Slinky Palermo, Slinky Palermo

I scanned over my neighbors.
Slinky Palermo, Slinky Palermo
Now I’m in all the papers.

Who knew, indeed?: A “minimal art painting”, n.d., by Slinky Palermo on Thai Pinterest.

So far we have only two images of artworks attributed to Slinky Palermo, from Pinterest [above] and tumblr [below]. I guess technically, it’s slinky palermo.

“Slinky Palermo/ Window Installation View 1970”, screenshot of elin-andersson-blog’s quiet tumblr

Though namechecked by famous critics in prominent places, and included with major historic figures in a publication for a group show,

Slinky Palermo cited in a Mutual Art syndication of a c. 2006 Jerry Saltz Village Voice review of Michael Krebber originally digitized by Proquest; a tumblr; and an Italian rare book dealer’s listing for a 1968 group show exhibition catalogue, image: google

the most significant critical information we have on the artistic practice of Slinky Palermo comes from just two sources.

The first is the Dia Art Foundation, which exhibited Slinky Palermo works from 1964-1997 in 2011, as seen in the results for two slightly differently worded Google searches:

“‘Slinky Palermo’ was in fact the assumed name adopted by the young German art[ist?]… [unknown]”
“Slinky Palermo’s commitment to painting was steadfast during the late 1960s, a period in which the medium was widely felt as untenable for… [unknown]”

It may be possible that additional Google searching will yield more detail from these truncated excerpts, in the way that you can, in desperation, search phrase by incremental phrase in a Google book snippet view.

The other is a New York Magazine directory listing for a 1995 exhibition at Brooke Alexander:

“Slinky Palermo — A retrospective of editioned graphic works by this German artist (1943-1977) who saw abstraction as an inquiry into the philosophy of phenomenology” image: google books

Whatever it may have been in the past, from this point forward, Slinky Palermo is an artist who sees abstraction as a Google search into the philosophy of epistemology.

Given the absence of actual books in the Google Books results, it seems likely that most Slinky Palermo mentions can be attributed to OCR software that predates Google’s own scanning initiative. Whether it’s a steadfast commitment painting in the face of untenable something, or glitching industrial-scale digitization, Slinky Palermo is a tenacious artifact—a bookmark, if not a flagbearer—of a specific historic moment and context, and for those that inhabit and revisit it. Which, looking prospectively, is all of us.