Raymond Pettibon | Tripping Corpse 6

Raymond Pettibon

Tripping Corpse 6

Lawndale, USA: SST Publications, 1985

28 pp., 21.6 x 14 x 0.2 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 500 numbered copies

Between the years 1981 and 1985, Raymond Pettibon produced six issues of Tripping Corpse, this being the final. The ‘zines were published by Pettibon’s older brother Greg Ginn, best known as the leader of the band Black Flag. 

Tripping Corpse included art, poetry, politics and band interviews and reviews. Number six features interviews with Keb Studerbox and Sonic Youth, an album review and drawings on 24 of the 28 pages. 

Reportedly, 400 copies of 500 produced were destroyed, making the title scarce. It has an estimated value of between three and five hundred dollars US. 

Gilbert & George | Dark Shadows

Gilbert & George

Dark Shadow

London, UK: Art for All & Nigel Greenwood Inc., 1976  

[unpaginated], 19.5 x 13 cm., hardcover

Edition of 2000 signed and numbered copies

One of the most celebrated and sought-after artists' books of the 1970's, Dark Shadow contains eight short stories: "Gordons Gin", "Dark Shadow", "Broken Hearts", "Bloody Life", "Balls Bar", "Bad Thoughts", "Inca Pisco", and "Human Bondage." These stories - irreverent, fantastical and funny - are illustrated with black-and-white images of the artists.

Despite the high edition size, each copy of the book is signed and numbered by Gilbert & George. Additionally, each copy is unique. The book is bound in hand-marbled cloth individually created by the artists in their studio, adorned with gold blocked title. 

The pair view Dark Shadow as a "living sculpture book", and the "result of our past three years of earnest daily thoughts, shadows, deeds, cares and pleasures." 

The book is co-published by the artists and gallerist Nigel Greenwood (1941 - 2004), an early promoter of conceptual art and proponent of artists' books, who worked with a number of artists central to both, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Marcel Broodthaers, Dieter Roth, Richard Hamilton, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle and Ed Ruscha. In addition to Dark Shadow, he also published Gilbert & George Side By Side and their Reclining Drunk ashtray. The pair first performed their infamous Singing Sculpture at Greenwood's gallery in 1970, when they were still students.

Dark Shadow is available from Specific Object for $575.00 US, here. 

The title is being reprinted at the end of April. Pre-order a copy here, for $190.00. 

David Platzker on Ed Ruscha

"THE DISTANCE from the Knox-Less service station in Oklahoma City to Bob’s Seaside Service, not so far from the Santa Monica Pier at the terminus of Route 66—both pictured in Ed Ruscha’s 1963 artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—was about 1,400 miles. It’s a drive Ruscha has taken many times since he traveled it with Mason Williams in Ruscha’s lowered 1950 four-door Ford, with throaty Smitty Glasspack dual muffler, following their graduation from Oklahoma City’s Classen High School in 1956.1

The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the American West, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—typed in 1951 and published in September 1957, a full year after Ruscha and Williams’s journey—to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which the author framed the trip from Oklahoma to California as one driven by drought and depression."

Continue reading "Station to Station: David Platzker on the art of Ed Ruscha" in the current issue of Artforum, here. 

Jonathan Monk Shops at Erotica

Jonathan Monk

Jonathan Monk Shops at Erotica

Berlin, Germany: Erotica, [c.2009]

38 x 34 cm.

Edition size unknown

A silkscreen cotton bag produced by a since-closed Berlin porn shop. One of a series of bags indicating that the artist is a patron of various businesses, the others all being art stores (“Jonathan Monk Shops at Art Metropole”, “Jonathan Monks Shops at Specific Object”, “Jonathan Monk Shops at Untitled”, etc. - see below). 

It’s unclear if the work is a joke about his previous endorsements, or an honest admission. 

On the back of the bag, the design is repeated but in a mirror image.

Jonathan Monk

Happy birthday to Jonathan Monk, who turns 54 today. 

Claes Oldenburg | N.Y.C. Pretzel

Claes Oldenburg

N.Y.C. Pretzel 

New York City, USA: I. C. Editions and David Platzker, 1994

17.5 x 16.5 x 1.6 cm.

Unlimited edition 

An open edition that were once widely available for around fifty dollars, but now sell for well over ten times that amount, these silkscreen prints on three-ply corrugated cardboard are rubber stamped with the artist's initials. 

Jenny Holzer | Put food out in the same place...

Jenny Holzer
The Survival Series: Put food out in the same place
New York City, USA: Self-published, 1984
15.2 x 25.4 cm.
Edition of 10

David Plattzker talk at NSCAD tomorrow

New York City-based curator David Platzker will present a lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design tomorrow evening.

One of the leading authorities on artists' books and multiples, Platzker is the Director of Specific Object, an innovative gallery, bookshop, and storehouse for a range of items from artists’ publications. He was previously the Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from 2013-2018, and the executive director of Printed Matter from 1998 to 2004. Prior to that has also held positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum.

His curatorial projects at Specific Object and Printed Matter included shows of John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Marcel Duchamp, Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, and Claes Oldenburg. At MoMA he co-curated There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33” in collaboration with Jon Hendricks; Sites of Reason (2014) with Erica Papernik; and in 2015 the exhibition Gilbert & George: The Early Years.

His publications include Printed Stuff: Prints, Poster, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg A Catalogue Raisonne 1958-1996, Hard Pressed: 600 Years of Prints and Process, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971, Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965–2016, among others.

The talk takes place Thursday, November 21, at 7:30 p.m., at Art Bar +Projects, Fountain Campus, (1873 Granville St, Halifax, NS).

David Platzker talk tomorrow

David Platzker will be giving a talk tomorrow at the at the St Louis Museum of Art about editions, multiples, artists' books and other printed matter of the 1960s to the present in conjunction with Elizabeth Wyckoff and Gretchen Wagner's show "Graphic Revolution: American Prints 1960 to Now." The talk begins at 2pm and admission is five dollars (free to members).

Click here for more information.

In the Spirt of Fluxus : Stamps by Robert Watts

Robert Watts
In the Spirt of Fluxus : Stamps by Robert Watts
Minneapolis/New York, USA: Walker Art Center / Robert Watts Studio Archive, 1993
4.6 x 2.6 cm.
Edition size unknown

The Walker Art Centre 1993 exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus featured a vintage stamp vending machine from which visitors could purchase facsimiles of Robert Watts' Fluxus stamps.

This set of three stamps is available from Specific Object, here, for $75 US.