A Body of Work: Self Portraits by John Coplans

John Coplans

A Body of Work: Self Portraits by John Coplans

New York City, USA: Printed Matter, 1987

[50] pp, 23 x 23 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

John Coplans was a British artist, writer, curator, museum director and former Editor-in-Chief of Artforum magazine. As an artist, he is best known for this series of frank photographs of his own aging naked body (he was in his mid-sixties when they were taken).  

 “I don’t know how it happens, but when I pose for one of these photographs, I become immersed in the past...I am somewhere else, another person, or a woman in another life. At times, I’m in my youth,” he wrote in the 2002 book A Body, published a year before his death.

In writings more contemporaneous to the publication of this artist book, he wrote "I photograph my body, I generalise it by beheading myself to make my body more like any other man's. Nakedness removes the body from the specificity of time. Unclothed, 1t belongs to the past, present, and future. It is classless, without country, unencumbered by language and free to wander across cultures at will."

A Body of Work contains no text, other than the captions for the twenty-four Polaroid positive/negative 4x5 images that appear. Bound in printed stiff white French fold paper covers, the book is sometimes listed as published by Printed Matter, and other times as self-published but distributed by Printed Matter. Like the artist's prints, the book was printed by the Meriden-Stinehour Press, Meriden, Connecticut.

An exhibition of the same name opened at The Museum of Modern Art, on April 23, 1988 [see below]. The works were selected by Susan Kismaric, curator 1n the Department of Photography, from an exhibition organized by Sandra S. Phillips, curator of photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

"In 1984 John Coplans (b. 1920) began the compelling series of nude self-portraits presented in this exhibition. Coplans posed himself naked against a blank white wall while observing the positions of his body in a video monitor. When he found the composition he wanted, a studio assistant made the exposure on Polaroid negative film. The process continued in the darkroom, where Coplans created the picture by cropping the negative and making a large-scale print. The resulting photographs are an intimate yet impersonal way to deal with the Issue of aging and the objective fact of his own body.”

- MoMA press release

Christopher Wool | Untitled Plate

Christopher Wool

Untitled Plate

New York City, USA: Artware Editions, 2021

10.75” diametre

Edition of 250

The Coalition for the Homeless is the nation’s oldest advocacy and direct service organization helping individuals and families experiencing homelessness. They partnered with Artware in 2020, at the peak of the Covid19 pandemic, to produce the Artist Plate Project.

The funds raised by the sale of plates provided food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and housing instability. The purchase of just one plate fed more than 100 homeless and hungry individuals. 

Over a hundred artists participated in the series, including Ed Ruscha, Elizabeth Peyton, Fred Tomaselli, Glenn Ligon, Jenny Holzer, Jonas Wood, Julian Opie, Laura Owens, Lawrence Weiner, Maurizio Cattelan, Rob Pruitt, Kay Rosen, Sarah Sze, Tauba Auerbach, Ugo Rondinone, Vik Muniz, Wade Guyton, Yoshitomo Nara and many, many others. The estates of Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and others also collaborated with the organization. 

Sophie Calle | La Visite Guidee

Sophie Calle

La Visite Guidee

Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1996

[48]pp., 17.7 x 25.2 cm., hardcover 

Edition of 1500

A 1996 exhibition catalogue/artists' book hybrid, consisting of images of the artist's personal possessions, which were placed in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam display cases, alongside the museum's own holdings. Visitors were given a guided tour on a walkman. Calle, accompanied by music by Laurie Anderson, offered autobiographical recollections of the objects. For example: 

"...When I went to her house to find a memento of her, I chose the TV guide that was still on a table by the television: her last issue of Tele Star. For my grandmother and her home, life had stopped the week of the 16th to the 22nd August, 1986." 

The cover image features my favourite work by Calle [below], in which she responded to a display case of historic chamber pots by placing a plastic red bucket among them. The intervention was accompanied by the following story: 

"In my fantasies, I am a man. Greg was quick to notice this. Perhaps that’s why he invited me one day to piss for him. It became a ritual: I would come up behind him, blindly undo his pants, take out his penis, and do my best to aim well. Then, after the customary shake, I would nonchalantly put it back and close his fly. Shortly after our separation, I asked Greg for a photo-souvenir of this ritual. He accepted. So in a Brooklyn studio, I had him pee into a plastic bucket in front of a camera. This photograph was an excuse to put my hand on his sex one last time. That evening, I agreed to the divorce."

In addition to the impact of the anecdote, the work causes the viewer to look differently upon the other historical objects displayed. A museum goer might be well aware of the intimate nature of their purpose, but Calle's candor illuminates and embellishes our relationship with these relics, encouraging a visceral, not academic, response to artifacts that people once pissed and shat into.

"In the Spring of 1994 a walkman offered visitors a guided tour of the museum a part of Sophie Calle's exhibition 'Absent', held from March 27 tot [sic] may 29, 1994. To the accompaniment of music by Laurie Anderson, the listener was lead past Calle's personal possessions, supplemented by autobiographical notes and scattered throughout the museum. We decided to preserve the temporary character of the arrangement by publishing a book of the objects and the accompanying texts. The companion CD re-enacts the tour for everyone.”

- La Visite Guidee, preface

Pierre Bismuth | Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them

Pierre Bismuth

Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them

Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2017

306 pp., 21.5 x 27 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled Towards a Catalogue Raisonné, this publication presents a novel and intriguing approach to a career overview. It is comprised of two volumes: a booklet accompanying Bismuth's 2015 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, and a would-be-catalogue raisonné.

Bismuth first came to my attention when the Art Gallery of York University presented his excellent Jungle Book Project in October of 2003. A year later, he won an Academy Award for contributing to the story for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

A few years later, I invited him to contribute a soundwork to the second of the two Mercersound CDs I compiled for Mercer Union. He told me to find a video of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger and extract the audio. It doesn’t make the cut here, but I could very easily see him vaguely recalling the project, but not why. 

Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them - nine years old this month - is out-of-print, but can still be found for its original price.

"Just like the idiosyncratic mix of conceptualism and appropriation refined by Bismuth throughout his career, Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don't Remember Why I Did Them suggests how easily authorship and intentionality can be undermined, even erased—and Bismuth is not exempt from his own treatment.

For his exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, titled “Der Kurator, der Anwalt und der Psychoanalytiker,” Bismuth invited a different set of authorities to interpret and give order to his works: curator Luca Lo Pinto, lawyer Laurent Caretto, and psychoanalyst Angel Enciso y Bergé. Each has contributed a text to the booklet that focuses on a selection of works and themes according to his own interests and training. Dessislava Dimova's essay provides a general overview of Bismuth's artistic project, discussing the importance of plasticity, iconography, and simulacra in his visual economy. This underlying instability and ambivalence is also reflected in the catalogue raisonné itself: following the example of Honoré de Balzac, who revised his writings on printer's proofs, this publication is released in the process of its own making. It is a work in progress—an incomplete history of the artist's practice that should be supplemented by its readers.”

- publisher’s statement

Adelaide Cioni: On Patterns

Adelaide Cioni

Adelaide Cioni: On Patterns

Milano, Italy: Mousse Publishing, 2023

144 pp., 16.5 x 23 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

“Patterns are an awkward attempt to point towards infinity and nature,” says Italian artist Adelaide Cioni, “an act of foolish bravery in front of something huge.” 

This catalogue documents her first UK exhibition [see below], which served as the culmination of the artist’s ongoing exploration of abstract, decorative patterns, investigating visual language across multiple media. It features texts by Daria Khan, Jennifer Higgie, Jareh Das, Cecilia Canziani, Agnieszka Gratza, Ilaria Puri Purini, in English.

Adelaide Cioni: On Patterns is available from the publisher, here, for € 25 or $ 29.95.

"What are patterns? How do they get rooted in our imagery? What do they tell us about ourselves and our relationship with nature, space, and infinity? How are they connected to music? Why do we find the same ones appearing in so many distant parts of the world? These are some of the questions that the new book Adelaide Cioni: On Patterns wants to explore. Cioni has investigated these themes in her practice through drawings, fabrics, performances, spatial installations, and collaborations with dancers and musicians. Produced on the occasion of Cioni’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom—Ab Ovo / On Patterns—at Mimosa House, London, the book aims to present the artist’s research. It follows five main threads in her work: nature, language, craft, abstraction, and movement.”

- publisher’s statement

Valie Export

Performance Artist Valie Export died yesterday, at the age of 85. 

Barbara Bloom | Lolita Rug

Barbara Bloom

Lolita Rug

New York City, USA: Self-published, 1999.

241.3 x 112.3 cm.

Edition of 10 [+2 AP] numbered copies

A hand-tufted wool rug that depicts a desecrated copy of Volume 2 of the Olympia Press edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita [see below]. 

Bloom had previously made the novel the subject of her work Reading Lolita In The Dark [see earlier post, here]. 

An example of the work sold for $45,000 during the VIP opening of Art Basel’s Paris week last year. It was purchased by Greek shipping magnate Dr. John Koustas, who gifted the piece to his wife, Dimitra, for her name day.