Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

With the Picasso and American Art show headed for the Walker Art Center, Walker blogger Paul Schmelzer remembered Maurizio Cattlean’s 1998 outfit/performance/whatevs as Picasso. So Schmelzer emailed Cattelan and asked him about Picasso…
Related: I can’t find Calvin Tomkins’ New Yorker profile online, but here’s a Sophie Arie feature on Cattelan from The Guardian.

Today Time’s Richard Lacayo posts about the Stephen Shore show’s arrival at the ICP in NYC. That reminded me…

I wrote about Uncommon Places when I was with Bloomberg in 2005 and when the show debuted at the Hammer. One of my favorite images was this photograph that Shore took in Presidio, Texas on February 21, 1975.

In 2006 I took my second trip to Marfa. Presidio is about an hour south of Marfa on U.S. Route 67. I thought it might be fun to do a short newspaper/magazine story about revisiting the site of Shore’s photograph. I wondered: What did the site of Shore’s photograph look like now? Could I better understand his compositional interests by visiting the scene of the shooting? How had America’s uncommon places changed in the intervening 30 years and what could art show us about that?

I decided to visit Presidio after an early-morning visit to Big Bend National Park. Somewhere around Terlingua, a ghost town just north of the park, I blew a tire. I never made it to Presidio. Next time I’m going to Presidio first.

A MAN reader writes in with an excellent idea: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which recently started a writer’s program notable for its support of mostly non-writers and obscure art magazines that will be non-read by anyone outside the Usual Art-Insider Crowd, should buy them. (Disclosure: I’m a non-grantee.)
Then the AWF should shut down its nascent writer’s program and shift that funding into combining Interview/AiA into a Harper’s or Atlantic-style magazine with a visual arts-centric world view, and partner with the Getty Trust to publish the ‘zine (thus mimicking the Harper’s publishing model). Solves multiple problems, doesn’t it?

The New York Post’s Keith J. Kelly reports that Art in America is for sale. Interview too. [via]
UPDATE: Lee Rosenbaum quotes an unnamed spokesperson from AiA’s parent company saying that the Post story is half-wrong.

The BBC has begun a ten-part series on The British Museum called, simply enough, The Museum. Yes: Ten parts. Five hours. (And to think that PBS gives us, uh, well, what does PBS give us?! Art21 every few years and…)
There’s no video from the programme/series online (unless you’re in the UK), so we in the US will have to hope that the series pops up on DVD or on BBC America.

Museums about which I care enough to want more.
FAMSF: Director John Buchanan is running the place into second-tier status by taking the Anschutzian King Tut show and by running an exhibition program seemingly more interested in France than in California. Thank goodness for the collection galleries.
MFA Houston: The second-biggest museum endowment in America (as of June, 2006), an enormous buildings complex, and a super-thin collection. Without curatorial superstar Mari Carmen Ramirez, where would it be?
National Gallery of Art: Really two different museums: A fantastic one for pre-1900 art (though notably light on central Europe), and a sub-mediocre one for post-1900 art, barely any of which is on view, ever. The photography program has lagged badly in the last year. It’s long past time to remodel the Pei building to create more gallery space, to get rid of that awful grey carpet, and to find a way to more thoroughly display the last 110 years of art history. No contemporary art program (!).
Smithsonian American Art Museum: A disastrous mish-mash in a nice, old building. The whole idea of what this museum should be (and can be) needs to be reconceptualized.
LACMA: This place should be a powerhouse. And Michael Govan (with some help from Eli Broad) might make it one.
Honorable mention: The Whitney, perenially threatening to become more important. Won’t get there until it fixes its signature show. The Corcoran, almost across the street from the White House, but somehow off the map.

Speaking of Donald Judd: In a perfect world I’d spend more time in Marfa, visiting all manner of art-related things, maybe a national park, maybe visiting a sludge ranch, and so on. But I can’t… so I’m delighted that the Chinati Foundation has a brand-new website. Check it out here.

UPDATE: Link to Denver Post story fixed.

The Menil Collection has just acquired Walter de Maria’s The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth, a painting that was included in the Dwan Gallery’s landmark 1968 ‘EARTH WORKS’ show. As far as I know, it’s the only painting that de Maria ever ‘made.’

In the summer of 1968 most of the ten artists that would participate in the show prepared work from far-flung locales: Carl Andre from Aspen, Heizer in California and Nevada, Sol LeWitt in Holland, Dennis Oppenheim in Connecticut, Robert Smithson in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and so on. de Maria was in Europe but he wrote Dwan’s director, John Weber, with instructions for the show: In addition to documentary photographs of a de Maria earthwork that included a performative element and an ‘earth room,’ de Maria wanted one other work included as well.

In September, a mere month before the show was to open, de Maria instructed Weber to make a piece that was nearly 20 feet long, seven feet high, and yellow. A stainless steel plaque was to be affixed to the middle of the canvas. The work’s title — possibly a reference to the color of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment — was to be etched on the plaque. Weber saw to it the work was made. It was the only painting in the exhibition — and the only work in the show to sell (to Robert Scull, apparently to repay a $3,000 debt).

When I first saw a JPEG of The Color Men… I thought of the untitled Donald Judd painting shown here. (The painting, owned by the Judd Foundation, is on view at 104 West Oak Street in Marfa. At eight feet by four feet, it’s smaller that the de Maria.) Judd’s painting, made in 1962, the year of his last paintings, presages Judd’s interest in industrial materials. Could it be that six years later de Maria, who would make use of stainless steel in the coming years, also chose a painting in which to signify his emergent interest in the same?

Related: The account of the EARTH WORKS show is from Suzaan Boettger’s essential Earthworks, a history of earth/land art of the 1960s.

Enjoy the long weekend. I’ll be back on Tuesday. One quick note: I don’t usually (ever) plug this kind of thing, but a benefit in honor of my friends James Wagner and Barry Hoggard can’t be all bad.