Robert Filliou | Fluxdust

Robert Filliou
Fluxdust
New York City, USA: Fluxus, [circa] 1967
12 × 10 × 1.7 cm.
Edition size unknown

A plastic box with a label designed by George Maciunas containing collected dust. In 1984, the artist stated that both Fluxdust and Fluxhair were mentioned to Maciunas over a beer in London during the Misfits festival. The works were later realized by Maciunas as a stand alone multiple, and as part of the collective Fluxkit.

Issue #23/24 of Impressions magazine (1980, edited by Isaac Applebaum and Lorne Fromer and designed by Suzy Lake) featured Filliou's 1977 work Poussière de Poussière (Dust to Dust) as a four page spread. Excerpts are below.

"In this instance, the artist quest involved cleaning works of art within public collections in Paris and presenting the dusty cloths along with a small photograph of the action in archive style boxes, as if 'the aura of original work could be presented as a relic.' "

- Amy Fowler, Quests for the Lost and Found

MISS READ 2015

The MISS READ Book Fair, 2015 (June 26th to 28th at Akademie der Künste in Berlin) has just announced the full list of participants on their Facebook page, here.

They include:

*[asterisk] (Aarhus)
& So (Berlin)
1% of one (Hamburg)
88books (Vancouver)
AA Bronson/Media Guru (Toronto/Berlin)
ABC [Artists’ Books Cooperative] (New York and elsewere)
Akademie der Künste (Berlin)
AKV (Berlin)
Alauda Publications (Amsterdam)
AMDISCS (London)
Anagram Books (London)
antipyrine (Aarhus)
Archive Books (Berlin)
Artlink Australia (Adelaide)
B-B-B BOOKS (Stockholm)
Back Bone Books (Berlin & Mexico City)
Bartleby & Co. (Brussels)
BLEK (Leipzig)
Boabooks (Geneva)
Book Works (London)
BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE (Berlin)
BQ Gallery (Berlin)
Brinkmann & Bose (Berlin)
Broken Dimanche Press (Berlin)
Camera Austria (Graz)
captures éditions (Valence)
Corrections and Clarifications/Anita Di Bianco (Berlin)
Christophe Daviet-Thery (Paris)
Dasein (Luzern)
Deutscher Kunstverlag (Berlin)
do you read me (Berlin)
Dominique Hurth (Berlin)
Doppell Edition (Berlin)
edition.nord (Niigata)
Edition Patrick Frey (Zurich)
Éditions Incertain Sens & Cabinet du livre d’artiste (Rennes)
Edition Staeck (Heidelberg)
Elisabeth Tonnard (Leerdam)
EN/OF (Kleve/Berlin)
Fantôme Verlag (Berlin)
Fillip (Vancouver)
Flaneur Magazine (Berlin)
Fucking Good Art (Rotterdam)
Für Dich Verlag (Borgerhout)
GAGARIN (Antwerp)
Gato Negro (Mexiko City)
Gloria Glitzer (Berlin)
joachim schmid (Berlin)
jrp | ringier (Zurich)
K. Verlag and friends (Berlin)
Kerber Verlag (Bielefeld/Berlin)
Kodoji Press (Baden, Switzerland)
Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin)
Kunstverein Milano (Milan)
Kunstverein Publishing (Amsterdam)
LemonMelon (London)
Lendroit (Rennes)
lorem ipsum (Rennes)
Lubok Verlag (Leipzig)
M.E.R. Paper Kunsthalle (Ghent)
SKULPI (Berlin)
Mark Pezinger Verlag (Berlin/Vienna)
Merve (Berlin)
Meta/Book (Amsterdam)
Michael Baers & Friends (Berlin)
Michalis Pichler/„greatest hits“ (Berlin)
n.b.k. (Berlin)
New Documents (Los Angeles)
Occulto (Berlin)
OEI (Stockholm)
OMMU (Athens)
Onomatopee (Eindhoven)
PAN (Berlin)
Passenger Books (Montreal/Berlin)
PogoBooks (Berlin)
possible books (Berlin)
PTohographies (Berlin)
Quick Magazine (Berlin)
Publication Studio (Rotterdam/Portland)
Raum der Publikation (Kiel)
Red Sphinx (London/Berlin)
Richard Kostelanetz (New York)
Ricochet (Leipzig)
Revolver Publishing (Berlin)
Rondade (Tokyo)
Salon Verlag (Cologne)
Schlebruegge. Editor/Fama & Fortune Bulletin (Vienna)
Scriptings (Berlin)
Sergej Vutuc (Heilbronn)
Shashasha (Tokyo)
Shelter Press (Lescheraines)
Spector Books (Leipzig)
SPIKE Art Quarterly (Berlin/Vienna)
springerin (Vienna)
Starship (Berlin)
Stefanie Leinhos (Leipzig)
Sternberg Press (Berlin)
Štokovec (Banská Štiavnica)
TDpaples (Barcelona)
Texte zur Kunst (Berlin)
Textem (Hamburg)
TFGC Publishing (Düsseldorf)
THE GREEN BOX (Berlin)
The Name Books (Chur)
Torpedo (Oslo)
Triple Canopy (New York/Berlin)
Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn)
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig (Cologne)
Verlag Silke Schreiber (Munich)
Version House (Berlin)
Westphalie (Vienna)
White Fungus (Taiwan)
wicker industries GmbH & Co. KG (Berlin)
Wien Lukatsch (Berlin)
ztscrpt (Berlin/Vienna)

Ben Patterson

Ben Patterson turns 81 today.

Every Building In The Sunset Strip

More about the book soon, once I've documented it, but here's the press release for the exhibition, which opens Saturday:



MKG127 is very pleased to present Every Building In The Sunset Strip, an exhibition of new work by Dave Dyment.

Opening Saturday May 30, from 2 - 5 PM.


Dave Dyment's fourth solo exhibition at MKG127 explores the relationship between architecture, the automobile and the camera lens, while paying tribute to an influential artists' book that celebrates it's fiftieth anniversary next year. In Zoomscape (2014), historian Mitchell Schwarzer argues that most architecture is now viewed "through the windshield of a moving vehicle" or "through the images of cameras, movies, and television programs--that is, through the lens of another's eye." Nowhere is this more true than in Los Angeles, the epicentre of North American filmmaking and driving. In 1966 Ed Ruscha produced one of the most revered artists' books ever, by driving along the Sunset Strip and documenting each building with a camera on a tripod in the back of his truck. The long-celebrated work has undergone recent reevaluation in the wake of Google Maps: "It's as if the car were itself part of the camera apparatus, generative of another means of framing experience" (Jaleh Mansoor, 2005).

Dyment's project remakes the book, twice: as text, unearthing stories about every building in Ruscha's Strip, and by amassing a comprehensive collection of images from film and television. Unlike the deliberately dispassionate portraits by Ruscha, the film-stills and anecdotes feature crime, car chases, romantic entanglements, and riots. Taken sequentially, they suggest an intertwined narrative while presenting an historic overview of the famous two-and-a-half kilometre stretch of the boulevard.

Dyment's work often involves exhaustive research and the use of cinema as archive, mining film for found imagery, shared associations, narrative tropes, and historical and fictional through lines.  Several recent projects have investigated 'location' in cinema, as does a forthcoming featuring-length video titled Substitute City. His work has been exhibited across the country and elsewhere, mostly recently at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery and the Montreal Biennale. Examples of his work can be seen at www.dave-dyment.com

Booksales

Tonight from 5 to 9pm at Access Gallery, 222 East Georgia Street, Vancouver:

Whisky and discounted books from The Contemporary Art Gallery, Access Gallery, Fillip, New Documents, Presentation House Gallery, Or Gallery and Western Front. See earlier post or visit their site, here.

Saturday May 30, from 10 to 4pm:

Monkey's Paw Garage Sale. A barn-like garage off of Skey Lane, just below Dundas. All books between one and three dollars. Visit the Facebook page, here.

A few iPhone photos as updates from recent posts:

1) Pop Up Shop at G Gallery with Bywater Brothers Editions, Nothing Else Press, Paul + Wendy Projects and Slow Editions. 

2) The launch event for Jess Dobkin's Artists' Newsstand. 

3) Mungo Thompson at G Gallery. 

4) Rodney Graham concert last night at The Great Hall. 

Marc Hundley | Weaverbird & Other Words

Marc Hundley
Weaverbird & Other Words
New York City, USA: RAINOFF, 2010
68 pp., 18 x 25 cm., hardcover
Edition of 500

Available for £33.00 from Ti Pi Tin, here.

Mark Hundley's I Love Coming Home opens at MKG127 on Saturday May 30, from 2 - 5 pm, and continues until June 27th. Visit the gallery website for more information, here.

Rodney Graham | Verwandlungsmusik (Transformation Music)

Rodney Graham
Verwandlungsmusik (Transformation Music)
Saint-Etienne, France: Espace Art Contemporain, 1991
Audio CD
12.5 x 14 cm
Edition size unknown


Subtitled Orchestral Highlights from Parsifal (1882-39,969,364,735 AD), this conceptual exercise remains one of my favourite artworks ever, and is tied for my very favourite artist's recording (with Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic).

The work originates from a story Graham had read about the composer Richard Wagner and the 1882 rehearsals of Parsifal in Bayreuth. The curtain-puller for the play was having trouble closing them on time, so Wagner was asked to compose some additional music to smooth over the transition. He refused, reportedly declaring "I do not write music by the meter."  (I'm unable to separate the anecdote from Max Von Sydow's tortured painter in Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters, indignantly proclaiming "I don't sell my work by the yard!").

Fortunately for the producers, Wagner's assistant Engelbert Humperdinck (the namesake of the 1960's crooner) was happy to oblige. His additions to the score were accepted by Wagner, used for the first few performances, but eventually dropped after the curtains were altered and the stage machinery was overhauled.

Graham hunted down these obscure excised bars and upon further investigation determined that Humperdinck had actually composed no new music, but rather manipulated the existing score so that the piece could loop back on itself. Graham recognized the similarity to his own 1983 work Lenz, in which he takes the reoccurrence of a phrase within the first five pages of a novel, and re-typesets them to facilitate a narrative that could loop back upon itself, mirroring the story of the protagonist, who is continuously retracing his own steps.

By returning the extra bars of music to the score of Parsifal as a progression of repetitions, Graham was able to create a series of asynchronous loops that would not resynchronize for 39 billion years. He attempts to pinpoint the exact time that the work would conclude (7:30 pm on June 18th), but the CD liner notes include a letter from Alan H. Batten of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics suggesting that an accurate calculation would be impossible. He goes on to list the problems with the speculation, not the least of which is the likelihood that long before that time the sun will cease to shine.


Alongside his art career (and often intermingling with it), Graham has been a prolific songwriter and performer. He was a member of the late-seventies post-punk/new wave band U-J3RK5 (with artists Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall and others) and has released several LPS of songs, including The Bed Bug, Love Buzz (2000), Getting It Together In The Country (2000), Rock is Hard (2003), Never Tell a Pal a Hard Luck Story (2005) and Why Look for Good Times (2008). In 2007, JPRingier released The Rodney Graham Songbook (available here).

The Rodney Graham Band consists of Graham on guitar and vocals, Dave Carswell on bass, Paul Rigby on guitar , mandolin and pedal steel, and Pete Bourne on drums. The group have performed in cities such as Berlin, Glasgow, London, New York and Paris. I believe the last time they played in Toronto was over a decade ago, in 2004, when Art Metropole and the AGO presented a concert at the Gladstone hotel (see below poster, which I think was designed by my then-colleague at AM, Pete Gazendam). Somewhere in my files I have Graham's set-list scrawled on the back of one of these photocopied handbills.

Tomorrow night Art en Valise hosts a performance of the band at The Great Hall from 8 to 10pm. Art en Valise identify as art lovers (not dealers or curators), and are "dedicated to introducing Canadian audiences to new ideas in the contemporary visual arts." The group consists of Paul Marks, Liza Mauer and Elisa Nuyten. Visit their website, here.

Tickets are $40 with a 50% discount for artists and students. They're available here.