Monday, July 7, 2025

SMS

















William N. Copley was an American painter, gallerist, collector, publisher and philanthropist, born on January 24, 1919. The adopted son of a newspaper magnate, Copley studied at Yale University before being drafted into the Second World War.

In 1946, his brother-in-law John Ployardt, a Canadian-born animator and narrator, introduced him to painting and Surrealism. After a night of drinking, the two decided to open a gallery and, “in the white haze of the morning after” were both “too proud to perish the thought.”

Copley sold his house, Ployardt quit his job at Disney, and they rented a bungalow at 257 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills (now a parking lot). A brass plaque inscribed “Copley Galleries” was produced, at a cost of $250. A pet capuchin monkey was bought to serve as a gallery mascot. When it escaped it was replaced with a cockatiel. “The bird was sweet and tame, and bird shit was easier to deal with than monkey shit,” Copley noted.

He convinced a number of artists to present their work at Copley Galleries, including René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Joseph Cornell (his first ever gallery exhibition), Man Ray, Roberto Matta and Max Ernst. Despite the stellar line-up, sales were poor, as Los Angeles audiences had not yet warmed to Surrealism the way they had in New York. “I think I sold two pictures. I was trying to sell Cornell for $200. Just couldn't do it. So I went out of business,” Copley told Paul Cummings, in 1968.

Copley’s failure as a salesman led to his success as a collector. Having guaranteed the artists that at least ten per cent of the exhibition would sell, Copley found himself buying a number of the works for himself. For example, he purchased Man Ray’s Observatory Time: The Lovers from 1936, for $500. The eight-by-three-foot painting of red lips floating above the landscape has subsequently been called “the quintessential Surrealist painting.”

After the gallery closed, he remained friends with many of the artists, and became particularly close with Marcel Duchamp, who he was introduced to by Man Ray. “It was Duchamp and Max Ernst who really encouraged me to continue painting,” he recounted.

In 1949, Copley left his wife and children and relocated to Paris, to pursue painting full-time. He held his first solo exhibition in 1951, at age 32. National and international solo and group exhibitions followed, including a solo turn at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and contributions to Documenta 5 and 7.

With his second wife, Norma Rathner, he developed the William and Norma Copley Foundation, with further money he inherited after the death of his father. The organization, of which Duchamp was a board member, offered small grants to artists and musicians. When Duchamp died in 1968, the Foundation donated his final work, L’Etant Donnes, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it remains today.

Copley eventually amassed one of the world's most highly regarded collections of Surrealist art, which was sold at auction in 1979. The Man Ray work purchased for $500 fetched $750,000, and the entire lot sold for $6.7 million, a record at the time, for single owner’s collection in the United States.

In the mid-sixties, Copley befriended the Surrealist and Dada painter Dmitri Petrov, then-based in Philadelphia. The pair decided to publish mail-order portfolios of work by contemporary artists out of a New York City Upper West Side loft. Inspired by Fluxus and notions of 'blurring the boundaries between art and life', they were determined to produce high-quality serial artworks which could bypass the museum and gallery system and reach buyers directly.

The plan was to produce a folder, designed by an artist, bi-monthly, which would contain works by several other artists, offered by subscription. Every artist received the same payment - $100 per submission.

Began at a time of much political unrest, the title S.M.S. (unfortunately) stands for ‘Shit Must Stop’, though mostly as an inside joke. Their publishing name, the considerably more distinguished sounding ‘The Letter Edged in Black Press Incorporated’, came from the suggestion of a lawyer. It is presumably a reference to the Country/Folk song of the same name, which has been recorded by Slim Whitman, Chet Atkins, Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash and others.

The loft production studio was reportedly lavish. It featured an open bar, a full buffet regularly replenished by the nearby Zabar's Delicatessen, and a pay-phone with complimentary dimes, housed in a cigar box. The place became a hotbed of activity. “On a given day, you never knew who would show up,” remembers Lew Syken, the project's chief designer.

The place was often packed with students, tasked with some of the more laborious production concerns, such as opening 8,000 letters sent to Copley from H.C. Westermann for portfolio No. 3, or to burn 2,000 of Lil Picard's bowties for the following issue. Copley occupied an office in the third floor loft with a view of West 80th Street and Broadway, and Petrov handled the day-to-day, often round-the-clock production schedule.

While the high-cost of producing the often intricate and elaborate works led to the closing of S.M.S. after a year, the six portfolios they produced rank among the most important Artists’-Multiples-as-Periodicals ever produced.

The portfolios included works by artists both well-renowned and obscure, including Arman, Enrico Baj, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Christo, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, John Giorno, Richard Hamilton, Dick Higgins, Roy Lichtenstein, Lee Lozano, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Terry Riley, Dieter Roth, Robert Watts, Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young, and others.

The covers were designed by Marcel Duchamp, Irving Petlin, John Battan, Robert Stanley, Richard Artschwager, and (possibly as a nod to Copley’s previous gallery mascot) Congo the Chimpanzee. The famous painting chimp was also included in the Fluxus Year Box 1, an early influence on S.M.S.

Roy Lichtenstein contributed a folded paper hat. Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece for John was a broken tea cup to be repaired with the supplied glue and three-stanza poem. Deiter Roth contributed a chocolate bar. Other formats included decals, folders, index cards, cut-outs, accordion folds, acetates, pill capsules, games, records, photo albums, and penakistiscope.

Although he only contributed one work to the series (a fascinating folder called The Barber's Shop), Copley presumably viewed the project as an extension of his work as an artist, personally signing each issue ‘CPLY’ (pronounced 'see ply', this was the name with which he signed his own paintings).

In total, 73 original multiples were produced for the 6 portfolios. 2000 copies of each were produced, and reportedly 1500 distributed. In 1981, Copley donated the remaining 500 sets of SMS to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. These were presumably stored and forgotten, until a flood hit, destroying many of them.

In 1998, in collaboration with Reinhold-Brown gallery, the New Museum offered complete sets of the periodical for the first time in almost two decades. They included the original mailing case, as well as two works that were produced in 1968 but never distributed: boxed audio cassettes by minimalists Terry Riley and La Monte Young. Collectors could also elect to have the portfolios housed in new custom-made plexiglass slipcases.

Most of the information about SMS comes from a slim, 16-page black and white catalogue produced at the time, including some of the oft-told legends recounted above. S.M.S. is worthy of it's own monograph, but very little has been published about the project. It's completely omitted in Phil Aarons' In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 and receives only brief mention in Gwen Allen's Artists' Magazines. Conversely, the similar Aspen Magazine gets a full chapter in Allen's book.

Aspen preceded S.M.S. by a couple of years, but didn't fully break away from the standard magazine format: Aspen commissioned writers to write about art, and included advertisements. Their format was less conventional than SMS (there was no standard size or approach for their box or folder) but the quality was also less consistent. The strength of the individual issues rested on the quality of the guest editors, who included Andy Warhol, Marshal McLuhan, Brian O’Doherty, Jon Hendricks, Dan Graham and Angus MacLise. While these issues are incredibly strong, the contents of the first and final Aspen hold little interest in terms of contemporary artists’ books, and multiples. (For more information on Aspen, see previous posts, here).

Copley's wealth meant that he could avoid the need for advertising (which itself proved tricky for Aspen, whose later issues did away with them altogether), but the decision not to publish art criticism in an art magazine speaks volumes as to Copley’s vision of what a periodical could be.


"S.M.S. That was what we called the magazine. It was The Letter Edged in Black Press Incorporated. And the S.M.S. really had no particular meaning except between the two of us, which was supposed to mean Shit Must Stop. It was a terribly foolhardy venture. I was between marriages and unable to paint, and looking for something to do. And I enjoyed it. The worst thing I feel about it is that I lost a good job. Because I liked it and I liked doing it.”
- William Copley


Sunday, July 6, 2025

Pencils


















Pencils by Micah Lexier, Roula Partheniou, Jem Maegan, Van Maltese, Kelly Mark, Yoko Ono, Colter Jacobsen, Image Bank, David Shrigley, Jenny Holzer and Buzz Spector. 







Saturday, July 5, 2025

Erwin Heerich












Erwin Heerich
Heerich
Mönchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1967
21 x 17 cm.
Edition of 330 numbered copies


Following Joseph Beuys, this is the second in the series of influential boxed catalogues published by the Städtisches Museum, from 1967 to 1978. 

The printed cardboard box contains an 8-page folded checklist, 20 loose cards printed on both sides with photographs of sculptures, drawings and German text by Johannes Cladders, and a printed graph paper sheet. It was created to accompany an exhibition that ran from the 18th of November to the 31st of December, 1967. It originally sold for 10 DM. 



Friday, July 4, 2025

Christian Marclay | Fourth of July










Christian Marclay
Fourth of July 
New York City, USA: Paula Cooper Gallery, 2010
128 pp., 10 x 7”, softcover
Edition of 1000


Recalling the destructive gestures of Guitar Drag, Footsteps or Record Without A Cover, this artist book features photographs that Marclay took on July 4th, 2005. They were subsequently produced as eight large prints, and torn into forty pieces.  

The images of the marching band at the Independence Day parade in Hyde Park, New York become chaotic fragments of sound, detached from the performers. 

Fourth of July is printed in uncut French folds that the reader must tear open to read. 






Thursday, July 3, 2025

Elisabetta Benassi | All I Remember











Elisabetta Benassi
All I Remember 
Rome, Italy: NERO, 2011 
478 pp., 16.5 x 21.5 cm, hardcover
Edition of 1000


Sometimes having the central information of an image denied to the viewer allows us to better understand it, or contemplate it anew. 

All I remember is a collection of four hundred and seventy-seven photographs that Elisabetta Benassi found in the archives of daily newspapers around Italy and the United States, between the years 2008 and 2011. She collected what she considers to be the most significant photos of the 20th century.

Each page of All I remember corresponds to a single photograph, from a collection of approximately 70,000 images dating from the 1920s to the early 1990s. The dates are not arbitrary. They correspond with the introduction of the 35mm Leica camera in 1925, and the first flash bulbs shortly afterwards, which led to the "Golden Age of Photojournalism”. By the 1990’s, digital photography made such archives unnecessary. 

The origins of the work date back to a time the artist visited the “Pommidoro” in Rome, where a an uncashed cheque from November 1, 1975 is framed on the restaurant wall. It is signed by one of Italy’s most celebrated and controversial filmmakers, Pier Paolo Pasolini. 

The next day he was brutally murdered at a beach in Ostia. Pasolini's body was almost unrecognizable, after being savagely beaten and run over several times with his own car. Multiple bones were broken and a metal bar had been used to crush his testicles. After his death, his body had been burned with gasoline. 

Benassi made work about Pasolini over a decade prior to this project, from videos where she interacts with a look-alike, to a replica of the car that ran him over. 

A photo of the car is included in All I Remember, taken on November 2, 1975 by the Associated Press. 

But Benassi’s book only features the backs of these photographs, so we do not see the violent image, merely read it’s typewritten caption on the verso: 

[Rome, 2 Nov. (AP) The car owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which Giuseppe Pelosi was stopped. A non-commissioned officer examines Pasolini’s jacket, which was found inside the car.]

The filmmaker’s name and the name of the man who spent nine years in prison for his murder (and recanted his confession almost thirty years later) are circled in felt-tip pen. 

Other photographs documented upside down feature similar handwritten and typed notes, name, dates, rubber stamps, stickers, newspaper clippings and sometimes other photographs. The detritus of now obsolete filing systems. 

Benassi uses the archive for a different kind of archeology, and together these images form an alternative portrait of the 20th century, where images of historical importance are coupled with those from news stories that came and went.  

"It's a collection of events and non-events in history, rather than the images we are addicted to, evoked by the signs that the reverse of those images traced over time, their use and reuse,” Benassi told Fabio Pariante of Frontrunner magazine. "Reversing history, forcing the links to show its hidden plot, looking at things a second time and reversing this gaze of mine also to the beholder: this interests me.”

These ‘images without images’ recall Christian Marclay’s White Noise (1983, see below) and Leah Singer’s silhouette imagery from discarded rubyliths she collected while archiving the photographic collection at the New York Daily News (below, centre). 

Photographs of Hitler admiring a prototype of the Volkswagen Beetle (a car that was partly his idea) and Ku Klux Klan demonstrations bring to mind a troubling exhibition curated by Kim Simon for TPW many years ago, in which lynching photographs had literally been whitewashed. With the hanging victims reduced to a white outline and the horror diminished, the images invite us to look closer at the gathered crowd - hateful expressions, smiling children and picnicking families in their Sunday best. 

The best, and ultimately most honest, histories tend to trouble the timeline, allowing fact and fiction to intermingle. Errors are uncorrected and alternate histories emerge. Books and films are discussed that were never released, or released under different titles. 

Benassi’s work takes its title from an unpublished Gertrude Stein novel. The back of the photograph of the author may be the only time it is referred to. Web searches for “Gertrude Stein” + “All I remember” returned zero results. 

The picture [which I assume is the one I found below, bottom] is captioned as follows:

“Gertrude Stein left), noted writer, sits with Justin Rey, Mayor of the village where her chateau is situated. Miss Stein remained at her chateau during the four years of German occupation of France. She has just completed a new book, dealing with the human race, entitled “All I Remember”. 


All I remember is available from the publisher, here, for the discounted price of €42.50 (from€50.00). 
 










Wednesday, July 2, 2025

The Getting Into the Spirits Cocktail Book from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion











General Idea
The Getting Into the Spirits Cocktail Book from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion
Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1980
64 pp., 4.5 x 10.7 cm., hardcover
Edition of 900 signed, numbered and rubber stamped copies


"The Cocktail Book is a souvenir of the Colour Bar Lounge of the 1984 Pavillion, General Idea’s mythological edifice: “ we think of the Colour Bar Lounge as a sort of cultural laboratory where we can experiment with new cultural mixes and serve them up to you, our friends...an establishment dedicated to the eradication of abstract expressionism and the encouragement of artful research. Although the mass media, like a vast pharmaceutical complex, continue to develop new cultural elixirs of an unprecedented intoxication and manufacture them in consumable form, art remains a curious and elitist drink. Despite its unique flavour and heady cultural properties it has never been effectively injected into the mainstream. Now General Idea is taking the necessary risks to isolate this potent mixture and introduce the infectious mutations into your home. These cocktails are the medium in which a culture is grown and introduced to the host...and everyone is a host at the Colour Bar Lounge!”
— General Idea