Artists’ Flexidisk records

 

Claes Oldenburg | The Soap at Baton Rouge

Claes Oldenburg

The Soap at Baton Rouge

Cincinnati, USA: Carl Solway Gallery, 1991

4 x 52 x 34 cm.

Edition of 250 signed and numbered copies

Produced to accompany Claes Oldenburg: Multiples in Retrospect, this cast polyurethane bar of soap is housed with the book in a linen-covered box, which also includes a screen print. The multiple has an incised signature, title, and number and the end sheet of the book is additionally signed and numbered. 

"In a short and charming text written to accompany the publication of his multiple The Soap at Baton Rouge, Claes Oldenburg talks of the genesis of the piece in a proposal to create a large-scale public work for Cincinnati. The proposal, to float a giant bar of Ivory soap down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, has all of the savvy whimsy we have come to expect of Oldenburg, combining references to the commercial history of the city with a gently comic debunking of the product itself that ultimately places the initial object of contemplation in an entirely new context. Cincinnati is home to Procter & Gamble, a giant among soap-sellers. It is also a town notorious for its clean living; a prosecutor of pornographers and a persecutor of the arts, Cincinnati tried to send a museum director to jail for showing the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990. Procter & Gamble's best-known product is Ivory soap, which the advertisement claims is so pure "it floats." But it floats because it is full of air, while the

"pure soap" that sold this product so heavily to the American public became rather soiled when the maidenly "Ivory Girl" turned out to be Marilyn Chambers, the infamous porn star.

A proposal for a grand riverboat spectacle failed to materialize, but the realization that, had it floated, it would have reached Baton Rouge no bigger than an actual bar of soap led to the idea of the multiple edition, thus cutting the grandiose histories of both the river and Procter & Gamble down to size.” 

- Thomas Lawson

Kenneth Goldsmith and Joan La Barbara | 73 Poems

Kenneth Goldsmith and Joan La Barbara

73 Poems 

Brooklyn, USA: Permanent Press, 1993 

[102] pp., 15 x 21 cm., paperback 

Edition of 1000 signed and numbered copies

Kenneth Goldsmith’s third publication, 73 Poems, takes its title from the posthumous 1963 e.e. cummings book of the same name [see below], despite there being seventy-nine poems in the volume. 

Goldsmith had produced a suite of drawings in the early nineties and a small publisher approached him with the idea of turning them into a book. He was enamoured with the cummings title at the time due to "its use of visual language—similar to but so different from concrete poetry.”

John Cage - who died the year prior to the release of this book - had previously set two of cummings’s poems to music, one of which Joan La Barbara performed on her album Singing Through: John Cage. Goldsmith had been listening to the record while making the drawings so when the publisher suggested an aural component La Barbara seemed the natural choice. 

"We contacted Joan, and she fell in love with the project,” Goldsmith recounted later. "While she’s primarily known as an interpreter, she’s also a wonderful composer, and this was a chance for her to compose an epic work for her voice. I passed off full-scale reproductions of the drawings to her, and she set to work, emerging with a stunning interpretation of my poems. I couldn’t have been more delighted with the result. I had no input whatsoever into her music, so it wasn’t so much of a collaboration

as it was her interpretation of my works, which is the only way I feel comfortable working with someone else.”

The tracks on the accompanying CD range from ten seconds in length to 2:04, with only six surpassing the one-minute mark.

The trade edition is signed and numbered by both artists, and a deluxe version includes three 22 x 30-inch lithographs in an edition of forty-five, which retailed for $1500 at the time. The collection is dedicated to Cage.

Listen to the 45 second 64th untitled track on youtube, here. 

"New-music mavens need not blush at failing to recognize Kenneth Goldsmith's name. Goldsmith is a visual artist who employs text (and to a lesser degree letters and numbers) as primary image. From Braque to Ed Ruscha, numbers, letters, and words have become by now commonplace. As to raw materials, in the event numerals and the alphabet, John Ashbery, Public Enemy, and Hallmark's rhymed-greeting hacks share in a common source toward, qualitatively, wildly disparate ends, or so one likes to think-call it elitist chutzpah.

The insert reproduces six of the seventy-nine poem-drawings serving as La Barbara's texts. As to the overage, Goldsmith, who immersed himself in the project so thoroughly as to lose count, opted for the wisdom of "Waste not, want not. " That's one story. The other, provided by permanent Press's Ellen Salpeter: In order to keep to the plan, the use of the foreground of one poem-drawing as background of another (with several exceptions), the project requires seventy-nine drawings. I take the claim on faith. Someone, somewhere, will explain a disparity better than 1. May Goldsmith's art so flourish that exegeses become the thing. The repros of the first and last poem-drawings reveal words arranged vertically, top to bottom, against offset word-shadows. Number 79 reads "BROTHER / LOVER / MOTHER / OTHER / SMOTHER / ANOTHER / UNDERCOVER," and number 1, "CRUDELY / LEWDLY / NUDELY / RUDELY / SCREWED ME / SHREWDLY," its background the text of 79, with 79's background I's forward lines. Isn't that delightfully clear? Don't thank me, it's part of the job. As these insert examples suggest, some of the poem-drawings fairly glow with sexuality, as do some of La Barbara's interpretations. Others engage in relative abstraction, as in 44's triangulated zeros, front and back, and 25's lone letter 1.

[...]

I've little doubt that the listener will be perfectly satisfied to hear La Barbara's vocalizations without the book, as stand-alone aural events. That said, for my own public and private needs, I judge the book necessary to a discovery of riches. La Barbara is simply brilliant! A personal favorite, number 45, a comically unpromising arrangement of zeros and ones, sounds like an incantation at the far end of a Tibetan nightmare. I don't exaggerate, nor do I select a particularly outstanding track-everything here is really quite remarkable. This one goes on the Want List.”

- Mike Silverton, Fanfare, Sept / Oct 1994

Martin Creed

 

Happy Birthday to Martin Creed, who turns 58 today. 

The Nova Convention LP

[Various Artists]

The Nova Convention

New York City, USA: Giorno Poetry Systems, 1979

Gatefold 2LP set

Edition size unknown

“I first met William S. Burroughs in 1978 at the Nova Convention, which was a three-day celebration of his work in New York City. During the day there were seminars about his work with Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, and many other writers and intellectuals. At night there were concerts by musicians

and poets who'd been influenced by his work. Frank Zappa read the talking asshole section from “Naked Lunch,” Patti Smith played the clarinet, Phil Glass played the piano. There were lots of other people too. It was a real scene. Keith Richards was also supposed to appear, and even though the promoters of this event knew a week ahead of time that he wasn't going to show up, they didn’t announce it. They just tacked up a note and posted it on the inside of the door to the theater.

“Keith Richards will not be appearing tonight” it said in very light pencil. So a couple thousand kids poured through the door and a lot of them were looking for Keith. Phil would be playing a solo piano work and they'd be yelling “KEITH! KEITHII” Nothing would shut them up and since | was one of the emcees, I'd have to keep going out to introduce someone else they didn’t want to hear. “You know, just keep the ball rolling,” the promoters kept saying.

Finally Burroughs shuffled out wearing a porkpie hat and carrying a briefcase and he sat down at a big wooden desk.

“Good evening.” Gravel crunching under a ten ton truck. Plastic ripping in slow motion. That voice! And he started talking about sex and drugs and alienation, things these kids thought they'd invented themselves and they couldn't believe it. But it was that voice that really got to people. And you could never read his books again without hearing that voice saying every word.”

- Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible

Six caps and a toque

 

Baseball caps by Richard Prince, Jonathan Monk, Micah Lexier & Guy Guy Guy, Keith Haring, Kay Rosen and Jenny Holzer. Chanuka toque by Cary Leibowitz. 

Maurizio Nannucci | Sessanta Verdi Naturali

Maurizio Nannucci

Sessanta Verdi Naturali

Innsbruck, Austria/Florence, Italy: Galerie im Taxispalais / Renzo Spagnoli Editore, 1977

24 pp., 33.5 x 11 cm., softcover

Edition of 1000

Sessanta Verdi Naturali (Sixty Natural Greens, in English) is a vertically-formatted book which opens to reveal images of plants (photographed in 1973) printed to scale Each square image is filled with a single botanical sample. It can be viewed page by page, three images per page, or the entire book unfolds into one continuous grid.