OLD NEWS

IT'S INTERNATIONAL FACE AND BODY ART DAY!
The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas,
depicted by George Catlin, 1844-45:
<https://tinyurl.com/ycxpm6c5> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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JERRY MCMILLAN, WHIMSICAL CHRONICLER OF LA’S ART SCENE, DIES AT 89 by Matt Stromberg
<https://tinyurl.com/5nf4jprh>
Photographer Jerry McMillan, who played a key role in documenting the mid-century art scene in Los Angeles, died on Monday, February 9, at the age of 89. The cause was “old age and a broken heart,” according to his son. McMillan’s wife of more than six decades, Patricia Ella McMillan, had passed away a week earlier.
Born on December 7, 1936, McMillan grew up in Oklahoma City, where he was childhood friends with Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode. In 1957, he drove to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), joining Ruscha, Goode, and fellow Okie transplants Patrick Blackwell and Mason Williams. The group lived together in Hollywood, then Los Feliz, and dubbed themselves the “Students Five.”
After graduating, McMillan emerged as one of the preeminent chroniclers of the emerging LA art world, photographing his friends and other artists, especially those in the orbit of seminal Ferus Gallery, including Ed Kienholz, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin.
“So much of what we know about the LA art scene in that era is from Jerry’s photos,” Andrew Perchuck, interim director of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), which acquired McMillan’s photographic archives from the 1960s and ’70s in 2015, told
<https://tinyurl.com/5azeva6k>
Beyond simply documenting his era, McMillan was instrumental in shaping the public personas of artists, often capturing them in scenes of “whimsically staged role-playing” as the GRI notes. He photographed Ruscha as a sailor, cowboy, and a shirtless, flexing beefcake, cheekily playing up various facets of his hyper-masculine facade. In “Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys” (1967), the artist-as-casanova appears in bed, sandwiched between two sleeping women. The image was used in the artist’s wedding announcement in Artforum.
“Because Joe and Ed were from Oklahoma, everyone assumed they were cowboys,” Perchuk told Hyperallergic, noting that McMillan leaned into the stereotype with his posed photos. “Jerry didn’t know how to ride a horse. They were urban kids from Oklahoma City.”
Besides portraying the all-male artists of Ferus Gallery’s “cool school,” McMillan took iconic photographs of women artists, including Barbara T. Smith and Judy Chicago. To announce Chicago’s name change in 1970 — she adopted her birth city as her last name — McMillan rented a boxing ring and captured her wearing a shirt bearing her new moniker and boxing gloves. Chicago stares back at the camera, stone-faced, a fighter who could hold her own in the male-dominated art world.
<https://tinyurl.com/2wcuwtz3>
McMillan was also responsible for the controversial image that accompanied the War Babies exhibition at LA’s Huysman Gallery in 1961, a notable early multi-racial exhibition. In McMillan’s photo, the four artists sit around a table draped with a United States flag, each eating a stereotypical food: African-American artist Ed Bereal with a watermelon, Catholic Joe Goode holding a mackerel, Ron Miyashiro (who is Hawaiian-Japanese American) posing with chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and Jewish artist Larry Bell with a bagel. A poster that featured the photo was widely disseminated, garnering attacks from the right for its supposed desecration of the flag, and from the left for its portrayal of ethnic stereotypes.
<https://tinyurl.com/4cz5ek9j>
At the same time that he was creating these photographs of fellow Angeleno artists, McMillan was pushing the boundaries of the medium with his pioneering photo-sculptures. “He really set out to philosophically examine what a photograph is and could be,” Craig Krull, told . “Does a photo have to be on paper? Does it have to be a picture of something?”
His first photo-sculpture was “Patty as Container” (1963), a box printed with images of his pregnant wife on all sides. He continued to innovate, printing photos on copper forms resembling paper bags, or etching the delicate forms of palm trees and cactuses onto sheets of metal.
McMillan’s three-dimensional photo works were included in a 1966 show at the Pasadena Art Museum curated by Walter Hopps, the institution’s first exhibition dedicated to a photographer, and in the groundbreaking 1970 exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His most recent show was held at Craig Krull Gallery last year.
Perchuk cites the artist’s early photo-sculptural experiments as majorly influential works that helped to usher photography, once considered a second-class medium, into the realm of fine art, a development often associated with a later generation of artists, such as those of the Pictures Generation.
“Jerry was doing that move of turning photography into a fine art object a decade earlier,” Perchuk said.
McMillan is survived by his children Jerry Jr., Heather, and Jennifer, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. _Hyperallergic

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PLACE
<https://tinyurl.com/sdnetypb> _DavidShrigley

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THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS: SEURAT AND THE SEA by Adrian Searle
<https://tinyurl.com/y7362dtk>
Georges Seurat died young. His two most famous paintings, both extremely large and innovative in their composition and technique, were completed while he was still in his mid-20s. As it was, Seurat painted approximately 45 paintings before his death, probably from diphtheria, in March 1891 when he was 31. More than half these works depict the Channel coast and sea and were completed on his summer trips between 1885 and 1890.
<https://tinyurl.com/32cauwtk>
Even if one takes on board the artist’s claims to science, objectivity and his adherence to theories about colour and perception which distance him from impressionism, Seurat’s paintings are peculiar and strange. Sometimes his line is very odd and stiff, yet his drawings themselves – tonal studies worked in conté crayon on textured, laid paper, are among the most marvellous I can think of. It is clear Seurat knew what he was doing; who knows what he might have gone on to achieve?
<https://tinyurl.com/m9w97kwk>
For all his adherence to the juxtaposition of discrete dots and strokes of pure colour rather than mixed pigments, in order that the human eye would register transitional colours and that the surfaces of his paintings would retain a naturalistic luminosity, Seurat sometimes went overboard with his borders of dots that he added to paintings often years after the original compositions were completed (and which to my eye add little). These strongly and often darkly coloured painted frames, devised and painted by the artist, have now mostly been discarded and lost.
<https://tinyurl.com/yr4t3ew2>
As for what came to be called Seurat’s pointillism, his cumulative little strokes and pustules of pigment, which make one aware of the effort and the artifice of his technique, sometimes you sense a kind of veil of interference between yourself and the image. In his small studies, usually painted on little wooden panels, the scale of his marks makes each individual touch count – both in terms of tonality and in its colour value – in the construction of an image. In Seurat’s larger paintings, when the artist is working his way across the undifferentiated expanse of a sandy beach, grass on a clifftop or slack water in a harbour, all that painstaking effort can feel plodding.
<https://tinyurl.com/bde7dktn>
But when it all comes together, as it often does, that labour turns into something else, and Seurat’s largely emptied-out and unpeopled everyday scenes take on a quivering psychological sense of import. Real or not, you feel his fixation and his stare. There’s something going on beyond the sunny day, the light striking the harbour wall and glinting on the unruffled water, the boat out in the offing, the water stretching away to meet the sky, the bollard by the wall, the stanchions and other bits of metalwork beside a working harbour: everything is happening everywhere all at once, but it all takes time to register.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3he88c>
There is also a great deal of pleasure to be found in the anomalies and sometimes puzzling decisions Seurat made. He could be as capricious as he was analytical. The blue sky on one side of The Lighthouse at Honfleur is less saturated than on the other. The view of a regatta at Grandcamp is interrupted by a fabulously unkempt and profuse patch of shrubbery, which creates a terrific foil for the orange jib on the boat just entering the painting to its left. These are the sort of wilful incidents someone might introduce to give pleasure to another painter. Seurat worked with, and played with, the given. But he was careful to paint the brimming brightness of the Channel coast on fine days when the weather had not moved in and the sea and sky became the colour of lead. On those days, I suppose, he stayed in and worked on his drawings and his yet unfinished canvases.
<https://tinyurl.com/xtxtjvx>
The new semaphore on its clifftop gantry at Port-en-Bessin sits in the top left-hand corner of the canvas, almost out of view, so that the eye almost clambers to find it. The entire series of six paintings Seurat completed in Port-en-Bessin, north of Bayeux, in the summer of 1888 have been bought back together for the first time since an exhibition in Brussels the following year. One gets a sense of the artist wandering the small town alone, noticing things. The pennants and French flags flapping wildly on the masts of boats moored in the inner harbour, while the water itself is perfectly calm. A few stick-like figures crossing a bridge in the distance. Another view, from the other side of the bridge, shows three figures in the foreground, a man walking, head down, a woman carrying a pannier, and a small child, alone and as stilted as a mannequin. Other solitaries loiter about in the distance, as casual as they are posed. There’s an air of the impending, of something about to happen. In another painting we are up on the cliff, observing the same scene from yet another point of view, and in another, we turn to watch sailing boats pass between lovely ovoid pools of shadow cast on the water by small clouds which we can’t see.
<https://tinyurl.com/3uucrzys>
All the while I think of Seurat, another solitary, with his portable, handheld paint box and a little panel, on which he lays out the scene, wedged into its lid. You think of him painting the light, but he is just as interested in the topography, the shapes of things, the bollards and lamp-posts, the new bridge and the cast-iron pillared fish market. Two summers later, in 1890, the artist is at Gravelines, a flat coastal area between Calais and Dunkirk. By now, his paintings are prickling and erupting with his little painted dots. The North Sea light is milky, turned down a notch from his summers farther south. A boat moves down the Channel at evening. There’s no one about in this violet hour, the sun gone, only the man on the boat and, I suppose, the painter following its progress.
<https://tinyurl.com/46sbszmh>
Seurat’s paintings are full of things – light, colour, objects and atmosphere and a sense of place, but what he has most of all is a wonderful feel for emptiness. It is there in the lassitude of the National Gallery’s Bathers at Asnières <https://tinyurl.com/3z67872f> (1884), and in the crowded stylisations of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte <https://tinyurl.com/yjuvs59x> (1884-6) just as much as it is in the seascapes. Sometimes I think I’m watching Seurat’s paintings as much as I’m looking at them, weaving through them, unseen and unnoticed, between his blizzards of light. _GuardianUK

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4xy7k25p> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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RACHEL WHITEREAD HOLE PUNCH
<https://tinyurl.com/yc73cymn>
These Rachel Whiteread postcards are like a jpg jumpscare. I’ve never seen one IRL, but I have to think they’re immediately legible as hole punched objects. When rephotographed, though, the lighting and shadows somehow short circuit my brain.
<https://tinyurl.com/44vku3fs>
The first/only/other ones I’d seen were in 2019, in a Notre Dame fundraising show at Gagosian Paris. And the caption identifying them as hole punches had to drag me across the line. 2019 was also when the 2005 postcard up top was in an artist postcards show at the British Museum, so a big year for Whiteread postcards._greg.org

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CLAUDE CAHUN & MARCEL MOORE.
they not only produced a body of remarkable photos together
but also heroically resisted the Nazis on Isle of Jersey during WWII
<https://tinyurl.com/5xntumkc>
Cahun is now known as the subject of a fascinating series of photos
that look forward to work of contemporary photographers like Cindy Sherman & Gillian Wearing.
<https://tinyurl.com/jnkh3ush>
Less widely recognized is that the photos were product of intense collaboration between Cahun & Moore
<https://tinyurl.com/mr4x2zat>
In November 1944 Cahun & Moore
were tried and convicted of undermining German forces
and sentenced to death, and their bank accounts and property were confiscated.
While the Germans never carried out the executions,
Cahun & Moore were imprisoned and released only after the war's end
<https://tinyurl.com/374e7jcj>

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THE (UN)DAILY PIC
<https://tinyurl.com/fxesr7mh>
is a view onto the light table at the heart of “Mammoth,” Nick Cave’s show that opens Friday By virtue of being filled with craft objects, like the ones favored by Cave’s female relations, the whole show is working through ideas of the feminine. That seems especially important in a museological context, that has tended to be built around the machismo typical of American science, anthropology and even art history. (Even though women often dominate museum staff, especially in art institutions.) As is typical of our moment, issues of gender and sexism — which affect and oppress half the world’s population — get mostly ignored in the exhibition’s catalog essays, whose (female authors) dwell instead on race and climate change.

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I HAVE THE SAME DREAM EVERY NIGHT
<https://tinyurl.com/4k8cjt6t> _DeanKissick

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29. QWERTY KEYBOARD by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/5d5ur8r2>
Nobody really knows why the keys are placed as they are. One theory says that letters that commonly go together are spaced apart because the early typewriters had those tiny bars that tangled as they sprang up against the paper. But if that’s true, why are E and R next to each other? And why are so many oft-used letters on the left side? Thousands of words can be spelled with the left hand only, but only a couple hundred with the right hand.
Still, QWERTY’s origin is less mysterious than why it has survived. Its inventor didn’t believe in it; a year before his death he filed a patent for a different, better layout. Yet factories and offices fell into place around an arrangement that maybe was designed for translating Morse code, or for salesmen pecking “TYPEWRITER” on one row, or that just emerged, strange and unintuitive, through trial and error. It has long since fossilized into cultural norm, an omnipresent aspect of our environment.
And from the 1874 Sholes and Gidden typewriter to IBM Selectric, Word, and AI, every iteration of the technology makes writing faster. How nice it would be if technological efficiency equaled intellectual and creative efficiency. But whether we compose longhand or on a computer—hands hovering to find F and J, to form whatever words we need—none of it speeds up good writing. Good writing takes time, takes polishing until, we hope, it shines. And then, pinky hovering over “return”, we must Send. _TheImpatientReader

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THE ALTERNATIVE SHOP FREMONT, NC
<https://tinyurl.com/yz9mbnjj> _RuralIndexingProject

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GARDNER MUSEUM’S STOLEN REMBRANDT IS NOT IN THE EPSTEIN FILES
A video by Instagrammer Emily Kaplan (whose handle is @newsnotnoise and whose slogan is “Truth > Agenda”), in which she says that two artworks stolen decades ago from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum show up in a tax estate document released by the U.S. Justice Department as part of the millions of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I think I just solved the biggest art heist in the world using the Epstein files,” says Kaplan, apparently not one who is given to understatement (she doesn’t specify who robbed the museum or where the artworks are, but, you know, details!). At the time of publication, the video had earned nearly 38,000 likes and been reposted more than 2,400 times and shared more than 18,000 times. _ARTnews

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ANNIBALE CARRACCI, DIANA AND ENDYMION, 1597-1602,
Francesco Albani wrote,
“When Annibale was alive, I heard him say that he wanted to redo his Diana,
observing that it seemed as if she was plucking lice off her beloved Endymion.
<https://tinyurl.com/4bexk2xd> _JesseLocker

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DON COLOSSUS,’ A GOLDEN STATUE OF PRESIDENT TRUMP, WAITS FOR ITS HOME
<https://tinyurl.com/s4ppa97j>
It’s known as “Don Colossus.”
At 15 feet tall, the statue of President Trump, mounted on its 7,000-pound pedestal, is about the height of a two-story building — a giant effigy cast in bronze and finished with a thick layer of gold leaf.
For more than a year, the golden statue has been at the center of one of the stranger moneymaking ventures of the Trump era. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid $300,000 to have a sculptor create it as a tribute to Mr. Trump, an outspoken crypto proponent.
Then they used it to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT.
Now, improbably, the project appears close to fruition. A pedestal made of concrete and stainless steel was installed last month on the grounds of Mr. Trump’s golf complex in Doral, Fla. Pastor Mark Burns, one of the organizers of the effort and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, told his collaborators that the president planned to attend the statue’s unveiling there,
<https://tinyurl.com/mskt6vbp>
Nearly everyone in the crypto world has tried to profit from the Trump presidency, striking business deals with his family or seeking regulatory relief from his administration. But few have attempted it as boldly as the backers of $PATRIOT.
A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency with hardly any function beyond speculation. It’s usually based on a viral joke or celebrity mascot, and worth only as much as online fans are willing to pay. The crucial ingredient is internet hype, enough to convince potential buyers that the price will keep going up.
The construction of a giant statue was an expensive way to gin up social media excitement. But it was a potentially profitable plan. The investors who financed the statue were given stashes of the coins, which can sometimes skyrocket in value, according to one of the project organizers. For months, the backers of “Don Colossus” posted work-in-progress images and forged alliances in the MAGA world, with the aim of securing a marketing coup — a spot for the statue on an official Trump property.
The $PATRIOT coin went on sale in late 2024 and briefly surged, as Mr. Trump promised to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.” At an event in Washington during inauguration weekend, the coin’s backers presented a bronze miniature of the statue to Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, and mingled with other conservative influencers.
But delays and infighting have marred the venture, offering a window into the volatile world of memecoins, which are plagued by scams that often end up costing investors money. The $PATRIOT coin’s price cratered last year, losing nearly all its value. As the coin’s backers rushed to finish the statue and boost coin sales, they clashed with their Ohio-based sculptor, Alan Cottrill. Mr. Cottrill said he was owed $75,000 for the intellectual property rights to the statue.
“You are using my copyrighted image in marketing your token!” he wrote to one of the coin’s backers last month.
“Yes lol as we planned to from day 1,” replied Ashley Sansalone, a crypto developer who worked on $PATRIOT, as well as a separate coin called Elon GOAT.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdenbdmb>
In a statement, Mr. Sansalone said that Mr. Cottrill would be paid in full before the statue was unveiled. “Under any business agreement, there’s always some funds withheld until the finished product is complete,” he said.
But it is not clear when the statue will go on display.
on Monday, the president’s son Eric Trump posted about it on X.
“We appreciate the support and enthusiasm,” he said, “but we want to be crystal clear — we are not involved in this coin.” _NYTimes

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NATURE AT WORK MAKING BIRDS, ANIMALS, AND PEOPLE ON HER ANVIL, CIRCA 1405,
<https://tinyurl.com/3b2n5vcx> _JesseLocker
GOD FORBID A WOMAN HAVE HOBBIES
‪_maimonides nutz‬

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MAGNUS IN DOHA = ART FAIR DISASTER by Theartdaddy
As if this week hadn’t already been enough, we had Magnus Resch clout chasing his way through Basel Qatar. The week before he was being offensive in Davos, and now we’ve unlocked Magnus: Middle East edition, which somehow managed to be even more offensive. Sometimes dealing with the men of this industry feels like Dante’s Inferno. Just when you think there can’t possibly be another level of hell, they meet you there and then raise the antics. Magnus did not disappoint.
What we got in Doha was what I can now confidently call cringe high art, a new term I have coined. A reel earnestly explaining why Basel Qatar might be the solution to the failing art world system. Clout chasing posts with German social media influencer heiresses. And then the most offensive move of all, Magnus attempting to take credit for introducing a female artist in the fair to Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
<https://tinyurl.com/5pt757d3>
What the actual fuck, Magnus. You can barely skim the Basel report and now you are positioning yourself as the art whisperer, introducing a former PS1 MoMA director and one of the most established curators, critics, and historians in the field to an artist. Okay. Let me know when I should start taking artist hot takes from you too, since you apparently spend so much time in studios and know people’s practices better than they do.
I am still gagging at the audacity of that post. The confidence. The delusion. The entitlement. Daddy remains firm in the position that Magnus should be banned from art fairs and possibly voted out of the industry altogether. At the very least, someone needs to take his phone away. _Theartdaddy

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IIT'S NATIONAL SLED DOG DAY!
Photograph by Bradford Washburn, Mt. Stanford, Alaska, 1938,
<https://tinyurl.com/3wzaknru> _‪PeterHuestis‬