Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper turns 77 today. 

Athena Tacha | My Adolescent Loves

Athena Tacha

My Adolescent Loves

Oberlin, USA: Self-published, 1976

[8] pp., 14 x 6.5 cm., single leaf folded

Edition of 500

Between 1972 to 2020, the Greek-American artist Athena Tacha produced twenty-seven accordion fold “Pocket Booklet” pamphlets: single sheet productions, often sold in small plastic sleeves. 

The booklets contain intimate autobiographical writings, with titles like My Childhood Garden, My Childhood Home, My Mother: A Psychological Portrait, My Fears, My Night Sagas, and the ongoing series The Process of Aging.

My Adolescent Loves strikes a diaristic tone, describing her pre-sexual, amorous feelings towards celebrities and people in her life.

"Each of her series of little “pocketbooks,” produced since 1972, is printed on a different pastel-colored paper (except Little Pleasures, which is unaccountably bright orange) and accordion-folded into a 5 3/4 by 3 inch-plastic slipcase. Different volumes treat such themes as The Way My Mind Works, My Mother, The Process of Aging, and My Adolescent Loves with absolute candor and bone-dry, sometimes childlike language. They often end with a disarming little twist; from Different Notions of Cleanliness: “As for sweeping, unless you do it very carefully, or with a vacuum (which I am lazy to get out every day for a little bit), I don’t believe much in it. All it does is push the dust around.” I have often found that people who are more accustomed to reading literature and its criticism tend to be bored or perplexed by the naïveté of Tacha’s texts. But that quality is only a whimsical vehicle for conveying serious biological and psychological observations."

-  Ellen H. Johnson, Artforum

Ready-Mades et Editions de et sur Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp 

Ready-Mades et Editions de et sur Marcel Duchamp

Paris, France: Galerie Claude Givaudan, 1967

69.5 x 48 cm.

Edition of 400

An offset poster for the exhibition Ready-Mades et Editions de et sur Marcel Duchamp held at Claude Givaudan Gallery in Paris, from June the 8th to September the 30th, 1967 (see below). 

The poster was conceived by Givaudan  and Duchamp. It features the artist’s hand holding a cigar (a detail from a photograph taken in his Paris studio in the Rue Larrey in May 1967) with smoke superimposed from a photograph provided by Pierre Joly of the singer Georges Brassens smoking a pipe. 

According to Arturo Schwarz’ The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, the poster was produced in an edition of 500, with one hundred copies omitting the text and being signed and numbered by the artist. 

This unsigned version is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and MoMa, the latter of which is offered copies for sale for $5360 (discounted from $6700), here. 

Takako Saito | A Dream

Takako Saito

A Dream

[np]: Self-published, 1970

11 × 8 × 7 cm.

Edition of 35 signed, titled and numbered copies

A two-part hinged wooden box with a bell screwed to inside and featuring a hand-drawn “heartbeat” graphic. around the box’s exterior and interior. 

Robert Indiana | Numbers

Robert Indiana

Numbers

New York City, USA; Chiron Press, 1966

27.5 x 27.5 x 9 cm.

Edition of 50 signed, dated and numbered copies

A set of 4 colour screenprints on wood panels, housed in a wooden box with a screenprinted cover. The piece was likely made while Indiana was working with Stephen Poleskie at Chiron Press on the Paris Review Poster (1965) and Purim: The Four Facets of Esther I and II, 1967.

While numbered 1 through 50, the edition was reportedly abandoned due to production difficulties, with fewer than ten sets produced. 

Indiana was born on this day in 1928. 

Karen Archey | After Institutions

 

Karen Archey

After Institutions

Germany: Floating Opera Press, 2022

116 pp., 12.0 × 17.0 cm., softcover

Edition of 2000

"Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at their inner workings. In After Institutions, Karen Archey addresses contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements by expanding the definition of Institutional Critique, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.”

- publisher’s statement

Forest for the Trees

The half-ass nature of posting recently is a result of Roula and I collaborating on an exhibition that opens this weekend at MKG127 in Toronto. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann looms large over the show. There is a deliberate re-make of one of his works, a completely inadvertent remake of another, and three works involving found photography.  The exhibition also includes three books, though two of them are represented as videos.

The found photography of the third video, though, owes more to a Meg Cranston work that I once exhibited when I worked at Mercer Union. She presented vernacular photography as a slide show, with bean bag chairs. The hundred or so dog portraits projected in the darkened space were not taken by her, or by a professional photographer, but by staff at a local shelter with neither the time, nor the training or equipment to perfect their pictures. 

But they did have the knowledge that a particular type of photograph helped the dog’s chances of being adopted. Pictures of dogs in cages didn’t go over well. Growling or looking angry, obviously was to be avoided. Or mangey. Give the dog a toy to play with and he’s more likely to become someone’s pet, they learned. Place her in front of a tree or some flowers and the dog’s chances increase, also. 

So the show became a loving testament to amateur photography, with serious life or death consequences. The photographs were only a month old - as I callously told the Globe and Mail at the time - but many of the dogs pictured were probably already dead. 

Our video features five hundred or so online images collected since 2012, accompanied by a 3000 word text about pareidolia. 

It’s life and death only in historical, evolutionary terms. As Carl Sagan explained “Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper.”

The video is called Forest For the Trees and is the third of the three USB sticks pictured above. The exhibition is title A IS FOR APPLE, and runs from September 13th to October 11th. For more information, visit the MKG127 website, here.