Bern Porter | Waste Maker: 1926 - 1961

Bern Porter

Waste Maker: 1926 - 1961

Somerville, USA: Abyss Publications, 1972

[unpaginated], 21.2 x 14 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Viewed by his biographer - and by Porter himself - as his most successful and important book, the manuscript for Waste Maker sat in the UCLA library for eleven years before Gerard Dombrowski at Abyss retrieved it for publication. 

Porter noted that he meant the title of the book to imply not only the careless person who makes waste, but one who “remakes waste, who finds waste that is both significant and beautiful.”

Dedicated to Kenneth Patchen and Bob Brown, Waste Maker was published the same year as his breakthrough volume, Found Poems, by the Something Else Press. Both titles repurposed images from newspaper articles, magazine advertisements, standardized tests, musical scores, instructional booklets and junk mail into “Found Poems” or “Founds”, as Porter preferred them to called. 

"Bern Porter is a 20th century Walt Whitman, a sometime printer and publisher, a long-time servant of both U.S. letters and his own very American muse. Wastemaker represents an assiduous discovery of America writ large in the smallest “found” details, as Porter collects native waste into artlessly designed pages, not only reflecting his own love and bitterness, but exposing cultural insights and perspectives that are indigenously true. As haste makes waste, so patient composition, by contrast, makes art, or even insight, in garbage. Wastemaker ranks with Michel Butor’s Mobile (1962) as print’s encompassing pastiche of modern America, but Porter’s is rougher in texture and kinkier in composition, more trivial in detail and more relentless in theme, as well as more intimate and unfinished in typically American ways."

- Richard Kostelanetz, introduction

Mark Gonzales | Weapons & Armor

Mark Gonzales

Weapons & Armor

Sittard, The Netherlands: Museum Het Domein, 2000

128 pp., 16.5 x 23.0 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

In December 2011, Mark Gonzales was named the "Most Influential Skateboarder of All Time" by Transworld Skateboarding magazine. His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally. He is the subject of numerous books including Mark Gonzales: Adventures in Street Skating (Rizzoli, 2020) and Non Stop Poetry: The Zines of Mark Gonzales (Printed Matter, Inc. 2014).

This catalogue, from an exhibition of the same name in 2000, mostly reproduces pages from his early zines on coloured paper. It also includes a section of colour photographs on glossy paper of the artist’s paintings, graffiti, and sculptures. 

Kim Gordon and Aaron Rose both contribute brief introductions. 

Robert Filliou | Eins, Un, One

Robert Filliou

Eins, Un, One

Cologne, Germany: Edition Hundertmark, c1984

3 x 3 x 3 cm.

Edition of 100 [+ 50 AP] signed copies

An over-sized wooden die in which all sides display 'one'. Filliou's initials appear on a small sticker on one of the sides.

The work was originally issued as part of the Armin Hundertmark Karton 100 [above, centre], a boxed work contained forty-four works by different artists, including Monika Bartholomé, Claus Böhmler, Günther Brüs, Henri Chopin, Philip Corner, Robert Filliou, Jochen Gerz, Ludwig Gosewitz, Al Hansen, Anatol Herzfeld, Bernard Heidsieck, Joe Jones, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Arthur Köpcke, Te Tsumi Kudo, Maria Lassnig, George Maciunas, Mario Merz, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, Paul Sharits, Takako Saito, Tomas Schmit, Endre Tot, Jiri Valoch, Ben Vautier, Stefan Wewerka, Emmett Williams and others. Most of the contributions are flat graphics, with the exception of five works, including Eric Andersen’s lighter [here]. 

Filliou would later exhibit installations involving thousands of similar dice, in a variety of colours and sizes. 

See also Dan Graham’s 1991 work One, below. 

"This work first appeared in 1984 and has been displayed in several 21st-century exhibitions, including Robert Filliou’s first solo exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2013. The constellation of 16,000 multicolored dice, each with all six sides bearing a single dot, delivers one of the more humorous works of homage to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard. With the guarantee of a single dot, it might be thought that chance has been abolished, whichever and however many dice are rolled. The multiple sizes and colors of the dice and the varied constellations into which they might fall per installation suggest otherwise.

Just a thought.

As Mallarmé’s last line — Toute Pensé émet un Coup de Dés — implies, even this thought emits a throw of the dice.”

- Robert Bolick

Hair Pieces

[Melissa Keys, editor]

Hair Pieces

Perimeter Editions, 2025

144 pp, 14.5 x 24 cm., coptic bind softcover

Edition of 1100

“I sense the power within the fingers/within an hour the power/could totally destroy me/or it could save my life"

                 - "Hairdresser on Fire" 

In my mid-teens the above lyric (a b-side to Morrissey’s first post-Smiths single, “Suedehead”1) spoke to my persistent need to reimagine myself every six months or so, by changing my style of dress and getting a new haircut. I would skip school and sit in a salon called Talking Heads, where a woman only a few years older than myself would help transform me. 

It was trivial teenage narcissism, for certain, but the transformative properties of hair is well-documented. 

An anthropologist friend of mine, Grant McCracken, wrote a book titled Big Hair: A Journey Into the Transformation of Self that sought to show how "hair is one of the imperatives of contemporary life. Hair matters in our culture because it is a way, perhaps the most important way, women transform themselves. And this is what the book is really about: hair as the matter and the method of our self-invention.”

Big Hair opens with a quote from boxing promoter Don King, who is instantly recognizable in silhouette because of his distinctive hairstyle: 

"Unless you grasp the significance of hair, you cannot know the power instilled in it." 

The works in Melissa Keys’ Hair Pieces all grapple with the corporeal, personal, and political power of hair. The book serves as an exhibition catalogue for the 2024 show of the same name, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, but holds its own as a stand-alone volume. 

The works presented encompass a wide range of practices, including drawing, painting, performance, photography, installation, and video. 

Marina Abramović and Ulay appear on the cover, from their 1977 work Relation in Time, a 17-hour long performance in which they sit back to back with their hair intertwined until fatigue sets in and they start to become untangled. Many of the works that follow owe a debt to this now-legendary piece. 

Sonia Boyce’s video Exquisite Tension from 2005 documents a day-long performance of the artist braiding together the hair of a Black woman and a white man who sit side-by-side. Loving Care, is a 1993 performance by Janine Antoni, in which the artist mopped the floor of the gallery with her hair soaked in Loving Care hair dye “Natural Black”, conflating action painting with domesticity.  

In Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt’s video Indigenous Shadow Part.2, Martinique Island (2014) a flag made of black hair flutters in the wind above the rocky shores of Diamant, where a slave trade boat capsized, killing its hundred African captives [below].

Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) [above, bottom] plays with gender fluidity as far back as 1972, cutting off her friend’s beard and glueing it to her own face. 

Hair Pieces also features works by Francis Alÿs, Georgia Banks, Polly Borland, Christina May Carey, Sadie Chandler, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Edith Dekyndt, Karla Dickens, Jim Dine, Peter Ellis, Tarryn Gill, Mona Hatoum, Lou Hubbard, Jiang Jian, Nusra Latif Qureshi, John Meade, Ana Mendieta, Hayley Millar Baker, SJ Norman, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Patricia Piccinini, Rosslynd Piggott, Wes Placek, C.J. Pyle, Chunxiao Qu, Julie Rrap, Shih Yung-Chun, Charlie Sofo, Christian Thompson, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Louise Weaver, William Wegman, Helen Wright, Ai Yamaguchi, and Zhang Chun Hong; and texts by Santilla Chingaipe, Justin Clemens, Lisa Gorton, Melissa Keys, and SJ Norman.

I might’ve been inclined to include Tom Friedman’s pubic hair soap, Bob Watts Male and Female Underpants, the Bless Hair Visor and My So-Called Life by Liz Knox, in which the artist - an undergrad student at the time - cut her hair to mirror the various hairstyles of a character from the titular show.  

1. The A-side also refers to hair - a ‘suedehead’ is a skinhead whose let their hair grown in some. The title track to The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead contains the line "But the rain that flattens my hair, these are the things that kill me". 

David Shrigley | What the Hell was I Thinking?

A few images of David Shrigley’s exhibition at the Kunsthal Rotterdam [which closed earlier this year] and some resulting merch available at the Shrigshop. 

Joyce Wieland | True Patriot Love

Joyce Wieland

True Patriot Love

Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Canada, 1971

222 pp., 25 x 17 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

"With this manifestation of True Patriot Love—created to accompany her same-titled exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada—Wieland joined other artists of the 1960s and 1970s who made one-of-a-kind books, or multiple-edition bookworks, that played with the form, appearance, and purpose of the conventional book.

 

Here Wieland uses a Canadian government publication about arctic flowers—an official-looking document with a deep-burgundy binding and embossed gold writing. On top of the original content that consists of scientific prose, simple line drawings of botanical specimens, and a few maps, Wieland overlays photographs and textual material for a collage-like result. She also affixes images to the pages of the book by stitching them together so that the threads remain visible.

 

Ultimately the entire book was re-photographed, printed, and sold in the guise of an exhibition catalogue. Some practical material related to the exhibition is tucked into a sleeve at the back of the bookwork, but otherwise it is clearly not a catalogue. Some photographs refer to artworks in the exhibition, but these are often blurry, partial views, or else the images are jumbled together.

 

Although Wieland’s exhibition True Patriot Love was colourful and humorous, the black and white imagery of her bookwork leaves a very different impression. Indeed, this object can be hailed as a significant contribution to Conceptual art, as reflected in its page-by-page interplay between image, text, and other kinds of mark making.  Fragments of writing, whether printed or handwritten, appear and trail off; these texts are in multiple languages: English, French, Inuktitut, and Gaelic. The writings include newspaper clippings, songs, and historical information, as well as parts of a film script that Wieland had written about Tom Thomson (1877–1917). (Wieland’s feature film The Far Shore, 1976, was the eventual outcome of these script fragments.) 

 

The photographs that are clipped or sewn into the book include landscapes, the pattern of snowshoe tracks, multiple reproductions of Thomson’s painting The West Wind, 1916–17, as well as images of Wieland re-enacting Laura Secord’s heroic trek during the War of 1812. Through these added elements, the original volume about arctic flowers is transformed into a more complex kind of landscape representation. Leafing through it, the reader finds no singular picture of the Canadian territory that dominates. Instead the land is regarded as a kind of palimpsest, criss-crossed by various voices, images, and texts.”

- Johanne Sloan

Jenny Holzer | Rubber Stamp Set

Jenny Holzer

Rubber Stamp Set

Minneapolis, USA : Walker Art Center, 1992

10.2 x 15.2 x 10.2 cm.

Edition size unknown

A boxed set of six rubber stamps and an ink pad. The stamps each feature a different Holzer truism:

Lack of Charisma Can Be Fatal

Any Supply is Immoral

Much Was Decided Before You Were Born

Confusing Yourself is a Way to Stay Honest

Money Creates Taste

Words Tend to Be Inadequate

I assume these were also available individually, as I have a single stamp and don’t recall breaking up a set.