Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum died today, at the age of 78. 

Three early obits: 

https://hyperallergic.com/1008907/dara-birnbaum-video-arts-wonder-woman-dies-at-78/

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/dara-birnbaum-video-artist-dead-wonder-woman-1234740430/

https://www.frieze.com/article/dara-birnbaum-video-artist-has-died-aged-78

Yoko Ono | Blood Objects from Family Album

Yoko Ono

Blood Objects from Family Album

New York City, USA: UBU Gallery, 1995

17.5 x 10.2 cm.

Edition size unknown

A year after the founding of Ubu Gallery in 1994, Yoko Ono presented a solo exhibition there, comprising of two bodies of work. Works from the Franklin Summer 'automatic' pointillist drawings series sat alongside Family Album objects (bronzed versions of everyday items such as a splintered bat, a mirror, a high-heeled shoe, all splattered with blood red pigment). The latter recalled the image of her husband John Lennon's iconic glasses covered in his own blood after being shot in front of Ono outside their home in 1980, which adorned the cover of her first album after his murder. 

To promote the show is this brilliant bit of ephemera, which I think bests the works in the show. A house key is just as good a signifier of domesticity as a mirror or shoe, and all the better that it arrives for free in the mail, serving as the exhibition announcement. 

The true brilliance is the lack of expense: I suspect most households have a drawer full of keys that are no longer in use but that the owners are reluctant to discard. It reminds me of when Laurie Anderson performed on SNL in 1986 - she handed out expired batteries and house keys to the audience as a keepsake. 

Additionally, the key has been a consistent motif in the artist’s lexicon - she has produced several keys to open the skies or universe.

Alison Knowles

Happy Birthday to Alison Knowles. 

Jiří Valoch | Poem for bpNichol

Jiří Valoch

Poem for bpNichol

Toronto, Canada: GrOnk, 1988

print on yellow paper

5.4 x 15 cm 

Edition of 89

Coasters

 

Jon Sasaki | A Space of Endless Potential

A lenticular postcard (which doesn’t scan well) invitation to Jon Sasaki’s A Space of Endless Potential, commissioned by the Bank of Montreal for their project space on the 68th floor of their Toronto office tower. 

Curated by Dawn Cain, the Project Room has featured commissioned works by Micah Lexier, Lois Andison, Michel de Broin, Shary Boyle, Graeme Patterson and Roula Partheniou (the last three now all Sackville residents). Cain has left her role and I believe the Project Room is no more. 

Visit the dedicated project site, here, for more information, and Chris Hampton’s CBC piece about the work, here. 

"Something was set in motion.

It should have slowed to a standstill long before now but it didn't, it is still going. Slowly. It appears not to have succumbed to the many forces that threaten to sap its energy, which is strange; in the universe we live in, energy is finite. Once expended, it leaves that thing that held it (a ball, a person, the universe itself) listless and static. Yet this little ball is still bouncing, almost like it exists in a universe outside of ours, untethered from its rules.

This installation, made in collaboration with engineer Gordon Hicks, conjures both a little orange ball that can bounce indefinitely and the charged room that allows it to do so. A place where objects are immune from the forces—of drag, air resistance, friction, kinetic energy loss—that normally bring bouncing balls to a standstill. A place where we can imagine our own energy to be similarly boundless.

The mechanics of the illusion are apparent from the outset: a motorized gantry, similar to the movable bed of a CNC machine or 3D printer, has been scaled to the size of the project room and suspended from the ceiling. It has been programmed to control the ball along three axes of movement following paths of travel that an actual thrown ball would take. The movements are unpredictable, generated in real time, and conceivably might never repeat throughout the exhibition. Incorporating a slow-motion version of real world physics the ball traces an ever unfolding and ultimately unpredictable path.

Ever present, the gantry is hard to ignore. It tells us how the trick is done, while the movements of the ball invite us to disregard those facts and be party to our own deception. To imagine an entity with boundless drive. Slowed to a dreamy pace, the ball ricochets through the BMO project room, transforming it into a lunar, weightless space. Time slows as we contemplate a little spherical object that will never run out of steam, possessing the unflagging energy and dynamism that we might wish for ourselves.”

- Jon Sasaki

Jeff Koons | Balloon Dog (Blue)

Jeff Koons

Balloon Dog (Blue)

 Los Angeles, USA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995

26 x 26 x 10.8 cm.

Edition of 2300 numbered copies [+50 AP]

Despite being produced in a large edition size and being reissued a few times, this work regularly sells for upwards of ten grand at auction. We had a few at Art Metropole when I was there, selling for between five and eight hundred dollars. 

Toronto audiences weren’t interested, but they sold quickly when we took them to art fairs (Basel, Berlin). 

I’m lukewarm on a lot of Koons’ works, but I’m drawn to the populist pieces like this and the flower dog.