Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Jonathan Monk | Picture Postcard Posted from Post Box Pictured





Jonathan Monk
Picture Postcard Posted from Post Box Pictured, Selva del Montello, Italy
Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2020
4 x 6"
Edition size unknown

Just announced: the 56th edition by Paul + Wendy Projects is the latest iteration of a Jonathan Monk project that features cards from Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Paris, Reykjavik, San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto, and Winnipeg.



Jonathan Monk: I was interested in involving myself with ephemera or postal works that were done by artists in the 1960s and 70s. The idea was to be able to do something really cheaply, but had more to it than just a simple postcard. I like this idea of posting something to someone and them receiving it. I did something similar in The Distance Between Me and You, 2001/2002), a series of Super-8 films where I fixed a camera to the front of my bike – I lived three minutes away from the nearest post office – then I would cycle this journey, filming the way, over the course of a year every time I had to go to the post office. Once I got to the post office, I would send off the undeveloped film to Kodak in Stuttgart, and then Kodak would send the developed reels directly to a collector who had purchased the piece. It documented the entire process in a roundabout way.

The first postcard happened in 2003. It was in Berlin, and it is literally a postbox around the corner from my house. I did the edition for Revolver. I came up with the title of the Picture Post Card Posted From Postbox Pictured without really knowing that it would become a series. It started with Berlin, and then other people got interested in publishing a card. I liked the idea that I could arrange to have an edition produced in New York, but then the card was actually sent from a postbox in Hong Kong. Spike is based in Vienna, but you’re also based here in Berlin, and I’m here. I have all the postcards in my studio, so when someone orders one, I write their name and address and sign them and send the cards in an envelope to the contact in Vienna (or whichever city), who then posts them. It was a way of creating this weird loop.

Colin Lang: How do you get the pictures of the individual postboxes that appear on the postcards?

JM: They are generally done by the people who want to publish an edition. Some of them were linked to exhibitions. One I did in San Francisco as part of a project at Wattis Art Institute (2005), and the one in New York with White Columns. Some editions are commissioned through a museum tied to their shop; there’s one in London at the ICA (2005), and one in Melbourne through the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2011).



Available from the publisher, here, for $50 CDN.

Cornelius Cardew | Stockhausen Serves Imperialism



Cornelius Cardew
Stockhausen Serves Imperialism 
New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2020
126 pp., 5.5 x 8.75", softcover
Edition of 2500

Cornelius Cardew was a choir boy at the Canterbury Cathedral at a very young age, and studied piano, cello and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London at 17. He moved to Cologne, Germany after being awarded a scholarship to the Studio for Electronic Music. After a year, he began working as an assistant to composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

"As a musician he was outstanding because he was not only a good pianist but also a good improviser and I hired him to become my assistant in the late 50s and he worked with me for over three years," Stockhausen later recounted. "He was one of the best examples that you can find among musicians because he was well informed about the latest theories of composition, as well as being a performer."

In 1958, Cardew attended a series of concerts in Cologne by John Cage, which had an enormous influence on him. The encounter, according to the New York Times, "provided the impetus for a radical shift of direction" in his work. Many of his most celebrated pieces - both solo and with the infamous Scratch Orchestra - show a clear debt to Cage.

Stockhausen Serves Imperialism serves as a violent attack on both Stockhausen and Cage, according to Cardew's own forward. The book denounces their work primarily through a Marxist lens:

"The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing 'geniuses.'"

Stockhausen had been the subject of protests for over a decade before the original publication of Cardew's book, in 1974. Henry Flynt - the artist and musician associated with Fluxus, Conceptual Art (a term he partially coined) and (briefly) the Velvet Underground - had released several manifestos with titles such as Fight Musical Decoration of Fascism and Picket Stockhausen Concert.1 He had twice protested performances of Stockhausen's music, and was joined on the picket line by artists Tony Conrad, Ben Vautier and George Maciunas (who designed his protest leaflets). 

John Cage is a less common target, and is often viewed as a spiritual grandfather to Fluxus and conceptual art. 

There is certainly a patricidal quality to Cardew's polemic. Branden Wayne Joseph, in his 2016 book Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture, argues that by writing about his "softness (the corrupt ideology)", Cardew renders Cage akin to James Dean's character's father in Rebel Without A Cause: "overly permissive and insufficiently strong", provoking his children "into insurrection against him". 

I'm unable to distinguish if paragraphs likes this:

"Bourgeois intellectual life is characterised by constant rivalry. The exponents of different schools are uninterruptedly cutting each other’s throats and striving for advantage in all kinds of underhand ways, including the formation of temporary alliances. Thus the academic composers feel threatened by the avant-gardists, for example, fearing for their entrenched positions."

display the type of self-awareness that one would hope for, or if the irony is entirely accidental. Certainly the composer is critical of his own works also, but typically only in the way that the recent-religious-convert repudiates his past.

By 1971, a Marxist faction within the Scratch Orchestra had led to the group's dissolution, with the argument that they had failed because their methods were bourgeois. Cardew joined an anti-revisionist Marxist political party and devoted his life to militant radical politics.

He disowned his work “The Great Learning”, because the text by Confucius on which it was based had been discredited by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Cardew would only permit performances of the piece if they were accompanied by his essay denouncing it.

He would later take on bigger targets than his former mentors, including David Bowie and the Clash. When Bowie - in character as the Thin White Duke, he would later claim - told an interviewer that he believed “very strongly in fascism”, Cardew put forward a motion at the Central London branch of the Musicians Union, to expel the pop star:

"This branch deplores the publicity recently given to the activities and Nazi style gimmickry of a certain artiste and his idea that this country needs a right wing dictatorship. Such ideas prepare the way for political situations in which the Trade Union movement can be destroyed, as it was in Nazi Germany. The spreading of such ideas must be considered as detrimental to the interests of the Union and any necessary steps should be taken to prevent such ideas from gaining credence in the community. We propose, therefore, that any member who openly promotes fascism or fascist ideas in his/ her act or recorded performance should be expelled from the Union."

According to an historian of the Union there was a tie vote, but a second motion - with a more extreme condemnation of the pop star - was carried fifteen to two.

A few years later, Cardew published a text called "Punk Rock Is Fascist", where he called The Clash "reactionary". I wish it were included in this new volume, as a post-script, mostly because I can't find it elsewhere. It  also doesn't appear to be included in the 2008 Cardew Reader.

Stockhausen Serves Imperialism does include supplementary writings by two of Cardew's Scratch Orchestra collaborators. Rod Eley contributes “A History of the Scratch Orchestra,” and John Tilbury “Introduction to Cage’s Music of Changes.”

Tilbury later published a biography titled Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished, which suggests that the composer may have been murdered. Cardew died at the age of 45, from a hit-and-run car accident outside of his London home on December 13th, 1981. The driver was never found. Tilbury leaves open the possibility that Cardew was killed because of his Marxist-Leninist beliefs, saying that the notion  "cannot be ruled out", and quoting Cardew's friend John Maharg: "MI5 are quite ruthless, people don't realize it. They kill pre-emptively".

Cardew was a composer who "renounced his compositions almost as soon as he completed them" (Damon Krukowski, Art Forum) and swung wildly from belief to belief. His early death means we will never know if he might've undergone another volte-face. Would Cardew have softened his political stances? Decided that instrumental music had no role in the revolution and abandoned composition altogether? Reconciled his varied beliefs in any way?

In Henry Flynt's incendiary 1975 book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization, he quotes a witty postcard that he received from Cardew in June of 1963, which suggests that the composer was aware of Flynt's protests against Stockhausen and high culture, and also that he was already grappling with the dilemma of his chosen profession:

“Dear Mr. Flynt, ...Since I may be depending on organized culture for my loot & livelihood I can wish you only a limited success in your movement....”


Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was initially published by Latimer New Dimensions in 1974, and has been long out of print. The Primary Information facsimile reprint is available from Printed Matter for $20.00 US, here.





1. Ironically, Flynt later called for the overthrow of the human race and Stockhausen would remark that the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos."

Monday, June 29, 2020

The Rubber Stamp Project: Erik Edson





Erik Edson, 1999, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

The Rubber Stamp Project: Barbara Sternberg








Barbara Sternberg, 1997, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

Sunday, June 28, 2020

The Rubber Stamp Project: Jon Claytor







Jon Claytor, 1998, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

Saturday, June 27, 2020

The Rubber Stamp Project: Daniel Barrow








Daniel Barrow, 2001, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

Friday, June 26, 2020

Broken Music




[Ursula Block, Michael Glasmeier, eds]
Broken Music
New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2019
280 pp., 26 x 21 x 2.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 2500


The first ‘art’ job I ever had was for a now-defunct space called Lake Galleries, the first Toronto venue (that I was aware of) to dedicate itself to conceptual art.1 It was an offshoot of the antiquarian bookstore D&E Lake, which remains active today. My first curatorial project ever was compiling a slim catalogue for the store, of artists’ records, and records designed by artists.

One of the resources I used was a book they had in their second story office called Broken Music. I asked to buy this book from them, and the owner Don Lake said “I can’t sell that book. That book makes me money”.

The record catalogue became the impetus for an exhibition by Roger Bywater at Art Metropole, which became my second arts employer. They too had a copy of Broken Music on the office shelf and I also pleaded with them to let me buy it, and was told no. It was too valuable a resource to part with.

Both of these jobs paid very little, so the three hundred dollar price tag on the secondary market for the 1989 out-of-print book meant I was resigned to never owning it. I would check Ebay as often as possible, in the hopes of finding an affordable copy, but an autobiography with the same title meant scrolling through pages and pages of sellers with buyer’s remorse from purchasing a memoir by Sting.

One year we went to the Berlin Art Fair for Art Metropole, bringing mostly multiples, some artists’ books and a small flip-display of CDs. On the second day of the fair a woman arrived and seemed to beeline to the audio works. She quickly and expertly filtered the good from the bad, and made a pile to purchase.

Sizing up her selections, I exclaimed “Who are you?”.

She quietly introduced herself as Ursula Block. Excitedly, I said “Oh, very nice to meet you, you produced the best book on sound art ever published. Please sell me a copy!”

Like Lake and Art Metropole before her, she declined, with a demure shaking of her head. “I no longer have copies for sale.”

We spoke for a few minutes before she stopped, her eye catching a book behind me on the shelf. She asked about it and I said “That’s the second best book on sound art ever published”.

She enthusiastically flipped through it, and promptly proposed a trade.

We scheduled an appointment for us to visit Gelbe Musik, a record store she had been running since 1981 (it closed a few years later, in 2014). The store felt a bit out of the way, and seemed fairly unassuming from the street, but inside had an incredible selection of records (I bought as many as I could carry) and also a space for very small sound art exhibitions.

While wondering how there could possibly be enough interest in Artists Records to sustain a store dedicated only to them, a few customers trickled in - on a Monday, when they were usually closed. Both of them made purchases. It was pretty heartwarming. I attributed it to the strength of her reputation.

Urusla was followed around the store by her pet terrier, who (by no coincidence, I’m sure) closely resembled Nipper, from the HMV logo (and the painting by Francis Barraud titled His Master's Voice, which provided both name and graphic to the record store chain). She went to a cabinet in the office area and pulled out a sealed copy of Broken Music, and handed it over.

For the price of the Art Metropole book Sound by Artists (minus my employee discount) I finally had a pristine copy of a book I had wanted for years.

It didn’t take long for the volume to begin to show signs of wear. Like Jon Hendrick’s Fluxus Codex, the book was regularly consulted and frequently scanned. There was soon a real danger that the spine would give out.

The news that Primary Information (already with a stellar track record of essential facsimile reprints of difficult-to-obtain texts) were set to produce a reprint was most welcome. I'm surprised it took me this long to order a copy (the donation of 100% of the proceeds to Black Lives Matter last month made it a very easy decision).

Broken Music was one of the first books published on the subject of artists’ records and remains the most comprehensive. It includes essays by both Block and Glasmeier, as well as Theodor W. Adorno, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, Hans Rudolf Zeller and dealer/publisher René Block (husband of Ursula). Perhaps most essential is the 200-page bibliography of artists’ records, including works by Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Jack Goldstein, Hans Haacke, Joe Jones, Martin Kippenberger, Anna Lockwood, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Michael Snow, Jean Tinguely, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner and many others.

Like the Art Metropole2 book I traded for it, Broken Music also features a flexi-disc, a recording of the Arditti Quartet performing Milan Knizak’s “Broken Music”, the book's namesake.

Available from the publishers for $30 (a tenth the price of the secondary market price a few years ago), Broken Music is an essential book for anyone interested in artists' recordings and audio art. Order your copy here.



1. It quickly branched off into many other things, including a distasteful exhibition of court drawings from the trial of serial killer Paul Bernardo, which led to my brief appearance on an episode of the American tabloid ‘news’ show Hard Copy

2. Sound by Artists (also recently reprinted after being worth around $300 on the secondary market) also includes a flexi-disc record, by Christian Marclay. Unlike the Knizak disc in Broken Music, Marclay's cannot be played, as it is bound into the book. 















The Rubber Stamp Project: Jen Budney






Jen Budney, 1996, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

Thursday, June 25, 2020

The Rubber Stamp Project: The Royal Art Lodge






The Royal Art Lodge, 2003, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Siglio Press Announce New Ray Johnson title



Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson was announced today as being released this fall by Siglio Press. The title is edited by Elizabeth Zuba and will include texts by Johnson confidant William S. Wilson.


"This gemlike Ray Johnson book celebrates his friendship with writer and logophile William S. Wilson in pictures and words.

Dubbed "Ray Johnson's Boswell," writer and logophile William S. Wilson was one of legendary artist Ray Johnson's closest friends and biggest champions. He was also perhaps Johnson’s most trusted poetic muse and synthesizer of referents and references. The influence was mutual: throughout their lifelong friendship, begun when both men were in their twenties, writer and artist challenged and enriched one another’s work.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson's archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frog Pond Splash embodies the energy, expansiveness and motion of their work and their friendship. Editor Elizabeth Zuba has selected short, perspicacious texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings) and collage works by Johnson to create juxtapositions that do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that are less bound than assembled, allowing the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, to add to and return to the way Johnson required of his correspondents and fellow travelers.

Taking its title from Wilson's haiku equivalence of Johnson's process, Frog Pond Splash is a small book but many things: a collage-like homage to their friendship, a treasure chest of prismatic "correspondances," as well as an unusual portrait of the disappearing, fractured Johnson through Wilson's words. Zuba's nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson's "open system" (which rejected closed and consistent meanings, codes and symbols) in its open, associative, and intimate playfulness.

- D.A.P.  listing

Previously Siglio Press have published Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson and a reprint of Johnson's classic Something Else Press title The Paper Snake.

Frog Pond Splash is due to be released on November 20th, 2020.



The Rubber Stamp Project: Shary Boyle









Shary Boyle, 2000, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

The Rubber Stamp Project: Terry Piercey










Terry Piercey, 1999, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The Rubber Stamp Project: Michael Buckland







Michael Buckland, 1996, for:


[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown


(see previous posts)

The Rubber Stamp Project: Anthea Black





Anthea Black, 2005, for:

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown


(see previous post)




Monday, June 22, 2020

The Rubber Stamp Project







[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

The Rubber Stamp Project began in 1996 when then-Director of Struts Gallery Gregory Elgstrand began commissioning artists to create works which could be stamped onto all outgoing mail from the centre for three months. The only stipulation was that the work had to fit on the back of a standard #10 envelope.

The series began with a somewhat incendiary text by Michael Fernandes that tackled the context directly: THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST RUN CENTRE IS TO BRING DOWN THE GOVERNMENT. It was soon followed by a similarly forthright work by Barbara Sternberg that read BUSINESS IS BUSINESS, CULTURE IS NOT BUSINESS.

While many of the initial works were text-based, artists such as The Royal Art Lodge, Jon Claytor, Daniel Barrow, Shary Boyle, Erik Edson and others contributed illustrative work to the series.

It's unclear when the project ended, but this hand-stamped (right down to the funding body acknowledgement) volume collects 8 years worth of stamps, by 31 different artists, including Cliff Eyland, Shawna Dempsey & Lori Millan, John Murchie, Annie Dunning, Jason Logan, Lucie Chan, Andrea Mortson, Anthea Black, Jen Budney and others.

It's available from the publisher, here, for $10 CDN. The following dozen or so posts will feature stamps from the book.


Sunday, June 21, 2020

General Idea | Orgasm Energy Chart








General Idea
Orgasm Energy Chart
Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1970
43.2 x 27.9 cm.
Edition of 100 (approx.)

A mail-art work consisting of an empty grid (offset lithograph in black on cream paper), where recipients are asked to chart their orgasms and return it to the group, for analysis.


"Cannibalizing the demographic instruments of market research, General Idea spun a seemingly endless series of charts and graphs to plot and, in effect, to produce an ideal audience profile in the absence of a vibrant contemporary art scene in 1970s Toronto. The perverse statistical distributions documented by the 1970 General Idea mail-art project, Orgasm Energy Chart, which invited respondents to document their sexual activity for a one-month period using a questionnaire designed by the trio, are emblematic of the devious geometries recorded by the media archaeologists."