George Maciunas | New Flux Year

George Maciunas
New Flux Year
New York City, USA: Fluxus, c. 1967
11.9 x 7 x 7 cm. [closed]
Edition size unknown


A commercial relief printed box with transfer type, containing a cloth covered spring, noise maker, and offset confetti printed with the title.

On Kawara |vOne Million Years: Past – For all those who have lived and died & Future – For the last one

On Kawara
One Million Years: Past – For all those who have lived and died & Future – For the last one
Antwerp, Belgium: Editions Micheline Szwajcer & Michèle Didier, Antwerp, 1999
16 x 11.5 x 9 cm.
Edition of 570, the first 60 of which were signed



On Kawara was born on this day in 1932. He died at the age of 81 in 2014.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on this day, sixty years ago.

Harold Budd | Budd Box

Harold Budd

Budd Box

London, UK: All Saints Records, 2018

5.12 x 5 x 1.06"

Edition of 1000 

A retrospective anthology boxset containing six Harold Budd albums: The Serpent (In Quicksilver) (1981) Abandoned Cities (1984) The White Arcades (1987) By The Dawn's Early Light (1991) Music For Three Pianos (1992) Luxa (1996). The discks are accompanied by a 68 page softbound book compiling interviews, essays, poems and archival photos. 

The collection omits his best-known albums, collaborations with Brian Eno (The Pavilion of Dreams, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror, and The Pearl) and The Moon and the Melodies, a 1986 recording with Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins. 

Budd died this week at the age of 84, from COVID19. 

Read an obituary at the Guardian, here. 

Yoko Ono on the 40th anniversary of her husband's death

Eighteen years ago Yoko Ono sent me this postcard, an image of John Lennon's bloodstained glasses on the windowsill of their Dakota apartment, looking out onto Central Park. The caption indicated that 676, 000 people had been killed by guns in the United States since the death of her husband, John Lennon. 

Today, she once again uses the anniversary of his death to highlight gun violence and to call for stricter gun control measures. 

Lennon was shot dead in front of their apartment forty years ago today, at the age of forty. The number of deaths from gunfire has more than doubled in the last 18 years, to 1,436,000. 

Cary Leibowitz | Vomit-bag

Cary Leibowitz

Vomit-bag

Dusseldorf, Germany: ID Galerie, 1991

39 x 44 cm

Edition of 500

An early shopping bag by Candyass/Cary Leibowitz, from John Goodwin's series of posts of works by the artist this week at:

https://www.instagram.com/goodwatercorktown/

Eleanor Antin | Library Science

Eleanor Antin

Library Science

Halifax, Canada: NSCAD, 1972

7.5 x 12.5 cm.

Edition size unknown

An invitation to Antin's week-long exhibition show "Library Science" at NSCAD, which was held from February 1 to 9, 1972. For the exhibition, Antin appropriated the Library of Congress’s classification system to classify “a sub-set of the world of people” (i.e. women). 

The exhibition invitation mimicked Library Card Catalogue systems, something Antin also did for shows in Glendale and Valencia. 

“Each participant in the exhibition of women artists was asked to provide me with a ‘piece of information’ of any form that she felt appropriate at this time. Twenty-six participants repsonded. Each 'piece of information’ (object or document) was classified for subject as a book in accordance with the classificational system of the Library of Congress…All of the 'pieces of information’ were exhibited beside their 'subject catalogue cards.’” 

- Eleanor Antin

Ben Vautier | Art is a question of signature (portfolio of 9)

Ben Vautier 

Art is a question of signature (portfolio of 9)

Ramatuelle, France: Atelier Laage, 1977

32 x 23.5 cm. 

Edition of 80 signed and numbered copies

Nine silkscreened signs investigating the idea of the artist's signature: defaced, ephemeral, forged, obscured, illegible, missing, etc. 

Sophie Calle | Bronx

Sophie Calle   

Bronx

Paris, France: Item Editions, 2002

unpaginated., 30.5 x 24.8 cm., loose leaves

Edition of 250 signed and numbered copies [+ 20 AP]

A project completed by the general public in both solicited and unsolicited ways, Bronx was the first exhibited work by French artist Sophie Calle. Produced over forty years ago, in 1980, the work was part of a city-wide group exhibition titled “Une Idée en L’Air.” 

Calle approached strangers on the streets of New York's South Bronx and asked them to take her to the one place they would most remember if they ever relocated away from the area. The resulting work, which was originally titled Waiting for People to Come to Fashion MODA and Asking them to Take me Wherever They Want in the South Bronx, featured unsentimental portrait photographs and texts about the chosen places. 

Calle was taken to mostly private places with some personal significance, like a grade school classroom or gardens, Yankee Stadium. One participant brought her to a borough that the Pope had blessed the year prior. A man took her to a bank, saying, "I used to have a bank account. I would like another one.”

“The day before the opening I hung the photos and the texts on the wall," Calle later recounted. "That night, an unexpected and providential collaborator broke into the gallery and covered every possible surface with graffiti.” She decided that having the works tagged made them "much better" in the end. 

The series - still bearing the graffiti marks - now resides in the permanent collection of the Bronx Museum. 

In 2002 Item Editions produced a bilingual reprint of the original 1980 work  - a debossed leather cover housing nine prints. It is valued at around $500 US. 

Alex Grunenfelder | 25.47m2

Alex Grunenfelder

25.47m2

Seoul, Korea: Self-published, 2020 

624 pp., 28.8 x 28.3 cm, hardcover 

Edition size unknown

"Produced during an artist residency in Seoul Korea, 25.47m2 is a 624-page book explores the relationship between printed matter and spatial environments. Taking inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science” in which he imagines an enormous map equal in size to the empire it represents, 25.47m2 contains the floor plan of a typical 274 square-foot Seoul officetel apartment reproduced at a 1:1 scale and tiled over 312 recto pages. The book’s 312 verso pages show a corresponding life-size and optically flattened photograph of the entire contents of the apartment.

Philosophically the book investigates the role of text, image and the gaze in creating and prehending space, and the inherently dual nature of printed matter as both object and representation, substrate and image. The floor plan, a graphic sign that serves as the primary document in defining the prospective real estate asset, typically operates at a high degree of formal abstraction. Rendering the plan at 1:1 eliminates the abstraction of scale and materializes the document as an object that physically embodies the surface area it represents, collapsing the separation between the plan and the space into a singular object. When reading the book the reader is literally traversing the dimensions of the apartment.

The form of a bound book inherently fragments this space into pages, preventing the spectator’s eye from grasping a total overview. There is no unified gaze, sightline or focal point. Instead, the eye must traverse the space in a serial fashion, one page at a time, with no view of what lies ahead and only a memory of what has preceded. Fragmenting the plan and photo into a sequence of uniform segments affords equal consideration to every square foot, yielding a very close reading of the space.

The project has also been presented in the form of 2 exhibitions. The launch at the RAT school of ART in Seoul presented the book within a contiguous life-size installation of the floor plan. At the Vancouver Art Book Fair the book was presented alongside the complete 1:1 photo rendered on a single 25.47m2 sheet of paper."

- Alex Grunenfelder

Robert Watts | $ Bills In Wood Chest

Robert Watts

$ Bills In Wood Chest

New York City, USA: Fluxus, [c1975]

17.8 x 41.3 x 9.2 cm.

Edition size unknown

A wooden box containing offset lithographs of Bob Watts' Dollar Bill work from 1962. The bills were originally designed to be distributed in large quantities, with the idea of devaluing both art and currency. 

The bill was also included in Fluxus 1, and the Anthology of Contemporary Engraving: The International Avant-Garde: America Discovered: Volume 5. 

Gerald Ferguson | Selected Works

Gerald Ferguson

Selected Works

Halifax, Canada: Anna Leonoewens Gallery/Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1974

14 pp., 8vo., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

From a twelve-day exhibition held in March of 1974, this slim publication documents work from 1969 to 1973. Ferguson, who arrived in Halifax in 1969, and taught at NSCAD until 2006, was one of the preeminent Canadian conceptual artists, and a primary force behind the rise of the school's influence. 

Available on Ebay, for $330 US, here. 

Linda Neaman | Foot Facts

Linda Neaman

Foot Facts

Buffalo, USA: Hallwells, 1983

[18] pp., 22 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Top Stories was a prose periodical featuring experimental writing by women authors and artists. The series included staple-bound booklets by Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Pati Hill, Mary Kelly, Cookie Mueller, and others. 

The series is published by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, an artist-run centre founded by Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Larry Lundy, Cindy Sherman and Michael Zwack in 1974. 

The fifth issue (of a total of 29 publications) presents an analysis of how women’s feet have been objectified and tortured over the years. Neaman's writings are illustrated with images of high heels, self-defence instructions, and reflexology charts.

Foot Facts is Neaman's second publication, after Sex & Monsters (also published by Hallwells, in 1980). Her third book, Dead Stuff, was published almost thirty years later, in 2012.

Foot Facts is available from Printed Matter, for $30 US, here.