Stanley Brouwn | One Step 1X-100X

Stanley Brouwn
One Step 1X-100X
Brussels, Belgium: Gallery MTL, 1971
[unpaginated], 15 x 16 cm., softcover
Edition size uknown


From the Fondazione Bonotto collection, here.

Miranda July | Margie Ruskie Stops Time

Miranda July w/ The Need
Margie Ruskie Stops Time
Portland, USA: Kill Rock Stars, 1996
7" 45 rpm single
Edition size unknown

The debut release for both Miranda July, and for backing band The Need (who went on to record for Kill Rock Stars, Outpunk and Chainsaw Records). July would later revisit the subject of stopping time in her second feature-length film, The Future.

"...it’s funny at another interview thing someone brought an old 7-inch of mine that’s called Margie Ruskie Stops Time, and I was like, “Oh, right! I forgot I already had this idea. Thankfully, you’re kind of the only person who has this 7-inch, I think!” But I’m a real sucker for anything to do with time or time travel. I could have gotten way nerdier there, but I tried to keep it emotional."

- Miranda July, interviewed by Christopher Frizzelle

The disc is available here, for between five and ten dollars (depending on condition). It is also available as a $2 download from Bandcamp, here.

July turns 43 today.

Artists Space Names Jay Sanders Executive Director and Chief Curator

From Artforum:

"The board of directors of Artists Space announced today that Jay Sanders, currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and curator of performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has been appointed as the organization’s new executive director and chief curator. He will assume his new post in April.

David Joselit and Eleanor Cayre, cochairs of the Artists Space executive search committee, said, “Jay Sanders has the vision, energy, and sense of adventure that Artists Space demands, combined with great depth of critical insight and a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary art. We could not have hoped to recruit a more brilliant executive director to carry forward this essential institution.”

During his tenure at the Whitney Museum, Sanders curated a range of exhibitions including shows dedicated to artists such as Laura Poitras and Sarah Michelson as well as an exhibition devoted to the origins of performance art in New York. He also organized major performance retrospectives of the vanguard composer Conlon Nancarrow, seminal downtown performance art duo DANCENOISE, Fluxus pioneer Takehisa Kosugi, and others. In 2012, Sanders cocurated the Whitney Biennial with Elisabeth Sussman. His exhibition of the works of Alexander Calder, “Calder: Hypermobility,” will open at the Whitney in June 2017.

“I could not be more honored and excited to be joining Artists Space at this important moment,” Sanders said. “As an institution that has played a vital and reflexive role in advancing the ongoing concerns of artists, I hold its mission and values in the highest regard. Artists Space is a critical site of experimentation, dialogue, and activity and has, time and time again, shown its potential to reinvent itself in relation to the present.”

Artists Space also announced plans to move to a new building after years at 38 Greene Street. More details about its new location will be revealed in the coming months."

Andy Warhol | You're In

Andy Warhol
You're In
New York City, USA: Self-published, 1967
20.3 × 5.7 × 5.7 cm
Edition of 100 numbered and dated copies

An edition of one hundred Coke bottles spray-painted silver and filled with "toilet water", which was actually a cheap scent titled Silver Lining. The simple works, which have reportedly fetched as much as $100,000 at auction, incorporate many of the artist's interests, including Coca-Cola (which Warhol had previously both drawn and silkscreened), the colour silver (his stated favourite), urine (the pun of the title, see also Piss Paintings) and scent.

"Another way to take up more space is with perfume," he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Elsewhere in the book he notes "I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection."

He describes this collection of perfumes as "very big" in 1975, and there are several mentions of the collection in the diary that he kept in the later years of his life. Warhol confessed to snooping through medicine cabinets at parties, not to uncover personal secrets of the hosts, but in the hopes of discovering a new brand of perfume that he was not yet aware of. 

In 1999 - twelve years after his death - production began on a signature line of perfumes. The scents were designed by others and the boxes featured classic Warhol imagery, such as the flowers, dollar signs and Marilyn Monroe. 

The Coca-Cola company - who now proudly own many of Warhol's work using the iconic symbol of the Coke bottle - initially objected to his first foray into smell, serving him with a cease and desist letter.



“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Cokes, Liz Taylor drinks Cokes, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

Gerhard Rühm turns 87 today

George Brecht | Cedille Uhr

George Brecht
Cedille Uhr
Mönchengladbach, Germany: Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, 1973
4 x 4.5 x 0.75 cm. [men's], 3 x 3 x 1 cm. [women's]
Edition of 90 [+5 A.P.] signed and numbered copies

A wrist watch containing a variety of tiny objects. Produced in an edition of 90 copies: 45 men's size and 45 women's.