Sadly, we are not BFF’s with Peter Norton or included on his holiday mailing list of friends who received the annual art projects commissioned over the last few decades. The Norton’s 1996 offering was created by the British musician Brian Eno and we are fortunate to have acquired a copy.

Eno and his friend, artist Peter Schmidt (who passed away in 1980), enjoyed playing the card game of Oblique Strategies. In 1975, the two wrote their own edition focusing on the art world. In this game of strategies, each card presents us with a problem we might face in life, along with a suggested way to approach the problem creatively.

In 1996, Eno revised and rewrote the deck of one hundred cards, which were edited by Norton and translated into Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic.

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies. One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, 1996. Graphic Arts Collection 2013- in process.

“These cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn’t seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position – which was quite different from the one we’d been in prior to that.

-Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80

See also Peter Schmidt’s design for Eno’s CD, Before and After Science (2004). Mendel Music Library (MUS) CD- 24728