Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger died on this day in 1997. 

Gaetano Pesce

Gaetano Pesce was born on this day in 1939. He was an Italian architect, urban planner, and industrial designer, whose work was characterized by an inventive use of colour and materials.

Pesce is best known for his work with resin, moulds, and casting techniques used to create vases, chairs, lamps, and the two-dimensional reliefs that he termed “industrial skins.”

Above are some of his innovative pieces produced as exhibition invitations. 

Jon Sasaki | A Space of Endless Potential

A lenticular postcard (which doesn’t scan well) invitation to Jon Sasaki’s A Space of Endless Potential, commissioned by the Bank of Montreal for their project space on the 68th floor of their Toronto office tower. 

Curated by Dawn Cain, the Project Room has featured commissioned works by Micah Lexier, Lois Andison, Michel de Broin, Shary Boyle, Graeme Patterson and Roula Partheniou (the last three now all Sackville residents). Cain has left her role and I believe the Project Room is no more. 

Visit the dedicated project site, here, for more information, and Chris Hampton’s CBC piece about the work, here. 

"Something was set in motion.

It should have slowed to a standstill long before now but it didn't, it is still going. Slowly. It appears not to have succumbed to the many forces that threaten to sap its energy, which is strange; in the universe we live in, energy is finite. Once expended, it leaves that thing that held it (a ball, a person, the universe itself) listless and static. Yet this little ball is still bouncing, almost like it exists in a universe outside of ours, untethered from its rules.

This installation, made in collaboration with engineer Gordon Hicks, conjures both a little orange ball that can bounce indefinitely and the charged room that allows it to do so. A place where objects are immune from the forces—of drag, air resistance, friction, kinetic energy loss—that normally bring bouncing balls to a standstill. A place where we can imagine our own energy to be similarly boundless.

The mechanics of the illusion are apparent from the outset: a motorized gantry, similar to the movable bed of a CNC machine or 3D printer, has been scaled to the size of the project room and suspended from the ceiling. It has been programmed to control the ball along three axes of movement following paths of travel that an actual thrown ball would take. The movements are unpredictable, generated in real time, and conceivably might never repeat throughout the exhibition. Incorporating a slow-motion version of real world physics the ball traces an ever unfolding and ultimately unpredictable path.

Ever present, the gantry is hard to ignore. It tells us how the trick is done, while the movements of the ball invite us to disregard those facts and be party to our own deception. To imagine an entity with boundless drive. Slowed to a dreamy pace, the ball ricochets through the BMO project room, transforming it into a lunar, weightless space. Time slows as we contemplate a little spherical object that will never run out of steam, possessing the unflagging energy and dynamism that we might wish for ourselves.”

- Jon Sasaki

Valie Export exhibition invitations and posters

Valie Export celebrates her 84th birthday today. 

An invitation card for an exhibition that opened 21 years ago today.  

Endre Tót | Ten Questions

Endre Tót

Ten Questions

Budapest, Hungary: Galeria Adres Lodz, 1973

10 x 18 cm. 

Edition size unknown

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. 

Ono has also frequently made use of the key as an object to open the sky, or open the universe (see next post). 

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.

Micah Lexier at Jack Shainman Gallery invite

Micah Lexier
Micah Lexier at Jack Shainman Gallery invite
New York City, USA: Jack Shaman Gallery, 1996
9 x 13 cm., thick card with 2.5 coin
Edition size unknown

"Exhibition invitation in the form of a custom-minted coin inserted in a die-cut thick card, offset-printed in red with handwritten text by Michael Klein foilstamped in silver."

- Micah Lexier, I'm Thinking Of A Number. NSCAD Press, 2010. No. 051. 

Snow Weiner Nannucci

Michael Snow, Lawrence Weiner, Maurizio Nannucci

Snow Weiner Nannucci

Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 1987

16 x 12.5 cm., sticker

Edition size unknown

A corner-clipped sticker designed by Lawrence Weiner for a collaborative exhibition with Michael Snow and Maurizio Nannucci at the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto in 1987.