Micah Lexier | I am Born

Micah Lexier

I am Born

Brescia, Italy: Tonini Editore, 2026

64 pp., 11.5 x 16.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 100

Last month Micah Lexier released his second book with the Italian imprint Tonini Editore. Both are small, bare-bone, minimal works, yet also strangely cinematic. 

The first is Autobiography, from 2022. It first appears to be entirely blank, part of a long lineage of blank conceptual artist books. The title suggests it might owe a debt to Piero Manzoni's Life and Works from 1963, which is also an entirely blank book. Closer inspection reveals that the pages of Autobiography are perforated. 

No stranger to the fetishization of printing techniques, Lexier could simply be celebrating the perforation for perforations' sake, or the circle and the hole, which have increasingly featured in his work of late. 

But given the dominant recurring theme of life-lived vs life still-to-come in Lexier’s practice, I’m inclined to see the pages akin to a wall calendar, which can be torn off and discarded. Specifically, the now-lampshaded trope from cinema, where calendar pages fall like autumn leaves to suggest the passing of time, in films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Man They Could Not Hang, Phantom of the Paradise, and countless others. 

I am Born shares a size, page count and sensibility with Autobiography. But rather than blank, the book is entirely comprised of entirely of numbers - beginning on the front cover, continuing on the endpapers and throughout, and ending on the verso. The only colophon information is contained on the outer spine. 

The first number is 1, and the final is 11,520.

The book is clearly an homage to previous artists’ publications that utilized grids of numbers, perhaps most famously Stanley Brouwn’s 1 step-100000 steps from 1972 [see below], as well as the non-art book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates [see previous post]. 

On Kawara’s One Million Years, from 1999 [see post, here] and Claude Closky’s satirical Three Thousand Four Hundred and Fifteen Friday the 13ths and The 365 Days of 1991 Classified By Size [see next post] are clearer precedents, as they count dates.  

The numbers in Lexier’s book are years, and all are printed the same, in grey. The lone exception is 1960, the year of Lexier’s birth, which is printed in black.

The impulse to identify your existence on a larger timeline might be viewed either as a self-aggrandizing or humbling gesture: seeing oneself as part of something much larger. It brings to mind the Sequoia Forest sequence in Vertigo where James Stewart and Kim Novak stand in front of a redwood cross-section showing its growth history by date and she points out when she was born [see below].  

With almost two thousand years before the protagonist enters the book, I’m also reminded of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Published from 1759 to 1767, in nine volumes, the novel purports to be a memoir, but the narrator digresses to such an extent that the books begin with the story of his conception and Shandy is not even born until the third volume. 

I am Born is available from the publisher, for €25.00, here. 

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

RAND Corporation

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

New York City, USA: The Free Press, 1955

400 pp., 27.4 x 19.8 x 7.6 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

About twenty years ago, I curated an exhibition called Infinity Etc., at Mercer Union. The show featured works by Claude Closky, Martin Creed, Germaine Koh, Kelly Mark, Jonathan Monk, Daniel Olson, and Lee Ranaldo. 

I included this book by the RAND Corporation think-tank as a kind of curatorial readymade. Outside of the exhibition proper, it sat on a shelf alongside the guest book, for viewers to casually flip through before or after visiting the show. 

Unbeknownst me to me (until a few weeks ago), it had already been signed as a readymade artwork by James Lee Byars. 

The book is a collection of random figures and is considered an important 20th century work in the field of statistics and random numbers. Today, print-on-demand reprints sell for upwards of a hundred dollars (despite online number generators being commonplace). 

The project began as early as 1947 with an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a computer, the results of which were then carefully filtered and tested before being used to generate the table. In addition to being available in book form, one could also order the numbers on a series of punch cards.

Reportedly, when A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates was first indexed by New York Public Library it was erroneously listed under the heading of "Psychology."

"Early in the course of research at The RAND Corporation a demand arose for random numbers; these were needed to solve problems of various kinds by experimental probability procedures, which have come to be called Monte Carlo methods. Many of the applications required a large supply of random digits or normal deviates of high quality, and the tables presented here were produced to meet those requirements. 

[...]

The random digits in this book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. Briefly, a random frequency pulse source, providing on the average about 100,000 pulses per second, was gated about once per second by a constant frequency pulse. Pulse standardization circuits passed the pulses through a 5-place binary counter. In principle the machine was a 32-place roulette wheel which made, on the average, about 3000 revolutions per trial and produced one number per second. A binary-to-decimal converter was used which converted 20 of the 32 numbers (the other twelve were discarded) and retained only the final digit of two-digit numbers; this final digit was fed into an IBM punch to produce finally a punched card table of random digits."

- Introduction to the 2001 Reissue

Forthcoming

 

Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano | “Memory” Game

Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano

“Memory” Game

Paris, France: GunGallery and Air de Paris, 2012

[124] pp., 11.3 × 16.5 × 21.2 cm., loose leaves

Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies

This deliberately confounding memory game was released on the occasion of the exhibition Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano: Memory at GunGallery, Stockholm, in 2012. The limited edition comprises sixty-two printed cards that each reproduce one of thirty-one photographs by Attilio Maranzano of an Italian amusement park on one side, and another of Maranzano’s photos on the reverse—but manipulated by Carsten Höller to resemble a drunkenly viewed version of the original. To play the game, participants place all of the images by one of the artists face down on a table. They then take turns flipping over two cards at a time in order to find a match. The object is to collect the most matches, but since the “backs” of the cards are not identical, as in the traditional children’s memory game, it’s disorienting and doubly hard to remember where each image has been placed.

The work is available from the Gagosian shop, here, for $385 US. 

Richard Tuttle: Sprengel Museum Hannover

 

[Richard Tuttle]

Richard Tuttle: Sprengel Museum Hannover

Hannover, Germany: Sprengel Museum, 1990

22.5 x 22.5 cm., boxed work

Edition size unknown

A cardboard box containing several different bookworks, designed as an exhibition catalogue for a show held from June 6th to August 19th, 1990. 

The contents include Richard Tuttle: Einleitung, an exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf, January 12th - February 28th, 1990; Richard Tuttle, an exhibition catalogue accompanying a show held at Sprengel Museum Hannover, June 6th - August 19th, 1990; the artist’s book Richard Tuttle: Notes for Sleep Time; the accordion fold book System of Color; and a screenprint mounted on board.

Joyce Wieland | Reason over Passion

Joyce Wieland

Reason over Passion

1968

Quilted cotton, 256.5 x 302.3 x 8 cm

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Joyce Wieland reported had high hopes for Pierre Trudeau when he became Canada’s 15th Prime Minister, in 1968. She and her then-husband Michael Snow hosted a reception for the Liberal leader at their Chambers Street loft in New York City, and were impressed by his knowledge of avant-garde cinema, dance, jazz drummers, etc. 

Inspired by Trudeau's notion of “Reason over passion” ("that is the theme of all my writing,” he declared) she promptly stitched the phrase into this celebrated quilt work, which ended up in Trudeau’s home (stories differ as to whether the work was gifted to, or purchased by him.). A decade later it was almost destroyed in a domestic spat [see below].

The following year Wieland released a film of the same name, which was screened in the Directors' Fortnight program at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. The phrase (at least in online searches) is more strongly connected to her now, than to him. 

Later disillusioned by the Liberal leader, Weiland has claimed that both the party and the artwork were jokes at Trudeau’s expense. Certainly conflating reason over passion with a bedspread would seem to support her later assertion. 

“Not long after getting home, on a terrible evening full of misery and rage, I attacked a priceless quilt by Joyce Wieland, a piece of art that hung on the sitting-room wall and one that Pierre particularly loved. Stitched on the front, neatly and smugly (it seemed to me then), were his favourite words: “Reason over Passion.” I seized a pair of scissors and cut the words off. Taking a box of pins, I then switched the words round, so they read “Passion over Reason.” I was in one of my manic phases, and I had concluded that the only way to make Pierre Trudeau listen was to desecrate art.”

- Margaret Trudeau, Changing My Mind, 2010

General Idea | Passion over Reason

 

General Idea

Passion over Reason

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1991

24 x 20.5 cm.

Open Edition

One of ten chenille and embroidery on crest-shaped felt patches produced by General Idea between 1988 and 1991. Intended as an unlimited edition, fewer than a hundred copies were made. In 2010, a second iteration of 100 were released as a fundraiser for the  Kunsthalle Basel.

The crest combines the ziggurat form with a phallic take on the fleur de lis.

Felix Partz produced a first series of Ziggurat paintings in the late sixties before the inception of the group, which were later absorbed into the General Idea oeuvre. The motif appears again in the Miss General Idea’s venetian blind dress and the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion.

It’s unclear if the title was a response to Joyce Weiland’s Reason over Passion, from 1968 [see next post].

“We were brought up in the post-war period, and we were interested in the idea of progress and images of progress.  We didn’t believe in progress as a concept.  We were interested in how it dominated the post-war imagination.  If you look at business magazines from the ’50s, for example Fortune Magazine, the advertising features a lot of skyscrapers, which are always stepped.  This image of the ziggurat always dominates.  It is an image of power or even male power […] the ziggurat came to represent the future, the strength of progress and technological change and the male power of construction.”

-  AA Bronson, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist