OLD NEWS

ON NATIONAL RADIO DAY,
please contemplate
https://tinyurl.com/4msrwtfx<
the beauty
<https://tinyurl.com/ymdw945h>
of the Panasonic
<https://tinyurl.com/44jpddrv>
Toot-A-Loop, 1972:
<https://tinyurl.com/28ku28kd> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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NEITHER SAINT NOR SINNER, ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI’S MARY MAGDALENE by Katy Hessel
https://tinyurl.com/b5szatrp<
A woman knocks her head back. Her eyes and mouth are closed but she is awake. With flushed cheeks, red lips and long, golden hair, she glows from a sharply lit flame in a room otherwise cloaked in darkness. Wearing textures ranging from a lace-trimmed chemise blouse – slipping down her right shoulder and exposing her porcelain skin – to a heavy yellow and purple material, she appears to be alone. Unaware of our presence, she exists in a state of sublimity, but also freedom.
The woman we are looking at is Mary Magdalene “in ecstasy”, painted in the early 1620s by Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian baroque artist famed for her heroic and powerful depictions of mythological and biblical women. Recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, it will go on view – free of charge. While it is, monumentally, the institution’s first acquisition by Gentileschi, it is also a picture that shows the saint “neither repentant nor suffering”, as curator Letizia Treves has written. An important distinction because, for centuries, Magdalene’s image has been shaped not just by scripture, but fabulated and conflated by powerful men.
<https://tinyurl.com/75676ruz>
“The most flexible female figure in Christian art”, as scholar Diane Apostolos-Cappadona told me. Look at images of her and you’ll see a reader, preacher, follower and witness; crying at the foot of the Cross, washing Christ’s feet or looking up to the heavens – repenting her sins with pearl-like tears – and too often conveniently exposing her chest. Sometimes identified by her jar of ointment or red robe (a contrast to the sanctified Virgin Mary’s blue), she is most popularly known, today, as Christ’s lover or a prostitute, despite no passage in the Bible describing her as such.
“The truth is, we don’t actually know who she was,” said Apostolos-Cappadona. “So all these layers of interpretation have fallen on her. And the transformations that she goes through, not just visually but narratively, devotionally, theologically, are as much related to cultural attitudes and theological shifts as they are to belief.” So what do we know?
Mary Magdalene appears in the Gospels 12 times. The first time we meet her she has seven “demons” cast out of her; the rest follow her presence at Christ’s crucifixion and as the first to witness his resurrection. It is she who spreads the “good news”. Her sexual and sinful reputation can largely be traced to a sermon delivered at the end of the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great, who confused her with Mary of Bethany and the “unnamed” sinner who bathed Jesus’s feet with her tears, and dried them with her hair.
Collapsing them into one, Pope Gregory effectively “created” the repentant prostitute – a myth further elaborated by seventh-century theologian Sophronius (who confused her with Mary of Egypt) and the middle ages’ Golden Legend (affirming her as penitent). Artists took note – perhaps her flexibility was part of her appeal – and, in a predominantly illiterate (but visually literate) world, this proved influential. With her “seven demons” becoming the “seven deadly sins”, her dominant story was established as one of sexual fall and subsequent moral redemption – concretised in artistic renderings that still get us to believe these stories today.
<https://tinyurl.com/ehuznfhu>
From Donatello’s emaciated and skeletal wood-carved Magdalene, weakly clasping her hands together in penitence, to Caravaggio’s 1606 depiction of her drained of colour and on the threshold of death – not to mention Rubens’ semi-nude and possessed Magdalene held up by angels – Mary Magdalene has frequently been denigrated sexually. Dürer’s print showed her coyly pointing one foot in front of another, with a giant halo and mounds of hair draping over her nude body, while Titian’s version looks up to the divine light, glassy eyes intact, and hands strategically placed to expose her breasts from her shimmering hair.
It seems suffering and sexualisation were the dominant poles when it came to representing her: she could warn women against sexual transgression, be the poster girl for repentance while offering artists an excuse to paint semi-nudity masked as piety. The “fallen woman redeemed” endured for centuries – so deeply that the Catholic church named its prison-like institutions that forced unpaid labour the “Magdalene laundries”, which shockingly only closed a mere 30 years ago.
But what if there was another side to her story? What if her tale could be one of spiritual awakening and transformation, in which she was pictured as full of life, delight and sublimity? In other words, what if we viewed her through the eyes of a woman?
This is what Gentileschi does. Her Magdalene is not performing for the viewer, not weeping, repenting, shamed, sexualised or dictating a moral lesson. Rather, she sports rosy cheeks and, as Treves wrote, is “passionately alive … in the throes of ecstatic rapture”. Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery of Art, said that Gentileschi “endows Mary Magdalene with an electrifying vitality”.
As I’ve written before, often when women depict biblical or mythological women, they show them not as passive, sinful, shameful or subordinate, but as active, complex and with minds of their own: “Women with a capital ‘W’” as Apostolos-Cappadona told me. She went further: “Yes, it’s an ecstasy painting, but it’s not her moment of conversion. It’s a moment of spiritual encounter … described sometimes as if it’s the finest sexual encounter … the greatest orgasm she could ever have. It’s aesthetic, it’s physical, it’s sexual, it’s spiritual. You are raised outside yourself to a higher level. It’s not just to be pornographic or erotic. It’s the fact that all these things come together. The head, the body, the spirit, the heart – and she fully experiences it.”
So, while this new Gentileschi might finally be redressing the imbalance of gender at the NGA, the acquisition is more significant than it looks, changing not just how we might come to view and think about biblical and mythological women, but also the female experience at large.
It’s something the Catholic church eventually caught up with. In 1969, it finally recognised Magdalene’s canonical definition as a faithful follower rather than a sinful repenter. As recently as 2016, Pope Francis elevated her ranking to the “apostle to the apostles”, marking 22 July as her feast day. It seems that, while one institution is only just letting women in, perspectives are changing. This new purchase – of a woman free from a patriarchal gaze, existing for no one but herself, not suffering nor sensationalised – is part of a greater shift towards equality. _GuardianUK

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PRETENDS
<https://tinyurl.com/5fsyvcm4> _DavidShrigley

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LONG-LOST REMBRANDT PRINTS RESURFACE AFTER A CENTURY IN STORAGE
<https://tinyurl.com/4kb4yunm>
A set of 35 rare prints by Rembrandt van Rijn, long forgotten in a family home, have been rediscovered in the Netherlands after nearly a century out of sight.
Kept in a dark safe for decades, the etchings are in exceptional condition. They were acquired in the early 20th century by the grandfather of Charlotte Meyer, who inherited them via her mother. It was only during the 2020 pandemic that she decided to have the collection examined by leading experts from the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, which confirmed their significance.
“They were completely blown away,” Meyer told the Dutch news outlet Omroep Gelderland.
Meyer’s grandfather had a connoisseurial eye for art and these instincts are evident in his skill for snapping up top quality Rembrandt prints at bargain prices. These works had long been safely stored away, not resurfacing for decades.
“Nobody was interested in etchings at that time. They were nothing special,” Meyer explained. “We kept them, but nobody really expected anything from them.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2knye9bc>
Meyers’s rediscovered prints will be shown at the Stedelijk Museum Zutphen in a new exhibition, “Rembrandt: From Dark to Light,” alongside more than 70 works by Rembrandt’s predecessors and followers drawn from the museum’s collection and loans from the nearby Museum Henriette Polak, as well as other pieces from Meyer’s collection, which she has been expanding since finding the prints. _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4nh78nnn> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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MICHAEL JENKINS, THIRTEEN LIGHTS AND COUNTING by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/dbhhsa62>
West Flanders furniture dealer Roger Vanthournout and his wife Josette collected art for over six decades. Did they see Michael Jenkins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ show at Xavier Hufkens <https://tinyurl.com/mr42zmcj> in Brussels in 1991? Is that what got them interested in Jenkins’ work, leading them to buy two large works on paper at Galerie Hans Mayer in Dusseldorf in 1992? Roger died in 2005, and Josette died last year, so we can’t ask them.
But we can sure look at Jenkins’ work in unexpectedly fascinating relation to Gonzalez-Torres’s. These two works, Counting (L) and Thirteen Lights (R), are flashe and pencil on paper. They also appear to be collage, not trompe l’oeil; so the drawings on paper that look taped on are taped on. And the drawings are of thirteen light bulbs on a string.
Felix made a stack with Jenkins in 1990. His portrait of Jenkins was in 1991. Both artists made works with bondage gear, and Felix made the go-go dancing platform—with 13 lights along each edge—in 1991. Then 1992 was full of light strings, with either 24 or 42 bulbs. The motif cannot be a coincidence. Whether there was a conversation about or between these two artist-friends’ works, there was certainly a shared context. Unlike Felix’s work, though, Jenkins’ has almost never been seen or shown or discussed beyond the moment of its making, during the AIDS crisis and queer resistance.
The most extensive text on Jenkins’ practice, I think, is his Summer 1992 Bomb interview with Bill Arning. He doesn’t mention anything directly related to these works, except for yellow, a color used for its nautical references to quarantine and disease. [I just read a quote from Victor Klemperer, too, about the horror of being forced to wear the six-pointed star in Germany; he mentioned yellow’s historic association with the plague and fear of Jews.]
Felix and the Vanthournouts are gone, but maybe it’s time to ask Jenkins.
[next morning update]
It’s a mixture of gratitude to Michael Seiwert for posting the Artforum review of Jenkins’ 1991 show at Jay Gorney, and sadness at my having not thought about Artforum when writing this post. On the bright side, Contemporary Art Library recently posted an archive of Gorney’s shows, including Jenkins. Incredible. Two things pertain to the drawings at hand: Jenkins was in portrait mode. All the drawings in 1991 were this 60×36 human/door/window scale. The counting is in NYC, too, in one drawing, but the counting is different, continuous, where the drawing above seems to record multiple counts. There’s the trace of human experience without an indication what’s being tallied or why.
<https://tinyurl.com/w4dhkabk>
The yellow stripes appear in one drawing, and inside this sculpture, Tower with Crazee Windows, 1991. Beautiful photos everywhere, though the yellow does start to feel immediately overwhelming. Maybe Jenkins thought so, too. The two 1993 works he showed next were red <https://tinyurl.com/dcambr2v> and white. _greg.org

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ALI EYAL
<https://tinyurl.com/4by4y49k> _HammerMuseum

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SCULPTURE COLLAPSE AT HANWHA FOUNDATION'S NYC GALLERY SENDS FOUR TO HOSPITAL
<https://tinyurl.com/c288faah>
A large sculpture by Korean American artist Michael Joo collapsed after an accident, reportedly caused by a careless visitor, during the February 20 opening of his exhibition “Sweat Models 1991–2006,” at New York’s Space ZeroOne.
The collapse of the piece Saltiness of Greatness (1992) injured four, who were taken to the emergency room via ambulance, according to a report The piece reportedly consists of stacks of compressed salt and, per a 2004 Francine Koslow Miller Artforum review of an MIT List Visual Arts Center survey in which it appeared, “charts the relative energy consumption and expenditure of Genghis Khan, Tokyo Rose, Bruce Lee, and Mao Tse-tung during their respective ‘reigns.’”
Joo, who lives in New York, has long used organic materials including urine, sweat, seeds, and deer both living and dead “to explore themes of transformation, evolution, and shamanism” in works in various mediums, according to Artforum.
Injured parties (all unnamed) included a Korean artist; a gallerist; a curator who is also a professor at a New York university; and a Hanwha Foundation board member, per the Seoul Economic Daily. The injuries included a hairline fracture and abrasions. _ARTnews

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NEIL JENNEY, TRASH AND TRASHCAN, 1970
<https://tinyurl.com/mrxwwr78>
Arman, Poubelle (Trash Can), 1964
<https://tinyurl.com/34z87mkt>
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971-73
<https://tinyurl.com/3bpt22wk> _MichaelLobel

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38. POLAROID CAMERA by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/ysfy64rk>
By the time we retrieved our pictures, a week after we’d dropped off our roll of film to be developed, we’d forgotten what we shot, and whom, and what it all looked like. We’d open the envelope of prints with recognition and surprise, seeing artifacts of our own recent past. We were looking at history.
The Polaroid changed all that. Its magical chemical innards meant the picture popped out, darkened and resolved before our eyes in minutes, collapsing time between lived moment and record of that moment. But strangely, even though the wait time was shortened, there was still a disconnect—still that searching to see what had been captured by the camera in a moment now gone forever. The Polaroid, though miraculously immediate, still recorded the irretrievable past.
The company eventually fell on hard times, ceasing production as digital photography made film irrelevant almost overnight, or so it felt. Polaroid’s unlikely revival by the Impossible Project1 is a story of nostalgia, of the human desire for the tactile that reassuringly endures. We still want the singular, irreplaceable print that we can hold.
Ironically, the Polaroid—once defined by speed, its processing time counted in minutes—is now the slow technology. Young people who’ve never had film developed find themselves waiting for their picture, savoring the delayed gratification of re-seeing and holding what was in that moment, now history. That instant, one of millions in our lives—we are never given two of them together, but always one after another. _TheImpatientReader

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POST OFFICE SAGOLA, MI
<https://tinyurl.com/4hpneze2> _RuralIndexingProject

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DIGITAL ARTIST GETS IN HOT WATER FOR AI-GENERATED WORKS ‘AFTER’ GEORGE CONDO
<https://tinyurl.com/yywyuscj>
Artists copying or quoting other artists’ works is common throughout art history. But when is a new piece too close to an existing artist’s work?
This question, and the way that AI might shift the answer to it, is at the center of a show on view New York’s Gallery. It’s the New York solo debut of 31-year-old New York artist Kevin Esherick, who started creating art in the 2021 wave of interest in digital art, especially NFTs. , in the founder’s words, “showcases human intuition applied to systems-based art making—work shaped by rules, logic, structure, or code.”
Three pieces in the show are the subject of a cease-and-desist letter from New York’s Eastman & Eastman Attorneys, representing painter George Condo. Those works are still on the walls, but they’re now covered in black velvet, and a redacted printout of the attorney’s letter hangs next to them, to let visitors know what they’re looking at.
Esherick’s show focuses on two bodies of work. For “Homages,” he trained an AI image generator to mimic the styles of artists he admires: Beeple, Condo, Petra Cortright, Shara Hughes, Julien Nguyen, Trevor Paglen, Cindy Sherman, and Salman Toor.
Esherick wrote to the artists ahead of time, informing them of the show and letting them know that he had created what he thought to be credible new artworks that could feel “at home in [their] oeuvre.” He gave the artists the option, if they felt the new work seemed to them like it could actually be their own, to sign the pieces, thus appropriating his adaptations, and collect his proceeds from their sale.
Most of the artists were receptive, said Esherick in a phone interview. “It’s an honor,” Paglen told. Beeple is even planning to help support an auction of the piece created in his style, says Esherick. https://tinyurl.com/3bm8ht6u _ARTnews

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IT'S HIS BIRTHDAY
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide), 1870
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3zkzkh>
And this gorgeousness
Winslow Homer, Among the Oaks (Live Oaks), 1886
<https://tinyurl.com/4fy23s5k> _RabihAlameddine

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CLAIMS OF 8,000-YEAR-OLD PETROGLYPH’S DISCOVERY IN VENEZUELA RAISE QUESTIONS
<https://tinyurl.com/5bexseyd>
A recently discovered set of rock carvings in the Venezuelan state of Monagas is being hailed as the nation’s oldest example of rock art, possibly up to 8,000 years old. Reports in the Venezuelan publication Ultimas Noticias say that the petroglyph panel—marked by spirals, concentric circles and humanoid forms—was found in the highland area of the Quebrada Seca community in Cedeño, around 2,125ft above sea level.
Reports about the discovery came after Daniel Monteverde, the mayor of Cedeño, announced the finding, appearing with a delegation from Venezuela’s National Land Institute (NLI). The Institute, created in 2002 to enact former president Hugo Chávez’s land reforms, has more recently been involved in issues pertaining to heritage sites in rural areas.
On the heels of a significant discovery of rock art in Canaima, the Cedeño find is in an area known as the “petroglyph capital” of Monagas because of the broader Indigenous legacy of the Chaima and Kariña peoples there. According to Ultimas Noticias, Monteverde stated that the NLI team located the petroglyph panel after a series of research expeditions. He also said that he hoped the discovery would help facilitate the development of “agritourism and adventure tourism” in the area.
The historian Luis Peñalver, who is associated with the NLI, described the discovery as a “milestone” that may represent one of the oldest archaeological records in eastern Venezuela. He added that the engravings suggest Cedeño was an important regional corridor for travel and settlement.
Monteverde indicated in his post that a meeting will soon be held with the Ministry of Popular Power for Culture and the National Institute of Cultural Heritage, in order to proceed with the formal certification of the petroglyphs. He also said the Tourism Department would initiate protocols to geolocate and safeguard the area to prevent vandalism, while the Institute of Cultural Heritage plans for the scientific study and dating of the pieces and the design of “an archaeological route that allows for sustainable tourism, respecting the integrity of the monument”.
And yet, in the video Monteverde can be seen touching a petroglyph with faint traces of pigment and spraying it with water, which can destroy evidence or lichens that provide valuable archaeological information. Many archaeologists in Venezuela have been critical of his approach of advertising the site’s location for tourists before proper dating has been done and before protection mechanisms have been put in place.
Rubi de la Valencia, a petroglyph expert and the director of the National Rock Art Archive, who has worked in Canaima, tells The Art Newspaper that the “discovery” announced by Monteverde and the NLI team was “highly debatable” and “lacking the perspective of local Indigenous communities”. She adds: “While we have documented this site within our national inventory, we find the claims regarding its dating and origin to be scientifically unsubstantiated.”
De la Valencia expressed doubt about the provenance and methodology of this dating. “Given that these artefacts were only discovered recently, which authorities formally designated them as among the oldest on record? Furthermore, which specific experts estimated their antiquity to be between 4,000 and 8,000 years? What specific laboratory analyses or geochronological techniques were employed to date these petroglyphs? Where is the peer-reviewed literature or the primary documentation regarding this dating? Who are the principal investigators responsible for these findings?”
The current claims, De la Valencia adds, “appear to rely on superficial morphological observation rather than rigorous empirical testing”, and social media rather than science.
She says that the rock art has not been “discovered” but was documented by the local Indigenous community for decades. _ArtNewspaper

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LUCA SIGNORELLI, DEEDS OF THE ANTICHRIST (DETAIL), SAN BRIZIO CHAPEL, 1499-1504
<https://tinyurl.com/48bz82nk> _MichaelLobel

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LOUVRE DIRECTOR LAURENCE DES CARS RESIGNS
<https://tinyurl.com/37avk2t2>
After a prolonged period of internal turmoil that has included a widely publicized heist, striking workers, two structural leaks, and a ticketing scam, the Louvre has lost its director.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he had officially accepted the resignation of Laurence des Cars, who had led the Louvre since 2021.
“Ms. Laurence des Cars has submitted to the President of the Republic her letter of resignation from the presidency of the Louvre Museum,” a short statement from Macron’s office said. “The head of state accepted it, welcoming an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs calm and a strong new impetus to carry out major security and modernization projects and the ‘Louvre – New Renaissance’ project.”
Des Cars previously tried to resign as scrutiny heightened around her, but culture minister Rachida Dati declined to accept the offer. She then went on to call the Louvre’s security systems “inadequate,” echoing remarks she had made internally prior to the theft. _ARTnews

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IT'S NATIONAL RADIO DAY!
One of my favorite Tad Dorgan drawings in my collection
is this 1923 look at the early days of marketing radios as consumer products.
"If this is the radio that plays the jazz I'll take it."
<https://tinyurl.com/w5us85zw> _‪PeterHuestis‬