Philip Corner | The piece of reality for today

Philip Corner 

The piece of reality for today

Düsseldorf, Germany: Edition Hundertmark 1983

11 x 11 x 3 cm.

Edition of 80 signed and numbered copies

A white box with an accordion-fold text and a circular mirror. The score proposes placing an object on the mirror and closing the box – reopening it later to find the object anew in enhanced three-dimensionality. 

Available from the publisher, here, for 190 Euros. 

Barbara Ess

Barbara Ess died yesterday at the age of seventy-three. Ess founded the No Wave magazine Just Another Asshole, featuring New York artists, writers and musicians. It was published as a multi-format periodical, taking the form of a 'zine, a tabloid, a commercial magazine, a paperback book, and an LP. 

Contributors to Just Another Asshole included Kathy Acker, Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Brian Buczak, Rhys Chatham, Michael Gira, Jack Goldstein, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer,   Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Carla Liss, Thurston Moore, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo, Jane Sherry, Kiki Smith, Michael Smith, Wharton Tiers, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and countless others. 

While it's tempting to imagine a great tombstone that simply read "Just Another Asshole", Ess was also well-known for her life-long dedication to pinhole camera photography, and for teaching at Bard College since 1997. 

As a musician she contributed tracks to the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, and in 2001 collaborated with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh on the album Radio Guitar, which Thurston Moore released on his Ecstatic Peace label. 

In 2005 she published I Am Not This Body, a book of her pinhole photographs. 

Lucio Fontana / Otto Hahn | Portrait d'Antonin Artaud

Lucio Fontana / Otto Hahn

Portrait d'Antonin Artaud (Deluxe Edition)

Paris, France: Le Soleil Noir, 1968

36.6 x 6.5 x 23.8 cm.

Edition of 80 [+ 10 AP] signed and numbered copies

The second of two Deluxe versions of Hahn's book (see previous posts). 

Here the book is contained in a wood and enamel book sculpture by Fontana, with four additional works: a copper die-cut plate, a steel die-cut plate, two Plexiglas die-cut plates. The work was originally sold for five hundred dollars. The current estimated value is about seven thousand Euros. 

"Fontana founded the Italian postwar movement Spazialismo, which aimed to bring art and science together. He is best known for groundbreaking work in which he slashed, cut, punctured, and bored into the surfaces of his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures in an attempt to transcend illusionistic representation.

These strategies can be seen in the "illustrations" Fontana contributed to a book by Otto Hahn about the iconoclastic French playwright, actor, poet, artist, and director Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). Through his theories about art and theater and his experiences with drug addiction and institutionalization, Artaud became a figure of tremendous interest among artists in the 1960s. To illustrate this book, Fontana created a set of punctured sheets of steel, brass, and plexiglass kept in a sculptural container."

- MoMA gallery label from Book/Shelf, March 26–July 7, 2008.

Lucio Fontana | Portrait d'Antonin Artaud di Otto Hahn (Deluxe)

 

Lucio Fontana / Otto Hahn

Portrait d'Antonin Artaud 

Paris, France: Le Soleil Noir, 1968

18.5 x 14.5 cm.

Edition of 150 copies

The first of two deluxe editions of the Hahn book, this one comes with a coloured rhodoïd by Fontana: an oval plaque with seventeen perforations. The piece and the book are presented in a black cardboard slipcase with a rectangular cut-out, through which the perforations can be seen. 

The work is "scratch-signed" according to Harry Ruhe's Lucio Fontana: graphics, multiples and more (2006, Tuja Books), as well as numbered. 

"Lucio Fontana’s surreal Portrait d’Antonin Artaud, by Otto Hahn (in 6 parts) imagines the author as a rust-red plastic vanity mirror, whose surface – bifurcated by a row of small holes – absorbs as much light as it reflects."

- EVAN MOFFITT, Frieze Magazine

Lucio Fontana / Otto Hahn | Portrait d'Antonin Artaud

 

Lucio Fontana / Otto Hahn

Portrait d'Antonin Artaud 

Paris, France: Le Soleil Noir, 1968

144 pp., 

Edition of 2730 numbered copies

A portrait of the French writer, dramatist, actor and founder of The Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud, by Otto Hahn, with a cover design by Lucio Fontana. Fontana also contributed works to two deluxe versions of this publication (see next posts). 

Esmaa Mohamoud | Faith in the Seeds 1

Esmaa Mohamoud

Faith in the Seeds 1

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 2020

21.6 × 30.5 × 22.9 cm

Edition of 12 [+ 1AP]

"The dandelion, though a wildflower, is commonly labelled as a weed to be eradicated at all costs, believed to ruin landscapes with its pervasiveness. Due to many qualities, including to its strong roots, the dandelion is one of the most resilient plants—thriving in many difficult conditions. One of the most magical aspects of the dandelion is its ability to spread its seeds through the air to grow and thrive in new places. This makes me think of the African diaspora and how we, as Black people, have had to spread our seeds and thrive and grow in new places. As such, this wildflower is here used to symbolize the ability to rise above life’s challenges. This work is dedicated to the resilience of the Black community and in particular, to those we’ve lost to police brutality. I want this installation to serve as a reminder of the resilience of Black people and as a beacon of hope for future generations.”

- Esmaa Mohamoud

Felix Gonzalez-Torres | Photostats

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Photostats

Siglio Press, 2020

88 pp., 8.25 x 6.5", hardcover

Edition size unknown

Released in November of last year, this volume is co-edited by Richard Kraft and Lisa Pearson, with writings by Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach.

Available from the publisher, here, for $36 US. 

Visit Siglio Press all weekend long at the Printed Matter Virtual Artist Book Fair. 

"Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface—are profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references. These works disrupt linear time, the seemingly causal relationships of chronology, and hierarchies of information as they ask how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats have a deep kinship with poetry in their use of specificity and ambiguity, operating as open fields: each juxtaposition and its oblique friction illuminates connections and disconnections.

The photostats also recall the screen—the television, and now the computer and phone—in which information is furiously delivered, and we are challenged to parse substance from surface, what we choose to assimilate from what we choose to reject. In the gallery, the glass surface of the framed photostats brings the viewer into an intimate relationship with the work as she may literally see herself in it—reflecting, too, her own assumptions. Now, as we find ourselves thirty years later, in a global pandemic, with a national reckoning in the face of enduring protests against police brutality and racial injustice, there is more to see of ourselves in the photostats and their uncanny multiplicity: layers of history with which we are only beginning to grapple as a society, grief in the wake of devastating loss, and the possibility of reinvention and regeneration.

Intended as discrete space to closely read the photostats with sustained attention, this elegant, clothbound volume opens from both sides: on one side, the framed photostats are reproduced as objects as one might encounter them in a gallery; on the other, white texts appear on full-bleed black fields to be read as writing. Its intimate size and its attention to the book as a physical object create a new way to experience the photostats.

In between the two sides, there are gorgeous and thought-provoking writings by poets Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach that do not explicate the work but instead enter it. Lauterbach penetrates the atmosphere of the photostats, contemplating mourning and memory while invoking Gonzalez-Torres’s spirit of generosity. De la Torre mines Gonzalez-Torres’s dates and references in her constraint-based essay, tracing time from past to present, while keenly attentive to the impossibility of linearity. Both demonstrate the richness of the work and its potential to inspire multiple readings."

- press release