My Friend Goo

Pleased to see my book made it into the hands of Raymond Pettibon. 

"The artist who created the iconic cover graphic for Sonic Youth’s 1990 LP Goo is no stranger to memetic dissemination. Raymond Pettibon was an early provisional member of his brother Greg Ginn’s punk rock band, Black Flag17 and proposed the band name and logo simultaneously, a stylized black flag represented as four black bars.18

"If a white flag means surrender, a black flag represents anarchy,” he told author Steven Blush. “I was a card-carrying anarchist when I was fourteen. The Black Flag was a symbol of anarchy; depicting that as pistons seemed to have some visual power, plus convey the actual form of the flag.”19

In Los Angeles, the image would soon become almost as ubiquitous as the anarchy symbol. The group spray-painted the logo all over the city: on the side of buildings, alleys, sidewalks, the freeway underpass, and “the back of 16 wheelers.” Because of the simplicity of reproducing the logo, fans began to take up the mantle. Keith Morris - the first singer of the band20 - described it as an early form of tagging.

“We saw the logo before we heard the band,” said Henry Rollins, who would later join the group as front person. It would eventually become the subject of countless memes, many in the form of fan tattoos21.

In the spirit of Punk Rock DIY, Black Flag self-released all of their recordings on their own label, SST Records22, virtually all of them with Pettibon illustrations on the cover23. Like Vaughn Oliver at 4AD or Peter Saville24 at Factory Records, Pettibon’s deadpan comic album cover and flyer designs came to define the visual identity of SST.25”

- excerpt from My Friend Goo: Memes, Mashups and Remixes

My Friend Goo

Jonathan Monk | Restaurant Drawing (Louise Lawler, What Else Could I Do, 1994)

Jonathan Monk

Restaurant Drawing (Louise Lawler, What Else Could I Do, 1994)

Toronto, Canada: Paul+Wendy Projects, 2025

7.5 x 19 cm.

Edition size unknown

A size-as reproduction of one of Jonathan Monk's brilliant restaurant drawings (see previous posts here, here and here), which are drawings on meal receipts sold for the cost of the meal. 

This drawing is based on Louise Lawler's What Else Could I Do, 1994, a photograph of a Gerhard Richter candle painting, a nod to Sonic Youth who later used Richter's image on the cover of their Daydream Nation LP.

The work is not for sale, but rather given away as a bookmark for the first hundred copies of my new book My Friend Goo: Memes, Mashups and Remixes, which is available from Paul + Wendy Projects, here. The work collects almost a hundred memes based on the Sonic Youth LP cover by Raymond Pettibon, and uses them as a way to discuss duplication and mutation in culture. 

It was a wise choice of the publishers (I’m far more likely to have a receipt as a placeholder in a book than anything formally produced for this reason) and smart of Monk to go with Richter (mediated through Lawler) instead of Pettibon. 

 

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Dave Dyment | My Friend Goo

Dave Dyment

My Friend Goo

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025

38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound

Edition of 200

Astutely recognizing that the subject matter touched on a number of my interests1, Paul Van Kooy commissioned me to write a text about Raymond Pettibon’s cover for Sonic Youth’s Goo LP and the subsequent hundreds of memes it has inspired. We amassed over a hundred of them, most of which appear in this little publication, and I wrote a text that attempts to make sense of them. 

It traces the way a Moors Murders paparazzi photo became a Raymond Pettibon drawing, then a cover for Sonic Youth’s major label debut and then a template for people to address subjects as varied as companionship, fandom, escape, corruption, trans rights, police killings, threats to democracy around the world, Covid19, and countless other contemporary concerns. 

The book is designed by Emma Wright (who designed Roula’s fantastic Index), features a cover illustration by Leanne Shapton2 and comes with a bookmark by Jonathan Monk3.

Thanks, of course, to Paul, Wendy, Emma, Leanne, Jonathan, Lee, and Roula. And special thanks to Annie Koyama for making this (and so many other things) possible.

The book is available from the publisher, here. 

1. Sonic Youth, Raymond Pettibon, album covers by artists, the ways that culture takes shape, etc.

2. Leanne Shapton is an artist, art director and publisher. She has designed lettering for the covers of two  Chuck Palahniuk novels and the credits of Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. She also created the "armpit sex drawing" for Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her.

3. The first hundred copies include a bookmark made from a receipt drawing with an illustration of another SY album cover, Daydream Nation (see next post). 

"A wonderful look into not just our mashup but the whole history of them. I loved the historical antecedents - and the footnotes are as good a read as the text! Really wonderful to have this text about (or, in reference to) our album cover and Ray’s drawing.”

- Lee Ranaldo

Jonathan Monk

 

Bottles

 

Jonathan Monk | Antipasti

Jonathan Monk

Antipasti

New York City, USA: Flat Fix, 2016

[86] pp.,  5.88 x 8.25”, spiral-bound

Edition size unknown

A lesser-known artist book that contains A4 printouts of other artists’ works that were used as source material for Jonathan Monk’s series of Restaurant Drawings (see previous three posts). 

The series uses Instagram brilliantly, the way good artists (including Monk) made use of the postal system in earlier mail art projects. Monk dines with his family, draws or paints on the receipt and then posts the image to his Instagram feed. A buyer is selected at random from the people who leave comments indicating their interest. The chosen person sends payment and Monk mails the drawing. 

“The finished drawings have all been sold for the price of the meal they represent. The owners of the drawings have (on occasion) fed myself and my family over the last year or so…” Monk notes. 

The premise reminds me of a great 2001 text work by Ben Kinmont that reads:

SOMETIMES A NICER SCULPTURE IS TO BE ABLE TO PROVIDE A LIVING FOR YOUR FAMILY

which refers to enveloping his side-hustle as an antiquarian bookseller, into his larger artist practice. The scan below Kinmont sent to me almost two decades ago for inclusion in the Art Metropole Commerce By Artists title, which I was editing at the time. 

Jonathan Monk | Restaurant Drawings Special Edition

Jonathan Monk

Restaurant Drawings Special Edition

New York City, USA: Karma, 2019

552 pp., 7.5 x 9.25”, hardcover

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

The Special Edition of Restaurant Drawings (see previous posts) is a green (vs pink) hardcover book that is signed and numbered by the artist and includes an original receipt drawing (11.75 x 4”). 

The edition sold out quickly. 

Jonathan Monk | Restaurant Drawings

Jonathan Monk

Restaurant Drawings

New York City, USA: Karma Books, 2019

552 pp., 7.5 x 9.25”, hardcover

Edition of 1000

Jonathan Monk sings for his supper in this massive collection of drawings of artworks he has doodled on restaurant receipts and sold for the price of the meal. 

On these bills, Monk recreates the work of John Baldessari, Alighiero Boetti, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt (see below, from our collection), Sherrie Levine, Piero Manzoni, Lawrence Weiner, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, and others.

The images are accompanied by an essay by Pedro Alonzo.

Restaurant Drawings is sold out most places, but a few copies are still available from the publisher, here. 

Jonathan Monk | Restaurant Drawing of Yoko Ono on the Simpsons

Following two months of postal strike, it’s nice to finally be getting mail. Today this Restaurant Drawing from Jonathan Monk arrived. Earlier in the year he posted an image of a Baldessari-as-Simpsons-Character receipt drawing being made into a t-shirt. I sent him screengrabs of Jasper Johns and Yoko Ono from other episodes, in case he might want to draw them also. I was not expecting to be gifted one in the mail. 

Baldessari and Johns both lent their voices to the show (Jasper John’s best line being “Yoink” as he steals food from a gallery opening) but Ono is voiced by an actress on staff, in the Beatles parody episode Homer's Barbershop Quartet (S05E01). As Barney’s avant-garde girlfriend she is more parody of an Ono-type artist, ordering a conceptual cocktail and recording a "Revolution 9”-like bit of musique concrete where she recites “Number eight, number eight...” over Barney’s belches. 

According to SimsponsWiki, she is also mentioned in "Last Tap Dance in Springfield” and "Covercraft", and appears as a hallucination in "The Bart of War”, and as a waxwork figure in "Crook and Ladder”. 

The cocktail she orders: "a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat”, became the basis for an artwork by Ragnar Kjartansson, as part of the 2016 exhibit One More Story at the Reykjavík Art Museum, which was curated by Ono. She Hyperallergic story, here, for more information. 

Kay Rosen | HI

Kay Rosen

HI

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2024

Adjustable one size fits all cap

Edition of 50

About twenty years ago Kay Rosen sent me a parcel that included a signed copy of the work HI as a rectangular button. A few years after that Micah Lexier (seen above with Jonathan Monk) included the work in an exhibition he curated at the gallery that represents me, MKG127 (see below). After the show ended the work remained as the exterior awning for a year or so, and kickstarted Michael Klein’s program of commissioning an artist to design the gallery signage (light boxes by Roula Partheniou,  Ken Lum, Abbas Akhavan, Deanna Bowen and many others followed). 

Now our good friends Paul Van Kooy and Wendy Gomoll have published the work as a one -size-fits-all baseball cap. 

HI has existed as a gallery wall-work, a billboard and public mural, but I think it works best as a wearable item, where it can function as a greeting. 

The hat is the second baseball cap published by Paul + Wendy Projects, their second work by Rosen and their 78th project overall. 

Produced in an edition of fifty, HI can be purchased for fifty dollars, here. 

Jonathan Monk | Crackers

Jonathan Monk

Crackers

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2023

One size fits all

Edition of 50 signed copies

To commemorate Jonathan Monk’s Crackers collection reaching the milestone of fifty copies, Paul+Wendy Projects released this embroidered 100% cotton baseball cap emblazoned with the word, in an edition of fifty. 

The one-size-fits-all adjustable cap is accompanied by a card signed by the artist and is available for fifty dollars (CDN) from the publisher, here. 

"In my early teens my mother would often react to certain things I did or said with...you must be crackers*...

Many years later, I read that Ed Ruscha said Crackers, published by Heavy Industry Publications, Hollywood in 1969 (the year of my birth), was the least popular of his artist books. It is also the cheapest and most readily available.

A combination of all of the above started my ongoing collection of the publication.

*crackers adjective (UK informal) silly, stupid, or slightly mentally ill (Cambridge Dictionary)."

- Jonathan Monk

Happy Birthday to Micah Lexier