Luigi Giannuzzi and Gavin Aldred, Cock: Indian Fireworks Art, Westzone Publishing, London, 2000

This sturdy and sizable accordion is a wonderful visual feast that documents a wide range of packaging images used by Indian firework manufacturers from the city of Sivakasi.

In an informative essay at the beginning of the book by Peter Nagy titled, A cartography of pictures, he states:

This book presents a simultaneity of histories. On the one hand we have a group of pictures culled from the immense stockpile created by artists in India over the past century, images which have served multiple uses and played contradictory roles, images whose semiotics are intertwined with the social and political histories of the Indian state. Complementary to this, we have a collection of packaging for a particular product and can discern the desires which have been projected onto that product.

Nagy goes on to write about fireworks' relationship to the Hindu festival Diwali (festival of lights) and how integral they have become to its celebration. In his conclusion he writes:

This collection of packaging images then, in the final analysis, describes the process taken from  colonial subject through independence and into globalisation. It celebrates the radical multiplicities of Hindu symbologies and their effects on secular subjects.

For those curious about the accordions' title, Nagy writes, "Surely innuendo was the goal for the artist who painted a none-too-subtle temptress holding a giant Roman candle and the copywriter who christened her "Cock Siren". All is explained!

42 double-sided pages, individual pages 12" (h) x 6.25" (w), and when fully open 22 ft 11 inches.

back cover

 

Richard Meier, Voix Editions/accordion publications, France

I just had to feature this selection of 16 accordion publications published by Meier's Voix Editions. I have only recently come across this impressive and wide-ranging publishing house, and found these tucked away in their catalogue. I have previously posted about this work by Albert Merz in a separate entry in this blog.  Éditions Richard Meier

Gianfranco Baruchello

Jean-Yves Bosseur

Cueco

Remi Dall'Aglio

Luis Darocha

Zingjiang Gao

Daniel Humair

Francois Martin

Albert Merz (see elsewhere in this blog)

Gerard Michel

Francois Morellet

Jean-Luc Parant

Michel Paysant

Horacio Sapere

Emmanuel Saulnier

Claude Vallat

Antoni Muntadas, Red, Arts Libris, Spain, 2019.

"On October 1st, 2017, the People's Republic of China commemorates its 68th anniversary with various celebrations. At the time, Antoni Muntadas was finishing his project Asian Protocols in China. On October 1st, 2017 he set out to identify and gather images and graphic items in which red, a symbolically loaded color in Chinese culture, affiliated with and used by the Government was predominant."  Antoni Muntadas

Four strips of 9 cards, individual cards 4" (h) x 5.75" (w), when opened each strip is 3ft long.

the text on the back of all the postcards

Julian Tuwin, and Matgorzat Surowska & Joanna Ruszczk, Locomotive/IDEOLO, Centrala, Poland, 2015

This is a really wonderful 78 foot accordion that takes as its cue a poem by the well-known Polish artist, Julian Tuwin (1894-1953) in which he describes a train and the varieties of things and people it was carrying in its 40 wagons.  Surowska and Rusczczk have brilliantly extended this idea into a train with 43 double-page wagons carrying a huge variety of people, animals and things. The black and white design works perfectly on the page and the graphics really pop. On the back of each page are texts related to that particular carriage and its contents, with all of them being concerned in some way with a variety of social, political, economic and aesthetic issues and themes, as well as a number of quotes by Tuwin.  

96 pages, double-sided, individual page 9.75" (t) x 9.75" (w), when fully opened 78 ft. 

Julian Tuwin, The Locomotive, 1938

sample of back page

on the floor and not fully extended either!

Cy Twombly, Fifty Days as Illam, Edition Cantz, Germany, 1990

An interesting accordion that reproduces this major work by Twombly. I particularly like how some of the images of the individual works wraparound the accordion's pages. Interestingly, this accordion has a central binding and the two halves of the work fold out from the center, kind of odd really. The work is located at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The online label for the work states:

In the summer of 1977, Cy Twombly began working on a "painting in ten parts" based on Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad. Completed in 1978 and collectively titled Fifty Days at Iliam, the works evoke incidents from Homer's epic poem in Twombly's characteristic synthesis of words and images. The ten large canvases follow one another much like a developing narrative. They are ordered as follows: Shield of Achilles; Heroes of the Achaeans; Vengeance of Achilles; Achaeans in Battle; The Fire that Consumes All Before It; Shades of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector; House of Priam; Ilians in Battle; Shades of Eternal Night; Heroes of the Ilians.

16 pages, single-sided, individual pages 11.75" (h) x 8.25 (w), when fully open 11ft long.

For photographs of the work installed in the museum see:  

https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/85709.html