The point d’ironie originates from a talk between agnes b., Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1997. Six to eight issues are published each year. Each of them is made by an artist who makes it his own and brings it up to a singular work of art. By means of its gratuitousness as well as of its size and circulation, the point d’ironie is an atypical periodical which is distributed in a scattered way (one hundred thousand copies are spread out over the world in museums, galleries, bookshops, schools, movie theatres, shops, etc.) Made up by the French writer Alcanter de Brahm at the end of the XIXth century, the point d’ironie is a punctuation mark used at the end of sentences (as an exclamation or a question mark) to point ironic passages in a text.
Raymond Pettibon & Marcel Dzama n°59
Raymond Pettibon was born in 1977 in Tuscon, Arizona. His work embraces a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Taking their points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the “do-it-yourself” aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary.
Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada. His work is characterized by an immediately recognizable visual language that draws from a diverse range of references and artistic influences, including Dada and Marcel Duchamp. While he has become know for his prolific drawings with their distinctive palette of muted colors, in recent years, the artist has expanded his practice to encompass sculpture, painting, film, and dioramas.
The collaboration began in Summer 2015 with the artists swapping the first of series of drawings to be completed by the other. In a variation of the “exquisite corpse“ method in which a partner is only given portions of an other with concealed drawing to work on, Dzama and Pettibon developed each other’s compositions trough illustrations, collage, and writing. Just as the surrealists invented the technique in the early twentieth century as a playful and ultimately enriching exercise, the present drawings combine the two artists’ distinct styles in a revealing and often seamless fashion. In several works, it is almost impossible to determine who made what, which indicates how both strove to assimilate the other’s vision or anticipate his response.
point d’ironie occasionally could be found in our MSU Bookstore!
