Snake America 99
Snake is a monthly email blast covering vintage.
(photo by me)
Wright Auction House, Jim Walrod's furniture collection: The home items of Jim Walrod, furniture finder to important people, decorator I guess and font of knowledge and artful person, will be auctioned by Wright on May 3, later today in Chicago. I wrote about Walrod's death when he passed away and it affected me. Much of his work was amassing this incredible collection of furniture and lamps. Wright says you can bid over the phone and on their app and in person and that the money is going to a charitable endowment that is not yet determined. Richard Wright, the company's founder and president, tells me his favorite auction from the lot is the New Order show poster for July 7, 1983.
This looks like most of the stuff from Walrod's Chinatown apartment that Mark Gonzales once lived in. Though I remember Walrod had an Anfibio sofa which isn't listed here. In an Apartmento interview a few years ago he told the writer that he rented and his cabinet was $50,000. After reading that I knew I needed to learn everything about him. What follows are pieces from the collection. Jack Dickey the journalist won two Jeopardy episodes and $46,802 in early April and I asked him would he spend it all on this furniture. He could spend it all on the Gaetano Pesce cabinet if he wanted. If he doesn't, and he's yet to answer, maybe I can. I would have to sell my record and clothing collection to pay for the cabinet and still be able to go to the movies. Let me know if you want either of those. This has to be the most important furniture auction of our lifetime. (Sotheby's auctioned David Bowie's Memphis collection in late in 2016 but Walrod's collection has a wider breadth of interest.)
(Courtesy of Wright)
Guy de Rougemont fake totem pole: I don't possess the critical faculties to describe what stops me dead in my tracks when i look at this. I saw a photo of this column in a story or post about Walrod's apartment a few or a couple years ago and have been looking for it since. I wasn't sure if it was a totem pole or light-up statue or what. It's hard to search for art totem poles. "Modern totem pole" yields Tiki statues and "Italian totem" is less than nothing. If I remember right this series of de Rougemont totems has three color schemes. He did more in other very bright colors and patterns. Phillips listed three for $14,000 each ten years ago but they didn't sell. de Rougemont did those on PVC and metal.
The French sculpture title translates to "column for the thirsty." Like water coming out of the ground or sunlight through the window. The column is unobtrusive and very smooth and the colors are so beautiful and positive. I can't think of a more optimistic piece of art than this. Usually bright things are wide and not narrow and it's disorienting in a good way to see many different bright colors on top of each other in a narrow space. But it's not busy: the white and black on the column give the the different fields of brightness space and keep them from clashing and crowding. I've never seen anything like it before. Cloud tables that look like beautiful clouds are de Rougemont's best known work. He made cloud lamps too and a cloud credenza. They're not whimsical or fun but are substantive and happy. He also has a 10-meter tall totem pole in Lyon that is colorful like the other ones. de Rougemont lives in Lyon and the pole was erected there in 1981. I don't like that one as much. He is my new favorite thing.
(Courtesy of Wright)
First Intermission: Jim Walrod got this Peter Shire teacup from mutual friends before him and Shire became friends themselves. Shire is an LA artist, furniture designer and architect who worked under Ettore Sottsass for Memphis and whose main or consistent medium is clay, like this cup. Shire's work is incredibly bright and optimistic and happy and deep. Him and Walrod met on Instagram, so not that long ago. Shire is about my dad's age. I asked Shire through our mutual friend Cole about Walrod.
"...The best thing I saw him score, the only thing I saw him score, ​it made me mad ​because ​he got it and I didn't. When we met up at Peter [Halley]'s, he came in brandishing a copy of New Fashion Japan by Leonard Koren, the French translation. He had happened to notice it as he passed by some guy selling books on the street...." ".... Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas said something more or less like: In the beginning there are only a few people who understand ​your work​. When you get popular, many people come around for that reason. But in the end it's always only the same people who were there in the beginning. (Loosely paraphrased. More or less​). Jim is that person who was there in the beginning...."
Shire also says he doesn't go to Dodgers games but listens to "every one of them" either on the radio at home or because he can hear them from Solano Canyon, that his bedsheets in his Apartmento feature are surplus yardage from Michael Levine downtown and "aren't even shown" in the magazine. And that he is working now on a book about towers and nostalgia for Hat & Beard Publishers [they did the Slash book and a good dancehall book], a table with "19 spinning plates and portholes like an ocean liner" for the curator Aaron Moulton for Over the Influence and "drawings, impossible teapots, interesting furniture, and some sculpture" at Kayne Griffin Corcoran​ through May 12.
(photo by me)
Nicola L La Femme Commode: In Apartmento, Walrod is on the cover with this cabinet. It's an orange woman who has drawers for a face. Walrod says in the interview that Nicola L let Bad Brains stay at her apartment in the 1980s. And that she shot the live Bad Brains flick, "My Picture at the Movies," at CB's in 1979. This was outright new information when he broke it in the magazine. The Commode's brilliant design and idea outweigh either of those facts or association. Nicola L is not associated with Bad Brains and it would be a disservice to link her work and art with music or people she let stay at her house. I used to know a little bit about furniture but my apartment isn't very big and once I got what I needed I began to mix up designer names and eras and my head started filling with other knowledge about leg exercises and clothing. Wright also has a Nicola L head with golf (?) balls inside. Man it is nice to look at. She made eight of these commodes and this one costs less than a used Honda Civic. Imagine looking at this every day.
(Courtesy of Wright)
Bitossi ashtray: It's good people don't smoke indoors anymore. It's bad they don’t smoke indoors in Atlantic City anymore. Since you should smoke indoors there. When I am in Atlantic City I am ashamed I don't smoke. I don't feel like that anywhere else, not even Europe. We live in a country defined by its glut of intractable problems but smoking in casinos is one of the few things here that work.
One negative effect of people smoking cigarettes less is it's harder to find nice ways to have short conversations with all types of people. Another small negative outcome of outlawing cigarette smoking indoors is that ashtrays have gone away. It's nice to have something small at home that has a limited purpose and permanent presence. Someone who smokes a pack a day might use their ashtray for 30 seconds in the few hours they're home and awake after work, but may look at it for half that time. An ashtray's real purpose is to be looked at. Hermes coin trays share this purpose but the side-effects of money are more deleterious than tobacco.
Smoking weakens people and strengthens the ties between people and each other and people and things. You could use a coffee cup for ash, like Ordell Robbie did in Jackie Brown when he pays for Beaumont Livingston's bail through Max Cherry. Severely advanced Italian brands like Bitossi Ceramiche designing art for cig rippers shows that even if everyone does the same thing, and we all are really doing the same thing, there's a way to do it different. I might be overthinking this since everyone ripped cigs in the 60s and 70s, which is when this ashtray was produced.
(photo by me)
Intermission: These Fiorucci cans, there's a song on an old DC hardcore record that shits on Fiorucci and I listened to it a lot in high school and grew to boycott Fiorucci. Not that I knew what Fiorucci was or saw any Fiorucci. I just stayed away. Boy was I wrong. These cans are subtly genius and delicate. They are very sweet and look like something on a store shelf in a Peter Bogdanovich movie. Or maybe a sad house somewhere. Walrod said what's up to Andy Warhol on Lexington Avenue in the 1970s or 1980s and that's how he started working at the original Fiorucci store on East 59th and that's when it got started for him.
(photo by me)
Hell's Angels homemade poster: Gig poster for a party Grateful Dead played in July of 1969 at a Longshoreman's hall for one dollar per head and no minors. The party was for Gino Heinicke, a Hell's Angel killed by seven Gypsy Jokers (also a bike gang) a few days earlier in a fight in Golden Gate Park. The Dead were super biker affiliated, and now my little sister lives down the block from their Haight Ashbury apartment. They have a Wasteland by her place and when I went I browsed the whole store twice and did not find one thing. How things have changed.
I like the lettering here and how the skull's helmet is over his eyes so he can't see where he's driving. I also like that this poster is in with the furniture and art here. Seeing all these things together doesn't feel like too much though the thought comes up. In my experience the world releases its infinite supply of incredible stuff at a trickle. One at a time, here and there, not all together. It's rare to get all the good stuff at once (though it happens). As ready as you might be it's a system shock and when I visited Wright's small showroom on Wednesday I was overwhelmed. I had recognized many of the pieces: some furniture was at Difficult, which Walrod curated for R & Company in 2015. Most if not all the lamps were in the Radical Italian Lighting exhibit at Patrick Parrish Gallery that year. It was over the top, $100,000 or more worth of lamps. Here everything is for sale and it's more than lamps. I try not to think about the money.
The lots here are a concentrated celebration of a life that bended reality and rules. So much beautiful art effortlessly circled one person. He would just find them at flea markets for cheap what seemed like every other week. Which seems impossible but any of us can get there if we put in the time reading and talking to people. This auction isn't a party like the one the Angels threw for Heinicke. Someone died and they're not coming back and their house is empty now. But these are beautiful works, whether set against each other or apart, together for the last time, making time stop until someone else like him comes around again.
Thanks for reading. Rest in peace Judith Lieber. New T-shirts, more newsletters and a book of all the newsletters coming at varying instances of soon.
Snake