John Baldessari | I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art scarf

John Baldessari

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art scarf

Los Angeles, USA: Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions, Ltd., 1998

86 x 89 cm.

Edition size unknown

Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions Ltd. was founded in California by Jean Robert Milant in 1970 as a gallery, publisher, and workshop. Cirrus worked with artists such as Lita Albuquerque, Matthew Brannon, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Eve Sonneman, and Barbara T. Smith, creating prints and presenting exhibitions of painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, and new media. 

This printed silk scarf recently sold for $1,197 US at Wright Auction house, against an estimate of between three and five hundred dollars. 

I Heart

The second (third) post of I Heart works, including projects by Ross Sinclair, Yoko Ono, David Shrigley, Jeremy Deller,  Noah Lyons, Roula Partheniou & I, and Mark Pawson, who fashioned an entire practice (and lifestyle) out of celebrating the things he loved. 

Steve Reich | Early Works

Steve Reich

Early Works

New York City, USA: Nonesuch, 1987

12” Vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

Early and influential tape-loop phase works including “Come Out”, "Piano Phase”, "Clapping Music"

and "It’s Gonna Rain.”

"I could easily talk for several hours just about this. It was particularly this piece called ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ that I heard with my friend Peter Schmidt, the painter. I’d met Peter while I was at art college and he was a very, very distinctive and unusual character. He was a German Jew who’d come over to England in the ’30s and was a very good poker player because it was impossible to know what he was thinking. He was a very inscrutable person. Most people found it very hard to be with him as you’d say something to him and he’d just look at you. But I liked him a lot and we got on very well, and it turned out we’d been thinking about a lot of similar things. One of the things we used to do was sit around at his place in Stockwell and explore new music. Generally it was he who would play things to me and one day he said, "Have you heard this?" and my life changed.

The first thing that happens when you’re listening to that is that the repetitive element of it gradually makes you start to lose focus of the pieces that keep repeating. You start hearing the little differences. It’s a little bit like the way a frog’s eye works. It doesn’t scan like ours do, it stays fixed on a scene and very quickly the rods and cones get saturated with everything that doesn’t move. So as soon as something does move, like a fly, that’s the only thing that the frog sees. I think the ears behave like that when they’re presented with something highly repetitive like this. Your ears quickly saturate or habituate with the common stuff and they start to pick up details. I remember the first time I heard ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, I started to zone in on the pigeons, because this was out in the street, it was a recording of a street preacher so you can hear cars and horns and then you start to hear these birds but only after a while, after the other stuff has cleared out of your consciousness. That’s amazing because what was making the music was my brain and that was the first time I’d realised that, as a composer, you could co-opt a listener’s brain. So suddenly, wow, that’s another 100 per cent of the universe opening up.

When you put something out into the world that is kind of incomplete and it takes your consciousness and the errors of your perceptual mechanism to actually make it into something, that totally changed my idea of what music could be. The actual amount of material used is tiny, the loop of "it’s gonna rain" is not even a second, and that’s the only element used in that section. You think, bloody hell, that’s economy, and I’ve always loved economy. At the time I first heard this we were in a period of maximum indulgence in pop music. Sixteen-track recorders had just appeared so suddenly so many people were just putting so much shit onto everything just because you could. Every spice in the cupboard. Suddenly I heard this and it was so stark and effective. The other thing about it is that within it is a mechanism that I’ve subsequently used a lot, which is the idea of having things running out of sync with each other. Again, your whole experience of music until then had been to do with synchronisation. Everything sticks together and then at this point everything changes together. What happens in this piece is that you get the same cycle but running so that on each repetition they’re in a slightly different place in relation to each other. So you have an automatic generator of variety and I use that on so much of my work. That became my go-to technique for making something interesting straight away.”

- Brian Eno

Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke turns 90 today. 

Videoscape: An Exhibition of Video Art

Marty Dunn, Peggy Gale, Gary Neill Kennedy

Videoscape: An Exhibition of Video Art

Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974

[74] pp, 26 x 22 cm., spiral-bound

Edition size unknown

Exhibition catalogue for an early presentation of Artists’ Video works at the AGO in Toronto, from November 20th, 1974 to April 1st, 1975. 

The artists include David Askevold, Dana W. Atchley, Jill Bellos, Charles Binamé, Jean-Pierre Boyer, Eric Cameron, Colin Campbell, Doug Carbert, Barbara Cochrane, Stephen Cruise, Don Druick, Marty Dunn, Ed Fitzgerald, General Idea, Gerry Gilbert, Carole Itter, Goddamatch (Max M. Anderson, Bob Wilcox, Bruce Green, Gordon Reed, Robert Montgomery), Michael Goldberg, Timothy A. Hanson, Noel Harding, Michael Hayden, Les Levine, Douglas MacLean, Richard Martin, Anne McMillan, Winston G. McNamee, Graham Metson, Robert Morris, Ian Murray, Bruce Parsons, John Pope, Al Razutis, Alex Salter, Richard Serra, Jeffrey Spalding, Lisa Steele, David Tipe, Brad Townsend, Visus Foundation, Vortex Intermedia, Doug Waterman, John Watt, William Wegman, Walter Wright, and John Young. 

The volume includes brief biographical notes on the participating artists, some of whom provide statements of their own. Marty Dunn’s text describes the conceptual, performance, synaesthetic and experiential elements of video, while Peggy Gale highlights the differences between television and video, traditional art forms and video and various centres for video production within Canada. Gary Neill Kennedy defines cybernetic, synaesthetic and synergistic aspects of video artworks. 

The Adventures of Willem De Ridder [Special Edition]

[Willem De Riddder]

The Adventures of Willem De Ridder [Special Edition]

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: CultClub, 2017

32 x 23.5 x 4.5 cm.

Edition of 50 numbered copies

Published by Harry Ruhe and Jeannette Dekeukeleire's CultClub, this white box contains the monograph of the same name, alongside editions Eric Andersen, Pieter Engels, Ken Friedman, Geoff and Jon Hendricks, Hugo Kaagman, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Wim T. Schippers, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and De Ridder’s former lover Annie Sprinkle. 

Editions:

"For Willem" by Eric Andersen

     Print on cardboard, 14.5 x 10.5 cm.

     Signed and numbered 32/50

"Willem de Ridder. A double portrait" by Ken Friedman

     B/w offset on cardboard, 21 x 30 cm.

"Untitled" by Bob Lens

     Color print on paper, 21 x 28.5 cm.

"Portrait of Willem" by Peter Pontiac

      Print on paper, 21 x 29.5 cm.

"Wie ist die Worst" by Willem de Ridder

      B/w offset on paper, 30 x 21 cm.

      Self portrait from the 60's

"Paper Constellation" by Willem de Ridder

      Mixed media on paper, 30 x 21.5 cm. Signed

   

"Untitled" by Annie Sprinkle

      Handcoloured print, 27.5 x 21.5 cm. Signed

  

"Untitled" by Ben Vautier

      Screenprint with USB, 29.5 x 21 cm.

"Replying Music for Walkman Piece" by Mieko Shiomi

       21 x 29.5 cm.

Photos:

 

"Wiesbaden, 2012", by Geoffrey Hendricks

      Color photograph, 12.5 x 18 cm.

Photograph with Ben Patterson at CultClub, 1 December 2012

      20.5 x 30.5 cm.

      while performing "Piano Activity" by Philip Corner

Media: 

DVD "The Lost Art of Willem de Ridder" by Frank Herrebout

Audio CD "Het Draadloze Individu" by Hugo Kaagman

Texts:

Texts by Jon Hendricks, Pieter Engels,

Bengt af Klintberg & Alison Knowles

Press:

Three articles,Romance Magazine by Wim T. Schippers

     June 1964, 31.5 x 25 cm. each

Pierre Bismuth

[Pierre Bismuth]

Pierre Bismuth

Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of York University, 2004

96 pp, 6 x 8”, hardcover

Edition size unknown

The catalogue to an exhibition of collages - both paper and video - at the Art Gallery of York University, from October 8th to November 23rd, 2003. 

Respect for the Dead features the opening scenes from various feature films - The Magnificent Seven, Jaws, Goodfellas, Dirty Harry, Dr No, and Breathless - truncated immediately following the first death. 

Collages for Men involves enlarged glossy images from porn magazines, with the models' bodies covered with white paper garments. 

For Unfolded Origami, Bismuth had an origamist fold and unfold posters, then displayed them flat. The posters include Andy Warhol's flowers, a map of Europe, an advertisement for the a fight between Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton, a cute kitten, and (a concession to the Toronto venue?) a Maple Leaf hockey player. The works are titled for the unfolded origami shape: dog, frog, peacock, yacht, etc. 

The fourth and final piece presented is the main draw here: The Jungle Book Project. For this work, the artist spliced together nineteen different international versions of the 1967 Walt Disney animated classic in such a way that each character speaks a different language.  Mogli speaks Spanish with a Latin American accent, Tigger speaks English, King Louie the orangutan speaks Japanese, Baloo speaks Hebrew, Bagheera the panther speaks Arabic, etc. etc. 

The book closes with two essays: “Why do Jewish mothers...?” by Aaron Schuster and "Chinese Whispers” by Alexander Alberro. These are followed by biographies and an exhibition checklist. 

“The Jungle Book Project comments on the entertainment industry's relationship to globalization. As they do with all of their products, prior to translating the film the Disney Corporation carefully researched the commercial viability of The Jungle Book in a number of languages and countries. The consumer reports seem to have indicated that whereas marketing the film in most European languages would be profitable, this would not be the case with African languages. As a result, The Jungle Book has not been translated into any African language. Evidently, Africa is not yet part of the culture industry’s global landscape. The exportation of the Disney product is relatively easy since the change in the voiceover virtually seamless. Unlike the type of out-of-synch effect that occurs when a film with actors is dubbed, to suture new voices to the animated cartoon figures does not pose problems of coher-

ency or delay. Films like The Jungle Book work equally well in all languages."

- Alexander Alberro