Jennie C Jones | RPM

 

Jennie C Jones

RPM

New Canaan, USA: The Glass House, 2018

20 x 20 cm.

Edition of 18 [+5 AP] signed and numbered copies 

RPM (revolutions per minute) is a limited edition 7"45 RPM lathe cut single housed in a letterpress sleeve. The work brings together two commissioned audio collages from the artist’s 2018 exhibition at The Glass House. The sound works respond to the Philip Johnson–designed Glass House and Sculpture Gallery. The title track employs a harmonious combination of solfeggio frequencies that considers the aural environment of the Glass House. In "Year of Construction: 1970," the aforementioned sound carries over as an undertone and is transformed by a counterpoint of predominantly black sonic practices from the year 1970, including Alice Coltrane, Alvin Singleton, Milford Graves, and Yusef Lateef. 

Johnson’s Glass House was completed in 1949, the same year that RCA Victor released the first 

45 RPM singles. 

SIDE A [3:36]

RPM (revolutions per minute), 2018

Singing Bowl, Glass Bowl, Digital Tone. All 528 HZ, a healing frequency.

SIDE B [3:19]

Year of Construction: 1970, 2018

Sourced from: Dorothy Ashby, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, Svein Finnerud Trio, Milford Graves, Andrew Hill, Yusef Lateef, “The Lumpen” Black Panther Party Revolutionary Band, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, and Alvin Singleton. All composed or recorded in 1970.

"Typically, I listen to music when I make work, but right now I’m in a gap of quiet in the studio. I need that aural palate cleanser and a moment to be still, so that I can return to music with new energy. Silence has an important role in my work, and there’s a formal relationship between my use of silence and historical silencing more broadly. Modernism in America was shaped during the postwar period, at a time when so much exciting Black music was also being made, but the bridge between the two was never built. My aesthetic strategies allow me to talk about the absence of these histories and push them to the fore. For example, my sculpture of a one-string at The Met is an homage to Louis Dotson and Moses Williams, two improvisers from Mississippi who performed on handmade versions of the instrument, and whose contributions to the history of avant-garde music have been all but forgotten.”

- Jennie C Jones

Flux Post Kit 7

[Fluxus]

Flux Post Kit 7

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1968

17.9 x 13.5 x 4.8 cm.

Edition size unknown

In March of 1967, a Fluxus newsletter included a call to artists to submit works for a forthcoming Flux-postal kit: "All are invited to submit ideas and participate, ideas can be either ready pictorial material or

just specified material which we have to find, produce or obtain otherwise [...] We will issue a 100 stamp sheet, each row (10 stamps) designed by different participant. Images can also be drawings, prints, engravings, letters, etc. etc."

Previously, George Maciunas had written to Ben Vautier: “We will also come out with 100 fluxstamps - collective designs, by various people - so let me know your ideas. All you need to do is send drawing, picture, anything. If it is halftone (dotted) it should be about same size as stamp, because dots can’t be reduced to over 120 lines per inch...”

The eventual work consisted of repackaged earlier Fluxus projects, such as stamps by Bob Watts and postcards by Watts and Vautier, as well as three new rubber stamps: Ken Friedman's Inconsequential is Coming, James Riddle's Everything and Ben Vautier's Ben Certifies this to be a work of Fluxart. 

John Held, Jr. maintains that this work is the first time a rubber stamp was included as part of an artists’ multiple. 

Contents varied in the kits, and some would also include selections from Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri's Monsters are Inoffensive cards, cards by George Brecht, etc. etc.

The plastic box featured an offset label designed by George Maciunas, who compiled the kit. His mechanical for the cover and for Vautier’s stamp are below, both housed in the collection of the MoMA. The materials listed are “ink, presstype, and correction fluid on paper”.

It is unclear what the 7 in the title refers to. 

The kit initially sold for $8, or $2 without the rubber stamps. It was designed as an unlimited edition, but reportedly only ten to twenty boxes were ever compiled. 

Yayoi Kusama | Yayoi Snow Globe

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Snow Globe

New York City, USA: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018

7 x 7 x 7 cm.

Edition size unknown

Sometime last year curator Matthew Higgs proposed on Instagram that someone write a book on the subject of “Artist’s Merch”. He posted an image of David Shrigley’s Heroin and Cocaine salt & pepper shakers to illustrate his point. 

This Yayoi Snow Globe snow globe would better represent the idea of Artists’ Merch - museum gift shop shlock that borrows the form of an artist’s edition. Items made with little input from the artist, designed as a keepsake souvenir of the accompanying exhibition. 

I have a Yoko Ono snowdome that fits the bill: produced by the Art Gallery of Ontario when they presented her YES retrospective, it consisted of two snow related texts from Grapefruit inserted into one of those cheap “add your own picture” globes. 

I’m happy to have it, and would likely pick up Yayoi Snow Globe, on sale. 

It’s a small glass and resin snowglobe featuring a portrait of the artist dressed in her signature red and white polka-dot patterned dress. When shaken, mirrored orbs not unlike those from Kusama's iconic Narcissus Garden float gracefully within the globe, in place of snow. 

 

 

Banksy | Welcome Mat

Banksy

Welcome Mat

Brighton, UK: Love Welcomes, 2020

46 × 71 cm.

Unlimited edition

Launched in 2017 as response to the refugee crisis in Greece, Love Welcomes is a "creative social enterprise that helps displaced women begin to stitch their lives back together." 

This open edition Welcome mat features hand-stitched fabric from life vests abandoned on the beaches of the Mediterranean.

Today Reuters outed Banksy in a painfully long article debunking the previous popular theory that he was Robert Del Naja, of the Bristol trip-hop group Massive Attack. It turns out Banksy is Robin Gunningham, 52, also from Bristol and a friend of Del Naja.

Jenny Holzer | Use What Is Dominant

Jenny Holzer

Use What Is Dominant

New York City, USA: The Whitney Museum of Art, 2003

9.5 x 25.5 x 25.5 cm.

Edition of 200

In a matter of a few short years, Jenny Holzer’s aphoristic texts went from being seen on guerrilla  stickers and wheat-pasted posters, to the Times Square Jumbotron and museums around the world. 

Subsequently many of the texts from the Survival Series (1983-85) have adorned baseball caps, t-shirts, postcards, condoms, pencils, golf balls, and the LED lights for which she is still best known. 

"Use What is Dominant in a Culture to Change it Quickly" is a lesser known example, primarily featured as a screenprint on brushed aluminum in 1990, and as part of an earlier parking meter sticker series [see below]. 

However, the statement could be viewed as the artists Modus Operandi. Both the subject and formats of her practice exploit the dominant cultural language of not just the world of advertising, but the pithy platitudes of sloganeering more generally. 

This etched glass bowl featuring the phrase was produced for the Whitney Museum in 2003, by Simon Pearce. His name and Holzer's signature are incised on the base.

"For all of its use of language, the real message of Holzer’s work concerns the media, the electronic display boards and digital units that empty language of any stable “meaning.” Her work imitates not nature (Cage) but culture in its manner of operation. Transformed into pop signs throughout our culture, linguistic meaning “implodes” (to use Jean Baudrillard’s phrase for the disintegration of the signified beneath the signifier). One could argue that Holzer is using Baudrillard’s tactic of strategic resistance to the dominant discourse system, by simulating “in a hyper-conformist manner the very mechanisms of the system . . . turning the system’s logic back on itself duplicating it, reflecting meaning, as in a mirror, without absorbing it.”

- Jessica Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art

Laurie Anderson | United States

Laurie Anderson

United States

New York City, USA:  Harper & Row, 1984

232 pp., 12 x 7”, softcover

Edition size unknown

Despite being over forty years old, Laurie Anderson’s United States is still viewed as her magnum opus - an eight hour performance spread out over two evenings in February of 1983. Split into four parts, the multi-media event featured songs, spoken word pieces, and animated vignettes about live in America. 

A five disc box set followed (later reissued as a four CD collection), as did this companion volume, which features texts, drawings and photographs by the artist. 

"United States is usually classified as performance art, but this is misleading. It was much more conventionally staged than performance art ordinarily is. It used the proscenium for the standard theatrical purpose—to establish an unambiguous distinction between the performer and the audience—and it rigorously excluded the element that gives most performance art its edge, which is contingency. In performance art, a piece isn’t performed; the performance is the piece. The work of art is whatever happens within a set of conditions the artist has laid down. But Anderson was performing pieces she had already created, some of which her audience already knew from listening to her hit single “O Superman” (released in 1981) and her album Big Science (1982). Her appearance at BAM had a lot more in common with Barry Manilow at Wolf Trap than it did with Chris Burden at The Kitchen. United States was a concert.

[...]

People like me, coming out of the ’60s, once dreamed of a fusion between something like pop music and something like Conceptual art, of an expressive form that would integrate the urgency and excitement of a rock concert with the cool detachment of an art without illusions. We wished for energy and imagination without pretension, for entertainment that did not pander and art that was not antagonistic to commercialism, merely indifferent to it. I suppose we hoped to strike such a balance in our own lives. Glimpses of what that sensibility might have been like were pretty rare. United States was one of them."

- Louis Menand, Artforum

Erik Kessels

Happy Birthday to Erik Kessels, who turns 60 today.