workfortheeyetodotoo

At last someone has managed to put on a Finlay show that might do the work some justice. There has been so much dithering around, so much lack of insight into a full exhibition, that you wonder if it will ever take place. In lieu there are a succession of smaller offerings of mostly printed work from private holdings. I saw one was held in some sort of taxi shed in Pimlico earlier this year : then there’s this, and I see another on the horizon in Portland Oregon, from the collection of Stephen Scobie, I presume. There is nothing amiss with a show based on publication, in fact it is a seminal cause, and Finlay’s work is a triumph of that. But not as an excuse for a more complete airing of all the work in all its facets.  Nonetheless, this display at Arnolfini in Bristol which runs until early September, looks magnificent in its arrangement, fresh, light and aerated, the opposite of a mordant attempt at the end of last year in one of the bigger emporiums. I just wish they would give up on other artists’ responses to work being shown! What a bad idea, and how confusing. For instance, what is that little gridded thing in the middle of the floor that I spent ages trying to reconcile with Finlay, thinking it must be a maquette for a photograph for a postcard (maybe one to be called Swastika Compass! ) – then I thought it was the inlay for a table by Graeme Murray that he may have left with Ian Finlay. Eventually I realized it was some other persons work entirely!

But well done Axel Wieder for this show. I should have known, as pro qm in Berlin from whence you come is one of the great bookshops.

The dust jacket of the 1946 resetting of Eric Gill’s essay was printed on the inside of another discarded jacket from the Works of William J. Locke Autograph Edition Volume XXXIII, also from The Bodley Head. Times of utility and re-use. It is remarkable that on the sleeve note Gill says ‘This book is written for people in general and not specifically for those people called artists…It is about art in general and the things every man needs… My appeal is to common sense.’ Is that what ‘ The Most Precious Ornament’ of another volume of Gill’s writing is about too!

Book Description: Marlborough Gallery New York, 1970. Soft cover. Book Condition: Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. March 1970. New York: Marlborough Gallery.28pp 300 x 210mm Stiff pictorial wraps.  A gorgeous copy of this scarce and profusely illustrated exhibition catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition “Ad Reinhard: Black Paintings 1951 to 1967” . A wonderful book, of working shots in the studio on Broadway facing W 4th St, together with remarkably fine reproductions of two paintings.Containing a Chronology by Ad Reinhardt.’The Quest for Art is Art’ by Harvard H Arnason, and the incisive essay ‘The Black Paintings’ by Barbara Rose. Not least wonderful in this exemplary catalogue are the matt black endpapers. A fine copy, with slight scuffing to the spine edge and back cover. Bookseller Inventory # LABL123

‘Scale is one of the tools at the artists’ disposal’   Lord Anish Kapoor

what a good idea to just put up the enamel plaque of Stuart Mills’ great simultaneous poem as if screwed to the wall of this column of text and images. The poem first appeared as a postcard in 1968-9, and then in his book The Sea is Silent, before being made in metal in 2009

The fine porch of Daniel Buren installed at the Chateau de Mouans-Sartoux in the south of France some time ago, the home of l’Espace de l’Art Concret. I was there quite recently, but unfortunately the porch was not, but a lot of works from an intermittent and difficult to define collection, which extends in little spurts all over the place. I always thought it was a difficult one to be orthodox about, l’Art Concret, in spite of its utopic idealism, it is constantly shifting, and finally that is to be admired.

I always wanted to make a Dinky Toy model of the whole procession of Anselm Kiefer moving his entire operation from Germany to France in the early 1990′s. But all  attempts at research were thwarted by secrecy of the event. The art transport company in Kassel would give nothing away, except that there were 47 trucks carrying the contents of his studio, the last five of which held the lead he had recently bought from its replacement on the roof of Cologne Cathedral.