This week on Tumblr: Fluxus bottles and jars

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/fluxus-jars

Bruce Nauman | LA AIR

Bruce Nauman
LA AIR
New York City, USA: Multiples, Inc., 1970
[12] pp., 30.4 x 30.4 cm., staple-bound
Edition of 1200

In 1970, Multiples Inc. released the seminal boxed work Artists & Photographs, which included Mel Bochner's Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), Christo's Packed Tower, Spoleto, Italy 1968, Jan Dibbets' Perspective Correction 1967, Tom Gormley's Red File Cabinet, Dan Graham's Two Parallel Essays, Douglas Huebler's Location Piece #2 : New York City – Seattle, Washington, Allan Kaprow's Pose,  Michael Kirby's Pont Neuf, Sol LeWitt's Schematic Drawing for Muybridge, Richard Long's Rain Dance, Robert Morris's Continuous Project Altered Daily, Ed Ruscha's Babycakes, Robert Smithson's Torn Photograph, Bernar Venet's Exploited, Andy Warhol's Portraits, Robert Rauschenberg's Revolver, and Dennis Oppenheim's Flower Arrangement for Bruce Nauman. 

Nauman's own contribution was a response to his earlier artist book, Clear Sky (see below). Whereas the former contained full-bleed images of various shades of blue, this title features color-field-like planes of indigo, crimson and yellow-green, suggesting the toxicity of the air in Los Angeles, where the artist had recently relocated.

Nauman's signature appears PRINTED on the verso.

LA Air is currently on sale at Printed Matter, for $540 US, here. High resolution images of each page can be seen at the Harvard Art Museum site, here.

Bruce Nauman | Clear Sky

Bruce Nauman
Clear Sky
New York City, USA: Castelli Gallery, [1968]
[12] pp., 12 x 12 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown

Nauman's second book (after Pictures of Sculpture in a Room) contains neither words nor images. Many critics have suggested that while Ed Ruscha was busy documenting Los Angeles buildings, pools and parking lots, Nauman trained his camera upward, to the LA sky (in this and the follow-up, LA Air). While it's true that Nauman's next outing would be a direct response to Ruscha's bookworks (Burning Small Fires), Clear Sky is reportedly made without a camera. The full-bleed images of varying hues of blue are simply ink, not photographs of the sky as suggested in the title.


"Clear Sky was a way to have a book that had only coloured pages- pictures of the sky. I like that idea that you were looking into an image of the sky, but it is just a page: you're not really looking into anything - you're looking at a flat page. LA Air was the same idea, but it was also a response to Clear Sky using polluted colours instead."

- Bruce Nauman, 1989

Boris Mikhailow | Suzi et cetera

Boris Mikhailow
Suzi et cetera
Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006
200 pp., 19 x 13 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown


"In the early 1980s, before Glasnost and Perestroika, Boris Mikhailov made this series of photographs in his home town of Charkow, in the Ukraine. Mikhailov is best known for his ruthlessly honest documentation of the problems of Soviet and Russian daily life; this work, which has never been published before, is sometimes gentler. "

- publisher's blurb

Richard Prince | Inside World

Richard Prince
Inside World
New York City, USA: Thea Westreich, 1989
12.5 x 8.75 cm.
Edition of 250 signed and numbered copies

An exhibition catalogue - artist’s book hybrid published on the occasion of a 1989 Kent Gallery show, co-curated by the artist and Thea Westreich. Each copy is personalized with a joke hand written by Prince, for example:

What a kid I was. I remember practicing the violin in front of a roaring fire. My old man walked in on me. He was furious. We didn't have a fireplace.


With all I've heard about A-Bombs that'll destroy a city and H-Bombs that'll destroy a state and chain reactions that'll destroy the world I just don't have the incentive to buy a two pants suit.


"If I refuse to go to bed with you," she whispered, "will you really commit suicide?" That's been my usual procedure.

Serge Oldenbourg | Flux Contents

Serge Oldenbourg
Flux Contents
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1969
6.3 × 3.3 × 3.3 cm.
Edition size unknown

"I like this idea," George Maciunas wrote to Ben Vautier in 1966, "very nice & easy to produce." Oldenbourg was a friend of Vautier's and the two had participated together in various Fluxus activities in Nice, France, in the mid-sixties.

The work consists of hardened plaster in a jar. It was the only work produced by Oldenbourg for Fluxus, before he and Maciunas had a falling out following his arrest in Prague.

Bob Cobbing | a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a s o u n d p o e m s e q u e n c e

Bob Cobbing
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a s o u n d p o e m s e q u e n c e
London, UK :  Writers Forum, 1965
56 pp., 23 x 17.6 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown

The 7th in the "Writers Forum Poets" series, this title consists of a sequence from a to z of sound poems to be read aloud. Typed pages in card cover.

Cobbing (along with John Rowan and Jeff Nuttall) founded the Writers Forum in the early sixties to publish his own work, and the work of other authors/artists working in the field of sound and visual poetry. Between 1963 and Cobbing's death in 2002, Writers' Forum published over one thousand pamphlets and books including works by Bill Bissett, John Cage, Paul Dutton, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Steve McCaffery, bpNicol, P. J. O'Rourke, Betty Radin, Richard Tipping, Lawrence Upton, Jiri Valoch and many others.