The following images are my best shot at capturing the appearance of the DADAPACKAGE that Ryan Baldwin sent to me. (NOTE: Mr. Baldwin created this work — to be clear, I myself only attempted to photograph it.)
I'll divide this entry into three parts:
- First I'll show a series of details of the sections of the work.
- Next I'll give, as much as it's possible, full views of the package's facets and aspects.
- Lastly, I'll note three works by Marcel Duchamp which Mr. Baldwin's creation reminded me of — this I hope will establish the package's place in the history of art.
1. DETAILS
View 1-a ("Ding Dong")
*
View 1-b
(after spectator's tampering with artwork's envelope)
*
View 2-a ("Everything Must Go")
*
View 2-b ("TURN SERVICE")
*
View 2-c ("Artois")
*
View 3-a ("FREE")
*
View 3-a: ALT [No. 2]
SIDE NOTE:
an interesting aside about the above image
That booklet that you see there (in that last image above) is a religious tract by a self-styled Christian cartoonist. A fun fact about this booklet is that I was once handed the very same tract, back in the days when I was an aspiring rapper; and me and my neighborhood friend, whose name is also Brian (but, as you can see, it was spelled with an "i" and not a "y" like mine) thot this tract was so funny that we decided to copy panels from it and use the images as album covers for our rap group. Cuz our rap group was prolific: we made a full 10-track demo album every week; and it was good to have a source from which to steal album covers. So when I saw this pamphlet fall out of the above artwork DADAPACKAGE, I immediately went down into my cluttered work-space and took a photo of our old demo CDs which were scattered all over my desk. So here are two photos of the same chaos of disks — I took one from the right angle and one from the left, cuz I was afraid that one of the photos wouldn't auto-focus correctly, because I don't know how to use my phone-cam yet (it turns out that both of the images didn't turn out); also I took one close-up of an album at random, for an example of the type of nuisance that we were engaged in...
Left view
Right view
Individual example
(I didn't wanna clutter the present entry by embedding the audio, but anyone who's interested in how one of these demos sounded can click right here.)
END OF SIDE NOTE
*
View 3-b ("Earth Auger")
*
View 3-c
*
View 4-a
*
View 4-b (closeup of View 4-a)
*
View 5 ("OtherSideFlapPic")
2. WIDER (SEMI-FULL) SHOTS
Aspect 1 ("First look...")
*
Aspect 2 (innards)
*
Aspect 3 (Church letter: "Mexico")
*
Reverse Facet
(exterior, transcribed to compensate for my ill-lit photo) [click to enlarge]
*
Obverse Facet (home address, censored)
*
Spine Facet, detail enlarged & doubled
3. FURTHER STUDY
(excerpts from Calvin Tomkins' biography of Marcel Duchamp, included here because I Bryan the editor-photographer-blogger feel that they illuminate Mr. Baldwin's work above)
Excerpt 1 of 3, from the chapter "ENTER ROSE SELAVY" (pages 230-231):
*
Excerpt 2 of 3, from the chapter "NEW YORK, 1942" (pages 336-337):
*
Excerpt 3 of 3, from the chapter "BOX-IN-A-SUITCASE" (pages 316-317):
