La Mamelle and the Pic

1 Give Them the Picture: An Anthology 2 Give Them The PicTure An Anthology of La Mamelle and ART COM, 1975–1984 Liz Glass, Susannah Magers & Julian Myers, eds. Dedicated to Steven Leiber for instilling in us a passion for the archive. Contents 8 Give Them the Picture: 78 The Avant-Garde and the Open Work Images An Introduction of Art: Traditionalism and Performance Mark Levy 139 From the Pages of 11 The Mediated Performance La Mamelle and ART COM Susannah Magers 82 IMPROVIDEO: Interactive Broadcast Conceived as the New Direction of Subscription Television Interviews Anthology: 1975–1984 Gregory McKenna 188 From the White Space to the Airwaves: 17 La Mamelle: From the Pages: 87 Performing Post-Performancist An Interview with Nancy Frank Lifting Some Words: Some History Performance Part I Michele Fiedler David Highsmith Carl Loeffler 192 Organizational Memory: An Interview 19 Video Art and the Ultimate Cliché 92 Performing Post-Performancist with Darlene Tong Darryl Sapien Performance Part II The Curatorial Practice Class Carl Loeffler 21 Eleanor Antin: An interview by mail Mary Stofflet 96 Performing Post-Performancist 196 Contributor Biographies Performance Part III 25 Tom Marioni, Director of the Carl Loeffler 199 Index of Images Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), San Francisco, in Conversation 100 Performing Post-Performancist Carl Loeffler Performance or The Televisionist Performing Televisionism 33 Chronology Carl Loeffler Linda Montano 104 Talking Back to Television 35 An Identity Transfer with Joseph Beuys Anne Milne Clive Robertson 109 Hero-Redoux: Superstars Sandwiched 37 An Interview with Ian Burn Lynn Hershman Michael Auping 111 Non Nagasaki Neoist Songs 51 The Floating Museum Phase I David Levi-Strauss and Phase II Lynn Hershman 115 Disappearing into the Culture as a Frequency: Bytes from a conversation 52 Interview, July 1977 with Willoughby Sharp Douglas Davis and Peter Frank Lynette Taylor 65 A Post Hysterical Hallucination For 118 Present Tense: Rite of Passage New Romantics Michael Nash Richard Irwin 122 An Artist’s Guide to Music Television 72 Notes from the Invisible Theater or Michael Nash Beyond Fashionism: Alternative to Alternative, the Rising Voice of the New 133 Participating in an Electronic Public: Frontality & Artists’ Theatre as Art TV Art Affects Culture Richard Irwin Anna Couey Give Them the Picture: known as Art Contemporary, subsequently particular, interrogating obsessively the changing its name to the abbreviated idea of television—what is it? For whom An Introduction ART COM in 1981. The aesthetics of La and, perhaps more importantly, to whom Mamelle and ART COM evolved with the does it speak? What is its relationship to name. The first issues maintained a black- art practice? And how can artists find their and-white minimal aesthetic redolent of place in this new mediascape? conceptualism and mail art. In the 1980s, Give Them the Picture is an anthology an alternative space for contemporary when La Mamelle was dropped from the In this light, the slogan “Give Them The 8 of writings that originally appeared in La artists, where practices ignored by title, the aesthetic adopted trappings of a Picture” evinced a kind of double- or 9 Mamelle and ART COM magazines. It major institutions might find their place popular publication. Bold colors, flashy triple-meaning. Perhaps most prosai- accompanies the exhibition God Only in history.[2] graphics and catchy titles replaced an cally, it stood in for the role of the table Knows Who the Audience Is: Performance, austere monochrome newsprint. of contents: to encapsulate each issue in Video, and Television Through the Lens Alongside serving as a venue for artists, a single “picture”. But more compelling of La Mamelle/ART COM, staged at La Mamelle/ART COM—somewhat Changes coursed through the style readings exist: “them” can be seen to the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary uniquely, among their cohort of institu- and substance of the magazine as well. refer to the television audience, to whom Arts in 2011. Founded by Carl Loeffler tions—saw their special mission as Offbeat artists’ statements, transcripts of artists and writers meant to deliver their with Trudi Richards in 1975, La Mamelle— documenting and recording these conversations in a sometimes agoniz- picture—which might, ART COM hoped, which later became known as ART anarchic and ephemeral practices; they ing and digressive real-time (see, for produce a programming more experi- COM—was a publishing body and a did so in an extensive archive of docu- example, the conversations with Ian Burn mental, anarchic and open-ended than gallery space during a crucial moment ments, artifacts and videos, and through and Tom Marioni, or between Peter Frank the rigorously controlled broadcast time in the history of San Francisco’s art their prodigious production of magazines and Douglas Davis in this volume), and allowed. Or, “Give Them The Picture” Give Them the Picture: and culture. Focusing on performance, and books, including twenty-five issues post-Beat cyberpunk rants (see Richard might refer to the artists themselves who non-object-based art, and, later, media- of La Mamelle and ART COM, as well as Irwin’s contributions beginning on page were (in ART COM’s formulation) to be ac- based works, La Mamelle/ART COM the survey texts Performance Anthology: 65), gave way to a style more polemi- corded access to the means of televisual functioned as a space for exhibitions Source Book For A Decade of California cal (see the included essays by Loeffler, production—and, by extension, access to and performances, and an organization Performance Art (1979) and Correspon- Michael Nash, and Anna Couey) and television’s mass audience. dedicated to archiving and disseminating dence Art: Source Book for the Network of discernibly fragmented, quick-mix, and information related to what it saw as the International Postal Art (1984). cut ‘n’ paste—a writing style in tune with This transition, around 1980, from docu- most important art of the time. the new hyper-temporality of pop culture menting the production of an avant-garde, Give Them the Picture presents essays in the 1980s, in particular the rhythms of perceived as such, to finding a place for An Anthology The 70s witnessed the creation of dozens and images culled from the pages of MTV, which Loeffler and others took in artists in an expanding and volatile media of new, self-organized institutions devoted La Mamelle and ART COM magazines with rapt attention. marketplace, was not without its anxieties, to contemporary art, from the Western between 1976 and 1984,[3] intending to contradictions, and vociferous debates— Front in Vancouver to the New Museum trace in particular their discussions of This new style accompanied a new as a reading of the contents of this anthol- in New York and 80 Langton in San Fran- time-based art practices. Pulled from later sense of La Mamelle/ART COM’s critical ogy will bear out. cisco. These organizations saw them- issues of ART COM, this title appeared project. While the magazine had always selves, explicitly, as a corrective to exist- originally as a heading on the table been interested in performance, video In his watershed essay, “E Unibus Pluram: ing museums: institutions of modernism, of contents, and was meant to signal and emerging technologies, the project Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster like the San Francisco Museum of Modern something of a turn in the magazine’s of considering an artist’s place in this Wallace posits that television inhabited Art (SFMOMA), which had once devoted approach around 1980. In the early years, new set of conditions now took center an impossible contradiction.[4] At its core, themselves to the most cutting-edge the magazine—by, for, and about artists— stage. With it came a new populist bent. television offered its target subject ac- practices of the avant-garde, but had was a venue for local and international art Articles about cutting-edge video-art cess to a certain kind of community and fallen behind the times by not exhibiting coverage; it included reviews, interviews, shared space with critical accounts of the sociability. Television’s popularity was performance, video, and the most radical information about other alternative spaces cable television market, the aesthetics of the result of a collective, and broadly-felt, forms of conceptual art.[1] In light of this and publications, and works of art made MTV, the development of slow-scan video desire for connection, with something or perceived dereliction of duty, La Mamelle/ specifically for inclusion in the magazine. technology and early incarnations of the someone; and yet the highly structured ART COM was imagined by its organiz- As the tides of artistic practice shifted Internet. Performance art was displaced and regulated actuality of television- ers, who came to include the artist Nancy throughout the course of its publication, by “televisionism,” and bohemia by viewing engendered only isolation. While Frank and the archivist Darlene Tong, as what was La Mamelle magazine became “teleculture.” The magazine began, in it connected its audience to an imagined or imaged “outside,” it was ultimately con- picturing, as you read, just how different Susannah Magers sumed alone. The apparatus determined this exhausting present might be, if the the experience—absolutely. authors had had their way. The Mediated Performance “God Only Knows Who The Audience Is,” — Liz Glass, Susannah Magers & Julian Myers, eds. was another of La Mamelle/ART COM’s ambivalent slogans, embodying both despair about this new disconnected Footnotes: In the spring of 1970, artist Terry Fox of performances were often intended for 10 community, and giddy excitement at the pushed himself into a corner of San the artists themselves, without aspirations 11 1. SFMOMA was attempting to adapt to dream of addressing this vast and invis- Francisco’s Reese Palley gallery, “as far towards re-presentations of the actions.

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