Cameron Jamie | Front Lawn Funerals and Cemeteries

Cameron Jamie

Front Lawn Funerals and Cemeteries

Zürich, Switzerland: Edition Patrick Frey, 2015

[144] pp., 23.5 x 35 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Cameron Jamie began photographing the Halloween decorations that adorned the homes in his suburban Los Angeles neighbourhood, in 1984. After relocating to France, he continued to travel back to L.A. to continue documenting the makeshift cemeteries, ghosts, guillotines, skeletons and scarecrows, where scenes of death play out for the amusement of children. 

 

"The book itself is an exceptionally produced, as is everything on Edition Patrick Frey, complete with glow in the dark cover and gravestone-imitated endpapers. It is a rightful production for such a project, the monochrome images inside becoming pathologically reduced from the myopia of nostalgic affect that color sometimes disables." 

- Brad Feuerhelm

Emmett Williams | Genesis: A Light Poem

Emmett Williams

Genesis: A Light Poem

Lodz, Poland: International Artists' Museum, 1991

22 pp., 24 x 24 cm., hardcover

Edition of 95 signed and numbered copies

Genesis: A Light Poem - translated into Polish by Piotr Bikont and Andrzej Chetko - consists of twenty-two pages with embossed typography on hand pressed white paper, and a portrait of Emmett Williams on front and back cover. 

During the book presentation in Lodz the artist recited the poem in a room lit by candles. After reading each letter he blew out a candle. By the time of the poem's end, the room was dark. 

Simon Cutts | workfortheeyetodo

Simon Cutts

workfortheeyetodo

Tipperary, Ireland: Coracle Press, nd [c.1993]

6.5 x 20.5 cm.

Edition size unknown

Coracle Press founders Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn later teamed up with Maggie Smith to open Workfortheeyetodo, a "book-space" that operated as a bookstore, distribution centre and reference place for the activities exploring the book as a medium. The centre hosted exhibitions, displays, and readings, often exploring the intersection between poetry and visual art. 

Workfortheeyetodo operated from 1992 to 1997. This undated enamel plaque is thought to be from the first year of operation. It features corner holes for hanging and his housed in a cardboard box. 

Nancy Holt | Time Outs

Nancy Holt

Time Outs 

Rochester, USA: Visual Studies Workshop, 1985

64 pp., 28 x 23 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

“In this book, Holt, an internationally known sculptor and video-filmmaker emerges as a longtime football fan. Photographs of football games, shot off the television screen, are accompanied by texts consisting of TV commentary and interviews with the players.” 

- Visual Studies Workshop

Xiu Xiu | Deforms the Unborn

Xiu Xiu

Deforms the Unborn

New York City, USA: Guggenheim, 2018

24 pp., 21.6 x 17.8 cm., staple bound

Edition size unknown

In May of 2018, the band Xiu Xiu premiered a long piece titled "Deforms the Unborn" at the Guggenheim Museum. The work was about the "agonizing experience of demonic possession, based on firsthand accounts of exorcisms in modern history." 

The composition was inspired by Danh Vo’s body of work titled after obscenities uttered in William Friedkin’s classic horror film, The Exorcist (1973).

Two years later, a three track LP was self-published by the band, as MP3s. 

Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins died on this day twenty-five years ago, in Quebec City, at age 60. 

Ida Applebroog, RIP

It was announced today that Ida Applebroog has died at the age of 93. 

Masanao Hirayama | Pyramid Quiz

Masanao Hirayama

Pyramid Quiz

Tokyo, Japan: Editions OK FRED, 2014

24 pp., 20 x 15 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 100

Thin zine Hirayama's Quiz series, with accompanying 15 x 4.5cm bookmark. 

Available from Art Metropole, for $17.00 CDN, here. 

John Waters | Tragedy

John Waters

Tragedy

Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett, 2015

46 x 46 x 12.5 cm

Edition of 25 signed and numbered copies

Scalp as sculpture, for Parkett magazine issue #96. Made of acrylic, synthetic hair, painted silicone, and urethane, the work resembles a serial killer's trophy, with the type of 'bad taste' artist and filmmaker John Waters is known for.

Waters has had an obsession with Jayne Mansfield since he first saw Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, as a skinny ten year old boy in 1956. "This wasn't a movie that my boy classmates wanted to see or cared about," he told The Director's Guild of America Quarterly, "they weren't interested in discussing Jayne Mansfield's complete lack of roots. I really had no one that I could be enthusiastic with about it. So it was a private secret of mine, this movie."

He has referred to his frequent collaborator, the performer Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead 1945 – 1988) as his own Jayne Mansfield. "Well, Jayne Mansfield mixed with Godzilla."

When Mansfield died in a car accident in 1967 it was reported that the actress was decapitated. The urban legend originated with police photographs of her crashed car with its top virtually sheared off, and what resembled a blonde-haired head tangled in the smashed windshield.  

Twenty years later the New York Times sent a journalist to interview the undertaker, who clarified that it was only her wig that came off in the crash. Shortly afterward another report claimed that part of her scalp was separated from her skull, also.

After Mansfield's death, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommended requiring a steel underride guard on all tractor-trailers, something the trucking industry was slow to adopt. In the USA, the underride guard is known an "ICC bumper", or a "Mansfield bar".

"John Waters, appropriately known as the 'Pope of Trash', adores bad taste and things despicable, negative, and disgusting. He loves difference and paradox." 

- Christine Macel, Parkett  

"Wouldn't Jayne Mansfield appreciate the irony of my appalling taste inside a tony swiss art magazine with highbrow credentials?"

- John Waters