Better Read

I looked at the episode numbers and thought it must be a mistake, but no, there hasn’t been a Better Read since 2021. But I’ve used a Sturtevant text before, in a way; in 2016, I had a computer read several pages of Spinoza’s Ethica, a text Sturtevant included in Vertical Nomad, which she showed at Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 2008. This is closer to Sturtevant’s Ethica. It is a presentation she made in 2007 at Inherent Vice, a workshop at Tate Modern on the subject and implications of the replica to contemporary art. Download Better_Read_039_Sturtevant_Tate_20230709.mp3 [greg.org, mp3, 6.4mb, 6:42]

A screenshot of the artwork to which ten McRib NFTs point, and to which no owner of the NFTs have any right, claim, or permission to engage with in any way. image via rarible.com Eight years ago, I was inspired by Ian Bogost’s article on the McRib to create a video work, untitled (where we all go), about art, love, and the inevitability of death. Bogost’s theory that the rare, seasonal appearance of the obviously artificial McRib sandwich helped to normalize the equally artificial McNuggets we see every day. This dynamic, I thought, also describes how the occasional spectacle of blockbuster art auctions create an economic logic for the rest of the art market all the way down the pricing pyramid. This same scheme is now in full effect in the NFT space. Pyramids merged yesterday when McDonald’s launched a one-week Twitter sweepstakes to promote the return of McRib by giving away ten “McRib NFTs.” At the time of posting, it has received over 81,000 retweet entries. This edition of Better Read features an abridged version of McDonald’s McRib Social Sweepstakes Official Rules [updated to archive.org link] and of the Terms and Conditions for McRib NFT on Rarible.com, where interested bidders have already offered 0.011 WETH, more than twice the initial market value suggested by McDonald’s. Because I am never under any illusion that anyone listens all the way through these things, I will not be spoiling anything by telling you how this ends, which is that McDonald’s, Rarible, and any and all of their crew, “will have no liability whatsoever for, and shall be held harmless against, any liability for any injuries, losses or damages of any kind, including death, to persons, or property resulting in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, from acceptance of the NFT.” listen to or download Better Read No. 037, McRib NFT [greg.org, 25:10, mp3, 12.8mb]

detail, Robert Rauschenberg, Autobiography, 1968, 5×4′, offset lithographic print, ed. 2000 The middle of three 5 x 4-ft offset lithograph panels in Robert Rauschenberg’s Autobiography contains a dizzying spiral of text featuring key moments of the artist’s life, as well as an extensive list of artworks. Robert Rauschenberg, Autobiography, 1968, 5 x 12 ft overall, ed. 2000 When Oliver mentioned it on twitter the other day, I realized I’d never actually made it through the entire text. Now I have. I transcribed it here for this robot to read. Download better-read-30_rr_autobiography_20190722.mp3 [greg.org, 6.9mb, 14:26] previously, related: From Robert Rauschenberg’s 1968 Autobiography

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1989, Installation view, 2019, by and via Public Art Fund For the 30th anniversary of its original installation and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, Public Art Fund reinstalled Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ first billboard work, “Untitled” (1989) at its original site facing Sheridan Square in the West Village. Until today, the Guggenheim also exhibited “Untitled” (1991), a stack sculpture made from 161 unsold prints originally made to support the Public Art Fund project. This edition of Better Read is the text of the billboard, plus the artist’s statement. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (1989) [publicartfund.org] Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (1991) [guggenheim.org]

Jenny Holzer projection for the Biennale di Firenze, 1996, photo: Attilio Maranzano via jennyholzer.com Jenny Holzer made her first xenon projection in 1996 as part of a collaboration with Helmut Lang for the Biennale di Firenze. As Lang would describe it, the text, Arno, was projected from a canoe club across the river onto the facade of a brothel. [The 19th/20th c. Palazzo Bargagli held the offices of Corierre della Serra, at least. That’s all I’ve found.] In 1998 Jenny Holzer told Joan Simon that the text for Arno originated in a music video for Red, Hot + Dance, which was a 1992 AIDS/HIV fundraiser concert/album. Mark Pellington, the MTV producer/director she mentioned, had done an MTV segment on Holzer, but he was also involved in producing U2’s ZOO TV, which had a video wall full of Truism-like texts that kind of pissed Holzer off. Anyway, there are no Arno-esque texts in the Red, Hot video. “The texts involve all the reasons to be naked or clothed — from sex to humiliation and murder,” said co-curator Ingrid Sischy to Amy Spindler. The Florence projection only ran for a few days in September, during the opening of the Biennale–and Pitti–but the text remained as LED columns in a Lucky Charms marshmallowy pavilion by Arata Isozaki, which was also where visitors could experience the fragrance Lang and Holzer developed together, that smelled, as they said often, like cigarettes, starch, and sperm. Arata Isozaki pavilions at the Forte Belvedere, Biennale di Firenze, 1996, image: gabbelini sheppard [The six other pairings of artists & designers were: Tony Cragg & Karl Lagerfeld (lmao); Roy Lichtenstein & Gianni Versace; Julian Schnabel & Azzedine Alaia (which wut?); Mario Merz & Jil Sander (which, same, wtf); Oliver Herring & Rei Kawakubo (hmm); and Damien Hirst & Miuccia Prada (chef kissing fingers emoji).] Holzer adapted the Arno text again for her 1998 nine-LED column permanent installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Catalan excerpts of it are also engraved in two large benches there now. As we all know by now, a scrolling LED is a helluva way to take in a text, so it was interesting when Helmut Lang posted an image of the complete [English] text for Holzer’s Arno to Instagram last night. It turns out embedding it in a stream of emoji-filled comments read by a computer is also a helluva way to take in a text, but here we are.

Applied Ballardianism, by Simon Sellars, published June 2018 by Urbanomic This, the 23rd installment of Better Read, texts that are better read aloud by a computer, was inspired by a @ballardian tweet. It is the table of contents of Simon Sellars’ new sort-of-a-novel-sort-of-a-memoir, Applied Ballardianism, which is out this month from Urbanomic. As I type that out, I fear I transcribed it as Urbanomics. Fortunately, probably no one will listen to this. I should’ve kept my trap shut. [update: I did not.] https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/better_read_023_ballardianism_20180611.mp3 Order Simon Sellars’ Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe for £18.99 from Urbanomic or as an e-pub book from lulu. [urbanomic, lulu]

Artist Joy Thomas and the John Brysons posing with his official Commerce Secretary portrait, Sept. 2012. image: joythomasart.com As Artnet reported last week, in the wake of the unprecedented popularity of the National Portrait Gallery’s new portraits of the Obamas, Donald Trump signed a law banning the use of federal funds for painted portraits of government officials and employees. As the Obamas’ portraits were funded with private donations, the law would have no effect. The text in this edition is the law, S.188, first sponsored by Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who took issue with the commissioning of a $22,400 portrait of an Obama-era cabinet official who stepped down before the portrait was even finished to recover from a severe car accident. It bans federal funds being used “for the painting of a portrait of an officer or employee of the Federal Government,” and then goes on to specify the Executive and Legislative organizations to which the law applies. There is no specific mention of the law’s applying to the Judicial branch of the federal government, or to unmentioned independent entities like the Smithsonian, NASA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Federal Reserve Bank, just to name four that come to mind. But perhaps the ban on any Federal employee is broad enough. The implications for this law are as yet unknown. Perhaps it will lead to an expansion of photography-based portraiture, including, hypothetically, portraits by artists that rival the expense of paintings. Perhaps artists will create official paintings that are somehow not technically portraits, or at least not representational. Scott Pruitt could be depicted by a painted picture of the $25,000 concrete phone booth he had installed in his EPA office, for example. Or Ryan Zinke could be included as a small but still recognizable figure dwarfed by the active face of a giant, publicly subsidized coal stripmine. Perhaps artists will paint the portrait for free with purchase of a frame, or a $31,000 office dining set, or a $125,000 door. Perhaps lobbyists, corporations, or others who wish to ingratiate themselves with a government official will donate their extravagantly expensive portraits, or commission them from the official’s dabbling wife. Perhaps painters will donate the portrait to an auction gala for a fake charity run by the president’s family and held at the president’s hotel, and the subject will need to bid his own portrait to a sufficiently high amount that he can keep his cabinet job another year. Or perhaps George W. Bush will paint them all. Download Better Read #021: Painted Portrait Ban [greg.org, mp3, 8:47, 4.2mb]

Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984, installed at Hirshhorn Museum, 2018, collection: MoMA The Hirshhorn Museum offers non-hearing or non-sighted visitors transcripts of audio or video artworks they exhibit. In some cases those transcripts come from the artist or their dealers. For the video art show in the lower level, you can read along for the entire performance of a Polish opera in Jasper & Malinowska’s Halka/Haiti, or [no thanks] all of Frances Stark’s sex chats. [The transcript for Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, though, only includes the lyrics to the Kanye West song he laid down, not the dialogue in his video montage.] When they don’t exist, though, the Hirshhorn produces their own descriptive, transcriptive text. Anyway, I noticed the existence of these transcripts while watching Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core (1984), a rapid-fire, multi-channel video installation that plays out over 13 monitors arrayed throughout a black box gallery. The improbability of the existence of one of Bender’s major works was already next-level. MoMA apparently helped restore or recover the work, which had only been exhibited as an abbreviated documentation video like my pic above, as recently as 2013. But the idea of a translating a frenetic video wall into a narrative text seemed too intriguing to ignore. And translating that back into an audio experience? If Bender wouldn’t have approved, I think she’d disapprove in the right way. Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984, acquired in 2016 [moma] Bender’s piece is included in Brand New: Art & Commodity in the 1980s at the Hirshhorn through May 2018 [hirshhorn] Press Release for Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core premiere at The Kitchen in 1984 [the kitchen] Press Release for The Kitchen’s 2013 show, “Gretchen Bender: Tracking The Thrill” [artforum, pdf] Download Better Read #019, Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core at the Hirshhorn, 20180223 [greg.org, mp3, 4.9mb, 10:00]

In writing yesterday’s post, I realized I’ve come back to Ellsworth Kelly’s “Notes of 1969” before. What strikes me now, besides the quote I used for yesterday’s title, was this: Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom; there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes. Sometimes I feel this, too, but with guilt or ambivalence, not freedom so much. I also think about how brick walls have become surfaces, and how most bricklayers now have been replaced by machines. Download and listen to Better_Read_018_Ellsworth_Kelly_Notes_of_1969.mp3 [mp3, 6:35, 6.7mb, via greg.org] Previously: related/impetus: I Found An Object And Presented It As Itself Alone not really related, but I do want to own this Google search: Ellsworth Kelly Dancing Monkey very much related, 2012, still thinking about how to handle these: Google Art Institute Project 2011: What I Looked At Today: Ellsworth Kelly’s Writing

SEW SEW SEW SEW SEW SEW This installment of Better Read is the text of the found net artwork, Embroidery Trouble Shooting Page, which was repeated as untitled (etsg) in 2015. When I first found the page, I marveled at its beautiful folly, and dreamed of printing it as a book. Then of using it as an abstract painting composition generator. Then I accepted responsibility to publish and preserve it after its original code changed. And since then, I’ve explored the possibilities and process for printing it as a single, giant page. I expect it would fill a wall. If you have any thoughts or tips for capturing a rendered webpage as a single image, I hope you’ll get in touch. Download better_read_017_etsg_20171018.mp3 [mp3, 5:35, 2.7mb, via greg.org] Previously: Untitled (Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide) untitled (etsg), 2015 [etsg.greg.org]

Laurie Lambrecht, Explosion, Slam, photo composition of Roy Lichtenstein’s Hand Written Word List and comic book clipping source material, made in the artist’s studio between 1990 and 1992. image via lensculture Why did Roy Lichtenstein make word lists is not really my question. How did Roy Lichtenstein’s word lists end up in the list of his artworks catalogued by the Lichtenstein Foundation? Both lists date from 1990. The first Handwritten Word List, feels like it fits right in. It appears to be a compilation, or a selection, of the onomatopoetic word graphics Lichtenstein famously adapted from comic books for his paintings. This list appears in at least two pictures taken between 1990 and 1992 by Laurie Lambrecht, a photographer who worked as an assistant to Lichtenstein in his studio. In the composition above, titled Explosion, Slam, it is surrounded by comics clippings. Her account of this time, inventorying Lichtenstein’s studio in preparation for his 1993 Guggenheim retrospective, mentions Polaroids, “bulging notebooks,” and a “scrapbook full of ‘Crying Girls,'” none of which apparently made the leap from archive to corpus that these lists did. The second, Typed Word List, are all adjectives “of praise,” in an alphabetical order. Did he create it for a work? A series? A lecture? Would he consult the list when artist friends asked his opinion about their show? I mean, you could probably get away with it on the phone, but it could get awkward to use such a prompt in person. [“What’d you think?” (Pulls out list.) “Neato.”] Or maybe he came up with the list after a heated conversation with Richard Serra, who was like, “You can’t have the verbs, Roy, they’re mine!” And Roy was like, “Fine!” In any case, they’re both pretty beat up, well-used, and have no discernible aesthetic embellishment. I won’t say they’re not aesthetic, because they are what they are. Download Better_Read_016_Roy_Lichtenstein_Word_Lists.mp3 [2:25, 1.3mb, greg.org] Hand Written Word List, 1990 [imageduplicator.com] Typed Word List, 1990 [imageduplicator.com] Inside Roy Lichtenstein’s Studio, photos by Laurie Lambrecht [lensculture]

Kara Walker, Detail of U.S.A. Idioms, 2017, image via sikkema jenkins & co It feels unusual to feature a current text on Better Read, but then, these are unusual times. It strikes me that Kara Walker’s artist’s statement for her current show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. has not been considered in an expanded context. An artist’s statement, in a press release, is already fighting with two critical hands behind its back. Yet the press release is actually the artist’s title for her show. The impetus for writing any of this is presumably well understood, but here, the specific circumstances of Walker’s work, her practice, and the shitshow of a world we’re living in right now should, I believe, upend our complacent expectations. I myself found it too easy to make quick judgments about these texts and their implications when I saw the ad for Walker’s show in Artforum, which contained the show’s title, which I’d previously ignored, because I’d taken it for a glib press release. I let the order of reception, my own subjectivity, influence my judgment, in ways that I might not have noticed without further, in-depth consideration. And yet Walker had anticipated it all. Download Better_Read_015_Kara_Walker_20170914.mp3 [6:57, 3.3mb, via greg.org] Kara Walker exhibition page [sikkemajenkinsco.com] Sikkema Jenkins’ press release with Kara Walker’s texts [pdf, sikkemajenkinsco.com]

Richard Hamilton invitation with 1951 Technique et Architecture illustration used for Five Tyres – abandoned (1964) and Five Tyres remoulded (1972) Sometimes I hit a wall while writing, and retyping someone else’s text helps get me going again. So here is another installment of Better Read, a series of mp3 files from greg.org in which an interesting, under-known, or hard-to-find art-related text is read by a computer. This text by Richard Hamilton accompanies Five Tyres remoulded, 1972 relief and print edition created with Carl Solway and EYE Editions. Hamilton describes his attempt to replicate by hand a complicated photo illustration he’d clipped from a trade magazine. The image was from the 50s, the project began and was abandoned in 1963, then reinitiated in 1970 with the help of a computer. Besides the obviously interesting insights onto his own process, Hamilton’s text resonates with the history of early Pop, conceptual art, and even appropriation, as well as the inter-relation of art and technology. Unless you had the portfolio itself, the text was only available in print in Studio International (1972, vol. 183, p. 276). Images of a first draft of the text were also included in a 2014 blog post by Carl Solway about his correspondence with Hamilton. So I’m sure having a computer-generated voice recording of it expands its availability tremendously. Richard Hamilton, Dimensional Data, screen print on mylar, 60x85cm, from Five Tyres remoulded (1972), via swann [2022 UPDATE: In September and October 2022, Galerie Buchholz included a Five Tyres remoulded portfolio in an exhibition of Hamilton’s work. The single text included in this work differs from the longer, two-part version from Solway’s archive. An image of the portfolio version is below.] play or dl Better_Read_014_Richard_Hamilton_Five_Tyres_Remoulded_20170624.mp3 [dropbox greg.org, mp3 9:55, 14.3mb] Related: Digging in the Archives: Richard Hamilton [solwaygallery.com] Five Tyres remoulded (1972) [tate.org.uk]

The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, by Stuart Davis, co-founder of the American Artists Congress in 1936, image: whitney.org This edition of Better Read features a speech delivered by Michigan Republican congressman George Donderos on the House floor on Tuesday August 16, 1949 titled, “Modern Art Shackled To Communism.” I came across quotes and excerpts from this speech while researching the American Artists Congress, the group that brought Picasso’s Guernica to the United States for a fundraising tour in 1938. Dondero made several fiery speeches against modern art during this, the McCarthy era, repeatedly accusing modernism and all its subsidiary “isms” of being a vile foreign-led Communist plot to destroy American art and values. Near as I can tell, this is the first time Dondero’s complete speech has been available outside the Congressional Record, which turns out to be a lot harder to get ahold of than I expected. I am currently preparing a compilation of all Dondero’s art-related speeches, and the responses they engendered from the accused, the threatened, and even, surprisingly, the nominally allied. Because even I have a hard time listening to a robot for 26 minutes, the complete text of Dondero’s speech is included after the jump. Download Better_Read_013_Dondero_Communist_Shackles_20170417.mp3 [26:49, 39mb, mp3 via dropbox greg.org] “Modern Art Shackled to Communism” Mr. George A. Dondero: Mr. Speaker, quite a few individuals in art, who are sincere in purpose, honest in intent, but with only a superficial knowledge of the complicated influences that surge in the art world of today, have written me–or otherwise expressed their opinions–that so-called modern or contemporary art cannot be Communist because art in Russia today is realistic and objective. The left-wing art magazines advance the same unsound premises of reasoning, asserting in editorial spasms that modern art is real American art. They plead for tolerance, but in turn tolerate nothing except their own subversive “isms.” The human art, termites, disciples of multiple “isms” that compose so-called modern art, boring industriously to destroy the high standards and priceless traditions of academic art, find comfort and satisfaction in the wide dissemination of this spurious reasoning and wickedly false declaration, and its casual acceptance by the unwary. This glib disavowal of any relationship between communism and so-called modern art is so pat and so spontaneous a reply by advocates of the “isms” in art, from deep, Red Stalinist to pale pink publicist, as to identify it readily to the observant as the same old party-line practice. It is the party line of the left-wingers, who are now in the big money, and who want above all to remain in the big money, voiced to confuse the legitimate artist, to disarm the arousing academician, and to fool the public. As I have previously stated, art is considered a weapon of communism, and the Communist doctrinaire names the artist as a soldier of the revolution. It is a weapon in the hands of a soldier in the revolution against our form of government, and against any government or system other than communism. From 1914 to 1920, art was used as a weapon of the Russian Revolution to destroy the Czarist Government, but when this destruction was accomplished, art ceased to be a weapon and became a medium of propaganda, picturing and extolling the imaginary wonders, benefits, and happiness of existence under the socialized state. Let me trace for you a main artery from the black heart of the isms of the Russian Revolution to the very heart of art in America. In 1914, Kandinsky, a Russian-born Expressionist and nonobjective painter, who found it safer to liv in Germany, returned to Russia, and 3 years later came the revolution. He is the man who preached that art must abandon the logical and adopt the illogical. He dominated a group of black knights of the isms, who murdered the art of the Russian academies. They were Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Constructionists, Suprematists, Abstractionists, and the rest of the same ilk. Kandinsky was a friend of Trotsky, and after the revolution founded the Moscow Institute of Art Culture. He was Communist leader in Red art–the commissar of the isms. Kandinsky remained in Russia until 1921, when the art of the isms began to feel the iron grip of the new art control, the art for the sake of propaganda, the art of social realism. Kandinsky went back to Germany. The Communist art that has infiltrated our cultural front is not the Communist art in Russia today–one is the weapon of destruction , and the other is the medium of controlled propaganda. Communist art outside Russia is to destroy the enemy, and we are the enemy of communism. Communist art in Russia is to delude the Russian workers. The art of the isms, the weapon of the Russian Revolution, is the art which has been transplanted to America, and today, having infiltrated and saturated many of our art centers, threatens to overawe, override and overpower the fine art of our tradition and inheritance. So-called modern or contemporary art in our own beloved country contains all the isms of depravity, decadence, and destruction. What are these isms that are the very foundation of so-called modern art? They are the same old lot of the Russian Revolution, some with transparent disguises, and others added from time to time as new convulsions find a new designation. I call the role of infamy without claim that my list is all-inclusive: daw daw ism, futurism, constructionism, suprematism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all are media of social or political pro test, all are instruments and weapons of destruction. To trace the origin, development and history of all these isms is a task too lengthy for the time available to me here, and also beyond the scope of my intention. But I do tag them specifically, as well as generally, as instruments of destruction. Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth. Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms. Surrealism aims to destroy by denial of reason. Let me touch briefly on some of the isms: The four leaders of the Cubist group were Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Duchamp, but what these reds are today is another matter. The artists of the isms change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Picasso, who is also daw daw ist, an abstractionist, or a surrealist, as unstable fancy dictates, is the hero of all the crackpots in so-called modern art. The left-wing critics call him the “gage” by which American modernists may measure their own radical worth, and a dozen years ago it was arranged that he address his disciples in the Red American Artists Congress by international telephone hook-up. But no matter what others call Picasso, he has said of himself: “I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting.” Concerning the other three, Braque, Leger, and Duchamp, there is variation only in degree of unbalance. Leger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist. The founding of surrealism is attributed to one Andre Breton. Samuel Putnam, former Red art critic for the Communist publication New Masses, says: “The surrealists are avowed Communists.” In his book, The Politics of the Unpolitical, Herbert Read, English author advocate of surrealism says surrealism, “is actually Communist, though generally anti-Stalinist. They are performing a very important revolutionary function. The particular method they adopt is to so mingle fact and fancy that the normal concept of reality no longer has existence.” There is a book titled Out of This Century, written by one Peggy Guggenheim, formerly owner of Modern Art Galleries in London and New York, and financial sponsor of Herbert Read. This book is vile, and its further sale has been stopped. In its pages are many truths, carelessly revealed, concerning persons now notorious in modern art. Max Ernst, a surrealist, was formerly married to the author. According to the printed statement of Peggy Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York arranged the flight passage of Max Ernst to the United States, and paid a deposit to hold a reservation for him at Lisbon. This is the same Max Ernst who directed the 1920 Dadaist exhibition in Cologne, where the only entrance was through a public urinal. The approach was but a non-prophylactic dose of the main exhibit. Baar geld, the artist leader of the Dadaists in Cologne, was also leader of the Communist Party in the same district. Yves Tanguy, a French surrealist, now transplanted to the United States, was a signer of the revolutionary manifesto of the surrealists, and a beneficiary of the largess of the same Peggy Guggenheim. Matta–Echaurren–a Chilean and an intimate of Max Ernst, has now sunk his taproot deep into America’s rich soil. According to the same Peggy Guggenheim, Matta was at one time under scrutiny by our own FBI. Another Surrrealist leader in this same disreputable group is Aragon–the Frenchman. He is a well-known Red, in fact, along with Maxim Gorky and Whitaker Chambers, self-confessed Communist, he as been an editor of the publication International Literature, organ of the Soviet International Union of Revolutionary Writers–Citations concerning Aragon, the voluble Peggy Guggenheim says: One day Rigid Edgewell invited me for dinner and asked me if I would render a great service to the Communist Party. They wanted to borrow my flat for Aragon and a whole convention of Communist writers who were comi

Reading a Dan Graham interview transcript about magazine articles as artworks, and contemplating the [so far] failed campaign for Giant Meteor ’16, I thought of Mel Bochner’s and Robert Smithson’s In The Domain Of The Great Bear, published in the Fall 1966 issue of Art Voices. This edition of Better Read is two excerpts from that work, which I imagined as a diptych. PDF scans of In The Domain Of The Great Bear can be found in various places online [pdf]. The version I like is on Mel Bochner’s own website [pdf], because it preserves the appearance of the work as originally published. Bochner spoke about Domain at a 2005 Smithson symposium at the Whitney Museum. I was at that symposium, but the New York-centric historian who said visiting the Spiral Jetty site doesn’t matter, the film is enough, and Nancy Holt’s nonchalant comments about adding more rocks to the Jetty have obliterated all other memories of that day. Fortunately the talk was later adapted as “Secrets of the Domes” and published in the September 2006 issue of Artforum. serendipitous update: I happened across the John Wilmdering Symposium at the NGA from last Fall, where art historian Justin Wolff talked about Rockwell Kent’s End of the World lithographs, which were made for Life Magazine. For a story, though, about a very popular program at the then-new Hayden Planetarium, where scientists would speculate on the many ways the earth could be destroyed. So this was not just Smithson; it was a Hayden thing. Great [End] Times. [oh, spoiler alert?] Download Better_Read_012_Bochner_Smithson_Domain.mp3 [9:36, mp3, 13.8mb, via dropbox greg.org]

Forrest Bess, The Asteroids #3, 1946, oil on canvas board, via Phillips Collection In 2014 the Phillips Collection received eight works by Forrest Bess from Miriam Shapiro Grosof, including a set of four paintings titled, The Asteroids (1946). They depict a dream Bess had, and the ceramist Arlene Shechet has put them on view for the first time as part of her museum-wide project, From Here On Now. [The other Bess paintings can be seen in the (Part 2) video here.] Shechet has made work in response to particular works and spaces at the Phillips, and has reinstalled at least five spaces, to absolutely riveting effect. Shechet’s ceramic and cast paper sculptures are variously abstract and referential, and are accomplished on their own, but as catalysts for and participants in dialogue with works from the collection, they appear essential. Shechet has chosen and placed extraordinary works, which should be familiar, but which all feel like revelations, in a way that makes the Phillips spring to life. I’d say she should curate the entire museum, but many of the galleries Shechet did not curate also vibrate with unexpected and fascinating paintings of all eras, from Bonnard, to Ryder, to Robert Natkin? Somehow, yes. With a tribute show of the late William Christenberry’s work and Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture prints, I’d say the Phillips is the most unexpectedly awesome show in town right now. Now on to Bess. Download Better_Read_011_Forrest_Bess_The_Asteroids_1946.mp3 [dropbox greg.org, 3:10, 4.5mb] From Here On Now, by Arlene Shechet, runs through March 7, 2017 [phillipscollection.org]

Has Questlove read this aloud himself? I don’t think so. I wish he would, because if I cry this much when the robot reads it… Download: Better_Read_010_Questlove_Im_Still_Human_20160920.mp3 [11:27, 16.5mb mp3 via dropbox greg.org] Read: Questlove: Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit [nymag via @jamilahlemieux] Questlove discussing racial profiling and his reaction to the Trayvon Martin verdict with Amy Goodman in Aug. 2013 [youtube]

Exhibition announcement card for Richard Prince’s window installation, “Single man looking to the right”, 1979, at the original location of Three Lives & Company bookstore, New York, via the catalogue for Edward Cella’s exhibition, “Richard Prince: The Douglas Blair Turnbaugh Collection, 1977-88” This is starting to become a habit. This edition of Better Read features “Single man looking to the right,” a 1979 text by Richard Prince, for a window installation he made at Three Lives & Co., a now-legendary neighborhood bookstore in the West Village. It’s included in a show Prince recently announced/denounced, a huge pile of early stuff saved by an early friend and supporter, the dance critic Doulas Blair Turnbaugh. The show is at Edward Cella in Los Angeles through July 2016. My interest was piqued by the light this early work sheds on Prince’s development of his practice, on his experimentation and the paths not taken, and less for the possible insights into Prince’s psyche or autobiography. This text seems to me both in sync with and apart from Prince’s Bird Talk texts, just as the rephotographed works Prince showed at Three Lives resonate with yet differ from what’s now generally thought of as his standard operating procedure. If anything, it’s freedom from an S.O.P. that tips the scale for these photos; they’re evidence of Prince’s experimentation. installation photo for Richard Prince’s window at Three Lives & Company, 1979, from Doug Eklund’s The Pictures Generation, p. 157 A small photo of the Three Lives installation in Doug Eklund’s The Pictures Generation catalogue also makes me wonder about the fate of these large, black & white, and differently “ganged up” Single Men prints. They’re not in Turnbaugh’s collection/show, and I’m thinking if they’re destroyed, they may have another life coming. Download Better_Read_009_Single_Man_20160627.mp3 from Dropbox greg.org [dropbox, mp3, 7.3mb, 4:57] Previously: Better Read #008: Death By Gun Better Read #007: Spinoza’s Ethica from Sturtevant’s Vertical Monad Better Read #006: The Jetty Foundation Presents, Send Me Your Money Better Read #005: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks Up Better Read #004: Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland, a Zine by Brian Sholis Better Read #003: Sincerely Yours, An Epic Scholarly Smackdown By Rosalind Krauss Better Read #002: A Lively Interview With Ray Johnson, c.1968 the Ur-Better Read: W.H. Auden’s The Shield Of Achilles, Read By A Machine

“Untitled” (Death By Gun), 1990, endless. collection: moma.org We’ve come to reading the names of the dead, to intone them, as a form of memorial. I’ve never felt Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Death By Gun) was a memorial per se, more a statement. Remembering for different ends. But following the massacre of Latinx gay people at Orlando’s Pulse night club, and the subsequent readings of their names, it occurred to me that I’d never read and did not remember the names of the people who appeared on Felix’s 1990 stack piece. I looked for the original Time magazine article that was the artist’s source, and I couldn’t find it online. I couldn’t find it in libraries. I ended up buying an old print edition of the magazine itself on eBay. July 17, 1989. And I transcribed the names of the 460 people who were killed in the US the first week of May 1989, the week Time chose to document, in the order Felix chose to lay them out, and had them read aloud by a computer. Download Better_Read_008_Death_By_Gun_20160620.mp3 from dropbox greg.org [dropbox greg.org, 16.7mb mp3, 11:37] Previously: Better Read #007: Spinoza’s Ethica from Sturtevant’s Vertical Monad Better Read #006: The Jetty Foundation Presents, Send Me Your Money Better Read #005: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks Up Better Read #004: Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland, a Zine by Brian Sholis Better Read #003: Sincerely Yours, An Epic Scholarly Smackdown By Rosalind Krauss Better Read #002: A Lively Interview With Ray Johnson, c.1968 the Ur-Better Read: W.H. Auden’s The Shield Of Achilles, Read By A Machine

Sturtevant’s Vertical Monad, 2008, installed at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London In case the last Better Read was too mainstream podcasty for you, here are the first few pages of Spinoza’s Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, in Latin, which Sturtevant included in her 2008 installation Vertical Monad, read by a computer. Better_Read_Sturtevant_Spinoza_20160610.mp3 [dropbox greg.org, 35Mb, 24:28]