greg.org – the making of, by greg allen

Olafur Eliasson, Hellisgerði, 1998

a black and white photo of a skeewampus skeleton of a pavilion wall made of 2 by 4s set on top of a graduated assemblage of wood shipping pallets sits against a volcanic rock wall in an icelandic park where olafur eliasson photographed it in 1998 — Cover for Olafur Eliasson’s Hellisgerði, 1998, an artist book published by the Reykjavik Art Museum

The park series (1998) is one of Olafur Eliasson’s earlier photo grids. A topology rather than a taxonomy, it documents a series of views of a single site: Hellisgerði (Lava Cave), a public park built on lava formations in the Reykjavik suburb of Hafnarfjördur. I’d seen The park series at the Menil, but did not recognize the photo above as coming from the grid. I thought it might have been a janky, early pavilion of some kind. And maybe it is, who knows?

a 4 x 6 grid of 24 color photos of little vistas within an icelandic park, all in identical brown frames, a 1998 work by olafur eliasson called the park series — Olafur Eliasson, The park series, 1998, 24 c-prints, each 10 x 14 3/4 in., via olafureliasson.net

But this image is the cover of an artist book Eliasson created for a 1998 show at the Reykjavik Art Museum — Kjarvalsstaðir. It’s called Hellisgerði, and is the 24 photos of the park that became The park series grid [which was not in the show, btw.] This echoes another little artist book from 1998, Landscapes with Yellow Background, which contains all 30 pictures in The landscape series (1997).

25 color photos in a 5 by 5 grid, each with a different closeup landscape of a volcanic rock park by olafur eliasson — Olafur Eliasson, The park series, 1998, 25 c-prints, each 10 x 14 3/4 in., via Sotheby’s

Which, it took me a second to realize that the edition of The park series grid I’d seen—which had come up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2013—had 25 prints, not 24: a 5×5 grid instead of a 4 x 6.

The extra print is at the lower right cornes, at the end [sic]; the series is a sequence, laid out left to right, top to bottom. Does that correspond to the geography? Does it mark a path through or around the park? Grids often look like contact sheets, which have a sense of chronology, documentation of a photographer’s experience photographing. But there’s no reason to make that assumption here.

Christo Wrapped Toy Horse, 1963

a toy horse wrapped like a mummy in muslin and twine rides on an exposed, rickety orange and blue roller skate base. it sits on a pedestal in a tastefully lit booth, with gilt framed paintings in the background, at the winter show at the park avenue armory,
the artwork by christo is shown by dealer jonathan boos and photographed here by patrick parrish for mondoblogo — Christo, Wrapped Toy Horse, 1963, at Jonathn Boos’ booth at The Winter Show, as photographed for mondoblogo

The way Jeanne-Claude’s NYT obituary tells it, her Bulgarian refugee husband Christo was already wrapping objects when they began their collaboration in 1962: “To avoid confusing dealers and the public, and to establish an artistic brand, they used only Christo’s name. In 1994 they retroactively applied the joint name “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” to all outdoor works and large-scale temporary indoor installations. Other works were credited to Christo alone.”

So this fascinating-looking Wrapped Toy Horse from 1963, the year before the duo moved from Paris to NYC, is Christo’s, and Jeanne-Claude is fine with that.

It is one of a whole slew of artworks, antiques, and design objects the eagle-eyed Patrick Parrish of Mondoblogo spotted on his turn through The Winter Show at the Armory. It was brought by private dealer Jonathan Boos who, as Parrish reveals, also had an incredible Ben Shahn painting.

I went to The Winter Show so you don’t have to [mondoblogo]

Mark Dion Prints The Moment

a pale blue horizontal sheet of 11 x 17 paper is screenprinted with the black silhouettes of four flying geese or whatever, each with a word written on them: protest, boycott, strike, sabotage. text on the bottom edge reads, resist much, obey little, a 2025 print by mark dion — Mark Dion, *Resist Much, Obey Little*, 2025, screenprint, 11 x 17 in., ed. 70, $700 via Tanya Bonakdar

DID SOMEONE SAY STRIKE?

Mark Dion has been making prints to meet the moment. To coincide with his current show at Tanya Bonakdar in NYC, the gallery has pulled together an online exhibition of some of Dion’s most recent prints. The most topical ones are here: Resist Much, Obey Little, a larger screenprint that feels like a timely throwback from an older resistance; and On Oligarchy, a postcard-sized letterpress from our most recent guillotine era, last February, in both black and white.

a small vertical 7.5 x 5.6 inch letterpress print in white on black paper is a line drawing of a guillotine, with the title, on oligarchy, as a caption below it, a 2025 print by mark dion — Mark Dion, On Oligarchy (black), 2025, letterpress, 7 1/2 x 5 1/2 in., ed. 40+4AP, via Tanya Bonakdar

Mark Dion New Prints, OVR [tanyabonakdargallery]

John Schabel, Laramie, Wyoming

a small horizontal patch of light at the lower center of the mostly black photograph picks out the mountainous horizon line, while the night sky above is streaked with moving stars, marking how long john schabel took to expose this picture of laramie wyoming in 1998 — John Schabel, Laramie, Wyoming, 1998, 36-in gelatin silver print, image via johnschabel.net

Woke up thinking about John Schabel for some reason, his Cities and Towns series of night landscape photographs from the western US, lit only by the light of a far off city. Or town. They’re extraordinary, large-format gelatin silver prints to get lost in front of.

John Schabel [johnschabel.net]

Marfa Sculptural Appropriation

a mosaic panel installed vertically, with red and black tangled lines against an off-white ground, on the wall of a white cube gallery space, with several related sculptures made or inspired from tangles of wire found on the west texas prairie, by christopher wool. this image is from glasstire's review of wool's 2-yr show in marfa — Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run installation view in Marfa, thru 2027, photo: Glasstire/Alex Marks

Gotta admit, 2025 was that kind of year, and I lost track of Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run exhibition, which I’d assumed ended in a tasty book. Turns out it up and moved to Marfa, the artist’s own [other] home. It’s installed for two whole years in two large gallery spaces, right in town, on Highland Avenue.

christopher wool's red and black snarly lines transformed into a stone and glass mosaic, which was then installed, horizontally, in a gutted prewar office space in lower manhattan in 2024 — Christopher Wool, mosaic, installed [sideways?] at See Stop Run in NYC in 2024, image via seestoprun

Mary Etherington’s review for Glasstire is a useful compare & contrast. One big specific difference may be due to ceiling height. Wool’s first foray into mosiac is shown in 16.5 x 11-ft portrait mode in Texas, while it was shown in 11×16.5 landscape in New York. Considering the 4x larger mosaic Wool made for Hudson Yards is also horizontal, the change doesn’t feel like a corrective as much as a variation.

The bigger difference is one Etherington works around to: the change in context. At first it seems obvious that means the difference between NYC’s sprawling, gutted skyscraper floor, and the adapted storefront white cubes in Marfa. And that compact blankness certainly intensifies the works’ relationships with each other vs the space.

Instead/also, it is Marfa and West Texas itself that makes the difference. I lol’d when Etherington literally called out Wool—again, a fairly longtime Marfa resident—for Marfa sculptural appropriation:

Pretty much everyone in Marfa has a collection of found wire. A visitor to Marfa picked up some cheese at the store and a little wire on the street, then posted it on social media. In New York, the smaller gauge wire sculptures felt out of place, too familiar. My dismissiveness was born of what felt like appropriation of the essence of Marfa. Don’t @ me.

What makes it click, though, is Wool’s installation of gigantized, wire-inspired sculptures in three scattered sites around town. So he’s not just taking from the Marfa found wire culture; he’s also giving back.

Disruption of Time & Place in the Classroom [glasstire]
See Stop Run still running [seestoprun]
Previously, related: Adam & Eve & Charles & Christopher

The Absence of Ice

a concrete cube about 1 meter tall whose main feature is an irregularly shaped void in the center, with irregularly shaped openings on otherwise smooth, crisp sides, left by a melting glacier chunk. a 2016 sculpture by olafur eliasson — Olafur Eliasson, The presence of absence (Nuup Kangerlua, 24 September 2015 #2), 2016, concrete, 1m^3? photographed at neugerrimschneider in 2016 by Jens Ziehe, via olafureliasson.net

When I think about getting rid of ICE, and about the threat our country is to Greenland, our other allies, and the habitable climate of the earth, I come back to the series of sculptures Olafur Eliasson made in 2015-2016.

To make The presence of absence, Eliasson collected fragments of ice from Greenlandic glaciers floating at sea, in this case, Nuuk Kangerlua, the large western fjord by Greenland’s capital, and cast them in concrete forms in his studio. “The melting glacier produced sounds like miniature explosions.” It took about a month, and left a physical memory of the ice, a void.

There’s a great video of the void from Eliasson’s 2016 show at neugerrimschneider in Berlin. [olafureliasson.net]

Fire and ICE

“Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood is named for Wendell Phillips, a fervent abolitionist. He was once asked why he couldn’t turn down the heat in his rhetoric: why are do you always have to be so firey? Phillips’ reply: ‘Yes, I’m on fire–because I have mountains of ice to melt!'”

The invocation of Phillips by composer and writer Frank Hudson has been doing numbers on Bluesky. It’s only one of a thread of posts about Minneapolis neighborhoods named after abolitionists.

As he writes in a recent blog post about having to set music aside to fight the forces of fascism and terror on the streets of his hometown, Hudson came to the Phillips quote the way so many have: it was a favorite of the late MN senator Paul Wellstone. He closed a March 2000 speech at an educators conference about the foundational importance to democracy of education with it:

That reminds me of a quote that has motivated me throughout my life. It is my favorite quote. It is from Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist from the 1840’s. At that time both political parties were very weary of the slavery issue and they weren’t sure how to confront it. But not Wendell, he just said slavery was a moral outrage, that it was unconscionable, and he wouldn’t equivocate. He wasn’t afraid to speak out.

After he gave a particularly fiery speech about abolition, a friend came up to him and said, “Wendell, why are you so on fire?”

And Wendell turned to his friend and said, “Brother May, I’m on fire because I have mountains of ice before me to melt.”

We have mountains of ice before us to melt. Thank you for your energy, your time, your love for children and your passion to do what is right. It has been an honor to be here.

And it was cited in memorials to Wellstone after his death in a plane crash in 2002.

I could not find Wellstone’s version of the exchange, though. But I did find Wendell Phillips repeating it in 1879—at the funeral of his longtime friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison:

He [Garrison] said to a friend who remonstrated with him on the heat and severity of his language, ‘Brother, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.’

Garrison co-founded and edited The Liberator, and founded—with Phillips and others—the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for full, immediate, and uncompensated emancipation of enslaved people in the US. It was Garrison’s call for full Black liberty and equality, grounded in the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence, that was considered unhelpfully extreme in the 1830s, when other early abolitionists were calling for gradual emancipation and the expulsion of Black people—both freed and enslaved—from the US.

The earliest mention of the story is from 1840, in a eulogy for the Rev. Charles Follen, who’d taken up the ministry after being fired from Harvard for his abolitionist views. Follen died in a fire on the steamship Lexington, and churches in Boston refused to host the Anti-Slavery Society’s memorial service for him:

He [Follen] knew that Mr. Garrison was incited to greater vehemence and severity by the coldness, and heartless indifference of almost all around him; and that nothing would so soon attemper his zeal, as to find himself supported, instead of opposed, by the wisest and best men in the community. He had heard and he felt the force of Mr. Garrison’s reply to an early friend, who was remonstrating with him on his violence of language. “Why,” said that friend, “you write as if you were all on fire.” “I have need to be all on fire,” was his solemn reply, “for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.”

That eulogy was delivered by Samuel Joseph May.

Brother May revealed himself as Garrison’s early friend in his 1869 memoir, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. It was not just the coldness and indifference of those around him that set Garrison afire, but it was also that. May was one of several friends who asked Garrison about turning down the rhetorical heat a bit:

“But,” said I, “some of the epithets, though not perhaps too severe, are not precisely applicable to the sin you denounce, and so may seem abusive.”

“Ah !” he rejoined, “until the term ‘slaveholder’ sends as deep a feeling of horror to the hearts of those who hear it applied to any one as the terms ‘robber,’ ‘pirate,’ ‘murderer’ do, we must use and multiply epithets when condemning the sin of him who is guilty of the ‘sum of all villanies.'”

“O” cried I, “my friend, do try to moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire.”

He stopped, laid his hand upon my shoulder with a kind but emphatic pressure, that I have felt ever since, and said slowly, with deep emotion, “Brother May, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” From that hour to this I have never said a word to Mr. Garrison in complaint of his style. I am more than half satisfied now that he was right then, and we who objected were mistaken. [paragraph breaks added]

Don’t call it genocide. Don’t call it fascism. Don’t call them nazis. Don’t call it an occupation. Don’t call it kidnapping. Don’t call it disappearing. Don’t call it white supremacism. Don’t call it terrorism. Don’t call it murder.

We have need to be all on fire, for there are mountains of ice about us to melt. We are here now with multiple people murdered by agents of the state, as evergrowing crowds fill the streets to take the places of the fallen and protect their neighbors in hiding. But the goal is the same as it has been for everyone who has caught the fire and passed it along to new generations who recognize its self-evident truth: equal liberty and equal justice for all. I really hope the fire this time does not take 30 years to do its thing.

David Diao Has The Floor

a brown jute doormat with the word welcome in large, all caps red, is overpainted with a fat black spraypainted stripe from upper right to lower left, a 1996 work by david diao being sold at wright auction in february 2026 — David Diao, Untitled, 1996, spray paint on jute, 27 x 16 x 1 in., selling 4 Feb 2026 at Wright

I never really thought of David Diao as an sculptor, and though it really does feel like it belongs on the floor, technically, this unwelcome mat IS painted. Wright put it in their Chicago sale, but there’s nothing in Chicago in Diao’s 1990s exhibition history, so maybe it comes from a Chicago collector. Even with no info, it really does feel like it captures the moment right now.

a deep brown horizontal painting with a cream rectangle floating on the right side. the rectangle has five holes in it that reveal the brown paint below, and which references the floorplan for the furniture in philip johnson's living room. along the bottom of the painting is a text, i think in vinyl lettering, that reads: a visitor to the glass house: mr johnson, do you ever move the furniture around? johnson: why would i? would you change anything at chartres cathedral? this 2007 painting by david diao is at tanya leighton in berlin — David Diao, *Do You Ever Move the Furniture?*, 2007, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 18×36 in., via Tanya Leighton

But it still barely cracks my top five floor-related Diao works. In the early 2000s, Diao made a series of works called Perfect Arrangement, paintings exploring the found composition of Philip Johnson’s detailed schematic for positioning the furniture in the Glass House. He showed the works at Tanya Leighton in Berlin in 2008-09, and she brought one of the breakouts to Art Basel in 2015.

a 30 by 40 inch rectangular sheet of cream industrial felt has four squares and one rectangle cut out of it, a composition that mirrors phiip johnson's placement of two chairs, a daybed, a coffee table, and an ottoman on the area rug of his glass house in connecticut. a 2005 artwork by david diao — Perfect Arrangement at 1/4 Scale, 2005, felt, 30 x 40 in., ed. 5, via Tanya Leighton

Perfect Arrangement at 1/4 Scale, 2005, is an edition with the floorplan cut into a 30 x 40 inch sheet of industrial felt. So rather than being a mat, it represents a carpet. And it very much goes on the wall.

Lot 235, 4 Feb 2026: David Diao, Untitled, 1996 [wright20]
David Diao, ‘Best Laid Plans’, Oct 2008-Jan 2009 [tanyaleighton]
Diao installed works at the Glass House during his 2014 retrospective at the Aldrich [theglasshouse.org]

Previously, related: Au Bout de la Nuit, Johnson’s lost Giacometti

Roni Horn’s Water, Selected Map

a vintage-style engraved map of iceland in black on white has 24 orange markers on it for the 24 glaciers roni horn included in her 2007 installation, water, selected. the same title is printed in the lower right corner. horn's signature runs up the left side. this example of the print is being sold at wright auction in febrary 2026 — Roni Horn, Water, Selected, 2007, inkjet print, 12 3/4 x 17 5/8 in., though the published size was 13 x 19 in., ed 80/150, being sold on 4 Feb 2026 at Wright

In 2007 Roni Horn realized Vatnasafn/ Library of Water, a permanent sculptural and community project commissioned by Artangel. It’s located in a former library on a hill overlooking the port in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, a town of about 1,200 people halfway between Reykjavik and the Westfjords.

The centerpiece of Vatnasafn is Water, Selected, for which Horn collected melt water from 24 glaciers across Iceland, and installed it in a constellation of glass columns in the library’s main space. [There are two other components to the library: a text drawing on the floor of the space, and an archive of weather reports.]

a silhouetted figure standing and perhaps reading in a room in front of a wall of windows with a view of an icelandic harbor. the room, as photographed, is filled with an overlapping forest of glass columns about the diameter of a telephone pole, glowing in the sunlight because they are filled with melted glacier water. all by roni horn for artangel — installation view of Roni Horn, *Water, Selected*, 2007, via Artangel

The space hosts chess tournaments, community gatherings, and writer residencies. Which matters because the proceeds of the limited edition print Artangel published originally went to support the Vatnasafn programming. The map, annotated with the locations of the 24 glaciers sampled—including the one that had already melted away by the time the project was completed—is an edition of 150. If your main goal is a bargain, then roll your dice with the example coming up for sale next month. If you want to support the arts in Stykkishólmur, give Artangel a ring and see if they have any left.

[Wild bit of Stykkishólmur trivia: it was the childhood home of Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson, who emigrated with his parents to Winnipeg, then North Dakota, who then changed his name to [Edgar] Holger Cahill, temporarily stepped in for Alfred Barr as director of The Museum of Modern Art, and served as director of the Federal Art Project at the WPA, and who married Dorothy Miller, one of MoMA’s most influential curators.

Oh no, it was also the site of a fictitious US Marines landing in the 1986 Tom Clancy novel, Red Storm Rising, about a Soviet attempt to destroy NATO by invading Iceland. I want to know less about this now, please.]

The Angle of History

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!

It’s No Joke

a glenn ligon edition on white paper in a white frame on a white wall has black marker lines crossing out all the text of a richard prince joke painting study except the last, "Black man: what you kickin' about, you white, ain't you?" the title is punchline, 2024 via hauser & wirth — Glenn Ligon, Punchline, 2024, Digital image with hand-drawn additions in marker, 12 x 9 in., ed. 12/25 +10 APs, photo: © Glenn Ligon, Ron Amstutz via Hauser & Wirth

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.

a 1989 richard prince taped together collage of a cropped text of two jokes on white paper in a white frame on a white wall at sotheby's in 2023, where one joke is about a hippie hitchhiker being mistaken for a girl and finna be raped by a trucker, and the other joke is about a white man who complains like job about losing everything, and a Black man saying, yeah but you're still white. — 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.

Glenn Ligon: Late at night, early in the morning, at noon, is at Hauser & Wirth @ the Roxy from 15 January until 4 April 2026 [hauserwirth]
Punchlines: 18 Jokes by Richard Prince, 15 Dec 2023, Lot 18 [sothebys]

FG-T NPG P&P & Me

a composite graphic for a book discussion at politics & prose by charlotte ickes and josh t franco with greg allen on sunday jan 25 2026 at 5pm, with the headshots of the two curators and the cover of their new catalogue always to return, which has a gorgeous installation shot of a blue mirror at an angle on a white wall above a washed out white marble floor, a centerpiece work by felix gonzalez torres at the national portrait gallery

NVM: SNOW DELAY

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.

Anyway, we’ll be at Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington DC on ~~Sunday, January 25th, at 5PM.~~ [UPDATE: SNOWED OUT, WATCH FOR A RESCHEDULE] Come and get your book, get it signed, and get fed by the curators of this incredible project. [First come, first seated, there is neither an endless supply of chairs or catalogues.]

Adam & Eve & Charles & Christopher

a pair of larger than lifesize figures in polished steel, an older white couple, the man standing, the woman seated to his left, on a landing outside a glass skyscraper lobby, where a large abstract mosaic of a loopy black and brown painting hangs above the security desk. the sculpture is adam and eve by charles ray; the mosaic is by christopher wool. a woman using crutches stands at the top of the step about to descend from the building lobby entrance level to the sculpture level. nyc in the winter evening of january 2026 — 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.

Los Ladrillos de Étant donnés

a black and white photo of a rustic wooden door set into a flat brick arch on a rough stucco wall, the exterior view, the only one permitted, of marcel duchamp's etant donnes at the philadelphia museum of art — 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?

a grainy black and white snapshot of a small white woman in a black summer dress posed next to a large rustic wood door in a larger brick arch doorway and wall, in a rural village in spain, from the archive of marcel duchamp and his wife teeny's visit in the early 1960s, now at the philadelphia museum of art — 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.

a black and white photo of a rustic wood door from spain, with a row of three square brick-patterned vinyl tiles above it, right up against an absolutely generic modern office building door and doorway, a december 1968 documentary photo by denise brown hare of marcel duchamp's last artwork etant donnes, before it was moved to the philadelphia museum of art — 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].

Hilton Als on Johns’s Little Guys

jasper johns, perilous night, 1990, is a vertically oriented revisiting of the right half of a pair of 1982 drawings of the same name. this one is neater, but still watery. two pages of the score of john cage's perilous night and a disembodied hand and arm print (facing down) sit in a black and grey background segmented by tracery that hints at another drawing, maybe with a sword, probably a detail from the isenheim altarpiece. but the pale green band at the bottom with three stick figures holding paint brushes renders the grey field as the sky instead. via matthew marks gallery, which showed it in 2024 — 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?