Michael Snow Tribute #1

 

Michael Snow - who died tonight at the age of 94 - has lived in the same home (with his wife, curator Peggy Gale) since 1984. Five years ago the city of Toronto named a lane after him, in honour of his international reputation as an artist. 

The Adventures Of Willem De Ridder

Jeannette Dekeukeleire & Harry Ruhé

The Adventures Of Willem De Ridder

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Cultclub Editions, 2017

74 pp., 26 x 21 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

"Promoter of avant-garde theatre, Fluxus agent, founder of an art mail order house, publisher of taboo-breaking magazines, producer of controversial Radio Art programmes, and much more, Willem de Ridder has led a storied life. It seems that the moment he became successful with whatever he was doing, he would abandon it entirely to embark on some other project. In producing this biography, Harry Ruhé and Jeannette Dekeukeleire went back to the source – De Ridder’s old house in his hometown – and sifted through dozens of folders, clippings, dusty boxes, and attic treasures. The result is a book full of pictures, where texts should be interpreted as extensive captions." - Idea Books

Willem de Ridder died on December 29th, at the age of 83. A memorial is being held for him tomorrow, January 6th.

Spencer Finch | A Cloud Index

Spencer Finch

A Cloud Index

Brooklyn, USA: Trying to Press, 2020

[60] pp., 35.6 x 20.3 cm., loose leaves bound by rubber band

Edition of 500

An artist’s book of loose pages held together with a silver rubber band, which recreates Spencer Finch’s massive canopy installation at a London train station.

"The sixty pastel drawings that comprise this book were originally created for a public art project at the new Elizabeth Line station at Paddington in London.

The entire work, titled ‘A Cloud Index,’ presents 27 different types of clouds within a single composition. The drawings were scanned and then printed onto 180 clear glass panels (each 2 meters x 6 meters) and installed in the canopy of the station.

“The pages of this book can be assembled and attached to a wall to re-create the entire artwork, at a reduced scale. The number printed on the back of each leaf corresponds to its location within the entire composition, which is a horizontal grid of 3 up x 20 across.

“Begin in the top left corner with the first drawing, followed by the second and third drawings placed below. The fourth drawing begins the second column at the top and so on until you get to the sixtieth drawing which completes the grid at the bottom right of the composition.”

- A Cloud Index preface

Available for $150.00 from the new Jonathan Hill catalogue, here. 

Willem De Ridder, RIP

 

Willem de Ridder died last week after a brief illness, on December 29th. The Dutch artist, anarchist, storyteller, publisher, composer, and "chairman" of Fluxus for Northern Europe was 83. His career stretched over seven decades, mostly avoiding the trappings of the art world (which has yet to publish an obituary for him). 

De Ridder graduated from the Academy of Arts in Den Bosch, and shortly afterwards decided to stop painting. After meeting George Maciunas and Nam June Paik in the early sixties, de Ridder was invited to run the Fluxus European Mail-Order House. 

"An enormous crate arrived by freight, delivered to my house," de Ridder told me in 2002. "There was a huge amount of things from Maciunas: suitcases, boxes, all kinds of work. I thought, "Shit, now I have to do something about it." So I arranged all the various editions beautifully and had a friend of mine take a photograph of the display. My girlfriend [Dorothy Meijer] at the time sat in the middle of display. The photo looked so great that I distributed it and made a catalogue of the work, which I also heavily distributed. It listed all of the Fluxus works for sale, with prices and a description. Of course, I didn’t sell anything. Not a single thing."

A recreation of the work (with a cardboard cut-out of Meijer) is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (above). 

Together with Wim T. Schippers, de Ridder organized Dutch Fluxus festivals in 1963 and 1964 and, later, the Wet Dream Festival, the first international erotic film festival. 

The latter was a spin-off from Suck: The First European Sex Paper, which he ran as part of the SELF group (Sexual Egalitarian and Libertarian Fraternity)1. Only eight issues were produced over a five year period of the periodical now called "an experimental amalgam of sexual liberation, feminist ferment, alternative visual culture, and literary ambition."2 De Ridder provided an office for the newspaper, and spearheaded the graphic design and artistic content, tapping his network for contributions by John Giorno, Valerie Solanas, Otto Muehl, Thomas Bayrle, Gunter Rambow, Ed van der Elsken, and others. 

Previously, the artist had founded the music newspaper Hit Week, which published 32 issues between 1965 and 1969. He also co-founded the "counter culture" nightclubs Provadya and Paradiso.

“When I started at Paradiso, everyone could just jump on stage. And if you didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t either,” De Ridder recalled in 2018. “In no time it was packed and they came from all over the country.” The venue - operational for over fifty years - has hosted performances by Adele, Arcade Fire, David Bowie, James Brown, Nick Cave, Duran Duran, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Hole, Ice Cube, Curtis Mayfield, Willie Nelson, Nirvana, the Pixies, Prince, The Ramones, The Rolling Stones, Sonic Youth, U2, Frank Zappa, and countless others.3 

De Ridder collaborated with performance artist and porn star/activist4 Annie Sprinkle, with whom he was also romantically involved, from 1978 to 1980. 

A consummate story-teller, with a captivating voice, de Ridder hosted a weekly radio show on Amsterdam radio station Radio 100 for over twenty years. 

“I was only interested in going into unknown territories, the insecure field of life. Most people are terrified of it. When I brought audiences into that state during my performances, there was panic, but there was always an idiot who said: “It’s ART!” The audience was immediately relieved. Oh… it’s art. Thank God. We were getting scared. The word “art” destroys all life. That’s why I step out of it. Museums are a sort of mausoleum.”

- Willem de Ridder 5

1. Other members of SELF included William Levy, Jim Haynes, Germain Greer and Heathcote Williams. 

2. Alison M. Gingeras, Document Journal. 

3. https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2017/08/amsterdams-paradiso-from-flower-power-to-punk-and-beyond/

4. In 1996, Annie Sprinkle became the first porn star to get a doctoral degree, earning a PhD in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.

5. Flash Art, 2016

[Willem de Ridder, top right, with Ben Patterson, Geoffrey 

Hendricks, Philip Corner, Eric Andersen and Alison Knowles]

[Willem de Ridder and Ben Patterson at CultClub, 2012]

[Willem de Ridder, Annie Sprinkle and unknown couple] 

[Willem de Ridder and Myrto Semmoh in 2018]

 

Steve Mykolyn | Songs For A Funeral

Steve Mykolyn

Songs For A Funeral

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 2019

12" vinyl record, gatefold sleeve

Edition of 144 copies signed and numbered copies

With all of the celebrity deaths in the week between Christmas and New Years (Dorothy Iannone, Pele, Vivienne Westwood, Pope XVI, Barbara Walters, gallerist Ronald Feldman, Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green, etc.), I found myself wondering if it was a genuine phenomenon that more people die at this time of the year, or if it was just the result of an otherwise slow news week, with obituaries dominating the headlines.1

But the statistics bear it out: there is a notable spike in deaths this week each year, and in fact, the most deaths of any day of the year is typically today, January 1st.2

This made me think about Steve Mykolyn's Songs For A Funeral, a work about mortality that ages with the buyer.3 Released in November of 2019, the work is an artists' record in which the cover is as important - possibly more so - than the music inside.4 

Producing the lavish LP - which includes a signed print, poster and guitar plectrum - had been a labour of love for Mykolyn, for over two years. He began working on the piece in 2017, a year that took several of his musical heroes: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Leon Russell and Prince. 

When an artist you admire dies, it takes a toll. If they die young you are robbed of future output, if they die naturally you are reminded of your own mortality. One might mourn the death of a celebrity as a way to rehearse grieve, a few times removed. 

Mykolyn commissioned illustrator Chad Eaton to produce ninety-six portraits of forty-eight musicians - first alive, and then dead. Eaton works in a woodcut style similar to the influential Mexican political lithographer Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852 – 1913), who used skulls, calaveras5, and bones to convey political and cultural critiques.

The gatefold LP sleeve features the portraits tiled four-by-three, on all four sides. Visually, it is not dissimilar to another elaborate LP design: the cover of the Rolling Stones 1978 album Some Girls, which featured band portraits alongside celebrities, using a die-cut design.6 But conceptually, it has more in common with another celebrated album cover - the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by Pop Artist Peter Blake. 

Even if one is disinclined to side with the Paul-Is-Dead conspiracists who view the album cover portrait as a funeral scene7,  the pictured cardboard cut-outs feature actors, authors, musicians, comedians, scientists, politicians and athletes who the band admired. Blake assembled his own list of favourites, as did gallerist Robert Fraser, and Beatles John and Paul. George Harrison suggested six Indian gurus and Ringo was reportedly happy to defer to his bandmates: "Whatever the others say is fine by me."

For his list of favourites, Mykolyn settled on Jimi Hendrix, Nick Cave, Lemmy from Motorhead, Bryan Ferry, David Byrne, Amy Winehouse, Iggy Pop, Ian Curtis from Joy Division, Brian Eno, Joe Strummer, Jay-Z, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Lou Reed, all four Beatles and Yoko, three Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Leon Russell, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, John Cale, Nico, Joey Ramone, David Johansen, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Thom York, Michael Stipe, Beck, Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, and about half a dozen others. 

Regardless of their status at the time of production, the musicians are featured on the cover as their living selves. To view their corresponding 'dead' portraits, the buyer must scratch-off the printed silver coated material (similar to a lottery ticket, see below). 

Mykolyn is the former CCO of ad agency TAXI8, and a partner in the design firm Castor. In 2008, he was co-curator of the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture. That same year he created and distributed seven thousand coats to the homeless (a New York Times article about the coats can be read, here). In 1997, he wrote and directed El Dia La Noche Y Los Muertos, an award-winning documentary about Mexico's Day of the Dead festival. Songs For A Funeral features music from this film, connecting the Memento Mori9 of the LP to an over 25 year-long investigation into the subject. 

His background in advertising and design serve the work well - everything about Songs For A Funeral  is highly considered: the protective plastic sleeve accommodates the opening of the gatefold (a first in all of my years of record collecting), the printed guitar pick is not an unnecessary flourish - it functions as a tool to scratch away the living portraits. 

Songs For A Funeral  was produced in an edition of 144 copies: 48 on white vinyl, a dead edition of 48 on black vinyl and a ghost edition of 48 on transparent vinyl. I regret buying only one (from the ghost edition) as I might be more inclined to scratch off the deaths as they occur if I had a second, pristine copy. 

1. I don't think Modest Mouse have ever made it to the CNN front page before, for example. 

2. In North America, anyway. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20805014/

3. An obvious personal interest of mine. See this work of mine, for example. 

4. Another shared interest. One of the first exhibitions I curated was of artist designed album covers. And preceding that, I produced this catalogue. 

5. A calavera is a representation of a human skull, mostly edible or decorative, handmade from sugar or clay. They are used in the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead. 

6. Many of them threatened lawsuits: Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Liza Minnelli (representing Judy Garland, her mother), Raquel Welch, and the estate of Marilyn Monroe all threatened to sue for the use of their likenesses without permission. The record was quickly reissued with the celebrity images removed and the phrase "Pardon our appearance – cover under reconstruction" in their stead. 

7. Sgt Peppers is ground zero for Paul-Is-Dead clues many of them involving the funeral-like cover portrait. For example, the yellow flowers at the bottom right are said to be in the shape of Paul's bass guitar and spell out the name PAUL, followed by a question mark. McCartney is seen wearing what looks like an OPP badge (Ontario Provincial Police, for some reason) but it is purported to actually read OPD (officially pronounced dead), etc. etc. 

8. TAXI is a marketing communications company that was founded in 1992 in Montreal. In 2009, it was awarded Platinum status by Deloitte based on six consecutive years among Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies. The following year, TAXI was named Agency of the Decade by Toronto-based Strategy magazine.

9. Memento Mori is an artistic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. It's translation from Latin is "remember that you have to die".