Hearts, spots, eggs and peas

 

Karel Appel | Musique Barbare

Karel Appel

Musique Barbare

Baarn, Holland: WVB, 1963

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

Originally composed for a documentary about Appel directed by filmmaker Jan Vrijman, this three-track LP features musique concrete recorded at the Insituut voor Sonologie in the Netherlands, with the help of composer Frits Weiland. Electric organ and various percussive sounds (distorted kettle drums perhaps most notably) are subjected to tape-speed manipulation. 

The first edition featured a thick gatefold cover and a 26-page book, and some copies were accompanied by a lithograph, with instructions that “It is strictly forbidden to sell this litho separately from the album Musique Barbare."

Depending on condition, copies with the lithograph sell for upwards of a thousand dollars.

Walter Robinson, RIP

Painter Walter Robinson has died, at the age of 74. In addition to his own art practice, Robinson cofounded Printed Matter (with Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard) in 1976, was part of the Collaborative Projects collective (with Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer and others) and edited Art-Rite Magazine (with Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn). He also coined the term Zombie Formalism. 

"The wonderful and wry Walter Robinson, painter, writer, and editor, was one of Printed Matter’s founding members. In the decades since he has shared a long history with us as a friend, collaborator and frequent supporter, and many of his projects have remained hugely important to Printed Matter’s own storyline. We are deeply sad to learn of his recent passing.

Walter was one of the founding editors of Art-Rite, an underground arts magazine that served a new generation of arts writing, presenting a platform for lively criticism and off-beat artists’ projects from a community of downtown artists — an incredible publication and archive that was the focus of our 2023 exhibition From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite. Through that process Walter brought a wealth of knowledge and insight, and helped to paint a richly rendered history of his experience co-editing the publication, sharing anecdotes and remembrances from the time. He was also an active member of Collaborative Projects Inc (Colab), the dynamic gathering of young artists who organized a series of now legendary shows and other art initiatives in the late 1970s – mid 1980s. In 2016 we had the pleasure of publishing a book that collected the varied work of the group, bookended by two pieces of writing by Walter.

Across his many projects in the arts, Walter brought an insuppressible energy to his work and collaborations that was inventive, generous, and often delivered with incisive humor. His lasting impact has been felt profoundly across New York’s arts culture and beyond. We’ll miss him dearly.”

- Printed Matter press release

Per Kirkeby | 4 Flux Drinks

Per Kirkeby

4 Flux Drinks

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1967

10 × 11.9 × 0.9 cm

Edition size unknown

4 Flux Drinks consists of a Canal Street plastic box with an offset label designed by George Maciunas, containing four altered tea bags. Various Fluxus newsletters list the tea bags as containing salt, sugar, ground aspirin and citric acid.

Both the box size and colour varied: it was issued in rectangular and square boxes which were transparent, white and red. Three different cover designs were distributed and at least two never used (see below). 

As was often the case, an artist would casually mention an idea and Maciunas would realize the work with little or no further involvement from them. 

From an interview in 1985 for Fluxus Codex: 

Per Kirkeby: We started out with salt - that was the basic idea. Salt was something that disappeared

in hot water. You can taste jt but you can’t see it. But you are affected by it. Citric Acid. Aspirins.

Jon Hendricks: You never knew that he had done them though?

Kirkeby: I knew from the newsletters. 

Hendricks: But he never sent them?

Kirkeby: No. That was also part of it. When / got those letters about the Flux Food Fest, | somehow couldn’t react to it. Had | been in New York, | probably would have done something. In that sense I’m a painter too, and | am simply very attached to concrete things.

Dave Dyment/Roula Partheniou | We Love

The Sweetest Little Thing is an event held annually on Valentine’s Day, which features an in-person and online auction to benefit Struts and the Owens Art Gallery. 

This year includes affordably priced works by Shary Boyle, Micah Lexier, Andrea Mortson, Graeme Patterson, Kerri Reid, Jon Sasaki, Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky and others who have appeared on this site numerous times. 

Roula and I donated this collaborative work, made last month. It is a plexiglass sculpture painted with acrylic paint and features a wooden gravity bar on the verso. 

100% of the proceeds from the auction go towards programming costs of the two galleries. 

Bid here: 

https://www.32auctions.com/organizations/78578/auctions/175799?r=1&t=all

Emmett Williams | Poems 1950-2003

Emmett Williams

Poems 1950-2003

Berlin, Germany: Edition RZ, 2004

12” vinly picture disk

Edition size unknown

Released three years before his death in 2007, this LP features over thirty short spoken word performances ranging in length from a quarter of a minute, to three and a half. The recordings were made between 2000 to 2003. The Last French-Fried Potato was originally released as a 20-page booklet in the Something Else Press Great Bear Pamphlet series. 

“This tiny sampling of my poetic oeuvre is a very mixed bag, as they say; so much so that I’m inclined to call it a bag of tricks. To confuse matters, some of the poems were meant to be looked at rather than read aloud, and others were intended to be performed with sound effects and slide projections.”

- Emmett Williams

The End Of The World 0:17

Once Upon A Time   0:24

Good Evening, Herr Goethe… 0:16

Good Evening, Dear Friedrich… 0:16

For Marilyn Monroe 0:23

Ach Bun Was   0:24

The Moon Is Green / Der Mond Ist Grün 0:44

Oracle 1:34

The Last French-Fried Potato 0:17

I Think Therefore I Am 1:42

A Book About Eggs 0:47

Litany And Response For Alison Knowles I 1:41

Litany And Response For Alison Knowles II 0:48

A Selection From 5,000 New Ways 2:16

Duet 1:32

Do You Remember? 2:20

Triadic Landscapes   1:31

Rotapoems, Six Variations On A Poem By Dieter Roth From His Lyrical Collection "Scheisse" 3:29

For Diter Rot 0:34

A Fragment 3:23

Souvenir Portraits From The Passing Parade In Dreamland 1:16

Portraits Of The Artist With Holes In His Head 0:47

Portraits Of The Artist As Primitive Man 0:30

Portraits Of The Artist As Dowager Empresses 0:34

Portrait-Studies Of Wholesale Meat Distributors 1:10

A Portrait Gallery Of Snoopers And Snuffers 0:50

Performance Art 0:36

In Vino Veritats 0:15

Vergissmeinnichte 0:28

Aphrodisiacal Applesauce 3:46

A Broken Alphabet   1:33

Herman de Vries | Humulus Lupulus

Herman de Vries

Humulus Lupulus

Tuttlingen, Germany: Galerie der Stadt Tuttlingen, 2016

16 x 25 x 4.5 cm.

Edition of 19 titled, signed and numbered copies

A grey cardboard box housing hops humulus lupulus from the exhibition herman de vries – no beginning, no end, which ran from the 10th of September to the 16th October, 2016, at Galerie der Stadt Tuttlingen. The work is signed, numbered and titled in graphite pencil by the artist, on the cover of the box. 

Accordion-Fold Artists’ Books

Leporellos by Kiki Smith, Kay Rosen, Nancy Karp, Emmett Williams, Diane Borsato, Raymond Pettibon, Miranda Maher, Robert Morris, Peter E. Clarke, Dave Dyment, Athena Tacha, Dennis Oppenheim, Hansjörg Mayer, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Lucio Fontana. 

Hollis Frampton | Poetic Justice

Hollis Frampton

Poetic Justice

Rochester, USA: Visual Studies Workshop, 1973

[unpaginated], 13.3 × 21.3 cm., softcover

Edition of 150 signed and unnumbered copies

Hapax Legomena is a seven-part film cycle by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who considers the series to be "a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities." 'Hapax Legomena' translates to "things said one time."

Poetic Justice (1972) is the second in the series, following Nostalgia (1971), and followed by Critical Mass, Travelling Matte, Ordinary Matter, Remote Control and Special Effects. 

The film is a continuous static shot of a stack of papers, on a table next to a plant and a cup of coffee. Page after page is placed on top of each other, forming a script that tells a surreal story.

In an interview Film Culture magazine, Frampton said that the idea of turning the film into a bookwork came from Nathan and Joan Lyons. Lyons said: 

When | first saw Hollis Frampton’s films, | was mesmerized by the clarity and brilliance with which he set about his project of deconstructing the language of film. Isn’t this what we were doing with the book in the 1970s as well? | sought and received permission to make a book of Poetic Justice. Like book pages, each shot in this film was given equal time. There is only one image, a tableau of a table with a coffee cup and a cactus bookending a film script which delineates 240 separate shots.”

"This book swims upstream to the place where it was spawned. Twenty years ago when | disbelieved that it would ever be given to me to make films, and when | was a lowercase surrealist, and when | believed that film-making started, like making love by telephone, with a script... wrote film scripts. Later, it came time to make a work in seven parts, of which Poetic Justice is the uncomfortable (it doesn’t move) second, and to recapitulate some of the history of film art as though it were my own life to recollect.

Such stereoscopy is not impossible. Ken Jacobs has given us a film in which simultaneous tridimensional spaces confound our various eyes: perfectly impossible, wholly realized. Earlier, a poet achieved a double exposure of Ulysses imprisoned in a horned flame, together with certain propositions of Richard of St. Victor—although there obtains by now other (and, for us, perhaps ampler) precedent for intercourse among modalities of vision and metalanguages of the seen.

That any book should share significant qualities with any film surprises me, penetrates to an obscure flaw among rejections crucial enough at one time. Now | suspect that unquestioning acceptance or unquestioning dismissal of the narrative propensities of the mind, lie to right and left of a major channel along which energy has leaked from film art. This leakage can be dealt with. If it is customary to say that film is young among the arts, it is more responsible to notice that film is the first of the arts that has its roots in consciousness as we know it."

— Hollis Frampton, afterword