John Giorno turns 77 years old today

American poet, performance artist and activist John Giorno turns 77 today.

Giorno is known for his performance poetry, for starring in Andy Warhol's durational film Sleep, for his Something Else Press title Cancer in My Left Ball, and for his not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems. Founded in in 1965 in order to connect poetry to new audiences via technology, the organization ran Dial-A-Poem and published a series of compilation LPs that featured artists, writers and musicians.

The series, sought after by both collectors of artists' audio and alternative music, featured William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Hüsker Dü, Philip Glass, Coil, Diamanda Galás, Glenn Branca, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Psychic TV, Lydia Lunch, Meredith Monk, Jim Carroll, Arto Lindsay, John Cage, Debbie Harry, New Order, David Byrne, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Butthole Surfers, The Swans, Henri Chopin, Robert Wilson, and Claes Oldenburg. Many of the covers were designed by artists, including Les Levine, Keith Haring and Robert Williams.

In total, Giorno has produced over 60 LPs, tapes, videos and books. In 2011, he starred in the video to R.E.M.'s final single We All Go Back to Where We Belong.

Kelly Mark | Important Instructions For Changing the World

Kelly Mark
Important Instructions For Changing the World
Winnipeg, Canada: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2001
144 pp., 20 x 18.2 x 1.2 cm.,  softcover
Edition size unknown

This catalogue, to accompany an exhibition curated by James Patten in 2001, features a few photographic and video based work, but primarily documents Kelly Mark's early drawings using Letraset dry transferable lettering. For over a decade the artist has been producing abstract visual compositions by applying the Letraset directly onto matte board. Each of the works in the exhibition was the uniform size 28 x 36 cm., but subsequently the drawings have grown into sprawling works, with one (recently purchased by the National Gallery of Canada), being over thirty-three feet long.

Mark's imagery has been reproduced as album cover art, promotional posters, wine bottles, magazine covers and a number of tattoos. Later this week the Nothing Else Press will issue the first editioned print of one of the Letraset Drawings, Frankfurther Five.

"Kelly Mark's Letraset 'drawings' are compositions of meticulously arranged transfer lettering on mount board. The black and white designs are ambiguous and suggest an unseen source material such as aerial mapping, sewing patterns or convoluted text-based bar code. More graphic and formally driven than her other work, they allow her the pleaseure of making and designing in a dynamic and architectural way."

- Terri Whitehead, "Kelly Mark", Art Review Magazine (UK) 

"Kelly Mark's work using Letraset seems to represent a dynamic dance and swirl of letters, moving accross page and frame to frame. While the indivivual pieces can stand alone, they are arranged as polyptychs and the line around which the marks are organizes flow from from one panel to the other. There is a dynamic machinery here, and the fontography by its black and white and serifed nature reminds me of the early century's dynamic steam machines, which inspired Duchamp to abandon paintings of traditional subject matter in favour of engineered renderings of chocolate-grinders and the hormonal process of love as if mediated by particles of malic-molded matter."

- Timothy Comeau, "Alphabetics", Blog TO

Laure Prouvost | The Artist Book

Laure Prouvost
The Artist Book
London, UK: Booworks, 2013
296 pp., 23 x 15.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 1000

"What is it to make an artist book about oneself? To construct a biography in which the formal structures and chapter divisions develop a narrative, into which the self dissolves?

Laure Prouvost explores the processes of narrative, translation and reflection, and the substantial mis-communications, cultural slippages, inventive opportunities and transformations inherent to these processes. Each mis-translation allows a new episode or incident to form that can disorder and reassemble its origin. In this project she uses the material format and expectations of the artist book as a means to make new work. In translating video, painting and sound onto the printed pages Prouvost instills the object with emotion and a sensorial self-awareness, and invites the reader to share ‘the artist’s’ psychological experience. Annotations and drawings that make reference to the protocols of the book, ‘This page does not need you to exist, this page is so heavy to turn, this text like the sound of your voice when reading these words’ provoke a physical and affective relationship with the texts and images presented.

The Artist Book includes multi-voiced biographies by anonymous contributors, that combine illustrated fantasies, anecdotes and vignettes of the artist, alongside collages of the artist’s studio, personal communications and a film on paper. These and other sections demonstrate Prouvost’s peculiar and complex navigation of influence, humour, art history and methodologies that informs her idiosyncratic language. Insistent gesticulations and perceptual cues guide the reader’s attention and transmit information, as the subject, or narrator, merges with the book itself."

- publishers blurb

Available from the publisher, for £20.00, here. A special limited edition of 12 copies, plus three artists' proofs accompanied the edition. These signed copies were bound in cloth and housed in a slipcase, and sold for  £850.

Yesterday it was announced that Prouvost was awarded the 2013 Turner Prize, beating out favorites David Shrigley and Tino Sehgal.

Lawrence Weiner | XX XY

Lawrence Weiner
XX XY
Paris, France/Fitzroy, Australia: Yvon Lambert Gallery/Third Drawer Down, 2012
9 Wooden blocks
1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5", each block
Edition of 1000

Reduced from $60 to $40.00, currently at Magic Pony, here. 

Lenka Clayton | One Brown Shoe

Lenka Clayton
One Brown Shoe 
Pittsburgh, USA: Self-published, 2013
100 pp., 14 x 10 x 5.5 cm., loose leaves, boxed
Edition of 250 signed and numbered copies

British artist Lenka Clayton's website lists three available limited editions; Moons From Next Door, 1/57th of Andy Warhol and One Brown Shoe. Moons From Next Door is a Viewmaster viewer with a custom made slide displaying seven images of found dog balls; used, chewed and generally gnarled. The photographs depict the balls against a black background, heavily shadowed, and appearing as satellites. 1/57th of Andy Warhol, is a shirt sold to Clayton by the Pop artist's nephew and cut into 57 pieces and boxed. In a gesture reminiscent of Yoko Ono (Mend Piece, the sky puzzle pieces, the opposite of Cut Piece), Clayton includes a needle and thread and suggests  "When the new owners accidentally meet one another the shirt can slowly be sewn back together."

Her latest boxed work is the beautifully produced exhibition catalogue/artist's book depicting images of the 200 shoes produced for Clayton's exhibition of the same name. The artist invited one hundred married couples (from 12 different countries) to each produce a single brown shoe, using only materials found around their homes. They were asked not to confer with one another, but rather to keep their projects secret, revealed only when both halves of the mismatched pair were complete.

The shoes are surprisingly considered and sculptural, made from an expansive range of household odds and ends like scraps of cereal boxes, scraps of leather, cuban cigars, office supplies, animal crackers, nut shells, and used packing tape.

Designed by MASS MoCA's Director of Design Brett Yasko, the foil-stamped box contains one hundred double-sided colour cards, a fold-out text sheet listing the participants and details of each shoe, and a project description.

 “Each pair of shoes might be seen as a portrait,” Lenka says, “of two individuals, of one couple, and of the difference between the two.”

The work is available, for $62.00 from artist's website, here, and from Printed Matter, here.

Yoko Ono | Infinite Universe at Dawn

This week Genesis Publications launched a new 'mini-site' to promote their forthcoming book Yoko Ono Infinite Universe At Dawn. The deluxe edition is available to pre-order now, at the hefty price of
£595.00 ($975 US, $1035 CDN). The site lists it as including:

Full leather binding with silver foil blocking.
First subscribers acknowledged on back page.
Numbered artist print of original drawing (with details to follow)
One of 350 Deluxe copies. » Signed by Yoko Ono.

Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, the "regular" edition is also "fully bound in soft-grain leather, with a die-cut hole to see the sky through" and "housed in a folding solander box with embossed artwork, lined with a photograph of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER at dawn."It will feature more than 300 (silver-edged) pages, illustrated with previously unseens photographs from Ono's archives. Based on the image above, the edition size for the standard edition is 1500. It also appears to be signed.

No word yet on what the regular edition will be priced at. Preorders can be made at Genesis Publications, here.

Paul Collins | [1962/1981/2002/2013]

Paul Collins
[1962/1981/2002/2013]
Toronto, Canada: Care Not Care, 2013
24 pp., 20×15.8 cm, saddle stapled
Edition of 100

"1] As a left-handed child and ADD avant la lettre, I could not keep my numbers straight. Columns of figures drifted around the pages of my grade school work book, rows bleeding into one another, making calculations difficult. The teacher suggested that I draw a box around each arithmetic exercise in order to keep things separated and legible. Years later this boxing, a framing or delineation of the subject, became central to my painting and drawing practice.

2] In 1981, I photographed the pages of my first-grade arithmetic work book, composed in the fall of 1962. My intent was to produce a facsimile of this juvenilia as an artist’s book. For all the usual reasons, the project was shelved.

3] In 2002, all the subjects listed on the spines of the 23-volume, 1962 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica were typed out on an electric typewriter in such a way as to imitate the boxing or framing found in my 1962 numbers work book. This concrete poem was read aloud on stage, but never actually published.

4] In 2013, I finally published the two works as a single artist’s book whose title,[1962/1981/2002/2013], recounts the chronology of its coming into being."

- Paul Collins

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