Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Ulises Carrión | Mirror Box













Ulises Carrión
Mirror Box
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Self-published, 1979
[18] pp., 18.5 x 18.5 cm., staple-bound
Edition of 100


An Artist Book handmade and self-published by Ulises Carrión featuring images of boxers rubber-stamped with pink and blue ink. The ink bleeds through the felt, leaving a ghostly impression on the opposing pages.

Ulises Carrión was reportedly a life-long boxing aficionado, and had just edited an issue of Commonpress a year prior, titled Box, Boxing, Boxers

The title is extremely scarce and prohibitively expensive. A copy is available at Printed Matter for $3,000.00 US, here


“Mirror Box is printed on synthetic felt with rubber stamps of two boxers facing each other in sequential sparring positions. The soft touch of the page, in contrast to the strong punch of the imagery, makes for a potent allusion ot the exchange and repression of male sexuality.” 
-Tim Guest / Germano Celant, Books by Artists






Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Zoe Leonard | I Want a President





Zoe Leonard
I Want a President
Mexico City, Mexico: Gato Negro, 2017
[32] pp., 10.5 x 8 cm., paperback
Edition size unknown

A small Risograph book with the text of Zoe Leonard's now-imfamous I Want a President, one line per page.  Written in 1992 and originally intended for an LGBT magazine that folded, the text for I Want A President was instead photocopied and distributed as "something like a pre-internet meme -- something shared, copied, and re-interpreted starting way before most Americans had internet connections at home" [Vice Magazine].

The work was given a second life when feminist genderqueer collective LTTR founded by Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy and Emily Roysdon produced a postcard version in 2006, including them in their fifth annual art journal.

In October 2016, a month before election day, High Line Art installed a large version of the poem, measuring 20 feet by 30 feet, on a pillar underneath The Standard Hotel on the High Line, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan (below). Images of the text went viral at that time.

The full text is as follows:

“I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place   where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”


“Although written 24 years ago, Zoe’s piece seems even more relevant and urgent today, given the current political and social climate. It’s a text that oscillates between a heartfelt confession and a militant manifesto, between poetry and politics. It’s very moving and so deeply personal. I think it will really affect many people on the deepest emotional level.”
- Cecilia Alemani, High Line Art curator
















Laurie Anderson on Trump






""In the show [Ark], Trump washes up, too. Like Reagan, she says, “he’s got this storytelling thing that’s like a comic book – the bad guys and the good guys”. But unlike Reagan, Trump doesn’t try to hide his evil beneath a slick veneer of optimism. “It’s verging on violence, so a lot of my motivation is fear. And I hate to admit that. Why does it always turn into hate speech? Why not love speech? What’s that tendency?” In person, Anderson is as quizzical as her records might suggest. Poised but you wouldn’t say polished. Her hands move a lot. “Are we so horrible and dark in our hearts that Trump is showing us who we really are? What grabs our attention is not sunny stories, it’s the dark stuff. The weird stuff. Sex and violence. All those things that say…” And then, on the couch, she lowers her voice into a carnival barker, a smug preacher, a man with a microphone: “Come over here. Let me show you something.” Her voice remodulates. She’s made her own body into a machine for doing this. “That feels very… American.”

[...]

"“When I see the faces and people at Trump rallies, I see this expression of glee on their faces,” Anderson says. “I recognise it because he’s saying, ‘Guess what? You’re free. Things are so messed up, but you are free.’ It’s completely rock ’n’ roll. I recognise that from being a young revolutionary; like, right on, this is broken and we’re going to break it even further.” Anderson cut her teeth in the civil and sexual rights movements of the 1960s; in 1989, she released Beautiful Red Dress, the catchiest song about menstruation and the gender wage gap to ever hit American airwaves. In 2021, she signed an open letter calling for the end of apartheid in Israel and lost a visiting professorship at a university in Essen, Germany, because of it. So she’s seen nihilism before. 

“My life was built around fear, in many ways,” she says. “I was born in 1947 in Chicago, the same city and month that the Doomsday Clock was set in motion.” Its hands are set by the scientists who originally developed the atomic bomb. At the moment, it’s 90 seconds to midnight. In some ways, we’re all out of time. 

Trump, then, is a storyteller on themes of horror and redemption through violence. “What’s the story that you live by?” Anderson asks. “Mine is that I’m an artist.” She pauses. “I wanted to make art to try to figure out what makes us so cold.” Just as her work refutes the bounds of time, it also refuses the bounty of that glee which Trump and his ilk feed off so ravenously. Anderson’s work counters those tired old tales with new stories – 52 of them fit into her ARK.

“Trump embodies the worst thing about branding and turning ourselves into saleable items. You know, what have you got for sale? What are you worth? That’s soul killing. It’s a cold question”"

Read the entire interview here: 





Monday, November 4, 2024

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

















Sunday, November 3, 2024

Paul McCarthy | Low Life Slow Life








Paul McCarthy
Low Life Slow Life
San Francisco, USA: CCA Wattis Institute, 2010
640 pp., softcover in a Tide box
Edition size unknown


Packaged in a retro detergent box (circa 1973) this hefty volume documents a two-part exhibition at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute that began in February of 2008. Curator Jens Hoffmann invited the artist to curate an exhibition of his own work, accompanied by works by other artists that he considered significant to his early-period career.

The catalogue showcases a vast range of works that have influenced McCarthy’s practice, with reproductions of artists' ephemera, personal letters, musical scores, reprinted essays and reviews from periodicals such as Artforum, Avalanche, High Performance, Vision and Parkett, and excerpts from artists' monographs spanning from the 1960s to the near-present.

The artists include Joseph Beuys, Gunter Brus, Bruce Conner, Howard Fried, Dan Graham,  Allan Kaprow (Assemblage, Environments & Happenings), Rachel Khedoori, Yves Klein (Dimanche), Tetsumi Kudo, Yayoi Kusama, Maria Lassnig, Robert Mallary, Gustav Metzger (Auto-destructive art manifesto), Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono (Grapefruit), Lil Picard, Jason Rhoades, Dieter Roth, Barbara Smith, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol and many others.

The catalogue also includes an interview with the artist and an essay on his work by Watts Institute curator Jens Hoffmann.

A still-sealed copy is available here, for $112 US. 





Saturday, November 2, 2024

Criterion Collection Sale

 

For those who experience cinema with physical media, the Criterion collection DVDs and Blu-ray discs are on sale for 50% off at Barnes and Nobles (in store and online). The sale lasts a month, ending on December 2nd. 


Friday, November 1, 2024

Jason Rhoades | 92 Caprice Book Stop












Jason Rhoades
92 Caprice Book Stop
New York City, USA: Printed Matter, 1997
38.1 x 33 x 33 cm.
Edition of 13 [+ 3 AP] signed and numbered copies


Various coloured five gallon buckets with seemingly different contents, including photographs, hardcover books, a vhs tape, a wheel chock, a metal car fragment, a small television, and a cotton rag
A printed text has been hastily taped to the front of the bucket and the lid is often inscribed.