Sunday, November 10, 2024

Cary Leibowitz | House of Liebowitz Puffy Print






Cary Leibowitz 
House of Liebowitz Puffy Print
New York City: Self-published, 2007,
13 x 13 x 1.5” 
Edition of 90 signed and numbered copies


A foam seat cushion for art critic Marcia Tucker that reads MARCIA TUCKER CHICKEN PLUCKER OYSTER SHUCKER LONG DISTANCE TRUCKER RSVP MOTHER FUCKER. 

Also in the series: OFFICIAL CANDYASS MUSEUM OF MODERN ART JELLO LIQUIDATION SALE. 

Leibowitz’ current exhibition You Really Let Yourself Go continues at New Discretions (515 W 20th Street, 3rd Floor) in New York City until November 23rd. 







Saturday, November 9, 2024

Rita McKeough: The Lion’s Share




Rita McKeoughJosephine Mills, Elizabeth Diggon
Rita McKeough: The Lion's Share 
Lethbridge, Canada: University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2012
64 pp., 24 x 17  x 1 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown


The Lion’s Share was an exhibition curated by Josephine Mills for the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, in 2011. It then traveled to the Doris McCarthy Art Gallery, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Kenderdine Gallery, and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery. 

The immersive installation included audio, electronics, and an opening night performance. The gallery was transformed into a faux-restaurant, which featured a kitchen floor covered in egg shells, table-settings with motorized spears stabbing at hotdogs and carrots, and glasses of milk which have formed their own tongues. Speakers played the sound of a lion eating. 

The artist described the scene as like “a 3D-version of a Looney Tunes restaurant in which things have gone terribly awry,” 



“I set out to find a dozen wild hotdogs in the coulees behind The Lions Share diner. I needed to get some fresh stock for the feedlot buffet before the dinner rush. I know there were probably hundreds maybe even thousands of them roaming through the coulees but I was in a rush and I didn’t have time to go very far. It is always hard to find them up near the buildings but I got lucky and found a dozen after about twenty minutes. They don’t move very fast so once I found them it was simply a matter of using my spear to poke them along.

It was hard to get them all going in one direction –a bit like herding cats, I imagine. . As soon as we got close to the building they all seemed to panic and they tried to turn back towards the grassland. It took me quite a while to gather them up again. I was starting to get a little frustrated. The hardest part was getting them through the door to the diner. They got more and more agitated and I had to be careful not to poke them too hard and leave marks on them. Our customers never liked to see marks on the bodies of the hotdogs. Once I got them into the diner, it was tricky moving them in between the tables and chairs, especially with people already filling the restaurant. Finally, I got them to the buffet table and I gently lifted each one with tongs and placed it into the buffet holding pen. It seemed stressful, overcrowded, and still full of hotdog droppings from the day before. I really needed to clean it out more often. To be honest, I felt really uneasy about putting them in but they were on the menu so what could I do?”
 - Rita McKeough







Friday, November 8, 2024

Tish Murtha | Elswick Kids







Tish Murtha
Elswick Kids
London, UK: Bluecoat Press, 2018
180 pp., 27 x 29 cm. hardcover
Edition size unknown


In the 2023 documentary Tish (which played the Sackville Film Society last night) photographer David Hurn recalls interviewing a young Tish Murtha about why she wanted to attend his photography class. She answered "I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children.”

Few twenty year olds can lay out their MO so succinctly. 

Directed by Paul Sng, who had previously made films about Poly Styrene and The Sleaford Mods, Tish makes the case that her work - largely forgotten at the time of her death in 2013 - is ripe for reappraisal. Her photographs of “marginalised communities from the inside” seem more relevant than ever today. 

She was also a powerful writer. The film unearths grant applications, letters to newspapers and - heartbreakingly - job applications in the final years of her life, where she is forced to list photography as one of her hobbies, alongside taking walks and reading. 

Writing about automation and the corporate promise of increased leisure time, with employees no longer having to endure dull, repetitive tasks sounds like she could be speaking about the impact of AI on the contemporary workforce. But she is writing about the working conditions in the late ’70’s Britain. Her sharp skepticism is clear (with terms like "enforced idleness”) and extends also to the gallery that represented her work, Side Gallery. 

She left the venue that had supported her early in her career out of fear that they wanted to push her work into an "anaesthetized philosophy of working-class culture”. 

From a young teenager she wielded a found camera as a weapon, even without it containing any film. She learned that just by carrying it, pedophiles luring children into their vans could be thwarted. 

This book features images of these kids, her neighbours in the Elswick district of Newcastle Upon Tyne, which was known as "the worst square mile in England”. 

Tish has deep empathy for her subjects and a fierce rage for their situation. The children here, despite the deep poverty and strong sense of hopelessness around them, manage to find joy in the bleakest of surroundings. 



"Elswick Kids is a less strident set of images. They were taken as Tish walked the streets of the working-class district of Elswick in Newcastle Upon Tyne and were not intended to be an exhibition in their own right. Today, though, they tell of a time when children had the freedom of the streets to play in and where friendship blossomed against a seemingly harsh background. The photographs have a stark beauty that shines from every page. Elswick Kids is a vital contribution to our understanding of life in a northern city in the late twentieth century.”
- publisher’s blurb


Thursday, November 7, 2024

Daniel Spoerri


















Daniel Spoerri died yesterday, at the age of 94. He made significant contributions to the world of artist books and multiples, as a curator, as a gallery and as an artist. 





Martin Kippenberger | Untouched & Unprinted Paper









Martin Kippenberger
Untouched & Unprinted Paper
New York City, USA: Printed Matter, 1990
24 x 15 x 5 cm., loose leaves in slipcase
Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies


A slipcased ream of pristine paper wrapped in kraft paper and sealed with brown paper tape (the removal of which results in the destruction of the artwork). The artist has neither printed on nor touched the stack.

Furthering the remove of the 'hand of the artist' - it's reported that Kippenberger also didn't even see the paper. The work's label on the front of the ream was signed by the artist and mailed to Printed Matter from California, where he was teaching.  When the publisher mailed Kippenberger his artist copies of the edition to the same address, they were somehow lost in transit.

A copy of the work appears in the collection of MoMA (top image), but otherwise has almost no online presence. The other images were taken at John Goodwin’s home in 2013. Goodwin was the director of Printed Matter at the time, and oversaw the production of the work. 




Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Ulises Carrión | Mirror Box













Ulises Carrión
Mirror Box
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Self-published, 1979
[18] pp., 18.5 x 18.5 cm., staple-bound
Edition of 100


An Artist Book handmade and self-published by Ulises Carrión featuring images of boxers rubber-stamped with pink and blue ink. The ink bleeds through the felt, leaving a ghostly impression on the opposing pages.

Ulises Carrión was reportedly a life-long boxing aficionado, and had just edited an issue of Commonpress a year prior, titled Box, Boxing, Boxers

The title is extremely scarce and prohibitively expensive. A copy is available at Printed Matter for $3,000.00 US, here


“Mirror Box is printed on synthetic felt with rubber stamps of two boxers facing each other in sequential sparring positions. The soft touch of the page, in contrast to the strong punch of the imagery, makes for a potent allusion ot the exchange and repression of male sexuality.” 
-Tim Guest / Germano Celant, Books by Artists






Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Zoe Leonard | I Want a President





Zoe Leonard
I Want a President
Mexico City, Mexico: Gato Negro, 2017
[32] pp., 10.5 x 8 cm., paperback
Edition size unknown

A small Risograph book with the text of Zoe Leonard's now-imfamous I Want a President, one line per page.  Written in 1992 and originally intended for an LGBT magazine that folded, the text for I Want A President was instead photocopied and distributed as "something like a pre-internet meme -- something shared, copied, and re-interpreted starting way before most Americans had internet connections at home" [Vice Magazine].

The work was given a second life when feminist genderqueer collective LTTR founded by Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy and Emily Roysdon produced a postcard version in 2006, including them in their fifth annual art journal.

In October 2016, a month before election day, High Line Art installed a large version of the poem, measuring 20 feet by 30 feet, on a pillar underneath The Standard Hotel on the High Line, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan (below). Images of the text went viral at that time.

The full text is as follows:

“I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place   where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”


“Although written 24 years ago, Zoe’s piece seems even more relevant and urgent today, given the current political and social climate. It’s a text that oscillates between a heartfelt confession and a militant manifesto, between poetry and politics. It’s very moving and so deeply personal. I think it will really affect many people on the deepest emotional level.”
- Cecilia Alemani, High Line Art curator