AA Bronson | life and works

AA Bronson

life and works

Brussels, Belgium: Michèle Didier, 2009

60 pp., 18 × 15.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 88 + 12AP

A blank book, other than the cover page, made entirely of transparent plastic sheets. The concept identically reproduces Piero Manzoni's life and works, published by Jes Petersen in 1963 (see earlier post, here). 

Alison Knowles

Alison Knowles celebrates her 90th birthday today. 

Stephen Willats | Balcony

Stephen Willats

Balcony

London, UK: Imprint93, 1994

staple-bound

Edition size unknown

"Xerox printing with stapled binding. I personally hand made all of the copies! (Probably no more than 125-150 in total.) I made the dust jackets from grease proof paper from the supermarket! (It changes color over time!)"

- Matthew Higgs

Susan Hiller | By Night

Susan Hiller 

By Night

London, UK: Tate Gallery, 2018

5.2 x 7.4 cm. 

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

Part of the ongoing series Rough Seas, which Hiller has been producing since 1982, using found vintage postcards depicting the English coast and the sea. This edition features images of the sea taken at night, many featuring lighthouses, and many with unnatural or ghostly colours. 

The miniature postcards are presented in a cloth covered box lined with douppion silk, and are accompanied by a signed and numbered card. 

Produced as a fundraiser for the Tate, this work can be purchased from the publisher, here. 

Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci died on this day six years ago, at the age of 77. 

Maurizio Nannucci | Not More Than Fifty Thousand Tourists Have Visited the Antarctic

Maurizio Nannucci

Not More Than Fifty Thousand Tourists Have Visited the Antarctic 

Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 2003

30 x 20"

Edition of 1000

The Art Metropole site lists this as the sixth iteration in the "Shopping Bags By Artists' series, but if it was 2003, I'm inclined to think it was the third. If I remember correctly, it was preceded by Yoko Ono and Dan Graham, and followed by John Jack Baylin and Ross Sinclair. After I left the series continued with bags by Michael Snow and Jonathan Monk. Almost a decade prior, Art Metropole and Printed Matter produced a paper shopping bag by Richard Prince and Lawrence Weiner. 

The silkscreened bags were produced to take to Art Basel each year, and were available free with purchase. Sometimes they were used to carry books or editions home, but mostly they tended to be saved. The Ono bag often appears for sale or at auction. 

Nannucci's bright yellow shopping bag is emblazoned with the text “NOT MORE THAN FIFTY THOUSAND TOURISTS HAVE VISITED THE ANTARCTIC”. 

General Idea Tote Bag

General Idea

General Idea Tote Bag

Geneva, Switzerland: JRPIEditions, 2022

30 x 40 cm.

Edition size unknown

A tote bag produced to accompany the exhibition catalogue for the General Idea traveling retrospective, which debuted in Ottawa last June and continued until the end of November, 2022. Billed as the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition of General Idea to date, the show is currently on display at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (until July 16th, 2023) and will then travel to the Gropius Bau in Berlin.

The bag is available from Printed Matter, here, for $40.00 US.

 

Alice Lang | Butt Vessel

Alice Lang 

Butt Vessel

Los Angeles, USA: Self-published, 2022

5.25 x 3.25 x 4.5"

Unlimited numbered edition

A mug or flower vase cast consisting of a scaled down 3D body scan of the artist, cast in doll porcelain. Each are hand-painted to include atomically correct replications of her freckles, moles and pubic hair (and nipples, on the sold separately Boob Vessel). 

Priced at $80 US, they are made to order from the artist, here, or available from the New Museum store, here. 

Yoko Ono | I Love You Earth

Today is the 53rd annual Earth Day. On April 22nd, 1970, United States Senator Gaylord Nelson initiated a nationwide environmental teach-in, based on peace activist John McConnell's proposed day to honour the Earth, and the concept of peace. Twenty years later, in 1990, the concept went global, with events organized in 141 nations (I marched in Toronto that year). Now more than a billion people participate, across 193 countries. 

The above billboard and text work is based on the closing song from Yoko Ono's LP StarPeace. The 1985 record was almost universally maligned, and not unfairly. Sounds gave it a one star review, calling it "a slab of pretentious AOR offal". Spin Magazine called it "a Sesame Street album for children who think My Weekly Reader has been withholding the truth", and said that "the album's placidity and earnestness make embarrassing claims on our emotions".

The poor response to the record led to Ono withdrawing from music, later saying "After Starpeace I was totally discouraged...by the fact that there was no kind of demand for what I was doing, to put it mildly!". She returned eleven years later with the brilliant Rising, in 1996. 

I LOVE YOU EARTH joins IMAGINE PEACE and FLY as Ono's most seen billboard projects, following the War Is Over! collaboration with John Lennon in the early seventies. 

Forthcoming

The blog has been on auto-pilot for the past couple of weeks, as we catch up on things following our trip to Toronto. The books in the top image are from there - half gifted, half purchased. The second image are titles that have arrived in the mail in that time (and the preceding weeks). I'll endeavour to get to them all shortly. 

 

Eduardo Kac | Pornéia

Eduardo Kac

Pornéia

Milan, Italy: Alga Marghen, 2016

31.5 x 31.5 cm.

Edition of 276

A single-sided vinyl LP containing a 40 page (30 x 29.5 cm.) booklet, launched at La Plaque Tournante, in Berlin on September 14th of 2016, to accompany a solo exhibition of the artist's work curated by Frederic Acquaviva. 

Pornéia is available from Printed Matter, here, for $25.00 US ($22.50 for members). A copy with a unique etching (below) is available for $3000 US, here. 

 

"These previously unissued recordings from the Porn Art Movement (1980-1982) include five performances recorded live on Ipanema Beach in 1982, as well as a selection of previously unheard studio recordings of my yellpoems (Poemas-pra- gritar). I used to perform these works in squares, beaches, parks, theatres and many other locations at the time—often with my signature pink miniskirt, when not au naturel.

I fused existing coarse and curse words with parts of words, neologisms, salacious buffoonery, the antinormative scribblings of toilet-wall graffiti, commonplaces, blasphemy, expletives, agrammatisms, incorrect orthography, slangy expressions, lexical exorbitance, general obscenities, the gross and the grotesque, into a new whole. My use of stigmatizing words in these pornpoems transformed them from denigratory to empowering, through political critique and defiance.

The LP also includes the Manifesto Pornô (1980) and four recordings of Flatographic poems (Poemas flatográficos), from 1982, in which I use the flatus as a compositional unit and the mellifluous flatal flow as material. Flatographic poems have visual scores— one of which can be seen on the cover—for metabolic performances that combine meticulous precision with gaseous explosiveness of scatological resonance. Demanding a high level of self-mastery on the part of the performer, this anal poetry was the only series of works produced in the Movement to literally explore the internal side of the body."

- Eduardo Kac, 2016