Hey, friends. Happy Sunday night; hope you’ve had a restful weekend, one full of words and songs and food and friends. I spent some of this week in New York, so the blog was a bit more art-forward than usual — a good thing, imho.
Consuming this week: Still reading Demon Copperhead; listening to Novo Amor’s Collapse (sad indie rock) and Floating Points’ Promises (collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra); watching the 49ers collapse in the fourth quarter; eating the best burger of my life at Red Hook Tavern.
Here’s what happened on the site this week. As always, thanks for subscribing. Hit reply and say hi, why don’t you?
I saw the Jenny Holzer show at The Guggenheim this week; close friends will know that I have a strange relationship with her work. The exhibition, which closes next week, is sort of a reprise of her groundbreaking show there in 1989. Here’s Roberta Smith’s review in the Times from December of that year (emphasis mine):
Ms. Holzer has been given the run of the Guggenheim, or more precisely half of it, and she has come up with a trio of installations that nearly strips the building of art yet fills it in her own way. She has focused her activities almost entirely on the Guggenheim’s great tiered atrium, leaving the walls of its coiled ramp bare. The museum has never looked, nor felt, quite like this.
In effect, the building has been turned into a vast darkened cave with glowing embers at its center: a 535-foot-long moving message that snakes its way around the first three tiers of the museum’s coil, offering a retrospective of Ms. Holzer’s writing as it goes.
This mixing of Ms. Holzer’s different texts emphasizes the range of her writing and the different voices she has called into service. She can offer wise words to live by, put you in touch with your most private memories or make you fear for the future of the planet.
In addition to the meaning of her words, there is the perceptual power and wonderful spatial disorientation of their upward-circling stream, which are heightened by shifts in color, typeface, speed and, upon occasion, direction. Standing on the ramp with the words moving above and below, the viewer feels like a small blip in some giant video game. As one moves down the ramp, the words circle at about the same pace - an effect that proposes each viewer as the center of a slowly revolving universe.
Fast forward to 2024, and the Guggenheim appears to have made some upgrades. Here’s Sarp Karem Yavuz in The Art Newspaper:
While the museum statement heralds Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a significant archival project that involved reverse-engineering the LED screens used in 1989, the entire activity seems to eschew any practical consideration in favour of laborious reverence… or perhaps a kind of insistence on authenticity. Like a VHS-tape filter on a TikTok video, despite mimicking the form of the older installation, the new and improved LED screens feel lacklustre in their nostalgia. In 1989, using inherently commercial LED-screen technology to reimagine the Guggenheim’s exhibition capabilities was refreshing and innovative. This time around, the hardware is neither vintage enough to be quaint nor cutting-edge enough to be a commentary on technology or capitalism today.
Back to Smith in 1989:
While the moving-message piece is the exhibition’s main event, it is balanced by two installations using carved benches that provide a needed sense of stillness. On the ground floor of the atrium is a large circle formed by 17 red granite benches that suggests an ancient campfire or a church meeting. In the two-story gallery at the beginning of the ramp’s first tier, 27 white granite benches are placed in closely regimented formation like markers in a crowded cemetery. Carved with phrases that also appear in the moving-message sign, these bench works, as they might be called, point to the ancient communal rituals of storytelling and mourning that inspire much of Ms. Holzer’s work.
I wish the museum curators had reprised not only the snaking text work up the museum’s coil, but also what appears to be remarkably daring restraint with the rest of the 1989 show. I loved this year’s main event, but the walk up the ramp was forgettable. I don’t think Lee Quiñones added much of interest to the wall full of Inflammatory Essays; the Trump Tweet pieces were painfully obvious; the redaction paintings didn’t work in the odd Guggenheim galleries. Honestly if you’re in New York, you should step into the museum lobby, admire the snaking Light Line, snap a few pics for the ‘gram, and head to the Met.
I’ll never stop loving her work, though. For me, Holzer is all about the truisms. Here’s what New Yorker critic Jackson Arn had to say in his review from this year.
“Truisms,” a cycle of almost-aphorisms that Holzer began scattering across New York in the late seventies, has no signature color or typeface or look of any kind, with the upshot that it can thrive anywhere—walls in SoHo, T-shirts, Spectacolor signs in Times Square, a Vegas marquee, a Qatar airport. The words speak with the authority of whichever billboard they’ve crashed, only to squander it on advice that is either too obvious or too obscure to help us. What they reveal is not capitalism’s secret messaging so much as an absence of all messages, nothing but surfaces desperate for eyeballs.
I’d tell you to follow @jennyholzer on Twitter, but talk about surfaces desperate for eyeballs…
Having also seen Doug Wheeler’s Day Night Day, I can report that it is absolutely mind-blowing.
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two luminous, rectangular thresholds or “walls” of light, which function as points of entry into an expansive environment that simulates the experience of limitless space, or a “ganzfeld,” where light appears to shift from day to night and back again. The viewer’s perception is heightened to a degree in which, as the artist articulates, “space appears as a volume, almost as matter.”
On view in New York until October 19th. Go.
File under: land art, 2024 edition. Cards Against Humanity is suing Space X.
Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall. Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire – Elon Musk – snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.
From the complaint:
SpaceX and/or its contractors entered the Property and, after erecting posts to mark the property line, proceeded to ignore any distinction based upon property ownership. The site was cleared of vegetation, and the soil was compacted with gravel or other substance to allow SpaceX and its contractors to run and park its vehicles all over the Property. Generators were brought in to run equipment and lights while work was being performed before and after daylight. An enormous mound of gravel was unloaded onto the Property; the gravel is being stored and used for the construction of buildings by SpaceX’s contractors along the road. Large pieces of construction equipment and numerous construction-related vehicles are utilized and stored on the Property continuously. And, of course, workers are present performing construction work and staging materials and vehicles for work to be performed on other tracts.
And I know this is just boilerplate, but after you read the whole complaint it’s really satisfying to read this:
CAH demands a trial by jury.
I loved the Anna Wiener profile of Grant Petersen, founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Wiener has a way with paragraphs.
About halfway through the ride, I came to a fork in the road. I didn’t know which path the others had taken, and I stood for a while, appreciating the shade of the oak trees, the quiet, the bandanna crisping around my neck. I tried to channel an essay of Petersen’s, written in 2002, on what he calls “underbiking”: taking a bike somewhere it isn’t obviously built to go. “Riding an UB changes how you look at any terrain,” he wrote. “You ride where it lets you ride, walk when it wants you to, and rely more on your growing skills than on the latest technology.” This struck me as a harmonic way of moving through the world – not my way, but whatever. I pushed off, found the group, and followed them down a steep, exhilarating slide. Dry earth sputtered against my calves. I loosened my hold on the brakes. Even in the heat, with friction shifters I didn’t understand how to use, I felt a flicker of my favorite feeling: competence. The wide tires were emboldening; the saddle height was psychologically fine. It was by far the longest, heaviest bicycle I had ever been on, and it moved with a surprising grace.
Greg Allen goes deep on Untitled (Yellow and Blue), a Mark Rothko painting from 1954 that is coming up for auction this fall. His write up of the provenance could be a treatment for a Wes Anderson movie.
Untitled (Yellow and Blue) is one of nine Rothko paintings Bunny and Paul Mellon acquired from Marlborough Gallery beginning in 1970, immediately after the artist’s death, and so right in the thick of the fiduciary malfeasance that prompted Rothko’s children to sue.
Some time between Paul’s death in 1999 and 2006, when it was shown at the Palazzo Grassi, Bunny sold the painting to François Pinault.
In June 2013, Pinault sold it through his auction house, Christie’s, along with a Fontana, to Eric Tan, a cutout for Jho Low, the Malaysian money launderer. [According to the Feds, the $79.5 million invoice was $36m for the Fontana, and so $43m for the Rothko.] In October 2013, Tan gifted the works, along with a $3 million Calder, to Low, with three copy & pasted “gift letters.”
In April 2014 Low borrowed $107 million from Sotheby’s Financial Services, pledging up to $285 million in artworks as collateral, including the Rothko, then he instructed them to sell artworks until the loan was repaid. Sotheby’s put the Rothko in their May 2015 Modern/Contemporary sale, where it was purchased by Russian oiligarch Farkhad Akhmedov for $46.5 million as part of his attempt to conceal $600 million while divorcing his wife Tatiana Akhmedova.
Tatiana was awarded title to the Rothko, other art, a yacht, and an apartment, in 2016, but some of the assets had been secretly transferred to the feuding couple’s son, and in 2020, she was still suing to receive them. When Sotheby’s publishes the updated provenance, perhaps we’ll know if Tatiana is the present seller.
Thanks for making it to the end. 🎉