Künstlerpost: George Brecht

George Brecht
Land Mass Translocation Project. Pilot Project: Isle of Wight. 
Cologne, Germany: Edition Galerie art intermedia, 1969
32.5 x 23.3 cm
Edition of 120 signed and numbered copies

Brecht's contribution to Künstlerpost is a cardboard map of the Azores and the Southern tip of England and a letter housed in a plastic sleeve printed "To Whom It May Concern."

Brecht developed the Land Mass Translocation Project after relocating from America to England in 1968. The premise is based on a geological forecast predictions that the southern part of Great Britain would sink to well below sea level within the next 1500 years. With this in mind, the artist founded “Brecht & MacDiarmid Research Associates”, to study the "geophysical, economic, social and other aspects of such an arrangement."

One possibility was the wedding of Miami and Havana, which would see Cuba moving northwards to kiss Florida, after a decade of Cold War friction.

This item is sometimes credited to the MacDiarmid Research Associates and is the only edition of the eight Künstlerpost works to signed out of 120, so it sometimes assumed that this work was produced earlier, and included in Künstlerpost after the fact. There are said to be twenty artists proofs of the Beuys edition (see below) so it's possible that all of the works were produced with 120 copies but most were numbered out of 100 and Brecht simply forgo the notion of the artist proof and signed his out of 120.