Rodney Graham | Send Your Child To Art School

On this day in 2015, Plug In ICA in Winnipeg launched the Rodney Graham: Send Your Child to Art School poster project. This poster series reformulates an earlier work by Graham, taking his message street-level to provoke conversations about the priorities of our educational institutions. This commissioned posters were distributed throughout Winnipeg. 

They are still available from the great Plug In store, in a range of colours, for $20.00 CDN, here: 

https://shop.plugin.org/products/rodney-graham-send-your-child-to-art-school

"You may have seen the colourful "Send Your Child To Art School" posters around the city. It is an artwork by Canadian artist Rodney Graham, that Plug In commissioned. Even though it is a simple statement, it reflects a more general belief in the benefits of the arts, challenging common dismissals of artists and the arts as being non-productive contributors to society.

Winnipeg is a place that is full of people and institutions that already understand and promote this belief and this is why I was drawn to this city."

- Jenifer Papararo, director of artistic programs at Plug In 

Lygia Clark | Livro-obra

Lygia Clark

Livro-obra

Self-published, 1964

20.0 x 20.0 cm. [closed]

Edition of 26 signed and lettered copies

An accordion fold book produced in an edition of 26 copies, one for each letter of the alphabet. 

"Lygia Clark was one of the leading artists of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, which included poetry as well as fine arts. She skillfully plays with the boundaries of plastic art and literature and unites them in her work Livro-Obra. The geometric fragments that seem to break out of the paper make a work of art (obra) out of a book (livro) and achieves a new objectivity that seduces the viewers to indulge in the tactile stimuli."

—Miriam Minak

George Bowering | Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number Nine

George Bowering

Baseball

Toronto, Canada: The Coach House Press, 1967

[24] pp., softcover

Edition of 500

Subtitled A Poem in the Magic Number Nine, this "book-length poem" is bound in green felt-like wrappers to mimic a sports team pennant. 

The title was reissued by Coach House Books thirty six years after this original publication in 1967 (see below image). 

Bowering's other baseball titles include Poem & Other Baseballs (Windsor, Black Moss, 1976), Taking the field (Red Deer, RDC Press, 1990), Baseball Love (Vancouver, Talonbooks, 2006) and The Diamond Alphabet (Toronto, BookThug, 2011). He is also the author of a memoir about Greg Curnoe. 

"From its remarkable design to its effervescent language, George Bowering1s ode to the beautiful game is as original as it is funny, as bittersweet as it is playful. A long-out-of-print Coach House classic, originally published in 1967, Baseball weaves together mythology, autobiography, literary history and pop culture into an inimitable book-length poem that explores all the nuances of the sport. Here are all the greats: Mantle, DiMaggio, Maris, Williams and Manuel Louie, shortstop for the Wenatchee Chiefs, their exploits captured in passages of off-kilter, occasionally melancholy, lyricism. Gar Smith1s enchanting and ingenious design has also been preserved; the book, complete with green velvet-flocked covers, is shaped like a pennant that, when unfolded, forms a diamond.

A long-time utility player, Bowering (our Homer?) has written books in many different genres and was recently named Canada1s first Poet Laureate. Baseball is a tantalizing glimpse of the writer at the beginning of his illustrious career; a real curveball of a book that will dazzle literature and sports fans alike." 

- Publisher's blurb

Dorothy Iannone | The Berlin Beauties

Dorothy Iannone

The Berlin Beauties 

Berlin, Germany: The Passion Press, 1978

[68]pp., 20.5 x 24.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 475 signed and numbered copies

Subtitled Or You Have No Idea How Beautiful You Are, this limited edition artists' book was published by Mary Dorothy Verlag as The Passion Press. 

The Berlin Beauties is available here, for $450.00 US. 

Kelly Mark | Liverpool A-Z

 

Kelly Mark w/Tenantspin

Liverpool A-Z

Liverpool, UK: Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, 2006

40 pp., 8.05 x 0.23 x 20.29 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

The result of Kelly Mark's month-long residency in Liverpool in 2006 was a project in which she interviewed 26 residents, one for each letter of the alphabet: Adam, Ben, Catherine, Dolly, Eileen, Fenfen, Gill, Hilary, Iain, John, Karl, Laura, Margo, Neil, Olivier, Paul, Queenie, Roger, Steven, Tony, Uka, Vinny, Wibke, Xavier, Yorkie and Zena. 

The participants include a dancer, singer, town planner, teacher, police officer, retired postal worker, BBC presenter, a philosopher and many others. The bookwork combines photographs of each with a short quote from the video interviews Mark conducted with the Liverpudlians.  

Designed to echo the iconic London street guide, Liverpool A–Z is an attempt to create a human map of the city. Mark provides a short introduction  and Alan Dunn of Tenantspin contributes an essay. Both are excerpted below. 

“Through the process of story telling a portrait of a city emerges from its people. Using the map guide of Liverpool A-Z as a starting point twenty-six individuals, with names ranging from Adam to Zena, were asked to share personal stories, insights and opinions in order to create a temporal guide to their city, an emotive map which includes humor, sadness, anger and love. The true essence of a city is its people.”

- Kelly Mark

"The A-Z street map as we know it today was the brainchild of Phyllis Pearsall (MBE) in 1936. It is a tool with thousands of equal working parts yet activities such as house hunting or relocating inevitably make a few pages dog-eared and marked while leaving the bulk of the A-Z as pristine sheets of streets, parts of the city that one need not, should not or cannot access.

My own Liverpool A-Z, purchased in late 1994 while house-hunting, is a case in point. Pages 95-100 are loose, as are 73/74 and 117/118 – both areas of residence. Page 199 has a red line drawn along The New Chester Road to give someone directions to The Oval and page 102 has Hatton’s Lane marked. A further 10 pages have been referred to, making a total of 22 pages from 175.

From two project managers and a call for participants on the local BBC Radio station, the avenues starting opening up. As buildings grow from single buildings on the river bank, one email became a phone call became a project proposal became a letter and a group of 26 guests who are in no way the only 26 people who could have participated in Liverpool A-Z but tenantspin as the connection between all these people – direct and also remote – became the validation for this particular mapping.

Kelly and tenantspin have pieced together a city in which no areas are deemed inaccessible, unnecessary or undesirable. Arts, law, history, philosophy, entertainment, sport, activism and media are all represented. As are the gaps in-between; people as citizens, observers, doers, participants in urban life and people as fine details of this great city, brought together to form more than the sum of the parts."

- Alan Dunn

Nic Wilson | What I Saw

Nic Wilson

What I Saw

Regina, Canada: Gravitron, 2020

38 pp., 6.5 × 4.3 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

"A collection of very short essays about looking, light, grief, photography, and decay. Part historic, part poetic, and part ekphrastic, these essays are immersed in other texts, other beings, and other people, from different times, and different places."

- publisher's blurb

N.E. Thing Company Ltd | Eye Scream Letterhead

N.E. Thing Company Ltd

Eye Scream Letterhead

Vancouver, Canada: Self-published, 1977

28 x 21.7 cm.

Edition size unknown

In 1977 the N.E.Thing Company (Co-Presidents Iain and Ingrid Baxter) opened Eye Scream, a commercial ice cream restaurant, on West Fourth Avenue in Vancouver. The layout of the store, the dishware, the business cards and letterhead were all designed by the artists. 

"We decided to do the Eye Scream restaurant as a survival technique, because we didn’t have income. But it was also an art project—we showed art there and the menu had all sorts of references to art. It did generate revenue, until it took us under. It looked like we made $20,000 a month, but it cost something like $25,000 to do it. That trauma, in part, led to our split, and Iain and I got divorced soon after."

- Ingrid Baxter, ArtNews

 

Larry Clark celebrates his 79th birthday today. 

Larry Miller | Discourse on All & Everything

Larry Miller

Discourse on All & Everything

Easton, USA: Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College

17 x 11" 

Edition size unknown

Poster for a performance at Lafayette College, April 15, 1991. The work is an updated version of a performance Miller gave eleven years prior at The Kitchen, in NYC.

The event was advertised as "the first in a series of performances about coping with the fantasies, fears and paradoxes of everyday existence". The event featured hypnosis, prerecorded audio as well as slide, video and film projection.

TriQuarterly 32: Anti-Object Art

[Charles Newman, ed] 

TriQuarterly 32: Anti-Object Art

Evanston, USA: Northwestern University, 1975

[unpaginated], 23.2 x 14.6 cm., glue-bound

Edition size unknown

TriQuarterly began at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL,  in 1958. The first issue was fifty cents. The current - Issue #160 is digital only, as the journal moved online in 2010. 

Issue 32 was guest edited by Lawrene Levy and John Perreault and concentrates on conceptual and anti-object art. 

The issue documents some classic works like Eleanor Antin's Carving, Joseph Beuys' I Like American and America Likes Me, Gilbert & George's Singing Sculpture, Robert Smithson's Amarillo Ramp (which is a small fold-out poster), etc., etc. 

Other artists featured include Ira Joel Haber, Lawrence Weiner, Christo, Agnes Denes, Marjorie Strider, Douglas Huebler, Gregg Powell, Brenda Miller, John Baldessari, LeAnnn Bartok Wilchusky, Vito Acconci, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Will Insley, Phil Berkman, Michael Crane, Michael Kirby, Spephen Zaima, Jan Sullivan, Nancy Holt, Adrian Piper, Robert Barry, Richard Long, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Joseph Kosuth, Alice Aycock, A. Ribé, Daniel Buren, Rafael Ferrer, Scott Burton, and Les Levine. 

Most notable about the issue is how it tackled the subject matter graphically. The cover is made of corrugated cardboard and contains a pocket that holds "five wallet-size photos of TriQuarterly 32." Featured on the 'cover' is an image of Smithson's Spiral Jetty.