The Paul D Fleck Library and Archives

The Paul D Fleck Library and Archives at the Banff Centre has a collection of Artists Books, Multiples and related materials that includes over 4,000 items. I did a residency at the Centre a few years ago and would visit the library every morning, signing out about a dozen things and returning them the next day for a replacement stack of books.

The above display is rotating weekly, until each item has been exhibited. Pictured titles include Enough is Enough by Karen Finley, Material by Jimmie Durham, Banana Rag by Ana Banana, A Remembrance of Annette by Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Radio Room (A Space), Expressionist Bestiary by Jacques Benoit, The Book of Tractations / The Book of Disappearances by Raul Ruiz, Guderna’s Mail Art Correspondence by Lad Guderna and Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the namesake for the rotating exhibition.

The Library hours of operation are Monday – Thursday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. They are closed Saturdays and statutory holidays. Their database of books and multiples is searchable, here.

Cathy Busby | Steve's Vinyl

Tomorrow night between 5 and 7pm, Printed Matter hosts a book launch for Cathy Busby's new title Steve's Vinyl. A talk at Artists Space precedes the event, between 1 and 3pm.

On World AIDS Day in 2011, Busby held an event at the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax, Nova Scotia in which she gave away her brother Steve's entire record collection. Stephen David Busby (1953-1993), the artist's older brother, died of an AIDS related illness twenty years ago. He left his record collection to his sister, who kept them in cardboard boxes, never playing them, for eighteen years.

Tickets to Steve’s Vinyl: A One-night-only Celebration and Album Giveaway were $20, and included a dance party, "culinary delights prepared by local pros" and the record of your choice. Proceeds went to the AIDS Coalition of Nova Scotia and to the not-for-profit Khyber Arts Society.

The book of the same name documents the event. For more information, visit Printed Matter's newly designed website, here.

OCADU 29th Annual Book Arts Fair

Tomorrow (Saturday November 30) from 10am to 5pm OCAD University's printmaking department presents their 29th Annual Book Arts Fair at the Great Hall, 100 McCaul Street.

The event features handmade and crafted works by many book artists, printmakers, artists, small publishers, students, professional artists, papermakers and printmaking suppliers, as well as live performances, poetry readings, and kid friendly crafting throughout the day.

The suggested donation is $5.00, with all proceeds going to student awards & initiatives. For more information visit the facebook page, here or contact the organizers at bookartsfair@gmail.com.

Joy Walker | Fade to Black

Joy Walker
Fade to Black
St. Catherines, Canada: Rodman Hall Centre, 2013
[26] pp., 23 x 15 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown

An exhibition/artist book hybrid published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name, curated by Marcie Bronson, which continues until January 5th at the Brock University gallery.

Walker and Bronson are in conversation tonight, Thursday November 28th, at 7pm. For more information, visit the gallery site, here.

Printed Matter's Emerging Artists Publication Series Winners Announced

Printed Matter has just announced the winners of their first Emerging Artists Publication Series, a program that "allows book artists to publish works experimenting with the medium in new and exciting ways." More than 300 artists' book proposals were submitted by NYC-based artists, and the six winners are:

Anne Callahan (Youngstown, OH)
Sara Cwynar (Vancouver)
Dawn Kim (Brooklyn)
Clive Murphy & Aengus Woods (Ireland)
Chris Nosenzo (Brooklyn)
Max Stolkin (Indianapolis)

The jury was comprised of Executive Director of Printed Matter James Jenkin, artist Tauba Auerbach, the Bibliographer at The Museum of Modern Art Library David Senior (whose recent artists' ephemera show can be viewed here) and Printed Matter's Consulting Design Director Garrick Gott.

The chosen artists will be working with Gott to develop their proposed artists' books, which will be published individually over the next year. Each will be accompanied by a book launch and window display.

For more information, visit Printed Matter's brand new website, here. 

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson | Portraits by Waiters

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson

Portraits by Waiters

Oslo, Norway: Multinational Enterprises, 2013

110 pp., 15 x 20 cm., softcover

Edition of 250

56 colour portraits of the artist taken by waiters and waitresses during an eight-week residency in Cologne, Germany. Every evening Jóhannsson, in a variety of resteraunts, cafes and dining halls, would ask the server to take his photograph. Each spread contains the record of one night, typically with a single image, but periodically with two - if the waiter felt another shot was necessary. 

A text by Sara Rundgren Yazdani (unbound, included as a laminated card) discusses the project as an attempt to reverse the role of the artist and the sitter, and to remove authorship from the work. Indeed, Jóhannsson's name appears neither on the cover, title page nor spine of the book, only in a 10pt font on the otherwise blank verso. 

The book is available here for $30.00. 

Emma Kay | Worldview

Emma Kay
Worldview
London, UK: Bookworks, 1999
224 pp., 21 x 15 cm., softcover
Edition of 1500

In Worldview, Emma Kay recounts a history of the planet told entirely from unaided memory. It begins with the big bang, and ends with apocalyptic visions suggested by the then-imminent end of the millennium in 1999. The piece was first realized as a high-resolution ink-jet print (see below), with a typeface and layout designed by the artist. The spaces between the paragraphs indicate omitted material, their size related to the artist’s perception of her memory lapse. The large digital print (176 x 270.5 cm) was produced in an edition of three.

The content, presumably from half-remembered exam text books, period piece movies, novels and magazine articles, features major omissions and dodgy information, presented in a neutral tone. A sample paragraph:

Apes’ upper limbs were long and strong, and were known as arms. Their brains were much larger in relation to their upper body weight than the dinosaurs’ brains. About a million years ago apes were multiplying rapidly, they appeared all over the Earth in pockets. They lived in social groups, which were hierarchical. They were herbivores. Most lived in trees but some had begun to live on the ground. The apes had the biggest brain in relation to their body of all the creatures so far. Their brain continually evolved, and their social interaction grew more complex.

Worldview follows Kay's The Bible from Memory (1997), a 7,500 word single page retelling of the King James Bible and Shakespeare from Memory (1998). Like The Bible From Memory, Worldview tells a global history bookended with creation and destruction, and represents an attempt at classification which reveals the flaws inherent in all histories.

"When I am writing I always imagine myself in some kind of virtual computer environment and think of my memory works as hypertexts. The associative and cognitive links people make are the very ones which computers try to emulate, and even represent. Hypertext is an apparently objective attempt to impose order over chaos and to get to grips with vast resources, though its subjectivity is inescapable. It seemed to me to be interesting to represent this attempt visually."

- Emma Kay

The bound Bookworks edition, also from 1999, features the original text and the addition of an index (above, bottom). The cover map is drawn by the artist, also from memory.

Now out-of-print, the title is available for between $45 and $145, here.

YokoKimThurston Deluxe Edition

Originally released in September of last year, shortly after the separation of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon (and the possibly permanent hiatus of Sonic Youth), YokoKimThurston is now being given the deluxe treatment, courtesy of Ono's label Chimera Music.

The 96 minute collaboration is being reissued as a 3 LP set, in a limited edition of 600 copies, signed by all three participants. The discs are encased in hand-painted boxes designed by Gordon. 100 of these are printed with a "double front" box, with painted on both sides. These 100 will be the first to ship. The box also contains a poster, sticker and download card for the MP3 versions.

The price is $200 plus shipping, and can be pre-ordered from Chimera, here. The discs will ship starting on the third of December.

The regular edition can be purchased for $14.98 from Amazon, here. 

Read the Pitchfork review of the project, here. 

Joshua Bonnetta | American Colour

Joshua Bonnetta
American Colour
Italy: Senufo Edition,
DVD, LP
Edition of 300


"In 2011, a processing facility in Kansas, the last to process Kodachrome, discontinued the K14 developing process. The historical stock became obsolete. In 2010, I photographed 14 rolls of Kodachrome 16mm, which had been stored since 1986. The stock was developed, in the last batch of footage processed. The resulting film is American Colour. The film was photographed over a week while traveling to Kansas from the birthplace of Kodachrome in upstate New York. In the wake of the obsolescence of Kodachrome, the footage is used to explore the stocks historic and unique rendering of colour, hue and light value in relation to the American landscape and it’s architecture.

The accompanying soundtrack is homage to Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr. the two violinists whom invented Kodachrome in 1935. The piece was created using a violin, tape, processing and site-specific shortwave radio recorded during the photography. The soundtrack will be performed live when possible."

- Joshua Bonnetta

“Joshua Bonnetta’s American Colour (note the bi-national spelling), was shot on old rolls of 16mm Kodachrome during a pilgrimage from the stock’s birthplace inupstate New York to Kansas, where its final rolls were processed earlier this year. Like a postscript to Dean’s Kodak, American Colour explores Kodachrome’s historic use and singular hues, doing so with digital means in the wake of its obsolescence.”

– Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival

"American Colour gives us a range of sensory experience, including the glimpses of the delicious colour we expect to see, but not limited to that. That Bonnetta's film registers the end of an era for film artists also, there is no doubt. But despite its references to death and decay this is not a film of mourning, nor even the idealization of a lost format. Bonnetta's journey does not take on the fatalism that may be implied by a cursory glance at the project. Instead, it opens up, accelerating to what the landscape has to offer, using Kodachrome as it has always been used, as the means to an end in colour."

- Irene Bindi, liner notes

If only all artists' videos were as beautifully packaged and affordably priced. The collection includes both the DVD and its soundtrack on LP, housed in a gatefold sleeve. The title is out-of-print from the publisher, but a few copies remain, for $30, at the Plug In bookstore.

Richard McGuire | Puzzlehead

The bass player for Liquid Liquid (and subsequently Grandmaster Melle Mel's classic White Lines (Don't Do It), which sampled the bass line from their song Cavern), animator, filmmaker, New Yorker illustrator and children's author, Richard McGuire self-published a series of toys including this 1990 work, Puzzlehead.


"Puzzlehead started as a phone doodle made on graph paper and then I made a prototype. I had the good fortune of meeting Steven Guarnaccia (now the head of Parsons illustration program). He was putting together a book project of 'artists who make toys'. We traded work.

A toy designer named Byron Glaser saw the prototype at Steven's studio and called me up. Within a few months I was in Indonesia working with a team who were manufacturing my product. Byron and his partner Sandra Higashi had altready created Zolo, a hand made wooden construction toy that was distributed by MoMA. in the late 80's. They were looking for other products to keep the team working they had put together."

- Richard McGuire

A reissue of the work is available for $40.00, here.

Christian Marclay | The Clock

Christian Marclay
The Clock
London, UK: White Cube, 2010
720 pp., 23.6 x 17 x 2.8 cm, softcover
Edition size unknown

I'm in Winnipeg this week, in part to participate in tonight's panel discussion about Christian Marclay's The Clock, currently on view at the WAG. Organized and moderated by Jonah Corne, the panel includes myself (speaking about my own, ah, complicated relationship with The Clock), filmmaker Irene Bindi and sound artist Crys Cole (who's performing tomorrow night at Interaccess in Toronto).

The discussion will be followed by a 24 hour screening of the work, with free popcorn.

The above title, featuring texts by Darian Leader and Honey Luard was - despite the international interest in, and acclaim for the work - only available in the UK, briefly. Only three years old now, the artist book/catalogue is already being offered on the secondary market with prices ranging from $932 to $2500.00.

Sara MacKillop | Faded Paper

Sara MacKillop
Faded Paper
Bristol, England: Spike Island, 2011
16 pp., 32 x 24 cm., staplebound
Edition of 150 numbered copies

An installation in 2011 at Spike Island in Bristol featured eight found pieces of paper, removed from institutional noticeboards and documenting (through sun fading) the size and shape of the announcements temporarily pinned there. The bookwork reproduces these images and features a cover of mauve sugar paper, designed itself to fade with minimal contact with sunlight.

Robert Filliou | Editions & Multiples

Robert Filliou
Editions & Multiples
Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2003
120 pp., 17 x 24 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown

A catalogue raisonné of editions, multiples, books and videos by Filliou, featuring texts by Michel Giroud, François Curlet, Bengt Adlers, Johannes Cladders, Anselm Dreher, Armin Hundertmark, Sylvie Jouval in French. The expected English edition never materialized and this French edition is now long out-of-print and increasingly rare.

Maurizio Nannuci | Words Without Silence

Maurizio Nannucci's exhibition at Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Words Without Silence/Silence Without Words, opens Sunday November 24th at 11am.

"For his third exhibition at Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska in Salzburg, Maurizio Nannucci has created a new site-specific installation composed by seven monochrome luminous neon texts spread across the exhibition space, filling each one with coloured reflexes and creating a unitary route making a statement about the semantic polyvalence of colour, light and language. All texts have a chiasmatic pattern, can be read in reverse and in consequence the meaning of the writing is turned upside down.
Blue, red, yellow, green, white, pink and orange are the used colours, as the early neon writings the artist conceived in the sixties. The neon texts are installed in the centre of the walls and give form to a continuous polychromatic horizon, in which colours make a fusion, turning the monochrome light of every single neon into a scale of shades unifying all texts."

- gallery press release 

For more information, visit the gallery website, here.

Michael Klein Sunday Scene

Today at 2pm, Michael Klein will be hosting the Power Plant Sunday Scene talk, speaking about the Micah Lexier exhibition One, and Two, and More Than Two.

Klein and Lexier's friendship dates back decades (they're seen above in New York City in 1980) and the pair have collaborated on several occasions.

Admission is free. For more information, visit the Power Plant website, here.

New Thing Quarterly Available

The new Thing Quarterly issue launched a few days ago. Issue 21, by novelist Ben Marcus, includes a custom tin of Thompson Cream and an accompanying booklet containing text by the author.

It's available here, for $70.00 US.

If you wish to store the work in its box, you may want to specify when you order. The previous Thing Quarterly (the Tauba Auerbach clock) arrived here last month with the box in terrible condition, as it had been sent without additional packaging. The address label was just affixed to the outside of the (Auerbach designed) box.

Deconstruct

(Various ‎Artitsts)
Deconstruct
London, UK: Blast First, 1994
61:41
Edition of 500

Blast First was a sub label of Mute records, founded by Paul Smith to release Sonic Youth records in the UK. The label has put out records and CDs by bands such as The Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr., Labradford, Liars, Pan Sonic, The Raincoats, and Suicide, as well as artworld crossovers such as Glenn Branca and Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass project.

This disk, made in a special arrangement with The Wire Magazine, features a variety of experimental music and audio art, including Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, and John Oswald. The CD booklet contains pages (text, visuals or both) by each of the participants.

Roula Partheniou | Desk Set

Roula Partheniou
Desk Set
Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2013
3.75 x 5.5 x 1.25" (stacked)
Acrylic on wood and MDF
Edition of 25, signed and numbered

The 21st edition from Paul + Wendy Projects (following works by The Royal Art Lodge, Kay Rosen, Daniel Eatock, Micah Lexier, Jason McLean, Sara MacKillop, Derek Sullivan, Jonathan Monk, Michael Dumontier, etc.) is a new hand-painted tabletop sculpture of stacked stationary.

Partheniou's practice often involves working with the notion of the replica, creating works that range from the highly detailed to distorted and reductive versions of everyday objects.

Desk Set can be seen as a companion work to Dopplekopf, a recent commissioned installation at Sheridan College in which Partheniou creates replicas of stationary (binders, tape, pens, CDs and DVDs) and then copies and mirrors them in greyscale. When viewed in the double-sided mirror that divides the customized vitrine the objects appear as though they are draining of colour (and vice-versa in the opposite direction).

Desk Set is available for $250 CDN, from the publisher, here.