George Brecht | Book

George Brecht
Book
Cologne, Germany: Michael Werner, 1972
[28 pp.], 31 x 22 cm., hardcover
Edition of 50 numbered copies

I’ve always considered George Brecht to be one of the most significant and influential Fluxus artists, but weeks went by after his death before an obituary appeared. Posthumous retrospectives have been few and far between, and only a couple of monographs have been published about his work. 

Robin Page described him as the only artist who could walk without leaving footprints. 

Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Ken Friedman, Geoffrey Hendricks, Larry Miller and other Fluxus artists I have spoken with/interviewed all held him in the highest regard and considered him the originator of the  “Event Score”, something quintessential to both performance and publications within Fluxus. 

When I taught I would regularly show students a few examples from his brilliant Wateryam box and announce “We’ll look into this more in a future class”, and then never did. It was almost as if I needed to keep it mysterious, unresolved. Not to them, to myself. 

I have folders of images of every iteration of the work, which could become a week’s worth of content here, but haven’t gotten around to posting them yet. Even now, five paragraphs in, I have to fight the urge not to (re!)save this as draft and return to it later. 

Brecht was a scientist before becoming an artist, he attended John Cage’s legendary classes, and his work predates and anticipates “Conceptual Art”, yet it tends to hit at an intuitive level, rather than intellectual one.

When asked to distinguish Fluxus from Pop Art, he described how Lichtenstein would take a newspaper cartoon and blow it up a hundred times and paint it on an enormous canvas. He said he would be more inclined to fold the cartoon and keep it in his pocket. 

Book was conceived in 1964, but not published until 1972, after Brecht relocated to Cologne. It’s an almost blank, tautological object. 

 

The clothbound cover boldly proclaims THIS IS THE COVER OF THE BOOK in debossed uppercase letters (leading many to mistake this as the book’s title). Inside, a further eighteen descriptions of the format of the book become the project’s sole content:

THIS IS THE TITLE PAGE

THIS IS THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TITLE PAGE, THAT GIVES YOU INFORMATION LIKE WHO PUBLISHED IT AND WHEN

THIS IS THE FIRST PAGE OF THE BOOK

THESE ARE THE END PAGES OF THE BOOK

It’s a mostly sober self-narration, but occasionally some playfulness appears, such as THIS IS THE PAGE THAT RUSTLES WHEN YOU TURN IT (MAYBE) or a description that plays with tense: 

THIS IS THE PAGE BEFORE THE TITLE PAGE OF THE BOOK THAT TELLS YOU WHAT THE TITLE IS OR WAS, OR IS GOING TO BE. 

It brings to mind a book I was made to buy when first hired to work for an antiquarian bookseller, to ensure the listings I wrote would be accurate: John Carter's ABC For Book Collectors. It’s essentially a glossary of industry terms - the bibliophile’s dictionary - with entries for things like conjugate leaves, endpapers, half-title, recto-verso, etc.

I expected it to be a dull, dry read, but it was actually pretty spirited. Sample entry: 

ELSE FINE

A favourite phrase with the never-say-die type of cataloguer: used in

such contexts as ‘somewhat wormed and age-stained, piece torn from

title, headlines cut into, joints repaired, new lettering-piece, else fine’.

‘Second impression, else fine’, noted by Carter, is an extreme case.

Book was re-issued in 2017 in a decidedly more affordable format, but can’t compete with the presence of the original. There have been many other titles, before and since, that tackle this same territory, but Book remains a gold standard in simplicity and presentation. 

"In 1972, Brecht went to Cologne and exhibited at documenta 5 in Kassel. During this period, he published his “blank book” BOOK, which directly references the concepts of Zen. In an attempt to bring a blind spot of object perception into focus, Brecht presented the object of the physical book and its elements, such as cover, endpapers, individual pages and colophon, with his written comments." 

- Ulrike Pennewitz