  
Minature golf course at Hitzacker am Elbe, 1963.
2002.04.11 10:28
Re: being/critical
The ownership of the chair that became Museumpeace was always as ambiguous as it still kind of sort of is. Isn't there a saying that "possession is 95% of the law," or is that the title of some forthcoming 95% finished work of art?
I'm not sure how familiar R is with my mid-1980s fashions, but the same appositional spirit is in both the fashions and the chair.
Just over a year ago, there was also a comparison made involving Rauschenberg, Johns and Museumpeace. Early in his career, Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for one of his drawing so that he (Rauschenberg) could erase it. De Kooning complied, and it took Rauschenberg quite some time to erase the drawing completely. (I saw the erased drawing in Washington DC in 1990 or 1991.) Then sometime in early 2000 I noticed a resemblance between Museumpeace (the chair) and the Jasper Johns 1962(?) painting Painting With Two Balls (as in "a painting with real balls"), and then I wrote a webpage entitled "reenacting Rauschenberg via doing Johns". This is now a response to R's notion that the "chair would be even more effective with some representational or decorative aspect--little fish, flowers, something on the surface to even further negate the materiality of the chair--a Warhol@Best idea if there ever was one.
Somewhat related to all this is the story (which I think I read in the Andy Warhol Diaries) of Julian Schnabel once staying as a guest in someone's apartment while the apartment owners were away. The apartment owners owned a Schnabel painting as well. Schnabel decided to paint some more on the apartment owner's Schnabel. The owner of the apartment and the painting was at first very upset to see what Schnabel had done (in apposition) to the painting. I'm actually making this next part up, but I once dreamt that Schnabel also retitled the painting, something like I Think There's a Part of My Anniversary Clock in the Atlantic Ocean Right Now or did he retitle it Honor Among Friends?
It's not exactly common knowledge, but Tony Shafrazi, the NYC art gallery owner that more or less put graffiti artists on the art map in the 1980s, was in the 1970s arrested for spray painting "Kill Lies All" on (i.e., apposing) Picasso's Guernica then at MoMA.
Isn't there an underlying metabolic (i.e., (self)destructive/(self)constructive) theme running throughout all of the above?
  
Stephen Lauf, MUSEUMPEACE (Philadelphia: acrylic on [Gehry] chair, 1999).
a reenactment of Rauschenberg
via doing Johns
Museumpeace is one of several intentionally iconoclastic artworks created over the last 17 years, and this particular "piece" is retrospectively evocative of both Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
"Rauschenberg was intrigued by his older friends, studying their techniques even as he mimicked their conversations. But he determined not to mimic their work. Making the point about his own independence in a particularly outrageous manner, Rauschenberg proposed that de Kooning give him one of his drawings, which Rauschenberg would then turn into his own work of art by erasing it. With some alarm, de Kooning agreed -- and chose a work that would be particularly hard to erase. After one month and forty erasers spent rubbing out the thick crayon, grease pencil, ink, and pencil markings, Rauschenberg produced Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). He jokingly called the work a "monochrome no-image." As Rauschenberg explained many years later, "I was trying both to purge myself of my teaching and at the same time exercise the possibilities."
Mary Kynn Kotz, Rauschenberg, art and life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990) p. 82.
The execution of Museumpeace occurred during the Spring of 1999, culminating with a polychromatic "top" and a monochromatic (white) "underside". As complete, Museumpeace conjures up Jasper Johns' Painting with Two Balls, that is, a painting exhibiting "real balls."
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Painting with Two Balls and Museumpeace
 
A collage of Warhol's Flower Paintings in apposition to Venturi and Rauch's Best Showroom
Stephen Lauf, Reenacting Shafrazi Apposing Guernica (digital manipulation, 2002.04.15).
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2002.04.11
on the road home
   
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