Brochure of ± I96I Founding the Expanded Arts
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Collaborative “Mail Art” Puts the Post in Postmodernism Letters, Envelopes and Enclosures Take Center Stage in an Intimate New Art Show
Collaborative “Mail Art” Puts the Post in Postmodernism Letters, envelopes and enclosures take center stage in an intimate new art show Envelope decoration was always a staple of the mail art experience. This colorful letter was sent from performance artist Anna Banana (Anna Lee Long) to collagist John Evans in 2010. (John Evans papers, Archives of American Art). By Ryan P. Smith JULY 30, 2018 In the era of instant messaging and FaceTime on the go, it can be easy to forget the pleasure of shuffling out to the mailbox in hope of discovering a thoughtful note from an old friend. Removing a letter from its envelope is a rich tactile experience, and marginalia, cross-outs, distinct penmanship and quirky enclosures combine to give epistolary exchanges a uniquely personal flavor. In the experimental artistic simmer of the late 1950s, the everyday creativity of letter-writing gave rise to a veritable movement: that of “mail art,” an antiestablishment, anything-goes mode of serial imaginative expression whose inclusive nature has kept it alive even into the Digital Age. Now a new show, “Pushing the Envelope,” organized by the Smithsonian's Achives of 2018 American Art and opening August 10 at the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery in Washington, D.C., promises to shine a spotlight on the medium. The enigmatic Neo-Dada collagist Ray Johnson, a Detroit native who struggled with fame even as he appropriated images of movie stars for his art, pioneered in the field of mail art, weaving together an immense spider web of collaborators that would survive him following his sudden suicide in 1995. -
Henry Flynt and Generative Aesthetics Redefined
1. In one of a series of video interviews conducted by Benjamin Piekut in 2005, Henry Flynt mentions his involvement in certain sci-fi literary scenes of the 1970s.1 Given his background in mathematics and analytic philosophy, in addition to his radical Marxist agitation as a member of 01/12 the Workers World Party in the sixties, Flynt took an interest in the more speculative aspects of sci-fi. “I was really thinking myself out of Marxism,” he says. “Trying to strip away its assumptions – [Marx’s] assumption that a utopia was possible with human beings as raw material.” Such musings would bring Flynt close to sci-fi as he considered the revision of the J.-P. Caron human and what he called “extraterrestrial politics.” He mentions a few pamphlets that he d wrote and took with him to meetings with sci-fi e On Constitutive n i writers, only to discover, shockingly, that they f e d had no interest in such topics. Instead, e R Dissociations conversations drifted quickly to the current state s c i 2 t of the book market for sci-fi writing. e h t ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊI’m interested in this anecdote in the as a Means of s e contemporary context given that sci-fi writing A e v has acquired status as quasi-philosophy, as a i t World- a r medium where different worlds are fashioned, e n sometimes guided by current scientific research, e G as in so-called “hard” sci-fi. While I don’t intend Unmaking: d n a here to examine sci-fi directly, it does allude to t n y the nature of worldmaking and generative l Henry Flynt and F aesthetics – the nature of which I hope to y r n illuminate below by engaging with Flynt’s work, e H Generative : as well as that of the philosophers Nelson g n i Goodman and Peter Strawson. -
What Is a Dance? in 3 Dances, Gene Friedman Attempts to Answer Just That, by Presenting Various Forms of Movement. the Film Is D
GENE FRIEDMAN 3 Dances What is a dance? In 3 Dances, Gene Friedman attempts to answer just that, by presenting various forms of movement. The film is divided into three sections: “Public” opens with a wide aerial shot of The Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden and visitors walking about; “Party,” filmed in the basement of Judson Memorial Church, features the artists Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Robert Rauschenberg, and Steve Paxton dancing the twist and other social dances; and “Private” shows the dancer Judith Dunn warming up and rehearsing in her loft studio, accompanied by an atonal vocal score. The three “dances” encompass the range of movement employed by the artists, musicians, and choreographers associated with Judson Dance Theater. With its overlaid exposures, calibrated framing, and pairing of distinct actions, Friedman’s film captures the group’s feverish spirit. WORKSHOPS In the late 1950s and early 1960s, three educational sites were formative for the group of artists who would go on to establish Judson Dance Theater. Through inexpensive workshops and composition classes, these artists explored and developed new approaches to art making that emphasized mutual aid and art’s relationship to its surroundings. The choreographer Anna Halprin used improvisation and simple tasks to encourage her students “to deal with ourselves as people, not dancers.” Her classes took place at her home outside San Francisco, on her Dance Deck, an open-air wood platform surrounded by redwood trees that she prompted her students to use as inspiration. In New York, near Judson Memorial Church, the ballet dancer James Waring taught a class in composition that brought together different elements of a theatrical performance, much like a collage. -
Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo*
Simone Forti with a lion cub at the Giardino Zoologico di Roma, 1968. Courtesy Simone Forti and The Box, LA. Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo* JULIA BRYAN-WILSON In the photograph, a young woman in a short skirt and sandals sits on a bench. With her crooked elbow, she braces her handbag to her body, tucking her large sketchpad into her armpit. She is petting a lion cub, and as she gazes down to witness the small but extraordinary fact of her hand on its fur, the ani- mal’s face turns towards the camera lens with closed eyes. This is dancer and choreographer Simone Forti on one of her many visits to the zoo during the brief time she lived in Rome in the late 1960s. Far from today’s “wildlife sanctu- aries” where animals can ostensibly wander freely, as the photo of this uncaged cub might suggest, the Giardino Zoologico di Roma offered a highly controlled environment in which animals lived within tight enclosures; Forti was here indulging in a staged, paid encounter, one that she characterized as “irre- sistible.”1 Irresistible because she was consistently moved by the creatures she drew and studied—moved as in stirred, or touched, as well as in shifted, or altered. As I argue, her dance practice changed dramatically as a result of the time she spent in Rome observing animal motions and interacting with other, animate forms of art. Petting a lion cub: irresistible, but still melancholy. Designed in part by German collector and merchant Carl Hagenbeck and built in 1911, the Roman zoo is an example of the turn-of-the-century “Hagenbeck revolution” in zoo architecture, which attempted to provide more naturalistic-appearing, open-air surroundings that were landscaped with artificial rocks and featured moats instead of bars, often creating tableaux of animals from different taxonomic * This article was made possible by the indefatigable Simone Forti, who talked with me, danced for me, and pulled all manner of documents and photographs out of her dresser drawers for me; thank you, Simone. -
International Indeterminacy George Maciunas and the Mail
ARTICLE internationaL indeterminaCy george maCiUnas and tHe maiL ColbY Chamberlain Post CHart “The main thing I wanted to talk about is the chart,” says Larry Miller.1 So begins George Maciunas’s last interview, in March 1978, two months before his death from pancreatic cancer. The video recording shows Maciunas supine on a couch, cocooned in a cardigan, noticeably weak. Miller speaks off camera, asking about “the chart,” otherwise known as Maciunas’s Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional, [sic] Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms, published in 1973. “Maybe I ought to describe the general construction,” Maciunas says.2 The chart tracks time as it moves downward, he explains. From left to right it registers what Maciunas calls “style,” with happenings at one extreme and Henry Flynt’s concept art at the other. “I chose style rather than location because the style is so unlocalised [sic], and mainly because of the travels of John Cage. So you could call the whole chart like ‘Travels of John Cage’ like you could say ‘Travels of St. Paul,’ you know?”3 According to Maciunas, Cage’s peripatetic concerts and 1 Larry Miller, “Transcript of the Videotaped Interview with George Maciunas, 24 March 1978,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), 183. 2 Miller, “Interview with George Maciunas,” 183. 3 Miller, “Interview with George Maciunas,” 183. © 2018 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00218 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/artm_a_00218 by guest on 23 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/artm_a_00218 by guest on23 September 2021 George Maciunas. -
Ray Johnson Drawings and Silhouettes, 1976-1990. RJE.FA02L.2012 RJE.01.2012 Finding Aid Prepared by Finding Aid Prepared by Julia Lipkins
Ray Johnson drawings and silhouettes, 1976-1990. RJE.FA02L.2012 RJE.01.2012 Finding aid prepared by Finding aid prepared by Julia Lipkins This finding aid was produced using the Archivists' Toolkit August 18, 2015 Describing Archives: A Content Standard Ray Johnson Estate January 2013 34 East 69th Street New York, NY, 10021 (212) 628-0700 [email protected] Ray Johnson drawings and silhouettes, 1976-1990. RJE.FA02L.2012 Table of Contents Summary Information ................................................................................................................................. 3 Biographical Note.......................................................................................................................................... 4 Scope and Contents Note.............................................................................................................................. 4 Administrative Information .........................................................................................................................5 Related Materials ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Controlled Access Headings..........................................................................................................................6 Bibliography...................................................................................................................................................7 Collection Inventory..................................................................................................................................... -
Judson Dance Theater: the Work Is Never Done
Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton reflect on Robert Ellis Dunn and Judith Dunn’s composition class YVONNE RAINER: My name is Yvonne Rainer. SIMONE FORTI: I’m Simone Forti. STEVE PAXTON: My name is Steve Paxton. I’m a dancer. RAINER: Choreographer. FORTI: Artist. RAINER: Writer. Filmmaker. FORTI: I’ve mainly worked with movement. PAXTON: I came from Arizona with my banjo on my knee about 1958. RAINER: I felt I’d come into dance pretty late, so I was in a hurry in 1960. I mean, absorbing everything, and that included ballet. It included Cunningham, it included Waring and Cage. PAXTON: The modern dance world was not homogeneous. I mean, it wasn’t all just one big thing. There were a lot of different aesthetics and dance approaches in it. FORTI: When Bob Dunn offered his composition class, it was like something solid to work with. RAINER: I enrolled in Robert Dunn’s composition class in the fall of 1960. At that point there were only five of us. And Bob rolled out these scores for John Cage’s Fontana Mix and started talking about ways that score might be adapted for choreographic purposes. FORTI: I remember the scores themselves, transferring into movement rather than sound. RAINER: I was looking for some other way to look at things. I mean, painters were defying all the rules already and Cage came along and introduced a whole new vocabulary of sounds and movements. PAXTON: Chance methods meant that instead of trying to imagine a new way to do something, you just set out using dice, coins to decide what part of the body to use or entrances and exits and length durations. -
PNZ 47 Digital Version
Poetry NZNEW ZEALAND 47 featuring the poetry of 1 Harry Ricketts comment by Jack Ross & Bill Sutton Poetry NZ Number 47, 2013 Two issues per year Editor: Alistair Paterson ONZM Submissions: Submit at any time with a stamped, self-addressed envelope (and an email address if available) to: Poetry NZ, 34B Methuen Road, Avondale, Auckland 0600, New Zealand or 1040 E. Paseo El Mirador, Palm Springs, CA 92262-4837, USA Please note that overseas submissions cannot be returned, and should include an email address for reply. Postal subscriptions: Poetry NZ, 37 Margot Street, Epsom, Auckland 1051, New Zealand or 1040 E. Paseo el Mirador, Palm Springs, CA 92262-4837, USA Postal subscription Rates: US Subscribers (by air) One year (2 issues) $30.00 $US24.00 Two years (4 issues) $55.00 $US45.00 Libraries: 1 year $32.00 $US25.00 Libraries: 2 years $60.00 $US46.00 Other countries One year (2 issues) $NZ36.00 Two years (4 issues) $NZ67.00 Online subscriptions: To take out a subscription go to www.poetrynz.net and click on ‘subscribe’. The online rates are listed on this site. When your subscription application is received it will be confi rmed by email, and your fi rst copy of the magazine will then be promptly posted out to you. 2 Poetry NZ 47 Alistair Paterson Editor Puriri Press & Brick Row Auckland, New Zealand Palm Springs, California, USA September 2013 3 ISSN 0114-5770 Copyright © 2013 Poetry NZ 37 Margot Street, Epsom, Auckland 1051, New Zealand All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. -
Ray Johnson and the Mail Art Scene in Eastern Europe*
Kunsttexte.de/ostblick 3/2014 - 1 Kornelia Röder Ray Johnson and the Mail Art Scene in Eastern Europe* Introduction The 1983 video Zone1, by the artist Jakobine Engel, The aim was to be quicker and smarter. Birger Jesch was recorded secretly in the underground station for example used envelopes normally carrying letters between East and West Berlin before the wall broke of condolence. Paweł Petasz sewed his letters in order down. ‘Zone’ was an insulting term for the Eastern to prevent them from being secretly opened by steam. Part of Germany, and this metaphorical expression Endré Tot and many others mailed their letters from gives an idea of the real situation with its lack of com- different cities and/or several times in the hope that munication and understanding during the time of one would arrive. the Cold War. Likewise, the dark tunnel with the light- ning spots could be read as a metaphor for the import- ance of creating an independent network of commu- nication and exchange between the two parts of the world and their different political systems. The artist Guillermo Deisler, who emigrated from Chile to East Germany in 1986, described the import- ance of the network of mail art, he called it a window to the world. The performance TRANS IDEEA by the artists Doru Tulcan and Iosif Kiraly from Timişoara (fig. 1) visualised the feeling of many people in the countries of Eastern Europe. These Romanian artists put themselves in a large envelope with stamps, postmark and recipient’s address. To understand the Fig. 1 Doru Tulcan and Iosif Kiraly, Timişoara,TRANS importance of the network it is necessary to IDEEA, Performance, October 1982. -
Judson Dance Theater: the Work Is Never Done
Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done The Museum of Modern Art, New York September 16, 2018-February 03, 2019 MoMA, 11w53, On View, 2nd Floor, Atrium MoMA, 11w53, On View, 2nd Floor, Contemporary Galleries Gallery 0: Atrium Complete Charles Atlas video installation checklist can be found in the brochure Posters CAROL SUMMERS Poster for Elaine Summers’ Fantastic Gardens 1964 Exhibition copy 24 × 36" (61 × 91.4 cm) Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, GIft of Elaine Summers Gallery 0: Atrium Posters Poster for an Evening of Dance 1963 Exhibition copy Yvonne Rainer Papers, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Gallery 0: Atrium Posters Poster for Concert of Dance #13, Judson Memorial Church, New York (November 19– 20, 1963) 1963 11 × 8 1/2" (28 × 21.6 cm) Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University Libraries Gallery 0: Atrium Posters Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done Gallery 0: Atrium Posters Poster for Concert of Dance #5, America on Wheels, Washington, DC (May 9, 1963) 1963 8 1/2 × 11" (21.6 × 28 cm) Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University Libraries Gallery 0: Atrium Posters Poster for Steve Paxton’s Afternoon (a forest concert), 101 Appletree Row, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey (October 6, 1963) 1963 8 1/2 × 11" (21.6 × 28 cm) Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University Libraries Gallery 0: Atrium Posters Flyer for -
Fluxus: the Is Gnificant Role of Female Artists Megan Butcher
Pace University DigitalCommons@Pace Honors College Theses Pforzheimer Honors College Summer 7-2018 Fluxus: The iS gnificant Role of Female Artists Megan Butcher Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses Part of the Contemporary Art Commons, and the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Butcher, Megan, "Fluxus: The iS gnificant Role of Female Artists" (2018). Honors College Theses. 178. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses/178 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Pforzheimer Honors College at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College Theses by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract The Fluxus movement of the 1960s and early 1970s laid the groundwork for future female artists and performance art as a medium. However, throughout my research, I have found that while there is evidence that female artists played an important role in this art movement, they were often not written about or credited for their contributions. Literature on the subject is also quite limited. Many books and journals only mention the more prominent female artists of Fluxus, leaving the lesser-known female artists difficult to research. The lack of scholarly discussion has led to the inaccurate documentation of the development of Fluxus art and how it influenced later movements. Additionally, the absence of research suggests that female artists’ work was less important and, consequently, keeps their efforts and achievements unknown. It can be demonstrated that works of art created by little-known female artists later influenced more prominent artists, but the original works have gone unacknowledged. -
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JUDSON Giampaolo Bianconi is Thomas J. Lax is Associate Julia Robinson is Associate In the early 1960s, an assembly of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and Curatorial Assistant in the Curator in the Department of Professor of Modern and filmmakers made use of a church in New York’s Greenwich Village to present Judson Dance Theater The Work Is Never Done Department of Media and Media and Performance Art Contemporary Art at New performances that redefined the kinds of movement that could be understood as Performance Art at MoMA. at MoMA. York University. She is the dance—performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston would declare the most editor of the October Files exciting in a generation. The group was Judson Dance Theater, its name borrowed Harry C. H. Choi is a Twelve- Victor “Viv” Liu was a volume John Cage (2011) from Judson Memorial Church, the socially engaged Protestant congregation Month Intern in the Department Seasonal Intern in the and the author of a forthcom- that hosted the dancers’ open workshops. The Judson artists emphasized new DANCE of Media and Performance Art Department of Media and ing book on George Brecht. compositional methods meant to strip dance of its theatrical conventions and fore- at MoMA. Performance Art at MoMA. Robinson is an active curator. grounded “ordinary” movements—gestures more likely to be seen on the street or at home. Although Judson Dance Theater would last only a few years, the artists affili- Vivian A. Crockett is the Jenny Harris is Curatorial Gloria Sutton is Associate ated with it, including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith 2017–18 Andrew W.