Top Ten (plus two)
Robert Fones
1. Instant Coffee, Manifesto
Instant Coffee loves everyone
and I love everything Instant Coffee does. This “manifesto” was printed in
Columbia using metal and wood type. The print shop had a shortage of Ts (not
commonly used in Spanish) and so other fonts appear whenever a T is
necessary. The print quality is
atrocious but it gives the poster a sense of urgency. The phrasing of the
text—in this and in other Instant Coffee works— is what appealed to me:
“INSTANT COFFEE BARELY RESEMBLES THE REAL THING, BUT IT’S EFFECT IS
EQUIVALENT.” Are they talking about instant coffee versus espresso? Instant
Coffee versus Rem Koolhaas? Instant coffee versus Coke? One never knows.
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2. Euan Macdonald, Selected
Standards
Macdonald found this set of 48
song sheets in Los Angeles, reproduced them as is and added his own photographs
and drawings as a counterpoint to the theme of each song. The pairings
sometimes appear to have a direct relationship, such as “Deep Night” with a
facing photograph of Los Angeles at night. At other times the connection is
more associative and dream-like such as “Far Away Places” and a drawing of a
glowing jellyfish against a black background. The sequence of song titles and
their accompanying images begin to suggest a strange narrative of hope, love
and loss, both for an unknown protagonist and for a city.
3. Luca Frei, The So-called
Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg
Sometimes I buy a book from
Art Metropole because I can’t grasp what it is about. This is one of those
books. It’s actually a translation of a book first published in 1976 by Albert
Meister that documents the travails of a fictitious 70-storey underground art
centre constructed beneath the Pompideau Centre. The centre has no rules so a
kind of freeform creative anarchy reigns with its inevitable problems that need
to be addressed. It reminded me of Rochdale College in Toronto in the 1960s.
Artist, Luica Frei translated the book into English, designed the cover, added
a single word of his own and a few illustrations and called it an artist’s
book. Is it? I’m still wondering. Certainly, if he hadn’t done it, this
engaging text would not have come into my hands and thoughts.
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4. Andrew Zealey, AA Bronson
School for Young Shamans
Can Andrew Zeally do anything
wrong? I’ve been following his music for years and was pleased to get a copy of
his latest work, a sound installation to accompany AA Bronson’s exhibition at
John Connelly in New York of work by “Young Shamans.” The music always drifts
through a meditative sequence that is too complex to remember. Hence, every
listen is a new experience of the rich fabric of sounds, voices and musical
snippets that he artfully splices together. “God Bee” is one of my favourites.
It flies through consciousness like a Buddhist insect leaving behind a cleansed
and more tranquil state of mind.
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5. George Saia, Shoe Journal
Yes, I coordinated the
production of this book. So of course I’m biased. But I learned so much about
George Saia’s (aka Jorge Zontal) obsessions and artistic modus operandi from
doing it that I wish everyone else would discover what I found in this little
gem. The introductory essay that I wrote places the book within the context of
General Idea’s oeuvre as well as discussing its affinity with work by other
artists associated with Mail Art and Pop Art who accumulated similar
fetishistic objects. Jorge’s obsessively
repeated black stiletto eventually transforms into an ice cream cone eating and
lip-smacking monster. Yes, it’s a bit pricey, but in a few years it’ll be on ABE
Books for thousands with a “very scarce” designation. Only 120 copies were
produced. It’s exquisitely hand-bound, if I may say so.
6. Julie Voyce, Gnat Devil
Button
It’s hard to choose a single
Julie Voyce item. Everything she does is imbued with her idiosyncratic humour
populated with a cosmology of devils, angels, things that squirt, things that
flirt, etc. Her inventiveness in print
media knows no bounds. But this little gnat devil button is a charmer, as Julie
herself might put it, and can indicate to others that you have a pet peeve that
is fuming inside you or perhaps a beef that you need to get off your chest.
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7. The Top 100, Art Metropole
A top ten list wouldn’t be
complete without another list embedded within it. The catalogue entries and essays
by Kitty Scott, Peggy Gale and AA Bronson bring this fabulous collection,
donated several years ago to the National Gallery to life. Many of these items
appeared at Art Metropole over the years, sat on shelves and then disappeared.
You can drool over the things you didn’t buy and pay attention to the things
you should buy now. Beautifully designed by Fugazi of Montreal.
8. Hans-Peter Feldmann,
Voyeur
There is no text in this
book. It is simply a collection of black and white photographic images, from
one to six on a page. The images appear to span the last fifty years or so.
Some are memorable images that we have all seen before, such as the one of
Chairman Mao swimming in the Yangtze River. Others are clearly just images that
appealed to Feldmann. The narrative they haphazardly construct is haunting and
freely associative. You are looking through the eyes of the photographers who
took the photographs as well as through Feldman’s eyes as he assembles images
together. The same image of an empty chair that appears at least four times in
the book seems to be an invitation to the reader to sit, look and ponder.
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9. Max Dean, Thumb chair
I was on a jury sometime in
the early 1980s when Max Dean got a grant to work with scientists in Ottawa to
develop his collapsing and reassembling chair project. Since then I’ve followed the various
manifestations of this work as computer science and object recognition
technology caught up with Dean’s imagination. This tiny thumb-activated version
takes the chair apart and puts it back together using the most rudimentary
elastic cord technology that is the antithesis of his real-life high-tech
version. That’s what I like about it. Exquisitely made of stainless steel.
10.Marianne Heske, Project
Gjerdeloa
Twenty-five years before
Simon Starling dismantled a wooden shed, transformed it into a boat and sailed
it down the Thames, Marianne Heske dismantled a log cabin in Norway, drove it
to Paris in a van and reassembled it in the Pompidou Centre. This book documents the whole process of
numbering the logs, hauling them down the mountainside, transporting them to
Paris and watching gallery visitors inspect the structure with graffiti dating
back to 1620. After the exhibition she returned it back to where it came from
and reassembled it again. There is a wise ecological lesson here that is even
more relevant today than it was in 1980.
11. Donald Judd, Complete
Writings 1959-1975
My two favourite writers
about art are Robert Smithson and Donald Judd. Smithson wrote mostly about his
own work or wrote texts that stood on their own. Judd wrote about his own work,
work by other artists, architecture, colour, furniture, and a wide range of
other topics. This volume originally published by the Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design and recently reissued in a new edition collects Judd’s early
writing when he was regularly writing reviews for Art News. I always liked the
fact that the collection is described as
“Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor,
Reports, Statements and Complaints.” Some of Judd’s writing has an edge of
complaining about it, but he was very smart and mostly right in what he was
complaining about. I like the fact that he gets right to the point with no
conventional preamble. His syntax is quirky and refreshing.
The second volume of his
writings published in The Netherlands includes everything from 1975 to 1986. It
is almost impossible to find. Since Judd died in 1994 there are still lots of
good articles that should be collected together. When will somebody step up to
the plate and publish a collected writings?
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12. Dan Graham, Video
Architecture-Television
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