Eric Andersen, The Banner, 1989/90, Silkscreen on cloth, 1.60 × 50 m, Edition of 9
Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin
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Eric Andersen's artwork comprised of nine, each 50 m long banner with coloured silkcreen printings (in yellow, red, purple, green, white, grey) of ellipses, letters and circles. Most of them are signed, numbered and dated.
Supposedly, the banner should be 450 m long, produced into 9 parts á 50 m.
We have 3 numbered parts (1st part of 9, 2nd part of 9 and 4th part of 9). 2 other 50 m long parts are only dedicated, but not numbered. The graphics on all the parts show similar motifs, but never the same composition. Means that all the single parts follow a certain design, always different.
We assume, that this artwork is unique and not an edition. Therefore a more profound research is requested.
In Viviani´s Complete Catalogue Raisoneè it is stated as edition.
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Eric Andersen is a Danish artist interested in performance and Intermedia art. He studied music in his childhood and, as early as 1960, began defining numbered pieces with the recurring title Opus, a series of compositions and open-ended work instructions, played in the paradox of the interaction between the artist and the audience.In 1962, Andersen participated in the first edition of the festival Festum Fluxorum held at the Nikolaj Kirke in Copenhagen, an event as acclaimed as it was publicly reviled and criticized.On this occasion, Andersen performed with Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Ben Patterson, George Maciunas, and the German artist and gallerist Arthur Köpcke, with whom he would often work in the future in support of the avant-gardes. In later years, Andersen made several trips to the former Eastern Bloc, where he engaged with the developing networks of vanguardist movements in countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. One such legendary trip, which had Moscow as its destination, resulted in a resounding clash between Andersen and Maciunas, who excommunicated him from the network in 1964. Andersen continued to be a promoter of Intermedia experiments and events involving artists such as Philip Corner, Geoffrey Hendricks, and Jackson MacLow at the Roskilde Festival of Fantastics (1982) and the monumental festival Margrethe Fjorden in 1996. Since the 1960s, Andersen has been an active contributor to mail art, later engaging also in complex experiments involving digital technology, as in the environmental project The Sun Lawn (1982) and the design for the grandiose satellite MARIANNE – An Eiffel Tower in Space(1986).With Francesco Conz, he worked on several ambitious editions, such as The Banner, which, at fifty meters long, is rumored to be the longest screen-print in the world. The remarkable The Portable Crying Stone materializes the itinerant installation Crying Space, developed by Andersen as early as the 1960s and repurposed worldwide. Thanks to Conz’s offer to use Veronese marble as the main support, Andersen emphasizes how the very fragility of tears will shape the more solid parts of the world. Original Opus scores are now in numerous public collections, including the Silverman Collection, New York and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Andersen continues to perform in numerous institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2014), the Seoul Museum of Art (2016), the Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen (2014), and the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (2019).
