Monthly Archives: June 2014

Little Grand Canyon Yellow: Earth Pigments from Places

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Called Little Grand Canyon Yellow, this 1964 painting by Howard Thomas is hung next to a vitrine of small, re-purposed glass jars at the Georgia Museum of Art. The title of the work was intended literally. The artist made the yellow pigment from earth from the Grand Canyon. Perhaps it is not coincidental this painting preceded the earthworks of Robert Smithson and Ana Mendieta of the 1970s.  Although still on canvas, Thomas engages with site through the locally sourced pigment that are referenced in the title. The style of the work, however, rather than being a fragmented areal view, seems to me more like formalist play because of the  centered shapes bounded by the canvas, suggesting no expansive horizon, and the disjointed layerings that creates a tone-on-tone sense of motion or depth.

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The glass jars showing Thomas’s pigments have fascinating labels, like the one below labelled “Frat House.” What kind of painting might that have been used in versus the one above, I wonder.

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do it: Taking the Global Local

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I’m excited to get the ball rolling on a few projects for Fall, one of which is an exhibition that art history PhD student Brooke Leeton and I will be curating at the Lamar Dodd School of Art entitled Let’s do it UGA. We recently created a website for the project at www.letsdoituga.wordpress.com.

do it is a curatorial project begun by Hans Ulrich Obrist based on a simple proposition: “Create an instruction that someone else can use to make an artwork.” (More about that on e-flux’s project website.) In “Let’s do it UGA,” graduate students select different sets of do it instructions that form the basis of works of art. Instruction-based art privileges themes of variation, copy and authenticity, and play and experimentation, resulting in a work of art unconcerned with ownership or style. Instead, what drives the exhibition is the act of interpretation.

Brooke and I have enjoyed preparing the framework for the exhibition, but most of all we are excited to see what it will look like when it opens October 17. Because the artists are working from different sets of instructions that changes how they normally work, rather than us selecting objects or artist’s who work we are familiar with, the end result is a surprise. The only performance we can predict is one we will do ourselves, on the opening night of the reception. Following Amalia Pica’s instructions Throw A Party (2012), Brooke and I will end our night sweeping confetti evenly against one wall.

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Truth is Better than Fiction: Story of a Stolen Rembrandt

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_73727275_rembrandtafp2 Rembrandt’s Child with Soap Bubble, above, was recently apprehended in France after a 15-year disappearance. Originally taken from two con-men with links to the backroom art world trade, the story of this painting’s disappearance is actual much more fantastic and less ordinary. As ARTNews reports, Frenchmen Patrick Vialaneix was compelled to steal it: 

He first saw the Rembrandt, L’enfant à la bulle de savon (Child with soap bubble), at age 13 on a visit with his mother to the municipal museum in Draguignan, France. It reminded him of himself so much that viewing it was “like looking in a mirror,” he said. He became obsessed with the painting, returning over and over to behold its charms.

His fixation escalated until finally, at the age of 28, he decided he had to steal it.

Read the rest of the story on ARTNews to learn how the alarm technician managed to steal it, and how the secret of the stolen painting then poisoned his relationships until he decided to sell it to the two middlemen who the French authorities finally caught. I absolutely understand the urge to want a work of art, perhaps a Rembrandt or a Vermeer for your very own, and if that means hiding a painting under my bed for 15 years, so be it.

But why we would invest any singular painting with such significance is perhaps a strange thing. Copyists were common before the age of mechanical reproduction, and today especially copying has never been easier. But the aura of the original remains intact, even though rationally we might realize that any object is just one of many objects whose physical properties can be reproduced. The latest Radiolab podcast, appropriately titled Things, is worth a listen for an exploration of why we sometimes place intense emotional value on objects. The Radiolab story discusses things in general, not art, and the crux of the discussion on whether its not better to let go, as Patrick Vialaneix finally did, or to hold on as tightly as possible.