Yoko Ono | My Mummy Was Beautiful

Tumblr plug

The companion tumblr to this blog:

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/

is more sporadically updated, but often features books, multiples, records and artists' ephemera not included here. This week: editions by David Shrigley.

Sturtevant | Protest and Survive Tea Towel

Sturtevant
Protest and Survive Tea Towel
London, UK: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009
70 x 50 cm
Edition size unknown

A linen tea towel with cotton embroidery featuring the artist dressed as Joseph Beuys, from 1988. The work was made to commemorate the Matthew Higgs and Paul Noble curated exhibition  'Now is the time to Protest. Without Protest there will be no Survival' from 2000.

Sturtevant died Wednesday in Paris, where she lived and worked. It is unclear as to her age, as reports on her birthdate vary from 1924 to 1930. Virtually all of her artistic output consisted of copies of work by other artists. Initially she began mimicking the work of Pop Artists Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol* before moving on to Beuys and Duchamp.

Other artists whose work she appropriated include Yvonne Rainer, Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In most cases her mimicry began before the artists had achieved fame. She mastered a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, film and photography,  in order to successfully copy the range of artists who are the subject of her work.

At the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale she was awarded a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award.

*Sturtevant apparently copied Warhol's silkscreens so often that Warhol himself once deflected a question about his methods by saying "I don't know. Ask Elaine [Sturtevant]."

Brief obituaries can be read here and here.

Jean Keller
The Black Book
Self-published/Lulu, 2013
740 pp., 14.81 wide x 20.98 cm., paperback
Edition size unknown

The way that early artists' books often dealt directly with the codex and other aspects of 'bookness', many print-on-demand artists'  bookworks tend to comment on their printed-ness, either by containing data that originated digitally (google maps, google earth, wikipedia, etc), or in this case, by referring directly to the process of print-on-demand publishing.

Keller explains:

"Ink used for digital printing is one of the most precious substances in the world. A single gallon of ink costs over four thousand dollars and this is one reason why digitally printed books are so expensive.

However, the price of a book is not calculated according to the amount of ink used in its production. For example, a Lulu book of blank pages costs an artist as much to produce as a book filled with text or large photographs. Furthermore, as the number of pages increases, the price of each page decreases. A book containing the maximum number of pages printed entirely in black ink therefore results in the lowest cost and maximum value for the artist.

Combining these two features, buyers of The Black Book can do so with the guarantee that they are getting the best possible value for their money."

The hand-off business model of Lulu allows the above text (essentially a big fuck you to the manufacturer) to appear directly on their own site, where the title is printed as needed and the artist collects his royalties later.

Buy it here, for $35.01.

Ben Kinmont

Ben Kinmont on his Sshhh project for the Whitney Biennial:

www.artforum.com/words/#entry46647

Allora & Calzadilla | Problems and Promises

Allora & Calzadilla
Problems and Promises
San Francisco, USA: The Thing Quarterly, 2010
Edition size unknown

Issue 6 of the subscription-based The Thing Quarterly consists of a blank book attached to a tennis shoe. One of the tennis shoe laces is sewn into the spine of the book.

The confused nature of the website regarding availability suggests a clamour for the last few copies. In addition to this sentence:

"This issue is closed, however there are a very small number of back issues that are available to subscribers for $48 and non-subscribers $60.00", a price of $300 is listed, and also the notification that the work has "sold out".

The first nine editions The Thing Quarterly have published since 2007 are completely sold out, with more than half (sixteen of twenty-two) of their publications no longer available.

Joan La Barbara | Tapesongs

Joan La Barbara
Tapesongs
Wilkes Barre, USA: Chiaroscuro Records, 1977
12" vinyl LP
Edition size unknown

Joan La Barbara is a virtuoso vocalist and composer who has collaborated with Robert Ashley, Larry Austin, Matthew Barney, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lou Harrison, Alvin Lucier, Christian Marclay, Steve Reich and many other significant artists and composers.

Tapesongs, her second release, remains one of her most celebrated recordings. The record features three different tracks, mostly a cappella, though she is accompanied by her own electronics and the timpani of Bruce Ditmas and Warren Smith on the final cut, the twenty-three minute long "Thunder".

Her performance of "Solo for Voice 45" (a piece whose pitches have been derived from star maps and organized according to the I Ching) has been called "the definitive recording" of the John Cage composition. La Barbara herself used chance operations to determine which phrases would be sung with the French pronunciation of the alphabet, and which would be sung in English.

She describes their first encounter:

"In 1976 in La Rochelle, France, it was the first time I was going to perform Cage’s music, his “Solo for Voice 45” from Song Books. Because it was the hottest and driest summer that had happened in Europe in ages, he arranged for two refrigerators to be placed to the side of the stage. He said to the musicians, “If your part includes long silences, you may quietly leave the stage and go and get yourself something cool to drink.”

It was a very generous thing to do; unfortunately it was also a recipe for disaster. The musicians decided that he obviously didn’t have any respect for concerts. The oboe player walked on stage carrying two bottles of wine and drank himself into a stupor, never picking up his instrument.
And afterwards Cage came up to me and said, “You were marvellous – you did your part and it was exquisite. I am with you always.” That was the moment I believe that he became my mentor."

In the liner notes for Tapesongs, Cage (in one of his annoying acrostics) calls La Barbara "a singer who changes your mind about music. And she does it in many different ways".




La Barbara can be heard singing the alphabet on Sesame Street, from around the same era as Tapesongs, on Youtube, here.