Sep 23
2012
Night, (1947) by sculptor Alberto Giacometti, was one of a handful of artworks that Philip Johnson displayed in the Glass House while he lived there. The plaster sculpture was granted a place of honor atop the central glass coffee table that Mies van der Rohe designed for Johnson. In the 1960s, Night began to shed its outer layer and was eventually sent to the artist’s studio for repair. Giacometti died before the work was conserved, and the sculpture was never returned.
In homage, the Glass House presents Night (1947–2015), an innovative sculpture-in-residence exhibition guest curated by Jordan Stein. The ongoing exhibition will feature contemporary artists whose works contend with the legacy of Night, starting with Ken Price's Doola.
What object has gone missing in your life? Not stolen, just absent. And where could it be?
A favorite book — Pictures At A Revolution — not stolen, but given away of my own free will. A beautiful hardcover with a bright yellow dust jacket showing a startlingly alive image of Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway that I enjoyed every time I glanced at my bookshelf.
A beautiful girl I’d been spending time with liked the anecdotes I’d related from the book about Mike Nichols and Dustin Hoffman and the old studio system. I lent it to her our first time getting together outside work. In hindsight, she never asked for it. Likely, never wanted it. For me, it was an object intended to bring us together. We’d swap our favorite stories, discuss our most loved chapters, and most importantly, see each other at least once more in order to return it.
Needless to say, none of this came about. She may have read and cherished it. She may have left it on the bus the same afternoon. We never had that next date, never discussed our favorite sections, never swapped stories. And I never saw it again. Where is the object? On her shelf in whatever city she lives in now? At the bus depot’s lost & found? In the possession of some film buff she passed it on to next? I vividly remember the stories from the book about Nichols and Hoffman and Beatty and Poitier. But what was the girl’s name I trusted with this favorite object? I have no earthly idea.
Monday, September 24 at 5:39pm
A coconut monkey. Worth fighting over, certainly not worth dying for. As a not-particularly strong 13-year-old summer camper, I wasn’t one to pick fights. But when our bunk came into possession of a coconut which had been decorated as a monkey, it became our mascot, for reasons lost to history. The Roman Legions had their golden eagle standards. Bunk 412 had a coconut monkey.
I don’t remember the name of the aggressor, but I remember that he was from “the mean bunk” next door. I came back to the bunk one afternoon, maybe to get a towel, or a baseball mitt, and there he was. He was chubby. And he was stealing our coconut. I did something I had never done before to anyone who wasn’t my brother. I punched him as hard as I could. We fell to the floor and “fought.” We were both weaklings. I’m sure we made outrageous threats. But luckily his asthma kicked in and I emerged the victor. He slumped off and I returned the coconut monkey to its pride of place in a cubby on the wall. If only my bunkmates were there to witness my feat of bravery.
I don’t know where the monkey wound up. Hazarding a guess: the garbage. I believe it to be the last possession that I ever fought physically for. I didn’t like the monkey that much. But it was a symbol. Like the Falkland Islands. Or this: ✆. And in that moment, at war, it meant everything to me. I wonder if, just maybe, it still resides in Bunk 412 to this day. Do coconuts get moldy?
Tuesday, September 25 at 7:55pm
In 1977 when the Rauschenberg retrospective was being held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Julius Wasserstein and the preparation crew made a sculpture for the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art. It was Moose-o-gram, in reply to Rauschenberg’s Monogram.
It was a beautiful piece, a moose with a tire around the middle, on a small black base, not unlike a miniature of Monogram, except with a moose.
With all the moves of the MMOFA to other locations, Moose-o-gram is sadly lost. In fact, installation photographs of the MMOFA from the 1970s show many items which have been misplaced over the years.
Natural selection?
http://www.myspace.com/manitobamuseum/videos/monogram/21519237
Wednesday, September 26 at 9:54am
i’ve moved so much in my life that i’ve become accustomed to things disappearing. i used to be wistful about objects, but i can’t think of anything i’m banging my head over. i’m haunted, though, and have been for over 13 years, by the loss of a documentation of an experience. i took a photograph one night just north of providence, ri during a trip with a carload of artists and other miscreants to a reservoir. it was deep summer, hot and misty, and i felt on the verge of finding something out about myself. we swam in the reservoir, the dark sky expansive, our clothes and my glasses and camera on the pebbled edge. i barely knew my swimming companions, but envied their artistic freedom, their casual way of moving through the world.
on the way back to the car, word spread that the cops had found us out and were on the hunt. we scattered into the park, i crouched down in a grove of trees, and took silent cues from another refugee, a guy who was well known and kind. the adventure of it excited me. we waited for a while, then slowly crept back to the parking lot, breaking into a run to the station wagon. i looked back and three of four others were jogging towards us through the night haze. i quickly took a photograph with no time to read the light meter. on the way back to the city, we got stopped by the cops, who took down all of our names and looked askance at the few of us sitting in the wagon’s trunk area. most everyone gave cavalier chuckles. nothing happened.
i developed the roll of black and white a few days later. something happened. a light leak? i misjudged the developing time? i accidentally open the camera back? a third of the negative fades into white, obscuring half the figures. it’s unprintable. i don’t think i even got the focus right. it’s a failure of a documentation of an experience that i hold onto. the memory is brighter than the image, yet i still mourn the absence of the photograph.
Wednesday, September 26 at 11:43am
During the few years that I lived in India, I carried a keychain with a glossy headshot of the Statue of Liberty. It was the worst kind of tourist kitsch, but I saw it for sale in downtown Delhi, and I bought it as some kind of reminder of home. When I returned to New York for good, I replaced Lady Liberty with an equally kitschy Taj Mahal keychain, complete with glitter and a fake rainbow. I liked the symmetry — portable postcards of icons that meant nothing to me that I carried with me always. Past lives, past addresses, terrible keychains. But within a few months of being back in Brooklyn, the Taj Mahal was gone. The keys weren’t — I still have those. But the keychain that dangled in my pocket had vanished. Had it washed up onto Liberty Island? Had it hitched a ride back to India? A real world mystery. I took it as a sign that my clumsy attempts to cling to old adventures had ended. Time to live in the present. Now, I have my keys on a plain ring, no icon attached.
A corollary: An object that has mysteriously surfaced in my life. A faded, lime green t-shirt from my third grade class appeared in my drawer a few years ago. I have no memory of obtaining this shirt. It is too big for me now; it would have swallowed me whole 20 years ago. Where did it come from? Why is it here? Possible clue: my third-grade teacher was severely overweight, and her husband was blind.
Wednesday, September 26 at 12:53pm
The end of my days as the in-house Curator of Gio Ponti’s Villa Planchart in Caracas came in the strange form of a missing object drama. The house has been kept for half a century intact. I became its curator to conserve the architecture, the art collection and the decorative arts as they were originally conceived. I made the villa’s Catalogue raissonée together with the original owner, and then a book. Luckily, it has proved to work.
But one day, three years ago -Ms. Planchart had already passed away-, I expressed my feelings about recovering an important Picasso’s painted ceramic plate (from his Bullring series) called “La Plaza de Toros” (Le Vallauris, 1960s), that the owners and Ponti had placed on a wall of the Tropical Dining Room. The clover, a black point left alone on its white wall, was for years a silent claim to me, amid the room’s marvels (not stolen, it was given in her old age by Ms. Planchart to one of her nephews, before I arrived).
I was the only thing to be missing in the great total work of art that this great modern villa is. Although it wasn’t a central piece as Giacometti’s “Night” was in the Glass House, it was indeed a noticeable loss. So I had this desperate urge to recover the Picasso, raise funds, buy it in auction, seek for it around the world. Instead, seen as an eccentric conservationist, the administration hung another artist’s work in its place. I wanted to restore the only absent piece of a perfectly conserved collection, like no other in the world. Now I only have the story to share in a conversation…
Thursday, September 27 at 12:25pm
I’m pretty good at retaining things. So it is extra-maddening when something does disappear.
Once I lost my favorite fountain pen. I made my then-girlfriend check her house and later grilled her, trying to jog her memory. It turned up in the trunk of her car, in my bag that we took to the beach months earlier. I would have rather kept her and lost the pen, but alas.
One thing that surely wasn’t stolen, but is still missing, is my copy of Breton’s “Anthology of Black Humor.” It was a gift I think, though who would have bought that for me? Anyway, it was lost so I asked for another for Christmas–I think this is what happened–and my mother and sister said they were looking for it in the Black Studies area of some bookstore, which I thought was as funny as anything in that book. So I got another copy and later loaned it out, maybe in 2004-05. It’s still gone and I’m sure I’ve asked if anyone has it. Where could it be? Maybe Steve, Jordan or Josh has it? Still annoyed.
Friday, September 28 at 3:42am
In 1995 I wandered into a storefront-home in downtown Denpasar, where a sweet and excitable man greeted me, and after awhile, insisted that I acquire a keris, or Indonesian ceremonial dagger.
He said it was meant for me. He shouted “I do yoga!” and did several one-armed pushups to illustrate his sincerity.
The handle had a few coarse hairs wrapped around it. He showed me how to etch the worn, wavy, marbleized blade with lemon juice, and how to address it: “Hello, you who live here”, and wrap it in white silk before placing it up high.
I did not acquire this high-maintenance object. And not only because one does not really acquire a keris- said to be forged of iron from earth and meteorite, able to destroy one’s enemies just by pointing at them, a companion more than a possession – but “weds” it.
If I had, what would have become of it? Would I have rubbed the blade gently with sandalwood, placing it atop the refrigerator in the party-loft I shared with seven to nine other young, shiftless types a few years later? Would it be an artifact, a talisman, or a thing in my closet, would it bring me good luck or, if it was a bad pairing, disaster?
I think about the approach suggested by the words “you who live here”. Far along from eighteen, I have found myself to be a person seduced- or obsessed- by thoughts about our relationship to matter, minerals, the silent and multiple languages of the non-human world. I have made artworks in a feeble attempt to grapple with these things.
Apart from the colonialist baggage surrounding a term like “animism”, there are many lenses to wear when seeing this world. I roll a quote like this, by Deleuze, over in my mind: “…what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable . . . Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere”, and I think the blade is with me anyway.
Sunday, September 30 at 12:55pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Jordan Stein
curator
0
The other night, after ruining some perfectly good red snapper, I sulked over to the living room, seeking redemption from my DVD shelf. What better solace than an old film to heal my broken culinary confidence? And what better film to get the job done than The 400 Blows, the poetic 1959 tale of a French boy for whom nothing goes right. Least of all snapper.
I scanned left to right across the titles. Then right to left. Where is this thing? Misplaced in the Weird Science case, I’m sure of it. Fifteen minutes and a minor tantrum later, I conceded there was nowhere else to look. The entire contents of my French New Wave section (1) was totally and completely gone.
And I had absolutely no idea where it went.
Sunday, September 23 at 8:22pm