WALASSE TING, 1988 Calendar, Art Unlimited, Amsterdam, 1988

Wall calendar, comb-bound with two staples and a punched hanging hole. Art Unlimited, Amsterdam, 1988. Cover reproduces Cats waiting for new excitement, 1987, acrylic on rice paper. Verso carries a printed “With Compliments” slip with a contemporary handwritten New Year’s greeting in French, signed “la Maison des Collectionneurs,” alongside Art Unlimited’s Amsterdam address and the copyright line “© Walasse Ting 1987.”

Made to be consulted for twelve months, then discarded. That built-in obsolescence is most of what makes it interesting now.

Art Unlimited was not a poster company that acquired reproduction rights to a famous artist’s image after the fact. The relationship with Ting predates this calendar and outlasts it: Ting held a solo exhibition at Art Unlimited, Amsterdam, in 1985, and in 1993 the same publisher issued Blue Sky, a book of his poems — a working relationship spanning close to a decade, of which this 1988 calendar sits roughly in the middle. That reframes the object considerably. It isn’t merchandise made from a licensed image; it’s one surviving artefact from an ongoing artist-publisher partnership, in a format designed to be thrown away at year’s end.

The verso adds a second layer of circulation. Someone — an entity identifying itself only as “la Maison des Collectionneurs” — used this particular copy as a New Year’s gift, writing over Art Unlimited’s own pre-printed compliments slip. The organisation itself can’t currently be traced; what can be said is that the object passed through two distribution systems before it reached whoever kept it: publisher to gift-giver, gift-giver to recipient. A calendar built for mass circulation ended up circulating twice.

There is also a clean institutional precedent for taking this kind of object seriously. The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas holds Calendar 1986, another Walasse Ting annual calendar, in its permanent collection — catalogued plainly, without euphemism, as a “commercially printed calendar.” A companion object to this one, in an American university museum, cuts against any assumption that this format is beneath collecting.

Ting himself is a harder artist to place neatly than the bright cat-and-flower image on this cover suggests. He arrived in Paris in 1953 and formed lasting friendships with Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn of the CoBrA circle; in New York he moved through Abstract Expressionism and Pop; his 1964 book 1¢ Life gathered his own poetry with contributions from Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and others, and remains the work most responsible for his place in art history. NSU Art Museum’s Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle (November 2023–March 2024) describes itself as “the first American institution to go beyond this legacy and acknowledge Ting’s mastery within a monographic museum show,” placing him explicitly in dialogue with its CoBrA collection rather than treating 1¢ Life as the whole story.

Seen against that reassessment, a cheap Amsterdam wall calendar from the same decade Ting was working there reads less like ephemera and more like a data point in an artist’s history that institutions are still actively filling in.

Condition: [pending — confirm completeness of the twelve monthly leaves, and describe wear to cover, binding and hanging hole]