Backworks catalog

[Jon Hendricks and Barbara Moore]

Backworks? Catalog No. B / Performance : Photographs of a Decade 1959 - 69

New York City, USA: Backworks, 1977

[20] pp., 27.6 x 21.3 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

I recently watched the documentary It’s Never Over and was reminded that singer Jeff Buckley once dated Rebecca Moore, daughter of Barbara and Peter Moore. 

Barbara Moore is an art historian and "a seminal and innovative champion of artists working in alternative mediums” [David Platzker]. She’ll be familiar to readers here as the proprietor of Bound and Unbound, and Reflux Editions. Peter Moore was a photographer known for his documentation of avant-garde art, music, dance and theatre events in 1960’s New York. He captured many classic Fluxus moments, as well as Happenings and performances that took place at the Judson Memorial Church. 

Artist, activist and curator Jon Hendricks programmed the Judson Church basement gallery and performance series at the time. He and Barbara Moore formed Backworks in the mid-seventies, specializing in documents and artifacts of the avant-garde, experimental art, Fluxus, etc. 

The venture was ran out of 488 Greenwich street, the home that Jon and Joanne Hendricks bought in 1975 (his brother Geoffrey Hendricks lived next door, at 486, with a Lawrence Weiner work above his door). 

Their clients included Gilbert and Lila Silverman, who Hendricks introduced to Fluxus. In 1981 he left the partnership to work for them, helping to amass the most important collection of Fluxus publications anywhere (now housed in the library of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC). After this Hendricks moved on to become Yoko Ono’s curator and right-hand man. 

This is the second of - I believe - three catalogues that Backworks issued. It includes performance photographs of works by Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Robert Whitman, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Shiegeko Kubota, Otto Muehl, Günter Brus, Max Neuhaus, Milan Knizak and others. In addition to Moore, the photographs include Max Baker, Martha Holmes, Scott Hyde, George Maciunas, Robert McElroy, and Lawrence Shustak. 

Jeff Buckley and Rebecca Moore