Wade's Welt, Excellent

I stopped by a friend's studio yesterday--which was fantastic, btw--and as I was leaving, and I noticed the cool, old Ellsworth Kelly exhibition poster in the bathroom, I so I was all, have you seen the Kelly edition of Die Welt, and he's all, it's fantastic, I just got it as a gift! and I'm all, right here right now? and he's all, yeah, I just brought it in, do you want to see it? and I'm like, well, yeah, and he's all, well, everyone should see it, Ellsworth's so lucky, and then the adult in the room was all, you should have some white gloves, and then we had to figure out who was actually the best at turning the pages, and anyway, long story short, it's completely incredible, and it would never happen in the US, but we all pretty much agreed that USA Today should do it. Can you even imagine it?

I Wanna The Kelly Welt, Chico, An Everthinisinnit

Ausgezeichnet!

To promote his two shows in Munich this fall/winter, at the Pinakothek and the Haus der Kunst [which closed this week, btw], the local paper die Welt published a special issue in which all photos were replaced by Ellsworth Kelly paintings. Cereal Records points to Burning Settlers Cabin, whoprocured a copy, which makes me all the more determined to track one down myself.

Unfortunately, all I can find on the Welt website is an offer for a facsimile edition of the front page [top], printed on archival paper in an edition of 100. I mean, it's signed, but I'm not sure that this works quite as well as a print as the newspaper does as an awesome object.

Any German-reading newspaper hoarders out there, please get in touch.

Great story: Just Say No To Safe [burningsettlerscabin via cerealrecords]
Die Welt's all-Ellsworth Kelly issue [cerealrecords]
Limitiert und handsigniert: die Kelly-Edition zur Zeitung, 499 Euro zuzüglich versicherten Versands [welt.de]
Previously, and definitely related: Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero
Previously, related, and not as awesome: Robert Rauschenberg's Piece of Tropic, 1979, ed. 650,000

Deeecoding Hirst

Basically, yeah, there was no way I could just let Daniel Barnes' hearsay claim that there's a secret text encoded in each of Damien Hirist's spot paintings go untested last night.

But the mechanics of decoding a Hirst Code, if it does, indeed, exist, are non-trivial. Sure, there's a key painting [on which more in a second], but the whole public premise of the series is that no color repeats within a painting. Yet there are many spots in a large painting which seem nearly indistinguishable from each other. So matching up the ABC0-9 color key precisely to the hundreds of similar spots is, to use the term of the season, a challenge.

The trick, I think, is to have a computer color match the Pantone PMS codes between the Key Painting and the others. Which requires color-matched images. But Hirst's catalogue of the complete spots doesn't drop until July. So I just went ahead and grabbed one of the largest spot images I could find, and then I combined it with a Key Painting, and ran it--or babystepped it, really--through Photoshop.

Tate Modern was the single, go-to source. Tate has both a key painting, Controlled Substances Key Painting (Spot 4a) [above], and a large [2x2.5m] spot painting, Anthraquinone-1 Diazonium Chloride[below], from 1994.

A quick note on the Key Paintings: according to Tate Modern, Hirst made four of them, in different dimensions [1" to 4" spots], and they are the only Spot paintings in which the color layout is identical. Which would imply, then, that there is a single key. Though there are definitely plenty of cryptographic methods for thwarting an assumption like that, too.

Anyway, I combined the two Tate images in one Photoshop canvas, and started waving my Magic Wand over each Key Painting spot in turn, looking for matches among the larger painting's 2,050 spots. Immediately, when several A's came up, I confirmed that I still had a matching problem; theoretically, there should be one, at most. The color scales of Photoshop, the compression algorithms of JPGs and TIFFs, all of these mediations affect the precise matching between two Hirst paintings. [I just realized that Hirst's spots actually almost pre-date Photoshop itself, which first launched in 1989, and which didn't get color management until v5.0 in 1998.]

There were also matches I thought were obvious, but which PS didn't even touch. I decided to be systematic, and to err on the side of more information now, in hopes of detecting a pattern later. So I checked tolerances at 5 and 8%, and only marked spots where the central majority of the spot was highlighted. Having no letter matched up felt more validating somehow than having just one. When I did Q, I jumped to U. I did the digits, too, because they were provided, and because 733tspeak did exist in some form since the 80s, and maybe Hirst was a phone phreakin' BBS nerd in high school, who knows?

I put all the text into a separate layer, which is below. It was really late last night, like around 1:30, so I can't be entirely sure until I check it again in the daylight, but I think I have seen something.

There seems to be a structured passage in the top center of the painting. Here's a detail:

I'm going to doublecheck my work, but in the mean time, please don't go running to Gagosian trying to claim a free spot painting and pretend you are the one who found Hirst's secret message from 1994.

Rijksoverheid Rood 8: Better Roller

Alright, I think we finally may be onto something. I switched to a high-density foam roller for this next coat, and though it looks kind of eggshelly in the photo, it actually ends up drying to a smoother finish than any brush so far. And it uses less paint, which means no drip/stalactites around the edges, which need to be cut/sanded off.

The rhythm is sort of set now: when I start a new coat, I flip the panel over and wetsand and tack the coat from two sessions prior. That way, the coats go on each side sort of interlaced [I'm painting both sides, and I think it'll be done when the panel builds up a sufficient edge of paint, not support, and there's a pretty clean, non-painterly surface with no discernible front/back.] They're not there yet, but it now seems like they will be.

On the question of posting this kind of log/journal-style info, yeah, it's still kind of boring to me, mixed with a bit of incredulity that really, why would anyone care? But that's fine.

Because one of the things I've found is that these posts almost always draw out some helpful and interesting emails from people who know paint far better than I do. So it's really nice to hear from people, to get advice and feedback, to check my assumptions, and to see what other people are doing.

Part of my decision to paint was to learn what it's really like, to see what paint does, how it behaves. And part of it was definitely to actually see some particular objects in person that I've seen in my mind, and which I haven't really found anywhere else. So it's all pretty good.

The Hirst Code

Speaking of texts written in entirely unlikely places...

I really have no idea what to make of the kicker in Daniel Barnes' Artslant review of the Brittania St installation of Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings:

As to be expected with Hirst, there is yet more spectacle. A member of Gagosian staff tells me that the key paintings which correlate specific colours with letters of the alphabet are the start of a game: if you look at each painting carefully, a sequence of colours will reveal a hidden word, and if you get the word first you win a spot painting.

A secret word embedded in each painting? Is there one word repeated or 1,200 or 1,500 separate words? Is there one key for all of them, or one for each of them? Is there one free painting for each of them? If you crack the Hirst Code, do you become overnight the artist's single largest collector, the Mugrabis of Hirst? If so, doesn't Viktor Pinchuk already have a team of ex-KGB cryptographers working on this problem?

Entirely aside from the "win a painting" sweepstakes element--the Secret Hirst's Other Spot Challenge--what are the conceptual contours of a Hirst Code? Are the words encoded in The Complete Spot Paintings random, or a list, or do they constitute a single, secret text? Is it an essay, a manifesto? An epic poem or sacred text? Is it the first page of a great novel,, or did Hirst randomly encode a page from his pharmaceuticals catalogue--or from a Tesco mailing, or his cable bill, whatever he had lying around the studio? Or does it just say ARSE 1,500 times?

Moby Dick Typed On Toilet Paper

There is much to do, and much to write, but it'll have to wait. Because right this minute, a copy of Moby Dick typed on six rolls of toilet paper is for sale on eBay:

MY FRIEND AND I ONCE JOKED THAT TOILET PAPER SHOULD HAVE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED ON THEM FOR CERTAIN PEOPLE
ONE DAY, THE CONVERSATION GREW FROM THERE AND TURNED INTO A WAGER THAT I COULDN'T (OR WOULDN'T) BE ABLE TO TYPE OUT A NOVEL ON TOILET PAPER.

YES, WE DID HAVE SOME TIME ON OUR HANDS BUT, AS YOU CAN SEE BY THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS, I WON THE BET.

THERE ARE FOUR FULL ROLLS, ONE ROLL (EPILOGUE) IS ABOUT 1/5 OF A ROLL AND ONE HALF-ROLL
ALL OF THE ROLLS OF TP CAME OUT OF A BRAND NEW -- CLEAN -- PACKAGE OF 2-PLY COTTONELLE
THEY'VE BEEN HANDLED VERY GINGERLY AND INFREQUENTLY

AS YOU'LL SEE IN THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS, ONE OR TWO ROLLS HAVE A TEAR AT THE BEGINNING
THIS IS WHERE I WAS TRYING TO PULL THE PAPER THROUGH THE TYPEWRITER

I'VE KEPT THIS MOD ODDITY IN A BOX IN A COOL, DRY PLACE FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS
AND HAVE ONLY BROKEN IT OUT TO PROVE TO DOUBTERS THAT I ACTUALLY DID IT

CONSIDERING WHAT IT'S BEEN THROUGH, IT'S IN AMAZING CONDITION

I mean, there's so much we still don't know. Like who did it? In this day of Facebook non-privacy, how can an artist be known simply as The Toilet Paper Moby Dick Master? And how long did it take? Wait, before that, even, what, really, was this conversation that led to this bet? And how did the bet end up involving one of the longer novels in the canon? Why not something shorter? Something like On The Road?

Moby Dick typed on toilet paper, opening bid, $399.95 plus free shipping, auction ends Jan. 29 [ebay via @cthon1c]
Kerouac Scroll Tour [ontheroad.org]

UPDATE: since posting this, the opening bid has been raised, appropriately, to $999.95.
UPDATE UPDATE: or one like it. "The seller has relistedthis item or one like it."

Lines + Dots, Picasso For Bloomsbury Fabrics

I've come across ads while surfing through New Yorkers from the 1950s, but this is one of the first times I've seen actual Pablo Picasso silk screened fabric turn up on eBay. And there's a whole 16-yard run of it, too. $46/yd doesn't seem like that much, either. Why, you could pay that much for the "fluoridized with DuPont Zepel ®" part alone.

Vintage Bloomcraft Picasso Line & Dots Fabric 16yd+ Screen Print RARE! UNUSED! starting bid $749

What I Looked At Today: Jean Arp

It's funny, all this time I've been looking hard at the brushstrokes of modernism, abstraction, and monochrome, trying to figure out how they were made--and, thus, how I might make some paintings myself--and I've ignored Jean Arp.

When I started wanting to figure out how to do crisp abstraction, I went to look at Dove and Mondrian, only to find drawing & filling in. Sheeler's precisionist paintings were actually paint-up-to-the-pencil-line sketches.

When I started wanting to figure out monochrome objects, I looked at Truitt in front of Kelly, and surprised myself to find brushstrokes just all over the damn place.

Still, Truitt's still Truitt, and Kelly's still Kelly. I was at the National Gallery yesterday, accompanying the kid's field trip, and their Truitt is pretty slick. And of course, their Atrium Kelly seems fantastic, if hard to see from the ground.

Orange Diagonal, 2008, via matthewmarks.com

And Kelly, talking about his recent relief paintings, did tell Carol Vogel, "What I've made is real -- underline the word real. It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture." Which I am totally onboard with.

But which also suddenly reminded me of something I'd read about Thomas Scheibitz a few years ago, from a 2008 show at the Camden Arts Centre:

Scheibitz has developed his own grammar for painting on sculpture, which like his paintings, bows simultaneously to a residual interest in illusionism and representation and at the same time relishes the drips, splashes and material traces that are the legacy of painterly modernism. Indeed the whole point of painted sculpture rests upon it being a real object in space, which simultaneously inhabits an "artificial world", by virtue of its disguised and painted exterior and its imagined and constructed form. It therefore exists in that realm of "second nature" that Scheibitz describes as the location of his work: the paint helps to suggest that the sculpture has a correlative in the "real" world, while simultaneously undermining any such belief. [emphasis added]

The Forest, detail, 1916, nga has no image

And finding myself with time to stare at Jean Arp's painted reliefs yesterday doesn't change that one bit. First off, they are fantastic. The surface is slick, smooth, pristine, nonpainterly.

Shirt Front and Fork, detail, 1922, for which nga also has no image?

Without planning to take up Arp in relation to Kelly, Scheibitz, or Truitt, I found myself impressed by these painted lines, painting on wood. They exist apart somehow from the painterly modernist practice of their time, and seemingly in transgression of sculptural modernism, and yet they're real. Underlined.

I don't really know much beyond the Mod101 slideshow blurb about Arp, but I guess I'll start digging and looking.

Don't Stop Until SOPA & PIPA Are Stopped

I've been using and working on the Internet for almost twenty years now. I've done start-ups and IPOs. I've worked for huge companies. I worked for Disney when they didn't know the web from a CD-ROM. I have been involved and engaged with copyright and intellectual property law and their relationship to art and culture for over a decade.

So my opposition to the entertainment industry's maximalist online power play, in the current form of two pieces of legislation being considered in the US Congress right now, SOPA and PIPA, is neither fleeting nor naive.

As many people with far greater expertise than I have discussed in great detail, these proposed laws are a grave threat to the Internet as a platform for economic, cultural, and political exchange. They are unnecessarily broad and ambiguous and give vast, new, unchecked power to corporations who have consistently lied and misrepresented their case and the supposed threat they face.

Stop SOPA and PIPA by calling your US Congressional representatives today, but also get smart on the issues surrounding these bills. And keep following them, and keep holding politicians and the companies they're serving accountable, because this crap won't end today or this week.

Public Knowledge primer and updates on SOPA & PIPA [publicknowledge.org]

Dutch Camo Landscape Painting Painting - 2

Another Sunday painting. Or another Sunday spent painting.

I did another round of taping off and painting on the Dutch Camo Landscape photo of Noordwijk today. The first time, I did two identical gray polygons This time, I did three, with different greys.

The taping is the most time-consuming aspect of the process, the mixing the most uncertain, and the painting itself the most anti-climactic.

Not really knowing anything about color systems or theory, I'm just eyeballing each match. At the moment, there's something going on, I think, with the way the polys get grouped; I mix one grey, then change it for the next, and then the next. They end up being sequential in a way, related to each other, composed of the same constituent pigments. Until they're not; the last poly was turning out to be not just lighter, but pinker, redder, and so I gambled and added a new paint, a single drop of red oxide, which blew the whole thing. It eventually came around, though.

Though I'm clearly counting on it somehow, I don't know what'll happen when I try to paint next to an already-painted polygon. I mean, on the one hand, I don't know how paint will handle the tape. On the other, there's a ridge there now. So I could just paint up to it. But that'd mean some edges will be taped and crisp, and others will be brushed.

At this point, I guess I'm still seeing if paint actually does what I think it'll do when I do it.

In unrelated news, that brown poly in the center of the photo looks kind of like Iraq.

Rijksoverheid Rood 7: Roller

Well, that was a total surface disaster.

The size and disposability of this crappy little foam roller made it irresistible. The bubbly eggshell finish that even contains a few crumbs of foam made it a total failure putting paint down on the monochromes.

The instructions on the back are so specific, I was tempted to call following them a conceptual conceit:

1. Pour 1/2 inch of paint into tray


2. Roll back and forth on slanted section of paint tray to load roller thoroughly


3. When painting, increase pressure on roller as it dispenses paint to pull paint from inside the foam reservoir


4. Performance improves as roller becomes fully saturated with paint


5. Finish with light strokes

On the bright side, there aren't any brushstrokes.

FEW HOURS LATER UPDATE: OK, maybe it's not so bad. The eggshelling thing is a bit subdued, but there's far less paint per coat with a roller, no drip, and it's generally smoother overall. I think I will continue with them a bit and see how it sands and builds up.

Previously: Rijksoverheid Rood paintings: the making of

'Bob Made It, But Jasper Made It Art.'

A couple of things that I still wonder about about Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing:

What did de Kooning think? The story of making it is always told by Rauschenberg, or from his side. Did de Kooning ever tell the story? Did he ever see the result? Or talk about it? Did anyone ever ask him about it? I've never found any reference at all.

When did Rauschenberg actually make it? The date's all over the map. SFMOMA currently says it's 1953. For a long time, it was dated 1953-55. James Meyer had it as 1951-2, but I don't think I've seen anyone else put it that early. Even the extraordinary timeline in John Elderfield's de Kooning retrospective catalogue has only the basics of Rauschenberg's travel schedule and his account to go on ["Probably April or After," it says, since April 1953 was when Rauschenberg returned from his European trip with Twombly.]

[UPDATENever mind. I got the EdKD dating ambiguity mixed up with Johns' Flag, which has been variously dated between 1954 and '56, whereas the date for EdKD has consistently been given as 1953 from its very earliest forays into the public view. Thanks to Sarah Roberts, research curator at SFMOMA, who took a moment from her multiyear project documenting Rauschenberg's work, to point out my error.]

What did people at the time think? Who actually ever saw it? Even someone as early to the work as Leo Steinberg apparently only talked to Bob about it on the phone.

And what about Johns? Who knew about his involvement? What is up with that? For forty-plus years, while Rauschenberg claimed or let others write or publish that he came up with the title, and drew the hand-lettered label, Johns stayed silent about his role in the collaboration. But others surely knew, certainly in the early years when the work was taking shape.

Just before the holidays, I got in touch with Edward Meneeley, and artist and photographer who became friends with many artists and dealers in 1950s and 60s New York because he photographed their artwork. Meneeley created Portable Gallery, a subscription slide service that provided regular installments of art images to libraries, colleges, galleries, and collectors.

I found him because it was his monthly newsletter, Portable Gallery Bulletin, to which Jasper Johns wrote in 1962, explaining that it was artst's prerogative, plus an agreement between himself and Rauschenberg, not "politics," behind the refusal to let Portable Gallery publish and distribute slides of Short Circuit.

In a multi-chapter biography published online by Joel Finsel, Meneleey says that he was friends with both Johns and Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, and that he had an affair with the latter behind the former's back. [He tells Finsel of Johns coming to his loft one morning looking for Rauschenberg, and inviting him in to talk about it, all the while Bob is hiding in Meneeley's bedroom, eavesdropping on the conversation. Which sounds like a dick move to me, but there you go.]

Anyway, after talking to Meneeley for a while about Short Circuit--which he first saw in 1955, when it was first exhibited at the Stable Gallery--I asked him what people thought or said at the time about Erased de Kooning Drawing.

"Everyone at the Cedar Bar knew," he told me, but they thought it was just a stunt, a joke. After finishing it, Rauschenberg didn't do much with it or, as Meneeley put it, "he didn't know what to do with it." Until Jasper came along.

[Remember, Bob apparently acquired the original de Kooning sketch of a woman sometime after April 1953. He met and quickly became involved with Johns in the winter of 1954.]

In Meneeley's recollection of the time, it was Jasper who basically saved Erased de Kooning Drawing from ending up as a barroom one-liner. He mounted it, gave it a title and a label, or really, a drawing of a label. "Bob made it," Meneeley told me, "But Jasper made it art."

Which is why I'm interested in hearing what people thought at the time it was made.