Fetish

Every year I was at Art Metropole we created a new shopping bag, typically released around this time of year, at the Basel Art Fair. They mostly featured classic artist graphics, rather than new works. The artists included Dan Graham, Yoko Ono, Maurizio Nannucci, Ross Sinclair, and Michael Snow.

The most popular (narrowly beating out Yoko Ono’s War is Over, below) was the black FETISH bag. It reproduced a graphic from a T-shirt by John Jack Baylin and John Dowd. I recall it being too difficult to silkscreen white on black bags, so we ended up applying stickers to the bags. I still have a couple, somewhere. 

The original shirt was published by Art Metropole in the mid-seventies, not long after the bookstore and archive first opened. It gradually achieved an iconic status in Toronto, Canada and beyond. 

To coincide with their presentation at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair and Festival, Art Met is  launching a new edition FETISH T-shirt. The fair opens tomorrow and continues until Sunday June 28th. 

Pre-order here: https://artmetropole.com/shop/16918

"Over the past five decades, other editions of this shirt were also created, reproduced, reinterpreted, and circulated by artists associated with Art Metropole, Image Bank, and Western Front. The design reached a moment of symbolic prominence during the seminal Hollywood Decca Dance (1974), held at the Elks Lodge in Los Angeles. Staged as a playful, artist-run parody of the Academy Awards, the event brought together over 800 artists from across North America and Europe, connected through Robert Filliou’s “Eternal Network.”⁠”

- Art Metropole, press release