Lenka Clayton | How We Thought It Would Be And How It Was

 

Lenka Clayton

How We Thought It Would Be And How It Was

Atlanta, USA: J&L Books, 2025

48 pp., 29.2 x 24.2 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Designed by Jason Fulford (who runs J&L Books with his partner Leanne Shapton), Lenka Clayton’s latest publication collects twenty-three of the more-than five-hundred drawings she has produced using a 1957 portable Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter. 

This series consists of works made in 2020, during the early days of the Covid pandemic, including her grandmother’s thumb on the camera during a Zoom call, kitchen haircuts, quarantined mail, empty supermarket shelves and tea towels repurposed as face masks.  

The book is available for $30 US, here. 

Barbara Kruger | I shop therefore I am

Barbara Kruger

I shop therefore I am

Cologne, Germany: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1990

43.9 x 27.3 x 10.7 cm.

Edition of 9000

Barbara Kruger’s reworking of Rene Descartes’ best known dictum ("Cogito, ergo sum") has appeared as a canvas book bag, t-shirt, magnet and postcard. But this simple paper shopping bag had the widest reach. 

Only a handful of artists' multiples can claim edition sizes higher than nine-thousand, but most of the bags adorned with Kruger’s signature text conflating consumerism with identity no longer remain, destroyed by the consumerism they gently mock. They were distributed as a functional and ephemeral shopping bag, and few survived the use value. 

The art market gets the last laugh, though, with unused copies framed copies to sell for upwards of two thousand dollars now, despite the high edition size and disposable nature of the production. 

"Prior to making it, I had read Walter Benjamin, and I’ll paraphrase a quote: “If the soul of the commodity existed, it would want to nestle in the home and hearth of every shopper that passed its way.” I thought that was amazing. When reading Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, I realized that he was a compulsive shopper. He’s always shopping for something, and it was about framing his image of perfection.

I remember when the works of artists in my peer group were first being discussed by critics and first being sold. I thought if my work was developing this commodity status, I had to address it in the work.”

- Barbara Kruger

Brian Eno | Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan

Brian Eno

Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan

London, UK: Hendring Ltd, 1987

47:00 VHS in clamshell box

Edition size unknown

I can’t seem to locate my copy of this, which I have had since my teens. Before moving across the country six years ago I became pretty ruthless about parting with things that I didn’t need, and may have decided that - in the absence of a VCR - this was of no use to me. 

I only played it a few times, but I thought about it often. The tape consists of seven short videos totalling 47 minutes, each filmed from the artist’s thirteenth floor apartment in the early eighties, and scored with his ambient compositions. Most of the music came from the first and fourth ambient records (Music for Airports and the lesser On Land) along with an unreleased track. 

The "video painting” images of the skyline (with a nod to an obvious precursor - Warhol’s duration Empire film) required you to turn your television set on its side to view correctly. This was at a time when most TVs were housed in wooden boxes and weighed a hundred pounds. As he dis not own a tripod, Eno had shot the footage with his (faulty, found) camera on its side. 

The work anticipates the recent onslaught of vertical filmmaking on Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. Today Netflix announced an overhaul of their interface, in part to accommodate new vertical video. In an attempt to appeal to younger viewers, the CBC website has been posting news stories in this format for several months now. 

This may feel like a mixed blessing for Eno. Ambient artworks can be thought of as allowing for a more ‘passive’ listener/viewer experience (rewarding attention but not demanding it), but these works also required an active viewing experience. In addition to having to turn your set on its side, there were instructions for manually manipulating the hue, contrast, and vertical controls of your television. 

But they were also designed to be long, slow and contemplative. To combat the shrinking attention spans brought on from MTV culture. Today ‘longform’ vertical video can mean anything longer than thirty seconds. 

Talk Tonight

I was invited by Struts to participate in their “Swap Meet” presentations in which four artists speak about a particular subject. Last month the topic was Artist Residencies and this month it’s Influence. 

I’m going to speak about Kelly Mark, something I’ve been itching to do after spending so much time revisiting her work after her death earlier this year. 

Marion van Wijk | Let Go – Bas Jan Ader

Marion van Wijk

Let Go – Bas Jan Ader

Eindhoven, The Netherlands: Lecturis, 2015

192 pp., 17 x 24 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

A Dutch-language account of Bas Jan Ader’s short life by artist/performer Marion van Wijk, who interviewed Ader’s friends and family, including his widow Mary Sue Andersen.

Roula Partheniou

Happy Birthday to Roula Partheniou. 

Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum died today, at the age of 78. 

Three early obits: 

https://hyperallergic.com/1008907/dara-birnbaum-video-arts-wonder-woman-dies-at-78/

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/dara-birnbaum-video-artist-dead-wonder-woman-1234740430/

https://www.frieze.com/article/dara-birnbaum-video-artist-has-died-aged-78

Yoko Ono | Blood Objects from Family Album

Yoko Ono

Blood Objects from Family Album

New York City, USA: UBU Gallery, 1995

17.5 x 10.2 cm.

Edition size unknown

A year after the founding of Ubu Gallery in 1994, Yoko Ono presented a solo exhibition there, comprising of two bodies of work. Works from the Franklin Summer 'automatic' pointillist drawings series sat alongside Family Album objects (bronzed versions of everyday items such as a splintered bat, a mirror, a high-heeled shoe, all splattered with blood red pigment). The latter recalled the image of her husband John Lennon's iconic glasses covered in his own blood after being shot in front of Ono outside their home in 1980, which adorned the cover of her first album after his murder. 

To promote the show is this brilliant bit of ephemera, which I think bests the works in the show. A house key is just as good a signifier of domesticity as a mirror or shoe, and all the better that it arrives for free in the mail, serving as the exhibition announcement. 

The true brilliance is the lack of expense: I suspect most households have a drawer full of keys that are no longer in use but that the owners are reluctant to discard. It reminds me of when Laurie Anderson performed on SNL in 1986 - she handed out expired batteries and house keys to the audience as a keepsake. 

Additionally, the key has been a consistent motif in the artist’s lexicon - she has produced several keys to open the skies or universe.

Alison Knowles

Happy Birthday to Alison Knowles. 

Jiří Valoch | Poem for bpNichol

Jiří Valoch

Poem for bpNichol

Toronto, Canada: GrOnk, 1988

print on yellow paper

5.4 x 15 cm 

Edition of 89

Coasters