Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair

Following closely on the heels of the Art Toronto and Feature fairs, this weekend the Art Gallery of Ontario will host the 2014 Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair.

Billing itself as "the only international antiquarian and collectible book fair in Canada", the TIABF
will run from Friday, November 7th through to Sunday, November 9th, 2014.

The exhibitors, from across Europe and North America, are members of their national associations and of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers. The fair promises a wide range of books, maps, prints and manuscripts, including travel and exploration; natural history, science and technology; children’s and illustrated; fine press and limited editions; modern first editions and signed volumes.

For more information, visit the sites below:

http://torontoantiquarianbookfair.com/
https://www.ilab.org

The below images are a sampling of the titles that Monkey's Paw will be bringing to the fair.

Elisabeth Tonnard | One Swimming Pool

Elisabeth Tonnard
One Swimming Pool
Leerdam, The Netherlands: Self-published, 2013
3164 pp., 14.8 x 18.8 x 19 cm., softcover
Edition of 9 (+1 AP) signed and numbered copies


A few pages back I posted a picture I took at the Stedelijk Museum, when we visited Amsterdam in the summer, of a work called One Swimming Pool. I misattributed the work to another artist in the exhibition somehow, which was just brought to my attention.

The work is by Elisabeth Tonnard, a Dutch artist and poet who has produced thirty-one books, some of which are held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Brooklyn Museum, Centre Pompidou, Columbia University, International Center for Photography, MoMA Library, New York Public Library, Tate Library and the Walker Art Center collections.

One Swimming Pool is a response to Ed Ruscha's Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass. The nine-volume bookwork can be dismantled and destroyed to produce a life-size swimming pool (648 x 648 cm.)

The exhibition, On the Move, continues until January 18th, 2015. For more information, visit the museum's website here and the artist's site here.

Juliane Foronda posted this picture to Instagram the other day, of the shelf at MKG127. The shelf features two artist books by Bill Burns, a DVD by Geoffrey Pugen, monographs about Laurel Woodcock, Sky Glabush, Monica Tap and David Harper, editions by myself, Roula Partheniou, Laurel Woodcock, Dean Drever, Michael Dumontier, Laura Kikauka, and a collaborative artist book by Roula Partheniou & Joy Walker.

Janek Schaefer | Skate/Rink

Janek Schaefer
Skate/Rink
London, UK: audiOh! Recordings, 2003
12" vinly LP, CD3
Edition size unknown


The term Turntable Skating refers to the tonearm of the record player, if improperly balanced, skipping across the disc towards the centre. A popular early DIY technique to thwart this was to tape a penny to the top of the tone-arm, to weigh it down. Most turntables now include adjustable counterweight contraptions. These devices also aim to keep the stylus in the centre of the groove (against the deterministic spiral of the groove, which draws it towards the centre of the disk) to prevent damage to the needle and to minimize distortions in the reading of the sound.

Janek Schaefer's Skate usurps this mechanism to create new playback and listening experiences. Using a custom built lathe, he developed a fragmented cutting technique to create a concentric collage of individual short 'sounds scars' on the vinyl. The sound from a pair of car speakers was used to generate the grooves.

When the disc is played, the stylus navigates it's own random path across the "intermittent terrain of physical/sonic diversions". A number of variables, including the make of the turntable, the speed and the user themselves, will affect the result of playback and thus offers each listener a somewhat unique listening experience. This approach follows in the footsteps of Christian Marclay, Milan Knizak, Lee Ranaldo, Boyd Rice and other artists/musicians and composers who treat the vinyl LP not as a fixed piece of music, but as a source material. A chapter I wrote for One For Me and One to Share called "The Needle and The Damage Done", examines this tendency in artists' recordworks (click here).

For those without a turntable (or without one they wish to risk), the accompanying CD3 features 99 tracks, with lengths varying from four seconds to almost a minute and a half, but with most hovering around ten seconds.

"The fashion for packaging CD reissues in minature replicas of the original album sleeves is inverted by Janek Schaefer's Skate/Rink which contains a 3"CD tcucked away incongruously in a 12" inner sleeve. The other half of the gatefold cover houses Skate, a vinyl disc that also plays games with expectations. Skate departs from the traditional spiral path steering the stylus from edge to centre. Schaefer built an ersatz lathe witha vibrating cutting head and scored the surface of the acetate with broken-up grooves that randomise the playing path on each passing. Skate is a kick in the teeth for all patented anti-skate mechanisms.

The record as art object has beenhighly visible as well as audible in recent years, not least through Christian Marclay's vinyl constructionsand turntable collages. Back in the mid 1960's the damaged or modified record as artwork and compositional resource was tried and tested by fluxus artist Milan Knizak with his 'Broken Music' series. 'Music While You Work', realised by his Fluxus associate Arthur Kocke, between 1958 and 1964, had already interupted the groove with plastic drips designed to cause annoyance to listeners. Schaefer's Skate can easily be connected to such interventions, but the assumption today is that we have become attached to surface noise, through nostalgia for a medium facing obsolescence or through conscious or subliminal expansion of our listening horizons. In place of passive, irritated audience, Schaefer envisages participants in an ongoing soundwork. SKate is offered as a starting point for the users personal explorations. "Experiment with it," he exhorts, " Have Fun!"

The Rink 3" CD is a 20 minute composition combining sounds from the LP and room recordings from a 2001 Skate installation in Cork Ireland. It has 99 index points to enablethe CD specific variation of random play. The sound predictably mixes graininess and shadow in a musicof crackle hiss click whine, crippled rhythms, occasional lapses into silence or shifts from surface imediacy to suggestions of spatial depth. The disc is stamped with an image of vinyl hosting three tracking arms, a further hint that Rink is in part a prompt to have fun with your own Skate."

Julian Cowley, The Wire

Sobey Art Award: Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

The Sobey Art Award exhibition opens this week at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. There's nothing in the history of the prize to suggest a hometown advantage, but I call it for Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. Their collaborative practice is prolific and excellent, they both have very strong individual practices, and they were both founding members of the Royal Art Lodge (whose Marcel Dzama was nominated in 2009, but lost to David Altmejd).

They're exhibiting their ongoing Typing editions (get them here for $50 each, while you still can) and the MDF Library, a series of hundreds of small book paintings.

For more information, visit the Sobey Foundation site here, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery's website, here. I note the WAG is also currently exhibiting work by Brian Jungen, who won the inaugural Sobey Award in 2002.

TRAVERSALS

"TRAVERSALS is based on a series of conceptual interviews with Dora Garcia, Chris Kraus, Mark von Schlegell, Charles Stankievech, and Jacob Wren originally produced for an installation in an art gallery. As a re-issue of these texts the forthcoming publication continues K.'s interest in the book-as-exhibition. Each invited contributor has found a unique way to explore the hybrid spaces between genres and art forms, and the discussions focus especially on the role and relationship between visual art and writing. While the interview process was rather formalised––with one set of five identical questions posed to each person in the first round, and then five individual questions asked in a second round in response to the first five answers––the texts themselves delight through a personal tone and a great openness for both idiosyncratic trajectories and unexpected traversals between the five different chapters."

The title is designed by artist Charles Stankievech and edited by curator/writer Anna-Sophie Springer, who together are k-verlag. For more information, visit their website, here.

The book launches today at Art Metropole (1490 Dundas Street West, Toronto), from 4 to 6 pm, with a presentation by Springer at 4:30.

Dean Baldwin | Eel’s Wallet

Dean Baldwin
Eel’s Wallet
Toronto, Canada: Nothing Else Press, 2014
16 x 11 x 3.5 cm (closed) 16 x 21.5 x 2 cm (open)
Edition of 47 signed and numbered copies

A continuation of the artist's many alcohol-themed projects (including bars for Nuit Blanche, the Venice Bienalle, etc., etc.) this eel-skin wallet contains virtually every possible event drink ticket currently in use. Buy one, and wherever you are the drinks are always on the house.

Available from www.nothingelsepress.com. 


Nothing Else Press and Eel's Wallet chosen by AA Bronson as one of his top five favourites at the London Art Book Fair last month:

"Named after Dick Higgins Fluxus-heavy press of the ’60s and ’70s, Something Else Press, this young publisher seemed the only ones present to have produced an entire new line of works especially for the Fair. My favourite? “Eel’s Wallet” by Dean Baldwin, an edition of 47 wallets stuffed full of drinks tickets, which bizarrely becomes some sort of “book” for which we have no name."

- AA Bronson, Time Out Magazine "Five Picks from the London Art Book Fair".