About two years ago, I mentioned my first real encounter with the work of Mike Mandel. At that time, Mike sat in for a class that Bill Burke was teaching and talked about his career. One of the early projects that he discussed was his set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (1975), a collection of portraits of photographers as baseball players with their “stats” on the back. These cards have since become collector’s items in the photography community but rarely do you see a complete set.

Well, as it turns out, Mike himself has put a complete collection on eBay.

Complete set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

As he writes in the listing,

The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards is a photo offset lithographic project that I authored and published in 1975. The project satirized the phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade.

Recently, I have offered complete sets for sale, but they are rare. This is a first edition of all 134 Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (plus one checklist, 135 cards in all). MINT CONDITION, offered for sale directly by the artist. Photographs by Mike Mandel. Texts, statistics and quotes by the respective artists printed on verso. Each card 3-1/2×2-1/2 inches. The reverse side for each card enabled the photographer to fill in their own personal data that referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards. In a sense, each photographer’s response provides an insight about how they approached their participation.

Some of the photographers, curators, and critics included are: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Ed Ruscha, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, Robert Cumming, Lewis Baltz, Duane Michals, Edmund Teske, Peter Bunnell, Robert Heinecken, Beaumont Newhall, etc. The cards are stored in archival baseball card pages, no pvc, acid free, 9 cards to a page. The set is collected and sold within a storage binder, black, pure archival polyproylene.

I will sign my card upon request.

Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards: Mike Mandel, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

Have a few thousand to spend? Looking to do it in the next three hours? Then hurry up and place a bid!

[thanks Jason]

UPDATE: The auction sold for $4,049. The person who bought it is probably kicking themselves for not buying the same exact item here for $2,950 (a savings of $1099).

Popularity: 26% [?]

David Byrne’s Playing the Building, 2008
© Justin Ouellette

To say that David Byrne is a prolific artist is an understatement. The work just keeps coming. His latest piece, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation entitled Playing the Building, “transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and ‘play.’”

The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features – metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.

Brilliant. Check out this video to see/hear it in action.

Find out more about Playing the Building here (don’t miss the interview).

UPDATE: Here is another interview with Byrne where you can hear him talk about the piece (thanks Sarah!):

Popularity: 29% [?]

detail from Blown-Up Blow-Up (blownupblowup.com), 2008
© Constant Dullart

If you haven’t seen Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up (even more of a shame if you’re a photographer), you might not understand but should still take a look at Constant Dullaart’s latest web project Blown-Up Blow-Up (following, of course, Blown-Up Balloon and Blown-Up Explosion).

See more of Dullaart’s work here.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Early color wheel, 1708
© C.B. (presumably Claude Boutet)

Pulling from Sarah Lowengard’s text, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, the COLOURlovers blog put together a great article on the history of the color wheel. The article looks at the progression of color organization systems and how the wheel came to be, featuring a some great color organization examples along the way.

Read it here.

Popularity: 22% [?]

While I like the photo work of Ananké Asseff (Remnants of the Paradise, for example), I was particularly excited to come across her interactive video piece entitled Contemplation.

Model of Contemplation, 2005-06
© Ananké Asseff

The piece consists of a girl sitting on the ground, contemplating the landscape with her back to the viewer. As the viewer approaches the screen, the woman turns (triggered by a sensor) to look at the viewer. When the viewer moves away from the screen, the girl turns back.

A simple installation that works quite beautifully.

See more of Asseff’s work here.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Inspired by a totally cosmic conversation about inner and outer space, I give you Powers of Ten!

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend.

Popularity: 31% [?]

L: Jamie’s Portrait, Crayon and paint by Jamie D. K. (Age 10, Australia)
R: My Dream House, Marker by Fujia L. (Age 9, USA)

Global Children’s Art Gallery: reminding us that kids are awesome (and better at art than us).

[via Bevel and Boss]

Popularity: 36% [?]

envelope and contents, including Drawing #81, Binoculars, 2008
from Jason Polan (The Drawing Project)

Jason Polan has been posting daily drawings on his blog, The Drawing Project, since the end of November and making them available to the first reader to e-mail him with their name and address.

Just the other day I received Drawing #81 in the mail, a lovely little (3.625” x 3.25” in.) pen and ink rendering of a pair of binoculars. I suggest subscribing to his RSS feed if you want to grab one of these.

Thanks, Jason!

Popularity: 40% [?]

randomly generated pairing of image and text [permalink]
© Shane Lavalette / lyin’ in lyon

Anything is a [dynamic website, pointless experiment, fictitious book, waste of time, collaborative magazine, source of inspiration, diversion] that lets its contributors freely add/edit any image or text to it, as often as they wish. Don’t quite understand what this means?

In each of its 64 main pages, there is an area allocated for 1 image (left side) and 1 body of text (right side). Upon registration, each contributor is asked to choose whether they wish to upload image or text, and they are permanently assigned a random page (with another contributor).

In addition to the 64 pages, visitors can also click on Give Me Anything!, which randomly combines any of the currently available images and text to create a ‘new’ page.

This project is inspired by web sites like ffffound.com, Derek Powazek’s Kvetch.com, and Maura Johnston’s Bittersweets.org, and off-line projects like Christy-Claire’s Something Anything.

To contribute you must be invited by someone who has contributed already. Each contributor gets 5 invites to give out as they see fit. Currently it’s a bit image-heavy (33 image contributors, 6 text contributors), but I imagine that will change.

Visit the website and watch it grow!

Popularity: 30% [?]

Improv Everywhere brings us the public performance, Frozen Grand Central.

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them.

Brilliant.

Popularity: 38% [?]