Janek Schaefer | Skate/Rink

Janek Schaefer
Skate/Rink
London, UK: audiOh! Recordings, 2003
12" vinly LP, CD3
Edition size unknown


The term Turntable Skating refers to the tonearm of the record player, if improperly balanced, skipping across the disc towards the centre. A popular early DIY technique to thwart this was to tape a penny to the top of the tone-arm, to weigh it down. Most turntables now include adjustable counterweight contraptions. These devices also aim to keep the stylus in the centre of the groove (against the deterministic spiral of the groove, which draws it towards the centre of the disk) to prevent damage to the needle and to minimize distortions in the reading of the sound.

Janek Schaefer's Skate usurps this mechanism to create new playback and listening experiences. Using a custom built lathe, he developed a fragmented cutting technique to create a concentric collage of individual short 'sounds scars' on the vinyl. The sound from a pair of car speakers was used to generate the grooves.

When the disc is played, the stylus navigates it's own random path across the "intermittent terrain of physical/sonic diversions". A number of variables, including the make of the turntable, the speed and the user themselves, will affect the result of playback and thus offers each listener a somewhat unique listening experience. This approach follows in the footsteps of Christian Marclay, Milan Knizak, Lee Ranaldo, Boyd Rice and other artists/musicians and composers who treat the vinyl LP not as a fixed piece of music, but as a source material. A chapter I wrote for One For Me and One to Share called "The Needle and The Damage Done", examines this tendency in artists' recordworks (click here).

For those without a turntable (or without one they wish to risk), the accompanying CD3 features 99 tracks, with lengths varying from four seconds to almost a minute and a half, but with most hovering around ten seconds.

"The fashion for packaging CD reissues in minature replicas of the original album sleeves is inverted by Janek Schaefer's Skate/Rink which contains a 3"CD tcucked away incongruously in a 12" inner sleeve. The other half of the gatefold cover houses Skate, a vinyl disc that also plays games with expectations. Skate departs from the traditional spiral path steering the stylus from edge to centre. Schaefer built an ersatz lathe witha vibrating cutting head and scored the surface of the acetate with broken-up grooves that randomise the playing path on each passing. Skate is a kick in the teeth for all patented anti-skate mechanisms.

The record as art object has beenhighly visible as well as audible in recent years, not least through Christian Marclay's vinyl constructionsand turntable collages. Back in the mid 1960's the damaged or modified record as artwork and compositional resource was tried and tested by fluxus artist Milan Knizak with his 'Broken Music' series. 'Music While You Work', realised by his Fluxus associate Arthur Kocke, between 1958 and 1964, had already interupted the groove with plastic drips designed to cause annoyance to listeners. Schaefer's Skate can easily be connected to such interventions, but the assumption today is that we have become attached to surface noise, through nostalgia for a medium facing obsolescence or through conscious or subliminal expansion of our listening horizons. In place of passive, irritated audience, Schaefer envisages participants in an ongoing soundwork. SKate is offered as a starting point for the users personal explorations. "Experiment with it," he exhorts, " Have Fun!"

The Rink 3" CD is a 20 minute composition combining sounds from the LP and room recordings from a 2001 Skate installation in Cork Ireland. It has 99 index points to enablethe CD specific variation of random play. The sound predictably mixes graininess and shadow in a musicof crackle hiss click whine, crippled rhythms, occasional lapses into silence or shifts from surface imediacy to suggestions of spatial depth. The disc is stamped with an image of vinyl hosting three tracking arms, a further hint that Rink is in part a prompt to have fun with your own Skate."

Julian Cowley, The Wire

C Magazine review of One For Me and One To Share

The following review of One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions, written by David Senior, appears in the current issue of C Magazine (117, Spring 2013), on newsstands now (with a cover graphic by Kristiina Lahde). 

One For Me and One to Share at Amazon.ca

I was doing some xmas shopping at amazon.ca and I got a recommendation for
One For Me and One To Share, which I hadn't realized was available on the site.

It's considerably cheaper there, too, at $21.91.

One for Me and One to Share Interview

A brief interview I did with Sky Goodden at Blouin Art Info regarding the book One For Me and One to Share: Artists' Multiples and Editions, can be read here.

Canadian Art Magazine launch

The new issue of Canadian Art magazine launches today at Diaz Contemporary from 5:30 to 7:30, with a cover story by Murray Whyte on Christian Marclay's The Clock.

The issue features a brief mention of One For Me and One to Share, which is available here.

One For Me and One to Share, launches tomorrow

Excluding single artist monographs (such as books on Beuys, Brecht, Oldenburg, Fluxus, General Idea, Kippenberger, Lexier, Roth) I have about a half-dozen books on the subject of Artists’ Multiples. Most are now long out of print and/or hard to find. Often they consist primarily of listings of works. Or the subject is lumped in with artists’ prints, which outnumber them two to one. Frequently they are geographically specific. The last major title on the subject (the essential Artists' Multiples, 1935-2000 by Stephen Bury) is now a decade old.

So, hoping to correct this gap in the discourse, we compiled and commissioned two interviews and seven essays on the subject, alongside 36 full-page colour images:

Roula Partheniou interviews Cary Leibowitz (aka Candyass) an artist who has produced more multiples than almost any other (Beuys published more, but Leibowitz's are perhaps better integrated into the artists' larger practice). He is candid and witty.

I speak with Harry Ruhé, the Amsterdam-based curator, dealer and publisher who has dedicated his life to artists' editions. He is a wealth of knowledge and a simple question could lead to a twenty-minute answer, so all I had to do was get out of the way and let him talk. I also write about the influence of the surplus stores of Canal Street on Fluxus, and about Artists' Records.

Mark Clintberg contributes a text about the politics of the multiple, examining the suspended multiple (Kelly Mark, Mitch Robertson), the abducted multiple (Geoffrey Farmer, Felix Gonzales-Torres) and the performative multiple (Miranda July, Cary Leibowitz, Harrell Fletcher).

Nicolas Brown writes about multiples with, within and as magazines (Parkett, Arkitip, The Thing, etc.), and Jonathan Shaughnessy (of the National Gallery of Canada) writes about the multiple going mainstream, discussing the retail outlets from Art Metropole to the Gagosian Gallery Shop. The volume also features an English translation of Océan Delleaux’s “The Artists’ Multiple: A Contribution to the Debate on the Democratization of Art”, originally printed in the French journal Ars, in 2008.

Greg Elgstrand, who co-edited the book with me (and co-authors the intro and preface), writes about multiples in the context of economics, a theme that runs through the book, and is reflected in our choice of illustrations. These include works by John Baldessari, Fionna Banner, Joseph Beuys, BGL, Barbara Bloom, Maurizio Cattelan & Ali Subotnick & Massimiliano Gioni, Marcel Dzama, Fluxus (George Brecht, Ken Friedman, Alice Hutchins, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, etc.), FM3, General Idea, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Martí Guixé, Jesse Harris, Jenny Holzer, Miranda July, Germaine Koh, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Cary Leibowitz, Micah Lexier, Piero Manzoni, Christian Marclay, Kelly Mark, Josephine Meckseper, N.E. Thing Co. LTD., Maurizio Nannucci, bpNichol, Claes Oldenburg, Mitch Robertson, Tom Sachs, David Shrigley, Lawrence Weiner, Ai Weiwei, and Rachel Whiteread.

Rounding out the 205 page volume is a 100-year chronology, a fairly extensive bibliography and full bibliographic listings of about 300 artists’ multiples.

One For Me and One to Share: Artists’ Multiples and Editions
Edited by Dave Dyment and Gregory Elgstrand
Published by YYZBOOKS
Designed by Martina Hawg


Book launch, tomorrow (Saturday the 26th) from
3pm to 6pm
Join us for drinks and sushi at
YYZ Artist Outlet
140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario

The price is $34.95 with a launch price of $30, which I’m sure YYZ will honour for same day web orders, too. Write to abarajas@yyzartistsoutlet.org.

The Facebook group is here:

www.facebook.com/events/315271021886425/

Cary Leibowitz

From Roula Partheniou's interview with Cary Leibowitz in One For Me and One To Share (launching, ahem, on Saturday at YYZ):

RP: Notions of retail seem important to your work. You once mentioned wanting to open a store that only sold plaid, for example.

CL: Oh yeah, I forgot about that idea. I’m always fantasizing about those kind of concepts – a store that might only sell trash cans, for example. I feel like I’ve missed the boat a bit because there are now retail stores not unlike that. Obviously not as specific, but stores that certainly wouldn’t have existed ten or fifteen years ago.

If someone said to me that I could either have backing for a retail store idea for the next five years or a traveling retrospective at all the biggest museums, I think I’d take the retail store.

One For Me and One To Share: Artists' Multiples and Editions

Got a copy from the printers today, looks good.

Here's the launch info:


ONE FOR ME AND ONE TO SHARE: ARTISTS’ MULTIPLES AND EDITIONS
Edited by Dave Dyment and Gregory Elgstrand
Published by YYZBOOKS
Spring 2012
$34.95

ISBN: 978-0-920397-52-7
205 pages softcover, 36 colour reproductions
Distribution: LitDistCo

BOOK LAUNCH
SATURDAY 26 MAY 2012
3:00 PM – 6:00 PM
#140-401 Richmond St. W
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8


Launch Price $30.00

Featuring essays and interviews by Nicholas Brown, Mark Clintberg, Océan Delleaux, Dave Dyment, Gregory Elgstrand, Cary Leibowitz, Roula Partheniou, Harry Ruhé, and Jonathan Shaughnessy.

Illustrated with over thirty-six colour reproductions of artists’ multiples by John Baldessari, Fionna Banner, Joseph Beuys, BGL, Barbara Bloom, George Brecht, Maurizio Cattelan & Ali Subotnick & Massimiliano Gioni, Marcel Dzama, Fluxus, FM3, Ken Friedman, General Idea, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Martí Guixé, Jesse Harris, Jenny Holzer, Alice Hutchins, Miranda July, Germaine Koh, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Cary Leibowitz, Micah Lexier, George Maciunas, Piero Manzoni, Christian Marclay, Kelly Mark, Josephine Meckseper, N.E. Thing Co. LTD., Maurizio Nannucci, bpNichol, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Mitch Robertson, Tom Sachs, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, David Shrigley, Ben Vautier, Lawrence Weiner, Ai Weiwei, and Rachel Whiteread.


To place an order, visit YYZ Books.

Point D'Ironie

In my interview with collector/curator/dealer Harry Ruhe for the forthcoming Artists Multiples book (out soon! more shameless plugs to come), he brings up Point D'Ironie, the series of artists' newspaper projects produced and distributed by the French fashion designer Agnès B:

HR: ….in Holland, these materials are still not collected by museums. In New York, the MOMA will sometimes acquire works in unlimited editions. Like the Agnès B. magazines, for instance. The MOMA not only has the magazines, but it has the displays from the fashion shops that they were originally distributed through.

DD: Do you see the Agnès B. arrangement as a feasible model for multiples, moving forward—with multiples produced as a promotional item for other industries?

HR: It’s one way. There are so many possibilities for distribution. I like that these artworks are available free, not for sale. Just this afternoon, someone showed me the Thomas Hirschhorn issue from the series. He paid 7.50 euros for it, which is crazy. I have double copies, but I will never sell them. Even after twenty years, I wouldn’t sell it, because the concept was that they were free.

…..A lot of people stay home, and order things from the Internet. I would say, “Forget that! Go out to the fairs, and the galleries, and bookshops. Get out of your chair, and out of your house and see what’s going on.”


To date, 52 issues have been published, with contributors including artists, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, cartoonists, poets, and architects. The series began with Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas and has included artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Harmony Korine, Yoko Ono, Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Claude Closky, Walid Raad, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha and Damian Hirst. The series is co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the mandate is to give artists carte blanche to work within the standard format of an 8-page tabloid. Half-magazine, half-poster, the issues consist of two sheets (approximately 43 x 61 cm), doubled sided, folded in half and unbound.

Four to six issues are published each year, with edition sizes varying between 100,000 to 300,000 copies, easily making them the most widely distributed artists' publications. They are made available free of charge, internationally, in bookshops, museums, galleries, schools, cafés, etc., as well as in all of the agnès b. locations (France, Europe, USA, Asia).

Despite the wide distribution and free cost, copies online now sell for between twelve and two-hundred dollars on the secondary market, depending on the artist (with Hirst, Prince and Barney being amongst the most costly). Near-complete sets sell in the thousands. I've yet to come across a complete set for sale.

Below is a spread from Gabriel Orozco's December 1998 issue (which I recall made great wrapping paper for gifts that Christmas), Harmony Korine's May 1999 issue (one of the few I still have left), and the Hirschhorn issue Ruhe refers to, from October 2001. Over the course of the next day or two I'll post other examples from the series.

Book launch date

One For Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions is at the printers and is expected back in a couple of weeks. The book launch, which will take place at YYZ (possibly accompanied by some related activities), is slated for a month from today - May 26th, from 2 to 5 pm.