Nancy Spero "Tattoo" 1996 silkscreen

Barry and I love art and the art world, or at least most of the art world. We were recently rudely reminded of the part we don't like.

One month ago we asked for permission to reproduce an image which I had photographed myself, of a work we own, which was created by a great artist we much admire. We wanted to add a photo to the entry in our collection site, and also to include an image of it on a card announcing a show at English Kills Art Gallery. The work is "Tattoo", a 1996 print by Nancy Spero (1926-2009), and it was going to be included in the large group installation inside the Bushwick gallery.

The owner, Chris Harding, had approached us with the idea for the show, and he had selected 46 pieces from among the works mounted inside our apartment. I think his very first choice was the Spero; it was certainly his first choice for the invitation, and we were delighted with his pick. We're very fond of the artist, and we treasure the piece itself.

Once we were told it would be Spero, we set about to get photo permission from the estate. We wrote first to Galerie Lelong, which represents the artist. They asked us to send an image and to explain further the purposes for which it would be used. They would then forward the request to the estate. About two weeks later we were told it had been approved, and that an agreement form would follow, meaning the final paperwork to authorize the copyright, from VAGA (the Spero estate's licensing agent).

Everyone on our end got very excited. It seemed we would make the printing deadline, and the world would now see a little more of Nancy Spero.

Two days later we heard directly from VAGA for the first time, and this time the news was not so good: We had proposed a large detail of the print for the face of the card, believing it would be more easily read and more compelling in the 5 x7 inch format, but they would not approve cropping of any kind. Also, we would have to come up with hundreds of dollars in "copyright license fees" for the right to use it for the invitation and for the right to display it on our collection website; the fee for the latter would have to be paid every 5 years.

Now we are both pretty well known as activists opposed to camera prohibitions as found sometimes in galeries but much more commonly in museums - and also opposed to the current national obsession with prohibiting cameras almost everywhere else - but we generally abide by the photography rules, and never more scrupulously than in uploading images of art onto our on-line collection site. We have entered more than 800 pieces there, and while we'd like to show a proper image of each, that will require not only time, but also the permission of the artist or the estate. In the meantime we will not show anything larger than a thumbnail, since the artist retains the rights to reproduction.

We have never been refused when we have asked for an okay, except for one extraordinary circumstance, and we certainly have never been asked for money.

I wrote back to the gallery and to VAGA, explaining what we do, that we have not and do not intend to ever sell the art we own, and that absolutely no money was going to change hands in the mounting of the show (although I didn't go so far as to describe English Kills as the un-Mary Boone). I got a response saying that the representative for the estate and VAGA had jointly agreed to give us a 20% discount on the fee for the 5-year website JPEG license, but not for the card reproduction. We were told however that we could not publish or print anything until after the estate was persuaded that "Tattoo" was actually a Spero work. The letter added that the process of gathering the information they needed would help authenticate it for our own records and for the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné*.

I have to say that we have absolutely no quarrel with Galerie Lelong's part in the negotiations; in fact we were pleased by the gallery's courtesy and quick response, especially as it was over a holiday weekend.

After that last letter from VAGA we walked away, and instead went with the wonderful Alejandro Diaz image, "Esta Galeria", which can be seen on the invitation. Also, we have not uploaded a larger-size image of the Spero on the collection site.

Several notes (really just a start):

1) Neither the gallery nor the estate had an image of the work we own, and it seems pretty clear that they didn't know it even existed until I wrote to the gallery.

2) The Estate, or VAGA, was happy to charge us money to show an image I took of a work we ourselves owned, and of which it knew nothing; only when I responded in surprise at being asked to pay did anyone show any interest in the art itself.

3) The non-commercial purposes, of the collection and the show, are quite clear, and were made apparent to the gallery, the artist's estate, and VAGA more than once, yet they wanted to exploit them.

4) Do artists really need a corporation to protect them from people like us? Incidentally, while one look at the VAGA site shows that they control the visibility of hundreds of dead artists, they are actually dwarfed by another property guardian, Artists Rights Society (ARS).

5) We have spoken to a number of younger artists about Nancy Spero, and very few have even heard of her or her work; perhaps we can now understand why.

6) Both Nancy and her partner of a half century, Leon Golub, in their lives and in their art, addressed power relations; it's inconceivable to me that either would want her/his art to be shielded from view.

* The last time we were a part of a Catalogue Raisonné project both we and the estate (of Mark Morrisroe, owned by Fotomuseum Winterthur) bent over backwards to help document an artist's work; there wasn't a hint of image insecurity.

[The image is only a thumbnail, and therefore almost completely useless, because I do not have permission from the artist's estate to publish a larger size; the framed print itself can be seen at English Kills Art Gallery through October 28]

untitled (red tracers) 2012

Last night I accompanied Barry to the Gotham Ruby Conference (GORUCO) afterparty. I was his arm candy, we explained to anyone who asked about my [technical] orientation. It was a beautiful night to be on the water, with a quarter moon above and under our feet a boat filled with some very nice and very smart people (including some real eye candy of all kinds). When we neared the Statue of Liberty the skies exploded in a terrific fireworks display set off from a barge anchored just off Ellis Island. Although this is the weekend of the 43rd anniversary of Stonewall, the occasion, and the sponsor, of these particular pyrotechnics was actually The B.I.G. Celebration.

I captured some more conventional shots, but this is the one which captured me, and it needed no Photoshopping. Fireworks are abstractions anyway; that's why most of us prefer them to bombs.

untitled (yellow Eames) 2012

untitled (expiring balloons) 2012

These aging balloon clusters (their black lines the hand of an artist?) were snagged in the branches of a sidewalk tree on 23rd Street yesterday, the oxygen (NOTE: my readers are going for helium) which had given them life slowly expelling.

untitled (truck tire) 2011

I spotted this miniature landscape in the front of a house on Graham Avenue in WIlliamsburg, and captured it in an unwitting homage to Harry Callahan.

untitled (Duchamp) 2011

A framed "Duchamp" has appeared on the window of the old White Box space on West 26 Street, while it awaits a new tenant.

untitled (casement ice) 2010

Ipomoea alba

I was walking about the West Village this afternoon when I spotted this gorgeous plant garlanding the high metal fence surrounding the lush Jefferson Market Garden. I immediately thought of one of my childhood favorites (and always a guaranteed gardening success), the Morning Glory, although this was clearly not my Michigan friend.

Just now I Googled "vine with large white flowers" and discovered I had seen and photographed a "Moon Vine", or "Moonflower" (Ipomoea alba). It's "a species of night-blooming morning-glory", according to Wikipedia, where I also learned that it may grow to 100 feet, given the appropriate host.

But the plant isn't just a pretty face and a tall drink of water: Ipomoea alba played an historic role in the history of rubber:

The ancient Mesoamerican civilizations used the Ipomoea alba morning glory to convert the latex from the Castilla elastica tree and the guayule plant to produce bouncing rubber balls. The sulfur in this morning glory served to vulcanize the rubber, a process pre-dating Charles Goodyear's discovery by at least 3,000 years.

*
But why is a tall person a "tall drink of water"? I've noticed a lot of silly ideas about this very-old-fashioned expression on line, but the phrase (one of my favorites) was always pretty clear to me, even as a child: Obviously if a very tall person took a drink of water, it would have a lot longer to go to reach the stomach.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens Hiawatha in clay, 1871-1872; this marble carving, 1874, 7 feet 9 inches high, including pedestal [detail]

Barry and I were leaving the Metropolitan Museum cafe in the American Wing yesterday when we passed the Saint-Gaudens marble "Hiawatha". I must have passed it any number of times before, but now I found myself zeroing in on the beautifully-modeled torso of this noble young man, created by an artist who was only about 23 himself when he began the work in clay. Then, thinking about the date, 1870, I thought about the time and geography of the work's origins.

In the very midst of the beginnings of the last segment of our protracted Indian wars, a very young Augustus Saint-Gaudens, fled Paris, where he had studied for three years, on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. He settled in Rome in late 1870 where he began work on "Hiawatha", his first full-length statue. His inspiration was the legendary Chippewa chief and founder of the Iroquois confederacy who was the main protagonist in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's enormously popular 1955 poem, "The Song of Hiawatha"*.

In 1870 Saint-Gaudens' native country was still nursing the wounds of the Civil War; France and Germany were engaged in a duel which quickly realized the end of one empire and the birth of another, both with enormous consequences which continue today; the Italian army had crossed the papal frontier (finally completing the wars for unification), in the same month the artist arrived in Rome. Saint-Gaudens however was otherwise engaged.

The War Between the States may have ended (he had been too young to participate), but there was hardly going to be any peace on the other side of the Atlantic, where twenty more years of wars directly impacted - in fact completely devastated - the people represented in his early masterpiece.

Americans were eager to settle the lands which had been opened up in the west, and Civil War veterans, adventurers and misfits were volunteering to secure their right to be there, defending it from the legitimate claims of the peoples we were already making into legends and heroes. The United States was determined to fulfill its own peoples' "manifest destiny" and would not allow what remained of native American civilizations to stand in the way of its claim to the "Land of Many Uses". In spite of occasional sensational - and hugely popularized - news events like "Custer's Last Stand"**, the full horror of these last Indian Wars was largely removed from the consciousness of Americans back east, much as in the case of our own wars today.

It was all over by 1890: Providence had made the entire country safe for the American Empire, but the devil had taken the hindmost; the Indian was now almost gone, and almost forgotten, except where and how it served the victors to remember him.

But it is a beautiful statue.

*
The fame and legend attached to both the poem and its subject continued well into the 20th century: I remember my class being told in grade school to memorize the trochaic tetrameter of this Longfellow poem, and we barely questioned the assignment (I never got beyond a few stanzas).

**
When my own family drove west in the big Buick on a long vacation 55 years ago, the Little Big Horn ranked extremely high on our own list of "must sees", and in fact, I've never forgotten my impressions of that sad, and then still very desolate, little-visited place.

This image includes only one segment of a vast checkered display set up in the Union Square Greenmarket last Friday by Samascott Orchards, of Martin van Buren's Kinderhook, New York. The cherries were going fast.

Speaking of van Buren, I just learned that the bewhiskered knickerbocker, incidentally the first president from New York (and the first born in the U.S.), was the first one for whom English was not a first language. We're still waiting for the second, and, if we all survive, there should be many more.

The boy went far. If he were alive today, what do we think he'd say about our modern Know Nothings? But maybe there's no real parallel, since his family, and many other Dutch settlers, had been busy, and dominant, in the upper Hudson valley since the early 1600's, before English, or the English had subsumed all. Also, the Dutch were pretty white, and definitely not Catholic. Today's Know Nothings have to find a way to get around the fact that if there are any "illegals", it's the people who stole the West, indeed the entire Western Hemisphere, from those who were there first.