The boingboing headline is a bit misleading, because though it is being used by the restorer who shot this YouTube video to stress test a player piano, that was not, I think, the composer's intentions for the piece.

Hamelin wrote two other pieces for player piano; all three are included on Player Piano, Vol. 6: Original Compositions in the Tradition of Nancarrow, a 2008 recording released by the obvious leader in documenting the player piano repertoire, the German label MDG.

Nancarrow turns out to be Conlon Nancarrow, an American-Mexican composer who pioneered the avant-garde player piano genre. Having moved to Mexico City after WWII to avoid anti-Communist harrassment in the US, Nancarrow had difficulty finding performers willing or able to tackle his complex compositions. He worked largely in obscurity until the late 1970s, and in 1982, he was the first composer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Eastern German player piano composer Wolfgang Heisig and Jürgen Hocker have been working to publish and perform Nancarrow's works. By threading divergent tempi through his pieces, Nancarrow definitely cleared the unplayability bar, though people have successfully made arrangements of his pieces for live performance by groups of musicians.

So in one sense, unplayable-for-humans is just a side effect, a negative characteristic of composed-for-player-piano music that explores and exploits the mechanistic, analogue medium itself. As Hocker wrote on the YouTube video description of Igor Stravinsky's "Etude for Pianola,"

Original Compositions for Player Piano between 1915 and 1930. In this period composers discovered the superhuman possibilities of the Player Piano. Strawinsky, Hindemith, Toch, Antheil, Münch, Haass and Casella used this new medium, decades before Conlon Nancarrow discovered it again for his ingenious Studies for Player Piano.

But it was watching that first stress test video, and realizing it's not technically a stress test, that got me thinking: what would an actual stress-test composition sound like? Are there such things? Compositions driven by functionality, or at least something other than aesthetic or listener experience?

It occurred to me when I kept hearing Hamelin's little ragtime melody over and over, and realized that the keys on that nickelodeon were not, in fact, being tested equally. But maybe they're being tested based on the algorithmically calculated frequency of their use? Would a stress test composition necessarily just bang on all the keys a thousand times, or run scales up and down, or would it proceed in some other optimized fashion? I'm sure these are all parameters that could be fed into a composing program. Not only would the output be unplayable by humans, it'd be uncomposable by them as well.

Circus Galop [wikipedia]
the 22-page score for Hamelin's "Circus Galop" is available at Sorabji [sorabji-archive.co.uk]
Juergen Hocker's YouTube channel is full of excellent player piano performances by Nancarrow and others [youtube]

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, as the adage goes, the two aren't all that different.)

I also disagree with her kicker, or feel the opposite, rather:

But it's hard to come away from this show without confronting the existentialism -- and fear -- behind these one-day-at-a-time paintings. They remain powerfully connected to Mr. Kawara's other well-known body of work, a series of telegrams sent to his dealer that bore the message "I am still alive." One never worries, with Mr. Kawara, that the art will expire before he does.

Didn't Christina Ruiz suggest exactly that for the supposedly endless Spot paintings?

After all, [Hirst] could easily approve the method of production for posthumous spot making so that his heirs can continue to make them until the end of recorded time.

I mean, I guess some people know, but what if it turns out Kawara had actually died in like 1985?

Also, I can't believe I didn't make the connection sooner--not that there is one, but why can't there be?--but I've had Jonathan Coulton's song from the end credits of Portal stuck in my head for a couple of weeks now. I'm singing it right now, in fact.

On Kawara Date Paintings in New York and 136 Other Cities, through Feb. 11 [davidzwirner.com]

I've kept quiet and hopeful for six months, but now I think it's time to congratulate Dia Foundation, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College on the renewal of Dia's lease for the Spiral Jetty site; and on the newly announced, three-way collaboration managing stewardship of the artwork. I think it's fantastic, reassuring for those who know and care about Smithson's work already, and encouraging for the many people in Utah and beyond who will discover it going forward.

When I founded The Jetty Foundation in Salt Lake last summer and submitted an application to DNR to lease the state land under Spiral Jetty, I proposed a similar partnership, where local stakeholders would support Dia's stewardship of the work by engaging on the crucial environmental, development, educational, and political issues that impact the Jetty. The Foundation also very explicitly affirmed the importance of Dia's undisputed role as owner of the artwork and the designated steward of Smithson's estate.

I don't mean to claim any credit for creating the solution that DNR developed in its negotiations with Dia. On the contrary, I think the concept of local institutional engagement on the Jetty's behalf has been gaining traction in Utah in the years years since the artwork re-emerged. If the Foundation's proposal encouraged Utahns' vision for a stronger, more engaged future for the Jetty, then the weeks I spent basically lobbying with local politicians, government officials, and other community leaders was well worth it.

Sheesh, I still feel so nervous, so cagey, so official, wary of adding uncertainty or controversy to an unexpectedly uncertain situation. Some folks I've talked to--and no doubt some folks I've very carefully not talked to--wonder what the point was, why meddle with Dia's deal?

The shortest answer is the one I gave last summer, which is that for a very hairy few weeks, the Jetty's future looked highly uncertain at best, and under direct threat at worst. It was not at all clear until after I'd filed the application, and met with officials at DNR, and had Dick Bueller, the official charged with determining the fate of the site lease, quote Smithson's own words to me, that I was reassured the artwork was not in existential danger. If there's any single person who deserves credit for Spiral Jetty's well-being, it is Mr. Bueller, who takes the work's stewardship incredibly seriously.

In the process of meeting with DNR and other folks and talking about the Jetty and its significance, I really came to see the lease expiration and renewal process as an integral part of Spiral Jetty itself. Smithson envisioned the Jetty as existing and operating on a geologic time scale. In addition to the cyclical changes of the seasons and the lake level, and the entropic natural forces of erosion, Smithson linked the Jetty to the prehistoric transformations that created Great Salt Lake itself--and the tar-like oil underneath it. The derelict 1920s oil wells at Rozel Point showed that humanity, too, was subject to entropy and failure.

By siting Spiral Jetty on leased state land, Smithson put in place a checking mechanism, an alarm that goes off every twenty years--or now 10--which gives people the chance to assess the Jetty and their relationship to it. Counting Smithson's original lease signing, then, this was the third tick of Spiral Jetty's geologic clock.

Which made me wonder what had happened before. So last summer, I began investigating the history of the Spiral Jetty site and its lease, and Rozel Point and Great Salt Lake. And we have come a long way, baby.

The first thing I noticed when I was studying the original 20-year lease Smithson signed in 1970 and the second 20-year lease Nancy Holt signed in 1991 should be immediately evident, but somehow wasn't: this had happened before. The lease expired, and it was almost a year before a new lease was signed. Now that the lease's fate is settled for another ten years, I think I can ask Nancy what that process was like.

The other thing that I'd wondered was why ten acres? Would it be possible to expand Spiral Jetty's buffer zone by acquiring adjacent leases? What is their status, anyway? I was surprised to find out that in the decade before Smithson built it, and from the mid-1970s into the 1980s, there was active leasing, testing and drilling going on around and even rightnextto the Jetty.

And there was no sign that the Jetty factored into any leasing, land, or lake decisions at all. With Smithson's death and the rise of the lake level, it's as if Spiral Jetty had really disappeared. In 1980, Dr. J Wallace Gwynn edited Great Salt Lake: A Scientific, Historical and Economic Overview for the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey at DNR. The 400-page what seems to be the first definitive, official history of the lake. There are a couple of references to Rozel Point's oil structures, but no mention of Spiral Jetty.

And so I compare the situation of the first lease, and the buildup to its expiration and the first renewal, to 2011, where tens of thousands of people in and out of Utah have visited the Jetty; where the possibility of test drilling several miles off Rozel Point causes an international furor; and where one of the top officials at DNR quotes Smithson from memory. Where Smithson's artwork and its site were once on the farthest, remotest edge of culture, now they have moved, if not to the center, then at least towards it.

[note: I expect I will wrap up The Jetty Foundation soon, but set up the website as an archive of lease documents and the historical materials I've collected about Rozel Point. I don't yet know what I will do with my remaining tote bags.]

UMFA, Dia Art Foundation, and Great Salt Lake Institute Collaborate to Ensure Long-Term Preservation of Spiral Jetty [umfa.utah.edu/spiraljettystewardship]
The Future of Spiral Jetty: Community and Collaboration, Feb. 2, 2012 [slcpl.lib.ut.us]
Previously: Site Specifics: Why I'm Bidding on the Lease for the Spiral Jetty site

It turns out though, that the artist's own term is not entirely accurate. Because according to his website, the painting, 2 Candles 1982, (CR 499-3), still exists: "Richter painted over this work in 1996. The painting is now entitled Abstract Painting (CR 837-4)."

l: 2 Candles, 1982-96 state; r: Abstract Painting 837-4, 1996-, images via gerhard-richter.com

Which would be interesting enough if it were a one-off thing. And no, it appears that Richter has not painted over any of the 73 other paintings listed as "[DESTROYED]". But by 1996, he had already been painting on photographs for a decade. In 1989, in fact, he produced two editions of candle images overpainted with squeegees.

Candle III, 1989, ed. of 30+10, image: gerhard-richter

There are at least a dozen other such editions since then which combine photos or photoreproductions and squeegeed abstract overpainting. They constitute a persistent connection between the two seemingly diametrically opposed bodies of Richters' work: photo-based representation and so-called aleatoric, or mechanized, gestureless abstraction. It's a dichotomy that continues to stump even the illustrious Benjamin Buchloh, who laments while writing, at great length, in the latest Artforum: "The question posed over and over again (and which has basically remained unanswered) was how these photographic images could be related to the emerging works of abstraction."

But my bigger point here, which Buchloh also cursorily notes, as does anyone who's seen Corinna Belz's film Gerhard Richter Painting, is that overpainting is central to Richter's abstract practice. In these stills from the scene that appears in Belz's original trailer, Richter very thoughtfully creates classical gestural abstractions:

Which remind me of nothing so much as the great, underappreciated-until-just-now, large-scale paintings of Willem de Kooning from the mid-1970s.

It's one of the main reasons I hustled back to MoMA to see the de Kooning show on the last day, after seeing Belz's film, and after getting both the Richter and de Kooning catalogues for Christmas. Because these amazing wet-on-wet structures that Richter laid down

felt almost like reincarnations of some of the virtuoso brushstrokes de Kooning made in 1975 paintings like Screams of Children Come from Seagulls [check out this dark blue, sideways L from the upper right quadrant, for example]

or the single, epic loop at the center of the Art Institute of Chicago's Untitled XI (1975):

And then when they're just right, Richter takes his squeegee to them. As if getting erased by Rauschenberg wasn't enough.

But--oh man, I really did just mean to do a quick, "ooh, look, overpainted Richter!" post here--but this is the thing that bugged me so bad about Buchloh's reading: his extraordinarily limited range of references in discussing Richter's work. I mean, it's basically Johns and Stella [Stella!]. And he dismisses Johns on false pretenses. And doesn't mention de Kooning once.

Here's what Buchloh got from Belz's film--WHICH HE WAS IN: some kind of Surrealist theatrical something or other:

Starting the production of each canvas with strange rehearsals of various forms of gestural abstraction, as though moving through recitals of its legacies, in the final phases Richter seems literally to execute the painting with a massive device that rakes paint across an apparently carefully planned and painted surface. Crisscrossing the canvas horizontally and vertically with this rather crude tool the artist accedes to a radical diminishment of tactile control and manual dexterity, suggesting that the erasure of painterly detail is as essential to the work's production as the inscription of procedural traces. Thus an uncanny and deeply discomforting dialectic between enunciation and erasure occurs at the very core of the pictorial production process itself, opening up the insight that we might be witnessing a chasm of negation and destruction as much as the emergence of enchanting coloristic and structural vistas.

Just as Rauschenberg's erasing were not negation, but creation through another type of mark, I think Richter's squeegee strokes are generative additions to, not killers of, the rich repertoire of markmaking techniques he inherited. Maybe it took Belz's film to show how tightly the squeegee marks are linked to Richter's body and movement. They don't diminish, but magnify; they're full-body gestural abstraction.

For a great illumination of the specifics of Richter's abstract production, I keep going back to Tate Modern conservator Rachel Parker's discussion with blogger Mark Godfrey during the Panorama show:

If we think about the very large scale of Wald 3, we must consider the logistics of one man making this painting. Although Richter probably dragged the squeegee across the wet surface in two separate applications this process must have demanded enormous physical energy. The two resulting squeegee tracks are obvious: one track extends from the top to about 5/8 of the way down the painting surface and the other starts just below this. It would appear that Richter applies the squeegee first to the left side of the work and then drags it from left to right: with both tracks he appears to stop ¾ of the way across for a rest before completion. You can also tell exactly when the momentum of dragging the squeegee across the very tacky surface began to slow down as the drag marks become more shallow. The upper track is characterised by the squeegee having embedded itself more deeply into the paint resulting in slightly sharper surface disturbances and deeper excavations. The lower track has glided more fluidly across the surface creating lighter disturbances. There is undoubtedly an element of chance in the results of this technique: the first track will bear most influence on the final composition whereas with the second track, Richter tries to replicate the same direction, speed and weight behind the squeegee to re-create the same marks in the paint. The compositional balance between track 1 and track 2 in Wald 3 exposes Richter's trust in his materials and intuitive craftsmanship.

Because Parker and Godfrey make a very persuasive case, I think, for some of the implications of Richter's overpainting,. In this case, they discussed SFMOMA's 1999 Abstract Painting (CR 858-6) [above] on aludibond panel:

Richter has applied his paint in a similar manner as before, manipulating the paint with a squeegee when the paint is very newly applied, hence its fluid character...Once the paint has dried Richter has taken a sharp wide-head palette knife and gouged and scraped features out of the paint layer, exposing the paint-stained white preparatory layer beneath. The technique creates a hallucinatory effect (are the shapes portals or are they solid elements floating in a multi-dimensional composition?).

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 artist a solo show on the spot. That show, Johns' first, ended up on the cover of Art News. Alfred Barr bought three works out of it for MoMA. When more conservative trustees balked at the possibility that the till-then-unknown artist might have unpatriotic intentions, Barr leaned on Philip Johnson to buy a fourth, Flag.

And of course, there's the story of how Johns made it, which MoMA lays out succinctly:

"One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag," Johns has said of this work, "and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it." Those materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint--a mixture of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears. The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars lend this icon historical specificity. The American flag is something "the mind already knows," Johns has said, but its execution complicates the representation and invites close inspection. A critic of the time encapsulated this painting's ambivalence, asking, "Is this a flag or a painting?"

MoMA's listing officially, and oddly, notes the date for Flag as "1954-55 (dated on reverse 1954)." So 1954-55. But perhaps 1954. Not an idle difference, I think. But there's more.

From an awesome footnote in Michael Crichton's awesome 1977 Whitney catalogue:

Occasionally his working methods cause curatorial problems. One long-standing question concerns the date of his first Flag painting, originally purchased by Philip Johnson in 1958, and now in the collection fo the Museum of Modern Art. The painting was dated 1954, but Johns argued that it was done in 1955. Recently someone noticed that the collage included newsprint from 1956, and the museum wanted to change the date accordingly. Johns stated that the picture was damaged in his studio in 1956, and that he repaired it that year, but that the painting was still properly dated 1955. He also points out that certain early works include collage elements that are old--much older than the paintings themselves--thus obviating entirely such direct methods of dating. [p. 65]

I would think that contemporary analytical tools exist that can test whether Flag was repaired as Johns claimed. Or maybe close looking is sufficient. Crichton set up this curatorial dating problem with one of my favorite quotes from the catalogue:

A note of caution: Often John's [sic] "laborious efforts" to cover actually draw attention to what has happened. One may speculate that the layered meanings in a Johns work have their analogue in the layers of paint and wax that sometimes conceal, sometimes reveal, what lies beneath. That is one way to look at it. Another way is to recognize that he is a painter whose interest in process leads him to reveal the process--as an action over time--to the viewer. That is, a series of events and decisions led to the final picture; Johns often seems as interested in the sequence of steps as he is in the final result--at least, he often tries to show "what happened" along the way. It may be exaggerated to say that a Johns painting contains its own biography, but that kind of idea is present in many pictures.

One thing's for certain, though: Flag is not Johns' first flag painting. [cont'd]

Jasper Johns, Flag, "1954-55 (dated on reverse 1954)" [moma.org]
Fred Orton's 1996 book Figuring Jasper Johns is one of the few in-depth analyses I've found of Flag. [amazon]

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 Kelly paintings. Cereal Records points to Burning Settlers Cabin, whoprocured a copy, which makes me all the more determined to track one down myself.

Unfortunately, all I can find on the Welt website is an offer for a facsimile edition of the front page [top], printed on archival paper in an edition of 100. I mean, it's signed, but I'm not sure that this works quite as well as a print as the newspaper does as an awesome object.

Any German-reading newspaper hoarders out there, please get in touch.

Great story: Just Say No To Safe [burningsettlerscabin via cerealrecords]
Die Welt's all-Ellsworth Kelly issue [cerealrecords]
Limitiert und handsigniert: die Kelly-Edition zur Zeitung, 499 Euro zuzüglich versicherten Versands [welt.de]
Previously, and definitely related: Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero
Previously, related, and not as awesome: Robert Rauschenberg's Piece of Tropic, 1979, ed. 650,000

But the mechanics of decoding a Hirst Code, if it does, indeed, exist, are non-trivial. Sure, there's a key painting [on which more in a second], but the whole public premise of the series is that no color repeats within a painting. Yet there are many spots in a large painting which seem nearly indistinguishable from each other. So matching up the ABC0-9 color key precisely to the hundreds of similar spots is, to use the term of the season, a challenge.

The trick, I think, is to have a computer color match the Pantone PMS codes between the Key Painting and the others. Which requires color-matched images. But Hirst's catalogue of the complete spots doesn't drop until July. So I just went ahead and grabbed one of the largest spot images I could find, and then I combined it with a Key Painting, and ran it--or babystepped it, really--through Photoshop.

Tate Modern was the single, go-to source. Tate has both a key painting, Controlled Substances Key Painting (Spot 4a) [above], and a large [2x2.5m] spot painting, Anthraquinone-1 Diazonium Chloride[below], from 1994.

A quick note on the Key Paintings: according to Tate Modern, Hirst made four of them, in different dimensions [1" to 4" spots], and they are the only Spot paintings in which the color layout is identical. Which would imply, then, that there is a single key. Though there are definitely plenty of cryptographic methods for thwarting an assumption like that, too.

Anyway, I combined the two Tate images in one Photoshop canvas, and started waving my Magic Wand over each Key Painting spot in turn, looking for matches among the larger painting's 2,050 spots. Immediately, when several A's came up, I confirmed that I still had a matching problem; theoretically, there should be one, at most. The color scales of Photoshop, the compression algorithms of JPGs and TIFFs, all of these mediations affect the precise matching between two Hirst paintings. [I just realized that Hirst's spots actually almost pre-date Photoshop itself, which first launched in 1989, and which didn't get color management until v5.0 in 1998.]

There were also matches I thought were obvious, but which PS didn't even touch. I decided to be systematic, and to err on the side of more information now, in hopes of detecting a pattern later. So I checked tolerances at 5 and 8%, and only marked spots where the central majority of the spot was highlighted. Having no letter matched up felt more validating somehow than having just one. When I did Q, I jumped to U. I did the digits, too, because they were provided, and because 733tspeak did exist in some form since the 80s, and maybe Hirst was a phone phreakin' BBS nerd in high school, who knows?

I put all the text into a separate layer, which is below. It was really late last night, like around 1:30, so I can't be entirely sure until I check it again in the daylight, but I think I have seen something.

There seems to be a structured passage in the top center of the painting. Here's a detail:

I'm going to doublecheck my work, but in the mean time, please don't go running to Gagosian trying to claim a free spot painting and pretend you are the one who found Hirst's secret message from 1994.