The Artist is an Illegitimate Cosmonaut

 by Robert Boyd

Today I reviewed Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew to Space from his Apartment, a short book by Russian art critic Boris Groys. It's a short book--only 60 pages (many of which are full-page illustrations). It's basically an essay on a single piece of art, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment. Ilya Kabakov is one of my favorite artists. He was an "official artist" in the Soviet Union, which  means he was a member of the Artists' Union and did work for the state--in his case, for state publishing houses, because he was a children's book illustrator. But he had other things he wanted to express, and developed a double art practice--one official, and one unofficial. But even in his unofficial art, he used the skills he had gained as a book illustrator. This narrative underpinning to his otherwise highly conceptual art is something that Groys reiterates in his book, along with the idea expressed in the title of this post, which is a quote from Groys' text (Kabakov the unofficial artist was a little like a fictional character trying to become a cosmonaut in his own apartment) and the idea of "Cosmism," a Russian philosophical movement with its roots in the 19th century. "Cosmism" is a topic that fascinate Groys--he published a book about it in 2018, and it is the subject of an interesting lecture he gave that can be found on YouTube.

Robert Boyd's Book Report: Erik Bulatov

 by Robert Boyd

Today I report on Erik Bulatov, a book published by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. I mention The Ransom of Russian Art by John McPhee and The Experimental Group by Matthew Jesse Jackson, which I have reviewed before.

The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes

Robert Boyd



I've had this book for a while in my "to read" pile, but I was a little intimidated by it. But then I picked up a copy of Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by Lev Rubinstein and as I started to read Rubinstein's book of poems, I realized that he had been a friend Ilya Kabakov and an associate of Collective Action, two of the main subjects of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes.I thought it would be useful to give Rubinstein some context if I knew more about the milieu he arose from. And I was right.

This book analyzes the work and actions of artists from the era under discussion (Moscow, from the beginning of the "Thaw" after Stalin's death (1953) and Khruschev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin in February 1956, until the end of the Soviet Union in 1989. It specifically focuses on "unofficial artists" like Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, the team of Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, and Collective Action, the group lead by Andrei Monastyrsky. But in addition to all of these highly conceptual artists, author Mathew Jesse Jackson looks at the broad swathe of unofficial art activities, including work by Ernst Neizvestiny and Oskar Rabin. In other words, it's not just a book of criticism, but is also a history of the scene that grew up mostly in artists' apartments. Boris Groys blurbed it on the back cover very aptly:

Matthew Jackson combines vast art historical and theoretical erudition with a rare ability to understand specific social milieus and psychological motives that govern individual artistic strategies. His book offers a fascinating--and at the same time precise--description of the Moscow artistic scene during the times of the cold war.

One almost doesn't need to write a review after that blurb. It really describes the book in a nutshell, both in tone and content. (It's weird that the quote comes from Groys--who is one of the subjects of the book!)

Jackson's "vast theoretical erudition" is evident is almost every paragraph--he seems to have read every important work of theory and criticism (in French, English and Russian) and deploys them all. He doesn't just focus on the artists but writes a lot about Soviet society and life in the Brezhnev years. He describes key public events in the history of unofficial art in the Soviet Union (such as the exhibit in 1962 called 30 Years of Moscow Art in which Khruschev angrily encountered Russian abstract art for the first time, and got into a shouting match with sculptor Neizvestiny, who he called a faggot, and the infamous "bulldozer show" in 1974, when a group of unofficial artists arranged an outdoor exhibit that was violently broken up by police and bulldozed.) It was events like this that gave Americans the idea that unofficial artists were dissidents, but for the most part, this wasn't true. They lived double lives--by day productive Soviet citizens, by night unofficial artists in their apartments. In a way, there was a secret society of artists working off the grid. Hence the term "unofficial artists". Official art was produced through artist and writers unions, for official publishing houses and galleries, and with very proscribed subjects matters and styles. (Although not as restrictive as we often imagine--after all, all of Tarkovsky's movies were made in this system. He was an "official" artist.)

Here it's important to mention apartments. During Stalin's rule, people lived in collective apartments, forced to room with strangers. This was mainly due to a lack of housing but also served the state as a kind of panopticon--everyone kept an eye on everyone else. Under Khruschev, a massive building program of cheap apartments was begun. These apartments have come to be called Khrushchyovka. They were utter crap, but they made private lives possible. The double lives mentioned above were greatly facilitated by the Khrushchyovkas. (Good descriptions of Khrushchyovkas and their effect on society can be found in Svetlana Alexievich's powerful oral history of the end of the Soviet Union, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.) For unofficial artists, who had almost no public space for exhibiting art, apartments were of supreme importance. They provided a place for artists to meet, to look at each other's work, and develop ideas. Kabakov's apartment was an important meeting place for all of the unofficial artists of the 1970s. Jackson quotes Groys, "There was no art market, no spectators from outside. This means that these artists made their works for their colleagues--other artists, writers, or intellectuals involved in the unofficial art scene." And Lev Rubinstein remarked, "I am from the underground, and for me the public is a certain aggregate of my friends and acquaintances that serve as a reference group that forms my aesthetic values."

(As an aside, this work did slowly leak out into the West through the efforts of dedicated, oddball collectors like Norton Dodge, an American academic who studied Soviet economic practices and frequently traveled to the USSR. His mission of collecting unofficial art is described in amusing detail in John McPhee's The Ransom of Russian Art. Then during the Gorbachev era, the market in the West for this work was accelerated.)

The thing was, the artists were never sure how tolerant the state was going to be at any given time. For example, Kabakov didn't participate in the bulldozer show, even though he was invited to do so. He knew it was a provocation and he had a lot to lose. Kabakov was an official artist in his day job--a member in good standing of the artists' union, working as an illustrator of children's books. We like to think of unofficial artists in the USSR as heroic dissidents, like Joseph Brodsky or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I think we in the West valorize those dissident artists because we imagine that we would act in a similarly heroic way in the same situation. But I think we would act more like Kabakov and Monastyrsky and Rubenstein--work quietly, leading double lives, constantly negotiating within our hearts what the state will let us get away with.

 
Collective Action, Slogan--1977, performance documentation

Collective Action was Andrei Monastyrsky's group that did what in the West we would call "performance art." But while "performance art" here is done for generally small audiences in public venues, Collective Action's performances were done for handpicked audiences of friends. The friends would often be participants in the actions, which often took place in open fields or forests on the edge of Moscow. For Slogan--1977, the group went to a field on the edge of some woods, two members raised a banner between two trees (that read, "I am not complaining about anything and I like this, although I have never been here before and know nothing about this place"--similarly mysterious lines are found in Lev Rubinstein's poetry). But an even more obscure performance involved Monastyrsky mailing a banner to Georgy Kizevalter with instructions. Kizevalter lived in Siberia and was instructed to raise the banner between two trees by himself, walk a certain number of paces away, and photograph it. It was a performance for one person, who was both the performer and the viewer!


Collective Action, To G. Kizevalter (Sogan--1980), 1980, performance documentation

Jackson's criticism and interpretation is erudite but he sometimes outsmarts himself. Writing about Erik Bulgatov, he writes "His best paintings sidestepped irony, offering unremarkable landscapes interrupted by precise rows of red letters. It is often said that such works "critiqued" Soviet reality, and no doubt they did, but the canvases amount to much more than postmodern political declarations." He then goes into a fascinating and detailed analysis of the painting Danger (1972-73) which is undoubtedly correct, but it seems unreasonable to deny the easy irony of the painting--a realistic scene of bucolic beauty superimposed with the word "Danger" four times. Irony is hardly "sidestepped" here--it is in fact shoved into the viewers face.


Erik Bulatov, Danger, 1972-73, oil on canvas

Ilya Kabakov eventually started doing "albums", which were series of drawings and texts that he would perform for guests in his apartment. Here, Jackson writes, "[Kabakov] had grown interested in narrative, grids, serial images, and frames--devices that seem incompatible, given the grid's presumed hostility to narrative." Presumed by whom? Here Jackson's erudition fails him. I've always thought that Kabakov's albums bore a resemblance to comics (which are, after all, narratives told in grids, with serial images in frames). I kind of dismissed this given the performance aspect of the works. But given the descriptions by Jackson, it seems reasonable to view albums like Ten Characters as a type of comics.


Ilya Kabakov, The Flying Komarov, 1972-75. Page from album 6 of Ten Characters

 And in the albums, we can see how his day job as a children's book illustrator affected his night job as a conceptual artist. His drawing style, combining linework and coloring, is like illustration and indeed very similar to much comics artwork. Indeed, this relationship between Soviet unofficial artists' day jobs and their art is underdeveloped in Jackson's book. (For example, Lev Rubinstein's poems were written with one line on a separate card, not unlike a card from a card catalog. His day job was as a librarian.) I have long wished that someone would publish Ten Characters as a book (dual language, of course), so we could read Kabakov's narratives.

But these are minor complaints. The Experimental Group is an amazing work of art history and illuminates an almost entirely underground scene brilliantly.

Chinati

Robert Boyd

In my post about Marfa, there is a large Chinati-shaped hole. Without Chinati, Marfa is just a Border Patrol post/cow town. But it happened mostly by accident. New York artist Donald Judd, who had long liked the desert Southwest and had taken his family on camping trips many times, happened to be offered a couple of buildings for sale cheap in Marfa at a moment when he was pondering moving out of New York.

Donald Judd was a successful artist in New York. Certainly he was one of the most famous of the minimalists--perhaps not as well-known as Frank Stella, but up there. His name was known in the art world long before his art was because of his years as an art critic. In some ways, he made as big an impact as a writer than as an artist--his writing style is admirably matter-of-fact. Indeed, it recalls the stripped-down prose of Cormac McCarthy, another transplant to the desert southwest.

Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common. [Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," 1965]

This quote from Judd's famous essay "Specific Objects" doesn't exactly sound like he's talking about Minimalism per se. When we think of Judd, we think of him in the company of Stella, Carl André, Dan Flavin, and so on. One of the things that surprises one about Chinati is that it isn't all striped-down Minimalism. You have work by artists like John Chamberlain, John Wesley and Ilya Kabakov there whose work has nothing to do with Minimalism. Judd had surprising broad tastes, and even in "Specific Objects," he refers with approval to artists who are working far afield from the Minimalist idiom.

His object with Chinati was not, therefore, to build a temple of Minimalism.  What drove him to the sheds and barracks of Fort D.A. Russell was a concern for display. As a sculptor, he had been disappointed with the way museums displayed his work. There was always too much other stuff around it--paintings in particular. His feeling was that sculpture needed to be in a dialogue with architecture, but that the relative clutter of a museum prevented this. (His ideas have been adopted at various newer museums, like the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art.)

To put his concepts of display in practice, he first bought a six-storey building in New York City that would be his home, his studio, and exhibition space for his work and work of artists he collected. But this building apparently became overwhelmed with artworks. He had the same problem as a museum--too much work to show.

In the meantime, Judd and his family had taken many trips to the Southwest, including two summers spent in Marfa. In 1971, he rented two dilapidated warehouses to store a bunch of his larger artwork. He subsequently bought the warehouses and some adjacent property in 1973. After restoration work, these would become Judd's studio and house in 1979.



Donald Judd's compound

The addition of a high wall around these structures give it the look of a compound. It ain't exactly neighborly. It makes me wonder what Judd's relation to the town was.

Today, this compound (and several other buildings downtown) are owned by the Judd Foundation. They contain his personal art collection, which is apparently substantial. I didn't see this work or the insides of these buildings, unfortunately. Despite their close relationship, Chinati and the Judd Foundation are distinct operations (I'd like to know the story behind this). You can tour the various Judd buildings in Marfa is you make a reservation and are willing to cough up $50. I passed this time, but maybe the next time I'm in Marfa, I'll take the tour.

In any case, Judd's personal properties were kind of a dress rehearsal for Chinati. Working with the Dia Foundation, Judd started buying up property around town with the intention of exhibiting some large pieces of art by himself, Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain. The first two properties purchased were the artillery sheds from Fort D.A. Russell. These large brick structures had been used for storing munitions and during World War II for housing German POWs. These buildings had been basically out of commission since 1949. Judd replaced the garage doors on the buildings with large windows, and when the roofs leaked, he added quonset-style metal roofs.



The artillery sheds at Chinati

These two buildings house 100 aluminum boxes by Judd. I'm sorry to say that I didn't take any photos of them--photography was not allowed. I'm sure there is some artistic justification for this, but the effect is to force viewers to buy the Chinati coffee table book, which I did. Here's a picture of Judd's boxes from Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd.


Donald Judd, Artillery Sheds with 100 Works in Mill Aluminum (detail), 1982-86, brick structure and aluminum objects

All the boxes are the same dimensions, arranged in four parallel rows. The large windows allow one to look east at another large Judd sculpture out in the field beside the old fort. To the west are old barracks. This display seems to fulfill Judd's desire for an uncluttered environment in which to view his work. It's easy to see the whole project as a bit megalomaniacal. The sheds were unair-conditioned, and it was cooler outside than in. It made us want to get through it as quickly as possible. But the environment was beautiful. Judd really created a work that made sense as a piece of architecture. The boxes came across as non-functional furniture within the space. It was the combination of the boxes and the architectural setting that made it work. And that was obviously Judd's intent.

The Dia Foundation commissioned the boxes, but all was not well with Dia. The main problem was that the foundation was financed by Schlumberger stock that it owned. (The stock came from Philippa de Menil, one of the founders of Dia and a daughter of John and Dominique de Menil.) I'm assuming that Dia financed Marfa through a combination of dividends and sales of the stock. The problem was that Schlumberger stock tracks oil prices (Schlumberger is an oil field services company). In 1980, the stock reached $21 a share. By 1982, it had reached $8.50. It climbed a bit in 1983 to $15, but it quickly fell and remained at $7 and $8 for the rest of the decade. The price of oil went into a 15 year decline. The Chinati book blandly states,

In 1983 an extremely critical phase began: Dia's financial situation took a turn for the worse. The foundation was financed almost exclusively by the returns on Philippa Pellizzi's Schlumberger stock, and after the price plummeted over a year's time and continued to decline, Dia was forced to take "extreme measures." [...] Marfa was to become a non-profit organization apart from Dia.

The actual story was a bit more complex. When Dia suggested to Judd that Marfa be spun off, Judd sued Dia. There was a great deal of tension between Dia co-founder Heiner Friedrich and Judd. Judd was very aggressive with Dia, and had negotiated a extremely lucrative contract with them. According to New York Magazine, after 1981, Marfa "would be permanently maintained and [...] Judd would get $17,500 a month as a combined installation payment and salary." ("Medicis For a Moment," Phoebe Hoban, New York, November 25, 1985) Basically with the threat of a lawsuit over their heads, Dominique de Menil effected a coup at Dia and tossed Freidrich out on his ear. But no board reorganization could make Schlumberger stock increase in value, so the divorce from Dia was completed despite Judd's wishes. (I'm reminded of the t-shirt that SubPop published when it went through an existential crisis--"What part of 'we have no money' don't you understand?")

This was how Chinati began in 1986--lots of assets but no money. Judd suddenly had to go begging, which must not have been pleasant, particularly for a guy who acted like he was entitled to Dia's millions just a few years before. Nonetheless, he was successful, even if it was touch-and-go for the rest of his life. When he died, his estate was in debt. The Chinati Foundation had to quickly expand its board and secure additional sources of funding. Which it accomplished.

In the meantime, Chinati had grown substantially. In addition to the 100 aluminum boxes, Judd placed a series of large concrete boxes out in a field on the southwest side of the old fort. Unlike the other works in the collection, visitors are permitted to photograph these Freestanding Works in Concrete. But you aren't allowed to touch them.



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete

When I posted a photo of myself posing in front of one of these boxes on Facebook, Dan Havel wrote:

Ahh, good ol' Judd land. Whenever I see those concrete boxes of his, methinks Judd was just influenced by culvert construction...In fact, seen monumental stacks of these by highway that are much more interesting than Judds. On the other hand, 100 boxes is incredibly beautiful in context of the buildings they are in. (Comment on Facebook, August 14, 2012)

This comment was attached to a photo of concrete culverts that he had photographed--which look remarkably like the Judds. And the thing is, these kinds of practical undecorated concrete structures are all around us, mostly unnoticed. Obviously Judd noticed them.



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete, with concrete cisterns in the foreground

In fact, in the same field as Freestanding Works in Concrete were several old concrete cisterns, presumably dating back to the fort's days as a cavalry outpost. Aside from the fact that they are a bit worn and open on top, they are extremely similar to Judd's artwork just beyond them. Leaving them in the field had to be a deliberate action on Judd's part. He may have been reminding us that these sculptures, though abstract in any ordinary sense, were based on something--the practical heavy objects that people made of concrete.

But to me, when I imagine the way these cisterns have been used over the decades, or when I recall exploring storm sewers and culverts as an unsupervised kid, the preciousness of Judd's works seems slightly absurd. DO NOT TOUCH! I think Freestanding Works in Concrete would be improved by the addition of several teenagers drinking beers and smoking on them.



John Chamberlain Building in downtown Marfa

Not all of Chinati is on the site of the old fort. The John Chamberlain Building is in downtown Marfa. This former mohair wool warehouse sits alongside the railroad tracks that run through town (and which provided Marfa its original reason to exist, as a watering station for trains). The wool industry was subsidized by the U.S. Army during World War II. The armies invading Europe needed warm clothes, so that meant that West Texas, which had never had a wool industry before, was roped into the war effort. After the war, the subsidy and the industry disappeared, leaving behind this vast empty building. In fact, Marfa went into a long decline after World War Two--the military bases which had been so important to the city closed up, and between 1950 and 1957, there was a drought so severe that the area never fully recovered. Many farmers and ranchers simply pulled up stakes and left. When Judd came to town, land and buildings could be bought cheap.

The mohair warehouse was used to house a large collection of John Chamberlain. Again, photography was not allowed. And again, the work in conjunction with the architecture was perfect. I have long loved Chamberlain's work, and I was extremely pleased with his retrospective at the Guggenheim this year, but this was a much finer setting for the work.



Interior of the John Chamberlain Building

The pieces were large and impressive, scattered across the vast floor like boulders rolling off a mountain into the plain. That seemed deliberate. It was as if they wanted you, inside this warehouse, to be reminded of the landscape outside. But the arrangement was not random. It was more like a Japanese garden, where each element has a kind of autonomy while looking beautiful in conjunction with the other elements. A viewer had the ability to walk all around each piece, to step back and come close. But in this process, that viewer was always capturing glimpses of other Chamberlains receding into the distance. This effect worked well with the lockstep 100 boxes in the artillery sheds and worked equally well with this scattered group. It was the size of the spaces that Judd needed to do this. And this notion of massive spaces for large works has been repeated at such venues as Mass MOCA and Dia: Beacon. I propose that in this era of dead malls, defunct superstores, and places like the Astrodome, this concept could be expanded. I, for one, would pay money to tour Dia: Astrodome.

Most of the other works are in the barracks buildings. These U-shaped buildings seem a little awkward for displaying art. Judd initially offered them all to Dan Flavin, but Flavin only wanted six of them. His installations were not completed until after his death, and they are some of the most spectacular of all the installations at Chinati.

You enter one side of the barrack. The room is empty and fairly dark (there is a window at one end, so there is some natural light). The long thin room ends at the bottom of the "U", and the viewer can see some colored light shining faintly from this dark end of the room. When you walk down to the end, you see two trapezoidal hallways. And at the end of the hallways (which can be long or short, depending on which barrack you are in) are a series of colored fluorescent lights and a second bunch of differently colored fluorescent behind them. So each hallway has a different combination of colors.



Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa project), 1996, installation



Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa project), 1996, installation

Standing in these halls was extremely disorienting. The slanted lights and walls gave it the feeling of a funhouse. The longer I stood in the halls, the more you felt myself wanting to lean. I wonder if viewers ever fall over. These works show that "minimalism" is not necessarily the right terms for his art. He is using his medium--fluorescent lights and architecture--to create a total experience. It's not about subtracting or paring down. And by using architecture as an element, he was in tune with Judd's conception of Marfa.



Ilya Kabakov, School No. 6 (detail), 1993, installation

The same can be said of Ilya Kabakov, even though he is a very different artist from the others above, and his use of the barrack he was given is likewise very different. He wasn't interested in creating a perfect environment for displaying some objects. He was interested in the barrack's status as an abandoned, defunct space. These barracks had held cavalry soldiers, ready to mount up and push back any spillover from the Mexican Revolution. They were an obsolete corner of the history of the 20th century. Kabakov decided to create another obsolete corner of that history here--a Soviet schoolhouse called School No. 6.

The work barrack is filled with wrecked furniture, papers, straw, dirt, musical instruments, sports equipment, books, school supplies, and vitrines filled with pictures and little written notes. One good reason to buy the big Chinati book is that it translates the notes. They are memories of children of various events the school. Some seem quite universal, and some are very Soviet specific (a pilot donates a matchbook and a single burned match to the school--when he was shot down, he survived in the forest by lighting fires to keep warm as he made his way back to the front. The burned match was his very last one, with which he lit a signal fire and was rescued). The installation depicts a turned page of history.

The courtyard, unlike the other barracks at Chinati, has been allowed to become overgrown with desert plants. The top of the "U" is crudely fenced off. The fence is flimsy and has many gaps--when you look through them, you see Judd's artillery sheds. I think this may have been a little joke on Kabakov's part. He wanted you, standing within this deliberate shambles, to be able to see the clean perfection of Judd's vision.

When Kabakov created School No. 6, he took off the doors and windows facing the inner courtyard. The idea was that the elements would enter the building, allowing the artfully-created illusion of decay to become actual decay. Sand and desert critters would come inside. But when the staff discovered that insects were eating the paper, they asked Kabakov if they could close off the inside from the outside. Kabakov must have been amused by this request, but he assented. A staff of Chinati so dedicated to permanence--DO NOT TOUCH!--couldn't handle the idea that a work was designed to erode away to nothingness.



Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Monument to the Last Horse, 1991, aluminum, polyurethane, paint

And conservation is sometimes a challenge. Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen's Monument to the Last Horse was being repaired when I was there. The piece was made out of aluminum (fabricated from a small model by the same fabricators that did Judd's boxes.) But the rough surface was made of polyurethane attached to the aluminum framework. Then the whole thing was painted brown. It's a lovely tribute to the history of Fort D.A. Russell, and as an outsized sculpture of a normally small thing, it simultaneously fits in with Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's oeuvre and fits in with other local monuments--for example, the mammoth roadrunner Paisano Pete in Fort Stockton.

The problem is that the paint was being slowly sandblasted away by nature. The polyurethane was in danger or eroding if the paint went away. When I was there, they were removing the paint by "sandblasting" it with ground-up walnut  shells (a substance that turns out to have a large variety of industrial uses) in preparation for repainting it. The ground around Monument to the Last Horse was covered with reddish walnut shell dust.

In addition to these pieces, there are paintings by John Wesley, sculptures by Richard Long, Roni Horn, David Rabinowitch and Carl André, and drawings by Ingólfur Arnarsson. The base hospital is being slowly converted into a space for work by Robert Irwin.

In the end, Chinati feels like a monument to Donald Judd's ego, but that doesn't bother me so much. Many museums start their lives as monuments to someone's ego. Usually it's some rich guy--"Look, here is the beauty I owned." Why not let an artist do the same? After all, Chinati feels very different from your garden variety museum. Judd was willing and able to give the work he displayed profound dignity--each artist has his own place and room for the work to breathe. It should be noted, however, that his vision is very macho--gigantic pieces made of construction materials, and only one female artist in the whole bunch (and the piece Van Bruggen helped create is itself sort of a male fantasy). You see this and wonder, what would a female Chinati look like? What if Donald Judd had died 1970 of a brain tumor and Eva Hesse had lived on to create a vast collection out in the desert?

These are the kind of thoughts that can come to you as you wander from barrack to barrack, going crazy from the heat.

Mat Brinkman's Beer

There is a long association of art and wine. Although here in the U.S., we often have this puritanical notion that art should educate us or enlighten us, one of art's main functions is pleasure. Ditto with alcohol. Alcohol and art are tools for hedonism. And when we start talking about wine, we add in another commonality, connoisseurship. So it was natural that the two should come together at some point, which is what happened in 1945 with Château Mouton Rothschild. In that year, they commissioned a young artist, Philippe Jullian, to create an illustration for their wine label.



Philippe Jullian, Château Mouton Rothschild 1945 wine label

After that point, Château Mouton Rothschild commissioned a new artist label each year by some of the greatest names in art. Here are a few.


Jean Cocteau, Château Mouton Rothschild 1947 wine label


André Masson, Château Mouton Rothschild 1957 wine label


Pierre Alechinsky, Château Mouton Rothschild 1966 wine label


Pablo Picasso, Château Mouton Rothschild 1973 wine label

This label was a tribute to Picasso, who died in 1973. I'm not sure if he actually created this image for Rothschild.


Niki de Saint Phalle, Château Mouton Rothschild 1997 wine label


Ilya Kabakov, Château Mouton Rothschild 2002 wine label

Château Mouton Rothschild started a tradition of limited edition artist labels. (Their labels are limited by the quantity of the vintage in a given year.)

So has anyone done this with art comics artists? Well, you can deduce that they have from the title of this post. A company called Alchemic Ale began releasing limited edition beer with artist-design silk-screened labels. The first was a beer with a label designed by Ron Regé, Jr., which came with a tiny little comic book attached. And in the past week or so, Alchemic Ale released a limited edition beer with a Halloween themed silkscreened label by Mat Brinkman.


Mat Brinkman, Bokrijks Ale bottle by Alchemic Ale, 2010

Mat Brinkman was one of the Fort Thunder artists. He's published two great books, Teratoid Heights and Multiforce, and as part of the group Forcefield, he was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

How is the beer? The Ron Regé, Jr. beer was Belgian abbey ale, and it was delicious. As for the Mat Brinkman beer? Well, my two bottle are cooling in the fridge right now--I will be drinking them later this afternoon. I'll give a review then.

One final note: Alchemic Ale is located here in Houston. Who would have guessed that the first alternative comics institution (after the late, lamented Apeshot Press) would be a beer importer?

Update: The Mat Brinkman-labels Bokrijks Ale is delicious--it has a young, fresh malty flavor.