David Stairs | Boundless

David Stairs

Boundless

San Francisco, USA: Self-published, 1983 & 1990

[unpaginated], spiral-bound, 8 cm diam. 

Edition size unknown

"A 1993 work by David Stairs, owned in one copy by (of all holders) the New York Public Library, is a round book of a few inches’ diameter closed by spiral binding along its whole circumference. Its punning title, Boundless, suggests (by “transposition”) the limitless speculation opened by bookwork at large when it is all binding, no text."

- Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art

Baldessari Afters

Five works that reference Baldessari’s signature work: Banksy, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Jonathan Monk, Emily Reimer, Yann Sérandour. Interestingly, all but one of them call back to the premise of students writing lines: Banksy draws a parallel with Bart’s weekly punishment in the opening credits of The Simpsons; Jonathan Monk defies the dictum; and Emily Reimer (then a student of mine) defaced the undersides of the classroom tables.  

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.