OLD NEWS

IT'S INTERNATIONAL DOT DAY!
Painting with Detail (Black), acrylic on two panels by Roy Lichtenstein, 1987,
<https://tinyurl.com/y2bfkjvz> _Peter Huestis

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RAFAEL FERRER, MUSICIAN-TURNED-ARTIST, HAS DIED AT 93
<https://tinyurl.com/5e77pdpe>
Musician-turned-artist Rafael Ferrer has died at age 93, Ferrer was “a groundbreaking artist whose singular and influential practice challenged boundaries” across a vast range of mediums and disciplines,
In fact, Ferrer first worked as a jazz drummer before moving into visual arts after discovering Surrealist artists and writers during a 1954 trip to Paris. He eventually studied painting with the exiled Spanish Surrealist artist Eugenio Fernández Granell at the University of Puerto Rico. Yet musical improvisation remained a defining influence throughout his practice, which was unusual in its diversity of styles, mediums, and materials. His work ranged from conceptual installations to assemblage sculptures and paintings. He used paper bags and blackboards as canvases, as well as calabash gourds and garbage can lids in hanging, Dada-inspired sculptures, while installations could be made of straw, dried leaves, or ice.
The unusual variety inherent to his practice has also been described as a source of confusion to a critical art world and market, which overlooked his career for years, particularly beginning in the 1980s, when he began painting again. That oversight was belatedly corrected
Ferrer was keenly aware of critical responses to his shift away from the conceptual, Process art installations he was known for making in the 1960s and ’70s, which had earned him a reputation as an avant-garde artist, particularly in Puerto Rico, One breakthrough leading into that period of acclaim was Ferrer’s 1968 guerrilla action involving driving 87 bushels of fall leaves from Philadelphia to New York in a pickup truck, and scattering them in front of art institutions.
When Ferrer experimented with new forms and styles—as he did in the ’80s with paintings made in a kind of faux naïve, modern expressionist style—his career quieted. “The psychology of the art world and the art market are so ingrained with repetition, making a steady, absolutely, consistently identifiable product much like the auto industry. That has never been the impetus of my work. I have always believed that the doing is what is exciting,” Ferrer told in 2013. “My earlier life as a musician created in my psyche a sense that what you do is dictated by the needs of the moment, all within a repertoire,” he added.
In fact, Ferrer’s artworks do possess a clear, conceptual through-line, as he explained in the same interview. “When I returned to painting, believe me, those paintings were all about spaces—my attraction to odd spaces with weird light and strange people,” he added. For his portraits of “strange people,” whom he also called his neighbors, “there is a mutual curiosity expressed in conversation, a back and forth I have with them,” he said. “The most problematic thing is familiarity. If I’m totally familiar with something, it’s no longer interesting.”
Art and music, however, never grew too familiar, and his whole life he continued to paint while listening to the latter. “Curiously, when I look at art or when I listen to music, I never seem to exhaust the endless revelations that make both things a continual source of inspiration,” he said. _ARTnews

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PRETENDS
<https://tinyurl.com/vd882b37> _DavidShrigley

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MANUEL ÁLVAREZ BRAVO’S SOLITARY GAZE
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If you’re unfamiliar with Álvarez Bravo’s work, the show features some of his most famous images, printed during his lifetime, that together echo an erotic, dreamy vision of solitude; all but one depict lone figures. In my favorite, “Los perros durmiendo ladran o Los sueños han de creers (Sleeping Dogs Bark or Dreams are for Believing)” (1966), a little dog naps by himself in the sun, his reclining paws mirroring the diagonal posts of a propped-up fence. Human dreamers likewise abound, sleeping outside, as do beautiful young women who look away from the camera.
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The first — and only — image to really puncture this solitude is a portrait of Frida Kahlo. Photographed in the 1930s, she holds her chin high and gazes squarely at the camera. The dark, reflective crystal orb next to her throws the image back at us. Who is this really a portrait of? we’re made to ask.
The photographs are laden with such mystery that it’s easy to see why the Surrealists wanted to claim Álvarez Bravo as one of their own. The images are compositionally simple but symbolically complex, like minimalist poetry. _Hyperallergic

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/5bv4kuzp> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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ARTHUR JAFA’S VITAL NEW MUSEUM SURVEY IS A HORROR SHOW FOR THE AGES by Alex Greenberger
<https://tinyurl.com/3vn872f2>
In a self-portrait from 1988, Arthur Jafa holds his camera to a mirror and stares upward, meeting both his own reflected face and the gaze of his viewer simultaneously. When it was first published, the photograph was called Self-Portrait. But at some point, Jafa changed it to Monster, the title it holds today.
The renaming of Monster is, I think, a telling gesture, especially because Jafa’s films and videos are filled with terrifying creatures. Some are human, some are not, and most end up getting ignored, for whatever reason, by the critics and curators who write about Jafa’s oeuvre, which may just count as the most influential body of work produced by any living artist active today.
Think, for example, of Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), the video that is justly regarded as Jafa’s magnum opus. Across seven minutes, Jafa montages an astonishing array of visual material related to Black life in the US, from the police killing of Walter Scott to grainy footage of the Notorious B.I.G. rapping. Set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” the piece is typically regarded as a salute to the survival of Black Americans in spite of so much death and disaster. But Jafa also includes two appropriated movie clips that seem at odds with that notion: one showing the monster from Cloverfield, laying waste to New York City; the other showing the Xenomorph from Alien salivating before chowing down on its prey.
More monsters show up in APEX (2013), which features 841 images played in quick succession across eight and a half minutes. In between pictures of partially mutilated heads, faraway planets, and African masks, there is a picture of the poster for Jaws and a still from a “Lord of the Rings” movie showing Gollum, whose madness turned him into a scaly-skinned, sharp-toothed cave dweller. And even more monsters can be found in sculptural works such as LeRage (2017), which shows a grayscale version of the Incredible Hulk smashing his fist into the ground and sending debris flying.
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Given this horde of creatures, it’s possible to call Jafa’s art a horror show. Certainly, his recently opened survey, the exquisite “I Am Tony”\, makes the case that this is a fair description.
Curators have parceled nearly four decades’ worth of art across two floors casting much of the exhibition in inky darkness. Stare deep enough into the show’s abyss, and you will find a mix of terror and transcendence that is appropriate to Jafa’s oeuvre. I was only somewhat surprised to encounter the Xenomorph once more, this time in The Last Wave (2020), a wall-filling mural in which the alien is set alongside images of a solar eclipse, a New Order album cover, Michael Jackson performing, Billie Holliday in her coffin, and countless other visions.
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Billed as his largest show to date, the exhibition is a vital one for Jafa, whose route to the center of the art world was unconventional. Having been obsessed with movies since childhood, Jafa went on to make a significant contribution to film history during the 1990s, lensing features directed by Spike Lee, Julie Dash (to whom he was once married), and John Akomfrah. He also worked as a second-unit cinematographer on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. But Jafa’s exhibition, which is less a typical survey than an immersive project in its own right, shows that he was making art simultaneously, even when most mainstream galleries weren’t showing it.
The show largely elides the cinematic part of his career and focuses instead on his visual art, which it presents in a nonlinear manner. Visitors can, of course, find well-known works by Jafa, including The White Album (2019), the video essay about whiteness that won him the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. But these pieces do not form the show’s core. Love Is the Message, his most acclaimed work, is so deemphasized that it is relegated to a small side gallery, where its triumphant song can barely be heard amid his other videos’ screams and rumbles.
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The great revelation of the exhibition is Jafa’s early work, which begins the impulse toward horror seen throughout his more recent work. Notebooks (1988–2007), a series of binders featuring images appropriated from books, magazines, and other print sources, is given a hallway of its own. One of the binders combines an advertisement for an MF DOOM album and a photograph by Cindy Sherman that shows the artist maniacally smiling while wearing a silvery mask. The collage enacts an uneasy racial dynamic: MF DOOM was a Black rapper known for cloaking his face in metal, while Sherman is a white artist whose disguises have included blackface.
The sense of menace was continued more obliquely in 2002 with My Black Death, for which Jafa exhibited his own Pontiac Trans Am, part of which he crushed and left alongside the vehicle’s front half. Rarely exhibited and here remade with another Trans Am as MBD_Trans Am (2026), the piece is paired with an ominous booming sound that is both alluring and repellent.
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This collision of horror and beauty is key to Jafa’s work, which proposes terror as a basic condition of life. “For me personally, I think Black being is intrinsically bound up with horror,” Jafa once told the curator Helen Molesworth. “I don’t think you can get around it. It can’t be reconciled, or theorized away. One has to accept it, to live with it.” Or, as Simone White puts in the catalog for the Jafa show, the work evinces the line of thinking that “blackness cannot exist without terror. Including intrablack terror.” (She also notes that this conception of Blackness is “not a settled thing” among many thinkers, and goes on to praise Jafa for “the whiff of shit he stirs up in powerful circles of black criticism.”)
Jafa’s remarks to Molesworth may help explain his cryptic 2021 video AGHDRA, in which a computer-generated ocean churns on for well over an hour, its waters filled with broken rocks. Set beneath a gorgeous sun at what may either be dawn or dusk, this sea occasionally stutters and reverses before continuing to roll all over again. Like MBD_Trans Am, the video has a foreboding din for its score, except that in this case the horror is even more explicit. For what it’s worth, back in 2021, Jafa told me that the piece has its roots in a Godzilla movie he saw in Tokyo with his son and a friend.
<https://tinyurl.com/42yt58w8>
AGHDRA is presented in a large, dim gallery at the end of the show alongside a “Picture Unit,” a walk-in structure resembling a maze whose walls are lined with more scary imagery, including a vision of white eyes peeking out from a void. Neither AGHDRA nor the “Picture Unit” contain any of the monsters seen elsewhere in the exhibition, but they do not need to, either, to make their point. They are about the sense that danger lurks everywhere.
It’s a sentiment Jafa makes explicit with a metal plaque appended to a wall near the exhibition’s end. When I went to the show, I just about missed this work because of the lack of light, but once I saw the sculpture, I couldn’t unsee the words that it bears: “AMERICA IS A SATANIC CULT.” The true monsters are all around us. There is no escape. _ARTnews

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
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Remedios Varo The flautist _CarolinaAMiranda

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MARBLE SCULPTURE BY BAROQUE MASTER FOUND AT U.K. SALVAGE YARD
<https://tinyurl.com/5cjmcej5>
A small marble statue found at a U.K. salvage yard could fetch at auction after experts determined it to be the work of Pietro Bracci, the 18th-century Baroque sculptor.
The roughly two-foot-tall marble has been identified as the only surviving maquette for a bronze statue of Pope Clement XII cast by Francesco Giardoni. It once stood inside the Palazzo Nuovo, the Roman palace which the pontiff established in 1734 as the world’s first public art museum, the Capitoline Museums. That bronze was subsequently melted down during the fleeting French-imposed Roman Republic of the late 1790s. The only other surviving representation of Bracci’s work is an engraving by Stefano and Rocco Pozzi, artist brothers who were active in the middle of the 18th-century.
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“Bracci was one of the great sculptors of eighteenth-century Rome, and this extraordinary survivor offers a tangible connection to the world of the papal court and the artistic splendor of the period.”
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Bracci, who trained in Rome under the prominent sculptor Camillo Rusconi, is best known for carving the figure of Oceanus in the city’s Trevi Fountain. Pope Clement XII had launched a far-reaching program of architectural renewal and in the 1730s, Bracci enjoyed a sustained period of papal patronage. By the time of the Capitoline commission, he had already completed a larger statue of Pope Clement XII that was installed in the main square of Ravenna.
As offered in the Pozzi engraving, an inscription fronting the bronze celebrated the pope’s building projects and transformation of the Palazzo Nuovo. Bracci was a key part of this project having also worked on restoring ancient sculpture from the vast Capitoline collection. _artnet

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WALLS PAPER
<https://tinyurl.com/43eak8u2>
New Openings Against Old Surfaces focuses on Matta-Clark’s artist book practice, and its emergence from the 1972 exhibition at 112 Greene St where Walls Paper first incarnations appeared. Matta-Clark first showed his photos of exposed interior walls on newsprint, “in long newsprint strips from ceiling to floor, and a version offered in tall stacks that one could freely take and hang at home.” The sliced book version followed in 1973.
<https://tinyurl.com/46e7rh45> _greg.org

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HOW DID THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM BECOME HOME TO THE LARGEST DUCHAMP COLLECTION
When the Philadelphia Museum of Art debuts its expanded Marcel Duchamp exhibit in October, it will be part of the first major U.S. retrospective of the mysterious forefather of modern art in more than a half century.
Exploring the arc and range of the pioneering French American artist, who died in 1968, the show features 300 of Duchamp’s paintings, sculpture, film, photography, printed matter, design, and his unclassifiable works known as “readymades.”
The PMA show includes Duchamp’s most celebrated creations, including his 1912 painting, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), and his avant-garde masterpiece created between 1915 and 1923, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. On hand will be Duchamp’s last major art piece, Étant donnés, a 1966 experiential assemblage he had been working on in secret and intended for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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This is a once-in-a-50-years project,” said Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Matthew Affron.
The monumental show also marks an opportunity to celebrate the museum’s preeminent relationship with Duchamp — and its lasting legacy and impact on the modern art world. No other art institution in the world has deeper Duchamp roots than the PMA, where the artist first helped install his works in 1954.
Questioning the very definition of what art could be — he believed any ordinary object could be recontextualized as art — Duchamp broke the rules. But the artistic anarchist also maintained a decidedly rigid belief that his work should remain together on permanent display — in a monumental museum.
Duchamp played a critical role in making Philadelphia that home.
After leaving Paris and its WWI-era artistic repression and moving to New York in 1915, the artist befriended patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg. With Duchamp’s careful guidance, the couple would amass the most fulsome collection of his works, and those of his contemporaries, anywhere.
By the 1950s, Duchamp and his patrons had negotiated with museums, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the National Gallery in Washington, before being wooed by the PMA’s forward-looking director, Sidney Fiske Kimball.
Recognizing Duchamp’s boundary-busting potential, Kimball offered what Duchamp wanted: space and control. Lots of it.
“By the 1950s, Duchamp was becoming a forefather for modern artists,” said Affron. “Fiske was determined to be able to place a major section of modern art within the building.”
Kimball displayed the Arensbergs’ gifted collection in a wing of the still-unfinished museum building on the Parkway, which he helped open in 1928.
Along with other abstract and cubist works, the Arensberg collection helped form the foundation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 75 years.
“It’s one of the greatest collections of modern art in an art museum,” Affron said.
The unusually intimate relationship between artist and institution — the museum’s permanent display includes 200 Duchamp works and extensive archives — helped shape the artist’s legacy and established the Philadelphia Museum of Art as an essential destination for modern art pilgrims.
Under Duchamp’s direction, the museum initially displayed his works alongside those of contemporaries, like Picasso, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, Georges Braque, and Francis Picabia. Many of those works, also amassed by the Arensbergs, were on display at the museum’s temporary show, “Marcel Duchamp, Curator,” <https://tinyurl.com/2yh3jtn4> which ran through July 12.
Curating the forthcoming retrospective with MoMA collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Affron said he strove to present a faithful chronology of Duchamp’s work, including replica versions of his own art that he produced later in life.
“One of the game-changing things Duchamp did was put into the question the value of original works of art,” Affron said. “He found a way of working between the originals and copies and when you lay his work out, you start to get a very interesting echo effect.”
It only makes sense for it all to be back at Duchamp’s spiritual home — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he said.
“We are doing our job of taking care of his legacy,” the curator said. _Mike Newall,_PhiladelphiaInquirer

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PIERRE-ERNEST PRINS, ÉDOUARD MANET ON HIS DEATHBED, C. 1883
<https://tinyurl.com/yayc8zd4> _MichaelLobel

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186. HOOVER DAM by Rainey Knudson
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Its builders compared it to the Egyptian pyramids. It was designed to last for millennia, and indeed, it’s likely that the dam—ruins at that point—will still be standing tens of thousands of years from now. It contains enough concrete to run a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York City; its “grout curtain” seals the bedrock beneath up to 150 feet deep. Had water pipes not been run through the concrete as it was poured, it would have taken 125 years to cool. As it is, it continues to slowly harden and strengthen to this day.
From the outset, there was a grandeur about Hoover Dam, a sense of holy-cow-look-at-this-impossible-thing-we’re-building—a monument to the idea that nature is negotiable, always, no matter the cost. Officially, 96 workers died during construction, but that number doesn’t include deaths from heat stroke in temperatures up to 140 degrees. The water captured from the Colorado River irrigated 1,500,000 new acres, with a billion gallons daily going “to wash southern California faces and water southern California lawns.”1
Oskar J.W. Hansen, the sculptor behind the dam’s Art Deco plaza, designed a celestial map in the terrazzo floor. It pinpoints the dedication date within the span of the 26,000-year Great Year, as the planet’s axis traces a circular path in space.2
This thing we made, this giant, smooth rock fitted neatly into a canyon, has triggered earthquakes and bent the Earth’s crust toward the south. It is geology.
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<https://tinyurl.com/mrxdvafd> _TheImpatientReader

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ROYAL THEATER ARCHER CITY, TX
<https://tinyurl.com/d8erae2n> _RuralIndexingProject

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A LOOK AT THE MUSEUM AUDIENCE…
The American Alliance of Museums is out to nuance the results of its own findings that the core museum audience is way whiter (84 percent white) and better educated (83 percent with a college or advanced degree) than the U.S. population as a whole. Editor Diamond Alexander notes that the sample of the AAM’s Annual Survey of Museum-Goers is biased towards “frequent” visitors. She argues that when you look at the broader pool of more casual attendees—people who visit a museum, perhaps, just once a year—the totals get a bit more diverse. She also notes that Asian Americans are about 10 percent more likely than any other demographic group to visit museums. _artnet

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GEORGES DE LA TOUR, THE CHEAT WITH THE ACE OF CLUBS, C. 1630-34 (
Someone's been looking at Caravaggio.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrxu5xvf> _JesseLocker

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SPIELBERG LOANS AT LUCAS by William Poundstone
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Steven Spielberg is apparently the uncredited lender of three Norman Rockwell paintings at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. In 2010 the Smithsonian American Art Museum presented a joint exhibition of Lucas' and Spielberg's Rockwell collections <http://tiny.cc/m4db101> . The show's website is still active, and it identifies three paintings and one drawing in the LMNA installation as being owned by Spielberg. They are Happy Birthday, Miss Jones, The Connoisseur, The Jury, and a finished preparatory drawing for Triple Self-Portrait. The Lucas labels credit these works to a "private collection."
Spielberg and Lucas have been friends since they met at USC film school in 1967. Spielberg also collects movie memorabilia and has lent one of the original "Rosebud" sleds from Citizen Kane to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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MARLENE DUMAS SELF PORTRAIT AT NOON, 2008
<https://tinyurl.com/bdebppc2> _RabihAlameddine

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WHITNEY MUSEUM UNION SETS STRIKE DATE
Unionized staff at the Whitney Museum of American Art are preparing to strike starting Monday, October 5, if they don’t reach what they consider a fair contract with the museum.
After voting earlier this month to authorize strike action in conjunction with the Brooklyn Museum and American Folk Art Museum unions, the Whitney union has timed its deadline around the preview week for late Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s retrospective,
This time around, staff are calling on the museum to ensure that the base salary rate for full-time employees meets the minimum figure for a single, childless adult to live sustainably in New York City: ~$71,000, as calculated in a City Hall report on the cost of living published earlier this year. _Hyperallergic

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IT IS STAR TREK DAY!
<https://tinyurl.com/33b9cn2b> _Peter Huestis