Christian Capurro
a vacant bazaar (provisional legend)

Christian Capurro’s a vacant bazaar (provisional legend) (1999–2010) consisted of nine magazines, each of which was all-but-completely rubbed out, erased by hand by the artist over the last decade. They are an assortment of popular lifestyle-fashion magazines—Vogue, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar etc.—dating from the mid 1990s, each one different from the last. All but one of the magazines are linked by a shared advertisement, the near-same detail of which is all that remains after their erasure except for page numbering and most of the covers.

Additionally, each magazine was accompanied by a homogeneous, and sometimes substantial, mass of erasings—the rubber and ink waste produced by the process of their erasure. In certain instances the erasings were kept separate as distinct, numbered page-piles. A range of spatial explorations of the relationship between the magazines and their respective erasings formed the basis of the a vacant bazaar (provisional legend) installation at Artspace, the inaugural public presentation of this work.