Liquid Liquid | Optima

Liquid Liquid 

Optimo

San Francisco, USA: Superior Viaduct, 2015

12” EP, 45 rpm

Edition size unknown

The third and final EP by Liquid Liquid with Richard McGuire was released in 1983, by the label 99 Records, whose small but mighty roster of artists included Glenn Branca, Bush Tetras, ESG, Congo, and Vivien Goldman (though they famously passed on signing Sonic Youth). 

Despite selling upwards of 30,000 copies when it was released, Optima was fetching as much as three hundred dollars on Discogs, so this 2015 reissue by Superior Viaduct1 was warmly received by record collectors, and soon became out-of-print itself. 

The dance-punk classic features only four songs, with one of them being the band’s most widely recognized song, or at least most widely recognized bass line. 

Grandmaster Melle Mel used Richard McGuire’s infectious bass part from Liquid Liquid's “Cavern” to drive his anti-drug anthem "White Lines (Don't Do It)”. The song was released a few months after “Cavern”, and quickly overshadowed it. 

I always assumed it was a sample, but the Sugarhill Records house band performed a cover of the Liquid Liquid track, which formed the basis of “White Lines”. 

Bass Player Doug Wimbish told Bass Guitar Magazine in 2009 that “A lot of Sugar Hill records that we recorded were clichéd riffs that DJs would spin in the club. We would record those riffs, and that particular song, the main part was by a band called Liquid Liquid.”

Stylus Magazine ranked "Cavern" #49 on its list of the "Top Basslines of All Time”. Guitar World ranked it at #32.2

99 Records sued Sugar Hill for copyright infringement - not just the recognizable bass line, but other rhythmic and melodic elements were used. Even some vocal phrasing and lyrics from “Cavern” appeared in “White Lines”. 

McGuire recalls label founder Ed Bahlman being asked by Sugar Hill to “take a ride” to sort out the publishing dispute. Bahlman reportedly feared for his life, and - after being told “We know where you live” - moved back home with his parents. Some of the (possibly apocryphal and certainly impossible to corroborate) scare tactic stories involve bricks through the company’s store windows and customers frightened by machete-wielding lunatics. 

Sugar Hill was ordered to pay $660,000 but instead declared bankruptcy. Bahlman shut down 99 Records, because of the case's legal costs, which apparently were around $60,000 (or $181,787.87 accounting for inflation). 

McGuire left the band to pursue his burgeoning visual arts career. 

In addition to performing the class bass line, he also designed the cover artwork for Optima (as he had for the previous EPs). He hoped to capture the songs' rhythms, which he described as "like standing in the middle of four tornados all swirling around”. The band’s name is spelled out in stacked letters, beside the doubled word on a vertical baseline. McGuire wanted it to be readable in two directions so "that you had to move it to read it." 

In 2017, Pitchfork awarded the EP (which clocks in at under fourteen minutes) a rare 10/10 score. The other two records that preceded it were rated 9.1 and 9.2

1. The Superior Viaduct label has reissued classic rarities from many artists and musicians relevant here, including: Suicide, David Cunningham, Gavin Bryars, William S Burroughs, Tony Conrad, Pascal Comelade, The Residents, Sun Ra, Steve Reich’s Four Organs, Jean Dubuffet, Laraaji, and Fluxus artists Yoshi Wada, Henry Flynt, Takehisa Kosugi, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. 

2. It’s rare a song would be recognizable to the average music listener by a bar or two of its bass part. Only a few immediately come to mind: "Walk on the Wild Side" by Lou Reed, "Cannonball "by the Breeders, "Come Together" by the Beatles, "Stand by Me" by Ben E. King, and "Under Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen (another bass hook made more famous through Hip-Hop appropriation). 

"The big beat becomes itself on their third EP, Optimo, recorded at Radio City Music Hall Studios. (This was not as spacious as the name suggests.) Of the four immaculate songs, one secured Liquid Liquid a permanent place in the pop songbook. “Cavern” is rooted to McGuire toggling between the notes A and C on his bass, playing the kind of hitched, self-fading line that no trained player would ever be able to write. It is as much the sound of being unable to play as it is some kind of clever phrasing. It is beyond clever when paired with the drumming, percussion, and vocals. “Cavern” is always there, already rotating and coming at you from behind the sun and under the earth."

- Sasha Frere-Jones, Pitchfork 

The Flue Volume 1, Number 5

[Franklin Furnace]

The Flue Volume 1, Number 5

New York City, USA: Franklin Furnace, 1981

8 pp., 43 x 29 cm., newspaper

Edition size unknown

Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in 1976, to serve artists working in marginalized media such as publishing and performance, which could be vulnerable to "institutional neglect, cultural bias, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content."

Four years in, the Artist Run Centre began publishing a periodical called The Flue. Conceived by artist and printer Conrad Gleber, The Flue published sixteen issues between 1980 and 1989, which varied in format, including tabloids, posters, and newsletters. 

The publication served as a vehicle for promotion, political advocacy1, and helping to fulfill the mandate  of the organization, with articles on Artists’ Books, Performance Art, and Video works. It featured contributions by Jon Hendricks, Barbara Moore, Clive Philpot, Louise Lawler, Pauline Oliveros, and many others. 

A variety of artists were invited to serve as editors and designers, including Barbara Kruger, Linda Montano, Sherrie Levine, Carla Liss, and Buzz Spector. Richard McGuire served as both for this fifth issue2, which featured Laurie Anderson on the cover, promoting a concert she gave in celebration of Franklin Furnace’s fifth anniversary. 

The issue also features Diana Augaitis’ “Eastern European Bookworks,” "Sound Works 2" by Peter Frank (see last week's post, here) and descriptions of installations and performances by Al Aguilar, Sydney Blum & Janet Henry, Ronny H. Cohen, James Coleman, Toby MacLennan, Sandra McKee, Carol Meine, and Sandy Moore.

Copies of the periodical are now extremely rare. This issue can be bought for $175 US, here, or downloaded as a free PDF from Primary Information, here. As part of their ongoing efforts to make rare, archival material available, the publisher has collaborated with Franklin Furnace to digitize and disturb all sixteen issues. 

1. In her editorial, Martha Wilson notes "As I am writing this, President Reagan is dealing a heavy blow to arts funding for organizations which present avant-garde art. Below you will see my letter to the New York Times and a reply from a citizen who doesn’t realize that less than a dollar a year of tax payer’s money is devoted to the arts in America." 

2. Wilson remained as Editor-in-Chief and McGuire shared editorial duties with Lucy Evanicki. 

Imposter Parents

First four pictures:  

With My Family (1973) by Hans Eijkelboom. The artist would watch for fathers to leave for work, then knock on the doors of their families and ask them to pose with him sitting in as the replacement patriarch. 

 

Second four pictures: 

Front (2005-2007) by Trish Morrissey. A similar approach to Eijkelboom’s, Morrissey traveled to beaches in the UK and Australia and would approach families who had set up temporary encampments. She would ask to join the group, replacing the mother, who she would ask to switch places with and become the photographer. "These highly performative photographs are shaped by chance encounters with strangers, and by what happens when physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. Ideas around the mythological creature the ‘shape shifter’ and the cuckoo are evoked,” she has written. "Each piece within the series is titled by the name of the woman who I replaced within the group."

Final image: 

Republican Derrick Anderson running for office in Virginia, posing as a happy family man to pick up the traditional values voters. The woman and children in the picture are not his family, but instead the family of a lifelong friend (mysteriously missing from the portrait). 

Anderson is childless, living alone with his pet (much to the dismay of J.D. Vance, one has to assume). 

Andreas Slominski | Eimer Wasser

Andreas Slominski

Eimer Wasser

Berlin, Germany: Deutsche Guggenheim, 1998

Various dimensions

Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies

The remnants of a performance which is presumably documented on the accompanying VHS cassette. Reportedly, Slominski placed the empty bucket between the books and shelves of the Deutsche Guggenheim gift shop. He then commissioned a plumber to install a water pipe to move water from the nearby toilet to flow into the bucket. Once complete, the pipe was removed again and the hole in the wall bricked up. The only remaining trace of the action was the full bucket of water. 

The edition consists of a plastic bucket, video cassette, tap, and copper pipes, and is signed with the artist's fingerprint on an enclosed certificate.

Yoko Ono | Yes Box

[Yoko Ono]

Yes Box

Lund, Sweden: Bakhall Printers & Publishers, 2004

14.5 x 13 x 1.5 cm

Edition size unknown

Yes Box - now twenty years old - is a white clamshell cardboard box containing two audio CDs, A Hole To See the Sky Through postcard, and a 32 page booklet, functioning as a catalogue of the travelling show Yes Yoko Ono. 

The exhibition was first presented by the Japan Society in New York City from October 2000 to January 2001, and then traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto the following year. 

The booklet features examples of works from the retrospective including Cut Piece, Bottoms, Play It By Trust, Amaze, Ceiling Painting, Fly, War is Over!, Painting to Hammer a Nail, Erection, Wish Tree, Smile, Sky Machine and others. 

The first CD features an eighteen minute interview with Ono and the other contains two songs from her then-current LP Blueprint for a Sunrise ( "It's Time for Action" and "I'm Not getting Enough"). The booklet's title, Soul got out of the box, is also the name of a song from the same album.

Roy Lichtenstein | Preparatory mock-ups for Hat

[see below post]

Roy Lichtenstein | Hat

Roy Lichtenstein

Hat

New York City, USA: Letter Edged in Black Press, 1968

49.5 x 35.6 cm.

Edition of 2000

The fourth issue of William Copley’s S.M.S. object periodical (below) contained a bookwork by John Cage, a cassette by La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, a burned bowtie by Lil Picard, a sticker by Bob Watts, Prison Poems by Domenico Rotella, as well as work by Robert Stanley, Arman, Paul Bergtold, Hollis Frampton, On Kawara and Princess Winifred. 

Perhaps the best known contribution is Hat by Roy Lichtenstein. The work is an offset lithograph of wave patterns and nautical motifs on laminated plastic sheet, printed double-sided and folded like a child’s hat. 

Like most of the S.M.S. editions, it was published in an edition of 2000, with the first hundred signed by the artist for the Deluxe set. A complete set of the Deluxe edition is valued at approximately twenty-five thousand US dollars. 

David Shrigley | Beans

David Shrigley

Beans [Socks]

Glasgow, Scotland: Self-publushed, 2023

Small or Large

Edition size unknown

Orange cotton socks with the word ‘Beans' embroidered on the ankle, packaged with a cardboard wrap-around designed by the artist. The socks are available in two sizes: small (EU 36-40) and large (EU 40 - 46)

Get yours from the Shrigley Shop, here. 

Peter Frank | Fluxus Music

Peter Frank

Fluxus Music

Berlin, Germany: Ricochet, 2015

8 pp., 20 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 50 

A six page ‘zine about the importance of music to Fluxus, reprinting an article from the Southern California Art Magazine issue #22, 1979, by Peter Frank. 

Frank is an American art critic and curator, living in Los Angeles. His curatorial work includes projects for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the  Guggenheim,  and many other national and international venues.

As a writer, he has contributed to The Village Voice, The SoHo Weekly News, the Huffington Post, Art in America, ARTnews, LA Weekly. and Visions Art Quarterly (where he served as editor). He is the author of the 1983 title Something Else Press, the only overview of the influential publisher. 

"In New York, where Fluxus began, John Cage - himself a product of unrigid West Coast thought in the 1930s and 1940s - exercised increasing influence over younger thinkers and devisers in all the arts. This influence was made possible by Cage´s own responsiveness to work in various arts, a responsiveness brought about by involvement with Merce Cunningham´s dance company, summers spent at the Black Mountain school (where all the arts were taught), and study of Zen Buddhist thought and practice. In 1956, and for two subsequent years, Cage taught a course in new music composition at the New School for Social Research. In this course several younger artists, musicians, writers filmmakers and others were led, or were encouraged to lead themselves, to means of escaping the restriction of given media and modes of thought. Allan Kaprow devised the first Happenings immediately after attending Cage´s class. Classmates of Kaprow, including George Brecht, Dick Higgings, Phillip Corner, and Al Hansen, broke through mediumistic boundaries with Cage´s encouragement and example mind. But, despite the friendships and aesthetics alliances that began in that class, there were divergent sensibilities. The complex, heavily theatrical, and painterly format of the Happening favoured by Kaprow, Hansen, and others who came on the scene was eschewed in favor of more restrained, reflective modes by such as Brecht and Robert Watts. Higgins, who was unusual in his ability to work with equal comfort on grand and minuscule levels, recalls that, after the flurry of excitement shared by Cage class alumni at the advent of Happenings ( and related forms in Europe), a contrasting interest arose.

[...]

The West Coast, Japanese, and sporadic European contingents merged with the New York group, attended one another´s loft performances, and began putting it all into words, into verbal instructions and position papers, into cards,flyers, and books. By the end of 1960 La Monte Young, a Cage disciple from Bay Area, had edited An Anthology of work participating in the new sensibility. In the version of the book published in 1963:

One of Young´s compositions bears resemblance to traditional musical notations: a fifth interval, B- natural and F-sharp, “ to be held for a very long time”. Another composition consists entirely of the direction, “ Draw a straight line and follow it.” Another: “The performer should prepare any composition and then perform as well as he can”. Another:” This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean”. The Piano Piece for David Tudor no. 3 reads: “ Most of them/were very old grasshoppers.” Composition 1960 no.9 consists of a small card with a straight line on it, enclosed in an envelope on which the following is printed: “ the enclosed score is right side up when the line is horizontal and slightly above center”.

The concision and poetry of Young´s formats, the wide range if interpretation they encourage and the availability of their language - anyone can realise a Young composition at any time, with no concert hall, instrument training, or even effort necessary- attracted other artists of the new sensibility, especially those whose performance scores were evolving toward a simplicity of form and statement anyway. George Brecht , Robert Watts, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Allison Knowles, and George Maciuanas, the designer of An Anthology, achieved new brevity, partly through Young´s model.”

- Peter Frank

Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines

The Vancouver Art Gallery iteration of the Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines exhibition closes tomorrow, after a run of over four months. 

Organized by the Brooklyn Museum and curated by Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer, the show features over a thousand zines and artworks by more than one hundred artists, demonstrating the importance of zines to a wide swath of subcultural scenes. It also examines the intersections with other mediums, including collage, craft, film, drawing, painting, performance, photography, sculpture and video.

To complement the exhibition - and pay tribute to Vancouver’s rich history of ‘zine making that emerged out of West Front in the seventies - the gallery has created a reading room featuring a selection of zines and small publications produced by local artists. These include Ho Tam, Whess Harman, Erica Wilk, Cole Pauls, Cheryl Hamilton, Lisa g Nielsen, and Liz Knox. 

Liz Knox’ contribution includes two great titles: The Anarchist Review from last year, and A Void, released by the Nothing Else Press in the spring. See previous posts, here and here. They have apparently both been stolen, but subsequently replenished. 

The reading room is the one space in the exhibition where visitors can handle publications, which is often an obstacle for historical exhibitions about works better suited for stores than museums. The installation for the reading room, titled Pockets of Time, is by local artist Marlene Yuen.

For more information, visit the Vancouver Art Gallery, here.