Banksy | Welcome Mat

Banksy

Welcome Mat

Brighton, UK: Love Welcomes, 2020

46 × 71 cm.

Unlimited edition

Launched in 2017 as response to the refugee crisis in Greece, Love Welcomes is a "creative social enterprise that helps displaced women begin to stitch their lives back together." 

This open edition Welcome mat features hand-stitched fabric from life vests abandoned on the beaches of the Mediterranean.

Today Reuters outed Banksy in a painfully long article debunking the previous popular theory that he was Robert Del Naja, of the Bristol trip-hop group Massive Attack. It turns out Banksy is Robin Gunningham, 52, also from Bristol and a friend of Del Naja.

Jenny Holzer | Use What Is Dominant

Jenny Holzer

Use What Is Dominant

New York City, USA: The Whitney Museum of Art, 2003

9.5 x 25.5 x 25.5 cm.

Edition of 200

In a matter of a few short years, Jenny Holzer’s aphoristic texts went from being seen on guerrilla  stickers and wheat-pasted posters, to the Times Square Jumbotron and museums around the world. 

Subsequently many of the texts from the Survival Series (1983-85) have adorned baseball caps, t-shirts, postcards, condoms, pencils, golf balls, and the LED lights for which she is still best known. 

"Use What is Dominant in a Culture to Change it Quickly" is a lesser known example, primarily featured as a screenprint on brushed aluminum in 1990, and as part of an earlier parking meter sticker series [see below]. 

However, the statement could be viewed as the artists Modus Operandi. Both the subject and formats of her practice exploit the dominant cultural language of not just the world of advertising, but the pithy platitudes of sloganeering more generally. 

This etched glass bowl featuring the phrase was produced for the Whitney Museum in 2003, by Simon Pearce. His name and Holzer's signature are incised on the base.

"For all of its use of language, the real message of Holzer’s work concerns the media, the electronic display boards and digital units that empty language of any stable “meaning.” Her work imitates not nature (Cage) but culture in its manner of operation. Transformed into pop signs throughout our culture, linguistic meaning “implodes” (to use Jean Baudrillard’s phrase for the disintegration of the signified beneath the signifier). One could argue that Holzer is using Baudrillard’s tactic of strategic resistance to the dominant discourse system, by simulating “in a hyper-conformist manner the very mechanisms of the system . . . turning the system’s logic back on itself duplicating it, reflecting meaning, as in a mirror, without absorbing it.”

- Jessica Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art

Laurie Anderson | United States

Laurie Anderson

United States

New York City, USA:  Harper & Row, 1984

232 pp., 12 x 7”, softcover

Edition size unknown

Despite being over forty years old, Laurie Anderson’s United States is still viewed as her magnum opus - an eight hour performance spread out over two evenings in February of 1983. Split into four parts, the multi-media event featured songs, spoken word pieces, and animated vignettes about live in America. 

A five disc box set followed (later reissued as a four CD collection), as did this companion volume, which features texts, drawings and photographs by the artist. 

"United States is usually classified as performance art, but this is misleading. It was much more conventionally staged than performance art ordinarily is. It used the proscenium for the standard theatrical purpose—to establish an unambiguous distinction between the performer and the audience—and it rigorously excluded the element that gives most performance art its edge, which is contingency. In performance art, a piece isn’t performed; the performance is the piece. The work of art is whatever happens within a set of conditions the artist has laid down. But Anderson was performing pieces she had already created, some of which her audience already knew from listening to her hit single “O Superman” (released in 1981) and her album Big Science (1982). Her appearance at BAM had a lot more in common with Barry Manilow at Wolf Trap than it did with Chris Burden at The Kitchen. United States was a concert.

[...]

People like me, coming out of the ’60s, once dreamed of a fusion between something like pop music and something like Conceptual art, of an expressive form that would integrate the urgency and excitement of a rock concert with the cool detachment of an art without illusions. We wished for energy and imagination without pretension, for entertainment that did not pander and art that was not antagonistic to commercialism, merely indifferent to it. I suppose we hoped to strike such a balance in our own lives. Glimpses of what that sensibility might have been like were pretty rare. United States was one of them."

- Louis Menand, Artforum

Erik Kessels

Happy Birthday to Erik Kessels, who turns 60 today. 

Kasia Fudakowski | Not a performance…

Kasia Fudakowski

Not a performance…

Hamburg, Germany: Klosterfelde Editions, 2018

50 x 35.3 cm.

Edition of 20 signed and numbered copies

A digital print on matt 250g/m2 paper [above, top], this work document’s the artists’ engraved bronze plaques, which document her attempt to quit smoking. The This is Not a performance… series began in 2014 and continues today. 

"Instead of being a promise, the action of quitting smoking, picking up the habit again, and quitting again becomes a farcical performance that plays with the idea of finality yet ultimately strips it of its power and meaning.”

- Chert Lüdde

Michael Snow | Questions and Answers

Michael Snow

Questions and Answers

San Francisco, USA: The Thing Quarterly/KADIST, 2016

7" vinyl record

Edition of 250 numbered copies

A 45 rpm single recorded on March 30, 2016 in Toronto.

Curator Joseph del Pesco and artist Euan Macdonald posed fifteen questions to the artist, such as "How does one shape the fortuitous?" and "What is your philosophy of time?". Snow answered with short musical improvisations recorded by Mani Mazinani. The replies to the questions are followed by "an Epilogue, offering reflections on the subjects raised by the questions."

In addition to the hand-numbered copies (on an accompanying card), an additional 250 copies were made available as a free digital download, all of which were consumed within minutes of the email announcement.

Questions and Answers is one of the final projects produced by The Thing Quarterly, before they ceased publishing objects in 2017. The single was released in September of 2016, at the New York Art Book Fair. It quickly sold out. 

The track listing is as follows: 

A1 What Was Your First Thought When You Woke This Morning?

A2 Why Make Films That Only A Few People Will See?

A3 What Moves You?

A4 What's Toronto Like In The First Days Of Spring?

A5 What's Left When You "Take The Spectator Out Of The Illusion"?

A6 Is There Anybody Listening To This Right Now?

A7 What's Frame-By-Frame Truth?

A8 What Are Mysterious Alterations Of Time And Mind?

A9 What Is Your Philosophy Of Time?

A10 Does The Music Start In Your Mind, Your Fingers, Or In The Piano?

B1 Do The White And Black Keys Symbolize Anything To You?

B2 How Does One Shape The Fortuitous?

B3 How Are Waves Visible Registers Of Invisible Forces?

B4 What Is Silence?

B5 What Is The World Coming To?

B6 Epilogue

Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger died on this day in 1997.