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Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective

New York City, USA: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987

85 pp., 25.5 x 24.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

The first major retrospective of Ana Mendieta’s work opened in November of 1987, just a little over two years after her death. Mendieta fell from the window of the 34th-floor apartment building that she shared with sculptor Carl Andre. She was 36 years old. The couple - married only nine months earlier and on the verge of divorce - had been heard arguing. Neighbours and the door man went on record saying that they had heard her cry out “No” immediately before the fall. 

Andre called 911 and told the operator “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” 

When the police arrived to examine the scene, Andre showed the officers catalogs of his work and restated that his wife had been jealous of his fame. The different levels of success in their careers became a frequent point of inquiry in the trial. 

Additionally, the defence used Mendieta’s work to discredit her. The use of blood and soil in her practice was said to represent a subconscious desire to kill herself. Her interests in indigenous occult practices suggested that she was mentally unstable, Andre’s lawyers argued. 

“The defendant’s guilt was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” the presiding judge announced, on February 12th, 1988, acquitting Andre on charges of murder. 

Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective surveyed the growth and change in Mendieta’s career and included thirty documentary colour photographs of her Silueta series; black and white photographs of Cuban rock carvings; early drawings on leaves; floor sculptures made from sand and earth; and videotape documentation of multiple performance works.”

The catalogue includes thirty-four b/w and twelve colour images, a preface by Marcia Tucker, and essays by Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perrault. 

“I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”

- Ana Mendieta

Bas Jan Ader | Kunstenaar - Artist

Bas Jan Ader

Kunstenaar - Artist

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stichting Openbaar Kunstbezit, 1988

96 pp., 27 x 22 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

An early monograph on the artist, whose small but striking body of work continues to resonate today, fifty years after his disappearance at sea. Edited by Paul Andriesse, the title - with text in Dutch and English - features colour and b&w illustrations, a biography, bibliography and list of works. 

Marshall McLuhan | Distant Early Warning

Marshall McLuhan

Distant Early Warning

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1969

54 pp., 6.35 by 8.89 cm., boxed

Edition size unknown

In 1968, after having moved back to Toronto from New York, Marshall McLuhan began publishing a monthly newsletter, advertised with no shortage of hyperbole: 

“THIS IS AN INVITATION TO JOIN A SELECT GROUP OF BUSINESS, ACADEMIC AND GOVERNMENT LEADERS WHO ARE ABOUT TO RECEIVE WHAT MUST BE THE MOST STARTLING NEWSPAPER EVER WRITTEN.” 

The project - produced with his son Eric and New Yorker Eugene Schwartz - was essentially a well-designed repurposing of pithy aphoristic statements by McLuhan, designed for corporate clients desperate not to miss out on the next big thing. 

“Which technological breakthroughs are completely hidden from your view?” asked a New York Times advertisement promoting the series. 

The newsletter took it’s name from the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic region of Canada (as well as Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland) which were set up to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War, and warn of any sea-and-land invasions.

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 

The series lasted less than two years, and the most notable of the issues was Volume 2, Number 1, which was accompanied by this deck of playing cards, designed by McLuhan and Harley Parker.

A pre-cursor to the Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies, the deck was designed to be used as a problem-solving device, a bottle-neck breaker. Printed as a functional deck of poker cards, the cards feature quotes from McLuhan himself, alongside W.C. Fields, Jacques Ellul, Sam Butler, John Cage and others. The texts include “The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs”, “Silence is all the sounds of the Environment at once” and, naturally, “The Medium is the Message”.

The cards were packaged in green, red, black, blue, or brown slipcases, and contained an instruction sheet with more purple prose (“an intellectual’s card deck!”) along with the rules of the game: 

"In addition to the conventional card games, the Dew Line deck performs as THE MANAGEMENT GAME. Proceed as follows:

(a) Take any card. Relate the aphorism to your current hang-up.

(b) Call to mind a private or corporate problem as you shuffle the cards. Select a card and apply its message.

(c) Take three cards. Experiment with different arrangements of these until they yield new insights and patterns in your problem.

(d) Deal yourself three cards. Pick a pair to maximize the comic side of your problem.

TO OBTAIN YOUR SCORE

(1) If you get your breakthrough in thirty seconds or less, you are a top Dew Liner!

(2) Those who get their million dollar solution in less than two minutes have not yet been promoted to the level of their incompetence.

(3) If it takes you three minutes or more, try another problem."

"Indeed, what one notices is McLuhan’s appeal to artists and corporations alike. Both craved the next new thing.”

- Alex Kitnick, Distant early warning: Marshall McLuhan and the transformation of the avant-garde

Jimmy Robert and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | distinguish the limit from the edge

Art Metropole Press release: 

"Please join us Saturday January 24th from 3:00-6:00 PM to celebrate the launch of distinguish the limit from the edge, a collaborative artist’s book by Jimmy Robert and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The launch will feature refreshments and a drop in signing with editor Jacob Korczynski. The publication will be available for purchase at a special launch price.

distinguish the limit from the edge proposes an intergenerational dialogue between Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert. Their connection emerges through the intersection of text and image between selected work from Cha’s oeuvre and Robert’s practice that share the formal strategies of the fold.

Robert’s work utilizes paper as a sculptural material, and his hand sometimes appears to shape the page. For Cha, the fold is present in her compositions enmeshing language through strategies of visual poetry, as in L’Image Concrete feuille L’Objet Abstrait (1976), and Untitled (après tu parti) (1976) which are both previously unpublished. The possibility of overlaying one’s work with the other, emphasised by the book’s spiral-bound double spine, and reverse fold-outs, forges an intimacy, a shared sensibility, and an encounter with the corporeal. In conversation with editor Jacob Korczynski, Robert refers to Fred Moten’s In The Break, stating, ‘Suddenly time falters. Words don’t go there. And if words don’t go there, then what does?’

distinguish the limit from the edge is commissioned by Book Works, edited by Jacob Korczynski and designed by Wolfe Hall. The book is published in association with Participant Inc. with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts Management Services, after the exhibition:

flipping through pages keeping a record of time: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Jimmy Robert curated by Jacob Korczynski at Participant Inc., 6 September – 3 November, 2024, supported by a Fall 2020 Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Art Metropole, 896 College St, Toronto

January 24, 2026, 3:00-6:00 PM”

 

Cary Leibowitz | Let the Wall Fall!

Cary Leibowitz

Let the Wall Fall! 

New York City, USA: Self-published, 1993

27 x 27 x 5 cm.

Edition of 200 signed and numbered copies

A rare early edition consisting of a plastic dustpan printed with the text "Let the Wall Fall! Candyass visits Berlin, 1977”, commemorating an ostensible trip when the artist was 13 or 14 year old. 

Larry Clark

Larry Clark turns 83 today. 

Jeremy Deller | Father and Son

Jeremy Deller

Father and Son

Melbourne, Australia: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2021

12.5 x 10 x 9 cm each

Edition of 150 signed and numbered copies

A miniature version of the life sized portraits Jeremy Deller produced in 2021, of media tycoons Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch [below]. 

The wax effigies were set alight in a deconsecrated church in the inner Melbourne suburb of Collingwood in what was described as "an invitation to a public vigil" and promoted with the Bible verse “For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise”.

Critic Jerry Saltz called the piece “Surely one of the best works of the year” for highlighting the “worthless inheritance and the profits of a family who gained the whole world but lost its soul”.

Father and Son is available exclusively from the publishers, for $550, with a limit of one edition per person. Contact info@acca.melbourne for more information.

Michael Snow | Walking Woman Brooch Set

Michael Snow

Walking Woman Brooch Set

Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1994

6.4 cm. length

Edition of 800 numbered copies

In the early part of this century these Sterling Silver brooches could still be had for $75 or so, if I remember correctly. Not wanting to wear one, I never bought a copy, which I now regret. I also regret that I didn’t take our friend Leah Singer’s wise advice and propose to Michael that our Nothing Else Press produce a reprint. I imagine there’d be a large audience clamouring for them. 

I love that the brooch can be worn as either the positive or negative space, of Snow’s iconic Walking Woman figure. 

In October of 2025, one of these was available at Waddington’s auction house, with an estimate of between $800 and $1200. It sold for more than twice the high estimate: $2500.

Goo Memes

Dave Dyment

My Friend Goo

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025

38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound

Edition of 200

My book from last year about my second favorite meme (after Ikea Monkey): variations on Raymond Pettibon’s cover for Sonic Youth’s major label debut, Goo. 

The versatility and timelessness of the image (it instantly evokes a buddy film, a road movie, rebellion, escape, etc.) makes it perfectly suited to address contemporary social problems, like Covid, Trump, Transphobia, the murder of George Floyd, and now the murder of Rebecca Good. The second image above has been making the rounds on social media and was reposted today by SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo.