Kristin Hersh

 My favourite singer/songwriter turns 60 today. 

Hans Eijkelboom | Portraits & Cameras

Hans Eijkelboom

Portraits & Cameras

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Self Published, 2009

64 pp., 21 x 13.8 cm., softcover

Edition of 1000

Martin Parr - who selected this title as one of the more important photo books of the decade - wrote the following about the artist: "Anthropologists often make use of photography in their research, especially when gathering information about a society's strange and fascinating habits. If I were an anthropologist, the first photographer I would call upon is Eijkelboom.” 

Another book artist who employs serial photography, Erik Kessels calls Eijkelboom "one of the most remarkable people I have come to know during the last few years."

Eijkelboom's first exhibited work in 1971, when he was only 21 years old, in the landmark SONSBEEK 71 exhibition. He was the youngest artist in a show that included Vito Acconci, Stanley Brouwn, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Lawrence Weiner, and many others.

The Amsterdam-based artist has produced over thirty artist's books, many of them self-published. One of the best, and hardest to acquire is In de Krant, or Being in the Newspaper. For ten consecutive days Eijkelboom succeeded in having his picture appear in the same newspaper. He tracked a press photographer and snuck into the frame whenever possible, in photographs ranging from hard news such as accidents and demonstrations, to promotional pieces like store openings. It's a durational performance documented unwittingly by the press.

For With My Family, in 1973, Eijkelboom rang random doorbells during the day when husbands and fathers were likely to be out at work. He convinced the women answering the door to let him in and pose for a family portrait, with him in the place of the missing father, often with a toddler bouncing happily on his knee.

A more recent project, 10 Euro Outfits, consists of self-portraits while travelling. For each, Eijkelboom photographs himself wearing outfits he bought locally, never spending more than ten euros.

In Portraits & Cameras photography itself (the camera, representation, etc.) becomes the subject matter. Eijkelboom was sixty years old at the time, and the sixty pages of the book reproduce an image of the artist at every year of his life. These cropped portraits are coupled with a a magazine ad featuring a camera introduced in that same year. The artist ages as the technology advances. Like most of his work, the book is smart, compelling and funny.

Jenny Holzer | Money creates Taste

Jenny Holzer

Money creates Taste

New York City, USA: Self-published, 2004

 7.5 x 7.5 x 7.5 cm.

Edition of 90 signed and numbered copies

A glass sphere engraved with Holzer’s Truism “Money Creates Taste” as a desktop paperweight, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

24 Stunden

[Various Artists]

24 Stunden

Itzehoe-Vosskate, Germany: Hansen & Hansen, 1965

[592] pp., 10.5 x 7.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

An exhibition catalogue as Artist Book as Artist Multiple, this short but thick volume documents a twenty-four hour performance event which took place at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany, on June 5, 1965 [see below]. 

In auction listings the work is generally attributed to Joseph Beuys, but I’ll assume that’s because he’s the most bankable of the group, rather than it being a project of his that they contributed to (the information tends to be in German). 

In addition to Beuys, the participating artists include Wolf Vostell, Bazon Brock, Rolf Jährling, Ute Klophaus, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Eckart Rahn, and Tomas Schmit. 

The ambitiously produced book features bound leporellos as well as square punching in the middle, in order to house a plastic bag filled with flour, intended as the final element of the work. 

Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota was born on this day in 1937.

Christian Marclay | The Bell and the Glass

Christian Marclay

The Bell and the Glass

Philadelphia, USA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004

96 pp., 7" x 9", softcover, exposed binding

Edition size unknown

Edited by Susan Rosenberg, this artists' book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that opened in May of 2003. Both the bookwork and multimedia installation explore shared affinities between two of Philadelphia's most famous cracked icons, The Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass.

The book pairs multiple images of both the Bell and Glass, along with musical scores about the bell, such as "You're A Grand Old Bell", "Liberty Bell Ring On", and "The Liberty Bell March" by John Philip Sousa (perhaps now best known as the theme song for Monty Python's Flying Circus).

"In collaboration with Relâche, Inc. and Relâche Ensemble, the museum presents The Bell and the Glass by acclaimed composer and visual artist Christian Marclay (born 1955). This multimedia installation and its accompanying musical composition are inspired by the artist’s interest in two Philadelphia icons: the Liberty Bell and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) by Marcel Duchamp, which is installed in gallery 182 of the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries.

The artist brings together this unlikely couple through four integrated components: a live music/sound performance by Relâche Ensemble, a photo-essay, a video composition, and an installation of objects selected by the artist from his collection, as well as from the holdings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Independence National Historical Park, the Atwater Kent Museum, and other institutions.

Marclay’s longstanding interest in objects that were created to make sound but rendered silent and dysfunctional led him to juxtapose the Bell and the Glass. In their iconic cracks, the artist discovers a coincidental, shared celebrity—and a potential for music. A new musical score by Marclay draws on the musical legacy of the Bell and the Glass—including tunes written in celebration of the Bell, and a score by Marcel Duchamp, written while he was working on the Large Glass, also on exhibit. Marclay’s double-screen video projection incorporates footage of Marcel Duchamp, clips from Hollywood movies, and shots of the Liberty Bell and of the Duchamp galleries at the museum. The video is a score and teleprompter for musicians of the Relâche Ensemble."

- Philadelphia Museum of Art, exhibition press release

Album Covers by Artists

For the second day in a row, the Pitchfork lead album review has featured a record with a classic contemporary artwork on the cover. 

Yesterday it was the Strokes, whose new LP features the famous Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy) image, and today it was zayALLCAPS’ My Uncle Told Me Some Real Ass Sh*t on the Phone Yesterday. It includes an image of David Hammons pissing on a Richard Serra work. 

Untitled (Cowboy) is one of Prince’s signature works, from a series that began in the mid-1970s, when Prince earned a living clipping magazine articles for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. Only the advertisements remained, and he began rephotographing and enlarging them. 

Alongside Spiritual America (a rephotograph of a young nude Brooke Shields), Untitled (Cowboy) is possibly the most iconic work from the series, featuring a rephotographed Marlboro ad, with the cowboy figure isolated and presented anew, removed from the original commercial context.

The Stokes cover is credited to Johann Rashid, who possibly rephotographed the rephotograph. 

The zayALLCAPS LP (not yet released on vinyl, it would seem) features the 1981 David Hammons work Pissed Off, one of two interventions Hammons made with Serra’s sculptures. A series of images by Dawoud Bey document Hammons urinating on the Serra work T.W.U in 1981, and then receiving a citation from an NYPD officer [see below]. The work is titled Pissed Off.