Roman Opalka
1965/1-∞
Berlin, Germany: Edition Block, 1977
12" vinyl LP
Edition of 400
In his mid-thirties, Roman Opalka began painting sequential numbers onto canvases, starting in the top left and corner and finishing in the bottom right. Each finished canvas was considered a "detail" of the larger conceptual practice, and a new canvas continued where he left off.
"All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life", "the problem is that we are, and are about not to be," he said.
All of the "details" have the same title, 1965 / 1 – ∞, as does this recording. Three years into the painting project the artist introduced a tape recorder to the process. In 1968, he began speaking each number into the microphone as he painted it.
"Every "detail" is accompanied by a phonetic registration on a tape recorder and a photographic documentation of my face," he noted.
This LP consists of forty-two minutes and fifty three seconds of the artist counting:
Side A Detail 1987108-2010495 22:10
Side B Detail 2136352-2154452 20:43
The disc was recorded 1976 in Berlin and the artist designed the cover and wrote the linter notes that appear in the gatefold sleeve.
The record is alued at approximately $200 to $275, depending on condition.
Opalka died on August 6th, 2011 at the age of 79. The final number he painted was 5607249.
