Monday, June 30, 2025

Tracey Emin | Strangeland









Tracey Emin
Strangeland
London, UK: Sceptre, 2005
213 pp., 20.5 x 13.5 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown


Tracey Emin's most celebrated and controversial work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 consisted of a tent with the appliquéd names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with. She described the piece as about "abortion, rape, teenage sex, abuse and poverty".

Three years later My Bed was inspired by a depressive time in Emin's life when she remained in bed for four days without eating or drinking anything but alcohol.

Given the overt and autobiographical nature of these work, a tell-all memoir was inevitable. 

In Strangeland, she candidly and matter-of-factly writes about her abortions (the second was “revenge for the first”), her eating disorders (“I had no tits, no hips, and I only ate digestive biscuits”), and her back alley rape by a classmate when she was thirteen (“I was crying. His lips were pressed against mine but I was motionless, like a small corpse.”). 

She quit school that year, and left the small seaside town of Margate two years after that. 

The book offers an account of the artist's journey to becoming "a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman” - from departing for London with twenty pounds and a pair of David Bowie LPs, to laying poolside and receiving calls about a Turner Prize nomination, the Pulp song about her hitting number one on the charts, and Bowie himself offering a flight home on his private jet.  

The passages that Julian Schnabel cites below are about Emin shoving a classmate into a tree and another - repeatedly - into a wall until “blood squirted everywhere”, all because one of them called Emin’s mother “old”; stealing from a drug dealer because he was "shit in bed”; and losing a dance competition because several boys she had slept with began chanting “Slag, Slag, Slag” at her. All before she was fourteen. 

Some of the most interesting stories in the book are about her Turkish father, constantly trying to regale his bored daughter with tales of his homeland:

“Yes, Dad, I know all about my grandmother and how she tore off her yashmak in front of the whole village because she wasn’t allowed to marry my granddad.”

“No, Dad. But you told me how Queen Victoria earned the island of Cyprus. She spent one night at the Sultan’s palace and the next morning she left with the deeds of Cyprus.”



""Like a fucking dog when the truth is hard to bear; I waved goodbye to my mum at the school gates.” I've read these words aloud on more than one occasion. This is the title of a story from Tracey Emin's book Strangeland. At the time, I wanted to share it with everybody I met. I don't know the exact date of when it was written. I'm under the impression that it was written as a diary entry by the teenage Tracey. I wouldn't be surprised if it was written yesterday. I was so impressed by this book that I'd like to recommend it as required reading for young people everywhere; the loneliness, the fragility, the disappointment and honesty, the clarity of all of it.

Suggested reading: "Like a fucking dog when the truth is hard to bear"; "Nayland Rock"; "Why I never became a dancer" – Hades, read the whole book for God's sake. She's a teenage Charles Bukowski, a Sam Shepard, giving Margate the distinction that Marty Scorsese gives to Little Italy. The cradle and site of adolescent crimes, unconscious acts, and brutal truths that form who we are and the scenes that made Tracey an artist.”
- Julian Schnabel




Sunday, June 29, 2025

Ian Wilson | Section 34







Ian Wilson
Section 34
Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole/David Bellman, 1984
68 pp., 21.3 x 14 cm., softcover
Edition of 500


Years ago, I curated an exhibition of Jenny Holzer Books and Multiples at Art Metropole: things we had in stock, things I tracked down, things sent from the Holzer studio (“Schlock,” one of her assistants called it, completely misunderstanding her practice). 

We also had a monitor playing a Jodi Foster movie in which she plays an artist on the run from a mob boss played by Dennis Hopper, who also directed. The film is sometimes called Catchfire and sometimes Backdraft, because Hopper disowned it and took his name off it (the credit went to the common pseudonym Alan Smithee). Foster’s character was an artist who made LED text works, all of which were provided by Holzer. 

At one point in the film, Hopper’s character is trying to get in the head of the woman he is hunting down and picks a book from her shelf. He reads it aloud: "The known is unknown and unknown and known. That it is unknown is unknown and known and unknown” and then throws it down and shakes his head. 

When this scene came on, our friend Alex (then a summer intern, while still in high school) exclaimed “We published that book!” He rushed to the shelf, pulled down Wilson’s Section 34 and found the passage. 

Each page of the book contains variations on the statement “The known is unknown and unknown and known. That it is unknown is unknown and known and unknown.” Section 34 is one of several books in the Section series. 



“Wilson has also produced a number of artist books, each simply titled Section followed by a number. The word ‘section’ reminds me of how nations organize their constitutions according to ‘acts’ and ‘sections.’ […] Linguistically, a section also always implies a pre-existing whole. A section can only be derived from a whole. Chapters have a different connotation in that they are like building blocks toward a whole. After all, a chapter can be incomplete while a section is always complete to the extent that it is a section. As such, naming his artist’s books Section followed by a number is homologically related to Buddhist or Hindu sutras, collections of canonical texts that were then assembled into a book of teachings.”
– Ken Lum





Saturday, June 28, 2025

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981 - 1984










Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981 - 1984
Edinburgh, Scotland: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 1984
[48] pp.,  29.5 x 22 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown


Rare and very expensive catalogue for Basquiat's first European solo exhibition which premiered at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and then travelled to ICA London and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam the following year. The title is said to be designed by the artist. 



Friday, June 27, 2025

Rudolf Stingel | Instructions








Rudolf Stingel
Instructions
Milan, Italy: Massimo De Carlo, 1989
24 pp., 21 x 15 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown


Published in conjunction of the third solo show of Rudolf Stingel, held at Galleria Massimo De Carlo, this slim pamphlet provides precise step-by-step instructions - in six languages - on how to create a Stingel abstract painting. 


"Stingel's feat was to reverse Walter Benjamin's theory [that authenticity and authorship are lost in mechanical reproduction], creating a chance to teach the mechanics of producing the aura of his artworks. He erased the very idea of the copy because every painting, following his instructions, would have come out as a true original.” 
- Francesco Bonami







Thursday, June 26, 2025

Jan Schoonhoven

















Jan Schoonhoven was born on this day in 1914. 






Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Kelly Mark | Important Instructions For Changing the World








Kelly Mark
Important Instructions For Changing the World
Winnipeg, Canada: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2001
144 pp., 20 x 18.2 x 1.2 cm.,  softcover
Edition size unknown


This catalogue, to accompany an exhibition curated by James Patten in 2001, features a few photographic and video based work, but primarily documents Kelly Mark's early drawings using Letraset dry transferable lettering. For almost two decades the artist produced abstract visual compositions by applying the Letraset directly onto matte board. Each of the works in the exhibition was the uniform size 28 x 36 cm., but subsequently the drawings have grown into sprawling works, with one (purchased by the National Gallery of Canada), being over thirty-three feet long.

The works share traits in common with Concrete Poetry, but Mark would have balked at such comparisons, preferring to think of them as ‘drawings’, similar to her three-dimensional objects covered in graphite

Mark's Letraset Drawings has been reproduced as album cover art, promotional posters, wine bottles, magazine covers and a number of tattoos. 

We own the example featured on the cover of the book [see below], from a trade many years ago. 


"Kelly Mark's Letraset 'drawings' are compositions of meticulously arranged transfer lettering on mount board. The black and white designs are ambiguous and suggest an unseen source material such as aerial mapping, sewing patterns or convoluted text-based bar code. More graphic and formally driven than her other work, they allow her the pleaseure of making and designing in a dynamic and architectural way."
- Terri Whitehead, Art Review Magazine (UK) 

"Kelly Mark's work using Letraset seems to represent a dynamic dance and swirl of letters, moving accross page and frame to frame. While the indivivual pieces can stand alone, they are arranged as polyptychs and the line around which the marks are organizes flow from from one panel to the other. There is a dynamic machinery here, and the fontography by its black and white and serifed nature reminds me of the early century's dynamic steam machines, which inspired Duchamp to abandon paintings of traditional subject matter in favour of engineered renderings of chocolate-grinders and the hormonal process of love as if mediated by particles of malic-molded matter."
- Timothy Comeau, Blog TO









Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Allan Kaprow | Photoalbum : Moving, A Happening

 









Allan Kaprow
Photo Album: Moving, A Happening
Chicago, USA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1967
16 pp.,  21.5 x 14 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown


A slim Artists' Book documenting a happening which took place over four days, at six different sites. Designed by Kaprow, the booklet features seventeen black&white photographs by (Fluxus photographer) Peter Moore. 

 
"Some unused houses in different parts of the city. On each of four days, old furniture is obtained, and is pushed through the streets to the houses. The furniture is installed. On the first day, bedrooms are furnished, and slept in that night. On the second day, dining rooms are furnished, and a meal is eaten. On the third day, living rooms are furnished, and guests are invited to cocktails. On the fourth day, attics are filled and their doors are locked.” 
- Allan Kaprow


"In December 1967 Kapfow did an event in Chicago called Moving (sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art), in which participants were asked to furnish apartments with secondhand furniture that had been purchased for the event. The participants would briefly occupy one apartment—perhaps eating a meal together— before packing up their belongings and moving on to the next, rolling stacks of chairs, boxes, lamps, even a piano through the streets like bands of urban nomads. Moving was familial and friendly and required less labor than Fluids had, but it was just as fluid in its wanderings from
place to place.”    
- Jeff Kelley


Monday, June 23, 2025

Germano Celant | Precronistoria 1966 - 69









Germano Celant
Precronistoria 1966 - 69
Florence, Italy: Centro Di, 1976
178 pp.,  21 x 14.5 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown


An important 'pre-history', examining percursors to Conceptual Art, Land Art, Minimal Art, Arte Povera and Body Art. Celant argues that these developments were rooted in the use of non-traditional art media, such as photography, video, audio records, books and films. 

With texts (in Italian) Celant, Lawrence Alloway, Michel Claura, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Nam June Paik, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Smithson, Buren-Mosset-Parmentier-Toroni, Lawrence Weiner and others.  



Sunday, June 22, 2025

My Friend Goo







Faith Ringgold | Peoples Flag Show








Faith Ringgold
Peoples Flag Show 
New York City, USA: Self-published, 1970
45.7 × 61 cm.
Edition size unknown


Last week Donald Trump revived calls for demonstrators who burn American flags to be sentenced to a year in prison. 

"I happen to think if you burn an American flag, because they were burning a lot of flags in Los Angeles, I think you go to jail for one year, just automatic," he told the New York Post.

Currently flag burning is neither unlawful nor unconstitutional, but Senator Josh Hawley responded to Trump’s statements by proposing a bill that would create stiffer penalties for rioters who burned American flags. 

Stephen Radich (1922 - 2007) was a New York gallerist charged with desecrating the American flag. From 1960 to 1969, he operated the Stephen Radich Gallery, where he exhibited works by Yayoi Kusama, George Sugarman, Dmitri Hadzi and others. 

In December of 1966 he presented an exhibition of works by Marc Morrel, which incorporated American flags as a protest against the Vietnam War. Morrel, a former marine, produced soft sculptures with titles like "The United States Flag in a Yellow Noose” and "The United States Flag as a Crucified Phallus”.

The exhibition came to the attention of the New York City police, and Radich was charged and convicted of "casting contempt on the American flag”1. He was ordered to pay a fine of $500 (which would amount to almost five thousand dollars today, adjusted for inflation), or face sixty days in jail. 

At the time, Jon Hendricks was the was the director of the gallery at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. He organized an event with his Guerrilla Art Action Group collaborator Jean Toche, and Faith Ringgold. They distributed a flyer titled “Call for Work for People’s Flag Show,” writing:

“As a challenge to the repressive laws governing so-called flag desecration, concerned artists and citizens are asked to participate in an exhibition, on Nov. 9th, 1970. The exhibition will run through Nov. 14th. Artists may not retain their conspicuous silence in times such as these. All participants should please limit their contribution to one piece. The delivery date for all work is Sunday afternoon, Nov. 8… Your voice is your sole defense against repression.”

Over a hundred and fifty works were submitted to The People’s Flag Show. These included a flag baked into a cake, a flag made of commercial pop cans, and a flag in the shape of a penis. Kate Millett draped a flag over a toilet bowl. Yvonne Rainer performed a nude dance with flags, and Abbie Hoffman spoke while wearing the flag skirt that he had been arrested for two years prior. Hendricks and Toche (below) burned a flag just prior to the exhibition opening, in the church’s courtyard. 

The Attorney General ordered the exhibition closed on November 13th - only a day earlier than planned - and Hendricks, Toche and Ringgold were arrested, charged with desecration of the flag. They became known as the Judson 32, and were convicted and fined $100 each.3



"In 1970, there was a Flag Show that took place at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park, for which Faith designed the poster and I wrote the words.  The show, after massive participation on the part of artists in New York, was closed by the Attorney General's office.  Faith, Jon Hendricks and Jon Toche were arrested and charged with Desecration of the Flag.  As a consequence, they were dubbed the Judson 3.  They were subsequently vindicated of all charges on Appeal by lawyers who were assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union.  It was an important case for Freedom of Speech among Artists.  In this poster, Faith further  develops her increasingly sophisticated use of words and lettering in art, as well as the image of the American Flag.”
- Michele Wallace, the artist’s daughter



1. Radich appealed his conviction to the United States Supreme Court, which, in 1971, returned a tie vote. Eventually, in 1974, a federal judge overturned the conviction.

2. Jean Toche was arrested again in 1974, this time by the FBI. He was charged with mailing a kidnapping threat to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The threat, in the form of a flyer, called for the kidnapping of "museum trustees, directors, administrators, curators and benefactors”. He maintained his practice of combining mail art tactics with radical politics until his death in 2018. 

Ringgold died at her New Jersey home, on April 13, 2024, at age 93. Jon Hendricks became the world’s leading scholar on Fluxus and remains the curator and archivist for Yoko Ono. 

3. Like Radich, their fines were also overturned with support from the New York Civil Liberties Union.


 





Saturday, June 21, 2025

John Lennon | Bag One catalogue










John Lennon
Bag One catalogue
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Michael Podulke and Gerard Bernard, 1970.
28 pp., 16.5 x 15 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown


A less common catalogue for an exhibition of Lennon’s erotic lithographs (see previous post). The cover features a photograph of Lennon and Ono at the Amsterdam Hilton in 1969, during their Bed-In event. The drawings represent less public aspects of their honeymoon: Ono with her legs spread, masturbating, and giving and receiving oral sex. 

From their earliest days together, Lennon was not shy about sharing intimate aspects of their life together. The couple posed nude for their Two Virgins album cover on the night that they first consummated their relationship. One of the last photographs of Lennon is by Annie Leibowitz and features him naked and embracing a clothed Ono (both images appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone magazine). A few months prior the pair were photographed undressing and making love (footage which was later used for the music video “Woman”). 

And Lennon's love of cunnilingus is well documented. During the 1972 One To One concert (see the 2025 documentary of the same name), Lennon’s performance of the song “Well, Well, Well” features the line “she looked so beautiful I could eat her” followed by the ad-lib “I did”. "It’s So Hard", also performed at the One To One concert, includes the line “Sometimes I feel like goin’ down”. In one of the many tell-all books by former associates (I can’t remember which), the author describes looking at the piece of paper inside Lennon’s typewriter and it simply stating “I am eating Yoko’s pussy”. 








John Lennon | Bag One




























John Lennon
Bag One
New York City, USA: Cinnamon Press, 1970
76.2 x 58.4 cm.
Edition of 300 signed and numbered copies [+ 45 hors commerce]


Anthony Fawcett met John Lennon and Yoko Ono when he was working at the Robert Fraser Gallery, and later assisted them with their Acorn Piece and Lennon's You Are Here. In February of 1969, he introduced Lennon to the technique of lithography and proposed that he produce a series of lithographs.

Ed Newman of Curwen press recalls "We just had everything in the corner of a room, so that whenever John felt like it, he could just do it. When he was inspired, he would work very quickly."

Lennon began work on a series of images using the technique, documenting his wedding and honeymoon. Aldo Crommylynck, Picasso's printer in Paris, produced trial prints which Lennon was reportedly pleased with, and arrangements were made to have the entire series produced in London. Fourteen images were selected and a fifteenth was written directly onto the zinc plate at the London printers in June of 1969.

Fashion designer Ted Lapidus (who is credited with creating 'unisex' fashions, and had previously made clothes for Lennon, Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Hardy, Twiggy and others) designed a white plastic zippered bag to house the prints. The name Bag One referred to Ono's Bag Piece, which the couple would sometimes perform in lieu of traditional interviews.

Lennon signed the 5145 prints during his stay at Ronnie Hawkins farm in Streetsville, Ontario, where Lennon and Ono stayed before the couple met with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

A month later, in January 1970, the prints were presented in an exhibition at Eugene Schuster's London Arts Gallery at 22 New Bond Street. The portfolio was offered for £550, with individual prints priced at £40 each. Fifty sets and twenty individual prints sold at the opening.

Less than 24 hours later, the police raided the gallery and confiscated eight works on the grounds that they were obscene. The images featured Ono with her legs spread, Ono masturbating, and Lennon performing cunnilingus ("Sometimes I feel like going down" he sang on It's So Hard, the following year). In one image, a threesome is depicted, with what appears to be Ono and two Lennons.

Detective Inspector Frederick Luff, the head of Scotland Yard's obscene publications squad, said that the lithographs were "the work of a sick mind", but the Director of Public Prosecution declined to prosecute Lennon under the Obscene Publications Act 1964. He feared that the case would open the floodgates and that countless historical artworks depicting nude figures would become subject to censorship.

Instead, Lennon was prosecuted under the Metropolitan Police Act 1839, which prohibits the selling or distributing of "profane, indecent or obscene books, papers, prints, drawings, paintings or representations". In the trial that followed, Schuster cited the example of Picasso's erotic works, which had never been confiscated, and argued that Lennon was being singled out because of his fame.

On April 27, 1970, three weeks into the trial, the gallery won the case.

A planned sequel (Bag Two?) based on the I Ching, was never realized.


“Lennon’s sex life in the medium of lithography is a poignant comment on a modern society. In the last year Lennon has repeatedly attempted to identify himself as an artist beyond Pop music. It has brought ridicule on him and his efforts have been scorned.

The history of lithography has seen a change of emphasis from content to technique and Lennon has taken advantage of this movement to expose a society by exposing his own private life to encourage a more introspective commitment to content by today’s artists who can be so timid. In a society where movement and social change play such an important part, the artist’s need to experiment is not new. Warhol and Rauschenberg have created a pattern. John Lennon is developing this tradition and although he may not be making many friends, he has committed himself to a particular cultural leadership which has always been the position of the artist.”
- London Arts Gallery, press release