LAURA CARPENTER / PHILIPPE THOMAS — Insights. Galerie Claire Burrus, Paris, 1990 [invitation]

Galerie Claire Burrus, Paris, 10–17 March 1990. Show invitation for the presentation of Laura Carpenter’s book Insights. Offset-printed card on cream stock, 17.5 × 13 cm.

Condition: Excellent. Light sun bleaching and age toning; the fading sits almost seamlessly within the card’s already pale, administrative design.

Carpenter entered Philippe Thomas’s authorial system through les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde®, publishing texts written by Thomas under her own name. The invitation announces the book, places Carpenter in the position of author and credits the agency only in the fine print. Thomas’s own name is absent.

In a single printed surface, the card performs the displacement of authorship that structured the publication and the agency around it: the recto carries title and name without image or institutional context; the verso supplies the gallery, the date, the event and the credit line — ‘avec le concours de l’agence les ready made appartiennent à tout le monde’ — in the smallest available type. The author is present. The author’s author is not.

Ships flat, securely backed and tracked.