bp Nichol | Lament

bpNichol

Lament : a sound poem to the memory of D. A. Levy who took his own life, November 1968

Toronto, Canada: Ganglia Press, 1969

[24] pp., 3.6 x 5”, staple-bound

Edition size unknown

d.a. levy was an American poet, artist, and publisher based in Cleveland, Ohio. Like bpNichol, he used lower case letters in his name and published mimeographed editions of his own work, and the work of poets he admired. 

He died at the age of 26, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on November 24, 1968, following a long legal battle over distributing “obscene poetry”. 

Published May 3rd, 1959, Nichol’s tribute Lament was previously performed as part of a reading in conjunction with the opening of an exhibition of concrete poetry at the UBC gallery the previous month. 

A second edition was released by the Writers Forum in London, in late ’69. A copy is available here, for $75.00. 

Laurie Anderson on Desert Island Discs today

I have an unusual and possibly unfair contempt for radio, and haven’t purposefully tuned in since my teens.  But I’ve always enjoyed BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, an archive of which is housed on the BBC website.

The series began in 1942 and is now approaching three and a half thousand episodes. The format remains largely the same, with the guest (or “castaway”) asked to choose eight recordings, a book and a luxury item that they would want with them if stranded on a desert island. 

In 2019, a panel of industry experts voted the program the greatest radio series of all time. 

I’m drawn to the show because I like to hear people talk about their work, and the ways that other culture has influenced them. 

They book mostly celebrities with occasional left field choice like a puppeteer, dog trainer, clown, death-row lawyer, medium or teddy bear expert. 

Periodically they will invite artists onto the show, mostly if they've won the Turner Prize or their work crosses over into pop culture. This is not a criticism - often artists communicate best through their work. 

Laurie Anderson’s primary medium is storytelling, so it’s surprising this is the first time she will appear on the show. She joins artists Marina Abramović, Sonia Boyce, Peter Doig, Jeremy Deller, Antony Gormley, Lubaina Himid, Steve McQueen, Yoko Ono, Grayson Perry, and Rachel Whiteread, who have all previously participated . 

The program airs today and typically can be downloaded, for free, a week or two after the initial air date. 

Alison Knowles | Natural Assemblages and the True Crow

Alison Knowles

Natural Assemblages and the True Crow

New York City USA: Printed Editions, 1980

[unpaginated], 21 x 15 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

A book of poetry and images produced by the original xerox machine at the Rochester School of Visual Studies. The objects and words are “found.” The title is dedicated to Dick Higgins, to whom Knowles was married for ten years, divorced for ten and then remarried again for the final decade of his life. 

"The project developed from VSW's invitation to work with the old Haloid-Xerox equipment. The objects | worked with were a battery pack and a hydraulic can top. These objects went through various voltage, time and size changes over an intense three-day period. The content of the work is the effect of dark and light on the two objects, achieved by manipulating the slow process of the original Haloid-Xerox copy machine. | am also interested in the ways of nature. The fog and light forms the copier produced and the grainy texture made a nice background to float the nature clips about birds and frogs and about my father and me raising chickens. This text runs along the bottom. So, the content would be a collage of meanings including the diary and the nature inserts in an imaginary landscape of pages. You could call the hydraulic can top and the battery pack performers in the book. A small circle and lines on each print became like a moon with scattered clouds. These turned out to be simply scratches on the plate and added a great deal to the final image in my opinion. This original Xerox machine reminds me of the early mainframe computers that would fill a room like a small car! These early versions of tools we have come to depend on were far more interesting in their original forms, now completely unavailable. For example, the Haloid’s processor made it possible to manipulate the image, to draw right into it with an electrostatic wand and actually move the toner around on the plate. In the case of Natural Assemblages and the True Crow, areas of chiaroscuro and bright light could be designed by the performer (artist). The speed of Xerox machines today wipes out the possibility of manipulating within the process. This concept relates to all my work—the desire to catch the moment in the process and change it."

—Alison Knowles

Yoko Ono/John Lennon | Rape poster

Yoko Ono and John Lennon

Rape poster

Austria: Piller-Druck, 1969

59 x 42 cm.

Edition size unknown

In 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon directed Film No. 6 (Rape or Chase), a 77-minute-long colour film  based on an earlier film score of Ono's (and a short text in Grapefruit).  

The film had its world premiere on ORF, an Austrian national public service broadcaster, on March 31, 1969. 

Rape, as it's more commonly known, shows the increasingly disturbing pursuit of a young woman by a camera crew. It remains the most controversial of the pair's film output, which includes close ups of bottoms (Film No.4) , flies on a naked woman's body (Fly) and Lennon's erection (Self-Portrait).

Writing for the The Evening Standard, Willie Frischauer declared "This film does for the age of television what Franz Kafka’s The Trial did for the age of totalitarianism."

It was initially assumed that the film was intended as commentary on the paparazzi following the pair, but Lennon clarified at the time: “We are showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn’t just about the Beatles. What is happening to this girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam, everywhere.”

The actress, Eva Rhodes, opened an animal sanctuary in the late nineties in her native Hungary, partially funded with a donation from Ono. An employee of the sanctuary murdered her in 2008, burying her body in the woods after first attempting to burn her corpse. 

“ …The concept of the film, the theme of the film, the instructions of the film, was created before I went into this strange exploitative atmosphere. In other words, I made the instructions before John and I got together. Isn’t that weird? That I would think of a filmic idea like that without knowing what I’m going to get into? And when I saw the film after John’s passing, because I had to put it in some festival somewhere, I got chills. I was describing the life I was going to be in without knowing it.”

– Yoko Ono, Goldmine, November 7, 1997

“It was completely candid- except for the effects we did later in the editing. The girl in the film did not know what was happening. Her sister was in on it, so when she calls her sister on the phone, her sister is just laughing at her and the girl doesn’t understand why. Nic Knowland did the actual shooting. I wasn’t there. Everything was candid, but I kept pushing him to bring back better material. The type of material he brought back at first was something like he would be standing on the street, and when a group of girls passed by, he would direct the camera to them. The girls would just giggle and run away, and he wouldn’t follow. I kept saying he could do better than that, be he actually had a personal problem doing the film because he was a Buddhist and a peacenik – he didn’t want to intrude on people’s privacy. I remember John saying later that no actress could have given a performance that real.

I’ve done tons of work, and I don’t have time to check it all out, but I wish I could check about this strange thing, which is that a lot of my works have been a projection of my future fate. It frightens me. It simply frightens me. I don’t want to see Rape now. I haven’t seen the Rape film in a long time, but just thinking about the concept of it frightens me because now I’m in that position, the position of the woman in the film."

– Yoko Ono, A Critical Cinema by Scott McDonald

Richard Prince | Skull Bunny Shopping Bag

Richard Prince

Skull Bunny Shopping Bag

New York City, USA/ Toronto, Canada: Printed Matter / Art Metropole, 1991

43 x 27.9 cm.

Edition size unknown

A screenprinted brown paper shopping bag published in conjunction with the exhibition Learn To Read Art in Basel, Switzerland, in June of 1991. The exhibition was a collaborative effort between Art Metropole and Printed Matter and the title (and the bag's verso text) is by Lawrence Weiner. The bag was printed by Imschoot, Uitgevers.

Jonathan Monk | Antipasti

Jonathan Monk

Antipasti

New York City, USA: Flat Fix, 2016

[86] pp.,  5.88 x 8.25”, spiral-bound

Edition size unknown

A lesser-known artist book that contains A4 printouts of other artists’ works that were used as source material for Jonathan Monk’s series of Restaurant Drawings (see previous three posts). 

The series uses Instagram brilliantly, the way good artists (including Monk) made use of the postal system in earlier mail art projects. Monk dines with his family, draws or paints on the receipt and then posts the image to his Instagram feed. A buyer is selected at random from the people who leave comments indicating their interest. The chosen person sends payment and Monk mails the drawing. 

“The finished drawings have all been sold for the price of the meal they represent. The owners of the drawings have (on occasion) fed myself and my family over the last year or so…” Monk notes. 

The premise reminds me of a great 2001 text work by Ben Kinmont that reads:

SOMETIMES A NICER SCULPTURE IS TO BE ABLE TO PROVIDE A LIVING FOR YOUR FAMILY

which refers to enveloping his side-hustle as an antiquarian bookseller, into his larger artist practice. The scan below Kinmont sent to me almost two decades ago for inclusion in the Art Metropole Commerce By Artists title, which I was editing at the time. 

Jonathan Monk | Restaurant Drawings Special Edition

Jonathan Monk

Restaurant Drawings Special Edition

New York City, USA: Karma, 2019

552 pp., 7.5 x 9.25”, hardcover

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

The Special Edition of Restaurant Drawings (see previous posts) is a green (vs pink) hardcover book that is signed and numbered by the artist and includes an original receipt drawing (11.75 x 4”). 

The edition sold out quickly.