#weird format wednesdays
WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: A Coloring Book - Drawings by Andy Warhol, 1991
This coloring book is an adaptation of the 1961 coloring book Warhol created entitled, The Wonderful World of Fleming Joffe. Warhol was commissioned to create this coloring book by a company that hired him to assist with their advertising illustrations,. It was given as a Christmas gift to their clients’ children.
Find more Andy Warhol materials in our Special Collections
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: The Vowels - A Congregation of Preachers, 2013
This artist book was printed by CB Sherlock at the MN Center for Books Arts and the poem was written by Ann Filemyr. There is one poem for each vowel, every word in the poem beginning with the same vowel to make one big alliteration. Each vowel poem consists of every word beginning with the same vowel. Each vowel poem was folded and stitched into cubes, becoming building blocks of language. Multiple poems emerge from this three dimensional form
Limited Edition 18/50
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Marcel Duchamp, 1968
More Duchamp! Because, why not?
Here’s a 30 second video showing all the elements of this piece!
The author, Octavio Paz, was a Mexican poet and was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. This set contains an essay by Paz about Duchamp, a selection of Duchamp’s writing compiled by Paz, several reproductions and a stand up cut-out of Duchamp.
Find other Marcel Duchamp materials in our special collection
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Marcel Duchamp - Deluxe Exhibition Catalog, 1991
This deluxe exhibition catalog was published for the exhibition Marcel Duchamp at Ronny Van de Velde, IJzerenpoortkaai 3 2000 Antwerpen Belgium, September 15 - December 15, 1991.
The deluxe exhibition catalog comes in a reproduction of a chessboard designed by Duchamp in 1937. Inside are several items including: a volume of essays by André Breton and Arturo Schwarz, a portfolio of reproductions of Duchamp’s works, a photograph of Duchamp, a copy of the ordinary edition of the Ronny van de Velde catalog, and an audiocassette of an interview with Duchamp in 1959 and Duchamp reading “The Creative Act”.
The portfolio of reproductions includes: Allégorie de Genre (1943), Door for Gradiva (1937/1968), Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood (1953), Self Portrait in Profile (1958), Etant donnés 1˚ la chute d’ eau, 2˚ le gaz d’éclairage (1946-1966), Where do we go from here? (1961), les anaglyphes géométriques (1912), Cheminée anaglyphe (1968), and The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (unfinished due to his death).
No. 748/850
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Paolo Soleri Exhibition Catalogue - Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969
A 1969 exhibition of work by the architect Paolo Soleri including drawings, plans and models.
A bit about Paolo…
“American architect of Italian birth. He received his doctorate in architecture from the polytechnic in Turin in 1946. A scholarship allowed him to travel to the USA, where he began working for Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in January 1947. Disenchanted with Taliesin he left with his friend Mark Mills in September 1948. They set up camp in the Arizona desert under a crude cantilevered column constructed of concrete blocks. The following year, with a client, Leonora Woods, and her daughter Corolyn Woods, they built with their own hands a house in Cave Creek, AZ. It consisted of two spaces of opposite character: a living room roofed by two glass and aluminium domes and a bedroom wing dug deep into a hillside and enclosed in masonry walls similar to those at Wright’s Taliesin West. The house dealt with formal, thermal, and constructional issues that inspired Soleri throughout his career.”
A bit about “Arcosanti”…
Supported by grants from the Graham and Guggenheim Foundations, Soleri began to explore massive urban applications of his philosophies, initially in the City on the Mesa project (1958–67), an urban plan for two million inhabitants on a plot the size of Manhattan. Using huge translucent plastic models to depict his ideas, he designed numerous high-density cities that he called ‘arcologies’ from their combination of architecture and ecology. From the early 1970s he built his prototype ‘arcology’, Arcosanti, on 14 acres of an 860-acre parcel in the high desert of central Arizona. The project was intended eventually to house 5000 people in a 25-storey chain of futuristic buildings perched on the edge of a mesa.”
-Oxford Art Online
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Fluxus 1
In a previous post about Fluxus, we highlighted the Fluxus Year Box One. The Fluxus 1 box was published first and the Fluxus Year Box One contains a sampling from previous works, including art pieces from Fluxus 1. Highlighted here are art pieces either unique to Fluxus 1 or not published in the previous post.
Fluxus was a group of international avant-garde artists that formed in Germany in 1962 and was active until the late 1970s… Read more
Excerpts from their manifesto:
Purge the world of bourgeois sickness and intellectual, professional and commercialized culture
Promote living art, an-art and non art reality
Fuse the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action
When you remove the book from its box, you are delighted to find a book of envelopes, each containing a different art piece. Flipping through each page and searching for the items inside the envelope, gives one a sense of receiving a letter in the mail or opening a gift.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: SATURDAY NIGHT IN MARIETTA
This beautiful book features 15 poems by Robert Bly each illustrated by a different visual artist: Bonnie Thompson Norman, Steve Miller, David Moyer, Ruth Lingen, Colleen Dwire, Jack Molloy, Karla Elling, Beth Grabowski, James Horton, Elsi Vassdal Ellis, Audrey Niffenegger, Eric Bealer, Deborah Mae Broad, Joe Sanders, and Caren Heft.
The unique box is made from barn wood, the binding is leather with vellum lacing, the endpapers are handmade and each page is folded with the artwork slid into each page.
Published in 1999 by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
Limited Edition. Letter O. Signed.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: SEM AU BOIS
SEM Au Bois is a brand new acquisition that we are very excited about. Georges Goursat, whose pseudonym was SEM, created the piece in 1908. It is a caricature of members of the Jockey Club of Paris and other well known persons of the time in a processional of carriages.
This piece is 30 feet long. We were only able to unroll half of it. It will be the centerpiece of our upcoming exhibit Sem, Gigi, and Caricature which opens February 3, 2015.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Sweet Grass : My Place
Printmaker and book artist CB Sherlock created Sweet Grass : My Place in 2010 in Minneapolis, MN. Sherlock creates small edition artist books and one of a kind artwork. The major theme in her work is the connectedness of humanity and the fibers that link us all together. Her work is about the similarities among people rather than the differences.
“Sweet Grass was written after many years of reflecting on belonging to the place our family visits every summer. In 2010, it was printed on handmade Sekishu paper…the accordion structure was bound with grass stalks with hand painted images”
The artist book has letterpress printed text and is housed in a folded vellum box.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Le Jeu de Marseille (The Game of Marseille)
Le Jeu de Marseille is a game of surrealist playing cards created in March 1941 by the artists Andre Breton, Wifredo Lam, Max Ernst, Jazqueline Lamba, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, Jacques Herold, Andre Masson, and Frederic Delanglade. These surrealists were attempting to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe to America. While they waited to leave the country, they stayed at the Villa Air-Bel in Marseille and created The Game of Marseille.
They deconstructed the monarchial playing cards and created revolutionary designs expressing their own ideals. They changed the cards’ suits to: Locks for knowledge (black), Wheels for revolution (red), Stars for dreams (black) and Flames for love (red).
The playing card designs were published in 1943 in the surrealist magazine, VVV Magazine. The game was also exhibited at the moma in NYC.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Fluxus Preview Review by George Maciunas, 1963
We have severalFluxusitems in our collection, this scroll is one of the recent additions.
Vertical scroll printed in offset (both recto and verso) on three joined strips of coated stock, rolled as issued. The scroll includes a montage of scores, performance photographs, information on future performances, listing of past and future Fluxus publications, and the definition of the hyper-word “Fluxus”. Contributors include: Eric Anderson, Ben Patterson, La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low, Dick Higgins, Daniel Spoerri, J. J. Lambert, Henry Flynt, Yoko Ono, etc. Editorial committee: Chairman, George Maciunas; Cross section, Nam June Paik, Emmett Williams; U.S. section, La Monte Young [and others], as well as sections representing other countries.
WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: The Bookmaker - Deb Rindl, 2000
WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: 1018 W Scott Street - Thomas Rose, 2005
- Description: “The images are printed on Arches Infinity digital 203 g/m paper on an Epson 4000 by Digi-Graphics in Minneapolis. The clamshell box, typography and printing are by Chip Schilling of Indulgence press. The text is set in the typeface, Century. The pages are printed letterpress from plates onto Arches Infinity 230 g/m paper”–Colophon.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: EDVARD MUNCH ETCHINGS, 1950
Perhaps this format isn’t quite as weird, this item contains a portfolio, several loose etchings from Munch, in a wrapper and matching box. There is also a separate booklet with contextual information.
Munch is best known for his work “The Scream.” He was a Norwegian artist whose work dealt with the depth of human psychology.
“As early as 1885, Edvard Munch felt the need to develop a bolder and more simplified style of painting, which we have now come to know as ‘expressionism’. He was one of those artists who reacted against naturalism, and led a movement which has since dominated modern art. It took Munch ten years to produce his own expressionist style, which was the formative influence of the German School of 1902, and which later in 1940 influenced American experimental art. Both as a painter and as a graphic artist, Munch searched to express the hitherto unplumbed depths of the human soul.”
-Johan H. Langaard, Tate Britian
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica : the 42 preliminary studies on paper reproduced in facsimile, 1990
This book is 2 feet long and consists of a booklet and 31 plates. This facsimile includes an introduction and commentary by the curator of The Picasso Museum in Paris, Marie-Laure Bernadac. Throughout the plates, you can observe Picasso’s process, to peek into his genius.
Picasso’s enormous black and white painting, Guernica, was completed in June of 1937. It is considered one of the most powerful anti-war paintings created.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: New Acquisition to the Fine Art Press Collection at the UMN Libraries (a corresponding collection to Gorman Rare Art Books Collection) - Miniature Books created by Jody Williams, 1989-2014
Jody Williams is a local Minneapolis book artist who teaches printmaking and book arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. She has also taught at Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts and the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Her work is in several library and museum collections such as The Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Minnesota Historical Society. Williams has received many grants, awards and fellowships throughout her career.
Her limited edition books are printed and bound with different materials and a vast variety of different formats.
@uispeccoll also wrote a tumblr post about her books in their collection!
WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: A B C–we print anything–in the cards - Carolee Schneemann, 1977
The cards are from a performance art piece by Carolee Schneemann. The following quote is from LIMA’s website. LIMA is based in The Netherlands and is the international platform for sustainable access to media art. You can read more as well as view a clip from her performance here
“This performance, recorded at De Appel, is completely different from what would be expected from Schneeman. Schneeman herself describes her performance as a ‘lecture with images’. She is sitting up straight, almost formally, in front of a white screen. Her contours are sharply defined against the canvas hanging behind her, due to a bright lamp that is shining on her. She is dispassionately reading out texts that are written on small cards. Blue cards contain conversations between characters a, b, c and d. Fragments from dreams and diaries are written on yellow cards, while red cards contain comments from friends and artists about each other. The differently coloured cards are being read in random order. (However, the video is in black-and-white, so that th colours of the cards remain a secret). Slides are being projected on two screens behind Schneeman; on the left, slides of the texts being read, so that the audience can read along, and in the middle, private, unposed photos of Schneeman and her friends.
Despite the fact that both text and images often convey an intimate tale, the performer Schneeman remains aloof from her own story. She presents it as clinical and detached as if she were reading the ABC. The strength of this performance lies in the constructed scenario form that Schneeman has chosen. Both visually and textually, she takes her story apart to investigate the relationship that comes about between text and image. The text is recorded in, or rather, translated into, a scenario, so that in fact persons come across more as characters. Her monotonous presentation reinforces this detachment, and makes the intimate photos and texts almost implausible. The authenticity of language and images is put to a severe test.”
Her work, Vulva’s Morphia #33, is also in our special collections!
WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: A+B - Arthur & Barbara, 2011
“Arthur & Barbara is a portrait of art critic/philosopher Arthur Danto and artist Barbara Westman seen reflected in the space of their New York City apartment on Riverside Drive. This book embodies their life and work in symbolic forms of thoughtful play … Arthur & Barbara is a collection of simple objects, images and "games” referring to both Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and to Fluxus Collections.“–Artist’s prospectus.
Created with Mahogany, aluminum, DVD, letterpress and archival pigment printing, laser etching, duplex plastic, paper and Van Heek cloth.
Limited edition of 20.
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Moses and the Shepherd - Poem by Jalaluddin Mohammad Rumi, 1207-1273. Print by Daniel Keleher and Etchings by Mark Beard, 1987
Accordion style book gives the reader multiple ways to engage with the story. A historical poem given new life through artwork, fine printing and unique binding.
Limited Edition 64/100
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: Holzpostkarte - Joseph Bueys , 1974
How would you like to receive this postcard in the mail?
Joseph Bueys was a German artist and prominent figure of the Fluxus movement. Primarily a sculptor and performance artist, he participated in time-based “happenings” and Impermanent installation art. He shared the Fluxus values of pushing at and seeking to eradicate the boundaries of the art world.
Find more Joseph Bueys materials in our special collections!
Pst….you can see an online collection of his works at the moma!
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