Christian Marclay | The Bell and the Glass

Christian Marclay

The Bell and the Glass

Philadelphia, USA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004

96 pp., 7" x 9", softcover, exposed binding

Edition size unknown

Edited by Susan Rosenberg, this artists' book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that opened in May of 2003. Both the bookwork and multimedia installation explore shared affinities between two of Philadelphia's most famous cracked icons, The Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass.

The book pairs multiple images of both the Bell and Glass, along with musical scores about the bell, such as "You're A Grand Old Bell", "Liberty Bell Ring On", and "The Liberty Bell March" by John Philip Sousa (perhaps now best known as the theme song for Monty Python's Flying Circus).

"In collaboration with Relâche, Inc. and Relâche Ensemble, the museum presents The Bell and the Glass by acclaimed composer and visual artist Christian Marclay (born 1955). This multimedia installation and its accompanying musical composition are inspired by the artist’s interest in two Philadelphia icons: the Liberty Bell and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) by Marcel Duchamp, which is installed in gallery 182 of the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries.

The artist brings together this unlikely couple through four integrated components: a live music/sound performance by Relâche Ensemble, a photo-essay, a video composition, and an installation of objects selected by the artist from his collection, as well as from the holdings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Independence National Historical Park, the Atwater Kent Museum, and other institutions.

Marclay’s longstanding interest in objects that were created to make sound but rendered silent and dysfunctional led him to juxtapose the Bell and the Glass. In their iconic cracks, the artist discovers a coincidental, shared celebrity—and a potential for music. A new musical score by Marclay draws on the musical legacy of the Bell and the Glass—including tunes written in celebration of the Bell, and a score by Marcel Duchamp, written while he was working on the Large Glass, also on exhibit. Marclay’s double-screen video projection incorporates footage of Marcel Duchamp, clips from Hollywood movies, and shots of the Liberty Bell and of the Duchamp galleries at the museum. The video is a score and teleprompter for musicians of the Relâche Ensemble."

- Philadelphia Museum of Art, exhibition press release

Album Covers by Artists

For the second day in a row, the Pitchfork lead album review has featured a record with a classic contemporary artwork on the cover. 

Yesterday it was the Strokes, whose new LP features the famous Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy) image, and today it was zayALLCAPS’ My Uncle Told Me Some Real Ass Sh*t on the Phone Yesterday. It includes an image of David Hammons pissing on a Richard Serra work. 

Untitled (Cowboy) is one of Prince’s signature works, from a series that began in the mid-1970s, when Prince earned a living clipping magazine articles for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. Only the advertisements remained, and he began rephotographing and enlarging them. 

Alongside Spiritual America (a rephotograph of a young nude Brooke Shields), Untitled (Cowboy) is possibly the most iconic work from the series, featuring a rephotographed Marlboro ad, with the cowboy figure isolated and presented anew, removed from the original commercial context.

The Stokes cover is credited to Johann Rashid, who possibly rephotographed the rephotograph. 

The zayALLCAPS LP (not yet released on vinyl, it would seem) features the 1981 David Hammons work Pissed Off, one of two interventions Hammons made with Serra’s sculptures. A series of images by Dawoud Bey document Hammons urinating on the Serra work T.W.U in 1981, and then receiving a citation from an NYPD officer [see below]. The work is titled Pissed Off. 

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer turns 76 today. 

Christine Borland

Very sad to hear that after a long illness Christine Borland has died. Condolences to Ross Sinclair, her family, friends and community. 

Peter Fischli / David Weiss | Equilibres

 

Peter Fischli / David Weiss

Equilibres

Cologne, Germany: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006

168 pp, 20.3 x 24.1 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

The eighty-two colour and black & white photographs that make up the Equilibres series were created between 1984 and 1986, immediately preceding their celebrated film The Way Things Go. Following the subheading dictum “Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses”, the works present household objects and studio detritus arranged to form tenuously-balanced assemblages.  

Michelle Grabner | The Thing Quarterly, Issue 27

Michelle Grabner

The Thing Quarterly, Issue 27

San Francisco, USA: The Thing Quarterly, 2015

23 x 23 x23 cm., boxed

Edition of 1000

Ken Johnson closed his twenty-four line New York Times review of an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner with this sentence: 

"If the show were a satire of the artist as a comfortably middle-class tenured professor and soccer mom, it would be funny and possibly illuminating, but it’s not.”

The overt sexism ignited a firestorm of counter-reviews and letters to the editor. Grabner herself responded by posting a link to the review on Facebook, without comment. 

“It was 300 words but it tells us a lot more about the world we live in than it does about Ken Johnson and Michelle Grabner,” she remarked later. 

The following year she responded with this functional size five gingham soccer ball. The ball arrived to subscribers to The Thing Quarterly boxed, accompanied by a pamphlet containing a brief introduction, an interview with Grabner by editor Jonn Herschend, and a reproduction of Joe Fyfe's review of the NYT review in HyperAllergic.

Geoffrey Hendricks | Taschengewitter (Pocket Storm)

Geoffrey Hendricks

Taschengewitter (Pocket Storm)

Eschenau, Austria: the eschenau summer press & temporary travelling press publications, 1991 

[4] pp., 21 × 14.8 cm., string-bound

Edition 150 numbered copies

Similar to Willem de Ridder's Paper Constellations and Martin Creed’s crumpled balls of paper, this book consists of a single sheet of wrinkled and folded paper. Given Hendrick’s lifelong interest in painting the sky [see below] - and the title - one can assume the paper is intended to represent a cloud. 

The work is published by herman de vries, who has been publishing artist’s publications with his eschenau summer press & temporary travelling press publications for over fifty years. There are 78 titles so far in the series, many by de vries himself. Other artists include Melanie Bonajo, Marinus Boezem, James Lee Byars, Eugen Gomringer, Maurizio Nannucci, Paul Panhuysen, Dieter Roth, Wolfgang 

These artists are given carte blanche, which results in striking experiments in form and content. More than 75 editions have now appeared in the series, ranging from a radio play with sound recordings of bumblebees to a glass slide that allows the sun to be viewed. All editions are shown in full in herman de vries - publisher and clarified by RKD curators Lynne van Rhijn and Ton Geerts.

Vija Celmins | The View

Vija Celmins

The View

New York City, USA: The Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985

[22] pp., 2.5 x 39 x 28.7 cm., hardcover

Edition of 120 signed copies

Poems by the Lithuania author Czeslaw Milosz illustrated with four mezzotints by Celmins. Bound by George Wieck in black morocco spine, in a matching slipcase. The unnumbered work is signed by both Milosz and Celmins.

The View is available here for $15,000 US.