Yoko Ono

Happy Birthday to Yoko Ono, who turns 92 today. 

David Shrigley | Travel Wallet

David Shrigley
Travel Wallet
San Francisco, USA: The Thing Quarterly, 2013
24 pp., 8 x 7.5", boxed
Edition size unknown


The nineteenth issue of The Thing Quarterly is a travel wallet made from soft, pebbled leather, with the title foil-stamped onto the cover. Inside are four credit card slots and two interior slip pockets, housing a removable 24-page booklet billed as "a meditation on travel, existentialism, and pool splashing", as well as four removable double-sided phrase cards. 

Rutherford Chang | The Beatles – We Buy White Albums

Rutherford Chang

The Beatles – We Buy White Albums

New York City, USA: Self-published, 2013

Double 12” vinyl LP set

Edition of 800

In 2012, I was invited by C Magazine to participate in a public conversation with Rutherford Chang called "Re-Translating Popular Culture in Contemporary Art.” We had both recently made artworks using the Beatles’ White Album as our source material. At the time, he owned 500 copies of the eponymously titled double album. 

Edition Art Fair director Bill Clarke (above, bottom) brought Chang back to Toronto four years later to present the collection, which at that point contained three times the number of White Album LPs. 

Chang would eventually amass over 3,400 copies of the record, according to his New York Times obituary. He died last month at the age of 45. 

His sister posted on Instagram that Chang had died in his home on January 24th. The cause of death remains unknown. 

The Beatles – We Buy White Albums is a limited-run, self-published double disk created by layering 100 unique used copies of the White Album. The gatefold sleeve cover and disc labels are composites of the weathered and graffitied originals. A 24 x 24 inch poster insert featuring images of the individual covers.

The project sold out quickly (he only had a few remaining copies by the time of his return trip to Toronto in 2016) so I’m grateful that he gifted me one, and grateful to have briefly known him. 

Discogs lists a single copy for €500.00, from Germany, here. 

Mel Bochner, RIP

Joseph Beuys | Evervess II 1

Joseph Beuys

Evervess II 1

Berlin, Germany: Galerie René Block,1968

27 x 16.5 x 9.5 cm.

Edition of 40

Evervess II 1 consists of two carbonated water bottles, housed in an unsigned, unnumbered wooden box. The labels of one of the bottles has been obscured by Beuy’s trademark grey felt. The text on the cover instructs: 

The sender starts giving information when ‘II’ has been drunk completely and the bottle cap has been thrown away as far as possible.’1 The work thus requires the collaboration of its user in order for it to take full effect as the ‘sender.’

"I search for a suitable quality in an object, which permits multiplication of that object, for instance the quality implying a series, found in this bottle of tonic-water.  Just by being an article of commerce, this bottle can communicate much through repetition.

But actually, it's more important to speak of distribution, of reaching a larger number of people... You can look at it from a number of different aspects. Why is anyone interested in distributing a thing as widely as possible? 

The whole thing is a game, one which, with the help of this kind of information, counts on anchoring a vehicle somewhere close by, so that people can later think back on it. It's a sort of prop for the memory, yes, a sort of prop in case something different happens in the future.

For me, each edition has the character of a kernel of condensation upon which many things may accumulate.

You see, all those people who have such an object will continue to be interested in how the point of departure from which the vehicles started is developing. They'll be watching to see what the person who produced these things is doing now. That way I stay in touch with people; just as you have come to me because of what I've made and we can talk about it, I can talk to just about anybody who owns such an object. There's a real affinity to people who own such things, such vehicles. It's like an antenna which is standing somewhere and with which one stays in touch. There are also cross­connections between people, or ricochets. One person says: Yes, I've got such a bottle. Another one has such a wooden box and a third one says: I've heard something about political activities, and so all sorts of different concepts converge, and that's what I'm interested in, that a whole lot of concepts come together.

I'm interested in the distribution of physical vehicles in the form of editions because I'm interested in spreading ideas.

The objects are only understandable in relations to my ideas. The work I do politically has a different effect on people because such a product exists than it would have if the means of expression were only the written word.

Although these products may not seem suitable for bringing about political change, I think more emanates from them than if the ideas behind them were revealed directly.

To me the vehicle quality of the editions is important...”

- Joseph Beuys

 

Hearts, spots, eggs and peas