Back in Tobias Wong’s day, we had to make screenshots with a camera, in a theater
Zachary Wolfe’s NY Mag profile of Matthew Barney is limply framed around the artist’s waning celebrity. But with the absence of Barbara Gladstone and Marian Goodman, and a poignant collab with 85yo Clarissa Dalrymple, its ruminative undercurrent of the body, aging, and generational transition is much more interesting.
And that confluence took me back to one of Eric Doeringer’s earliest masterpieces: Cremaster Fanatic, the internet’s biggest Matthew Barney Fan site. Which is now gone. Could Wolfe have been right all along?
Zombie cremasterfanatic.com lives on at the Internet Archive, but I’m bringing at least one collection from the Matthew Barney fan art section back to life: the photos and bootleg video clip artist/designer Tobias Wong took inside a screening of The Cremaster Cycle in Vancouver sometime in the early 2000s.
From the camera’s filenames, it looks like Wong watched the films in order: a pic and a video from Cremaster 2, one from Cremaster 4, and the rest from Cremaster 5.
shoutout little guys: Jasper Johns, Mirror’s Edge 2, 1993, encaustic on canvas, 66 x 44 1/8 in., apparently the Meyerhoffs are going to give it to the National Gallery of Art someday, wishing them a long life and all
I was researching Jasper Johns’s two Mirror’s Edge paintings from 1992 and ’93, and sometimes it’s good to revisit the ancient texts. Such as the catalogue for MoMA’s 1996 retrospective, where Kirk Varnedoe and Robera Bernstein have tremendous essays with tantalizing notes and a low-key invasively detailed chronology. It’s online, but the endpapers are details of the spiral galaxy in this 1995 untitled lithograph. the 90s were Peak Spiral Galaxy for Johns.
Mirror’s Edge, 1992 and Mirror’s Edge, 1993, facing off in MoMA’s 1996 Jasper Johns catalogue
The two versions, one oil, the other encaustic, are not quite mirrored and not quite flipped; each layer seems to have been reoriented separately. With a practice that integrates printmaking so thoroughly with painting and drawing, Johns moves fluently between the mirror planes, like someone who can write with both hands, simultaneously, forward and backward.
Anyway, here is Bernstein discussing the edges of the Mirror’s Edges, quoting Johns quoting Leonardo:
The layered, shifting perceptions in the Mirror’s Edge works continue Johns’s preoccupation with space as both an expressive and a perceptual element of art. He has said that the trompe l’oeil wooden strip at one edge of each Mirror’s Edge painting was meant to evoke a part of a mirror’s frame, functioning like similar devices in other works of his to underscore the fiction of the paintings’ complex illusionism. For Johns, the importance of the mirror as a metaphor for the work of art may go back to Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, an important source for Johns’s theories on art dating back to the 1950s. Leonardo writes that “the mind of the painter must resemble a mirror.” He calls the mirror the painter’s master, advising that “when you want to see if your picture corresponds throughout with the objects you have drawn from nature, take a mirror and look in that at the reflection of the real things, and compare the reflected image with your picture— You should take the mirror for your guide…because on its surface the objects appear in many respects as in a painting.”
This mind/mirror thing could be a whole, two-museum retrospective in itself, I’m sure.
Robert Rauschenberg, Star Quarters, 1971, screenprint on mirrored Perspex, four 4-foot square panels, ed. 45+10AP, printed for Multiples, Inc. by Styria Studios, image via nga.gov.au
And there I saw Star Quarters, Rauschenberg’s 1971, four-panel screenprint edition for Multiples, Inc., which does not look like this. Because it is a skyful of illustrated constellations printed on a four-panel, 16-foot Perspex mirror.
I love how the pads under the Rauschenberg suggest, to paraphrase Johns, “some aspect of a place outside the world of the [print],” even as the the mirror brings the outside inside it.
Here is what Panel I looked like when it was sold in May 2020. The constellations are printed on top of the images, and they just sunk 20 screws into the face to attach the wood mount on the back? Seriously? Was laminating and adhesive technology so underdeveloped?
you can’t spell Louise Lawler without LLOL: the guy from Nadeau peeking out from his foamcore to take a picture of three mis-matched Rauschenberg Star Quarters, via liveauctioneers
Shoutout to this guy, I guess, who saw his shot and decided to take it.
In 2021 as Mind/Mirror was about to open at the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Johns biographer Deborah Solomon mentioned a comment the artist had made to her in 1988: “One wants one’s work to be the world, but of course it’s never the world. The work is in the world.” And the world is in the work.
Rachel Harrison, Green Kettlebell, 2016, cardboard polystyrene cement acrylic mouse pad 25.4 x 20.3 x 20.3 cm, selling December 2 at Van-Ham
This sculpture, Green Kettlebell, comes from Rachel Harrison’s first exhibition at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin from April through June 2016.
That show, titled Depth Jump To Second Box, which has an incredible text by the artist about the collapse of life and work, the personal and the professional, had Green Kettlebell installed alongside nine or ten other works in a conference room shared by the corporate tenants of the gallery’s office block. It is only right that the next owner of the sculpture put it among the trophies, photos, and deal tombstones on the credenza behind her desk. Good luck.
Rachel Harrison, Pure Vanilla Joy, 2016, wood, cardboard, cement, acrylic gaming pad, Fabuloso, Glade, Febreze, overall: 127 x 61 x 39 cm, via K-T-Z
At first it was the ersatz environment—the spatial equivalent of the carefully calibrated incongruity of the found consumer products Harrison incorporates in her work—then it was the transposition of the works to pedestals, but I got unexpected Twombly vibes, especially from Pure Vanilla Joy.
I have no idea how this screenshot from Edwin Parker got here, but look at the stuff on that sculpture
By which I obviously mean, when Tacita Dean filmed him and his sculptures in his cluttered storefront studio in 2010, Twombly had unexpected Rachel Harrison vibes.
In “Eat Me,” his excellent essay in the LRB on Wayne Thiebaud, Paul Keegan writes how “the sliding catastrophe of impossible and unreachable spaces, without visual foothold” was
…already latent in his pie slices, which turn into cliffs of fall if viewed with the passion they invite. His most demure arrangements of pies and meringues imply a compression of space. The backgrounds and the tabletop surfaces are elements of composition rather than naturalistic settings: there is nothing beyond the table’s presumed edge, if indeed there is a table, as opposed to the blank fact of nearness. Their horizontality is troubled by extreme recession, so that they seem like ledges. The lack of co-ordinates, of background, serves to unsituate his cakes and pies, which orbit in their solar system like planets, and he insisted that the effect he wanted was ‘one of isolation’. He must have seen the astounding still life of Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber painted by Juan Sánchez Cotán in 1602 and acquired by the San Diego Museum in 1945. Each exactly rendered vegetable globe hangs from a string or overhangs the frame, which is at once a mundane larder and a conceptual void.
He must have, at some point, but I’m not sure it happened before 1962, when he painted Caged Pie, which the SDMA didn’t buy until 15 years later.
What I’d rather find out is, did Rauschenberg see the Sánchez Cotán when he was stationed in San Diego in the Army in 1944-46? It sounds like no, that his first museum was the Huntingon.
Those two pieces of melon cast in plaster, et al.: Nov. 9, 1956 Tiffany’s windows by Matson Jones Custom Display
And when Gene Moore had Rauschenberg and Johns re-create the Sánchez Cotán for a Tiffany’s window in 1956, he gave the boys from Matson Jones a book of still lifes to work from. To be the model for their cast plaster melon. So I’d wonder if Thiebaud, who came back to NYC in 1956 and became friendly with the deKoonings, among others, saw the Matson Jones windows at Tiffany’s in November?
Portal Frame Holiday House for the Dollander Family, St-Clair, 1949-51, arch. Henri Prouvé, built and furnished by Jean Prouvé, 📷: RMN via jeanprouve.com
“Industrialists originally from the Vosges region of France, Roger and Marguerite Dollander were among Jean Prouvé’s close friends. In the late 1940s, they commissioned him to design their holiday home in Saint-Clair, on the French Riviera. “Conceived in its entirety by Jean Prouvé and his brother Henri, the villa stands as a remarkable testament to their innovative vision of modern living. Henri drew up the plans, while Jean oversaw the construction. The distinctive nature of this commission also lies in the attention devoted to its interior design: all of the original furniture was designed and manufactured in Jean Prouvé’s workshops in Maxéville. “Architecture and furnishings were thus conceived as part of a unified creative approach, driven by the pursuit of coherence: creating a functional living environment tailored to the needs of everyday life. “Among the many pieces of furniture incorporated into the project is our exceptional two-seater variant of the Kangourou Visitor armchair.”
Period photo of the interior of the Dollanders’ holiday home, with an unspecified shelf, a tile table Trienale di Milano, and Lit Flavigny and two of four Fauteuils Kangourou, with slipcovers by Mme Dollander, 📷: the family, via jeanprouve.com
«I have a lot of memories of parents, aunts and friends sitting in the Fauteuil Kangourou. Some were reading, some were enjoying a drink, some were playing the guitar. It was a large and comfortable chair.
Three of the Fauteuil Kangourou armchairs had tubes in Métal Brut. One was upholstered with red textile, the two others in green, and they all had white piping, and were sewn by my grandmother. For the Villa Dollander, Jean Prouvé also designed a two-seated version of the Kangourou with a structure in red metal.», recalled Olivier Lalande, for a Vitra Anecdote about the chairs.
An interior of the Dollanders’ Prouvé home with a double Swing-jig lamp, some unspecified shelving and cabinets, and two Fauteuils Kangourou and another lit Flavigny with slipcovers by Mme. Dollander, 📷: the family, via jeanprouve.com
The house (100 m2 3br, 1 ba, plus garage, enlarged to 85 m2, with 3 more bedrooms) was added to the Patrimoine Culturel in 1989. Photographer Manuel Bougot documented the Dollanders’ home in 2016, tracing its decades of continued family enjoyment.
The family put the house, stripped of its original furnishings, up for sale in 2020, for EUR 6.4 million. It sold in 2022, and its new Australian owner, undertaking a slow and sensitive restoration, opens it for public visits during les journées du patrimoine each September.
In 2021 members of the Dollander family sold five pieces of Prouvé furniture, at Christie’s, plus some blueprints, plus a letter opener. An Anthony chair was put up for sale in February.
The transition of this house and its furnishings to landmark and artifact happened rather late in the Dollanders’ era; the grandchildren did not sign up to be stewards. And years after they’ve been swapped out in le Lavandou, it’s hard to argue for the historic importance of keeping a EUR6,000 together with the EUR30,000 bunkbeds, much less keeping them in situ.
This custom Prouvé chair originally had a red canvas cover with white piping on it, made by the owner
And yet the distinctive nature of the Dollanders’ commission and the unified approach to its creation are now being used to resell the two-seater Fauteuil Kangourou at Christie’s. Mme Dollander’s slipcover has been replaced.
Andy Warhol, VIP Ticket — Studio 54, 1978, synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 8 x 14 in., photographed at NYPL by @cmonstah
Los Angelena and greg.org hero Carolina Miranda just posted a Friday night signoff: the Studio 54 drink ticket painting Warhol gave to Truman Capote in 1978. The painting went to the New York Public Library as part of Capote’s archive in 1984, and because it’s archive, not art, it’s not catalogued with basic information like the dimensions. I measured it; it is 8 x 14 inches. Which is around Warhol’s preferred size for gift paintings. [This 26 inch tall variation, stamped and copyrighted, signed and certified as a Warhol by Fred Hughes, was not a gift.]
Because of the Warhol Foundation’s 2021 copyright claim on the painting, based on its going on view in a special collections exhibit, the NYPL cannot publish an image of this object in their collection. It’s widely repeated that Warhol designed the drink tickets, but I doubt it. There’s all kinds of Studio 54 ephemera with Gilbert Lesser’s logo, including some with serial numbers thousands lower than the single strip that appears in Warhol’s work more than a year after the club opened.
Warhol, VIP Ticket — Studio 54 [verso], 1978 via NYPL
But whatever, in a 2022 Live event on YouTube they did show the verso, which is messy as hell. The piece of tape Warhol signed is just hanging there on the stretcher bars.
This event in September 2022 was a reading of scenes from WARHOLCAPOTE, a “non-fiction” play by Rob Roth, based on 80 hours of recorded conversations between the two men. Because both parties knew of the recordings—they had discussed taping their conversations to make a play together—Roth was able to convince the Warhol Foundation to let him listen to the 59 Capote tapes. The other 3,000 recordings Warhol had made remain locked away until 2037.
Anyway, the scenes were read by Julio Torres and Cole Escola. And I was geeking out just over the transcript, then I found the video. They are transfixing.
WARHOLCAPOTE had its world premiere in September 2017 at American Repertory Theater, starring Stephen Spinella and Dan Butler. (Butler replaced Leslie Jordan as Capote, who bowed out a couple of months earlier. This was all covered in the Times and what not at the time, but I never heard a thing about it then or since, until tonight.
Since the early 2000s, Wood has run an art world-centered poker game in Los Angeles, which began as a way for emerging artists like himself and Mark Grotjahn to make a living while making art. On its third iteration in 2023, Nate Freeman wrote about the game’s latest the evolution into a $500 buy-in tournament, the World Series of Art Poker.
Gerard O’Brien, who opened the California design-centered Reform Gallery in 2003, and the art gallery spinoff, Landing, in 2012, was tagged by Nate as a regular in Wood’s early game. So was artist Matt Johnson (MJ?), a childhood friend of Wood. Except, perhaps, for his name written across some of the works, LA Modern’s single seller is unidentified, but the sale includes a lot of artists O’Brien showed at Landing. I’m not going to Google to see if that’s his Rudolph Schindler apartment.
But unless Gerard was running a basketball gambling book, and Wood’s ubiquitous use of the basketball in his work is actually a giant sports betting operation hiding in plain sight, I think these are O’Brien’s souvenirs from decade-old poker games with Wood and Johnson.
With a combined face value of $25,500 and an estimate of just $2-3,000, it might be worth checking whether these debts have been settled, and if the IOUs vest the buyer with a claim.
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2019, intaglio and chine collé, 37 1/2 x 26 3/4 in., AP 7/8, a gift from the artist
The main two are Shrinky Dink 3, from 2011, which has this “[self-]portraits all the way down” quality to its various nested motifs, and Untitled (2019), in which a skull-wielding skeletal figure is surrounded by art-making stuff. The motifs in Shrinky Dink are layered, while in Untitled they are jumbled. [Of course, these are prints, so what they really are is meticulously constructed.] And the point here is, obviously, yes there are stick figures.
detail of Jasper Johns Untitled, 2025, the all white one, acrylic on etching, with the lone stick figure and the stamp, love that, via Matthew Marks
Or were.
through the acrylic faintly: detail from Untitled, 2025, the white & green one, with stick figures, which seem to inhabit a plane in front of the oval opening of the print composition, at Matthew Marks
In the three Untitled drawings, all from 2025, based on Untitled from 2019, the stick figures are almost but not quite painted out. Two of these works are acrylic, and the third is acrylic and India ink.
this really does look like the darkest spot in the work, and yet, the stick figure still sticking his head above the frame. The signature stamp on this one is white, btw: detail from Untitled, 2025, the black acrylic & ink one, at Matthew Marks
And if you were to tell me this was the end of the stick figures motif, adios, I would not be surprised. That said, they do persist here, behind the painting scene, Artists still at work.
Jenny Holzer, Untitled, 1986, bronze, ed. 2/15, 4 x 8 in., selling at Christie’s to benefit the Gund Art Fndn
Sometimes it can feel like artists are just clearing stuff out when they donate to a benefit auction, and sometimes Jenny Holzer sends ed. 2/15 of a bronze PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT plaque to the Creative Time gala in 1986, and Agnes Gund buys it.
The bigger folly than trying to understand what an artist is doing is trying to understand what an artist is doing now. It’s a fool’s game, and apparently, I am here for it.
When I started looking at the stick figures motif in Jasper Johns’s work in 2024, and into 2025, it was driven by the busy little guys’ appearance in a series of prints that were shown in 2024, and 2023, but which were based on drawings from 2019, which were shown in 2021. Which may have been peak little guys.
Point is, it can be easier to focus on the origin of a Johns motif than on the complex way it gets used, especially when there’s a time lag and incomplete picture of what the artist is up to, and especially when he is still using it.
Jasper Johns, Artists at Work, 2021, etching and aquatint, 15 x 12 1/2 in., ed. 60, AP 9/20 at the Walker
The other big [sic] addition is Artists at Work, a 2021 etching and aquatint which seems to answer the question of what the little guys do. To Geller’s star field Johns has added a skull and, remarkably, two ghostly, hovering hands. Artists at work. This print was made for The Met 150, a commemorative portfolio whose realization and launch was thwarted by COVID.
When read right-to-left, manga-style, the prints on the Walker’s grid tell a little guys narrative I could never have imagined—”the grouping practically demands a narrative of some kind. Can you imagine Johns just making up little situations and stories for his little guys?”—but I kind of did: The artists at work, creating a universe, giving it color, conjuring a skull in the heavens, and bringing it down to earth. Maybe one other thing these stick figures did was to keep Johns company during the isolated days of the pandemic.
Which could explain why, by 2024, when he made the works in his just-opened show at Marks, he’d mostly painted them out. At least that’s what we can see at the moment.
two Flags on Orange. Flag on Oranges. Examples of Flag on Orange, 1998, etching and aquatint, 27 x 20 in or so, ed. 2/27 [l] went to Agnes Gund, and ed. 13/27 [r] to MoMA
Print people are just like, duh, but I love how aquatint reproduces the effects of paint so closely. And it only really occurs to me when looking at two of the same print. Like the two examples of Jasper Johns’s Flag on Orange (1998), the first edition he put out from his new Low Road Studio press, from Aggie Gund [left] and MoMA [right].
It’s the little similarities
I’m talking about, like, the darker orange part above the flag, and the pooling edges of the stars and stripes. That liquid behavior gets captured on the plate somehow, no doubt some kind of upstate Connecticut intaglio sorcery.
There’s something kind of great about so many of the works in Agnes Gund’s collection coming from benefit auctions. In a way, she understood the assignment: if an artist is going to be asked, and going to make the gesture of donating an artwork to a cause, someone needs to buy it. And one artist who donated works repeatedly is Glenn Ligon, and one person who bought them repeatedly was Aggie.
The earliest of the three Ligons coming up for sale in the Gund Art Foundation sale at Christie’s is Double Self-Portrait, which Ligon donated to Gund’s own non-profit, Studio in the Schools, in 1995. Gund bought Ligon’s little Untitled punching bag the next year at the New Museum Gala. And the 1999 work on paper, Study for Fire Next Time/Hands, went through/for Jasper Johns’s Foundation For Contemporary Arts in 2001.
But the one that stands out is the one Ligon gave directly to Gund, in 2019. This Study for Negro Sunshine (Red) #5 has a Malcolm X coloring book image on the verso. Which gives it a little of that something-I-whipped-up vibe that differentiates a gift from a product.
three Lawlers: Alligator, Monogram, and Untitled, all around 100 cm tall, AP 1/1, collection artic
greg.org hero Wayne Bremser posted this early Lawler, Alligator, which I’d never noticed before. I think I’ve somehow never seen it, because I would really expect if I ever saw a Lacoste sling sofa with a giant alligator under a polished brass Donald Judd unit MOUNTED TO THE DOORS OF SOMEONE’S CHÂTEAU or whatever, I would have remembered it. I’m imagining Judd flipping his lid.
And the artist sneaking a selfie in there besides.
The Art Institute of Chicago got the artist’s proofs of these three early pictures—Alligator (1985), Monogram (1984), and Untitled (1987), which has Rauschenberg’s Monogram in it, obv—in 2006, and says they’re “often displayed as a triptych.” I love that for them.
[whoops a few minutes later update] just looked at the Art Institute’s 2009 Essential Guide, and they show the two monogram-related works switched, with the bed on the right. How about when you go to Chicago, you lmk?
Three Lawlers in Art Institute Triptych order: via
Rabah has pounded nails into an open dictionary, leaving only one definition visible and legible:
philistine \ˈfil-ə-ˌstēn; fə-ˈlis-tən\ n. often cap [Philistine, inhabitant of ancient Philistia (Palestine)]; a materialistic person; esp : one who is smugly insensitive or indifferent to intellectual or artistic values – philistine adj. often cap
An artwork like this from 1961 would be extraordinary for many reasons.