{"product_id":"walasse-ting-1988-calendar-art-unlimited-amsterdam","title":"WALASSE TING, 1988 Calendar, Art Unlimited, Amsterdam, 1988","description":"\u003cp\u003eWall calendar, comb-bound with two staples and a punched hanging hole. Art Unlimited, Amsterdam, 1988. Cover reproduces \u003cem\u003eCats waiting for new excitement\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMade to be consulted for twelve months, then discarded. That built-in obsolescence is most of what makes it interesting now.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eArt 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 \u003cem\u003eBlue Sky\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is also a clean institutional precedent for taking this kind of object seriously. The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas holds \u003cem\u003eCalendar 1986\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTing 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 \u003cem\u003e1¢ Life\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eWalasse Ting: Parrot Jungle\u003c\/em\u003e (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 \u003cem\u003e1¢ Life\u003c\/em\u003e as the whole story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeen 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: [pending — confirm completeness of the twelve monthly leaves, and describe wear to cover, binding and hanging hole]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Art Unlimited","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54546762989906,"sku":"TNR-2026-0643","price":125.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Ting_Walasse._1988_Calendar.jpg?v=1788580769","url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/products\/walasse-ting-1988-calendar-art-unlimited-amsterdam","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}