. The Beverly Hills art dealer Robert Shapazian's bequest to the Huntingon Museum of 10 Brillo Boxes...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:51 AM
October 7, 2010
What if they decided to put Tilted Arc back? What if the General Services Administration, and the Jacob Javits Federal Building folks called up Richard Serra and said, "You know what this Federal Plaza needs after all is a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
October 5, 2010
Terrance O'Shea, late 1960s, 11x11x2 slab of laminated plexiglass This summer while poking around into the conflicted treatment of the Pasadena Art Museum's Warhol Brillo Boxes, I found a tangential mystery: 10 or 30 or 40 or more Kellogg's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:36 PM
About this time last year, while pondering the ur-satelloons that were Prof. T.S.C. Lowe's Civil War-era aerial reconnaissance balloons operated for the Union Army, I was struck by the idea of re-creating the rather awesome-sounding and -looking portable hydrogen...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:56 AM
I've never done an actual, in-depth search for any, but I've always wondered what became of the giant photomurals architect Paul Rudolph used for the exhibition design of Edward Steichen's landmark 1955 MoMA show, Family of Man. [vintage scan...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
October 4, 2010
Now I love me some rodeo, but primarily bull riding. It pains me to think how many rodeos I've missed at Madison Square Garden. So seeing legendary Magnum photographer [wait, is there any other kind?] Ernst Haas' 1957 photo...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
While pursuing his MFA at the University of Miami in 1976, artist Leo Rosenblatt created a printmaking process called Stat Art, "a technique incorporating drawing and mixed media on large sheets of commercial copy film in conjunction with light...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:00 PM
October 3, 2010
I just got back from hearing longtime Washington Post art critic Paul Richard speak at the National Gallery of Art. Richard is an excellent speaker and an alluring storyteller. His lecture, titled "What I Saw," began with his move from...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:25 PM
October 2, 2010
From the website of Sri Dharma Mittra, the Asana Yoga pioneer of Gramercy Park, and the Bernd & Hilla Becher of yogic typologies:In 1984 Dharma completed the Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures, as an offering to his Guru,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:57 PM
I don't know why, exactly, but as I was looking online for Zakaeuses this morning, the description of this early 18th century Inuit knife from the British Museum caught me off guard:This type of knife was made and used...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:57 PM
October 1, 2010
Hahahahahahawesome. Threadless pandaterrorists used facebook to plot a silent but hilarious panda-in at Gavin Brown yesterday to protest Rob Pruitt's "alleged misappropriation [to put it mildly]" of a panda t-shirt design by Jimiyo and AJ Dimarucot. Never mind that...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:03 PM
It's taken a while, mostly because I've been slack about following up on them, but the artist proofs from the 20x200.com edition of my print, Untitled (300x404), are in the mail and should be here very soon. I've seen...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:57 PM
Huh, I didn't notice that, but maybe I liked Ditto's limited edition Why Shapes What? book so much because of its gorgeously saturated palette? I wonder what Untitled (300x404) would look like stencil-printed on a Riso V8000? How would...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:38 PM
September 30, 2010
So after posting about Four-Color Process, I was looking around to see who is working to preserve this masterful, cheap, laborious-looking halftone printing process. I mean, we brought letterpress back, right? Well. So far, on the printing front, I'm not...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
UbuWeb's tweet about Nam June Paik's music reminds me it's long past time to post this hilarious story of Paik's 1965 Fluxus-style performance in Reykjavik, where he and Charlotte Moorman nearly capsized Iceland's nascent new music movement. Artnews.is quotes a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
September 29, 2010
Sure, you can get it for free right here, in all its original jpeg glory, but if you want to see the velvety printed goodness of Untitled (300x404) in person, you should head to 20x200's booth at the Affordable...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:26 PM
September 28, 2010
As longer-term readers of greg.org know, I am slowly trying to locate an original copy of the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, an 1870-plate portrait/catalogue of the visible universe [or the universe visible from the Palomar Observatory, anyway] taken...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
This is so awesome, a dome home that doesn't leak:Lot: 207 R. Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Home model Pease Woodworking Company USA, c. 1960 mixed media 13 dia x 7 h inches Pease Woodworking Company was licensed by Fuller to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
September 27, 2010
Holy smokes, Gary Beydler. A Los Angeles experimental filmmaker whose 1974 time-lapse silent short, Hand Held Day, was just mentioned by Steve Roden. It's incredible. Youtube user austinstein posted this version in 2007, before Beydler's too-small body of work...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:42 PM
September 26, 2010
Trying to clear some browser tabs. From John Hilgart, the guy who brought the world Comic Book Cartography, comes his next foray into the overlooked, undersung details of comics history, Four Color Process. It's an incredibly beautiful collection of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
September 24, 2010
So I just got Odd Man In, Suzanne Muchnic's 1998 bio of Norton Simon, and yeah, the Pasadena Art Museum was a mess, and Simon's takeover of it was pretty stunning. But Muchnic portrays it as of a piece with...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
September 23, 2010
Tyler thought the inadvertent awesomeness of this Hirshhorn photo of Ellsworth Kelly's Red Yellow Blue V (1968) was right up my alley. And he's right. It is awesome enough to make me think the photographer might have been especially...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:03 PM
Ed Ruscha is the most handsome 'cowboy' artist I've ever seen. I think his paintings are not only beautiful to look at but also have a sad, poetic and painfully truthful commentary on America... He is a true American hero:...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:49 AM
September 20, 2010
The movement predates his arrival, but on a sunny Sunday in September, with the wave of relational aesthetics breaking against the rocky Malibu cliffs beneath his feet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art powerfully proclaimed his institution's support...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:30 PM
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Hal Laessig, a Newark architect, developer, and artist who was a graduate student of Daniel Libeskind's at Cranbrook, and who came back to build three fantastical, fantasy machines for LIbeskind's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:41 PM
Jerry, Jerry Jerry: Once upon a time in the nineties, art that wanted to be complicit with the system, that tried to lure collectors as it criticized the artist-dealer-buyer complex, had an edgy Trojan-horse coerciveness. A lot of people got...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
September 18, 2010
God bless the Internet and all who surf upon her. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I thought was an esoteric topic, even for greg.org: the fantastical lost machines from "Three Lessons of Architecture," Daniel Libeskind's exhibition...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:08 PM
September 17, 2010
Hey you people, with your dying print venues, muscling in on my action! "A visit to the show might end with a broad smile at three paintings by Arcimboldo (pronounced Arch-im-BOLD-o)" - Blake Gopnik, Washington Post "In the current show...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
September 15, 2010
Dear Art World, Please arrange the following on a 2x2 grid for me? Or maybe a spectrum? Because I cannot: Eve Sussman's 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), which I quite like, but: Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching (2007) and his cinematic projections...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:53 PM
And so far, I can't find it anywhere:UEZ: when your work first started to appear and was classified as Conceptual art, did you have a secure visual language which you knew would be viable over time? Or could you have...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:28 AM
September 14, 2010
It's funny how I think I know the history of the Pasadena Art Museum, when all I'm doing is projecting back and assuming a bunch of stuff based on a bunch of great-sounding anecdotes: First museum shows for Duchamp, Lichtenstein,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:23 PM
That's Futurist painter Luigi Russolo on the left being helped by his friend Ugo Piatti, probably around 1913 or 1914. They stand amidst Russolo's musical instruments, intonarumori, noise-intoners, which were designed in accordance with the principles laid out in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:38 AM
September 12, 2010
Good grief, it was only a couple of hours ago, and I can't even remember what took me to this three-year-old link roundup on BLDGBLOG that mentions hail cannons. I mean, hail cannon. Turns out they still make'em, they just...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
My list of incredible objects and machines from the past that need to be refabricated as art objects continues to grow. Actually, I guess the acoustic mirrors, built in the 1920s and early 30s as part of a sound ranging...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:58 PM
September 11, 2010
Christopher Knight took the occasion of an Alberto Burri retrospective in Santa Monica to tweet about Cretto, the artist's absolutely incredible 20-acre memorial/earthwork, in which the earthquake ruins of the Sicilian town of Gibellina were encased in a grid...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:20 PM
September 10, 2010
Here [via COS] is David Shrigley's animated short for Save The Arts, which is trying to help arts organizations in the UK avoid debilitating budget cuts. At first, I thought WTF?? The Arts are so screwed! Then I thought, well,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:39 AM
September 9, 2010
Seascape I, 1964, screenprint on Rowlux, ed. 200, from New York Ten portfolio [via] You know how you just think you'll blog about one thing, and then you want to get a little context, so you dig a bit,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:49 AM
This is why greg.org readers earn the big bucks, people. GF-R spotted this hilarious/sublime juxtaposition of ad and content from the LIFE Magazine report on the 1958 fire at the Museum of Modern Art and asks,:coincidence? Or the work...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:14 AM
September 8, 2010
Over the weekend, I hit the road to interview some people I've wanted to meet and talk with for months now. I'll be publishing the results soon here on greg.org. One of the artists whose work I've been interested in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:16 PM
September 6, 2010
And in other Just Cold Stealin' My Satelloon Idea Before The Fact News: This has been stuck on my iPad for way too long. At a space flight conference a couple of months ago, the Global Aerospace Corporation announced their...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
September 3, 2010
I can't quite figure out how it ties to the rest of the story, but I still think Sean O'Toole just shortlisted himself for arts lede of the year:For every Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein there is a fascist doppelgänger...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:48 AM
via la_biennale So Venice is not a total bust. Raumlaborberlin have installed their 2006 mobile inflatospace sculpture, „Das Küchenmonument," in the Giardini. And next to it is The Generator, an on-site workshop for knocking together "sedia veneziana," which are...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
September 2, 2010
via tsaaby Yeah, so I'd been poking around flickr for a while, looking to see how MOS's project for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale turned out. Because well, because. via Erika-Milite And hmm. What is it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
This is where Nightcrawler 'ports in and shouts, "Ausgezeichnet!" Here is Joseph Beuys, pop singer, performing his greatest anti-US, anti-nuclear hit from 1982, "Sonne statt Reagan, [Sun not Reagan]." Reagan, remember, is a German homonym for rain [Regen], so it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:53 PM
The fire at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC this morning reminded me of the incredible story of another museum fire, at The Museum of Modern Art in 1958. Before my time, I know, but I'd only learned of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:10 PM
August 31, 2010
It's taking me a while to warm to Tom Houseago's sculptures, but that's fine. It took me a very long time to come around to Rachel Harrison's work, and boy, is it worth it, so I'm happy to give...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:26 AM
The Ed-werd Rew-Shay Memorial Art World Pronunciation Guide keeps on growing! the latest additions include: Richard Anuszkiewicz Huma Bhabha Thomas Houseago And some great mispronunciations that needed addressing: Chinati Laocoon Modigliani Also, I just know the Aperture Foundation's video editors...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:39 AM
August 29, 2010
this is pretty awesome:...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:56 PM
August 28, 2010
In the 1980s Daniel Libeskind was an increasingly prominent architectural theorist who--I was about to say "who had nevertheless not actually ever built anything," but the whole thing that's turning my head upside down is that he did, in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
August 27, 2010
One of the great stories surrounding MoMA's 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye" is how collector/garmento Larry Aldrich turned several Op paintings he owned into fabrics, and then into dresses, which fed into the Op Art Trend that was apparently...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
August 26, 2010
Danish artist Jacob Boeskov flew to Lagos, Nigeria to make and star in a short action film he wrote titled, Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front with the noted Nollywood director Teco Benson. The film was produced by...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:55 PM
August 25, 2010
Holy smokes, Gordon Hyatt, I didn't know what you did 44 summers ago. Among the episodes of CBS's news program "Eye on New York" which were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1967 for their Television Archive...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:47 PM
After watching the first segment at maryandmatt's blog, I was hooked. Mike Wallace, shooting a 1965 episode of WCBS news show Eye on New York in and about The Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster exhibition of Op Art, "The...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:45 AM
August 23, 2010
I watched the documentary Alice Neel last night, made in 2007 by the late artist's grandson Andrew Neel. It's pretty good, definitely worth a watch. Documentaries by family members come with a whole set of conflicts and challenges baked in,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:21 PM
August 22, 2010
Dear painting experts, Please tell me that the brush-steadying stick with the sock on the end which is so vital to the painting process that it must be included in Serious & Important Photographic Portraits of such artists as Arnold...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:06 PM
August 21, 2010
I know that what's really needed around here is a redesign, and probably the addition of a few thousand tags. But right now that's an 8th burner project, and I've only got a 4-burner stove. But in the mean time,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:43 PM
I'm glad and not surprised to see I'm the only person using Google Street View as an artistic source. Since at least last year, photographer Michael Wolf has been making a series of Street View-based works that explore urban...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:00 PM
August 20, 2010
This has been sitting on my desktop since last month, when Google Maps announced the addition of 45-degree Aerial View imagery for new locations, including Dortmund, Germany. So I clicked over to Dortmund, and zoomed in there to the central...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
And thus we see the painful difference between meaning to buy Wary Meyers' awesome-looking design project book Tossed and Found and actually buying it. I would have been inspired by their Enzo Mari autoprogettazione-esque mantle many months ago. What...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:31 PM
August 18, 2010
When it was publicly announced in March 1990 that the National Gallery of Canada had purchased Barnett Newman's 1967 painting, Voice of Fire for $1.8 million (Canadian), there was an immediate press and political uproar that so much public money...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
August 17, 2010
Speaking of National Gallery of Canada upheavals, Walrus Magazine, late-career post-minimalist kitsch, and Blake Gopnik: In March 2010, Walrus celebrated the 20th anniversary of longtime NGC contemporary curator Brydon Smith's purchase of Barnett Newman's towering 1967 painting, Voice of Fire...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:50 PM
It takes a big man to acknowledge when he agrees with Blake Gopnik. Paddy Johnson's post about controversy at the National Gallery of Canada led me to "Pop Life: Art in the Material World," Jack Bankowsky et al's solipsistic exhibition...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:04 AM
August 15, 2010
Dealer-turned-public art empresaria Emi Fontana talking in Artforum about West of Rome:...people believe that public art needs to occupy planned and assigned spaces. What we're doing is much more fine-tuned: You have to find the space that resonates with the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:47 PM
August 14, 2010
While wandering through the National Air and Space Museum [family's in town], I stumbled across James Keeler's lantern slides of spiral nebulae, taken at the Lick Observatory outside San Jose beginning in 1888. Keeler was a pioneering astronomer at...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
Well, a color chart print, anyway. In 1974, at the height [and end] of Gerhard Richter's production of painted grids of colored squares and rectangles, he also published Colour Fields. 6 Arrangements of 1260 Colours, a portfolio of six...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:04 PM
August 13, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Henning Lohner's film essay/documentary about working with John Cage to make One11 and 103, Cage's only feature film project, completed just before he passed away in 1992. It's on YouTube, chopped up...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:18 PM
In anticipation of Creative Time Summit II--it's October 9-10, just a few weeks away!--I've been watching some of the talks from last fall's Summit, organized by Nato Thompson held at the NY Public Library. [For an overview, check out Frieze's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:18 AM
August 10, 2010
John Emerson saw an "I [HEART] NY" flyer in Arabic posted in the East Village a few days after September 11, 2001. He posted a large, printable graphic version on his blog a year later. A few months after...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:32 PM
August 9, 2010
In addition to being the subject of his film and photographic work, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator modulated light and space as a sculptural installation, and it served as a Light Prop for an Electric Stage. But in 1930, the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Licht Raum Modulator, 1970 reconstruction, image: bauhaus.de Did I say a few minutes? Laszlo Moholy-Nagy spent around eight years [from 1922-30] building his Light Space Modulator, and then he carted it around Europe, and to America, reworking...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:14 PM
July 29, 2010
I'd known Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1930 kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator indirectly as a film subject, and then in 2002 through incredible color photographs Oliver Renaud-Clement showed at Andrea Rosen in 2002. [And again, in direct relation to the artist's sculptures...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:15 AM
July 27, 2010
Digging around on Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator and its relation to a later generation of kinetic light works by artists like Otto Piene, I came across some early works by Piene's Zero Group co-founder, Heinz Mack. As early as...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
July 26, 2010
Breaker, Breaker One-Nine, I got Moving Serra, a documentary about transporting Richard Serra's 242-ton sculpture Sequence cross-country, from MoMA to LACMA on a fleet of flatbeds, that's blowing my mind right now. We need a convoy of Serra torqued...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:57 PM
July 23, 2010
Oh Gerhard-Richter.com, why did I ever doubt you? Last February, while holed up in the Snowpocalypse, I thought the hell out of the Serpentine Gallery's catalogue for Richter's 4900 Colours. The work consists of 25 enamel color squares arranged randomly...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:36 PM
In addition to the world's greatest artist website, artist Gerhard Richter also makes paintings. Now these two endeavors come together with the debut of a micro-site devoted to 4900 Colours, the set of 196 5x5 grids of 25 randomly...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
July 22, 2010
That Google Street View snafu yesterday reminded me of a still from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1932 abstract//constructivist short film, Lichtspiel, or Lightplay. Normally, I'd say that's the art-nerdiest possible free association in the world, but I've actually been meaning to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:37 PM
July 21, 2010
While scoping out the 1974 video art conference at MoMA, "Open Circuits, the Future of Television," filmmaker Jose Montes Baquer decided that for some reason, Salvador Dali should be the artist he would collaborate with for his documentary. Baquer...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
I was on the phone, trying to give directions to a friend to a small Japanese grocery store in Rockville, Maryland, so I pulled it up on Google Street View. Which turned out to be useless, but weirdly beautiful....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:13 PM
Holy smokes, people, just watch how these things turn out. In April, I spotted this photo at MoMA; it was in the second floor hallway just past the cafe, with no caption, and a date: 1970. I spent a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:09 AM
July 20, 2010
I was half-watching the German artist Ferdinand Kriwet's Apollovision, a film & sound & video collage of the Apollo 11 moon landing as American media spectacle made, incredibly, in 1969, when I heard this:Now you can follow the Apollo...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:32 AM
July 18, 2010
The things you learn at church. So of course I knew that the late illustrator Arnold Friberg's dramatic paintings of scenes from the Book of Mormon, with ripped Nephites and Lamanites striding around the Promised Land, are lodged in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
July 17, 2010
The only word I can think of is the one Things already used: epic. Sean Michaels goes long and deep for a Brick Magazine profile of the not quite invisible, not quite underground world of L'UX, Untergunther, La Mexicaine de...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:35 PM
July 15, 2010
Melvin Sokolsky's classic Bubble Collection photoshoot for Alexey Brodovitch's March 1963 Harper's Bazaar got BoingBoinged this week, and given the recent reorientation of the blog towards retrofuturistic orbs, Jason kindly passed along exactly what I was looking for: the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:54 PM
The Times reports happily on the bright future of enlarging and printing our digital images--a future which is here today!Some companies offer the option to print onto a stretched canvas. The effect is instant art, ready to be hung. Canvas...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
July 14, 2010
So woohoo, Andrew Russeth pointed back to a Charlie Finch artnet gossip column from 1998, and just wow. I was there, I mean, I remember a lot of that stuff, and it is freaking me out how alien and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
July 12, 2010
From Artforum: On Thursday evening, the 2010 Renaissance Arts Prize awardees were announced. Winners Barbara Nati, Steffi Klenz, Laura Mergoni, and Natalia Saurin received awards donated by David Morante, cofounder of the prize and former Consul General of Italy in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:34 AM
I was talking shop with Tyler Green this weekend, and he told me that the Washington Post's art critic Blake Gopnik actually did devote more than a paragraph in a review of two unrelated shows at a different museum to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:00 AM
July 11, 2010
Len Lye called his kinetic artworks Tangible Motion Sculptures, or just Tangibles, because they made visible motion and other phenomena, like the wind. In 1960, he and his wife Ann, along with some other friends, headed over to huge...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:41 PM
Larry Gottheim's 1970 short film Fog Line is just beautiful to watch. 11 minutes of fog imperceptibly but inexorably dissipating in a rural landscape. It reminds me a bit of Tacita Dean's Banewl, a 63-minute fixed shot of a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
July 10, 2010
I came across a mention of Len Lye's spectacular-looking kinetic sculpture a couple of weeks ago, while reading 1965 coverage of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts. Sandwiched in between a photo of Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:02 PM
July 9, 2010
How much of this is really unanticipated, unexpected, unsurprising, and ultimately, unauthorized? The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College [no relation] has two Warhol Brillo Boxes from 1970. It describes them as "(enlarged refabrication of 1964 project)." Then this:Exhibitions...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
July 8, 2010
Wow, I knew about the Moon Museum segment because Jade Dellinger emailed about it. But I didn't know the first episode of this season's History Detectives also included a whole segment on satelloons and Project Echo. I love how they...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:43 PM
July 7, 2010
I didn't make it the first time, of course, but I did see Gilbert & George's reprise of "The Singing Sculpture" in 1991 at Sonnabend. It left a pretty deep impression on me in a way their photo compositions...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:50 PM
According to the Gerhard Richter's website, FAZ Overpainted, a 2002 squeegee paint-on-paper edition is based on a photograph of a 2001 copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). The hand visible on the right is that of Richter. The...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:06 PM
July 5, 2010
The Moment has a Q&A with Mike Bidlo, whose work, Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964), 2005 is currently on view in the Lever House lobby: Did you ever meet him [Warhol] more formally? Yes, at a party at Jean-Michel...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:12 PM
Last October, Mark Leckey presented In A Long Tail World at the ICA in London. From the writeups, it sounded like a cross between Chris Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Ted by way of the Guggenheim Las Vegas. Leckey's now loaded...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:30 PM
ESA has released images of the first all-sky survey from the Planck space observatory, which is currently in orbit around Lagrange-2, a balancing point between the gravitational exertions of the moon and the earth. Planck rotates at a constant...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:16 PM
Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world's largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
NPR's Robert Krulwich had a fascinating story the other day that works even better online. Because there are slideshows and video footage of Starfish Prime, the hydrogen bomb the US detonated in space on July 9, 1962. The launch...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:44 PM
July 3, 2010
This FT essay by Daphne Guinness about buying Isabella Blow's estate before it was dispersed at Christie's is a wonderful, sad, incredible thing. [via @artnetdotcom] All the way back in 2002, I overwrote a long post about Blow, Walter Benjamin,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:32 PM
July 2, 2010
Harrier and Jaguar, Fiona Banner's commission for Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries opened this week, and from the making of film and interview with the artist, it looks spectacular. Banner has installed two decommissioned fighter jets--a BAe Sea Harrier XE695...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
One of the simplest, best parts of Innen Stadt Außen [Inner City Out], Olafur Eliasson's multiple public and museum projects in his adopted hometown of Berlin this year, is now online as a short film. In what feels like...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
July 1, 2010
Souren Melikian's auction analysis for the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times is almost always entertainingly specious, but he is at his best/worst when he writes about contemporary art, about which he obviously knows nothing:The next lot, "Cristina Passing By,"...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
I like writing the word camofleur. In response to the burning question [sic] that arose from Ad Reinhardt's chronology, what was up with Arshile Gorky wanting to start a camouflage school in 1943? Because everyone knows that Gorky was...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
Thanks to greg.org reader Fred for sending along a link to a memo computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith wrote in 1995, soon after his company Altamira [the one he founded after Lucasfilm and Pixar] had been assimilated by...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
June 29, 2010
First up, a high five to Andrew Russeth at ArtInfo for highlighting Nicholas Robinson Gallery's summer installation of Andy Warhol's unusual Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall). What a weird, wonderful--but mostly weird--work. It's basically a mural of shimmering, lenticular photos...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
53 years later, the guy who invented the square pixel regrets the error. In 1957, NIST computer expert Russell Kirsch scanned the world's first digital image [a photo of his infant son, above] using the country's first programmable computer....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:08 PM
How much of discovery is really just rediscovery? or learning remembering? I was waiting to read how editor/art historian Barbara Rose had decided to model the chronology at the opening of her 1991 book, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
I'll confess, when I saw the tweets start flying about Mira Schor's essay on Otto Dix, Greater NY, and Bravo's Work of Art, I was skeptical. How the hell was she gonna fit any of those, never mind all three--at...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:12 PM
June 28, 2010
See, now here is another reason I've gotten so backed up: I was overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this. It's currently freaking me out how much is turning on the Osaka 70 World Expo. It's as if there's a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
After I posted about Sigmar Polke's photocopied masterpiece Daphne, Mondo-Blogo emailed the great news that Corraini has republished Bruno Munari's Original Xerographies. I have the original Original Xerographies in a box somewhere; it's more handbook-ish than I remembered--which is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:44 PM
I hear blogging is out, everyone's tweeting or facebooking now. While I don't quite buy it, I am finding that I'm more likely to keep something I find interesting in my browser tabs for months rather than post it straightaway....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:22 PM
June 26, 2010
Thanks to Paul Schmelzer at Eyeteeth for pointing to Bob Nickas's great 1999 interview with Maurizio Cattelan. Good times. I really wanted to focus on his experience with painting, so this excerpt starts kind of in the middle of the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
First, the good news: The Jeff Koons BMW Art Car ran in Le Mans! The bad news: it totally sucked and crapped out after just a few hours. I know how it feels, Jeff. I once helped organize an all-female...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:46 AM
June 25, 2010
I only met Tobias Wong a couple of times, but it took me aback to see so many people I do know were described or quoted in Alex Williams' NY Times piece as Tobi's friends. Tobi liked to give other...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
I may have something to write later about Yves Klein, I don't know. Peter Schjeldahl summed up what I'd already noticed, that the art discourse is very uncomfortable--or at least largely silent--on the topic of Klein's apparently deep or abiding...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:45 PM
June 24, 2010
Alberto Giacometti's figures look the way they do because he tried to capture what he called, "The moment I see them" and the way "they appear in my field of vision..." Arthur C Danto said this accounted for "the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
June 22, 2010
Now before we get too far, let me state for the record that so long as there's no thievery or lying involved, but appropriate credit or consideration is, I got no problem at all with a man who takes another...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
June 20, 2010
Last fall, I was looking for a way to paper the art world with giant versions of the awesome PDF wanted posters the LAPD Art Theft Detail had created for Richard Weisman's stolen Warhol Athletes Series paintings. So I created...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:18 PM
June 19, 2010
I didn't follow Sigmar Polke's work closely. At least not consciously. This excerpt from Reiner Speck's essay about Polke's 2004 artist's book Daphne is awesome, even if it sounds a bit like someone's been huffing toner at the end:An...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:16 PM
So funny, last night at the Brooklyn Museum, Andrew Russeth was saying as how some late Warhol paintings look remarkably like David Salle. Villaca Caja, 1929, at Galerie Hopkins-Custot And I was flipping through The Art Newspaper's Basel daily edition,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:32 AM
June 18, 2010
Ian Wilson's conversation-based art practice reminded Ben of the introduction to Asif Agha's 2006 book, Language and Social Relations. An excerpt:...It is therefore all the more important to see that utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:00 PM
June 16, 2010
I've long admired Ian Wilson's conversation-based art works, though for years I've wondered if selling conversations as art doesn't complicate one's daily interactions with people, sort of a conceptual version of how doctors always get hit up for medical advice...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:48 PM
June 11, 2010
I find Gerhard Richter's squeegee paintings to be both endlessly fascinating and seemingly endless. I don't sweat too much when I think about the one I didn't buy when I could have; it's just so hard to decide that this,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:44 PM
June 10, 2010
When I offhandedly declared a jpg of Richard Prince's 2003 rephoto, Untitled, (Cowboy) to be my own work a year ago, I had no idea it would ever leave my blog post. As an idea, appropriating an appropriation might be...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
June 9, 2010
I'm as excited as the next guy that there's an app for the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn. I bought it the first day to try it out. I did not expect it to be as cool as the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:32 AM
June 8, 2010
Look, no one is more surprised than I am about this. But when Jen Bekman and I started talking about it a while back, it started sounding like the awesomest thing in the world. So I've done an edition with...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:57 PM
The day I watched the video of Jeff Koons' crew wrapping the vinyl decals on his BMW Art Car was also the day I surfed across Little Lamb, Richmond artist/musician Sara Gossett's awesome blogspot compendium of psychedelia [which has...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:05 AM
It's a testament to the PR-fed, context-free media machine, I guess, that Olafur Eliasson, the last artist to make a BMW Art Car, goes entirely unmentioned in the promotions of Jeff Koons' iteration. [One exception: Richard Chang at the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:37 AM
June 7, 2010
The Brooklyn Rail's Phong Bui interviewed Vija Celmins about her show at David McKee GalleryBrooklyn Rail: About the night sky paintings, I always wanted to ask you, with all of the subtleties of gray tones embedded in the white...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:19 PM
Whoa, check that out! The Moon Museum's on the Tee Vee! Or it will be, June 21st. The PBS show History Detectives is trying to figure out whether the Moon Museum, a SIM card-sized ceramic wafer created in 1969...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:16 AM
June 4, 2010
Bell Labs' Billy Kluver guided Andy Warhol to the Mylar balloons the artist used for Silver Clouds, his 1966 installation at Leo Castelli Gallery. And at Ferus Gallery. And at the Cincinnati Arts Center. At the time, Bell Labs...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
June 2, 2010
After bagging on Blake Gopnik's comments on Marcel Duchamp playing the buyers of his readymades for fools, I started looking more closely at Duchamp's actual statements and working process. It's so easy to consider him as just a source of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
May 29, 2010
Sure, there's Dutch Camo Landscapes, and Razzle Dazzle, and the Civilian Camouflage Council, but it all pales in comparison to the truly epic WWII camo accomplishments of Jasper Maskelyne and The Magic Gang. Maskelyne was a British magician-turned-Army camo mastermind...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
May 28, 2010
Colorful, cheap African textiles: they're not just for Yinka Shonibare anymore! Called Pagne in West Africa and Kanga [also khanga] in Tanzania, 1x1.5m screenprinted cotton wraps are produced all across Africa. There is a tradition to make commemorative kanga...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:43 AM
May 26, 2010
So fantastic. I stumbled across this inadvertent diptych in Google Books, it's pp. 86-7 of P. Ch. Joubert's 1844 addition to the Manuels Roret series, Nouveau manuel complet du fabricant et de l'amateur de tabac. It's beautiful, somewhere between...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:53 PM
May 24, 2010
Hans Ulrich Obrist, is there anything you haven't done? In 1993 as part of the Museum In Progress project, Obrist helped the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti realize a longtime idea of putting art on airplanes. In addition...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
Artist/curator Anton Vidokle reworks an excellent lecture on the problems of curator/artists in the latest issue of e-flux journalI feel that whereas artists' engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
This 11-minute documentary short by Brisbane animator Simon Cottee gives a nice look at contemporary pixel art and its origins. Unsurprisingly, game developer Jason Rohrer has the most thoughtful perspective on the idealized, ex-post-facto perception of pixels as these perfect,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
On the occasion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul [1] winning the Palme d'Or, Frieze's Dan Fox has a incisive recap of the debate over Slow Cinema that erupted after Nick James' Sight and Sound recent op-ed calling the genre out as a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
May 23, 2010
A couple of months ago, I wondered aloud about the reason Yves Klein schlepped all the way out to the Parisian suburbs to make the leap into the void for his famous photocollage, Leap into the Void. The site, 3,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:47 AM
May 21, 2010
That is so Epic. From Epic Brewing Company, Salt Lake City, Utah. Spiral Jetty IPA | Epic Brewing Company [epicbrewing.com via the freshly relocated tyler green] Related? The Shoppes at Rozel Point, from Visiting Artist (sic), a lecture involving Smithson...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:02 PM
A digitized collection of vintage NASA Goddard Space Flight Center newsletters led me to the June 23, 1963 issue of LIFE Magazine. If it were possible for any photo of a Project Echo satelloon to be slightly less than awesome,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:41 AM
May 20, 2010
The ad's been running for a while now, but Jean just spotted this disclaimer at the end of AT&T's "Blanket" commercial last night: "The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect affiliation or involvement with AT&T." I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
My buddy John Powers has been working on this insane project forlikeever: an artists commentary track--with pictures!--that runs alongside Star Wars IV. Tonight he's presenting it at Philoctetes, and discussing it along with Colby Chamberlain and Luke duBois, who's made...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:24 AM
May 19, 2010
I think we all know that Jeff Koons worked on Wall Street before he became an artist. It's mentioned in many of his profiles. But what, exactly, did he do? And what relevance, if any, does it really have...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:38 PM
Holy smokes, this is so incredible. Vincent Ocasla beat (sic) Sim City by spending three years designing and building Magnasanti, a six million person city that runs flawlessly (sic, again, obv) for 50,000 years. The YouTube video is ominously awesome....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
May 18, 2010
Do you find yourself wanting to talk about Group Zero, but the only names you can pronounce are Fontana and Klein [and Westwater]? Do you ever call galleries you're about to walk into, just to hear them say the artist's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:04 AM
May 17, 2010
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik commenting on the tiny chip of porcelain Eva and Franco Mattes, the formerly anonymous artists behind 0100101110101101.org, reportedly took from one of Marcel Duchamp's urinal sculptures: In the case of Duchamp's "Fountain," could it...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
December 1942, the US is at war, and everyone is tinkering in his basement, doing his part to protect the civilian and industrial landscape against the latest technological threat: aerial photo reconnaissance. From a lengthy, fascinating article in Popular Mechanics:But...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:02 AM
May 14, 2010
First up, let me just say these are fantastic; I would love to see this row of bombardier training simulators parked in any gallery in the world, right next to Chris Burden's homemade B-Car. But then you'd have to...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:07 PM
Apex Art just announced that Courtenay Finn and Gary Fogelson were selected for this year's open curating slots. Finn's proposal uses a work by Bruce Nauman as a jumping off point for a show about "the role of reading in...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:26 PM
May 11, 2010
10 works from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962/1989, each 50x58cm, edition of 25 I am a huge Ed Ruscha fan, have been for a long time. His artist books of typological photographs were some of the first works of art...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
May 8, 2010
This explains the "two or three Happenings" discrepancies; there was a matinee Happening on Thursday. Also: "Globe Poster - Baltimore." I've had this on my desktop so long, I've forgotten where I ganked it. Oh, that's right, Oldenburg's print...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
April 29, 2010
God bless him, even if he's on the wrong side of [most of the intervening 40 years of] contemporary art history, you gotta love Hilton Kramer's eviscerating takedown of MoMA's 1970 conceptualist exhibition, Information, curated by Kynaston McShine:The exhibition is,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
with apologies to Marco, whose skin, which is not really chartreuse, was done early on, before I figured out a more suitable color....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
April 27, 2010
Alright, all y'all who didn't tell me about Otto Piene's classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:35 PM
Thanks to Judd [no relation] Tully, I pulled Martha Buskirk's book, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art down again and was reminded of how awesome it is on the fascinating conflicts between Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Donald Judd [and...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
April 26, 2010
No, not Michael Whitney Straight. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in a 1995 interview with Rob Storr:There's a great quote by the director of the Christian Coalition, who said that he wanted to be a spy. "I want to be invisible," he...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:59 PM
April 25, 2010
More from Giuseppe Panza's 1985 Archives of American Art Oral Histories interview with Christopher Knight, this time on Panza's preference for abstraction: But I believe that the modern science reveal to our knowledge a world which is far above the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, interviewed by Christopher Knight in 1985 for the Archives of American Art:DR. PANZA: Well, the connection between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art was made through Rauschenberg, because if you look at Rauschenberg, you see also the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:04 PM
On 2nd, 3rd and 4th of April 1985, there was a discussion between Christopher Knight and Count [sic?!] Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. What was said remains in the collection of Christopher Knight. And in the Archives of American Art. And...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:30 PM
April 24, 2010
On some day in January 1972, there was a discussion between Count Panza and Ian Wilson. What was said remains in the collection of Count Panza.--A guess at what a young gallery assistant named Jeffrey Deitch typed up on a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:34 PM
April 23, 2010
I cannot go to Oregon for the weekend, but I would pay cash money right here and now to watch a livestream of the Judd Conference, the Univerity of Oregon's day-long exploration of Donald Judd's fabrication methods. The official title...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
April 20, 2010
While researching the National Gallery of Art's Barkley L. Hendricks paintings, which were purchased by J. Carter Brown with money from Michael Whitney Straight, I came across one of the crazier space-meets-art moments in the history of exhibition design: Art...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
April 19, 2010
Oh, I take it all back. The Washington Post does support a vibrant local art scene. If they didn't, would they be "looking to discover the Washington Region's newest talents" with their "Real Art D.C." Art Contest? I didn't think...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
Sperone Westwater calls it Light Ballet on Wheels, 1965. Sure. It's hard to tell from the microfilm, but a photospread of artist-made household objects in the New York Times Magazine ["They Call It Art," (-ouch), Sept. 25, 1966] sure...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:14 AM
April 18, 2010
Following on to their 2008 retrospective of ZERO, Sperone Westwater is exhibiting work by the group's co-founder, Otto Piene. " Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967" runs through May 22nd. [16 Miles has very nice installation shots.]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:50 PM
April 17, 2010
Figure in Landscape, 2009 I'm probably enjoying reading the legal filings in Craig Robins' lawsuit against David Zwirner a little too much. [Randy Kennedy's got a nice summary in the NYT today; basically, Robins says Zwirner revealed a confidential...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:59 AM
April 15, 2010
Cross a first edition of Yoko Ono's 1964 "event score"/instruction-based art book Grapefruit off my Ones I've Let Get Away list. Turns out it's not just me:There are no copies of the first (limited) edition of Grapefruit currently being...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:13 PM
Some interesting developments since putting the Walking Man self-portrait collection out there. Thanks for the feedback and responses. I think it's becoming clearer that walking man is not, as I wrote, a guy who "came upon the Google Street...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:56 AM
April 14, 2010
You could argue that Primary Information's facsimile editions of Avalanche, the awesome artist-run journal published in the mid-1970s by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, are only the 3rd and 4th greatest editions of Avalanche, after Wade Guyton &co's bootleg photocopied...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
April 12, 2010
Google Street View Bilbao 2 Originally uploaded by artberri I have no idea who walking man is, and ultimately it doesn't really matter to me; the portraits of him that got inserted repeatedly throughout Google Street View ultimately stand...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
HUGE news from on the Enzo Mari autoprogettazione X [Scandinavian Furniture Giant] mashup front: The Finnish manufacturer Artek will announce 'sedia 1- chair,' "the first object from Mari's thought-provoking project 'autoprogettazione' to go into production" with the company. "the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
April 10, 2010
In the Summer of 2009, an unidentified young man came upon the Google Street View Trike preparing to map the Binnenhof, the center of the Dutch government, in The Hague. He decided to tag along. The man walked alongside...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
April 9, 2010
He's pretty harsh on unnamed governments who complain about unblurred faces, and got more than a bit of engineer's arrogance, which is why, I guess, he works for Google, but Michael Jones's talk, "The Meaning of Maps,"at O'Reilly's Where...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:18 PM
If there's something I'm happy to be corrected on, it's my assertion earlier this week that the National Gallery of Art has never exhibited its awesome, early, major Barkley Hendricks portraits. It turns out they have, and here's how we...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:08 PM
Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, "Configurations of the New World,", papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:34 PM
April 8, 2010
5. That plant. 4. That Girard-lookin' wall hanging. 3. Those Piet Hein Eek-lookin' sofas. 2. The Courier-lookin' typeface on those teasers. 1. A tie between Curries & Smog. via LA Modern, which will be auctioning this and other vintage...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
April 7, 2010
Dealer Leo Castelli in a December 1969 interview with Paul Cummings, discussing the early work of John Chamberlain:Then before that, he had done those foam rubber sculptures, which were really very, very good. At that time, people were more...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
April 6, 2010
It's hard to say where the momentous awesomeness of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's 1963 Pop Art Festival first overwhelmed me. When I learned that noted Pop Artist John Cage performed on opening night? When I found out that...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:39 AM
April 4, 2010
Maybe that should be, "Hast du mich gesehen?" Do you have Andrea Fraser's Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER'S Writings...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:48 PM
Seriously. It's been eating at me for over a year. Like everyone else who saw them in "Birth of the Cool," Nasher Museum curator Trevor Schoonmaker's retrospective, I was in awe of Barkely L. Hendricks' straight-up full length portraits...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
April 3, 2010
I was reading Calvin Tomkins' 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold's giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
March 31, 2010
I've already mentioned the May 3, 1963 Time Magazine article about the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's Pop Art Festival; it's really not much, but it contains the most extensive contemporary account of Claes Oldenburg's 1963 Happening, Stars. Here's how...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
I've been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it's been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos. Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
March 30, 2010
So the last couple of months, I've been working on an idea for book, and I wanted to see a mockup/proof. It's mostly photographs/images, with a very text introduction, and I wanted only one image per spread, like a nice...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:39 PM
The Archive of American Art's collection of transcripts of Paul Cummings' interviews with art world figures is always good for a firsthand account and an interesting nugget or reflection. But I don't think I've ever had quite the visceral reaction...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
In her 1998 biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Nina Burleigh used Stars, Claes Oldenburg's Happening at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's 1963 Pop Art Festival, as a bellwether for sophisticated Georgetown/Washington's temperament towards contemporary art. Here's how Burleigh described...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
March 27, 2010
Hello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art? Never mind, Blake Gopnik is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:22 PM
March 25, 2010
The week before The Pop Art Festival in Washington DC, Art Buchwald had lunch with Claes Oldenburg, WGMA Assistant Director Alice Denney, and publicist John Mecklin. The topic was Oldenburg's upcoming Happening, Stars. Buchwald wrote (in the first person...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:09 PM
In Frieze, Jennifer Allen [no relation] declares the death of photography. Film photography, that is:Digitalization brings photography closer to cinema, too. The galloping horse that Eadweard Muybridge photo-graphed with 24 cameras can now be captured with one high-speed digital camera....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:57 PM
March 24, 2010
Suddenly silver mirrored balls are everywhere. Music video and filmmaker Roel Wouters created the trailer for last year's International Film Festival Breda: A silver sphere on an endless checkerboard floor is the default for many 3D modeling applications. It can...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:01 PM
March 23, 2010
I could feel Mondo-Blogo was baiting me as I scrolled through the photos from MoonFire, Taschen's luscious 2009 commemorative book for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. He was amped about the text by Norman Mailer, and the...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:48 PM
It's been a few months, and now I've been researching it so many places, I can't remember exactly where I first discovered that Claes Oldenburg did a Happening in Washington DC. And an early one, too. He was invited...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:42 PM
March 22, 2010
Through The Night Softly was a 1973 performance piece-as-latenight-TV-commercial by Chris Burden. It's a 10-second video of the artist, in a Speedo, inching on his stomach across a parking lot full of broken glass. [View it on UbuWeb.] Burden...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
March 21, 2010
A great post on language & progress, Claude Levi-Strauss & TIno Sehgal. Some of the most interesting commentary I've read on discerning the actual structure and contours of Sehgal's This Progress, too. [futureofthebook.org via @briansholis] Which makes me wonder: do...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:28 PM
March 20, 2010
I've been working on a shot-for-shot remake of the Spiral Jetty film for a while, and so I'm quite familiar with the storyboard-like drawings Smithson did for it. Familiar with them as drawings, that is. He called them Movie...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
March 19, 2010
It doesn't feel like a tangent to go from satelloons and museums on the moon to other aesthetic aspects of space and the space race. Plus there's the fascination at discovering, as a grown man, how much I hadn't...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:45 PM
Roberta Smith loves loves loves the Ken Price/Josef Albers show at Brooke Alexander. I all but stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago after finding Brooke's interview with Price (PDF), and I have to agree. It is incredibly...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
March 18, 2010
Ivan Lozano's post about Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, and the conservation of performance art is absolutely fantastic. [It's built off the Performance Workshop Klaus Biesenbach held a couple of weeks ago, which was written up by Carol Kino...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:31 PM
March 16, 2010
You remember how, a couple of months ago, I could find next to nothing online about Vern Blosum, the mysterious artist whose crisp, deadpan paintings of parking meters were featured in one of the very first museum exhibitions of Pop...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:18 PM
While rummaging around in Vito Acconci's early exhibition history for traces of Kathryn Bigelow's work [more on that in a second], I came across a set of three early, short Super 8mm films I'd never heard of: Three Attention...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:17 PM
"The lady clad in bright red silk was having her picture taken from every angle around Abramovic's performance. It was spectacular." C-Monster has an awesome photoset and a firsthand account of experiencing Marina Abramovic's MoMA performance, The Artist Is...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:02 AM
From a 1983 New York Times profile of up-and-coming artist/photographer Cindy Sherman:One day several years ago, in the studio of David Salle, who borrows extensively from the media, Miss Sherman saw a soft-porn magazine photograph of ''a housewife looking sexy''...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:40 AM
March 15, 2010
I'm slightly fascinated with the talk-based artwork of Ian Wilson. The last couple of weeks, I'd been working on a Conceptualism-related proposal, and so I had out my catalogue for Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer's awesome, formative [for me, anyway]...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:34 PM
Can I just suggest that, when you buy an article from the New York Times Archive, you go ahead and buy a 10-pack? In addition to supporting your local paper in their time of financial distress and dire need [ahem],...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
March 14, 2010
Part of re-creating the Project Echo satelloons as art objects is tracking down the documentation and history of it all, identifying archives and primary source materials, and finding out how, exactly NASA built these early, early satellites. Because it's...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:41 PM
March 13, 2010
Like everyone else reading it on OSCAR NIGHT®, Andrew Hultkrans' 1995 Artforum interview with Kathryn Bigelow gave me hope for the films-by-artists genre, if not quite from the direction people might expect. To hear a double OSCAR® winner say of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:40 AM
March 12, 2010
was in Carol Vogel's article on the Hirshhorn's upcoming Yves Klein retrospective [and the Kleins being auctioned to coincide with it]:A colorful figure who was an aspiring judo instructor, Klein studied Rosicrucianism and was obsessed with philosophical and poetic investigations...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:48 PM
Ken Knowlton's artistic collaborations have been less well-known that his Bell Labs colleague, Billy Kluver, who created E.A.T. Experiements with Art & Technology, with Robert Rauschenberg and who introduced Andy Warhol to Mylar. But we'll get to that. In...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:54 PM
Stan VanDerBeek and Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs collaborated on a series of digital structuralist computer/graphic/text animations in 1966. They used BeFLIX, [Bell Flicks], an 8-bit graphics programming language Knowlton developed in 1963. The Tate's clean version of Poemfield No....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:16 PM
March 9, 2010
I'm still looking for the c. 1958-9 images of the 12-foot satelloon prototype being inflated in the US Capitol Building as part of NASA's push to fund the 100-foot version. But look what I found in the March 14, 1961...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:53 PM
The story smells a little planted, but as long as a couple of these awesome Razzle Dazzle, Dakis Razzin,' New Museum critiquin' posters find their way into a mailing tube and land on my doorstep, I will definitely play along:...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:02 PM
I often wonder what it'll do to my kids to grow up immersed in contemporary art the way they are: reading Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series at bedtime; seeing every vertical line in a painting as a "zip"; choosing to watch...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:25 PM
March 8, 2010
In 1961, Hazleton Laboratories, a pioneering biological sciences testing company based in Falls Church, Virginia, was growing rapidly. For one of their expansions, executives and scientists were given allocations to buy cutting edge abstract art for their offices. Which...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
March 6, 2010
I just bought this incredible poster at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in DC. It's for "Hier ist die Future," an exhibition held last year at the library by British artist...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:25 PM
March 5, 2010
Jeffrey Weiss's Artforum article on the implications of forensic analysis of paintings has me stoked to see "Radical Invention," Stephanie d'Alessandro and John Elderfield's incredible-sounding exhibition of experimental Matisse in the 1910s. Weiss calls out the potential trap of uncritically...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
March 4, 2010
A lot of people are excited about the takedown of Nicolai Ouroussoff in Design Observer this week. And I can see their quaint, anti-starchitect point. But for me, Ouroussoff's biggest crime only became clear this afternoon. That's when I...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
I'm afraid there's part of me that sees Edward Hopper as a little too loved-it-in-high-school, the Salinger of painting. But I still like Empty Room in the Sun, 1963, and I really like the way Brian O'Doherty talks about...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:26 PM
March 3, 2010
For a generation of art watchers, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty existed primarily as an image, via the making-of film and Gianfranco Gorgoni's iconic aerial photographs, which were exhibited at MoMA's seminal Information show and were published in Smithson's Artforum...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:31 PM
From Ken Johnson's thrilled NYT review of "Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age," which was at the National Gallery last winter:The painters of the golden age in Holland brought the city onto center stage and made...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
547 West 27th Street Proposed Rooftop Painting Originally uploaded by Madilworth Last fall as the Dutch Landscape paintings idea was kicking into gear, artist Molly Dilworth emailed me a link to her rather awesome project, Paintings for Satellites. For...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
March 2, 2010
Apparently, in the 1890s, the Swedish modernist playwright August Strindberg went through a period of intense imagemaking. He created paintings and photographs [hold that thought] that sound and look decades ahead of their time using chance and natural/chemical processes...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:55 AM
March 1, 2010
Joerg has an interesting recap of Thomas Ruff speaking with Philip Gefter a couple of weeks ago at Aperture. I'm a fan of several of Ruff's series of work--and distinctly not a fan of others, but hey. Here's a...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
February 26, 2010
Hey Snow People, I'll be participating in a "non-hierarchical panel discussion" about collecting art tomorrow, Saturday, 2/27 at #class, that's hashtagclass, Bill Powhida and Jen Dalton's show/performance/talk-in at Edward Winkleman Gallery. The gig is organized by Barry Hoggard and James...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:52 PM
February 25, 2010
I've been thinking about this image from Google Street View, the one of the Mauritshuis which contains two distorted images of the guy's head. As that elongated lower head shows, Google's image knitting algorithm apparently combined two photos of...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:29 PM
February 24, 2010
For all my talk lately about satelloons, Olafur's stayed very politely quiet about his own giant, swinging aluminum balls. Maybe because he only has one? Seriously, though, I hope it's an edition. Your Imploded View is a 51-inch diameter, 660-lb...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:20 PM
February 23, 2010
These are mostly for me, just kind of gathered here without order or comment for the moment. I've been thinking about Alberto Giacometti lately, and his sculptural, spatial pursuit of that moment when a figure comes into view. Arthur...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
February 22, 2010
Because I now appear to be constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise, after mentioning the Mauritshuis, the Vermeer-loaded Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, I checked to see if was camo-obscured on Google Maps. [I kind of knew it wasn't,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:36 PM
February 21, 2010
The inconvenient intrusion of war and political upheaval [i.e., the collapse of the Dutch government and the looming withdrawal of Dutch troops from their frontline deployment in Afghanistan] into my Dutch Landscapes project has sent me trying to re-find...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:27 PM
February 20, 2010
You may recall how Google Maps recently changed the polygonal camouflage on one of the Dutch landscapes I was using for my painting project. I was back there, getting a clean shot of the nicely distorted grid plaza--the site...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:45 AM
February 19, 2010
As you can guess from the mentions of Sherrie Levine, I've been studying the issues around copying and reproducing and originality and authorship. And whenever you do that, Walter Benjamin comes up, specifically his concept of aura. Basically, it's what...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
Who are the freaks and nerds who call out picayune corrections in newspaper articles? Me, for one. On a New York Times piece I did once, I changed an entire line during the copyediting process. The piece was much,...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:30 AM
Gareth Long's giant lenticular prints based on the iconic-yet-anachronous 1991 cover designs for JD Salinger's books are freaking me out right now. They're like Noland or Morris Louis canvases, reanimated through some immediately dated, retrofuturistic technology. Something an aesthete...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:26 AM
February 18, 2010
For their "Art of Two Germanys" show in 2008, LACMA recreated part of a 1966 gallery installation by Gerhard Richter called Volker Bradke, which was designed to mimic or reference the postwar German bourgeoisie's penchant for ticky tacky floral wallpaper....
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:05 PM
February 17, 2010
Here's Sherrie Levine talking in 1993 about the making of her Meltdown woodblock print series with BAM's Constance Lewallen in the Journal of Contemporary Art. Levine did just what Susan Tallman, who reviewed Meltdown kind of negatively in 1990, feared:...
$MTEntryExcerpt$>
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:42 PM
February 16, 2010