Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin turns 73 today. 

Art Cash

[Various Artists]

Art Cash

New York City, USA: Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc., 1971

70 x 56 cm.

Edition of 75 signed and numbered copies

Art Cash is a double-sided offset lithograph collaboration between Andy Warhol, Bob Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Gormley, Red Grooms and Marisol. Oyvind Fahlstrom's proposal was deemed too controversial and wasn't produced. Two years later Fahlstrom produced a $108 bill, which may have been the rejected design. 

The project was created by members of the non-profit Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc., for a Casino style fundraising event called the "Art Cash Benefit for Television Programming fundraising", which was in aid of the Community Television Center and the Artist's Television Project at Automation House, New York City.

EAT - who had a long history of convincing corporations to partner with artists - approached the American Bank Note Company - who provided the paper for the United States Treasury Department - to print the work on the same paper used for US currency. 

The bulk of the sheets were cut up to use at the gambling event, with only seventy-five full sheets held back for sale. Attendees at the fundraiser each received an envelope containing one of each of the six bills. 

Warhol’s bill conflated copyright and currency. In place of the text "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” (and all other graphics), he employed his rubber stamp "This photograph May Not be Etc”, which was presumably semi-functional at the Factory. Its most famous appearance may be the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers LP [see below, bottom, ahem].  

The print is signed in pencil by all of the artists, except Warhol, whose signature is from the same rubber stamp used to create his currency. 

 

Impressions 24/15 Spring 1980

Impressions

24/15 Spring 1980

Toronto, Canada: Impressions, 1980

64 pp., 27 x 35.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Impressions was a Toronto art magazine that I knew very little about - edited and designed by Isaac Applebaum and Lorne Fromer, with help from Suzy Lake - which, in 1983, morphed into C Magazine, currently struggling to stay afloat.  

This issue features articles about and projects by Martha Rosler, Joseph Beuys, Komar and Melamid, Theodore Wan, Robert Filliou and Ken Friedman. The latter is a transcription of a conference lecture Friedman gave in Rochester, New York, much of it about artists’ books (“Why is there a proliferation of artists books and why are only a few of them any good?” he asks). 

"In the spring of 1978 Isaac Applebaum, then-editor, invited Rodney Werden and myself to brainstorm a way out of escalating printing costs facing Impressions Magazine. Unable to match the quality of some of the fine monographs that Impressions had published in the past, a new configuration of people, budgets and technology began driving the publication towards a new concept for a magazine.             Oversized and printed on newsprint, Impressions made up for quality reproduction with size and grit. Only the cover retained the fine sheet-fed quality of previous Impressions monographs.

Photo-based became the editorial operative. From interviews and found art, photo documents of performances, a photo fumeti, to scripts, letters, snapshots, post cards--- they all made it to the pages of Impressions.

   

Impressions was never about - Impressions was - first generation, in your face raw, gritty, and large. 11” x 15” large. In 6 issues Impressions went from the coffee table to the bathroom library, and to our delight we discovered there were a lot of readers there."

- Lorne Fromer

Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt was born on this day in 1928.

Hiroshi Sugimoto | Sea of Buddha

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Sea of Buddha

New York City, USA: Sonnabend Sundell Editions, 1997

24 x 15.5 cm., Leporello fold in cloth slip cover

Edition of 1000 numbered copies

Conceived in 1988 and realized in 1995, Sea of Buddha captures the serene yet subtly varied presence of the thousand-and-one twelfth century gilded statues of the Thousand-Armed Kannon Bodhisattva in the Sanjūsangen-dō temple in Kyoto, Japan. 

Inspired by Walter De Maria’s installation The Broken Kilometer [below, bottom], battled bureaucracy for seven years, before finally being allowed to document the interior of the temple. Using an 8x10 large-format camera, Sugimoto captured tightly framed rows upon rows of statues in a series of forty-eight black and white near-identical images. 

This accordion-fold artist’s book with brushed aluminum covers was released two year later, in an edition of 1000 numbered copies. 

The complete edition represents one million Bodhisattvas. 

"The New York art scene in the 1970s was dominated by minimal and conceptual art, experiments in visualizing abstract concepts. It occurred to me that similar motives inspired the making of art in twelfth-century Japan. In a Kyoto temple, there is an eight-hundred-years old installation of a thousand-and-one Senju Kanon, the "Thousand-Armed Merciful Bodhisattava Avalokitesvara" figure, which is a three-dimensional representation of the Buddhist afterlife, the Pure Land Western Paradise. After seven years of red tape, I was finally granted permission to photograph in the temple of Sanjusangendo, the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In special preparation for the shoot, I had all late-medieval and early-modern embellishments removed, and the contemporary fluorescent lighting was turned off. Stripping the temple of these additions re-created  the splendor of the thousand bodhisattvas glistening in the light of the sun rising over the Higashiyama Hills, perhaps as the Kyoto aristocracy of the Heian period (794-1185) might have seen them. Will today's conceptual art survive another eight-hundred years?"

- Hiroshi Sugimoto

Fall Reading List

Today Hyperallergic posted their “15 Art Books For Your Fall Reading List”. Read it here. 

Multiples: The First Decade

John Tancock [editor]

Multiples: The First Decade

Philadelphia, USA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1971

[106 pp.], 23 x 14 x 4 cm., softcover

Edition of 4000

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from March 5th to April 4th, 1971, Multiples: The First Decade is one of the earliest publications on the subject of artist’s multiples and editions. Additionally, it is wisely designed to function as both a book and an object. 

The catalogue is comprised of brightly coloured cardstock pages, held closed wrap-around bellyband with a snap affixed. The title includes sixty-five black and white images on tipped-in glossy white pages. 

Artists include: Arman, Jean Arp, Richard Artschwager, Enrico Baj, Mary Bauermeister, Miguel Berrocal, Joseph Beuys, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, K.P. Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, Ursula Burghardt, Pol Bury, John Cage, Alexander Calder, Christo, Walter De Maria, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Robert Filliou, Lucio Fontana, Gilbert & George, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Iwao Kagoshima, Milan Knizak, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Shoji Lida, Rene Magritte, Piero Manzoni, Enzo Mari, Marisol, Bruno Munari, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelson, Kazuo Okazaki, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Palermo, Alicia Penalba, Robert Rauschenberg, May Ray, Dieter Roth, Mimmo Rotella, Gerhard Rühm, Ed Ruscha, Lucas Samaras, Robert Smithson, Daniel Spoerri, Takis, Takao Tanabe, Andre Thomkins, Joe Tilson, Jean Tinguely, Gunther Uëcker, Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner and dozens of others. 

Despite the high edition size of 4000, pristine or even intact copies are notoriously hard to come by, a result of the innovative but impractical design (and fifty-five years).