She reported on the documentary almost two months ago, and Macdonald told her the same fascinating-to-me thing he told Josh Slater-Williams, that Galliano’s Fall 2022 show was about being the subject of a documentary. Which, if you look at that show, is all kinds of problematic. But.
She also adds so much more context: that it was Anna Wintour who dangled a Galliano documentary on the hook for several years until a director—Macdonald—bit. And crucially, as I read it, that the whole thing pivoted on documentary’s backers at Dior—and LVMH.
The reputation being laundered by the documentary is not Galliano’s—or not just Galliano’s—but Galliano’s collections for Dior. So cooperating effusively was, Macdonald suggested, “a great way for them to say, ‘Okay, we’ve laid that to rest.’ And I think, so, for Dior and for John, I think that was their agenda.”
“It is also, of course,” wrote Tashjian-Wise, “an agenda that allows them to make more money off Galliano-designed products.” And so it seems unsurprising that weeks after the documentary dropped, Galliano was declared “the real winner of the Met Gala.” Tashjian-Wise notes that Galliano dressed six celebrities for the Met Gala, including Kim Kardashian, and Zendaya—twice. The actress skipped the co-chairs receiving line at the top of the Met’s stairs to take a second lap outside, wearing a vintage Galliano-era Givenchy.
Both Tashjian-Wise and Chantal Fernandez at The Cut reported rumors that Galliano had been Anna Wintour’s and curator Andrew Bolton’s intended subject this year’s Costume Institute exhibition. After someone at the Met nixed the plan last year, Bolton had to throw together a collection exhibition about spring florals based on a dystopian Philip K. Dick story.
A Wintour-orchestrated, LVMH-sanctioned documentary. A triumphant LVMH-sponsored museum retrospective, and reported “suggestions” that Galliano would return to LVMH. The plan really was going to be, put the antisemitic outrage outrage to rest, and use the Met Gala to launch a rebooted Galliano. The world—and some museum trustees, apparently—have intervened, but it does cast a stark light on the Met Gala as a wholly instrumentalized tool of the luxury industry.
Fernandez’ article on Andrew Bolton gets into the Costume Institute’s weird governance and curatorial shenanigans, but we’ve never gotten a breakdown of the Met Gala’s actual value proposition as the the world’s most extravagant sponcon. It’s a Condé Nast-branded, pay-to-play fashion show, combined with a party giving Vogue advertisers both content opportunities and facetime with celebrities, and the venue gets a cut of the door. And we’re all either too starstruck or too grateful for the fundraising to acknowledge how, beneath the museum’s sheer veil of cultural credibility, the Met Gala is naked.
Shoutout to @dailyrothko for bringing this darkest of all Rothkos to light.
Ink on paper, 42 x 50 inches, not titled, dated, or signed, but from 1969, referred to as 1969, and annotated on the back, “no number/ black/ no. 1” in two different corners. In the National Gallery’s collection since the Rothko kids’ gift in 1986, but I’m not sure it’s been shown. I, for one, would love to see it.
The General Services Administration commissioned Tilted Arc from Richard Serra in 1981 as part of a Percent for Art program. The GSA’s regional manager guided the campaign to have it removed in 1985. It was finally removed at night on March 15, 1989 after Serra’s contract- and free speech-related lawsuit was dismissed. The three Cor-Ten steel plates that comprised the sculpture were taken from the Javits Building plaza in lower Manhattan to a government-owned parking lot at 3rd Avenue & 29th St in Brooklyn. The site was adjacent to the Metropolitan Detention Center. In 1999 the Bureau of Prisons built a new joint on the site, and the pieces of Tilted Arc were sent to a GSA depot at Middle River, Maryland. And there they stayed, on a loading dock, stacked and separated by pressure-treated lumber, as the GSA put it, “indefinitely.”
Which is not the same as forever. The government sold the Middle River site, and Tilted Arc was moved to the GSA’s Fine Art Storage facility in Virginia in the summer of 2005. [18 pallets of relief sculpture molds by Ray Kaskey for the World War II Memorial were also moved, but in different trucks.] It remains there to this day. I saw it yesterday, in fact. [Tilted Arc, that is, not the molds.]
By at least 1993, the GSA conducted regular evaluations of the condition of the Tilted Arc plates. [From the 2001 email thread submitting the first report from Middle River: “The iron curtain is still here.” “Norman reports the sculpture is still on the loading dock and is fine.”] In 2004 it was noticed that they were rusting unevenly due, it was determined, to moisture being trapped in the lumber and held against the otherwise protective oxidized surface.
After an evaluation by McKay Lodge, an art conservation firm which has long held contracts to maintain GSA artworks around the country, GSA issued a statement of work [pdf] to “STABILIZE TILTED ARC.” I find the text below, giving background to the proposal, to be extremely helpful in seeing how the GSA views the artwork:
In 1968 GSA constructs the U.S. Customs Court and Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza, along lower Broadway in New York City. Due to prohibitive inflation and shifting policies within the agency, no public artwork is funded at the time of construction. In 1979, GSA authorizes the Art in Architecture Program to allocate funds for Richard Serra to create a public artwork for the Federal Plaza, on the corner site adjacent to the U.S. Customs Court and Federal Building (now named for Senator Jacob K. Javits). Serra’s sculpture, known as Tilted Arc, is installed on July 16, 1981.
The sculpture was looming and domineering, and an interesting study in the manipulation and compression of public space. Cast in steel, the arc stood 12′ high and 120′ long, and when it [was] on the plaza, it obscured all views of the city beyond the brown metallic wall. [sic obv]
GSA Dismantles Tilted Arc In June of 1986, the National Endowment for the Arts announces that it will assist GSA to locate a new site for Tilted Arc. However, Serra adamantly reiterates that the sculpture is site-specific, and if moved will be rendered meaningless. [again, sic obv]
McKay Lodge proposed to treat the plates with a marine anti-corrosion film. They were unstacked, cleaned and sprayed, and restacked. The conservator’s report noted that “the predicted problem [uneven corrosion] had occurred to some extent, but pitting had not yet occurred to a degree that the steel would be permanently marred. Nevertheless, it revealed the importance of coating this steel if it is to be stored for years, and the work was performed just in time.”
McKay Lodge recommended reapplying the film as needed every 3-5 years, and to minimize exposure to rainwater by “fastening a covering of plywood over the length of the newly [re-]stacked steel plates and then tying over this waterproof tarps sufficiently fastened to avoid wind lifting.”
Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk’s foundational 1990 book, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents WAS Tilted Arc for me, so I FOIA’d Tilted Arc in 2015 because I’d wanted to see where it was, and what happened to it after it was removed. I also wondered if any consideration or analysis had been done relating to Tilted Arc in 2010, when the Jacob Javits Building plaza was being redesigned for the second time. [In 1997 Martha Schwartz’s sinuous bench maze replaced the planters and benches that had been scattered across the original architects’ plinth-with-fountain plaza.] The proposal documents from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, who was selected for the redesign, did not show any trace of historical review or evaluation of reinstalling Tilted Arc. The focus, if I recall, was on alleviating drainage and ventilation problems in the parking lot under the plaza.
When I went to see Tilted Arc‘s situation in 2015, it was indeed encased in an armature of some kind and wrapped in blue tarp. The warehouse complex felt obscure, but neither secret nor restricted. In the intervening years, development around the site has accelerated. There is a new Wegman’s nearby, and countless condo and office towers. The warehouse next to Tilted Arc‘s storage area is now a microbrewery, with outdoor seating. While I’ve been not disclosing its location all this time, I’ve heard from multiple people of their visits.
When I went yesterday, the tarp was off, the plywood was rotting and covered with fallen leaves. The protective coating that is supposed to cure to a white film when active was not visible to me. While ignoring the decades of Serra conservation experience now accumulated by museums and collectors around the world, GSA appears to not even be following their own basic policies to keep the work intact. Preserving Tilted Arc by clamming up and ignoring it is not working.
Preserve it for what, you ask? Didn’t Serra himself declare it destroyed? The actual answer to that is, yes, no, and we don’t know. In his introduction to The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, Serra quoted his own statement to a 1984 GSA hearing: “I want to make it perfectly clear that Tilted Arc was commissioned and designed for one particular site: Federal Plaza. It is a site-specific work and as such not to be relocated To remove the work is to destroy the work.” To which he added, “This has been accomplished; Tilted Arc is destroyed.”
So if the US Government put it back in Federal Plaza tomorrow, would it no longer be destroyed? What parameters of that site must be specified for Serra to have considered it a viable work again? Did he say? Did anyone think to ask? [Anyone besides me, I mean. In 2015 I suggested to a mutual friend that he ask Richard to at least document his intentions for Tilted Arc, in hope that it might ever be reinstalled some day. I don’t know if he did, but the time when we can’t ask anymore has come.]
Tilted Arc was removed because an art-hating judge, a Reagan appointee, and Rudy Giuliani wanted to score political points by destroying something that mattered to people they hated. The people angry at the government for chopping it up and destroying it were wrong; that government dismantled it the same way they installed it—look at those tongue & groove joints, it just slides apart!—and they’ve spent 35 years storing, moving, protecting and conserving the pieces of it.
To what end? Serra shut down the possibility of selling it off; no collector or institution would take a destroyed Serra […unless?] So why take this effort if not to preserve the possibility of reinstalling it? How does that play out? Serra himself was obviously never going to ask for it, but he’s gone now. The GSA seems uninterested to pursue it on their own. So who makes it happen? Are Serra collectors in a Whatsapp group chat right now trying to figure it out? Could you imagine a more fitting monument to billionaires colluding to get the government to do whatever they want than a resurrected Tilted Arc?
Or maybe it’s just a government that does its job, takes care of things, appreciates the arts, recognizes a sculpture’s significance, and creates the opportunity to do something better. The history of Tilted Arc is long, but it bends back toward Manhattan.
The exhibition, Henri Matisse: Forms in Freedom, at the National Art Center Tokyo includes a full-scale replica of la Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (1947-51). The experience incorporates simulated daylight on an accelerated loop, as if the replica stained glass windows were the ceiling of the mall at Caesar’s Palace.
In the caption Chie Sumiyoshi’s Mon Oncle article about the exhibit, it calls the above image a reproduction [再現] of a tile mural. But the only thing tiled here are the sheets of the photomural. The stained glass windows opposite, then, are also photos of the windows, and the wrought iron grates and landscaping behind them. Matisse’s candlesticks are on the replica altar, but Matisse’s crucifix is not.
I can find no images of a Tokyo replica of Matisse’s Stations of The Cross, which occupies the wall that would be directly next to the photographers of the images above. It is a tense and janky tangle that replaces a physical procession with a halting visual search for the next number and the next step. Matisse drew it at scale, with charcoal on the end of a bamboo pole. So the physical experience being replicated would have been not just that of a tourist, but of Matisse himself, standing in front of his work.
If I can find any relevant Brice Marden comments, or if someone gets married in there, I will update this post immediately.
The commercial satellite data The Guardian used to document the Israeli destruction of neighborhoods, buildings, and fields in Gaza is almost a month old now.
From 1985-87 John Cage worked on one of his most ambitiously scaled projects ever, a full-scale opera created by chance operation. “Europera 1 & 2” debuted at the Frankfurt Oper in late 1987, and they have been an object of longtime interest and fascination on this blog. But because my interest was first in the visual and material aspects of the production—the props, the canvas flats with blown up vintage opera imagery—I missed a key sound element: “Truckera.”
“Truckera” was a 3-minute sound loop made of 101 opera LPs recorded in batches, and mixed down in layers into one “thick” truck-like sound. “Truckera” was to be played by the percussion section of the “Europera” orchestra. Which, fine.
What is wild, though, is that Cage produced “Truckera” live, on air, on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR, with a studioful of turntables and DAT decks and a team of dozens of audio engineers. It took almost three hours.
In between takes and mixes, Cage and host Brooke Wentz chat; Cage reads excerpts of collaged-together synopses from “Europera’s” 12 different programs; and they play recordings of various recent or related works. All the while, the sounds, cues, and logistical banter of audio production continue in the background [or whatever the Cagean equivalent is.]
At times the broadcast feels like, if not quite a Cagean composition, then definitely a Cagean performance, the kind of lecture/musical event Cage did often on college campuses. But it’s actually something rarer: a chance [sic] to eavesdrop on some central moments of Cage’s actual production.
This all comes up now because the Truckera broadcast was recorded, and rebroadcast, and rebroadcast again. WKCR aired it last September 5 to mark Cage’s birthday. And Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, just finished airing it—in three one-hour installments—on her weekly show, All Things Cage, on WXGC. I haven’t actually gotten through all three yet, but it’s already the best Cage recording I’ve heard this year.
It’s just a couple of minutes walk from 356, south toward the Instagram Influencer Bridge, past the Explore Vatican Immersive Sistine Chapel Experience, to Luna Luna, the Artist Carnival Immersive Experience Drake just installed in a 60,000 square-foot soundstage that’s part of the 18-acre property being assembled by Anderson Real Estate, which owns and manages 4.5 million square feet of commercial properties in California, Hawaii, and the US Virgin Islands.
Specifically, I never really noticed or heard that much about the revolving doors Marcel Duchamp used as exhibition devices in the 1938 Exposition internationale du surréalisme he designed/curated at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. As Murtha pointed out, Duchamp later considered other elements from the show to be artworks—1200 Coal Bags Suspended From The Ceiling Over a Stove, for example—but the doors didn’t get the same treatment. Despite, as I see below, Duchamp’s well-documented interest in doors—and Large Glass works that, you must admit, look rather doorish.
It feels like worlds ago, and world ago all the way down. And also just yesterday.
For a few hours in the Summer of 2023, an Instagram account that tracks the work of artist Richard Prince posted a picture of a rusty shoe tree, standing in front of an abstract painting. It echoed the original image of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which Alfred Stieglitz photographed in front of a Marsden Hartley painting in 1917.
The Instagram image included text elements: DEPOSITION above and RICHARD PRINCE below, with a url and password to an unlisted video file. The video, more than six hours long, appeared to be a recording of Richard Prince’s deposition in a pair of conjoined lawsuits filed by photographers Donald Graham and Eric McNatt, in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Both men objected to photos they took, posted to Instagram by others, which appeared in Prince’s 2014 New Portraits series.
From the jump, the experience of encountering a Sturtevant is different from almost all other artworks. The moment of recognition, of loading up your assumptions and expectations of an artist’s work, of anticipating a certain kind of engagement is the same, until the instant it isn’t. Sturtevant’s work triggers a recognition, and then it thwarts it. When you realize a work is by Sturtevant, you consider how close she has gotten to the artist you thought it was by; then you start marking differences. You may also start to reflect on your upended expectations, and to question the systems that produced them.
And by you, I mean me. And the Sturtevant work that has been confounding me for months is Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Blue Placebo). The 2004 sculpture is a repetition of “Untitled” (Blue Placebo), a 1991 pour of blue cellophane-wrapped candy. The Sturtevant was acquired by the Whitney Museum in 2016, and it went on view for the first time this summer in “Inheritance,” an expansive collection exhibition about legacy and lineage curated by Rujeko Hockley.
As far as I can tell, Sturtevant only made one candy pour. It was shown at least twice in the artist’s lifetime, and this is the second time since her death. How does it work? What does it do? How does a museum handle it? Is there a certificate?
Alex Greenberger has the English report at ARTnews, but there is apparently a German version of Antiques Roadshow called Bares für Rares, or Cash for Rarities, and it is hosted by Jerry Saltz starring in Gilbert & Sullivan’s adaptation of Death in Venice? I don’t really speak German. But that’s not important now. What matters is that an Isa Genzken sculpture was crumbling on prime time German television.
Once I could confirm she included no LL Bean tote bags, I made my peace with not blogging every review and post and image of Cady Noland’s one-room exhibition at Gagosian. But it’s hard to resist, especially in this window before I get to the show in person.
On tumblr Octavio has posted some intriguing photos that were not in the gallery checklist: a collection of archival Polaroids, some stacks several pictures deep, of earlier installations and details of work. I’m going to wait to go through them more carefully, but I will absolutely rush to post the discovery of a new category of Cady Noland sculpture alongside “destroyed by refabrication” and “disavowed because of damage and conservation shenanigans”:
As the poisoning and destruction of twitter continues apace, I’ve been expending more of my social media energy on Bluesky, which is still in testing mode. The current owner of twitter has apparently taken to disabling accounts that publicize Bluesky or Bluesky invites, but that is fine.
If you are a greg.org reader and would like an invite, please email me. I have a few to share, and would love to see more folks there. First-come, first-served.
[UPDATE: OK, I’m out of invites for the moment, but will share more again when they come.]
[I am also on tumblr, at gregdotorg.tumblr.com, and would love to connect with greg.org readers there, too. Follow and let me find out.]