Marianne Wex | Let’s Take Back Our Space

Marianne Wex

Let’s Take Back Our Space

Berlin, Germany: Frauenliteratur Verlag, 1979

366 pp., 24 x 19 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown 

Subtitled Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, this title features 2037 photographs of men and women and asserts that body language is a result of sex-based, patriarchal socialization, affecting all of our other "feminine" and "masculine" role behaviour. 

Anticipating the phrase "manspreading" thirty-five years ago, the volume illustrates how a woman will sit “legs held close together, feet either straight or turned slightly inward, arms held close to the body. In short, the woman makes herself small and narrow, and takes up little space." Men, on the other hand, sit "legs far apart, feet turned outwards, the arms held at a distance from the body. In short, the man takes up space and generally takes up significantly more space than the woman.”

Originally published in German, in 1979, an English translation appeared five years later in 1984, Let’s Take Back Our Space is considered to be the artist's lone surviving work. Shortly after its creation she became seriously ill and later embarked on a successful career in medicine. 

In 2009, Let’s Take Back Our Space was exhibited for the first time since its unveiling. It has shown a few times subsequently, and is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (above, bottom). 

Wex died last week, at the age of eighty-three. 

"The German artist Marianne Wex started out as a painter before producing her photographic project Let’s Take Back Our Space, one of the great unsung works of 1970s feminist history and cultural analysis. Born in Hamburg in 1937, Wex studied at the city’s University of Fine Arts, where she later taught for seventeen years. In 1979, she published Let’s Take Back Our Space as a book, with the subtitle “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures. It is a visual survey comprised of hundreds of photographs assembled into dozens of thematic grids: Seated persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; standing persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; people sitting and laying on the ground; arm and leg positions; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statuary; how the men of Christianity took over an old goddess gesture; the stultifying effect of the patriarchal socialization of men. And so on. The images were culled from a huge range of sources—advertisements, reportage, fashion magazines, studio portraits, the history of art—and many were taken on the streets of Hamburg by Wex, who proposes that our smallest, most unconscious gestures speak volumes about the power relations of gender in daily life."

- David Campany, Aperture

Last day to purchase prints and support States of Change

With the realization that five states will most likely decide the election (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), the organization States of Change have released a series of fundraising prints, each selling for $150 US. The proceeds (minus $15.50 to cover production costs) will support forty-two different local groups fighting voter suppression in these battleground states.  

The sale ends tomorrow at 11:59 pm PST. 

Participating artists include Alfredo Jaar, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Danny Lyon, Sara Cwynar, Robert Frank, Sally Mann, Hank Willis Thomas (above), Sharon Lockhart, James Welling, Hannah Price, Jack Pierson, Nan Goldin, Jason Fulford, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (who recently told Pitchfork "We can’t do anything progressively until we get rid of Trump. Then we can work on Biden."). 

The works are sold as unlimited editions, unsigned and unnumbered, with the following conditions: 

(1) You must not display the artwork in a museum, gallery, exhibition, or otherwise public nature, without the express written consent of the artist.

(2) You must not resell the artwork without the express consent of the artist.

(3) You are a human making an individual purchase, and not a bot designed to make rapid purchases.

(4) You agree to not make any further copies of the image after its purchase.

(5) All sales are final. Because all net proceeds are being donated to Movement Voter Project, refunds will not be possible.

Visit the States of Change website, here, to purchase. 

La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela | Selected Writings

La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela

Selected Writings

Munich, Germany: Heiner Friedrich, 1969

104 pp., 21 x 14.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 2100, 98 of which are signed and numbered

A collection of writings by and about composer La Monte Young, and featuring drawings by his partner and collaborator Marian Zazeela.

The thin volume includes "Notes On The Continuous Periodic Composite Sound Waveform Environment Realizations Of "Map Of 49's Dream The Two Systems Of Eleven Sets Of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery," (which was also published in the Dan Graham edited issue of Aspen Magazine), "Dream House,"Conversation With La Monte Young By Richard Kostelanetz," The Soul Of The Word," "Lecture 1960," and "Poem To Diane." 

"RICHARD KOSTELANETZ - What were your purposes in the pieces of your second year at Berkeley, the compositions of 1960, written after your encounter with Cage?

LA MONTE YOUNG - I was on my way to Mount Tamalpais, the biggest mountain in the Marin County area, and I started thinking about the butterfly. Alone, it made a very beautiful piece. Being very young, I could still take something so highly poetic and use it without the fear I would have now - that it would be trampled on. Now, I would offer something quite a bit more substantial than a butterfly or a fire - something that can’t be so easily walked on. After all, a butterfly is only a butterfly. No matter how much I write about the fact that a butterfly does make a sound - that it is potentially a composition - anyone that wants to can say, “Well, it’s only a butterfly.”

KOSTELANETZ - Your point, then, in bringing into the concert situation a jar of butterflies and then releasing them, was that a butterfly makes a sound.

YOUNG - True. Another important point was that a person should listen to what he ordinarily just looks at, or look at things he would ordinarily just hear."

Valued at between $800 and $1200 US, a PDF is available at Ubuweb, here. 

Jean-Paul Vroom | He

Jean-Paul Vroom

He

Amsterdam, Holland: Scientific Publishing Corp., 1969

54 pp., 16 x 24 x 1 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled “Visual Information About a Human Being”, this title features 46 black and white images of Van der Gulik. 

"The human body is a universe, wherein all dramatic, comic, vulgar, aesthetic, ethical emotions, visual as well as sensed, can be experienced.This book makes claim to being the most optimistic book of our time" 

- Jean-Paul Vroom

Joseph Beuys | Iphigenia / Titus Andronicus

Joseph Beuys

Iphigenia / Titus Andronicus

Munich, Germany/New York City, USA: Edition Schellmann, 1985

78 x 55.3 x 12.8 cm.

Edition of 45 [+ 5 AP] 

Joseph Beuys performed the 'action' Iphigenia / Titus Andronicus at Experimenta 3 in Frankfurt on 29th and 30th of May, 1969. The performance consisted of the artist reciting the text of Goethe’s play Iphigenia, while a loudspeaker relayed the pre-recorded sound of two actors reading Iphigenia and Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus. Both plays deal with the subject of vengeance, with the violent ending of Titus Andronicus contrasting with the happy ending of Iphigenia. 

Beuys appeared dressed in a fur coat, which he quickly removed before beginning to imitate the flight of birds, striking a pair of bronze cymbals and emitting guttural sounds, regurgitating fat and feeding sugar a white horse. The horse stood atop a sheet of metal, which was rigged with microphones, so that every time the horse scraped or stamped its hooves, the sound was magnified. 

Now valued at approximately $7000 US, the edition that documents the work consists of a photo-positive and negative on film, signed with the artist's brown paint stamp. 

John Baldessari | Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)

John Baldessari
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)

Milan, Italy: Edizioni Giampaolo Prearo and Galleria Toselli, 1973

[12 pp]., 25 x 32.5 cm., loose leaves

Edition of 2000 [+500 publisher's copies]

12 coloured photographic plates in an embossed box, produced on the occasion of Baldessari’s first solo exhibition in Italy in 1973. 

"Ever since the onset of photography, the roles of the hand and the arm in making art have been subject to doubt. Once the definitive means of bringing an idea into form, these human appendages could seem feeble or quaint in an age of science and industry. Allowing gravity to participate in marking became a vital way to give art a deeper or more objective structure. Marcel Duchamp dropped threads to make the lines of his pivotal 1913–14 work 3 Standard Stoppages, and Jackson Pollock later dripped paint to push the limits of his control over line. These tactics called attention to art making as a performative grappling with chance and indifference.

In his 1973 series Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), John Baldessari brought his impish wit to this modernist turn. He threw three balls in the air in hopes that a snapshot might catch them aloft and aligned. Through the magic of photography, gravity was defeated, and the balls never had to come down. Although he playfully inserted his arm or his finger in other works, in Throwing Three Balls he kept himself out of the frame. Well, not quite: his balls were in the frame, and the playful reference they make both to his surname and to masculine anatomy is crucial. Throwing Three Balls spoofs the swagger of the Pollock myth of a man laying himself bare through his struggle with the elements. Whereas Pollock orbited his canvases on the floor with all the gravitas of a seminal creator, Baldessari sent his tiny planets skyward with a playful toss.

We should remember, however, that Throwing Three Balls was a game for two players. While Baldessari threw, his then-wife Carol Wixom operated the camera. Chance became the intersection of their performances, where the scattershot and the snapshot met. Each resulting image depicted a hanging sculpture made from dime-store materials that invoked, in the deadpan innocence of pop, both the lofty aspirations of the moon-shot era and the absurd randomness of the atomic age. As the catalyst of such images, Baldessari’s arm became one of the most disarming of his generation.

- Robin Kelsey, Aperture Magazine

Last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host interviewed his wife Molly McNearney, from their shared bedroom - which houses Throwing Three Balls..., framed above the bed:

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp died on this day in 1968, at the age of 81.