Triphop's Universe

It is a tough concept to grasp - that a painting is still a painting even at the moment it is being painted over. But there it was, Wednesday morning, a set of two-story wall drawings by Sol LeWitt being primed in white and rolled over with heavy gray.

There went the two most prominent pieces of art in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the only one viewable without the encumbrance of buying a $12.50 ticket. The paintings, "Wall Drawing #935" and "Wall Drawing #936," each measuring 29 by 32 feet, had been there on temporary display that lasted eight years. The panels, one stripes and one arcs in a repeating pattern of yellow, purple, green, orange, red and blue, fit so well on either side of the black granite staircase that LeWitt had become wallpaper.

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The wall drawings were never meant to last this long, according to SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels. He should know, because he commissioned them in the first place, as the marquee to a LeWitt retrospective in 1999. They instantly seemed to belong in the atrium, and late benefactor Phyllis Wattis purchased them in 2000 as a going-away gift for Garrels when he decamped for five years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, followed by three at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Garrels has come back as Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture. He was reinstalled this month, only to find that those LeWitts still hadn't been de-installed. The timing was coincidental. Early this year, a caucus of curators at SFMOMA decided to reinvigorate the entryway.

"Some people have already expressed disappointment that they will be painted out," he said. "If people want to blame me, that's fine. But I had no part in the decision."

Garrels does not concern himself with the vagaries of market value, but Jeffrey Fraenkel of Fraenkel Gallery, which works closely with the LeWitt estate, said, "Those two wall drawings are major works that summarize several of LeWitt's ideas. Something like that would almost certainly be in the seven-figure range."

The seven figures are in a certificate of sole right to reproduce. This is what the museum owns, and it can have "Wall Drawings #935" and "#936" repainted at any time anywhere in any size, so long as it is to scale, and the artist's written instructions are followed. LeWitt's own brushwork never was part of the program. He didn't touch anything, and never insinuated that he did.

"The art part of it is LeWitt's concept, and the concept is documented" says Fraenkel, who has a LeWitt wall drawing in his home. "No LeWitt drawings have been done by him. They have always been painted by his assistants."

LeWitt, who died last year at 78, is still creating art. At the same time the two wall drawings at SFMOMA are being obliterated, 100 more are going up at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. These will take up more wall space - nearly an acre of it, covering three stories of a mill building - and last longer: 25 years. The LeWitt industry at work can be seen at www.massmoca.org.

"The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system" was how LeWitt put it. "The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance."

via San Francisco Chronicle

A mesostic is a poem or other typography such that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text. Similar to an acrostic, but with the vertical phrase intersecting the middle of the line, as opposed to beginning each new line.

The practice of using of using index words to select pieces from a preexisting text was developed by Jackson Mac Low as "diastics". It was used extensively by the experimental composer John Cage (Walsh 2001).

I just don't get how this guy can stay "legit," especially by continuing to align himself with an event like this. From TimesOnline:

Roll up! Roll up! The Banksy tombola has arrived, aimed at Hollywood stars, billionaire financiers and anyone else who can afford to blow £5,000 on a raffle ticket.

For that, the buyer and a friend gain admission to a disused factory in Bloomsbury, Central London, where, for one night only, there will be drink, strippers and a very remote chance of walking away with an original work by the world’s most ruthlessly marketed guerrilla artist.

The “Extravaganza” is timed to coincide with the phenomenally successful Frieze contemporary art fair in London next month. The Lazarides Gallery in Soho put 250 of the eye-wateringly expensive tickets up for sale yesterday - evidence that the upper end of the contemporary art market is as yet unscathed by talk of the worst economic slump in 60 years

. . .

However, it is the Lazarides Extravaganza that looks set to trump every other show in town for sheer ostentation. Ralph Taylor, a director of the gallery, said: “It’s a risk for us and it’s a bit of a gamble for the ticket buyers, but that’s part of the fun. This kind of one-off is the way that we do business.”

Each ticket holder will receive a minor original work from one of the gallery’s artists: Jonathan Yeo, Antony Micallef, Paul Insect, JR or the New York collective Faile. They also have a one in ten chance of landing a work by these artists and four others, including Banksy, who has two pieces in the tombola.

One of them is a defaced 19th-century oil painting entitled System Error which the gallery values at about £300,000. The other is Sketch for Essex Road, which shows two children pledging allegiance to a Tesco carrier bag on a flagpole.