Otto Piene RIP

Otto Piene
Lichtballett
Cambridge, USA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011
96 pp., 9.8 x 7.1", softcover
Edition size unknown


Otto Piene died Thursday at the age of 86. He was born and raised in North Germany and lived and worked in both Düsseldorf and Groton, Massachusetts.

Piene reportedly died in a taxi cab in Berlin, where he was visiting for the launch of his major retrospective More Sky, spread across the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle. The day before his death he spoke at the opening of the exhibition and was in preparations for Sky Art Event, which was slated to take place tonight in the sky above the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Piene represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1967 and 1971, and his work was included in Documenta in 1959, 1964, and 1977. He was a founder, along with Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, of the renowned ZERO group, which was known for their manifestos and single-evening exhibitions.
The group, who have collaborated with Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and others, will be honoured with a large-scale historical survey to open at the Guggenheim in New York this fall.

The exhibition catalogue Lichtballett "highlights the artist’s ongoing exploration of light as an artistic and communicative medium. Piene’s Lichtballett (light ballet) performances, first produced using hand-operated lights directed through perforated stencils, became mechanized in the 1960s. The artist’s light sculptures consisted of motorized lamps, grids, and discs producing a flow of projected light; these machines evolved into kinetic sculptural environments of mechanized effects through the 1960s and ’70s. Featuring Piene’s own writings on light as an artistic medium, an essay by art historian Michelle Y. Kuo, and an interview with curator João Ribas, Otto Piene: Lichtballett documents the artist’s pioneering investigation of art and technology."

Ben Vautier turns 79 today

Jake and Dinos Chapman | Insult to Injury

Jake and Dinos Chapman
Insult to Injury Wallpaper
London, UK: White Cube, 2009
Digital print on wallpaper
1000 x 52 cm


A 10 metre roll of wallpaper (with a repeat of 84cm) featuring the artists' rewordings of Goya etchings. The victims heads have been replaced with those of puppies and clowns, the design of the wallpaper is based on traditional toile de Jouy textiles.

Available for £360.00, here.

Claire Fontaine | Some Instructions For the Sharing of Private Property

Claire Fontaine
Some Instructions For the Sharing of Private Property
Paris, France: Onestar Press, 2011
150 pp., 14 x 22.5 cm., paperback
Edition of 250

"This book is a tale of seduction. It reveals how to win the resistance of closed doors that we all face each day. We can read that a lock is not a hostile obstacle to our desire but a new potential lover, whose interiority we have to see with the eyes of the soul and whose qualities and defaults we have to imagine. A world of silent dialogues between unanimated beings and humans discloses itself in these pages. Chapter after chapter, a disquieting light is shed on the triad of the artist, the consumer and the lock-picker, all belonging to the same confraternity of bilingual creatures, fearless explorers of the deserts of reification, able to communicate with and through objects. Smelling, touching, listening are to be learnt again by the ones who might want to succeed in lock-picking, and if they do – they are warned - they shouldn’t think “I made it” but wonder “what exactly happened ?”. Because the point isn’t why resistance leaves the place to openness, but how that happens. There is a science of quality that defies logic, it rules the domain of the love conquest whose champion is Don Giovanni, restless wrecker of moral boundaries and petty bourgeois common sense, moved by the mere pleasure of adding another name to his list. There is a use value that ruins all exchange value. And there is an accumulation of competence that threatens all other possible accumulation.If this manual contains information, it must be said that it can only be used in the way one would follow directions for spiritual exercises. Never think about yourself and never think about the lock : ego gets in the way of lock-picking as much as it does for any Zen practice. Visualizing the invisible, evaluating the con-sequences of the least of our gestures, reaching a state of concentrated relaxation are parts of the process, whose unspoken aim is becoming something between flesh and metal - like Odradek is both a bobbin and a begging creature, but he is neither of them.Some instructions for the sharing of private property is a story of asceticism told by various anonymous voices. Because the morality of the lock-picker resembles the one of the fidèles d’amour : there are many easy ways to break into places, but picking a lock is the more virtuous one. Cultivating this virtuosity involves sensing the world more intensely, sanding one’s fingertips until each grain of sand paper can be distinctly felt, making oneself as rigid and cold as a key until perfectly understanding what every clicking noise means, being aware of the infinite states that exist between closed and open, all to be inhabited and influenced. Lock-pickers belong to a clandestine congregation, which has the means to enter our houses and our hearts, but here a choice is presented to us : becoming one of them or taking closed doors for an answer."

- Claire Fontaine, March 2011

Available from the publisher, here, for 60 €, and from Printed Matter, here, for $55.00 US.

Claire Fontaine (the Paris-based collective who borrow their name from a brand of school notebooks) give a free lecture on the subject of Italian feminists of the 1970s today at OCADU at 6:30pm, room 190. 

The event is organized as part of the Getting Rid Of Ourselves exhibition, curated by Helena Reckitt and featuring works by Becky Beasley, Adrian Blackwell, Heath Bunting, Kajsa Dahlberg, Jesse Darling, Janez Jansa and collaborations by Kernel, Goldin+Senneby and Claire Fontaine. The works in the exhibition "question the link between art and self-expression through tactics of anonymity, shared authorship, appropriated identities, delegated production, and financial speculation." 

The opening of the exhibition follows the talk, from 8pm to 10pm tonight, at Onsite [at] OCAD University (230 Richmond St. West). Several of the artists will be present. The show runs until October 11th. 

For more information, visit the Facebook page, here. 

Ed Ruscha vs The Library of Congress

"Artists’ books are, like any other medium, a means of conveying art ideas from the artist to the viewer/reader. Unlike most other media they are available to all at a low cost.  They do not need a special place to be seen. They are not valuable except for the ideas they contain.  They contain the material in a sequence which is determined by the artist. (The reader/viewer can read the material in any order but the artist presents it as s/he thinks it should be).  Art shows come and go but books stay around for years.  They are works themselves, not reproductions of works.  Books are the best medium for many artists working today.  The material seen on the walls of galleries in many cases cannot be easily read/seen on walls but can be more easily read at home under less intimidating conditions.  It is the desire of artists that their ideas be understood by as many people as possible.  Books make it easier to accomplish this."

- Sol LeWitt, Art-Rite Magazine #14, January 1976

Or Gallery Bookstore Summer Sale

From July 11th to August 2nd, Or Gallery's bookstore is offering 10% off everything in the store, 30% off of Or Gallery publications (including works co-published by Bywater Brothers) and 60% off of magazine back issues.

They are throwing in a free tote bag with any three book purchases and a tote bag and mug with any five books purchased.

For more information, visit the website, here.