Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović turns 79 today. 

Kristján Guðmundsson

Kristján Guðmundsson died last week at the age of 81. 

Artists’ Chocolate

 

Dara Birnbaum | Rough Edits. Popular Image Video 1977-1980

Dara Birnbaum

Rough Edits. Popular Image Video 1977-1980

Halifax, Canada: Press of The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1987

130 pp., 26.5 x 19 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

After a two-year hiatus owing to limited funds, the Nova Scotia College of Art Press resumed publishing in 1978. President Garry Neill Kennedy invited Benjamin Buchloh to relocate from Dusseldorf and serve as editor. An admirer of the Nova Scotia Series (“I considered it to be one of the best edited and produced series in the field of contemporary art” he later wrote), he proposed the Nova Scotia Pamphlets as a companion project. 

His goal was to provide "artists who work outside traditional media an adequate form of publishing their work and to make it accessible when galleries and museums are reluctant to even consider the historical consequences that conceptual art and contemporary thinking in other fields have had on the definition of aesthetic practice in the beginning of the eighties.”

Martha Rosler’s 3 Works was published in 1980 and was followed by Gerhard Richter’s 128 Details from a Picture and Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and Essays. 

The fourth and final pamphlet was Rough Edits: Popular Image Video Works - 1977-1980. The booklet was based on a seminar Birnbaum gave when she taught at the school in the late seventies. Some biographies suggest that it was while teaching at NSCAD that she first began producing the edited video works that she became known for. 

This publication - one of the artist’s earliest - explores these early television appropriation works, with stills from Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry (1979) and the iconic Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79). Birnbaum describes these works as 

Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons and TV genres ( to reveal their subtexts. Birnbaum describes her tapes as new “ready-mades for the late 20th Century” and as works that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

The reader also features interviews with the artist and an essay by Norman Klein titled Audience Culture and the Video Screen.

Birnbaum died May 2nd of this year, at the age of 78. 

Amy Newman | Barnett Newman Here

Amy Newman

Barnett Newman Here

Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 2025

728 pp., 24.5 x 17 x 4.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

An epic, and likely now definitive biography of the New York abstract expressionist, by art historian and journalist Amy Newman (no relation). Granted full access to the artist's archives, Newman spent decades researching the volume, which includes interviews, oral histories, and previously unseen correspondence, as well as twenty colour and over sixty black & white illustrations.  

Released a month ago today, the title has already considerable press coverage. It has been called “a vibrant magnum opus that gloriously reveals Barnett Newman in full” (Booklist), “an impressive, nuanced study” (Kirkus Reviews), and “essential reading for those interested in understanding both the man and his work” (Library Journal).

Purchase Barnett Newman Here as a hefty hardcover book, or as an e-pub, from the publisher, here. 

Gilbert and George | Worlds and Windows

Gilbert and George

Worlds and Windows 

London, UK / New York City, USA: Anthony d’Offay Gallery / Robert Miller. 1990

[unpaginated], 31.4 x 23.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Published to coincide with exhibitions at the galleries of Anthony d’Offay in London and Robert Miller in New York, this catalogue opens with a six-page essay by Robert Rosenblum, and is followed by 130 full-page colour reproductions of collages the duo created using commercially available postcards. 

Herman de Vries | Random Objectivations

Herman de Vries

Random Objectivations 

Brescia, Italy: Edizioni Amodulo, 1972

222 pp., 24 x 27 cm., softcover

Edition of 1000

"objectivation is important as a part of my occupation with 'visual information'. 'visual information' is here used in the sense of hans sleutelaar [Hans Sleutelaar at the vernissage of the exhibition 'anno 62', 't Venster, Rotterdam 1962] who thought the term more appropriate to the new conception than the term 'art'. as an extreme consequence of objectivation i tried to eliminate the personal - not the human! - element in my compositions by way of the random method.

the word random here implies the purely haphazard treatment of the experimental material. therefore it is desirable to ensure that the events in question are sufficiently random by using some special technique [N.T.J. Bailey, Statistical Methods in Biology (London 1959)].

the true meaning of randomness has profound philosophical aspects, but there is no reason to go into these here.

various sources of random numbers are available, but the most convenient is table XXXIII in fisher and yates [Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research / edited by R.A. Fischer and F. Yates (Edinburgh 1953)]. the first six pages of the table contain 15.000 numbers arronged in pairs. these numbers have been generated so as to be on effectively random or haphazard series of digits. without embarking on any detailed logical analysis, we can loosely define what we mean by 'random' in this context as follows. each of the digits 0, 1, 2, ... 8, 9 ought to appear in a long series with approximately equal frequencies; so would all possible pairs 00, 01 , 02, ... 99, and all possible triplets, etc. in fact any specific pattern of digits ought to appear with approximately its calculable chance of occurence. the tables have been tested to make sure they have these properties.

carrying out my compositions called 'random objectivations', i started reading the numbers from a haphazardly chosen point of the table, and gave a 'value' to each digit. value here means: a colour, gluing on a square or leaving it out, etc. in this way i obtained results which were acceptable for the spectator and gave the impression that they were intended as art. i would like to point out that all compositions are of equal quality if they are sufficiently large i.e. made with more than 20 or 30 numbers.

the 'random objectivations' i started in 1962. other things i am doing are white collages (first in 1958, continued in 1960); white paintings (since 1959); reflecting objects and surfaces, made with glass granuals (since 1960); objects in the form of blocks and columns, mostly of wood pointed white, and also of such materials as glass und steel (since 1960); white books (1961 and 1962) objectivations is an important element common to all these activities. the choice of the depersonalized act is as important as the creative act itself.”

- Herman de Vries

Stanley Brouwn | 100 this-way-brouwn-problems for computer I.B.M. 360 model 95

Stanley Brouwn

100 this-way-brouwn-problems for computer I.B.M. 360 model 95

Köln/New York, Germany/USA: Verlag Gebr. König, 1970

[208] pp., 23 x 23 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown 

Since 1972, every catalogue or group exhibition that Stanley Brouwn participated in has featured the line “At the request of the artist there are no photos or bio-bibliographical data” or “At the artist’s request, his birth date is excluded here, and the works are not reproduced”, or some variation thereof. Brouwn also consistently refused to give any interviews about his work. Images of the artist are incredibly rare. 

He was was born in 1935 in the northern South American Republic of Surinam, in the capital city of Paramaribo. At the age of 22 he moved to Amsterdam, the year of his first published work (according to Harry Ruhe’s comprehensive Stanley Brouwn: A Chronology). Brouwn contributed a drawing and a poem to Spiraal 1. The following year he contributed to the next four issues of the periodical. 

In 1960, the artist mailed out invitations declaring the shoe stores of Amsterdam as his art work. Later that same year he began his best-known series - This Way Brouwn. The artist stopped passersby in the street and asked for directions, encouraging them to make a fast sketch explaining a route. He then stamped these drawings with the title, exhibited them and made them into a bookwork. 

His first gallery exhibition (a group show) took place in 1962, at Ruhe’s Galerie A.  The following year he appeared in a television program created by Willem de Ridder and Wim T Schippers. Brouwn is shown placing white sheets of paper on the street, inviting pedestrians to walk over and leave their footprints. 

His first publication was made of pink silk-tissue paper in an edition of 100 copies. Brouwn added lemon juice stains, which eventually dried and could only be seen when heated. A dealer tells the story of selling one of these for just under two thousand pounds, several years ago. After the transaction was made, but before the work could be lovingly packed and shipped, his assistant discarded it, thinking it was waste paper on his boss’ desk. 

Brouwnhairs from 1964 is a 76-page, self-published book in an edition of three. A single hair of the artist’s is pasted onto each page. Lucy Lippard discusses the project in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966 to 1972. Later that same year Brouwn contributed to the first Fluxus Yearbox (miscredited to Stanley Brown) and to Wolf Vostell’s De-coll/age 4. 

By the early 1970s Brouwn had made measurement and his own movements central to his work, systematically counting the distances he had covered. This procedure produced a series of books entirely devoted to a sequence of numbers or text-based measurements, densities or distances. These books have been exhibited in otherwise empty galleries on simple white bookshelves, without any other identifying texts. 

For his third artist book 100 this-way-brouwn problems for computer IBM 360 model 95, the artist poses  questions not to passersby, but to an IBM computer. 

The edition size is unknown, but thought to be around 300 copies. 

"It is a method of perception and action which Stanley Brouwn, on the other hand gives to the IBM computer, model 95 in his book, 100 This Way-Brouwn-Problems for Computer IBM. 360 Model 95, in which Brouwn collects a series of phrases which begin from ‘Show Brouwn the Way in All Cities, Villages, etc.” followed by ‘Show Brouwn the Way From Each Point On a Circle With X at the Centre and a Radius of 1 angstrôm to all other points (1 angstrom = 0.00000001 cm)’ and other similar phrases where the variation of the phrase comes only from the substitution of the scale of 2 to 100 angstrôm. Brouwn’s work consists of cataloging of steps or minimal changes of direction as in his book La Paz, in which he marks a series of walks of different length in the direction of La Paz, Rangoon, Havana, Helsinki, Georgetown, Washington, Warsaw, New Delhi, etc., realized from a point in Schiedam or Amsterdam."

- Germano Celant, "BOOK AS ARTWORK: 1960 - 72”