Ger van Elk | Bulletin 33

Ger van Elk
Bulletin 33
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Art & Project, 1971
4 pp., 11.7 x 8.3", folded
Edition of 800


The 33rd (of an eventual 156) Art & Project Bulletin announces the Ger van Elk work Paul Klee - Um Den Fisch, 1926 (Around The Fish) from 1970, which consists of eight colour slides projected onto a wooden table with a white cloth. The slides document the artist consuming a meal based on a Klee painting. Van Elk reconstructed Klee’s work with tangible objects, replacing abstract designs with tangible items.

In addition to producing more Art & Project bulletins than any other artist (numbers 19, 33, 55, 65, 74, 100, 132, and 139), Ger Van Elk was also played a crucial role in introducing the Amsterdam gallery and publisher to numerous Los Angeles artists, including Bas Jan Ader (issues 44, 89), William Leavitt (58 and 80) and Allen Ruppersberg (67 and 105).

Van Elk moved from Amsterdam to Los Angeles in 1961, with his father, Peter Van Elk, an animator for Hanna Barbera, who worked on several episodes of the Flintstones. Here he befriend artists such as William Wegman, John Baldessari, and Robert Indiana. He was previously close with Bas Jan Ader, and when Ader also relocated to LA the two shared an apartment together on Sunset Boulevard.

"We wanted to be movie stars," Van Elk told Christophe Cherix in 2008. Their cohabitation was cut short when a neighbour set their house on fire and Ader moved in with his future wife, Mary Sue.

Van Elk had several solo exhibitions at the Art & Project gallery from 1970 to 1987, and (together with Marinus Boezem, Wim T. Schippers and Jan Dibbets) is seen as one of the main representatives of the conceptual art and arte povera movements in the Netherlands. His work was included in Documenta 5, in 1972, and in the influential exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” in 1969.

Ger van Elk died on Sunday (August 17th) at the age of 73.

Bulletin 33 is available for $99 from FTN Books, here.

David Harper | Entre Le Chien Et Le Loup

[David Harper]
Entre Le Chien Et Le Loup
Toronto, Canada: Doris McCarthy Art Gallery, 2014
120 pp., 22.6 x 14.7 x 2 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown


A handsomely designed catalogue to accompany the travelling exhibition of the same name, which began at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in February of 2013 and wraps up at Saint Mary's University Art Gallery later this month. It was also hosted by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the Kenderline Art Gallery (Saskatchewan) and the Ottawa Art Gallery.  All venues are co-publishers of the book.

The title phrase “entre chien et loup” translates literally into "between dog and wolf" but is used to describe a time of day,  just before night, when the light is so dim one cannot distinguish the two animals. It also expresses that limit between the familiar, the comfortable versus the unknown and the dangerous, the domestic and the wild. It is an uncertain threshold between hope and fear.

Harper's first monograph is a white clothbound book (with a discreet foil stamped cover) held in a die-cut cardboard slipcase, designed by Lauren Wickware. It features an introduction from Doris McCarthy Director/Curator Ann MacDonald and the essays "The Magic of The Handmade Thing" by Lise Stone & Jim Zanzi, "My Life as a Placeholder" by Jan Peacock, "All at Once" by Crystal Mowry and "Whether Pigs Have Wings" by Robin Metcalfe.

The final stop on the tour opens this Saturday (August 23rd) and runs until the 5th of October at the  Saint Mary's University Art Gallery in Halifax. Visit the gallery site, here.

The catalogue will be part of a joint-launch with the pace of days, which documents Monica Tap's recent exhibition at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. The event takes place on September 2nd, from 7 to 9 pm at MKG127.

David Shrigley | No Junk Mail

David Shrigley
No Junk Mail 
Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2014
13 x 13 cm.
Edition of 100 (+12 APs) signed and numbered copies

An overly earnest sign commanding No Junk Mail always seems worse than actual junk mail, so this David Shrigley work is the perfect functional multiple.

The porcelain enamel on steel sign is the most recent (23rd) edition from Paul + Wendy projects, who have also published prints, books and multiples by The Royal Art Lodge, Kay Rosen, Jonathan Monk, Micah Lexier, Maggie Groat, Daniel Eatock, Derek Sullivan and many others.  The sign is housed in a cardboard box and is accompanied by a letterpress card with the artists signature. It's available from the publishers, here, for $250 CDN., while supplies last.

Film Culture 44, Spring 1967

Jonas Mekas (ed), George Maciunas (designer)
Film Culture 44, Spring 1967
New York City, USA: Film Culture, 1967
78 pp., 26.5 x 21 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

Founded in 1955 by Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas, the New York-based magazine Film Culture is regarded as the seminal avant-garde cinema magazine. It began by covering Hollywood films and evolved into the primary voice of independent and avant-garde cinema, continuing on until 1996.

Film Culture took up offices in the 80 Wooster Street building that friend and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas converted into the "creative co-op" that first brought artists into SoHo, changing the area forever, and earning him the epithet “Father of SoHo”. Maciunas was was the designer for nine of the seventy-nine issues of the journal. He responsible for the typography and layout of issues 14 - 18, 30, and 43 - 45. (Maciunas' design for Mekas' book Reminiscences can be seen here).

Maciunas bound issue #30 in corrugated cardboard and issue #43 was a newspaper dedicated to Fluxus, but #44 remains the most accessible (read: still available for under $150), while still showing the hallmarks of Maciunas' design. These include an envelope containing facsimile reproductions of hand-written notes to Mekas, his stylized interplay between image and typography and his own contribution “USA Surpasses All Genocide Records”.

"Maciunas was a highly skilled typographer and graphic designer. He did commercial work to seek out a living, but used non-commercial venues to experiment with new ways of representing ideas in graphic form. His multi-disciplinary studies in architecture, art and graphic design at Cooper Union, in architecture and musicology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and in art history at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, exposed him to an array of visual information—from musical scores to architectural blueprints—giving him the tools to develop his unique graphic style. We see this early on in his ambitious information charts, begun in the late 1950s, which trace developments in the histories of art and world events, covering antiquity to the present.

Well-versed in the history of the avant-garde from Dada to Lettrism, Macuinas continued these groups’ interests in the visuality of text, often as a means to explore the conceptually challenging spaces in which semiotics break down. Fluxus, in particular, but also journals such as Film Culture, were where his most inventive designs came to light."

- Tomas Schmit

Levin Haegele | Glow Box

Levin Haegele
Glow Box
London, UK: Self-published, 2002
5.5 x 6.5 x 2.5 cm
Edition of 15 signed and numbered copies

Packaged phosphorescent powder as used in the artists' installation piece Glow Room.

Les Rassembleurs

Les Rassembleurs, curated by Dean Baldwin, closes a week from today at MKG127. It is the gallery’s fourth “artist-curated” summer exhibition, following Toolkit by Germaine Koh in 2012, Chopped and Screwed by Hugh Scott-Douglas in 2011 and A - B, by Micah Lexier in 2010.  

The exhibition includes the work of 14 artists on the loose topic of intoxication and indulgence (Dean’s professional area of expertise). Several of the artists (Ken Nicol, Roula Partheniou, Michael Dumontier, Kristan Horton) have appeared on this site (see tags below) many times before. Other artists include Valérie Blass, Karen Kraven, and Roy Meuwissen from Montreal), Dean Drever from Kingston, John Marriott and Margaux Williamson  from Toronto, Radames "Juni" Figeroa (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Poonam Jain (Mumbai) and Sarah Peters (New York). 

I have two works in the show. One is a silkscreen text piece called Red Nose Semiotics, about a 1905 ballad which became a popular trope in early British comedies. Before one could show a character vomiting or urinating in public, the song Nellie Dean was the fastest cue to the character’s inebriation.

The other work is titled The Piano Has Been Drinking, after the Tom Waits song of the same name. Here an altered 45 rpm record plays the song off-axis, continuing the fiction of the lyrics, in which the singer claims to be sober. The audio for the piece can be heard here. 

For more information, visit the gallery site here, or a review by Terrence Dick, here. 

Janet Cardiff | A Large Slow River

Janet Cardiff

A Large Slow River

Oakville, Canada: Oakville Galleries, 2001

46 pp.,13 x 15 xm., hardcover
Audio CD
Edition size unknown


This catalogue and audio CD is long out-of-print, but the commissioned walk is still active at Oakville Galleries' Gairloch Gardens, where one can sign out an MP3 player, put on the headphones and follow the instructions of the audio tour.

Those with their own copy of the 18-minute track could visit the work outside of gallery hours, or if the rumours of the gallery transitioning out of the garden space ever come true, after it is gone.

The book includes an essay by Oakville Galleries curator Marnie Fleming, who retires this year after 20 years at the space. Her final exhibition You've Really Got a Hold on Me, continues until August 30th.

"A Large Slow River has a beautiful site. It is set on Lake Ontario, with the waves hitting the rocks all day. Water was a major element in this walk. While working on the script, I was writing a fictional account of a man slipping at the top of a waterfall and falling to his death. I decided one Sunday while working on it that I needed to go to record the sound effects for the waterfall so we drove for over an hour to Waterton National Park in Alberta, just north of the Montana border. When we got to the small town where the waterfall was located, we decided to have lunch. Just as we were finishing lunch, I said to George that we had to get going, he had to hurry up. I was really impatient and intense. So we left the restaurant in a hurry and drove the two blocks to the waterfall. Just as we arrived at the site, 3 young people were walking slowly across the top of the 40-meter waterfall on a log that had become lodged above it. Everyone was watching this scene and thinking that the kids were crazy. It was a very dangerous thing to do. They all got across safely and the audience at the bottom was shaking their heads at the craziness of youth. I started to set up my recording gear in the van. As I was doing this, one kid who was still up above realized that he had made an impression on the audience below so he started dancing on the rocks at the top of the falls. Just as I was all set up and pressed the button to record I heard screams and yelling. I turned around to see that the boy had slipped off the rock and plunged the forty meters to the bottom. One of the strangest things is the way George looked at me at that moment and said ‘how did you know ?’ as if I had caused it. It took two teams of mountain climbers 3 days to get the boy’s body out from between the rocks where it had become stuck. No one had fallen or died at this waterfall since the late ’60s. I still wonder why it happened at that moment. I have a recording sitting on a shelf in my studio of the boy’s girlfriend crying, screaming crowds, men yelling instructions about getting ropes, and the sound of the sirens with the ambulance arriving. The crash of the waterfall is behind all of this like white noise. I never did use that part of the script or any of the recordings from that day."

- Janet Cardiff