Object, Action and Ephemera
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
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. -
Major Exhibition Poses Tough Questions and Reasserts Fluxus Attitude
Contact: Alyson Cluck 212/998-6782 or [email protected] Major Exhibition Poses Tough Questions And Reasserts Fluxus Attitude Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond open at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery on September 9, 2011 New York City (July 21, 2011)—On view from September 9 through December 3, 2011, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life features over 100 works dating primarily from the 1960s and ’70s by artists such as George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Ken Friedman, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and La Monte Young. Curated by art historian Jacquelynn Baas and organized by Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, the exhibition draws heavily on the Hood’s George Maciunas Memorial Collection, and includes art objects, documents, videos, event scores, and Fluxkits. Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life is accompanied by a second installation, Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond, in the Grey’s Lower Level Gallery. Fluxus—which began in the 1960s as an international network of artists, composers, and designers―resists categorization as an art movement, collective, or group. It also defies traditional geographical, chronological, and medium-based approaches. Instead, Fluxus participants employ a “do-it-yourself” attitude, relating their activities to everyday life and to viewers’ experiences, often blurring the boundaries between art and life. Offering a fresh look at Fluxus, the show and its installation are George Maciunas, Burglary Fluxkit, 1971. Hood designed to spark multiple interpretations, exploring Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection: Gift of the Friedman Family; the works’ relationships to key themes of human GM.986.80.164. -
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..................................................................................................................................... -
The Diagram Dematerialized, from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to George Brecht
The Diagram Dematerialized, from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to George Brecht Natilee Harren The event scores of American Fluxus artist George toire of Fluxus events. It appeared in the premiere Fluxus Brecht are minimal and enigmatic, meant to be interpreted concert in Wiesbaden, Germany, in September, 1962, and and enacted by a viewer according only to the limits of the remained on the program as it traveled to Copenhagen, Paris, imagination. Whether imperative or merely propositional, Düsseldorf, and Amsterdam.3 In Copenhagen, Higgins stood Brecht’s scores always position objects and actions in spa- atop a wooden ladder and poured water in a slight arc from tial and temporal relationships, and they are open and a small watering can into an aluminum tub on the ground. generative, embodying the potential for an immense range In Amsterdam, Maciunas held a clear bottle in one hand, of actions to take place in their wake. These qualities of releasing a slight stream into a shallow tin at his feet. Brecht the event score—the arrangement of spatial and temporal performed the piece himself at a concert of happenings in relationships, the call to the beholder’s imagination, and April, 1963, at Rutgers University, where he bent over half- its infinite potentiality—seem to belong to the order of the way to pour water from a curvaceous white pitcher into a diagram, and thus connect Brecht’s work to an entire history white teacup on the floor below (Figure 2). He made several of avant-garde engagements with a diagram model that we sculptures from the score, including a 1966 version in which are only beginning to recognize. -
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. -
Occupying Practices
366 ARCHITECTURE: MATERIAL AND IMAGINED Occupying Practices MARIE-PAULE MACDONALD, MRAIC University of Waterloo Rooms are frames of mind and apartment ads become western mainstream movement, pop art, where the "sell- today's poetry, which is my favorite reading. out"was seen as the first step in cultural production, after - Yoko Ono' which the consequences were explored. Recognition of Fluxus has provided relief from proble~natic"debased The nest or the web, the den or the hole are created by aspects of pop art: the marketable Warholian flatness, its the animal in the harness of its genes. Dwellings are not passivity towards issues of exploitation; and its adherence to such lairs for breeding: they are shaped by a culture. No a salodatelier system milnicking industrially produced work other art expresses as fully as dwelling that aspect of by assistant-crafted series, then credited to a single celebrity- human existence that is historical and cannot be re- author for signature status. duced to biological programs [...] citizens have lost the Rather than opposing any other movement, Fluxus pro- potency to imprint their lives on urban space. they use posed openness. While its dada-derived, anarchic character- or consume their "housing" [...I Most people today do istics initially made its reception confused, the tendency of not dwell in the place where they spend their days and the work now reads as politically and culturally democratic leave no traces in the place where they spend their and open. According to George Brecht, "... Fluxus encorn- nights. passes opposites. Consider opposing it, supporting it, ignor- - Ivan Illich2 ing it. -
From Modernism/Modernity, 11, No. 3 (2004): 282-87. Fluxier-Than-Thou
From Modernism/Modernity, 11, no. 3 (2004): 282-87. Fluxier-than-Thou: Review Essay Fluxus Experience. Hannah Higgins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 259. $29.95 (paper). Teddy Hultberg, Oyvind Fahlström on the Air—Manipulating the World. Stockholm: Sveriges Radios Förlag / Fylkingen, 1999. Bilingual text, Swedish and English. Pp. 337. 2 CDs: Birds in Sweden, The Holy Torsten Nilsson. SEK 400 ($52.00) cloth. Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University “Fluxus,” Dick Higgins has observed, “was not a movement; it has no stated consistent programme or manifesto which the work must match, and it did not propose to move art or our awareness of art from point A to point B. The very name, Fluxus, suggests change, being in a state of flux. The idea was that it would always reflect the most exciting avant-garde tendencies of a given time or moment—the Fluxattitude.”1 Hannah Higgins, the daughter of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, both of them foundational Fluxus intermedia artists, agrees. Again and again, in Fluxus Experience, she insists that Fluxus was not, as is usually thought, an inconoclastic avant- garde movement but a way of life, a “fertile field for multiple intelligence interactions” (193) that has strong pedagogical potential. In keeping with her father’s theory of intermedia (see Figure 33), Hannah Higgins uses a Deweyite approach to map possible intersections between Fluxus and other disciplines so as to “allow for a sort of cognitive cross-training through exploratory creativity” (193). Within our existing university structure, a potential Fluxus program “would by definition be unspecialized . -
Oral History Interview with Alison Knowles
Oral history interview with Alison Knowles This interview is part of the Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project, funded by the A G Foundation. Archives of American Art 750 9th Street, NW Victor Building, Suite 2200 Washington, D.C. 20001 https://www.aaa.si.edu/services/questions https://www.aaa.si.edu/ Table of Contents Collection Overview ........................................................................................................ 1 Administrative Information .............................................................................................. 1 General............................................................................................................................. 2 Scope and Contents........................................................................................................ 1 Scope and Contents........................................................................................................ 1 Scope and Contents........................................................................................................ 2 Biographical / Historical.................................................................................................... 1 Names and Subjects ...................................................................................................... 2 Container Listing ...................................................................................................... Oral history interview with Alison Knowles AAA.knowle10 Collection Overview Repository: -
Projetos Editoriais Que Testam Os Limites Da Publicação
UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE BELAS-ARTES FACULDADE DE ARQUITETURA Projetos Editoriais que testam os limites da Publicação Bárbara Forte Fernandes Gonçalves Teixeira Dissertação Mestrado em Práticas Tipográficas e Editoriais Contemporâneas Dissertação orientada pela Professora Doutora Sofia Leal Rodrigues 2019 I DECLARAÇÃO DE AUTORIA Eu, Bárbara Forte Fernandes Gonçalves Teixeira, declaro que a presente dissertação de mestrado intitulada “Projetos Editoriais que testam os limites da Edição”, é o resultado da minha investigação pessoal e independente. O conteúdo é original e todas as fontes consultadas estão devidamente mencionadas na bibliografia ou outras listagens de fontes documentais, tal como todas as citações diretas ou indiretas têm devida indicação ao longo do trabalho segundo as normas académicas. O Candidato Lisboa, 22 de Outubro de 2019 II RESUMO O livro enquanto veículo de expressão artística tem vindo a ser explorado desde a génese das práticas editoriais. O design, a música, o teatro, a literatura, o cinema, entre outras formas de manifestação criativa, são ingredientes do bolo que constituí a book art e a publicação independente, cuja expressividade é diretamente influenciada pela mistura rica de áreas e técnicas participantes. É necessário conhecer particularidades do trabalho percursor neste âmbito, para que se assimile e compreenda o papel disruptivo do artist’s book. As formas comunicação gráfica primevas (são exemplo as pinturas rupestres), despoletaram espontaneamente, cumprindo as necessidades do ser humano pré-histórico. Com o avançar dos anos, e à medida que a linguagem se desenvolvia cada vez mais complexa, os suportes de inscrição de matéria foram também aperfeiçoados. As culturas chinesa e egípcia possibilitaram a descoberta e refinamento do papel, ao aplicarem as fibras de bambu e papiro, respetivamente, num processo de fabricação de “folhas”. -
Mail ART Exhlbltlons O COMPETITIONS
MAiL ART EXHlBltlONS O COMPETITIONS NEWS Kay Thomas, artist-in-residence, at Ross Elementary school designing the stamps for the united ~ations,Hundert- in Odessa, Texas has reported to Umbrella that there is a wasser said he tried to capture the spirit of the decla- children's Learning Disabled Class at the Elementary School ration, which was in 1948. where she works, and they have had their first exposure to Hundertwasser's vivid designs describe a series Mail Art, and they love it. Their teacher, Mrs. Hanes, is rights and freedoms that he believes are essential for quite enthusiastic and plans to give the kids one period a man's salvation. "A postage stamp is an important week to make Mail Art. So, Mail Art Network, send mail matter. Though it is very small and tiny in size, it art to Mrs. Hanes' Class, Ross Elementary School, P.O. Box bears a decisive message. stamps are the 3912, Odessa, TX 79761, and know that you are connec- measure to the cultural standing of a country.The ting children who really need encouragement-and you tiny square connects the hearts of the sender and won't believe how refreshing their mail art is! the receiver, reducing the distances. It is a bridge between people and countries. The postage stamp Guy Bleus is organizing the European Cavellini Festival passes all frontiers. It reaches men in. prisons, asy- for 1984 in Brussels. 1) Cavellini will be appointed or nomi- lums and hospitals." =hey can be purchased and nated the First President of the United States of Europe; used only in New York, Geneva and Vienna. -
"The Line Between the Happening and Daily Life Should Be Kept As Fluid, and Perhaps Indistinct, As Possible."
"The line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible." Synopsis What began as a challenge to the category of "art" initiated by the Futurists and Dadaists in the 1910s and 1920s came to fruition with the performance art movements, one branch of which was referred to as Happenings. Happenings involved more than the detached observation of the viewer; the artist engaged with Happenings required the viewer to actively participate in each piece. There was not a definite or consistent style for Happenings, as they greatly varied in size and intricacy. However, all artists staging Happenings operated with the fundamental belief that art could be brought into the realm of everyday life. This turn toward performance was a reaction against the long- standing dominance of the technical aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and was a new art form that grew out of the social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s. © The Art Story Foundation – All rights Reserved For more movements, artists and ideas on Modern Art visit www.TheArtStory.org Key Ideas A main component of Happenings was the involvement of the viewer. Each instance a Happening occurred the viewer was used to add in an element of chance so, every time a piece was performed or exhibited it would never be the same as the previous time. Unlike preceding works of art which were, by definition, static, Happenings could evolve and provide a unique encounter for each individual who partook of the experience. The concept of the ephemeral was important to Happenings, as the performance was a temporary experience, and, as such could not be exhibited in a museum in the traditional sense. -
In the Mid-1950S Artist Ray Johnson
In the mid-1950s artist Ray Johnson (1927-95) began to send collages, messages, and found and altered objects to a growing base of artists and friends, asking that they continue to expand this networked correspondence through the mail sys- tem, initiating what in the 1960s would be named the New York Correspondance School [sic]. Perhaps Johnson intended the name as a pun on the New York School, another name for the Abstract Expressionist movement based in New York, which had dominated the avant-garde since the late 1940s. Intentionally disconnected from traditional systems of art production and consumption, Johnson and other mail artists set their work within the present tense of social reality. "Mail Art," Johnson claimed, "has no history, only a present."1 Ray Johnson's work-collages, correspondence art, and performance events- remains mysterious and a bit hard to pin down. As a young artist, he studied at Black Mountain College, the progressive arts school in North Carolina founded in 1933. Johnson's early paintings nod to the Bauhaus heritage of his teacher Josef Albers. But soon after he settled in New York City in 1949, Johnson abandoned geometric abstraction and started making small collages. He moved in a new direction, toward chance-based expressions and explorations, more in line with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, whom he first encountered at Black Mountain, and their circle of friends in New York, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Cy Twombly. Johnson's collage approach was diaristic, a stream-of-consciousness flow through the matter and memory of his everyday life and surroundings, shifting from one topic to another, across all variety of things.