Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker died on this day in 1997, at the age of 50. 

Robert Rauschenberg | The Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues

When I first posted the below text twelve years ago, I got an email from a publicist, asking if I wanted to interview Talking Heads members Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, to promote their new Tom Tom Club record. I thought about it and - after listening to the disc - declined, explaining that while I was a fan of the Talking Heads, I had written this because the record was designed by an artist, and that the site was not music-based. 

Looking back, I regret it. I should have just talked to them and tossed off some quick post. 

Here’s the text again, with some new images. The original can be found here. 

After their debut in 1977, the Talking Heads released a studio album a year for the next three years (More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light), all produced by Brian Eno. Their fifth studio album, Speaking in Tongues, took three years to produce, with a live album in released in 1982 as a stop-gap). All members of the group put out solo projects in this time, but part of the delay might also have been the ambitious plans for the album packaging.

“I approached Bob Rauschenberg in the mid-’80s to design a cover…I had recently seen some of his black-and-white photo collages at Leo Castelli’s gallery on West Broadway and thought they were amazing, and I wondered what he would do with an LP cover,” Byrne wrote in an op-ed obituary for the artist, published as Bob The Builder in the New York Times in May, 2008.

Rauschenberg agreed, but didn’t simply want to provide an illustration for the standard 12” cardboard sleeve. “His package consisted of a conceptual collage piece in which the color separation layers — the cyan, magenta and yellow images that combined to make one full-color image — were, well, deconstructed. Only by rotating the LP and the separate plastic disc could one see — and then only intermittently — the three-color images included in the collage. It was a transparent explication of how the three-color process works, yet in this case, one could never see all the full-color images at the same time, as Bob had perversely scrambled the separations.”

The design harkens back to Rauschenberg’s contribution to the boxed work entitled Artists & Photographs, which was published in 1970 by Marian Goodman’s imprint Multiples, Inc. [see below]. The portfolio of nineteen artists’ publications included many works that are now considered classic editions: Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings, Dennis Oppenheim’s Flower Arrangement for Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson’s Torn Photograph…, Ed Ruscha’s Babycakes and many more, with works by Christo, Jan Dibbets, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, Allan Kaprow, Dan Graham, etc. Rauschenberg’s contribution, Revolver, was a portable version of a larger, motorized work, of the same name, from 1967. It comprised of five rotating plexiglass disks (9 inches in diameter), each screenprinted. The box was published in an edition of 1200 copies.

Due to production problems and escalating costs, it was decided that the Rauschenberg designed Speaking in Tongues would only be released in a limited edition, of 50,000 copies. The record would also be released in a standard package with a cover by Byrne, which he designed by painting onto the white sleeves of test pressings. Guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison lists “Helped coordinate the manufacture of the Robert Rauschenberg cover for Speaking in Tongues” as one of four achievements in 1982, on his autobiographical timeline. Apparently it took a year and a half to find a company that could vacu-form a clear vinyl record. Eventually Harrison turned to the Oscar Meyer hot dog packaging company.

Speaking in Tongues, was a commercial breakthrough for the band, producing their only American Top Ten hit, "Burning Down the House". The tour to promote the album, documented by Jonathan Demme’s feature film Stop Making Sense, would be their last.

In 1983 Robert Rauschenberg won a Grammy Award for the album cover art, the first and only for the band while they were active. In 2005, fourteen years after their break-up, the group was awarded a Grammy for the packaging of the retrospective Once in a Lifetime box set, which featured paintings by Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov. The band have never been awarded a Grammy for their music.

Most copies of Speaking in Tongues have yellowed over time from exposure to light, though periodically copies found stored in boxes remain transparent. These are often offered for exorbitant prices, but tend to sell for between $40 and $120.00, with the higher end being sealed copies, or less yellowed.

At least one promotional event was held at the time of the album’s release where Byrne and Rauschenberg signed copies of the record together. These are increasingly rare now.

In 2000 a copy signed by both was auctioned for $646 and recently the Gagosian Shop offered one for $2000. This week [in 2012] on Ebay a copy housed in a specially designed plexi-stand failed to reach the minimum bid of $1500.00.

William Anastasi | This Is Not My Signature

[William Anastasi]

This Is Not My Signature

Milan, Italy: Mousse Publishing, 2024

264 pp., 21 x 27 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

William Anastasi - who died a year ago today, at the age of 90 - was a difficult artist to pin down. His prolific output included a wide variety of media and genres, including drawing, painting, sound art, video, instructional works, photo conceptualism, institutional critique, walking works, and process-based art. But he is often overlooked in surveys, and remains largely unknown.1  

Released in August of this year,  This Is Not My Signature aims to rectify this with a well-illustrated monograph featuring essays by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen, who also edits the volume. 

The book reads like an alternative history of Conceptual Art, with Anastasi at the centre. 

His closed-circuit video piece Free Will (1968) anticipates Nam June Paik’s signature work by six years.  

The installation consists of a small black and white monitor placed on the gallery floor a foot or two from the corner. Atop the monitor is a camera, pointed at and providing a live feed of the corner. Paik’s TV Buddha features a Buddha statue watching an image of itself on a TV screen. Paik uses the camera-on-monitor to suggest endless contemplation, but Anastasi has already noted the dead end. 

Lesser known examples of works that may owe a debt to Free Will include Gottfried Bechtold’s Video Installation (1972), which involves a mirror instead of a corner, and John Knight's Site Displacement (1969). The latter almost reads like an interpolation of Anastasi’s work from the prior year.  Here too, the gallery corner is filmed and fed to a live monitor, but in this instance the screen is placed in different corner of the room. 

Ange Leccia appears to pay tribute to Anastasi in the title of his closed-circuit video work Arrangement Stasi (1985-1990). But the Stasi in question is the East German secret police, as the work trains two cameras on each other as a comment on invasive surveillance.  

Free Will is far from the only example where Anastasi arrives at ideas years before his peers. 

Michael Snow’s Authorization (a work considered key enough to appear on the cover of the retrospective book Michael Snow: Sequences, a History His Art) debuted at the 1970 Venice Biennale, three years after Anastasi’s nearly identical Nine Polaroid Photographs in a Mirror (1967). Snow maintained he had not seen the earlier work, and there’s no reason to doubt him, but the similarities are uncanny. 

Anastasi’s World’s Greatest Music (1977) consists of three portable record players playing the run-out grooves of children’s records playing at 78rpm, predating Christian Marclay’s investigation into the mechanics of music playback devices. 

This Is Not My Signature opens with an important caveat, in a chronology that precedes the table of contents, highlighted with the caption “Nota Bene”2. It reads, in full: 

“Like many (pre)conceptual bodies of work, Anastasi’s suffered from a lack of documentation: some of his early works have not been photographically archived, while others had been produced long after they had been thought of or sketched. Although this chronological discrepancy is a truism of conceptual art, there is no attempt to minimize its scientific inconvenience. It’s true that historical authenticity and conceptualism do not always mesh. We are aware that some of the proposed dates rely on memory or testimonies that have no material documentation. The traceable works undeniably argue in favour of the artist and the originality of his ideas. Nevertheless, it seems essential to make this qualification. The dates given are those of the supposed invention of the works, whether or not they were actually produced at this time. We have relied on the artist’s archives and his testimonies as given in his publications, attempting as far as possible to cross-check this data with those reported by other institutions”. 

The works in This Is Not My Signature are often double-dated, presumably including both the year the work was conceived and the year that it was exhibited. Or the year from which supporting documentation exists. Sometimes these dates differ by decades.3  

Anastasi's One gallon high gloss industrial enamel, thrown, and a companion work One gallon high gloss industrial enamel, poured are both listed as from 1966/1989. Based on the earlier date, these pieces would predate Lawrence Weiner’s Two Minutes of Spray Paint Directly Upon The Floor From a Standard Aerosol Spray Can by two years.

If we discount these examples because of the uncertainty of their dates, there is still Lawrence Weiner’s A 36” x 36” Removal To The Lathing Or Support Wall Of Plaster Or Wallboard From A Wall (1968) to consider. The cut wall piece was first presented as part of Harald Szeemann’s important "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” exhibition in 1969. It is preceded by several similar works by Anastasi, dating from 1966. Note, also, that Weiner himself back-dates the work by a year.

Anastasi clearly had an influence on the next generation of conceptual artists, also. 

Micah Lexier’s A Minute of My Time works, and charming drawings made by placing a pen to paper as an airplane lands, undoubtedly took inspiration from Anastasi’s Subway Drawings.4 These were produced when the artist was traveling to visit his friend John Cage, with whom he played chess, daily. Anastasi would sit with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board in his lap, and surrender the drawing to vibrations of the subway car.5

Jonathan Monk’s This Painting series find an antecedent in Anastasi’s A Painting of A Soup Can Used to Hang Here. 

In the essay “Small Wonders”, former MoMA Senior Curator Robert Storr argues that “Anastasi is a conceptual artist who has—well—conceived innumerable formal gambits that trap our vague thoughts in precise conundrums, which is to say, in physical manifestations that expose their inherent ideational paradoxes, which he ingeniously presents to us for all to see—and think about. Some of these gambits share characteristics with those of other artists of his period and orientation, raising questions of who did this or that ‘first.’” “Firstness”, he goes on to say, "is supremely important". 

Chiara Costa’s chapter “The Idea Behind the Art: Virginia Dwan and William Anastasi” is mostly about Dwan and the important and influential gallery she operated for twelve years. Her choice of artists show a keen eye, including Yves Klein (1961), Robert Rauschenberg (1962), Jean Tinguely and Claes Oldenburg (1963) and Niki de Saint Phalle (1964). 

In 1965, the Los Angeles gallery opened an outpost in New York City, the first LA space to do so, according to the press release at the time. 

Between the years 1966 and ’71, Anastasi had four solo exhibitions at the New York gallery. The second, in April 1967, was a work called Six Sites, now widely regarded as one of the very first documented example of photoconceptualism. 

Virginia Dwan championed Anastasi’s work and was protective of him. When asked about the unheralded influence of his work, she replies “the artists definitely saw it”. 

In late 1970, Anastasi participated in a Dwan Gallery group show called Language IV. Walter de Maria was represented in the exhibition with a Western Union telegram (see below) that he had sent Dwan, stating: “I urge you to consider closing the gallery and to consider world wide land operations.”6

Six months later, she capitulated to the idea. Dwan closed the space and Anastasi was without representation for sixteen years. 

“I continued to make work,” he told Thomas McEviley, "and I showed now and then in group shows, but it was tough. I was the last [type of artist] who should be without a gallery, and yet I wouldn’t go looking for one”. 

This lack of representation later in life undoubtedly diminished Anastasi’s chances of receiving wider exposure, possibly compounded by his lack of a distinctive signature style or medium. 

This Is Not My Signature is an essential overview of Anastasi’s life and work. It’s also a cautionary tale that it’s possible to win the race and still be viewed as an also-ran. 

The title is available from the publisher for € 40/ $ 45.00, here.

1. Anastasi’s work is entirely omitted from Lucy Lippard’s Six Years, which recounts the shift towards the “dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972”.

2. Nota Bene is a Latin phrase used to indicate that special attention should be paid to something.

3. The dates of conceptual works are often controversial. I’ve spoken to many Fluxus artists who dispute the dates of works in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, for example. 

4. Lexier and Anastasi share many similar interests, from corners to tautologies to puzzles. 

5. In a 1990 interview Cage distinguished the works from surrealist automatism by clarifying "It’s not psychological; it’s physical.”

6. Walter De Maria’s telegram to Dwan dates back to 1968, but was first framed and exhibited as an artwork in 1970.  

 

Claes Oldenburg | Soft Alphabet

Claes Oldenburg

Soft Alphabet 

New York City, USA: Multiples, Inc., 1978

74 x 56.2 x 7.3 cm. 

Edition of 16 [+ 2 AP] signed and numbered copies

Wim Crouwel (1928 - 2019) was a designer and typographer who began working for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 1964.

In 1970, Crouwel designed the catalogue Claes Oldenburg for the museum, with a stark cover featuring only the artist’s name and the initials of the institution (see previous post). The embossed text was in a typeface inspired by Oldenburg’s iconic soft sculptures that came to be known as ‘padded letters’.  They are built on an elementary three-by-three unit grid, altered slightly for the ascenders, descenders, and the letter “M,” employing an inner rounded corner.1 

“When the catalogue was finished and Claes saw it,” Crouwel later said, "he asked me if I would do the whole alphabet. So I did. Then he sent me a lovely drawing, of his ice-cream alphabet, with the dripping letters.” 

Oldenburg transformed the characters into soft objects themselves, and produced them for Marian Goodman’s Multiples Inc., in 1978. The forty-one characters are sand-filled bags made of sewn cotton, housed in a large screen-printed wooden box which is signed on the underside in black ink. 

The work has a value of about twenty-thousand dollars. The study for the work (graphite and wax crayon on paper, below) is valued at upwards of a hundred thousand dollars. 

1. Crouwel also invented the typeface New Alphabet, which was not used for anything of note for twenty-one years, when it appeared on the cover of Joy Division’s Substance LP. 

Claes Oldenburg

Wim Crouwel

Claes Oldenburg

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum, 1970

74 pp., 27.6 x 20.8 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Designed by Wim Crouwel (see next post), Claes Oldenburg is a catalogue produced to accompany an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, from the 16th of January to the 15th of March, in 1970. The book features five reproductions in colour and 139 in black and white. 

It includes texts (in English and Dutch) by E. de Wilde and Alicia Legg and Oldenburg’s famous 1961

I Am For… statement (my favourite of which is "I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero”). 

Crouwel used the same cover font he designed for the exhibition poster, below. 

The catalogue is available here, for €80.00.

5000th post

I started this blog in January of 2012, and it has now reached the milestone of 5000 posts, averaging more than one entry a day for thirteen years. 

Neil Farber | Hey Kid

Neil Farber

Hey Kid

Zurich, Switzerland: Nieves, 2006

32 pp., 14 x 20 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 150 numbered copies

Released in 2006 - alongside works by Larry Clark, Harmony Korine and Kim Gordon - this black and white photocopied ‘zine is a collection of previously unpublished drawings from Farber’s series of adult-child encounters, each beginning with ''Hey kid''.