High Performance - The Record (Artists Doing Songs)

[Various Artists]

High Performance - The Record (Artists Doing Songs)

Los Angeles, USA: High Performance Records, 1983

31.4 × 31.4 cm.

Edition size unknown

High Performance was a quarterly arts magazine founded in 1978 with an editorial mission to provide support and a critical context for "new, innovative and unrecognized work in the arts." It began primarily as a performance art magazine and eventually expanded into coverage of video, sound and public art. 

Linda Frye Burnham founded the periodical and was the magazine's editor from 1978 to 1985, and then co-editor wit Steven Durland until 1997, when it ceased publishing. Here she serves as a contributing artist (singing "Downtown Blues"), co-producer, co-designer and author of the liner notes. 

The double LP was released as issue #23 (Volume 6, No. 3) of the magazine, in the fall of 1983. Other contributors include Terry Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, Jacki Apple, Jill Kroesen, Bill Harding, Paul McCarthy, Martha Wilson and many others. 

As part of the Steven Leiber collection, the work is held in the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and is included in Ursula Block's seminal overview of artists' records, Broken Music. 

Artists’ Invitations 1965-1985

[Bruno Tonini, ed.]

Artists’ Invitations 1965-1985

Ravenna, Italy: Danilo Montanari Editore, 2019

510 pp., 16.5 x 24 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Many artists would presumably have no interest in creating a postcard to advertise their exhibition, happy to allow the gallery staff to design, print and distribute, preferring producing the work over its promotion. Others (myself included) relish the opportunity to use the format of the invitation as venue for a new work, or different context. Or just as an opportunity to play around with materials. 

Putting an image of the most impressive piece in the show is likely a good method to ensure that it sells, but I would rather use the space of the card to expand upon the show, even if only slightly. 

The category of 'artists' ephemera' has become a sub-genre of artists' publications in the last thirty or so years. My own collection is negligible, though I've curated a couple of exhibitions of ephemera (and their distant cousin, the performance relic) for YYZ in Toronto and MST in Calgary. I also contributed an essay on the subject of ephemera to the Open Studio publication Printopolis.

I always attribute the increased interest in ephemera both to pioneering art dealers, like Harry Ruhe and Steven Leiber (whose book Extra Art: A Survey of Artists' Ephemera 1960-1999 paved the way for titles like this, and the MoMA catalogue Please Come to My Show) and to a collector's desire to own a work that was possibly designed to thwart such ownership. I'm thinking of certain works in the genres of Conceptual Art, Land Art, Performance Art, etc. etc. If you can't buy Robert Barry's Closed Gallery, the next best thing is to acquire the announcement card, I guess. 

For me, collecting this material is of interest because you can amass a decent collection for free. Even if I'm not particularly interested in a particular example, I tend to save invitations when I have a clear sense that they were designed by the artist. 

When I was at Art Metropole we would always take a binder of ephemera to the Basel Art Fair, primarily for collector Christoph Schifferli to peruse and shop from. These items ranged from recent mailings to duplicate materials from Art Metropole's archive. The works in Artists’ Invitations 1965-1985 come from his impressive collection, and the collection of editor Bruno Tonini and his wife Alessandra. 

Tonini's title aims to illustrate this lesser known aspect of the ’60s, ‘70s, and ’80s art world, with a particular focus on Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Land Art, Pop Art, Fluxus, and Actionism, including Spanish and South American art.

Steven Leiber

Art dealer and collector Steven Leiber died five years ago today, at the age of 54, at his home in San Francisco. Above are some examples of the sales catalogues that he produced of artists' books, multiples and ephemera.

Printopolis book launch

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Les Levine | Watergate Fashions

Les Levine
Watergate Fashions
New York City, USA: Steffanoty Gallery, 1974
7 pp., 8.5 x 11", staple-bound
Edition size unknown

A list documenting the outfits of each person involved in the Watergate Hearings. Available for $60.00 US, at Steven Leiber's Basement, here.

The Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center

"The death two years ago of the obsessive San Francisco collector and dealer Steven Leiber left a gaping hole in the scholarship of late-20th-century art books and ephemera. But his legacy will live on at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which has acquired Mr. Leiber’s vast collection of Conceptual art and art materials, as well as his library of reference and artists’ books related to Conceptualism and the Fluxus movement.

In his obituary in 2012, Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote that while working as a private dealer selling prints, drawings and multiples, Mr. Leiber “bought 21 boxes of ephemera relating to the performance-oriented Fluxus art movement of the early 1960s, the Beat and Concrete poetry movements and the 1960s counterculture,” and “after a year of sorting and organizing the material, he had a new field of expertise: the ephemeral.”

The growing collection, which Mr. Leiber oversaw from an office in the basement of his grandmother’s house, became an essential stop for scholars, artists and curators. The archive included work by influential artists like Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Hanne Darboven, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Lee Lozano and Bruce Nauman.

The Berkeley museum – whose new home in downtown Berkeley, designed by the firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, is scheduled to open in early 2016 – will name the area of the new building that will house the collection the Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center. With the acquisition, which was a partial purchase and partial gift from the Steven Leiber Trust, the museum and film archive will become one of the world’s most important centers for the study of Conceptual art."

- Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, December 18th, 2014

Holiday Recommendation Guest Post #13: Sarah Robayo Sheridan

I thought of the edition that I would really want for Xmas, but that is outside of my budget:

[Various artists]
Artists & Editions
San Francisco, USA: Rite Editions, 2013
14 × 14 × 4.5"
Screen printed cardboard box containing five prints, four artist generated archival publications, two three-dimensional paper pieces, two posters, a painting, a drawing, a coupon for redeeming a record, an artist’s book, a metal stencil, a weaving, a sewn canvas work and an edition catalog.
Edition of 35

Available here, for $12,500.00


It's a great tribute to Steven, following on his various dealer catalogues that always mimicked well known (and lesser known) editions.

- Sarah Robayo Sheridan


Sarah Robayo Sheridan is a curator, writer and occasional teacher. She has previously been Director of Exhibitions and Publications at Mercer Union. In 2008, she worked closely with Steven Leiber and Rite Editions to produce the edition "The White Album" by Mungo Thomson. In 2014, she will become Curator of Exhibitions at The Power Plant.

The Catalogues of Steven Leiber: A Memorial Exhibition

Philip E Aarons/Tom Patchett
The Catalogues of Steven Leiber: A Memorial Exhibition
New York City, USA: The NY Art Book Fair, 2012
[16] pp., 22.5 x 15.4 cm., staple-bound
Edition of 1000

Steven Leiber, notable San Francisco art dealer, collector and leading expert on the topic of artists' ephemera, was well known in collector circles for the elaborate sales lists that he produced. Since 1992, according to Art in America, he produced over 40 such catalogues, offering publications by artists (artists' books, records, multiples, ephemera, etc.). These were scholarly listings, meticulously researched and (as an essay by Tom Patchett indicates) without a single typo. They were also lavishly designed, typically borrowing the format of an artists' publication. A list from 1996 mimics the format of Art Forum magazine, for example. Another came packaged in an LP sleeve.

These catalogues have themselves become collectable, and have been acquired (or collected over the years) by a number of museums and universities. Leiber's death in January, at age 54, from cancer, has led to a few tribute exhibitions of these labours of love. The National Gallery of Canada displayed a selection earlier in the year, and last month the NY Art Book Fair presented a memorial exhibition, accompanied by this thin catalogue, which features listings and illustrations (some below) as well as personal accounts of Leiber by collector Phil Aarons and Tom Patchett.

7 Objects

7 Objects
New York City, USA: Tanglewood Press, 1969.
13.5 x 24 x 9.5"
Large wooden box containing multiples by seven artists.
Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies.

Contents include:

David Bradshaw
Tears
Painting on canvas
20 x 15"

Eva Hesse
Enclosed
Pliable Objects made from Gauze-like Tape, dipped in liquid rubber, wrapped around a blown balloon and powered.
dimensions vary

Stephen Kaltenbach
Fire
bronze sidewalk plaque, nails, postcard
3.75 x 7.75"

Bruce Nauman
Untitled record
12 x 12"
Soundtrack to violin film.

Keith Sonnier
Plaster cast in Satin
14 x 22"

Alan Saret
Untitled
31.4 x 58.4 cm
Reprocessed nylon net multiple in colors, in black box

Richard Serra
Rolled, Encased & Sawed
3 pounds of lead encased in lead pipe
12" long





The boxed collection sold at Christie's auction in 2000 for $4935. Five years later the box sold for $9600, the lower end of the estimate. Only two years after that, the Serra piece alone fetched $12,738. In 2009 the Nauman record, at a Phillips de Pury & Company auction, had an estimate of between three and four hundred dollars. It sold for $1625.


A fifty-one minute audio presentation of the work by Steven Leiber can be heard here.