The World's Fair, Censorship, and a Bizarre "Warhol" Mosaic

Mosaic in Passerelle Plaza, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York. Photo: 16 Miles

August 23 Update: New York City Department of Parks & Recreation spokesperson Vickie Karp and John Krawchuk, the department's Director of Historic Preservation, have confirmed that the mosaics were installed about ten years ago and were restored last year. Mosaic maker Michael Golden was the design consultant on the project. I have spoken with Mr. Golden, and there will be more details to follow soon.

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This is a weird one. Walking through the Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Flushing, Queens, over the weekend, I came across this mosaic not far from the new Mets stadium. It's New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses (the hard-charging bureaucrat investigated in Robert Caro's devastating biography, The Power Broker), as depicted by Andy Warhol. But it's not that simple: Warhol's silkscreened portraits of Moses are believed to have been lost or destroyed, the mosaic may have been installed in 1998, and the image ties into a much more complicated, infamous episode in the Pop artist's career. First, some quick background information.


Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964. Silkscreen ink on Masonite, New York World's Fair, 25 panels, each 48 x 48 in., overall 20 x 20 ft.

For the 1964-65 New York World's Fair (one of Moses' pet project), architect Philip Johnson was hired to design the New York State Pavilion and commission 10 artists to create work to decorate its exterior. He asked Warhol to participate, and the Pop artist responded by creating Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), a large mural with photos of criminal suspects collected by the New York City Police Department. However, before the fair opened, someone asked Warhol to remove it, and he had it covered with silver paint. As Richard Meyer writes in his remarkable 2002 book, Outlaw Representation, no one could quite agree about what happened. Here is a quick rundown of explanations from various people, via Meyer:

1. Initial reports claimed that Warhol himself asked for the work to be removed. The Times reported that "he did not feel that it achieved the intended artistic effect," citing Johnson for that explanation. In the Herald-Tribune, Warhol's gallerist (Eleanor Ward, whom he would soon leave for Leo Castelli) concurred: "Andy just didn't like the way it looked," she said. Warhol, for the record, is not quoted in the article.


2. A few months later, the Times quoted Warhol saying that the mural was removed because some of the men in the photographs had been "pardoned," and there was a fear of a lawsuit coming from one or more of them.


3. In 1970, Johnson told art historian Rainer Crone that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was concerned that most of the men were Italian, making the mural less than politically palatable. In addition, because some of the men had been exonerated, "we would have been subject to law-suits from here to the end of the world," he said.

More likely, Meyer argues, politicians (probably Moses or Rockefeller or both) could not accept reputed criminals being presented at a fair that was supposed to reflect the glory of New York, the United States, and the future. And then there is, of course, that matter of the group of men being described as "most wanted," a description that is rife with homoerotic implications.

Warhol had a novel solution to the censorship, proposing the creation of a new mural with 25 portraits of Moses, replacing the desired men with the bureaucrat that may have blocked their appearance at the fair. Warhol produced a few trial silkscreens all of the silkscreens, though Johnson vetoed the idea, saying later that "taking potshots at the head of the fair would seem to me very, very bad taste." The image below is an extant photograph of one of those trial portraits. August 23 Update: Former Warhol associate Mark Lancaster wrote in, saying that he helped the artist print all 25 portraits of Moses. He also photographed the works.


Andy Warhol, Robert Moses, 1964. Synthetic polymer paint silkscreened on canvas.

Thanks to the magic of Google Books, and its archive of old Life magazines, it seems safe to say that Warhol used a photograph of Moses that ran in a 1962 profile of the parks commissioner in Life. (Warhol used a mirror image of the bureaucrat: the original from the magazine is below.)


Photograph of Robert Moses from "Disputatious Dirt-Mover," Life magazine, October 5, 1962

With that history in mind, the Flushing Meadows mosaic looks even more bizarre. The anonymous artisan responsible for the work (the Parks Department is looking into who made them) made the rather unorthodox choice of using Warhol's lost, censored mirror image to (at least ostensibly) pay tribute to Moses and the World's Fair. However, labeling it a "Warhol" is a bit of a stretch since the artist had no involvement in the work: it's really just a mosaic of a mirrored photograph from Life. That said, one does suspect that the mosaic maker knew the story, particular since he or she bothered to dig up an image of Warhol's lost Moses portrait. Also, look back at the mosaic at the top of this post: Moses' mouth has been enlarged to a comic scale. He looks balder and fatter than in the Life photograph, just a little bit unhinged. Is it intended as a satirical caricature, a pro-Warhol critique masquerading as an innocuous piece of public art? What is going on here? (Also, it seems worth noting that there is a very real risk that visitors to the park, unaware of Moses' possible role in censoring Warhol, may take the portrait as a legitimate celebration of the autocratic fair director, though one hopes not.)


Mosaic in Passerelle Plaza, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York

Just in case that wasn't strange enough, another mosaic depicts Johnson's Theaterama, the part of the New York State Pavilion that was decorated with the ten artists (more on that later). Yes, Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men seems to be depicted, even though it was painted over before the start of the fair. (It was subsequently covered with a tarp and later removed). It shows the 1964 World's Fair as it never officially looked. Rather, it is an imagined, idealized vision of a fair without censorship and of a society that was willing to accept Warhol's men.

If you made the mosaic or know who did, please send me an email. I would love to speak with that person (or those persons). Thank you!


The Queens Theatre-in-the-Park, formerly the New York State Pavilion's Theaterama

Andy Warhol's Peculiar 100-Part Group Portrait

Andy Warhol, Portraits of the Artists, 1967. Screenprints on 100 polystyrene boxes, each box 50 x 50 mm, overall 696 x 696 mm including frame. On view at the Wadsworth Atheneum, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine. Photo: 16 Miles

In 1967, New York dealer Leo Castelli hosted an exhibition to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Upper East Side gallery. Each of his artists contributed work to the show, and Andy Warhol (who came to the gallery late, after having two shows at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery), put together a series of portraits, in a variety of sizes, of 12 Castelli artists: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Cy Twombly, Lee Bontecou, Larry Poons, John Chamberlain, and Warhol himself.

Some of the works in the show were quite small, which turns out to have been an bit unfortunate. Explaining the works, Volume 2 of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné notes: “According to the Castelli inventory, several were stolen from the exhibit.” Thankfully for collectors, Warhol also made a rather unusual multiple of 10 of the portraits on polystyrene boxes. Each set of 100 boxes, featuring 10 portraits of each artist, were sold in a numbered edition of 200, plus 25 lettered copies.

I know that it’s been a bit Wadsworth Atheneum-heavy around here recently, but it turns out that it has one of the Portraits of the Artists multiples on display, which is easily one of the strangest pieces that Warhol ever produced and is worth a post. I'd never seen the work before, so when I returned home, I did a lot of Internet-searching and discovered something odd: every edition appeared to be configured differently. The Wadsworth's has the artists in horizontal rows; elsewhere, they are arranged vertically or even scattered about. Here are a sampling. (Note: If you want to try to identify each of the Castelli artists in the Wadsworth’s Atheneum piece, above, I have included the list, top to bottom, at the end of this post.)


Photo: Alan Brown Gallery


Photo: Christie's


Photo: Honolulu Academy of Arts


Photo: Christie's

Perplexed, I contacted Patricia Hickson, the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum, who consulted the work's object file. One of the notes in the file read: "Curiously, although Portraits in part of an edition of 200, the order and direction of the artists' images and the color bands vary among the serigraphs in the edition." But here is where things get especially interesting. Hickson explained that the work's frame can be opened, and the boxes can be rearranged, accounting for the differences in all of the images online. The work at the Wadsworth, though, has not been reconfigured since it was donated by super collectors (and serious Castelli clients) Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine in 1977.

Earlier this month, I was going on and on about the mutability of Warhol's sculptures, about the fact that, if you happen to own a set of Brillo boxes, you can arrange the pieces any way you like. Here, Warhol has taken that idea to the next level. When the Brillo boxes are sold or moved, they lose their previous arrangement. But in Portrait of the Artists, the work itself records how collectors chose to configure the work. Which leads to a few questions: did the Tremaines rearrange their copy, or does the work they donated to the Wadsworth show how Warhol originally displayed the work? (Or was was each copy sold in a different configuration?) Does it even matter what the original layout looked like?


Photo: Phillips de Pury & Company

A final question: who was cut from the 12 artists whose portraits were featured in the Castelli anniversary show in order to make a group of 10 plastic boxes? This, at least, we have an answer to, thanks to the Catalogue. It turns out that Warhol removed Twombly and Chamberlain. Which is interesting: Chamberlain was one of his favorite artists (Warhol collected his work), but he may have been a bit tired of Chamberlian’s portrait, having traded 316 — yes, 316 — copies of it to Chamberlain in exchange for a metal sculpture called Jackpot. (Chamberlain assembled 315 of the portraits into a single rectangular work that he called 315 Johns.) As for what is going on with the wood frame of one of the examples sold at Christie's, I don't even want to think about it.

Key: The artists in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s piece (shown at top), in order from top to bottom: Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol.

The Mutability of Warhol's Brillo Boxes

Mike Bidlo, installation views of Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964), 2005, at Lever House, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

“The things I make are / variable / as simple as possible / reproducible. / They are components of a space, since they are like building elements, / they can always be rearranged into new combinations or positions, thus, they alter the space. / I leave this alteration to the consumer who thereby again and anew participates in the creation.”

– Charlotte Posenenske, in Offenbach, Germany, published in Art International 12 (May 1968)

It’s too bad that German sculptor Charlotte Posenenske and Andy Warhol never collaborated. Reading the 1968 manifesto that is published in the pamphlet accompanying Artists Space’s smart show of Posenenske's work, it just about perfectly describes Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures. Explaining her own sculptures, Posenenske writes that they are “reproducible,” that “they can always be rearranged into new combinations or positions,” and that she has left “this alteration to the consumer.”

Having only seen Warhol’s sculptures displayed in regular grids, their mutability only occurred to me after a trip to the Lever House, where collector Aby Rosen has put Mike Bidlo’s faux Warhol Brillo Boxes on display. Check out the three pieces that are turned on their sides! (There’s even one that is upside down.) I also hadn’t realized that some sets of the boxes were sold (or at least authorized) in complete editions of ten or more. Single boxes, like this one, which was once in the collection of Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, turn up at auction occasionally.

A catalogue writer at Christie’s nicely summarizes the mutability of the works in an entry about a set of 10 boxes, breathlessly explaining that this is “an art that is open to all, that we can arrange and rearrange like building bricks at our own discretion…” The Pop artist, the writer says, “insist[ed] that we have the right as much as he does to take part in an artistic process that, as we can see from the subject matter, has been democratised and made open for all.”

For a thorough look at the various editions of the Brillo Boxes, Greg Allen is the key source. He also links to The Moment’s interview with Bidlo, who briefly describes the various versions of the work, proving that appropriation artists tend to be the most discerning connoisseurs. Charlie Finch has also weighed in, detailing Rosen’s “champagne vernissage” for the lobby show, which was attended by philosopher and Brillo Box expert Arthur Danto. Finch calls for a reevaluation of Bidlo’s work, and asks, “Is Mike Bidlo ready for his auction moment?” This much is clear: if a Bidlo Brillo Box ever beats the price of a Warhol Brillo Box in an auction room, it is going to be a very special day.





A real Brillo Box is securely enclosed in glass in the Lever House lobby.

Mike Bidlo, "Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964)"
Lever House Art Collection
New York, New York
Through September 11, 2010

Andy Warhol: David Salle Fan

Andy Warhol, The Last Supper (Be a Somebody with a Body), 1985–86. Acrylic on linen, 50 x 56 in. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


David Salle, We'll Shake the Bag, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in.

At last night's opening for "Andy Warhol: The Late Decade" at the Brooklyn Museum (which was packed with people, by the way, though they may have just been there for the free wine and beer), the Andy Warhol painting up above was attracting a great deal of attention. "My word! That really looks a lot like a David Salle painting!" one patron shouted to his friend. When I returned home to read the weekend reviews, Roberta Smith already had it covered in the New York Times:

Especially intriguing are a series of mostly black-and-white works in which Warhol, inspired perhaps by David Salle, starts using a projector to draw and paint existing motifs directly onto the image.

Warhol collaborated with Celemente and Basquiat — but not Salle. Instead, he seems to have decided to paint like him.

Updated: Greg Allen points out the David Salle-Francis Picabia connection.

Related: Joseph Ketner on "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade" on ARTINFO

Five Favorites at the 2010 Armory Show

Adam McEwen, installation view of "I Am Curious Yellow" installation at the Nicole Klagsbrun booth

Right before I visit an art fair, I always imagine that I'll get to learn about the work of hundreds of artists I don't know and that I'll emerge with a few new interests. However, when I visit, I usually end up finding it pretty difficult to focus on anything new. With that in mind, here are five pieces from established figures that stood out at the 2010 Armory Show.

Nicole Klagsbrun was smart, filling her yellow-carpeted booth with yellow works by Adam McEwen, and branding it as a single installation entitled "I Am Curious Yellow." Most successful contemporary artists have one smart, signature line of works; McEwen has at least four or five — the gum paintings, the obituary paintings, the text-message paintings, the cigarette prints, etc. The graphite sculptures he has fabricated are the most interesting, though; he's done credit cards, hanging florescent lights, and now he has produced this fine, energy-efficient bulb.

Just about everything McEwen does cries for attention — as evidenced by the huge, yellow swastika in the Klagsbrun booth. His light bulb, in contrast, hangs quietly — a little sadly — in space: a perfect piece of fragile, brittle metal that casts no light.


Ken Price at the Nyehaus and Franklin Parrasch Gallery booth

A smooth, pink egg filled with ovular, dark-green globules — fingers, eggs, monsters, larvae? Kitsch can also be creepy, Ken Price reminds us.


Nick Cave soundsuit at the Jack Shainman booth

Jack Shainman lined up a handful of soundsuits on a platform outside of their booth, earning perhaps the most gawkers of any display at the show. Even when they're standing there motionless, they look like absurd amounts of fun. I hope that the collector that bought this throws caution to the wind, tosses it on, and dances around frequently.


Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild 805-4, 1994. Oil on canvas, 22 x 24 in., at the Edward Tyler Nahem booth

Sure, Richter abstractions are pretty much standard art-fair fare, but this one really pops. It's only roughly two-by-two feet big, but it feels huge and heavy when you're in front of it — you'd think that Richter had built up thousands of layers of paint. Monstrous, horribly beautiful stuff.


Andy Warhol, Silver Clouds, 1966, at the Nyehaus and Franklin Parrasch Gallery booth

This was the ultimate bargain in the show. Priced at $5,000 a balloon (complete with the original wrapping), Nyehaus sold them out. They floated above the booth with string, launched with quite a bit more helium than in their original installation (in fairness, it can't be practical to have loose balloons flying around booths while trying to sell art).

In the area where I grew up in New Jersey, local governments limit the size of the signs stores are allowed to have along major highways. To grab a little bit more attention, many of those businesses erect gargantuan flagpoles to fly over-sized America flags. This would seem to be a smarter, more elegant art world version of that practice.

A Mysterious Orange Tribute at MoMA

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on 32 canvases, each 20 x 16 in. Photos: 16 Miles.

Do you notice anything strange about this installation at the Museum of Modern Art (other than the terrible color, which is a result of my poor job correcting the photograph)? Look really closely. What about in this one below?


Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl [detail], 1963. Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 67 5/8 x 66 3/4 in.

Yeah! There are peculiar, bright orange boxes floating on the walls of one of MoMA's postwar permanent collection galleries, hiding in plain sight near the Warhol, the Lichtenstein, a Vija Celmins, a Michelangelo Pistoletto, and a few other works. So what are they? Let's take a closer look!






All three photos above: George Brecht, various cards from Water Yam, 1963, distributed around the gallery.

It turns out that the scattered orange boxes are instructional cards for visitors to George Brecht's 1963 Water Yam show and part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift that was donated to the museum in 2008. Brecht also died that year, so the installation is something of a fittingly quiet, charming tribute to him.

I wonder if Gabriel Orozco ever saw Brecht's cards hung like this. There's a definite Yogurt Caps vibe about the way the way they sit nonchalantly and unassumingly next to some of MoMA's most prized treasures. (The curatorial team has also provided only one wall label for the eight or so pieces — right next to the Soup Cans — meaning that people who spot the boxes have to hunt to find out what they are, which is fun.)

Does anyone know when the Brechts first went up? It's terrifying to realize that I probably walked past them at least two or three times recently without noticing them in the room.

Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen, at Skarstedt Gallery [Photographs]

Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Warhol, cross-dressers, and his Polaroid Big Shot camera. His assistant Vincent Fremont: “Bob Colacello found most of them at a club called the Gilded Grape. After the photo session, I would hand the subjects a model release and a check and send them over to the bank.” The paint is super thick on a lot of these, similar to the 1978-79 Shadow paintings at Dia, though Warhol or his assistants seem to be working with a smaller brush here.











Andy Warhol, "Ladies and Gentlemen"
Skarstedt Gallery
20 East 79th Street
New York, New York
Through October 24, 2009
[more photographs]

Dave Hickey, Peter Plagens, Cupcake Crowns, etc. [Collected]

Ursula von Rydingsvard, For Paul [detail], 1990-1992 / 2001. Photo: 16 Miles [more photographs]

• "I don't see any long-distance runners out, anyone who drinks rejection like Cognac." - Dave Hickey, on young artists at the School of Visual Arts, September 17, 2009
• "It’s not my problem any more. I’m 68 years old. I’m a painter... I don’t get exercised that art has all gone to hell in a hand basket." - Peter Plagens
• 11 Most Wanted Warhols. And Warhol's 13 Most Wanted Men. [via C-Monster]
• A bronze zoo on Park Avenue.
• Sara Greenberger Rafferty
• Tacita Dean
• "Sorry we are not sorry." William Eggleston in the journal.
• Cupcake Crown

Twombly Best-Dressed, Post-Crisis Aesthetics, Expensive Whiskey [Collected]

Claes Oldenburg, Apple Core, 1990 at Kentuck Knob, Pennsylvania. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

• New York Street Art Map
• Creative Time Comics!
• Charlie Finch: "Male chauvanism never went away." [via Edward Winkleman]
• Museums: Where the Boys Aren't working
• Sad Roerich theft; at least we now know the Nicholas Roerich Museum exists
• Bruce High Quality at Harris Lieberman reviewed; performance text
• More on the end of incandescent light in Europe
• Post-Crisis Aesthetics: Flood, Baer, Kern, Peers
• Cy Twombly on the Vanity Fair best-dressed list with Chiara Clemente, Agnes Gund, Alicia Keys
• Contemporary Art and Sweet Foodstuffs: I wish I had thought of this
• Luc Sante on Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men [via Brian Sholis]
• Vintage Whiskey prices up
• Rachel Hayes, killing it downtown

The Epic Art History in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Artists at Mr. Chow's, 1986. Photo: Smithsonian Archives of American Art; Carol Saft, photographer

Dear Lucy,

The enemies of women's liberation in the arts will be crushed.

Love,

Nancy

- Letter from painter Nancy Spero to art critic Lucy Lippard, October 29, 1971

Get ready to burn a lot of time. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art (AAA) have been expanding their online holdings, and the results are massive. These are our favorite picks from what we've sorted through so far:

• A 1949 letter from Andy Warhol to Harper's Magazine managing editor Russell Lynes with biographical information. "My life couldn't fill a penny postcard," he writes in wavy script. "Now I'm in NY City moving from one roach infested apartment to another."
• This 1986 photograph of Katz, Warhol, Arman, Hockney, Clemente, Basquiat, Chamberlain, Schnabel, Scharf, Heizer, Mapplethorpe, Shafrazi, and many others (including two women) hanging out at - no joke - Mr. Chow's. I can not believe this is real.
• A face collage constructed on a letter for Lucy Lippard from Ray Johnson in 1969. The whole Lucy Lippard section is pretty great.
• The Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, which were just added. Goodness knows what is buried in them.

Cash for Art, Vandalism as Art, etc. [Collected]

"Vomiting on Painting was an Artistic Act."  Sticker on 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.  Photo: 16 Miles.

• Need cash fast?  Have pricey art for collateral?  Art Capital Group is ready.
• Which reminds us of: Cash for Your Warhol.  Explained.
• The UK Times and Saatchi tally the votes and declare the Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century. Warhol is number eight.
  
• Eli Broad's name rhymes with road, a book by Joel Holmberg reminds us.  He owns many Warhols. [via AFC]
• Obama viewed a Kandinsky show in Paris, though he missed Bruce Nauman's win in Venice.
• Art Observed had stellar coverage of Venice, including work by Liam Gillick, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Mona Hatoum, among others.
• The FBI has a division devoted to art thefts.  The Art Crime Team's (ACT) official site.  Check out that insignia.
• They don't cover art vandalism, though.  The sticker above references 22-year-old art student Jubal Brown's 'performance' puking all over Mondrian's Composition in Red, White, and Blue in 1996. Some other notable occurrences of art vandalism.

Picasso Videos, Donald Judd's Love for Whiskey (and Clogs), and Other Links [Compendium]

Ruben Ochoa, three the hard way, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Massive Picasso coverage, new Warhol album covers, an epic Ernesto Neto installation, the news that Donald Judd collected fine whiskey, and the nicest day so far this year in New York.  There's a lot to get excited about this week:

• Great videos about Picasso: Mosqueteros, the show of the artist's late work at Gagosian, including interviews with biographer John Richardson and grandson Bernard Picasso.
• According to @theartmarket, there may have been 5,000 visitors to the Picasso show last weekend, following Roberta Smith's laudatory review in the Times.  
• More than 50 previously-forgotten Andy Warhol album covers, have been rediscovered.  (via Little Known Facts)
• Ernesto Neto will be taking over the Park Avenue Armory from May 14 to June 14, constructing an epic installation, curated by Tom Eccles.
• "Judd accrued enormous collections of things as varied as top-flight whiskey, ceramics, and Native American rugs, not to mention hundreds of pairs of artisanal Dutch clogs—all carefully catalogued and categorized."  A list of some of history's most famous debtors.  (via C-Monster)

Upcoming Talks [Calendar]

The Hispanic Society of America.  Photo: 16miles

The New York art fairs open up this week.  In the realm of academia, though, there are also big things happening this month.  Here are our picks for the best talks, listed chronologically and to be updated throughout the month.  They include former Guild & Greyshkul partner Sara VanDerBeek on her photography, two Dia events, another in the new Elizabeth Dee-initiated space, X, that used to belong to Dia, and a pair of talks featuring Hal Foster, who easily wins the award for best lecture titles.

Sara VanDerBeek on Her Photography

International Center for Photography, 1114 Avenue of the America, New York, NY

Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 7:00 pm

Liam Gillick on the Factory that Exists but Does Not Produce

Art in General, 79 Walker Street, New York, NY

Saturday, March 7, 2009, 3:00 pm

Mitchell Codding, Director of the Hispanic Society, and Bettina Funcke, Senior Editor U.S. for Parkett on the work of Zoe Leonard [rsvp @ diaart.org for reservations]

The Hispanic Society of America, 613 West 155th Street (entrance on Broadway), New York, NY

Saturday, March 14, 2009, 2:00 pm

Isaac Julien on Andy Warhol [$6 regular; $3 student]

Dia Art Foundation, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY

Sunday, March 22, 2009, 6:30 pm

Hal Foster and David Joselit on Recessional Aesthetics: New Publics or Business as Usual

X, 548 West 22nd Street, New York, NY

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 7:00 pm

How to Survive Civilization or: What We Can Still Learn from Dada

Cooper Union, Wollman Auditorium, Cooper Square New York, NY

Monday, April 6, 2009, 6:00 pm

Walter Benjamin and Branden Joseph on Media as Resistance

Walter Benjamin on film, 1936:

"Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst the prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling."

Branden Joseph on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 2002:

"Yet, in its time the EPI mobilized the conflictual, deterritorialized forces of electronic media toward the explosion of a newly developing postinstitutional prison-world ... amongst the far-flung debris of which some, at least, would find it possible - less calmly, perhaps, but no less adventurously - to go traveling."

Works Cited
Branden Joseph, "My Mind Split Open": Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable," Grey Room 08       (Summer 2002), p. 98.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, Ed.                 Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) p. 236.

Photo: Fred W. McDarrah, The Velvet Underground at The Dom, April 1, 1966.

Video Art 8 - Andy Warhol, Kiss (1964) [Excerpt]

Listen with the music off at least once, though the addition of the Mertens (however questionable) makes this a nice video to send to your Lover. Also, fast forward past 4:30 for the more serious fare. The full version is 54 minutes long.

Secret Restaurants Part 2 (and Luxury Art in Luxury Hotels)

The Times reports on the continuing proliferation of secret restaurants, doing a better reported, more extensive version of the piece I wrote a few months ago and posted on here recently. To Milk & Honey, La Esquina, and The Back Room, they add the Waverly Inn and - interestingly - the Gramercy Park Hotel's Rose Bar, which contains literally millions of dollars of art, replete with at least one piece by Prince, Twombly, Warhol, Basquiat, Hirst, and Schnabel (who helped design the $200 million renovation). What's most remarkable is that the GPH is not alone in its pricey wall hangings. The Hotel Ganesvoort has also generated quite a bit of buzz over its art collection, anchored by a large Warhol / Basquiat collaboration piece.

Quick Art 1

Raymond Pettibon
The Priest
1988
8 1/2 x 11 inches
Ink on paper

Setting aside his early political cartoons for the UCLA school newspaper (he majored in economics), Raymond Pettibon's first major break came from doing concert posters and album covers for his older brother Greg Ginn's band, Black Flag. The Priest comes right from the moment when Pettibon was beginning to make major roads into the high art world with a series of major gallery showings. Within two years his work would provide the cover for Sonic Youth's Goo album, solidifying his ascent.

For his artistic practice, the period was also deeply transformational. While early drawings tend to contain a punch line (however perverse), later drawings become filled with more text and, consequently, ambiguity. Pronouns become linguistic shifters (see Roman Jakobson) in these works, they are (to use Saussure) signifiers with multiple possible signifieds. Here Pettibon accomplishes the a similar feat with only two words: "the priest", and the viewer again becomes responsible for crafting their own interpretation. This is one version.

The scene is a memento mori of the type that flourished in still life in the seventeenth century and remained a common genre of painting into the twentieth century for Cezanne [pictured at left] and Picasso. However, unlike nearly every other example in the field, it sits alone; there are no remnants of worldly life and thus closely mirrors Warhol's skull paintings from the 1970s [pictured below]. This is almost certainly deliberate, as Pettibon repeatedly adopts the motifs of many of the great Pop stars in his own drawings.

The concept of a memento mori comes from the very beginning of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities ... all is vanity." Every living person will die, he reminds the reader, and worldly pursuits will be rendered meaningless. It's tempting to suggest that the text sits as a label for the skull: this was a priest who also died. This is impossible to disprove. It is also possible that the words may refer to the preacher Ecclesiastes himself, bringing him into the drawing for commentary. His words only a few lines down in the Bible fittingly describe Pettibon's process: "there is no new thing under the sun."

There is nothing left to do but recycle old images, paint the same paintings, it first seems to suggest. That's not a particularly optimistic message. (Of course, Warhol's is perhaps even less so, capturing a skull divorced from any human trace: death is the only reality.) The trick, though, is that Pettibon has actually created something new. Grafting together text and a drawing, he disassembles the history of the memento mori painting, arguing that death may not be entirely final: Ecclesiastes was wrong. Art can cheat it.