Each issue of the 1980s Eye Magazine had a different editor inviting artists to make a work, which would be copied and collated into a spiral-bound volume. Sometimes artists would submit an entire edition of prints, or objects, and some issues were published looseleaf, or in boxes.
There is no comprehensive archive of Eye Magazine. The largest holding I’ve found is in the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry at the University of Iowa, which has seven issues from between 1982 and 1986, including the most famous [sic] one, Cobalt Myth Mechanics, Eye No. 14, edited in 1986 by Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, otherwise known as Paul H-O. Earlier issues in the Sackner archive list edition sizes of 150 or 155. Cobalt Myth Mechanics is listed in Iowa as having a run of “around 200,” and all signed editions are numbered out of 200.
But an old eBay listing scraped by worthpoint quotes Paul H-O in a 2011 online text, now unfindable, as saying: “[the] binding process and handmade covers were, in fact, killing me… They were so labor intensive each copy averaged over two hours after collating so I produced the copies in small batches, and in fact never finished more than about 150.”
The 1987 announcement of Eye #14 in The Print Collectors’ Newsletter says the contributing artists all “share social concerns.” From H-O’s editiorial note: “Not one of the people who’ve made these pages is guilty of not caring about man’s fate.” MoMA reproduces 16 artist folios, but not the title pages or H-O’s text.
The point of all this is that Eye #14 includes two unique contributions from now-canonical artists, and one of them is also an art market star: Karen Finley, and David Hammons.
Finley made annotations by hand on a one-page excerpt of a performance script, a man on the subway’s chillingly nonchalant rape fantasy. One loose copy of Finley’s edition turned up at Printed Matter, with associated Eye #14-related pages signed by Paul H-O in 2012. But otherwise, all the action is on Hammons.
Hammons’ piece is no less dire, and it is probably singlehandedly responsible for H-O’s binding woes. On 200 pieces of found cardboard, Hammons made unique stencil portraits of Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist and Pratt student strangled in NYC Transit police custody in 1983. The 1985 acquittal of eleven officers charged in Stewart’s death gave Hammons the piece’s title: The Man Nobody Killed, which is also painted across the work.
Sometimes these prints are stripped out of the magazine and sold separately as straightup Hammonses, for straightup Hammons prices. In January 2017 four copies of Eye #14 turned up at Wright20. They were listed as containing “David Hammons most well-known work, The Man Who Was Never Shot,” which manages to be both technically true and horribly, hilariously wrong. They sold for $875.
Over the next six years, three of the issues have had their Hammons prints stripped out and sold as standalone works at Swann, for prices ranging from $4,420 to $40,000. Another loose The Man Nobody Killed sold for $50,000 in 2021. Last year a complete copy of Eye #14 sold for $6,250.
Next month a framed Hammons [above] with just the signed title page on the back is up for sale. And soon we’ll know whether there’s one person who doesn’t know what it is and what it’s worth, or two.
Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to the fifty leftover Hammonses Paul H-O didn’t bind.