Text. Sound. Image. Small Press Festival.

[Guy Schraenen, ed] 

Text. Sound. Image. Small Press Festival. 

Antwerp, Belgium: A.S.P.C., 1976

[unpaginated], 20 x 10.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 500 copies

The Archive for Small Press & Communication (A.S.P.C.) was an international centre for documentation, preservation and exhibitions of artists' publications (books, records, catalogues, magazines, postcards, posters, invitations, etc.) founded in 1974 by Guy Schraenen and Anne Marsily in Antwerp, Belgium.

The main focus of the centre was Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Land Art, Minimalism, Pop Art, Concrete Poetry, Sound Poetry, Sound Art, and Mail Art. It includes works by Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Ulises Carrión, Henri Chopin, Hanne Darboven, Robert Filliou, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Roman Opalka, Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri, Timm Ulrichs, Ben Vautier,  Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner and many others. 

In 1999 the A.S.P.C. collection was acquired by the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen, Germany. 

This rare catalogue documents the first exhibition organized by the A.S.P.C., held in Galerie Kontakt in Antwerp, Galerie Posada in Brussels, and Zwarte Zaal in Ghent in 1976/1977. It includes an introduction by Schraenen, statements by several small press publishers, such as Henri Chopin, Paul de Vree, Richard Kostelanetz, and Ulises Carrión. 

The publication lists over eight-hundred exhibited items which were sent from 28 countries. It is accompanied by a loose inlaid ASPC card with red string, citing abbreviations used in the catalogue. 

General Idea | Infe©ted Coeur Volant

General Idea

Infe©ted Coeur Volant

Toronto, Canada: General Idea, 1994

23.5 x 23.5 x 2.5 cm

Acrylic, wax on heart-shaped medium-density fibreboard

Edition of 4 signed copies

Infe©ted Coeur Volant is the lesser-known cousin to General Idea’s signature work, the Image Virus. Both involve the appropriation of other artists works (Robert Indiana and Marcel Duchamp) in service of a project tackling the AIDS crisis. 

Duchamp’s Coeur Volant [see previous post] is a graphic work that creates the optical illusion of a pulsing heart. By replacing the original's blue and red palette with their signature colour palette, General Idea render the heart lifeless, a victim to contagion.

As far as I can glean, the edition of four refers to four separate and unique sets of six unique, hand-painted hearts. A black on black version is in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Vancouver, white on white is in the permanent collection of the Museo Ettore Fico in Turin, Italy, and a blue version (inspired by Yves Klien) has been held in a private collection in Switzerland since 2009.

This stand alone, outside of the edition, and is inscribed:

"Fern, I had this made up from one of Felix’s colour studies. We made 6 extra hearts to paint in miscellaneous colors as gifts for friends - and this one is for you. Love AA.”

I can only assume it was to Fern Bayer, who lived in the same Bloor Street apartment building complex as AA Bronson, and worked for him for many years. She is almost certainly one of the world’s leading experts on General Idea (and super-sweet, to boot). 

Like the AIDS works before it, the Infe©ted Coeur Volant was also produced in multiple iterations, including a T-shirt, a print, wallpaper and Boutique Ceurs Volants, a three-dimensional free-standing sales exhibit, selling the posthumously produced Dick All buttplug, itself also reportedly based on a work by Duchamp (Wedge of Chastity, 1954).

Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles | Color Swatch

Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles

Color Swatch

19 x 14.6 cm.

Unique

Last month this work sold at Christie’s auction house for $50,800 US, more than twice its high estimate of between $15,000 and $ 20,000. 

The Association Marcel Duchamp confirmed the authenticity, and the following ‘essay’ accompanied the sale: 

"Executed in 1968, Color Swatch belongs to the final, quietly subversive chapter of Marcel Duchamp’s career, when the artist distilled his lifelong interrogation of authorship and choice into gestures of striking economy. At first glance, the composition—two overlapping discs, one red, one blue, suspended against a black ground—appears almost disarmingly simple. Yet its origins lie in a moment of selection rather than invention: Duchamp chose the configuration from a group of color swatches, elevating it through the act of designation.

The present work relates to a small silkscreen project conceived in dialogue with the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, whose close association with Duchamp underscores the collaborative and process-oriented spirit of the piece. What emerges is less a conventional work than a meditation on perception and authorship: an image that hovers between design, experiment, and readymade."

Knowles’ account from her website contradicts at least the “close association”: 

"Through Daniel Spoerri, the Something Else Press arranged to meet Marcel Duchamp. [The] screen print was preceded by a four by five colour swatch showing two circles one red, one blue. He selected this color swatch one day while we are having tea at his tenth street apartment in New York. There were eleven color swatches, each showing blue and red circles but in different intensities. He selected one and left it out on table saying "Oh, that's it." I put the others in my brief case and we kept talking. Teeny Duchamp walked by the table, saw the color swatch and said "MARCEL, when did you do this?" He asked for a pencil, smiled and signed the color swatch. This color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp's last readymade! I kept this little swatch for about a year and then sold it to a collecter in Remsheid. Richard Hamilton, to whom I gave a copy of the final print, called this work a piece of memorabilia, not a readymade. Duchamp died the following year but I am sure he would have agreed. I like the story very much because it describes the process as important as the product according to a master."

The Something Else Press (which Knowles co-founded with her husband Dick Higgins) had arranged to use Duchamp’s Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts) graphic as the cover to Emmett Williams long-form Concrete Poem Sweethearts [below, top]. The image is a proto-Op-Art collage Duchamp made in 1936 for the cover of an issue of Cahiers d’art [see below, centre] which featured an essay by Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (ex-wife of Francis Picabia) on Duchamp’s optical machines and experiments. It is composed of a blue heart inside a red heart, inside a blue. If the viewer squints, or looks away slightly, the vibrant colours cause the work to throb, pulse or flutter.1

According to Peter Frank’s Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography, Higgins and Williams decided to capitalize on “Duchamp’s assent” by publishing a silkscreen poster, which would be produced by Knowles. Reportedly only twenty-two copies turned out satisfactorily. 

The collector in Remsheid that Knowles sold the signed swatch to was Vice-Versand publisher Wolfgang Feelisch. 

Calling this a work a ‘readymade’ by Duchamp takes his notion of an artistic exploration of authorship and repurposes it to one of finance and provenance. It brings to mind the phrase "an angry nihilism”,

which conservative writer Robert Fulford used to describe all of Duchamp’s readymades.2 

1. One of my favourite works by General Idea appropriates, infects and deactivates Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts), see below, bottom, and next post. 

2. Writing for the right-wing National Post in 2015, Fulford went on to say that "Duchamp must have imagined it would soon be forgotten, but critics and journalists put it in books that established it as a historic breakthrough”, suggesting that the result is all art has become "hopelessly debased”. However, later in life Duchamp told his biographer Calvin Tompkins: "I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work."

"Which, a lot going on here, starting with Richard Hamilton of all people being kind of a bitch about Duchamp memorabilia, especially after getting a copy of the print. But they’re both not wrong, and I’m sure Duchamp would have approved of the mess.

I don’t think I’m so into Knowles’ takeaway from the story, though I am very interested in what she took away from the meeting, namely the other ten other color swatches that she made, and Duchamp touched but didn’t sign. That Duchamp memorabilia sets my heart aflutter.

But let’s put all that aside and conjure up in our minds the world inside the sentence, “the color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade!””

- Greg Allen, greg.org

Fetish

Every year I was at Art Metropole we created a new shopping bag, typically released around this time of year, at the Basel Art Fair. They mostly featured classic artist graphics, rather than new works. The artists included Dan Graham, Yoko Ono, Maurizio Nannucci, Ross Sinclair, and Michael Snow.

The most popular (narrowly beating out Yoko Ono’s War is Over, below) was the black FETISH bag. It reproduced a graphic from a T-shirt by John Jack Baylin and John Dowd. I recall it being too difficult to silkscreen white on black bags, so we ended up applying stickers to the bags. I still have a couple, somewhere. 

The original shirt was published by Art Metropole in the mid-seventies, not long after the bookstore and archive first opened. It gradually achieved an iconic status in Toronto, Canada and beyond. 

To coincide with their presentation at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair and Festival, Art Met is  launching a new edition FETISH T-shirt. The fair opens tomorrow and continues until Sunday June 28th. 

Pre-order here: https://artmetropole.com/shop/16918

"Over the past five decades, other editions of this shirt were also created, reproduced, reinterpreted, and circulated by artists associated with Art Metropole, Image Bank, and Western Front. The design reached a moment of symbolic prominence during the seminal Hollywood Decca Dance (1974), held at the Elks Lodge in Los Angeles. Staged as a playful, artist-run parody of the Academy Awards, the event brought together over 800 artists from across North America and Europe, connected through Robert Filliou’s “Eternal Network.”⁠”

- Art Metropole, press release

Stanley Brouwn

Stanley Brouwn was born on this day in 1935. 

Laurie Anderson | Hearring

Laurie Anderson

Hearring

Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett Editions, 1997

10.2 x 4.5 x 2 cm.

Edition of 150 signed and numbered copies

Over thirty-three years, Parkett Editions produced several wearable works, including gloves by Meret Oppenheim and Roman Signer, eyeglasses by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a tie by Sophie Calle, a shirt by Luc Tuymans, a ring by Jenny Holzer, and this earring by Laurie Anderson. 

Produced for Parkett issue #49 (which featured Anderson, Jeff Wall and Douglas Gordon), the piece consists of a brass, copper, circuit board, loudspeaker, lithium battery, Plexiglas and wires. It features a playable sound message of approximately twenty seconds.

Anderson stated that the work "sings into your ear and also yells various instructions". These include phrases like “Hey You! I’m right behind you!” and "Hello! It’s me. I’m right behind you”. 

The jewelry is by Josiah Dearborn, and the 'engineering design' is by Bob Bielecki, who previously collaborated with Anderson on works such as her signature magnetic tape violin.

Yesterday Anderson was named the 2026 Kyoto Prize laureate in Arts and Philosophy, alongside chemist Tsutomu Miyasaka, in Advanced Technology, and marine microbiologist Farooq Azam, in Basic Sciences. The Kyoto Prize is Japan’s highest private award for global achievement. The prizes will be awarded in a ceremony on November 10th.

She released the following statement:

“I would like to express my gratitude to those who decided to give me the great honor of receiving the 2026 Kyoto Prize,” Anderson says. “I’m very aware of the magnitude of this prize and of the long line of people before me who have received this great honor. So I accept in the spirit of deepest humility. Like many artists, I’ve spent my life making work that I hoped would be understood and, above all, useful to others. But to have this dream of being understood acknowledged is a very emotional experience for me. And it also gives me an enormous amount of joy. I am also grateful to the many teachers who have shown me ways to live, love and make art.”

John McWhorter

 

I first became aware of linguist and author John McWhorter in 2017, with the release of his book Talking Back, Talking Black, which passionately debunked persistent myths about ‘errors’ in Black English grammar. 

Later, during Covid19, his writings were a welcome antidote to the unthinking orthodoxy of the online left, which was short on solutions and long on sloganeering, and hell-bent on becoming a new religion (minus the forgiveness). 

After George Floyd's murder at the hands of the police, when the white middle class response was to post pictures of themselves “doing the work” by reading Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, McWhorter argued that the book "openly infantilized Black people" and "dehumanized us”.

He has been described as "a radical centrist thinker" and self-identifies as "a cranky liberal Democrat” and atheist. He teaches John Cage to students in his Music Humanities class at Columbia University. 

Earlier this spring, one of his New York Times opinion columns ended with a strange request: he and his daughters collected Bubly cans and were missing a flavour that was released for a limited time, and only in Canada [see above].

Determined to drink less sugar, I became addicted to these sweetener-free drinks and had been obsessively trying out each new flavour. As a way to entice my nephew to visit, I kept one of each can as a kind of “soda museum” in the door of the basement refrigerator. I think I was up to 75 or so different varieties of soda, before some of them started leaking. 

But I still had a copy of Merry Berry Bubly, from five years ago. 

I found McWhorter's email address and wrote to say that I would happily part with the can, as thanks for his writings and podcast appearances that I had enjoyed over the years. He replied immediately with his home address. Then followed with “Promise not to include a cherry bomb or anthrax.”

His daughter apparently shares his sense of humour. The other day a parcel of signed books arrived with a hand written note:

“Dear Dave, This is John McWhorter’s daughter. Thank you for the sending us the last Bubly can and not poisoning us! - D McWhorter (the older one)”

"In Talking Back, Talking Black, McWhorter offers an explanation, a defence, and, most heartening, a celebration of the dialect that has become, he argues, an American lingua franca. He demonstrates the ‘legitimacy’ of Black English by uncovering its complexity and sophistication, as well as the still unfolding journey that has led to its creation. . . . [His] intelligent breeziness is the source of the book’s considerable charm.

— The New Yorker