Städtisches Museum Boxed Works

Yesterday's post of 8 Works by Lawrence Weiner marks the end of the boxed catalogues overseen by curator and director Johannes Cladder at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach, Germany.

To view all the previous posts, click here.

8 Works of Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner
8 Works of Lawrence Weiner
Mönchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1973
21 x 16 x 2.7 cm
Edition of 330 numbered copies

Jonas Hafner | La Crimae-La Crime

Jonas Hafner
La Crimae-La Crime
Monchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1976
16 x 20.5 cm.
Edition of 330 numbered copies

A printed die-cut cardboard box containing 26 loose sheets mostly with German text and image overlays and  three folded posters. Published to coincide with an exhibition that opened January 1st, 1976. Text by curator Johannes Cladder.

Available here, from Anartist Books, for £45.56 .

Hanne Darboven | Ausstellung Mit 6 Filmprojektoren Nach Büchern Über 1968

Hanne Darboven
Ausstellung Mit 6 Filmprojektoren Nach Büchern Über 1968
Monchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1969
16.5 x 20.5 cm
Edition of 440 numbered copies

A cardboard box containing two booklets and a gridded drawing pad, issued as an exhibition catalogue for solo show of Darboven's which ran from February 25 to April 7, 1969. With text (in German) by curator and museum director Johannes Cladders.

Bill Burns | Ikea Playlist kit for Primates

Bill Burns
Ikea Playlist kit for Primates
Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 2010
12 x 12 x 1.4"
Edition of 7 signed and numbered copies (+4 AP)


"The IKEA Playlist Kit for Primates consists of IKEA style instructions to how to build a guard tower and a prison cell as well as an orange playlist of the songs played to prisoners at several extraterritorial prison camps including that at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. Each kit also contains three vinyl LP records. All six items are contained in a handsome foil stamped archival box. The project is also known as Guard Tower Plans, Prison Cell Plans, and the Songs of Guantanamo Bay."


Burns' third solo exhibition at MKG127 runs from June 7th to July 5th, with a reception held tonight between 6 and 8pm. For more information, visit the gallery website, here.

Derek Sullivan | Cover to Cover

Derek Sullivan's exhibition Cover to Cover opens this Friday night from 6 to 9 pm at Galerie Emmanuel Herve.

For more information, visit the gallery website here.

"Moving between drawing and sculpture, the work of Derek Sullivan often takes the form of the double or decoy. He deftly weaves together the intersecting histories of modernist architecture, design, and abstraction into new relations of signification, paying particular attention to recurring patterns and forms. Through an elaborate process of copying, and often with the most basic materials—wood, pencil crayon, gouache, printed paper—Sullivan transforms his original referents in such a way to contest the very idea of meaning and authorship.

At the heart of his practice is the book—its conventions, its histories, and its possibilities. Sullivan takes up the history of the artist’s book in particular, and looks back to artists who explored the formal and conceptual apparatus of the codex in an effort to reinvent the form of the book today.

The starting point for Sullivan’s recent exhibition is Cover to Cover, the 1975 book by Canadian artist Michael Snow, one of the most seminal artists’ books produced in the history of the genre. The book is entirely composed of images reproduced to the edge of the page. There is no text, save the title printed on the spine. The sequence of images is made by two photographers aiming their cameras at the artist who is caught in their photographic crossfire. Their exposures are synchronized and result in two parallel sequences that form a pair of images printed recto-verso on each page of the book, from cover to cover. The book collapses form and image in such a way that the traditional codex is no longer linear, but becomes circular.

In playful homage, Sullivan has created a series of dust jackets for Snow’s seminal book. Similarly titled Cover to Cover (2014), Sullivan’s dustjackets are a proposition to disguise, contain and ultimately reinvent the original. They are distinctly handmade, incorporating found images and collage, text and drawing, as a way to imagine new trajectories for the book. Sullivan’s proposition for different covers for Snow’s Cover to Cover plays on the multiple meanings of the word "cover" as both a book cover, but also a cover version in music when a new interpretation is made of an old hit.

Sullivan’s dust jacket decoys are paired with Snow’s Nose (2014), a large Xerographic print of Michael Snow’s face—a close-up of the artist’s nose. The work is a reference to Nikolai Gogol’s satirical short story, The Nose (1836), in which a Russian bureaucrat loses his nose only to find that it has taken on a life of its own. Snow’s Nose is also a play on words. In English, “nose” and “knows” are homonyms, two words that sound exactly the same in speech, but have different etymologies and meanings. Here we see the artist’s nose, but it also suggests that Michael Snow has the knowledge of something that we don’t. What does Snow know? Where is Snow’s nose? Finally Snow’s Nose is accompanied sculptural artist&rsq uo;s book in the form of a handkerchief.

Together the works in the exhibition tease out the history of the artist book alongside the question of artistic influence and lineage, in a mischievous and adoring homage to the legacy of Michael Snow."

- Kathleen Ritter