Claes Oldenburg | London Knees 1966

Claes Oldenburg

London Knees 1966

London, UK/Berlin, Germany: Editions Alecto/Neuendorf Verlag, 1968

19 x 43.2 x 29.5 cm.

Edition of 120 signed and numbered copies [+10 AP]

I’ve never particularly been a fan of the large scale public artworks that Claes Oldenburg is best known for (with a few notable exceptions), but hold many of his editioned works in high regard. And perhaps my favourite of them all is London Knees, which served double-duty as both an elaborate boxed multiple, and a proposal for a monumental public art work. 

Oldenburg first visited London in October of 1966, while preparing for a solo exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery. He became fascinated with the recent inventions of the miniskirt and go-go boots and imagined a pair of knees captured below the skirt and above the boots as a colossal monument.

The boxed work contains twenty-one prints that image the knees as colossal monuments situated around London, and a pair of flesh-like, life-size knees with a base, all contained in a traveling valise.

The knees were cast in flexible latex by Models (London) Ltd, coated in polyurethane by Hadfields Radiation Research Ltd, Surrey, and are contained in wool felt bags. The acrylic bases were made by J Watson (London) and Co Ltd, London and the boxes by F & J Randall Ltd, London. The papers have been printed by Lautrec Litho Ltd, Leeds and by Editions Alecto Ltd, London.

In addition to the ten artists proofs, there are believed to be three pairs of knees produced as "allowanced for mistakes”. At least one of these has made it to auction, without the box and accompanying material. The works were advertised with a folder contained nine photographic slides (see below). 

"Created as a proposal for a gigantic monument at the Victoria Embankment, London. 'London Knees' (1966), was a very contemporary phenomenon, due to the recent invention of the miniskirt. It is difficult now to imagine how revolutionary this paradoxical combination of masculine voyeurism and feminine liberation seemed in its time. However, 'Knees' would not have qualified as the subject of a colossal monument, without links to other formal themes observed in London's surroundings, such as turrets and columns in the city's architecture or the ubiquitous posters of a government anti-smoking campaign showing heaps of butts, or 'fagends'. The architectural and fetishistic functions of 'Knees' was accentuated by the fashion of wearing boots with the mini, which created a sharply demarcated area of the body suitable for objectification.” 

- Claes Oldenburg

Mel Chin and Helen Nagge | Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place

Mel Chin and Helen Nagge

Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2023

40 pp., 8.5 x 11”, softcover

Edition size unknown

When first visiting Los Angeles, the thing that struck me most about the city is how many of the street names were already familiar to me. Rodeo Drive, Wilshire Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, Fairfax Avenue, and countless others I had heard mentioned in cinema or on television. Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive both have films named after them (by Billy Wilder and David Lynch, respectively). 

And of course Melrose Avenue is known for Melrose Place, itself a spin-off from Beverely Hills 90210. I’ve only seen a single episode of the latter (I recall every single scene ending with one of the two male leads storming out of the room indignantly) and I’ve never seen the former, but obviously it’s impact was huge. 

Mel Chin told Slate magazine a story about flying from L.A. to Georgia and looking down at the landscape below and being unable to shake the place he had just left.  “I started to think, L.A. is in the air,” he said, "It’s through microwave transmission, through the television that’s on down there. Television is the modern cathode ray etching products into our brains.”

Chin formed a group called the GALA Committee in 1995 and began a two-year, covert, viral, public art project using Melrose Place as his medium. 

Like a heist in reverse, "In the Name of the Place” involved members of the GALA Committee  (“GA” for the University of Georgia and “LA” for the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles) infiltrating the series with artworks they created specifically for it, a kind of ‘anti-product placement’. 

They tracked down Deborah Siegel, the Set Decorator for the series, and proposed to her that GALA would produce artworks for Melrose Place, at no cost. The show agreed. 

The group produced over a hundred pieces across two seasons of the series. These works covertly addressed subjects such as reproductive rights, AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, drug and alcohol abuse, and corporate malfeasance. 

In one scene (involving unprotected sex) GALA dressed the character’s room with bedsheets adorned with images of hundreds of unrolled condoms. In another, an Absolute Vodka ad features an image of the Oklahoma city bombing. A bag of Chinese take-out is emblazoned the Chinese characters for  "Human Rights" and "Turmoil"; terms used by the Chinese government to justify the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I’ve read about other instances of covert props, but none to this extant, or with this wide reach. A queer production designer for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 smuggled in some objects that played up the (not so discreet) homoeroticism of the script, including the main character having a "No Chicks Allowed" sign on his bedroom door, and a board game in his closet called Probe. 

The bank robbery scene in Baby Driver was supposed to include Michael Myers masks from the Halloween series, but the studio was unable to obtain the rights. So director Edgar Wright reached out to Toronto comic Mike Myers and asked him to grant permission to use his likeness for the masks. He found the joke funny, and agreed. 

James Franco smuggled himself into a soap opera, ostensibly as some kind of art project. The film star appeared on General Hospital in 2009 and reprised the role in 2011. It later came out that the ‘intervention’ was for a forthcoming documentary, which has yet to see release. 

Similar to the General Idea AIDs “Image Virus” project, Chin characterizes the project as like a virus, symbiotic and invisible. The work was exhibited at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, in Los Angeles, in 1997, as part of "Uncommon Sense”, alongside The Cornerstone Theater, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ann Carlson & Mary Ellen Strom, Rick Lowe and Karen Finley. 

In an otherwise negative review of the show, Christopher Knight in the LA Times singled out the work as "a conceptually elastic, wonderfully loopy exercise in post-Pop art.” He goes on to say that Chin "scrupulously avoids placing art on a pedestal above TV; he’s not holier-than-thou. It’s great fun to see the art turn up casually and without fanfare on TV, a place notably inhospitable to the genre. It’s also disorienting. The cartoonish unreality of the show suddenly becomes tangible, while the material presence of art assumes emphatically fictional proportions. The oddly refreshing result is a subtle feeling of critical participation in the usually passive act of TV viewing."

Following the exhibition, the props were sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. The auction catalogue served double duty as an artists’ book, documenting the works and articulating the framework of the GALA Committee. It quickly become scarce.

Primetime Contemporary Art is a facsimile reproduction released by Primary Information, the Brooklyn publisher rightly heralded for their commitment to making rare and significant publications available and affordable. Following the re-publication of this project, the Wikipedia page for Melrose Place now features a section (after "Nielsen ratings", "Spin-offs”, and “Lawsuit”) about the GALA Committee and their intervention almost thirty years ago. 

Primetime Contemporary Art is available from Primary Information, for $15.00 US, here. 

Jonathan Monk | Crackers

Jonathan Monk

Crackers

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2023

One size fits all

Edition of 50 signed copies

To commemorate Jonathan Monk’s Crackers collection reaching the milestone of fifty copies, Paul+Wendy Projects released this embroidered 100% cotton baseball cap emblazoned with the word, in an edition of fifty. 

The one-size-fits-all adjustable cap is accompanied by a card signed by the artist and is available for fifty dollars (CDN) from the publisher, here. 

"In my early teens my mother would often react to certain things I did or said with...you must be crackers*...

Many years later, I read that Ed Ruscha said Crackers, published by Heavy Industry Publications, Hollywood in 1969 (the year of my birth), was the least popular of his artist books. It is also the cheapest and most readily available.

A combination of all of the above started my ongoing collection of the publication.

*crackers adjective (UK informal) silly, stupid, or slightly mentally ill (Cambridge Dictionary)."

- Jonathan Monk

Robert Morris | Continuous Project Altered Daily

Robert Morris

Continuous Project Altered Daily

New York City, USA: Multiples, Inc., 1970

[18] pp., 11.5 x 30.5 cm., accordion-fold

Edition of 1200

Continuous Project Altered Daily documents an installation of materials such as earth, water, grease, wood, plastic, felt, string, light, photographs, and sound. The form was, as the title suggests, altered daily.

Edited by Marian Goodman for inclusion in the Artists & Photographs box (which also included Christo, Douglas Heubler, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and others) the leporello book presents 16 sepia-toned photos of the installation showing twelve stages of the work, along with detail shots of the piece.

"This cool and important accordion is the documentation of a work by Morris (1931-2018) which took place over a 22 day period at the dealer Leo Castelli's warehouse in New York. Scattered along a wall Morris brought in a cornucopia of different materials such as: earth, clay, asbestos, cotton, water, grease, plastic, felt, wood, thread waste, electric lights, photographs, and a tape recorder. Morris started the work on February 28th and over the next 22 day span he would move these materials into different combinations creating an ongoing work that never solidified into any one shape, thus eliding definition as a sculpture and moving into something much less definable and infinity variable. Visitors were invited to visit during the afternoons and Morris worked on the piece at other times. 

A pioneer and theoretician of the emerging minimal, process art, earth art and anti-form movements of the period Morris is an important historical figure. Morris would describe this piece as both "A reverse excavation, building up ruins,"(1) and "The most mythical thing I've ever done. Cain-like of dirt, a construction that goes nowhere, a constructed ruin built over an abandoned agricultural organization." Underlining the importance of this work within his larger career Thomas Kren, a former curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, remarked that "Robert Morris' entire oeuvre is a single work — 'a continuous project altered daily.'"

The accordion format is the ideal medium with which to demonstrate the changes that took place during these 22 days, and it's also one that offers the viewer a chance to see in one full sweep the constantly mutating processes that defined this work or non-work.”

- Stephen Perkins, Accordion Publications

Robert Breer | Flix

Robert Breer

Flix

Montreal, Canada: La Cinémathèque Canadienne, 1967

90 pp., 10.5 x 6.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

In May of 2005, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf hosted what they billed as "the world’s first comprehensive exhibition on the subject of the convergence of art, animation and film in the 20th Century”. Titled 

Daumenkino (or The Flip Book Show), the exhibition featured flip books from more than 170 artists and filmmakers, including John Baldessari, Tacita Dean, Julia Featheringill, Jårg Geismar, Volker Gerling, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Keith Haring, Sabine Hecher, William Kentridge, Sigrun Köhler, Jonathan Monk, Bruce Nauman, Stephanie Ognar, Tony Oursler, Dieter Roth, Miguel Rothschild, Jack Smith, Beat Streuli, Andy Warhol, Janet Zweig and Robert Breer.

Breer’s Flix was published by the Cinémathèque Canadienne in Montreal as part of a series of thirteen animated flip books commissioned on the occasion of the World Retrospective of Animation Cinema in 1967. The series also included Jan Lenica, Emile Cohl (twice), Yoji Kuri, Gene Deitch, Vladimir Lehky, and Otto Messmer, the creator of Felix the Cat. 

All are scarce, but Breer's - which features geometrical forms in black and yellow on a white background - seems to be the most rare - with prices ranging from $400 to $1600 US. 

Breer, who died at the age of 85 in 2011, had been called “the kinetic poet of the avant-garde”. 

Johanna VanDerBeek, Stan VanDerBeek, and Robert Breer at the World Retrospective of Animation Cinema in 1967.

herman de vries | harvest

herman de vries 

harvest

Bogor, Indonesia: Roel Arkesteijn, 2016

50 × 30 × 11 cm.

Edition of 13 signed, numbered and dated copies [+ 1 AP, 2 HC, 1 PP]

Published on the occasion of the exhibition herman de vries. basic values at the Erasmus Huis, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2015, as part of the Jakarta Biennale, this work includes a Javanese rice sickle (arit), Javanese newspapers and a signed and numbered book basic values housed in a silkscreened wooden box.

Martin Kippenberger and Wilhelm Schürmann | Song of Joy

Martin Kippenberger and Wilhelm Schürmann

Song of Joy

Aachen, Germany: Neue Galerie Sammlung Ludwig, 1983

[20] pp., 29.7 × 21 × 0.1 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

An early exhibition catalogue produced in an edition of approximately 800 copies. 

Available from Jonathan Hill Bookseller, here, for $300. 

“Song of Joy was published to accompany a group exhibition by Martin Kippenberger (‘gemalte bilder’ [painted images]) and his friend, the photographer and collector Wilhelm Schürmann [b. 1946] (‘Fotografierte Bilder’ [photographed images]) at the Neue Galerie Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen from 10 June to 24 July 1983. The catalogue contains a brief foreword [actually found at the end], a text co-authored by Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen…”

– Uwe Koch, Annotated catalogue raisonné of the books by Martin Kippenberger, 1977-1997 (2003)

Vision: Word of Mouth

[Various Artists]

Vision: Word of Mouth

Oakland, USA: Crown Point Press, 1980

Boxed set of 3 12” vinyl records

Edition of 1000

VISION was a journal of contemporary art published by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press irregularly between 1975 through 1982, which was edited and curated by Tom Marioni under the auspices of his “Museum of Conceptual Art (MoCA)”. The format typically took the shape of a magazine, with Issue #5 being a box of photographs and #4 being a boxed set of vinyl records. 

For this project twelve artists from California, New York and Europe were each invited to prepare a twelve minute talk on any subject. The artists included: Marioni, Robert Kushner, Marina Abramovic & Ulay, John Cage, Daniel Buren, Joan Jonas, Bryan Hunt, Chris Burden, William T. Wiley, Brice Marden, Pat Steir and Laurie Anderson.

From the liner note: "This meeting took place on Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands in the Pacific ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Japan, a few degrees above the equator north of Australia. Thirty-seven people met together over a period of a week in January 1980. Prepared talks by the twelve participating artists were given in the evenings before and after dinner. The days were spent exploring."

The box set includes a 4 page booklet, illustrated with black and white photographic portraits of the artists.

"In 1980, as part of a project called Word of Mouth, I was invited, along with eleven other artists, to go to Ponape, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. The idea was that we'd sit around talking for a few days and that the conversations would be made into a talking record.

The first night we were all really jet-lagged. But as soon as we sat down the organizers set up all these mics and switched on thousand-watt light bulbs, and we tried our best to seem as intelligent as possible.

Television had just come to Ponape a week before we arrived, and there was a strong excitement around the island, as people crowded around the few sets.

Then the day after we arrived, in a bizarre replay of the first TV show ever broadcast to Ponape, prisoners escaped from a jail, broke into the radio station and murdered the DJ. Then they went off on a rampage through the jungle armed with lawnmower blades. In all, four people were murdered in cold blood.

Detectives, flown in from Guam to investigate, swarmed everywhere. At night we stayed around in our cottages listening out into the jungle.

Finally the local chief decided to hold a ceremony for the murder victims. The artist Marina Abramović and I went, as representatives of our group, to film it.

The ceremony was held in a large thatched lean-to, and most of the ceremony involved cooking beans in pits and brewing a dark drink from roots. The smell was overwhelming. Dogs careened around barking, and everybody seemed to be having a fairly good time, as funerals go.

After a few hours, Marina and I were presented to the chief, who was sitting on a raised platform above the pits. We'd been told we couldn't turn our backs on the chief at any time, or ever be higher than he was. So we scrambled up onto the platform with our film equipment and sort of duck-waddled up backwards to the chief.

As a present I brought one of those Fred Flintstone cameras, the kind where the film canister is also the body of the camera, and I presented it to the chief. He seemed delighted and began to click off pictures. He wasn't advancing the film between shots, but since we were told we shouldn't speak unless spoken to, I wasn't able to inform him that he wasn't going to get twelve pictures, but only one, very, very complicated one.

After a couple more hours, the chief lifted his hand and there was absolute silence.

All the dogs had suddenly stopped barking. We looked around and saw the dogs. All their throats had been simultaneously cut, and their bodies, still breathing, pierced with rods, were turning on the spits. The chief insisted we join in the meal, but Marina had turned green, and I asked if we could just have ours to go. They carefully wrapped the dogs in leaves and we carried their bodies away.”

- Laurie Anderson

James Hoff | Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands

James Hoff is a Brooklyn based artist and musician, and the co-founder and director of Primary Information. Today he announced a new project on Instagram: 

"Out today! My new record “Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands,” published by @shelter_press is now available on LP and on all streaming platforms. Many who know me, know I’ve been working on this record for the last several years (and that I began the foundations of it many many years ago at @issueprojectroom).

While many think of my music as overly conceptual, this record was very personal and autobiographical. It was created from snippets of a few pop songs (by Blondie, Madonna, Lou Reed, David Bowie) that got disturbingly stuck in my head in the last few years as well as the tinnitus frequencies I’ve experienced for many decades—both of which have been exacerbated by long-term mental health issues, which were particularly acute in the last few years. While the tracks underscore and illuminate the relationship between the larger social, political, and economic conditions we live in and the sounds we experience between our ears, this album is largely a self portrait that aims to work inside the sonic conditions of our times to create something new that is personal, emotional, and yes, critical. I hope you all enjoy!

Pick it up via bandcamp (link in bio). If in Brooklyn grab it at @recordgrouch and if in Manhattan grab it at @ergotrecords If in Europe, order a copy from @shelter_press or via @boomkatonline Shops should be carrying it everywhere in a 1-2 weeks.

Special thanks to Bartolomé and Felicia at Shelter, @joshbonati for the expert mastering, @marisollimonmartinez for her piano work on “Half-After Life”, and the Jack Whitten Estate (@hauserwirth) for allowing me to use one of my favorite paintings for the cover.

Special thanks to the friends who gave me ears and critical support through the process: @glennligon, @ryandais , @matthew_w_walker__ , @dennysellson , @mashinkahakopian, and Børre Sæthre.

Lastly, thanks to the venues and curators that have given me the space and stage to play this music live over the last few years: @kamran_sadeghi_official, @pioneerworks, @29speedway, @____page_not_found____ , and @publicsfi

More shows coming in the fall. European bookers, get in touch!”

Jubal Brown | DIE SCUM

Jubal Brown

DIE SCUM 

Toronto, Canada: Impulse [b], 2021

276 pp., softcover

Edition size unknown

Not too many Canadian artists receive feature articles in the New York Times when they are 22 years old, and still in school. Toronto artist and OCADU student Jubal Brown received international coverage for a performative event in which he ingested blue icing, blue gelatin and blueberry yoghurt, and vomited it up onto a Mondrian painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The headline read "Student Says Vomiting on Painting Was an Artistic Act."

Twenty-five years later (almost to the day1) Brown released his debut novel, with Eldon Garnet’s Impulse imprint. Subtitled Sex & Drugs & Contemporary Art, DIE SCUM is described as a "punk pulp love story by a post-post-modern dandy, boy-about-town, lost in the perverse underworld of sex & drugs & culture wars.”

Now working as a Social Service Worker and Addictions Counsellor, Brown’s current work deals with addiction, dysfunctional relationships, depression and mental health issues. The book follows the protagonist, a drug dealer for the arts community obsessed with ants and old movies, during a paranoid and misanthropic depression. 

Die Scum is available for €20, here. 

1. The article by Anthony Depalma was published in the NY Times on December 4th, 1996, and DIE SCUM was launched at the Embassy Bar on December 2nd, 2021. Depalma penned a follow-up, "No Stomach for Art” a week later. 

Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely was born on this day in 1925.