All these years, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) has been simultaneously over-quoted and under-read, to our peril:
One reason why fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth [🙃] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
…
[cuts section about the Klee which, not right now, Angel of History, Ima need you to focus!]
…
At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them.
somehow ambushing me in the appendix of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Always To Return catalogue, available in bookstores near me Sunday!
One thing I love about this edition [which greg.org hero Matt tipped me off about] in Glenn Ligon’s new show of works on paper at Hauser & Wirth , is that Ligon did not use the digital image of the 1989 study from Punchlines, Sotheby’s themed online sale of Richard Prince jokes in December 2023 as the base for his hand-drawn redactions.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Study for Joke Painting), 1989, ballpoint pen, tape and printed paper on paper, 12 by 9 in., sold at Sotheby’s 15 Dec 2023 for $7,620
Ligon’s image of Prince’s printed, clipped, annotated, taped, three-layer study has different shadows along the edges of the collage, so a different lighting situation than when Sotheby’s photographed it. Did Ligon photograph it while on view? Did he buy it? That would be some praxis. [And with an edition of 25, a great ROI.]
The dimensions of Ligon’s edition and Prince’s study are identical—and I love how Ligon signs his in a way that echoes Prince. But that’s just the dimension of the sheet; in fact, Ligon is presenting his work, Punchline (2024), in an identical frame, too. The facsimile objecthood is strong with this one.
Except, of course, Ligon’s intervention completely transforms the work. It’s not that his crossouts eliminate the rape and racist jokes; you can still make them out, if you’re determined to. But he changes entirely the delivery and impact of the punchline [sic], which is not, of course, much of a punchline at all.
When I went looking to see if Prince ever made a painting with this double joke printed 16 inches wide, I didn’t find one. But I did find one of Prince’s joke sources: The Official Black Joke Book/The Official White Joke Book, a 1975 addition to a long series of Official [Some Target Group] Joke Books by Larry Wilde. [So far, the text of the hippie hitchhiker joke does not appear anywhere online outside of Prince’s own oeuvre.]
Ligon recomposes the text, but also reauthors it in ways that matter, and that highlight the mechanisms of appropriation. In his Cariou deposition Prince talks about wanting “to be a girlfriend,” wanting dreads and to be a Rasta he saw at a bar in St. Barth. And when he can’t, he says, “Maybe I should paint them. Maybe that’s a way to substitute that desire.” Now there’s a thread to pull on, which runs through Prince’s work, but also through the white male gaze culture he was soaking in and drawing from.
Text, appropriation, painting, history, racialized experience, queerness. This one print has me questioning whose tools are being used here, whose house is being dismantled, and what’s being built in its place. I’m not sure there’s another artist working now who could make so little into so much.
look at my name on the P&P website in tiny little type!
I am so psyched for this, a chance to talk with Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco about one of the most incredible catalogues I’ve seen, for one of the best shows in years: Felix Gonzalez-Torres Always To Return, at the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
The show closed last year, of course, but the catalogue is only just dropping now. Which might seem slow, but it’s certainly quicker than the catalogue for Specific Objects Without Specific Form, which took several years to be published. But like that book, I already find Always To Return to be one of the foundational texts to shaping our understanding of Gonzalez-Torres’ work and its evolution.
installation view, Charles Ray, Adam & Eve, 2023, two blocks of milled stainless steel; Christopher Wool, Crosstown Traffic, 2023, stone & glass mosaic
Every other time I’ve been by the blinds were down, blocking the Christopher Wool mosaic from view. I’m glad Wool made the effort to make a mosaic; it’s very well executed. Both the Wool and the Charles Ray are good, but also feel particularly unimpactful. Maybe it’s just me, and the moment.
Marcel Duchamp Exterior of Étant donnés, 1946-66, as installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Mixed-media assemblage, published by Michael R. Taylor via
I realize that he spent twenty years working on Étant donnés, so why does it still surprise me that Marcel Duchamp sourced the door AND the bricks for the arch from BF Spain?
Marcel Duchamp, snapshot of exterior door of Étant donnés in its original setting, with Teeny Duchamp, La Bisbal, early 1960s, collection The Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, published by Michael Taylor, via
The door came from a town called La Bisbal, where Marcel and Teeny went doorscouting in the early 1960s, I guess? It was only in the summer of 1968, though, that Duchamp selected 150 bricks for the doorway arch, to be shipped to the US by a contractor in Cadaqués, his regular vacation spot. [Presumably, Duchamp was trying to match the crumbled brick wall already included in the work, which frames the nude mannequin and landscape. presumably brought back from Spain at some earlier date.
Denise Browne Hare, 11th St installation of Étant donnés, with vinyl brick tiles, December 1968, from a documentation portfolio published for the first time in 2009 by Michael Taylor via
Until the bricks arrived, Duchamp put up a row of brick-shaped vinyl tiles as placeholders in the 11th St studio where the Étant donnés diorama was constructed (or reconstructed, because he’d already had to move it once).
Duchamp, of course, never took delivery of the bricks. He died in October 1968, and in anticipation of the disassembly and move of Étant donnés, Teeny had it photographed by Denise Browne Hare in December.
The bricks, meanwhile, went on their own convoluted journey, and the shipping and customs delays getting them caused weeks of drama for the Philadelphia Museum, which was rushing to secretly install the work before word got out—and before Teeny left to Spain for the summer.
It’s so chill now, but the entire saga of Étant donnés is buck wild, from the secrecy of its creation; the logistics of its acquisition and installation; the sheer institutional freakout over its existence, voyeur/creeper and nudity factors; and the paranoia and draconian constraints over its documentation and reproduction.
They all culminate in the tragicomedy of, of all people, Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp’s dealer and the editor of his catalogue raisonné, WHICH WAS READY TO GO, only finding out about the existence of Étant donnés as it was being dismantled in NYC and shipped to Philadelphia, and literally writing the CR text on it at the museum as soon as it opened to the public. He then proceeded to politely rage for permission to photograph the work for the second edition of the CR, which the museum was absolutely too terrified to do. Schwarz was forced to reproduce bootleg snapshots taken through the work’s peephole.
The sweet irony is that all this extraordinary detail is laid out in full in Michael R. Taylor’s 2009 book, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés. The Genesis, Construction, Installation, and Legacy of a Secret Masterwork, published on the work’s 40th anniversary by the Philadelphia Museum. I have a copy somewhere, but it’s so much easier to read on this heroic Slovenian artist’s website [shruggie emoji].
Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks in 2024
I really wished I’d seen the show of Jasper Johns drawings at Matthew Marks when I went deep on the little stick figures motif. Perilous Night, a 1990 watercolor, was the earliest of several works in the show in which the little guys appeared.
And I REALLY wish I’d gotten the catalogue immediately, because I just picked it up this afternoon, and Hilton Als had this to say about the stick figures in Perilous Night:
The right side of this watercolor and ink on paper is a replica of a score by John Cage, a close friend of Johns for many years. Cage wrote “Perilous Night” in 1943 and 1944. A composition for a prepared piano, it’s an angry piece whose strong rhythms speak to us emotionally—he was going through a difficult time with his then wife, the surrealist artist Xenia Cage—even as we understand that Cage is asking questions about what the piano can and cannot do. Who’s to say? In Johns’s piece, the sheet music floats against an abstract field made up of vertical shapes that reach up, up, up toward the top of the page. On the bottom of the work, a strip of green field. Three little stick figures stand on that green, gesticulating. Who are they? What are they? Fallen notes from Cage’s score?(Johns doesn’t render the notes in Cage’s score; all we see are traces of notes.) Or are those tiny figures from Johns’s and Cage’s past? Johns’s Perilous Night is an exercise, too, in depth—an experiment that challenges Johns’s famous flatness. One image tells us about another: the sheet music leads us to the abstraction, and the abstraction leads us to that little strip of green. It’s a work that’s giddy with possibility, a kind of “what if” piece. What if I put a little green here? And figures there? What happens to the work? To the eye? To the eye of the ideas?
Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp birthday cake and rotorelief-looking dishware, vers 196o, photo negative at the Centre Pompidou
I love everything about the Centre Pompidou’s let it all hang out presentation of photo negatives in their collection, except the lack of metadata, and the inability to right-click.
There are ten candles, and what looks to be the remnant of the number ten written in icing. Was this maybe his tenth summer back, so his last birthday, in 1968? Will this be one of the many mysteries Ann Temkin will solve for us later this year?
R.B. Kitaj, Marlborough (Mark Rothko), 1969-70, screenprint, 19×17 in. on 23 x 30 sheet or so, from a 50-print portfolio in an ed. 150, image via MoMA, who photographed the whole sheet
While factchecking for a panel, I stumbled across this wild screenprint, Marlborough (Mark Rothko) (1969-70), by R. B. Kitaj.
It’s from a portfolio of 50 screenprints Kitaj made in London, In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, that reproduces book covers from Kitaj’s own library. In Our Time includes some rare edition deep cuts, but overall, Kitaj seems to select covers as both aesthetic and found objects, rather than [just] for literary reference.
David Diao, BN Spine (2), 2013, acrylic and silkscreen, 72 x 100 in., image via Greene Naftali
But nothing else matched the manipulated, mirroring of this Rothko print, which seemed to have its own ghostly Rothko composition, turned sideways. Until I realized that Kitaj didn’t manipulate anything. The print depicts, not the cover of Marlborough’s 1964 exhibition catalogue, but its printed mylar dust jacket.
Marlborough Mark Rothko (Feb-March 1964) via abebooks
Cy Twombly, Note I, 2005-07, acrylic on three wood panels in artist frame, 98 x 146 in., photo by Ian Reeves, collection SFMOMA
Thierry Greub’s research on the inscriptions in Cy Twombly’s work fills multiple volumes. Dean Rader wrote an entire book of poems from experiencing Twombly’s work. Reading Greub’s essay on Rader’s book and being caught in the flow of Twombly’s writing, I found myself suddenly stuck on the marks on this painting, Note I from III Notes from Salalah (2005-07).
They look like letters—Greub calls them, “lasso-shaped ‘ls’ and ‘es’ of Twombly’s writing-evoking traces of painting.” When the Art Institute showed the series in 2009, James Rondeau made reference to the “pseudo-writing” of the blackboard paintings, and to how the loops and apostrophe-like strokes interpreted “the calligraphic nature of printed Arabic.”
Honestly, I’m fine either/or/and/also, but I am just stymied by how they were made. The strokes on the right seem to start from the right, but each loop/stroke seems to start from the left. And the strokes on the left seem to start from the left. The point is, I think the strokes and drips tell this entire story of their making, yet they are not written. They look like letters or calligraphy, but they’re not made by writing.
vs. Cy Twombly writing: Three Notes from Salalah exhibition poster from Gagosian Rome, 2008, via Gagosian Shop
The Art Institute goes on, “Although ostensibly based on writing, the paintings are also specifically indebted to place,” and then heads straight to the lush, green, tropical landscape of Salalah in Oman. Meanwhile, the only place I can picture is Twombly’s tiny storefront studio in downtown Lexington, Virginia where the series was painted. Because each Note is three wood panels, each 8×4 feet, like sheets of plywood, joined together, into a massive wall. Did he join them first? Or join two and add one later? Could the studio even fit all three Notes at once? Twombly made these when he was 80. The mind may reel, but it’s nothing compared to Twombly’s arm.
The little A5 magazine had four sheets of rasterized potato images, and instructions for scaling them up to A4 for pasting. With the print issue long unavailable, Pot has made an A4 PDF available on his studio website.
one of four sheets of Free Potato Wallpaper, an A4 pdf as a resized jpg, via bertjanpot.nl
Because the paper is printed basically as tiles instead of rolls, the trick to getting a more random potato effect is to turn some sheets upside down. Of course your desire for some respite from an uncertain world may also inspire you to paper your wall in elaborate potato patterns. Quick, while you still have the freedom to choose.
This is apparently Enzo Mari’s fireplace, where it looks like he burned a postcard of Julia Louis Dreyfus in effigy every month? I have no idea, but the only other domestic images I can find from his studio are from this apartamento magazine interview from 2009, when I was deep in Enzo Mariology. [Everything else for this image is unattributed fluff. And do you know how hard it is to search for Enzo Mari’s own house? This is ridiculous.]
I will update this post with more info when I find it, and if it turns out to be all locked away for two generations in Mari’s archive, I’ll post an update about that, too.
nell’angolo il camino, uno ziggurat domestico con le foto di nipoti sorridenti. «Questo è uno degli interventi fatti nella casa, come la cucina-corridoio. Non ci sono disegni, l’ho pensato e fabbricato insieme al muratore. Per ogni piano due strati di mattoni, poi intonacati. Per me è stato un gioco, un passatempo, la realizzazione di un sogno dopo aver spiato le case dei contadini. Sarebbe bello potersi occupare solo di mantenere vivo il fuoco»
“in the corner the fireplace, a domestic ziggurat with photos of smiling grandchildren. This is one of the interventions made in the house, such as the kitchen-corridor. There are no drawings, I thought it and manufactured it together with the mason. For each level two layers of bricks, then plastered. For me it was a game, a pastime, the realization of a dream after spying on the homes of peasants. It would be nice to be able to take care of keeping the fire alive.”
Incredible. MoMA will close the latest installment of its film preservation series, To Save and Project, with a mountain of never-before-seen footage from Andy Warhol and The Factory. There were more than eighty 100-ft rolls of exposed black & white film in Warhol’s archive that had never been developed. Turns out it includes several Screen Tests, material from the shoots of several films [including, I guess, the shot above, of Jack Smith in Batman Dracula], some explicit goings-on from the Factory, and Warhol around town in 1964. Tickets for the February 2nd screening will be released for members on Jan. 19th.
Roy Lichtenstein posing with his Swiss Cheese freight elevator doors to his loft studio, which appears to be just part of the whole Lichtensteinworld painting scheme.
Swiss Cheese Day was yesterday, and Peter Huestis celebrated on Bluesky by posting about the swiss cheese freight elevator doors Roy Lichtenstein painted in his 29th St. loft in 1984. The loft was sold, probably in the 90s, and the buyer, unsurprisingly, wanted to keep the doors, and so they were entered into Lichtenstein’s catalogue raisonné. The most important part to me, though, was the security bar, painted to match, which did not get a CR entry separate from the doors. If that was all a trip into the Lichtenstein Foundation website yielded, it would have been enough.
I traded the rights to everything I’ve ever written and my firstborn to the Lichtenstein Foundation so that I could properly celebrate Swiss Cheese Day by illustrating the existential reckoning Roy Lichtenstein left behind with these polished brass and glass doors (1993)
But no. There is another. And another. And another. Lichtenstein made THREE more sets of Swiss cheese doors. They’re dated to 1993, fabricated in 1993-97 [by Jack Brogan, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell’s guy], and only installed, posthumously, in 1998. They were mirror finish bronze, and they were made for two entrances and an elevator in the atrocious house Hugh Newell Jacobsen built in Bel Air for Betsy and Bud Knapp, one-time owners of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit.
After another artist praised them, I had to reconsider the bronze doors, and I found an explanation that lets me agree: Lichtenstein created these doors so that every time the Knapps entered their 15,000 square-foot home made of fifteen 1,000-square foot post-modern pavilions, they were faced with their own reflections, and compelled to remember that they were people who commissioned three sets of mirror-finish bronze cartoon Swiss cheese doors.
It makes a village: the wetted motor court of Hugh Newell Jacobsen’s Brobdignagian mutation of his House Pavilion, with a Lichtenstein brushstroke sculpture and a pair of bronze and glass Swiss cheese doors, from the 2011 MLS, still somehow on Zillow in 2026
The Knapps could only endure the self-scrutiny for so long. They put the house on the market in 2011 for $24 million. Nobu bought it in 2013 for $15m, said not my existential terror, and got rid of the doors.
People really did be having their Jasper Johns Target (1992) in their 2011 LA real estate listings. TBH except for the early Irwin, the art all looks like it was bought new for the house. Which feels very Bel Air.
At least until then they were contained. They now roam the earth who knows where, just waiting to strike again. The Knapps’ Jasper Johns, meanwhile, has, after a couple of stops, been safely ensconced in Larry Gagosian’s place since at least 2021, when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum’s half of the retrospective.
It’s been a minute, but the latest edition of Phone It In: An Art Writing Mixtape is here. Thanks to all who called in to 34-SOUVENIR to share something you’ve read recently. As much as I could, I linked and namechecked people below.
It’s kind of wild how these end up reflecting a moment, even when they pull sources from across decades:
Jane Birkin in an undated photo with one of her at least five Birkin bags, with a Médecins du Monde sticker on it, via Sotheby’s
I misremembered the connection, and thought that Jane Birkin had originally sold her original Hermès bag to benefit Médecins du Monde. But no.
I just looked it up, and Birkin put Médecins du Monde stickers on her Birkin to show her support. But she donated her original 1985 Birkin to an auction in 1994, “Les Encheres de l’Espoir,” to benefit Association Solidarité Sida, the leading French AIDS support charity. Whoever bought it sold it in 2000, and whoever bought it in 2000 sold it last year at Sotheby’s for EUR8.6 million, all proceeds to them.
It came up because Médecins du Monde is one of 37 international aid groups Israel has now banned from operating in Gaza.
![cy twombly's loopy dgaf handwritten poster for his show, 3 notes from salalah at larry gagosian galley [heh] via crispi 16 dec 15, feb 16, all in fat blue india ink brush, and then roma written in like ballpoint pen in the bottom right corner, in case you didn't know where via crispi was, loser. this poster from 2008 is now for sale at the gagosian shop for 1250 us dollars](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/three-notes-salalah_gagosian-shop-765x1024.jpeg)
