This week on Tumblr: Parkett Editions

Based out of Zurich, Switzerland, Parkett magazine publishes thrice a year and has a circulation of 12,000. Founded in the early '80's, the periodical has ran features on Laurie Anderson, Richard Artschwager, Meret Oppenheim, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Dennis Oppenheim, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Jeff Koons, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Ann Hamilton, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Richard Serra, Hanne Darboven, Mariko Mori, Robert Mapplethorpe, Brice Marden, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Ed Ruscha, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nancy Spero, and many others.

Each artist highlighted in the magazine creates a special signed and numbered artwork, exclusive to Parkett.

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com

Every Building in the Sunset Strip at Untitled Art Fair, Miami

Earlier this year I remade Ed Ruscha's 1966 artist book Every Building On The Sunset Strip, twice. The first was an accordion-fold book, in which I researched every address in the original title, unearthing stories that ranged from the banal to the bizarre, as is evidenced by the following two (sequential) entries:


8860 - The Sun-Bee Food Mart from 1966 is now the Sun Bee Liquor & Food Mart. It can be seen very briefly in the exploitation film Black Shampoo (1976) and The Outside Man (1972). 

8863 - Barney Ruditsky was a British-born American police officer and private detective. During his 20-year career with the New York Police Department, he was a prominent "celebrity detective”. He retired from the force in 1941 and served in the army during World War II, where he was wounded by shrapnel. Ruditsky then moved to Los Angeles and opened a Liquor Store near the corner of Clark and Sunset. He named it Angel’s Corner, after his unpublished memoirs. He was also the co-owner of Sherry’s nightclub, down the street. 

His writings about his time with the NYPD were adapted into the television series The Lawless Years (1959 - 1961), but he is best known for an incident when he was working as a Los Angeles Private Detective. In 1954, actress Marilyn Monroe  was divorcing baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. After seeing her car parked outside an apartment near Melrose and Crescent Heights and suspecting her of infidelities, DiMaggio hired Ruditsky to orchestrate a raid on the apartment. 

At 11pm, the two men, accompanied by some of Rudistky’s colleagues and the singer Frank Sinatra, battered down the front door with an axe, breaking glass and tearing it from its hinges. A Mrs Florence Ross - a 39 year-old secretary who lived alone - was fast asleep, and Monroe was next door, visiting her friend Sheila Stewart Renour. The incident, and subsequent lawsuit, became known as the “Wrong Door Raid”.


Many of the stories involve the film industry, unsurprisingly. The second remake of Ruscha's book was as a slide show video and series of fifty prints. By watching virtually every film and television series ever filmed in the area, I was able to track down every address in the book, replacing Ruscha's dispassionate black and white photographs, with colour film stills.

For more information, visit my website, here.

A small portion of this project will be on view at the Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach, Ocean Drive at 12 Street, beginning December 2nd and running until the 6th. The MKG127 booth is located at C9.

Jon Sasaki | Rightsized Limo Air Freshener

Jon Sasaki
Rightsized Limo Air Freshener
Detroit, USA: Canadian Residency, 2015
18 x 5.5 cm
Edition of 250

A functioning car air freshener ("New Car Scent") that serves as a souvenir for Jon Sasaki's work of the same name, performed two weeks ago today at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, just outside of the Mike Kelley Homestead (which can be seen in the back of some of the below iPhone pics).

The performance lasted about six hours on a beautiful, sunny mid-November afternoon. Sasaki, with help from local welders and students from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, trisected a stretched limousine, removed the middle section and welded the vehicle back together again, now the size of a Town Car.

With echoes of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, the piece also tied in nicely to recent Sisyphean tasks the artist has undertaken, including Bouncy Highrise (see Nuit Blanche post below) and 58 Yard / 53.0352 Metre Runway, where Sasaki built and attempted to fly an aircraft using only instructions from a thirty-five year old issue of Popular Mechanics magazine. (see video, here).

Read more about the project at hyperallergic.com, here

The air freshener multiple was distributed free of charge to the first 100 visitors at the performance. It's possible that additional copies are available from the publisher, here.