DIGEST 73: Boldface Names
At Auction June 25-July 1, 2025
THE ARCADES:LIVE Thursday June 26. Preview at 7, shows at 8 and 8:45. You’re invited! A show of historical design from the 17th C. to the present, alongside a solo presentation of TINA POTTER’s work. With a very special live show featuring:
KEN BARNETT, GABRIEL HELD, NATASHA STAGG, and VLAD
Sonic landscape by flirty800, soundtrack by JON ECKHAUS
Special thanks to JESSI REAVES, TEDDY BERGMAN, JUSTIN KRAY, and THOMAS MCCARTY. It takes a village to raise a David.
In his 1987 Artforum review of Tina Potter (American, born 1950), Charles Hagen notes:
Photography can be used as an abstract medium only with difficulty. Its primary purpose has been to reveal detail, to provide a surfeit of information about the scene it depicts. The illusion that photographs offer an objective picture of reality is based on just this overwhelming ocean of data that it offers. Photographers who want to emphasize the pictorial qualities of the medium—chiaroscuro, texture, abstract form—have to find ways to suppress its unflagging tendency to depict specific and recognizable scenes, and by the same token to forestall the tendency on the part of viewers to read the pictures for precisely those references to the world beyond the picture.
He is entirely right—it is both the strength and weakness of photography that the medium is so tightly wedded to our sense of reality. “Photoreal” is used to decribe a quality of images: the technology has shaped our way of thinking. But there has been an impulse in photography since the modernists (Man Ray, notably) to explore a relation more primal than that of reflection. The photograph is also a thing—chemicals, paper, light—rather than the image of a thing and as such, another material to work with.
Tina Potter exploits this double life of photography—as image, and as thing. Overly nearly 50 years she has drawn on the photographs at hand—personal snapshots of New York City in the 1980s, catastrophic photojournalism of Chernobyl, microscopic photos of viruses and bacteria that she montages in service of new and uncanny images. The work suggests a primal artistic fantasy—to be able to take the world as such as the very medium of creation, to take scenes of atrocity and agents of devastation and transmute them into objects of beauty and fascination. It is a dream of mastery for an age of mediated anxiety: as any attentive parent notices, the doll and the drawing are two of the first media through which we stage relating, representing, and mastering the world.
For his part, Hagen appreciated Potter’s painterly approach: he liked her Idols which use electron microscopy imagery to reconstitute forms suggestive of neolithic idols. But he could not see why Potter drew on other images of catastrophe, wondering if she “employs them more for their formal qualities than for what they represent.” That is, Hagen needed Potter to do precisely what her work refuses to do—to illustrate some unitary theory of how the world outside the image ought to stand in relation to its image and to us. Potter, thankfully, offers instead a series of experiments, the record of her own half century of sense-making, whose resonances in the age of photographic deception and virality (biological and mediatic), feel more prescient than ever.
Tina Potter’s work has been exhibited and reviewed widely. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. I am pleased to present a selection of her works at the Arcades Live.
I am out of space. If you need guidance on auction bidding look back at every other digest.
Terre mêlée as in mixed earth. Basically laminating different colored clay to produce this marbled effect. French from 17th c. Beautiful!
Upholstered Bench
This is so not me but it is so my readers, if that makes sense. I do like it.
(5) Shoji Hamada Figures
Very Spirited Away in the forest.
Leonidas Maroulis, In the Name of Christ
I do get why you wouldn’t like this. But I do.
happy pride.
Dirty, dirty runners. But they can be cleaned. And they are cool. Edward Fields. I feel like I should have a trivia night where I test you all on the Arcades classics. Like…American rug maker, White House rugs. Who is Edward Fields? Maybe at the next live show.
7.A Pair of Art Deco Nightstands
Nice.
I had a very upsetting interaction with LA and Julien’s last week that I don’t want to talk about just yet for legal reasons. Anyway, this is at Julien’s and I suggest you bid carefully . . .
9 .Trio of Willy Guhl Molar Planters
OK, Circa Auctions—first, hi! Second, how are you getting all this Willy Guhl? And can I have these?
See you at the live show, vultures!