Per Kirkeby, RIP

Danish artist Per Kirkeby has died at the age of seventy-nine. 

Chris Burden

Chris Burden died three years ago today, at the age of 69.

Vibe Arts Auction

VIBE Arts is an award-winning charitable organization committed to "providing children and youth in under-resourced communities with high quality community and school based arts education."

Their fundraising auction - organized by Bill Clarke and hosted by Stephen Ranger - takes place tonight at 7pm at the Spoke Club, in Toronto. I can't find a list of other participants, but the auction includes the above Ere Long Done Do Does Did bookwork and print. For more information, visit the Vibe Arts site, here:

https://vibearts.ca/media/arts-effect/

Wolf Vostell | Berliner Brot

Wolf Vostell
Berliner Brot
Berlin, Germany: Fine-Art Gallery, 1994
25 x 35 x 28 cm.
Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

Bread painted with liquid cement on one side and a video monitor.

The artist produced several other works involving televisions monitors encased in cement, and another (Prague Bread) involving objects baked into bread.

Per Kirkeby

Per Kirkeby died today at the age of 79.

Salvador Dali | Venus de Milo aux tiroirs

Salvador Dali
Venus de Milo aux tiroirs
Bologna, Italy: Venturi Arte, 1936/64
8 x 9.5 x 38 cm.
Edition of 150 numbered copies


A white painted bronze multiple with six removable drawers, stamped with the artist's signature on the base. An example of the work recently sold at a Christie's auction for GBP 13,750, against an estimate of between GBP 4,000  and GBP 6,000.

Francis Alÿs | Ghetto Collector

Francis Alÿs
Ghetto Collector
Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett Editions, 2003
15 x 24 x 13.8 cm.
Edition of 99 signed and numbered copies

Francis Alÿs' 1991 work The Collector was a performance in which the artist walked through the streets of Mexico City pulling a small toy dog behind him, on wheels. The object was magnetized and  - over the course of the journey - collected metallic debris as a kind of souvenir.

The Ghetto Collector for Parkett #69 is made of tin, magnets, plastic string and rubber wheels. There are 25 design variations.


“Each of Alÿs’s disturbances in the normal traffic patterns of everyday life spans a portion of the city, most involve a process of accumulation or depletion, all are willful, deadpan, understated, and efficient with regard to their apparent aimlessness. And, whether documented in videos or photos, all are visually memorable.”

- Robert Storr, Parkett #69

"I discovered fables in the early ’80s, while studying in Venice. My interest was related to certain urban contexts, places which I felt were impossible to intervene in physically, whose history felt untouchable. It seemed that the only way to have any interference or dialogue with their history and their daily life, of stirring up their inertia, was by introducing a narrative or a fable as if it were a verbal virus. The idea came up to intervene in the place’s imagination without adding any physical matter to it, but instead playing at the level of metaphor or allegory. I think the first experiments with that concept were my walks for The Collector, from 1990–92. I’d walk around the streets of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico with a toy of sorts made of magnets on wheels. After three days people started talking about the crazy gringo walking around with his magnetized dog, but after seven days, the story, the anecdote, had remained even though the characters were gone. That’s how I started developing the idea of introducing tales and fables into a place’s history at a particular moment of its local history. This became a potential method to interact with places that I stumbled upon during those years, mainly in Mexico City, but also outside, as when I tried to spread a rumor in the town of Tlayacapan, Morelos."

- Francis Alÿs