We managed to get to Al Ruppersberg’s exhibition “You and Me or the Art of Give and Take” at the Santa Monica Museum on its last day. My favorite work was a wonderful two-part book drawing Twins, which is in Mike Kelley’s collection. There was another stunning piece in which viewers were invited to rearrange laminated panels on a giant pegboard to “tell the story they wanted.” There were images and texts relating to punk rock and old Americana. On the other side of the pegboard wall was a “Never Ending Book,” featuring images collaged on the wall and, in boxes resting on colorful sculptures, color-print-out of some of the images that you could take home. (We loved the idea of The Never Ending Book, Part 2…ha!) The entire installation was gorgeous and everything was embued with Ruppersberg’s generous humor.
There is a wonderful article on the exhibition here, with great installation shots.
Wonderful website with animated documentation of artists’ books in Reed College’s Special Collections
“The spectrum of modern and contemporary Artists’ Books in Reed College’s Special Collections and collected on this website include traditional letterpress printed books of poetry, conceptual book works, sculptural and visual works, concrete poetry, and magazine works. This unique collection, which holds significant 20th century and contemporary artists’ books, gives students and the broader population insight into the significant role artist’s books have played among the avant-garde of Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the United States, from the turn of the last century to the present.”
The works are divided into four categories: 1) livres d’artiste; 2) avant-garde; 3) conceptualist; 4) contemporary.
“Learn to Read Art,” whose title derives from a work by Lawrence Weiner, is an exhibition of Printed Matter’s history looks at their books, prints, photographs, multiples, and other editions from 1976 to the present.
In this seven-minute sound poetry tutorial, Christian Bök takes the most difficult things and makes them pleasurable and completely understandable. Produced by Curtis Fox for the Poetry Foundation, Curtis tries — and botches — a snippet of sound poetry. He then hands the mic over to Christian who makes it soar. Bök then goes on to precisely explain the piece and its historic context. I can’t imagine anything better to use as a teaching aid to explain and demonstrate this art form.
Dieter Roth, Black page with holes (poetry machine), 1961
Diter Rot developed this piece as a contribution to the Fluxus publication An Anthology, which appeared in 1963. When the book was first planned in 1961, he sent to George Maciunas a black page with holes in it and the following instructions for use:
Please take the sheet with holes in, but do it like this: take any printed matter, for instance pages of book, catalogs, logocats, folders, posters, newspaper, emballage cut in size of fluxus make the holes there in to through, put in to fluxus, loose (as the black sheet) would have been; loose, i mean : don’t take black sheet, take pages of book, catalogs, logocats, folders, posters, newspaper, emballage, tricotage camouflage, cut as fluxus in size, make the holes therein, put into it fluxum, i mean put the loose sheet then into fluxus.
In other words: the black page is intended as a master for perforating found printed material through which changing views will then be available. On publication, An Anthology included a “white page with holes” but not the associated printed matter.
