Ben Vautier. Ben Dieu Art Total Sa Revue
Lebeer-Hossmann Editeurs, Brussels 1975
Eric Watier, Bloc
Jim Dine, This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning, 2004
This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning is the sincere title of a long visual poem by artist Jim Dine. The result of years of photographing poems after he has written them on walls and objects, it presents a symbiotic marriage of three very personal elements: his photographs, his handwriting, and his words. While unique in and of itself, this particular body of work is in keeping with Dine's greater oeuvre, a multi-disciplinary enterprise in which the artist seeks to access his unconscious. Regardless of which media Dine is working in, he maintains a familiar but ever-expanding repertory of images: tools, hearts and a torso of Venus, plus the more recent iconography of crows, skulls, a Pinocchio doll, and an odd-couple ape and cat. As with his paintings, sculptures and graphic work, for which he is better known, Dine seeks to record his physical and emotional presence concretely, not gesturally. The camera is but one of the many tools he has at his disposal for making such pictures. Though he has been making art for over four decades, producing paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry and even music, Dine has only been working with photography since 1996.
Appropriation artist Sherrie Levine applies her touch to this edition of Gustave Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple. After choosing a typeface and layout for the original text and cover, Levine affixes her own name smartly as the creator of this book. By affirming the fluid authorship of an creation, Levine approaches the implications of a statement by Flaubert, which reads "In the ideal I have of Art, I think that one must not show one's own...Man is nothing, the work of art everything."
Sol Lewitt, Geometric Figures & Color
H. N. Abrams; First Edition edition (1979)
Sol Lewitt, Cock Fight Dance
Rizzoli (1980)
Simon Cutts. Piano Stool Footnotes, 1982
A book of concrete poetry. 15.4×13cm, 224pp. Edition 1,000, fifty of which are signed and numbered. Published by The Jargon Society, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
David Shrigley, Err
Lawrence Weiner. Something to put something on
44 pages, Little Steidl, 2007
Neither storybook nor autobiography, Something to Put Something On is rather a "questioning book" for children, at once moving and intriguing in its candor. Something to Put Something On poses direct questions about art-making to and for young readers. Generously endowed with its maker's legendary wit, it is also, appropriately, the first title in the Little Steidl program.
Peter Wuthrich, Lesend