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. 

Collected Postcards

 

Michael Morris, RIP

This 1974 picture was taken outside of the Western Front in 1974. Michael Morris is flanked by Happenings creator Alan Kaprow and Joanne Danzker (later the CEO and Director of the Biennale of Sydney) on the left, and poet Steve McCafftery and Fluxus artist Robert Filliou on the right. 

Morris died on Friday November 18th, at the age of eighty. 

Image Bank | Colour Bar

Image Bank

Colour Bar

Los Angeles, USA: New Documents, 2020

4.13 × 1.91 × 17.46 cm.

Open edition

Two years after founding Image Bank in 1969, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov began their Colour Bar Research project, one of the duo's most celebrated works. An exercise in endless painting, Colour Bar Research involved sculpture, performance, film, magazine interventions1 and conceptual projects. 

A thousand wooden colour bars were hand-painted at "Babyland" - their newly acquired rural property near Roberts Creek - in 1971, and another thousand the year after, at the New Era Social Club, in Vancouver.

These bars were used as modules in temporary outdoor works of art, an attempt to "make art from a community of collaboration". The two thousand colour bars were filmed, videotaped and photographed in a landscape populated with naked performers, as a kind of infinitely variable, floating conceptual painting. By using the objects as props to be documented, the duo emphasized play and process over finished product.  

In the spirit of the open edition of the original works, Los Angeles-based publisher New Documents - who had previously produced a volume of Trasov's Mr Peanut Drawings - last year released a continuation of the work. While ostensibly an unlimited edition, their website lists fifty copies, with only five remaining. 

Colour Bar is available for $40.00 US from the New Documents site, here. 

"Concurrent with their artistic explorations of the busily social, urban environment, Image Bank also initiated artistic activities in the context of the idyllic, natural environment. These were conducted at a place called Babyland — a piece of property purchased by Morris and Trasov at Roberts Creek on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast, two hours from Vancouver by car ferry. Utilizing the natural environment somewhat in the way they had utilized the urban environment during the Mr. Peanut for Mayor campaign, Babyland became 'a place to act out fantasies, to set up the props and pursue a culture / nature debate'.

With precedents such as the Monte Verita community in Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century, Babyland became a meeting-place for artistic production and conviviality within a natural setting. Visitors to Babyland during the early 1970s included artists, film writers, poets, art critics, and crafts people from Canada and abroad. 

One fascinating project conducted at Babyland was Colour Bar Research (1972-74), which consisted of the arrangement of an 'endless painting' composed of a thousand wood blocks painted in colour spectrums. These colour bars were arranged and rearranged in a variety of ways — as ziggurat patterns on fields, let loose in streams, and floated on a lake. Accompanied by nude or costumed visitors 'on the set' at Babyland and Lake Yogo, this endless painting was documented on film, slides, and photographs — in images suggestive of a youthful paradise where the physics of light and ever-changing colour combinations merges in a utopian vision of interpersonal playfulness and refracted possibilities for bodies and selves."

- Luis Jacob, Golden Streams

1. A 1973 "Special Double Issue" of FILE Megazine featured one of eight offset "colour bar" cards inserted into each copy of the publication. Mr Peanut also featured on the cover of the inaugural issue of FILE, a year prior. 

Image Bank Annual Report

Image Bank

Image Bank Annual Report

Vancouver, Canada: Self-published, 1971

18 pp., 28 x 22 cm., loose leaves in folder

Edition size unknown

An annual report published two years into into the Image Bank project, which was founded by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova, in order to use the postal system to facilitate the exchange of ideas, images and information between artists. 

 

 

 

Art-Rite magazine and Edit DeAk

Edit DeAk, Walter Robinson, and Joshua Cohn met in an art criticism class taught by Brian O'Doherty at Barnard College in New York, in 1972. The following year they began publishing Art-Rite, a forerunner to the punk/art ‘zine of the latter half of that decade. The publication was printed on newsprint and espoused a decidedly insider (though often anonymous) point of view. Each issue was given over entirely to an artist, a collective or a theme.

What made Art-Rite so unique, deAk told Artforum in 2003, was its “whole new tone and attitude. It was unheard of to have a sense of humor at the time, or not to be talking about ‘the problem’ of art—the problem of this, the problem of that.”

Most issues had covers designed by artists, including William Wegman, Richard Tuttle, Yuri, Christo, Dorothea Rockburne, Vito Acconci, Pat Steir, Robert Ryman, Joseph Beuys, Edward Ruscha, Alan Vega (Suicide), Carl Andre, Rosemary Mayer, Kim MacConnel, Image Bank, Chris Burden, Demi, and Judy Rifka.

The incredible list of contributors includes Chris Burden, Allen Ruppersberg, Kathy Acker, John Baldessari, Daniel Buren, Judith Hoffberg, Allan Kaprow, Richard Kostalanetz, Sol Le Witt, Lucy Lippard, Maurizio Nannucci, Richard Nonas, Adrian Piper, Lucio Pozzi, Marcia Resnick, Carolee Schneeman, Pat Steir, Lawrence Weiner, Robin Winters, Douglas Huebler, David Salle, Rosalee Goldberg, A.A. Bronson, Naomi Spector, Eve Sonneman, Peter Frank, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, David Antin, Diego Cortez, Joan La Barbara, Joan Jonas, Philip Glass, Hannah Wilke, Rebecca Horn, Nancy Holt, Lucio Pozzi, Trisha Brown, Michael Kirby, Scott Burton, Robert Wilson, Yvonne Rainer, Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs, Lil Picard, Linda Benglis, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Hans Haacke, Julian Schnabel, Nancy Spero, Judy Chicago, Nancy Graves, Joan Jonas, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Les Levine, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Shigeko Kubota, Richard Landry, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Willoughby Sharp and numerous others.

"We were riding on the absurdity of the situation—that we were three nobodies, had no money, had no fame, and didn’t know anybody in the art world. But it was perfect—we were totally free,” said deAk in 1974.

After the 21st issue (actually nineteenth) in 1978, the periodical folded. "It petered out. We kind of ran out of money," said Robinson. "It's just one of those things. We never really made any money out of it and it had just run it's course."

DeAk adds "We were getting older. We were not making any money, we had to work all the time and I just got tired". She went on to contribute to Artforum, Interview, ZG, Art Random, and many other publications, writing about Dennis Oppenheim, Hanne Darboven, Cookie Mueller, Cindy Sherman and others.

DeAk died last week at the age of 68.


“RIP my brilliant 70s collaborator who emerged from the Hungarian waves (via car trunk at the Yugoslavian border) with her equally brilliant husband Peter Grass, to rehab a 3500 sq ft loft on the top floor of 149 Wooster St into a center of fun and DIY culture, where she presided as guiding spirit over the launch of Art-Rite magazine and so many other endeavors, including curating the first performance art festival at Artists Space, then next door, and overseeing its first graffiti art show (I think) and co-founding Printed Matter.”

- Walter Robinson