• In S.F.: Luc Tuymans at SFMOMA, opens Wednesday. Read the NYT profile of Tuymans here.
• In L.A.: After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the California African American Museum, through March 7. That Nadine Robinson piece looks pretty damn badass.
• In San Jose, Calif: The Art of Zines 2010 at Anno Domini through March 13.
• In Houston: Maurizio Cattelan at the Menil Collection, opens Friday.
• In NYC: Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, opens Friday.
• In NYC: Kiki Smith, Sojourn, at the Brooklyn Museum, opens Friday.
• In NYC: Last week to see Omer Fast: Nostalgia at the Whitney, closing on Sunday. Don’t miss.
• In NYC: Metal Mad: An Army of Artists Paying Homage To Heavy Metal, at Giant Robot, through March 3. (World’s Best Ever.)
• In London: The Worst Condition is to Pass Under a Sword Which is Not One’s Own, at the Tate Modern, through May 3.
• In Berlin: East Side Stories: German Photography 1950s to 1980s, at Kicken Gallery, through April 17.

Thank you thank you Marshall Astor.

• Who Owns What in art history. (@tabgirl.)
• Late addition: The NYT profiles Eli Broad, “a billionaire philanthropist whose beneficence comes with not just strings but with ropes that could moor an ocean liner.” (@KnightLAT.)
• I love it when Jerry Saltz gets RANTY. Dude needs a YouTube channel, stat. A few points I take issue with in this writing-about-art tirade:
  • One, there already are online art mags out there (see Triple Canopy, Idiom).
  • Two, there’s an implicit assumption that art magazines offer a writer editing. C’mon dude, one word: ArtForum. If that stuff is “edited,” I don’t want to see what it looked like before it went in. Most unedited bloggers I read produce better copy than that. Besides, good editors are hard to come by in any media.
  • Three, dude has got to get over the anonymous trolls. They’ve always been around, it’s just that the Internet makes their trolling more public. I’ve worked at news dailies and weeklies where we’ve gotten vicious, crazy shit via every imaginable means — letters, packages, e-mails, not to mention psychotic phone calls. My advice: Let. It. Go. By getting enraged about this, you’re egging those freaks on.
  • Lastly, because I have to add my two cents: I think everyone in the art industry — especially writers — should be obligated to hold at least one job outside of it at all times (like long-haul trucker), ‘cuz there’s something to be said about having experience in the big wide world and not just in cement boxes full of objects. (In the interest of transparency: My name is Carolina A. Miranda and I approved this post.)
• In a related story: the atomic drops are flying in ¡The John Yau versus Jerry Saltz Art Critic Smackdown! Let’s get ready to ruuuuuuuuuuuumble!!!!
• And because it’s All-Jerry-All-The-Time here on C-Mon: Some websquatter is trying to send the The Great Saltzino a message.
• Whew. Onto other things: Japanther is debuting a book in collaboration with Dan Graham.
• Jeff Koons is hiring. (@16miles)
• SFMOMA has raised $250 million for its new wing. (Arts Journal.)
• 17 museum admissions tags from around the world. (@musueumnerd.)
• Have been enjoying Man Bartlett’s 1stfans Twitter feed for the Brooklyn Museum. And yes, you have to be a museum member to read them. (It’s $20 a year, the price of about 5 cappuccinos. And no, I don’t want to hear any belly-aching about it.)
• Shit I Wish I’d Made Up: The Marina Abramovic Energy Blanket, only $460.
• Artspeak, “a grey porridge of abstract nouns.”
• Silvio Berlusconi made of sand.
• A Q&A with Shaquille O’Neal, curator. My favorite line: “I”m working with the greatest artist in the world, Peter Max.” (@ARTnewsmag.)
• TwitPics from space. (@simondumenco.)
• A blog called Studies in Crap. (Out There.)
• One in four Americans is employed to protect the rich. (The Rumpus.)
• When fine art plagiarizes fine photography.
• Graffiti New York, one man’s three-decade chronicle of graffiti in the NYT. Funny line: “Some European aficionados arrive and immediately start asking how they can paint the side of a train. (Mr. Felisbret says some also think that teenagers rule the city and all graffiti writers are break dancers.)” See the slideshow.
• Today’s Street Art: The tree shadows of Pablo Sánchez Herrero in Salamanca.
• Madonna, aging pop star/green architecture patron.
• Chocolate anus. Seriously.

• Hello Kitty chainsaw.
• Giacometti sells for a butt-load of $$$.
• In sorta related news: Author Michael Crichton is sellin’ some art, including a Jasper Johns flag painting. (@russelltrombone.)
• Talking to the owner of the e-Bay piece that sells itself: “I have this thing, and I really want to keep it, but the reason I want to keep it is that it might leave.” (Modern Art Notes.)
• The L.A. Dept of Cultural Affairs gets to hold onto at least some of its funding.
• The Met is getting bloggy. (Modern Art Notes.)
• New Yorkers discovering “California minimalism” are just figuring out what Cali types already know, says Tyler Green. Speaking of which, Green links to a series of interviews he did with Doug Wheeler in ‘08.
• There’s a coupla of Paul McCarthy videos from 1987 on tank.tv until Feb. 29. So totally weird.
• Jeff Koons is gonna make a BMW art car. I’m voting for metallic balloon finish over the Dakis Joannou yacht pattern.
• 26 Cars in Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill.
• Tony Kushner’s six-word memoir.
• Photo Essay: Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
• Upside down face. (@GOOD.)
• A Haitian hip-hop mix. Trés groovy. (@sfj.)
• Today’s Urban Decay Photo Essay: Restoring the Loew’s Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. (Gracias, Big Papi G.)
• Steve Powers’ Love Letters to Philly now available in book form.
• Ripo Came and Went.
• A petition to save Paul Rudolph’s John Chorley Elementary School in Middletown, NY.
• Chiloé.

Last December, the director of L.A.’s Box Gallery contacted me about the conservation of some 1950s and 60s pieces by Robert Mallary (1917-1997). The pieces consisted largely of old tuxedos dipped in resin and sculptures made of polyester, sand and dirt. For an Art Nurse like myself, nothing is more exciting than a chance to work on detritus-as-art, and these works — made by a pioneer in the field of assemblage and use of resin — would provide me with a rich opportunity to experiment with the conservation of new materials, not to mention chew over the limits between junk and art.

Crafted out of wood, dirt, sand, rusted steel, cardboard, tar paper and fabric that has been crushed, bent, twisted, and dipped in a resin of questionable formulation, these sculptures had once been seen in landmark avant-garde exhibitions such as MoMA’s Sixteen Americans (1959) and Art of Assemblage (1961). More recently, they had  languished in a near-junk heap in the building that had once served as Mallary’s studio in Conway, Massachusetts. They might have never been seen or heard from again if artist Paul McCarthy, long an admirer of Mallary’s work, hadn’t included some of them in the show Low Life, Slow Life at the San Francisco Wattis Institute in 2008.

“As soon as we saw this work we knew something bigger had to be done,” says Box Gallery director Mara McCarthy (who also happens to be Paul’s daughter). So the gallery’s team made three separate trips to Massachusetts and carefully sorted through the heaps in Mallary’s studio. After receiving the Art Nurse treatment, eighteen of these sculptures will go on exhibit this Saturday. Working on them wasn’t easy. Mallary’s pieces aren’t just fragile; they’re each made up of  what seems to be a million different materials – one corner might be all fabric and resin, another dirt and old newspaper. And because every material adheres differently and every adhesive used in conservation has the potential to stain the very thing you’re gluing, every single repair required a separate decision.  By the end of the week when the work was done (which incidentally was also the week that L.A. was pummeled by rain, which meant that everything took twice as long to dry) my brain felt as torqued as one of Mallary’s tuxedo pieces.

But it was clearly worth it.  In today’s art world, we’ve gotten so used to pieces made of weird materials that junk art seems as common as canvas painting.  But Mallary’s sculptures have a raw power that defies description.  This is shockingly good work – that has not been seen in nearly four decades. So if you’re going to be anywhere near L.A. over the next couple of months, get yourself over to The Box to see them. Mara McCarthy, in fact, believes that the proper resting place for these pieces would be a museum. After spending 60 hours staring and handling these works, I’d have to heartily agree.

A special thanks to the folks at the gallery for allowing us to document this process. See many more photos after the jump. Robert Mallary opens at the Box Gallery in Chinatown this Sat, Feb. 6 at 6pm and is on display until April 3, 2010.

The piles of sculpture in Mallary’s Massachusetts studio.

Bits of sculpture are retrieved and inventoried in the courtyard.

Jouster, 1960, shortly after being rescued.

Detail from Jouster. Tar paper, resin, broken wood and steel.

Jouster, the wide shot, at the Box, in L.A.

In the foreground: Corner Piece, getting the Art Nurse treatment. In the background, parts of Paul McCarthy’s Pig Island.

Flight 61. A mix of carboard, wood, newspaper, resin and lots of dirt.

Harpy, 1962, gets vacuumed after four decades of accumulating dirt and cobwebs.

Trek, 1958-59.

Corner Piece gets trussed in preparation for assembly.

Mallary’s Harpy, installed. See another similar work, Crucifix here.

Do you have a conservation question for the Art Nurse? E-mail her at suzie [at ] c-monster [dot] net.