Transcript of a voiceover by Giles Bailey for Applied Art, its maverick production process is now tangible: pages assem- And at the end of the same wall, Jason Fulford’s small 2007 to open up a fourth field. The pages were then captioned Kunstverein, Amsterdam, May 2010 bled on the fly according to a distinctly west coast stoner logic, Droste effect C-Print of an Ulrich Roski album cover, along “Courtesy of Seth Price” in clandestine reference to the 8 marked by hole-plugging idiosyncrasies such as the short story 8 with a test Polaroid of the same image incorporated to fold conceit, and this particular line of sampling further protracted * * * that runs across the bottom right-hand corner of each page, time into the equation of its own production. here through their reproduction as metre-high capital-A all set on thin newsprint, cheap and low-bulk, once timely, Art lithographs framed for the wall. To clarify, these are 5 The title is overheard from a short film,Pulmo Marina, now quickly browning and fading. Stripped of its explanatory blown-up facsimiles of two pages from the magazine rather by Aurélien Froment: The sketch itself was accidentally hung the wrong way up text in the magazine, the object is left to speak for itself, and On the left is a square of miniature replications of Ken Kesey than the original books, and any blanks, gaps, fields, and when first exhibited at the V&A, effectively prioritizing its as part of the bigger group is forced to interact with the other and his Merry Pranksters’ notorious mid-sixties hippy van gray areas between these various generations of images, IF YOU STUCK A TAG ON THEM TO TRACK THEM abstract qualities over its representational ones. Paul Elliman objects, like a bunch of strange kids in a playground. (immortalized by Tom Wolfe), with its lovingly misspelled 13 formats, mediums and media are imprecisely where any THE WAY CERTAIN FISH ARE TAGGED THESE DAYS introduces this anecdote to frame some thoughts around the So what you’re looking at here is, at its most allusive destination FURTHUR painted over the front windscreen. new work lies. THEY WOULD SINK INSTANTLY idea that abstraction—and by extension modernism—was only (and ignoring for a moment the obvious contradiction) a claim And on the right, one from a Jamie Reid Sex Pistols collage On the face of it, there’s no reason to assume these And also the adjacent spread from Ettore Sotsass’s statement acceptable to the British public when grounded in function. against representation which amounts to Dot Dot Dot’s very bound for NOWHERE. When it came to tracking down objects should share any formal characteristics, because on “Decoration” as doctored by Justin Beal in 2007—the The opening quote is from Stefan Themerson’s General Piesc, Let’s move on. particular conception of modernism: a faith in objects rather material carriers of these immaterial images, the Pistols’ (a) their umbilical texts have been written by a wide range of book abstracted as photograph, statement as image. a story in which the General finds happiness only when he has than pictures of objects. This could be transposed to experi- vehicle was easy enough, printed on the reverse of the sleeve The buses are an example of two objects arriving in people with different backgrounds and interests at different forgotten his mission: BACK ROOM ence over convenience—and by extension perhaps conver- for “Pretty Vacant” which reached number 6 in 1977, and so reverse, by excavating a single worldly object back from a times across the past decade, and (b) Dot Dot Dot has sation over monologue or community over individual too. pretty ubiquitous in second-hand record shops. Its psychedelic multiplied image. A similar pair are the juxtaposed versions no particular aesthetic mandate. In fact, anything approaching The Greek males thought geometry was the thing. Dr Zamen- Another sense in which images are secondary in the magazine This is why it seems useful to regard this collection with that equivalent was less apparent, at least until I came across a of what appear to be proportionally-enlarged scans of original an ethos would rather stand against any kind of prescribed hof thought Esperanto was the thing. Jesus-Christ thought the is that they’re often second-rate. By which I mean poor opening quote from Stefan Themerson in mind—a statement cartoon of Kesey’s bus on a piece of LSD blotter art. This pages from Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal 1897 poem, whose or standardized style in favour of unique form drawn 14 dialectical loaf of bread was the thing. And geometry produced quality, black and white, and printed on uncoated paper which profoundly modernist in both spirit and rhetoric. could still be bought—unloaded—from his son Zane in title is usually translated as “A throw of the dice will never from specific content. Such as David Osbaldeston’s 2008 bazookas. And polyglotism produced more quarrels. And love reduces definition. This is partly practical, as we’ve never Applied to this collection, then, Themerson’s manners are Berkeley, California. The blotter art arrived ready-perforated abolish chance,” and Marcel Broodthaers’ 1969 adaptation, “Diagram for a Search Engine”—above and slightly to the produced hatred. And none of these great things has proved really been able to afford decent photography or color printing, manifest in a certain (what is the right word) momentum (?) into single trips and signed by old Pranksters—an odd counter- which abstracts and/or censors Mallarmé’s arrangement, sub- right of (Mallarmé/Broodthaers)/Price to be more (what is the right word) efficacious (?) than what I, but also in deliberate reaction to how “graphics” were typically Its common denominator is a way of thinking—an approach, point to the drab coffee rings that stained the Pistols’ single. titled “Image” in relation to the original “Text.” in my female way would like to call “good manners”. reproduced in the eighties and nineties—as seductive full-color an attitude—in line with Themerson’s alacrity and good humor. The morning after the first incarnation of the show in Estonia, surfaces that barely began to relate the stickier and generally I’m clearly grasping for words and left wanting here, but what a corner of ten tabs had been carefully torn off, most probably Moving further to the left on this East wall, a more ENTRANCE more compelling substance underneath. In other words, I’m getting at is more efficiently summed up by those Wire LPs by the gang of itinerant Russians who had been hanging applied, “hard” abstraction is found in the transformation of these images were only skin-deep. Our response was to down- hung on the East wall at knee height, running chronologically about all night, according to the locals. Later the piece was statistics to serial graphic information in the two Isotype This is the thirteenth occasion of showing this group of play the surface in an attempt to get at the depth through from 1977’s Pink Flag to the 1989 best-of composite lost, perhaps seized, on a flight to London, and so a new sheet charts. The top one, for example, presents the relative num- 16 artifacts, or pictures of those artifacts, whose only objective the writing. A good example of this, behind the door, is the On Returning. This is one of the easier-to-relate reasons for had to be ordered from Zane. bers of workers’ “Strikes and Lockouts”—symbolized by red connection is that they have appeared in the pages of Dot Dot “Money” spread with images of an antique cash register, dino- collecting and showing this stuff: if you look hard enough it Extra-formal accidents—such as these allusions to psy- fists—in Britain, France and Germany from 1913 to 1928. 8 Dot at some point since its conception in the year 2000. saur and bar chart, from the 1969 edition of the Whole Earth actually moves. chedelics and stimulants—suggest something of the reason 13 This collection of source material was first assembled in 2004. Catalog, a kind of seventies counterculture Yellow Pages. for actually gathering rather than merely depicting these By source material I mean the original items represented in items; setting up the conditions for something other to occur. print by screened images. In the regular hierarchy of the maga- Further examples of particularly loaded objects include, zine, texts are generally primary and images secondary, and the opposite the buses on the West wall, the indigo stencil print —which both mocks and affirms the romantic gesture of 14 fundamental idea of these exhibitions was to invert these roles, of Muriel Cooper’s pioneering 1977 self-portrait-by-Polaroid- its medium, the woodcut, as well as it’s rhetoric, the heroic as a kind of parallel operation. simultaneously-video-imaged-and-printed. avant-garde polemic. And yet it seems disingenuous to The magazine’s contributors rarely write directly about deny the blatant graphic synchronicities across the collection. 8 how this kind of cultural residue looks, but draw on it rather Again these scans have both appeared in juxtaposition twice in The trouble is that the nature of these synchronicities is to trigger, illustrate, or reference broader sociological, philo- Dot Dot Dot, on the first occasion accompanying if not exactly as profoundly difficult to articulate as they are easy to Or in the unwitting sister logos by Muriel Cooper for the 11 illustrating a text “About Nothing” by Peter Bilak; and more perceive. This is because they are primarily cerebral not MIT Press in 1963, and Raymond Pettibon for his brother’s sopical or art-historical ideas.