Kristján Gudmundsson | Punktar

Kristján Gudmundsson

Punktar 

Reykjavik, Iceland/Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Silver Press, 1972

12 pp., 18 x 15 cm., softcover

Edition of 300 signed and numbered copies

At an Instant Coffee event years and years ago, curator Christina Ritchie told a story about a Canadian visiting Iceland for the first time. Upon learning where he was from, the cab driver who picked him up from the airport wanted to discuss the merits of Margaret Atwood. The cabbie then asked him what brought him to Iceland, and he sheepishly replied that he had come because of the writings of Halldor Laxness. 

Despite winning the Nobel Peace prize for literature in 1955, the author was pretty obscure at this point (The New Yorker published a story last year titled The Rediscovery of Halldor Laxness). He had become a socialist in America from "watching the starving unemployed in the parks”, alienating many readers and journalists. 

The tourist thought it unlikely that even his seemingly literate cab driver would be aware of him. “I’ll take you to his house,” the driver said. 

This story struck a chord with me as I had just finished reading his epic novel Independent People. It’s a miserable tale of a sheep farmer and his put-upon wife’s battle for survival, and it’s a difficult read. It’s also brilliant. 

For his self-published 1972 artist book, Kristján Gudmundsson photographed and enlarged punctuation from poems by Laxness - three periods. He considered them “enlarged silences”. 

The work reminds me Fiona Banner’s Full Stop drawings: large lead drawings of round and oval shapes, which were later made three dimensional as public art works and this boxed multiple. 

Bibliography

 

Tomorrow is the last day to see the MKG127 summer group exhibition Bibliography, which features novels, math books, textbooks, phone books, matchbooks and more, by Dean Baldwin Lew, Alan Belcher, Adam David Brown, Bill Burns, Michael Dumontier, Dave Dyment, Liza Eurich, Sara Graham, Instant Coffee, Laura Kikauka, Kristiina Lahde, Jason Lujan, Gwen MacGregor, John Marriott, Luke Parnell, Roula Partheniou, Geoffrey Pugen, Jayce Salloum, Monica Tap, Joy Walker, and Laurel Woodcock.

Press release: 

"The format of the book has proved remarkably resilient in the face of breakthroughs in other technologies. Its early demise has been predicted continually – with the advent of cinema, television, the personal computer and the e-book reader. Even the phonograph was once cause for alarm, as evidenced in Octave Uzanne’s short story from 1894, The End of Books:

“If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products.”

Bibliophiles needn’t have worried. While the death knell rang throughout the last century-plus, the codex held steady. Today physical books still outsell their electronic counterparts four-to-one. Sixty-eight percent of readers between the age of 18 and 29 prefer printed volumes, suggesting the trend is not drifting downward.

This exhibition celebrates the multi-faceted form of the book with a wide array of treatments, from foregrounding text, typography, the page, the title, or the cover, to using the form of the book as context for content."

For more information, visit the MKG127 website, here. 

Record Shop

Record Shop, a group exhibition including work by myself, Sonny Assu, Deanna Bowen, Bill Burns, Roula Partheniou, Geoffrey Pugen, Marla Hlady, Christof Migone, Michael Dumontier, Suzie Smith, Instant Coffee, Laura Kikauka and Eleanor King, opens this Saturday at MKG127 in Toronto.

Posters, playlists and lots of works about the vinyl record, as well as guest playlists by artists, curators and collectors, and an event hosted by Record Club's Paul Butler.

MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West. Hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6 PM, or by appointment. For more information call 647-435-7682 or visit the website, here, for more information.

Instant Coffe | Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little

The Western Front has just released a new book on the Toronto/Vancouver collective Instant Coffee, which includes a text I wrote about the group almost a decade ago. The title, Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little, can be downloaded as a free e-pub or PDF, here:

http://front.bc.ca/events/feeling-so-much-yet-doing-so-little/

The section[s] of my text pertaining to multiples is below.



"A crudely collaged sign emphatically launched their endeavour, declaring “Sorry We’re Open”. Constructed from two store-bought Open and Closed signs, the piece looked like it was made with a kitchen knife and some scotch tape, but it somehow brilliantly managed to convey the quasi-sincerity of the collective and its intentions to behave as a business.

A used 1974 Holiday Cruiser trailer retrofitted with low-fi discotheque equipment became the headquarters. Economically designed as studio, presentation centre and party central, the mobile venue would hijack other art openings, simultaneously exploiting the built-in audience of a recognized institution and proposing an alternate way of working.

[...]

Almost as though the intention were to franchise them, other Urban Disco Trailers soon followed. When I worked at Art Metropole Jinhan Ko pitched them as a multiple. There were four of them now, and four is a multiple, he reasoned. The number eventually grew to five, though one of them has subsequently been crushed into a cube, but not before being loaded up with solicited items from other artists to serve as a time capsule of sorts.

Other multiples were created at the time, as though to fill the need of having product. Many of these early objects were simply items furnished with the Instant Coffee logo, similar to some of the 60’s Fluxus multiples such as Flux Corsage (boxed seeds), Flux snakes (boxed spaghetti) and Flux Holes (boxed straws). A drinking flask with the phrase Instant Coffee stenciled onto it managed to transcend the banality of the gesture and become something else altogether. Their swag came in the form of flags, posters, pylons, patches, stickers and magnets. These items represent an exercise in branding, to be sure, but also served as a way one could buy into the Instant Coffee lifestyle. Later projects such as the Suitcase Radios, Disco-Danglers and Cooler Speakers moved away from the straight-ahead marketing and further emphasized this way-of-life."

DIY opens this Saturday

In 2010, MKG127 began a series of artist-curated summer shows with A-B by Micah Lexier. Group exhibitions by Hugh Scott-Douglas, Germaine Koh and Dean Baldwin followed. This Saturday a show that I organized opens from 2 to 5 pm.

DIY collects the work of nine artists and two collectives whose work refers to, or employs the spirit of "do-it-yourself”. The exhibition includes both new and existing works by Dean Baldwin (Montreal), Bill Burns (Toronto), Instant Coffee (Vancouver), Liam Crockard (Toronto), Michael Dumontier (Winnipeg) , Daniel Eatock (London, UK), Juliane Foronda (Toronto), Kristiina Lahde (Toronto), Roula Partheniou (Toronto), Joe Scanlan (New York City) and VSVSVS (Toronto).



"In Britain, the term DIY is synonymous with home repair. Elsewhere it carries more go-it-alone connotations. The term is over a hundred years old, came into common usage in the 1950s, and defined a subculture twenty years later. Today it’s ubiquitous as both an ethos and a marketing brand, from Ikea to Etsy to Martha Stewart-style Pinterest pages. DIY features fetishized tools of the trade, as well as examples of do-it-yourself projects: from makeshift speakers and skateparks to some-assembly-required coffee, prisons and funerals."

- press release

The exhibition continues until August 20, at MKG127, which is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. Hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6 PM or by appointment. For more information call 647-435-7682

(image: Joe Scanlan)

Volumes Book Launch tonight

In 2003, Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer co-curated an exhibition called Re-Play that featured myself, David Armstrong Six, Joanne Bristol, Stan Douglas, Raymond Gervais, Rodney Graham, Pascal Grandmaison, Instant Coffee, Tim Lee, Ian Murray, Shannon Oksanen, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Kevin Schmidt, Steven Shearer, Zin Taylor, Ron Terada, Althea Thauberger, and Holly Ward. Re-Play was part of a larger touring exhibition of sound art shows called Sounstracks, that also included Come a Singin' (curated by Andrew Hunter), See Hear! (by Timothy Long and Ben Portis), and Video Heroes (curated by Sylvie Gilbert).

A catalogue for the Soundtracks exhibitions has been in the works every since.

A decade later Christof Migone curated an exhibition called Volume: Hear Here. It featured myself, Alexis O'Hara, Darsha Hewitt, John Oswald, Ian Skedd, Charles Stankievech, Mitchell Akiyama, crys cole, Marla Hlady, Neil Klassen, David Lieberman, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sylvia Matas,
David Merritt, Ryan Park, Juliana Pivato, Alexandre St-Onge, Chiyoko Szlavnics and John Wynne.

Part of the impetus of the second show was to renew efforts to complete the original catalogue, which would now serve as a document of both. It launches tonight at Hart House (7 Hart House Circle, St. George Campus, University of Toronto) from 5 to 8pm. The book (and accompanying 10" vinyl record" is available for sale for $50, and the launch will feature DJ sets by Martin Arnold, Marc Couroux, Mitchell Akiyama.

If you're coming by car, please note the Pan Am games have closed off sections of Harbord Street. For more information, visit the facebook page here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1633089103574469/

Instant Coffee Pink Noise poster launch

Instant Coffee
Pink Noise
Vancouver, Canada: Self-published, 2015
21.5 x 33"
Edition of 400

Tomorrow evening MKG127 hosts a launch party for Instant Coffee's Pink Noise poster project. The launch takes place within the current exhibition by Geoffrey Pugen and features a performance by Dan Colussi of The Pinc Lincolns.

The posters are available for $20.00 each.

MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. The event runs from 7 to 9pm.

Instant Coffee | Red Violator

Instant Coffee
Red Violator
Vancouver, Canada: Self-published, 2012
red neon
Edition of 3

Instant Coffee's third exhibition at MKG127, Take the Easy Way, closes today with a slide show presentation (see below post). For more information, visit the gallery site, here or the artists' site, here.

Update: read the Artinfo review here.

Slide Show Presentation

As part of Instant Coffee's Take the Easy Way Out exhibition, I will be presenting a ten minute slide presentation at MKG127 tomorrow, alongside Adam David Brown, Bill Burns, Ulysses Castellanos, and Paulette Phillips.

I will be presenting excerpts and outtakes from my latest book project The Morning Has Gold In Its Mouth, a fully fan-annotated run down of Kubrick's The Shining, frame by frame.

The event takes place between 5 and 6 pm, tomorrow.

Saturday May 25th

1445 Dundas St. W.
(647)435-7682  
info@mkg127.com
www.mkg127.com

Sorry

Jinhan Ko & Janet Lobberecht | Troubles by design

Jinhan Ko & Janet Lobberecht
Troubles by design, a breaking up book/design by troubles, a book about breaking up
Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 2000
16 pp., 12.7 x 20.5 cm., paper
Edition of 1000, 25 signed by the artists

Instant Coffee's Jinhan Ko - known for immersive creative collaboration with his romantic partners - and Janet Lobberecht document their break-up in this double-sided Little Cockroach Press booklet.