A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

[Various artists]

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

Madison, USA: Partial Press, 2022

180 pp., 5.83 x 8.27”, softcover

Edition size unknown

A compendium that collects a series of ‘conceptual’ or ‘unrealized’ books and moves them one step closer to realization by bounding them together and getting them into bookstores. 

Edited and published (as Partial Press) by Carley Gomez and Levi Sherman, the book’s full title is 

A Physical Book Which Compiles Conceptual Books by Various Artists: Possibly Undermining Their Conceptual Commitment to Dematerialization, but Also Sparking Unforeseen Juxtapositions and Insinuating the Works into New Situations.

Featuring over ninety contributors from around the world, the volume presents books that previously only existed as "verbal statements, descriptions, or provocations”. Beyond conceptual works, the book features rhetorical, impossible and implausible books.

The title can be purchased from Fungus Books, in Pittsburgh, a small but well-curated store dedicated to "Rare, new, & used books, records, printed matter.” Fungus was founded by writer Ed Steck, alongside partners Seth Glick (Concept Art Gallery) and Michael Seamans (Mind Cure Records). Seamans stocks a small display of vinyl records in the store, where one might find Sun Ra, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno, Moondog, Jandek, and Terry Riley disks. 

The bookstore carries some of my favourite contemporary publishers of artists’ books: Primary Information, Siglio Press, and New Documents. Our visit was brief, but I spotted several gems, such as 

Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine Plans, a rare Ben Vautier pamphlet, Steve McCaffery’s double volume Seven Pages Missing and Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man reprint. Other author/artists in stock included Harry Smith, Susan Howe, Luis Bunuel, Bernadette Mayer, William Burroughs, Yvonne Rainer, James Baldwin, Valie Export, Dieter Roth, Destroy All Monsters, and many others. 

The store is located at 700 & 1/2 South Trenton Avenue, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visit their site here. 

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists is also available as an ebook, for $2.00, here.  

"When Levi first envisioned the anthology, he pictured conceptual books in the vein of 1960s and ‘70s Conceptual art, and we did receive such books. Like many Fluxus publications, these conceptual books build a frame through which to view everyday experiences in a new light. An Index of Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Bruex makes this explicit: “Instructions: Move through your days with awareness of new beginnings and final endings.” Some instruction pieces lend themselves to execution, relying on chance to produce novel outcomes. Random Color Generated Instant Book by Esther K Smith & Susan Happersett exemplifies this approach with detailed, plainspoken instructions and everyday materials. Other instructions are more poignant as mental exercises. In this category, we would place Who Has Seen the Wind by Cathryn Miller of Byopia Press. One could feasibly print her ninety-nine sonograms of the wind, but it is Miller’s Duchampian declaration that these imagined prints are art, specifically asemic poems, that is so striking. Despite their variety, these works all share Conceptual art’s emphasis on the viewer/reader rather than the artist. They remind us that reading is a creative, constitutive act.”

 - Carley Gomez

Raven Chacon | For Zitkála-Šá

Raven Chacon

For Zitkála-Šá

Toronto, Canada/Los Angeles, USA: Art Metropole/New Documents, 2022

128 pp.., 24.2 × 33.7 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Released last year - a few months after Raven Chacon became the first Indigenous composer to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize - For Zitkála-Šá collects a series of scores that pay tribute to the Yankton Dakota writer, musician, and activist. These works were written to be performed by thirteen contemporary female Indigenous performing artists: Buffy Sainte-Marie, Laura Ortman, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Suzanne Kite, Barbara Croall, Jacqueline Wilson, Autumn Chacon, Heidi Senungetuk, Ange Loft, Joy Harjo, Carmina Escobar, Olivia Shortt, and the artist’s partner, Candice Hopkins. 

The book is supplemented by texts by each performer, and a contextualizing essay by by the artist/composer.

For Zitkála-Šá is available from Struts Gallery's bookstore, for $55.00, here. 

Lucy Lippard turns 86 today. 

Lucy Lippard | 5 Prose Fictions

Lucy Lippard

5 Prose Fictions

New York City, USA: Self-published, 1976

[14] pp., 21.6 × 27.9 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

A self-published mimeographed work featuring five pieces by Lippard: "The Cries You Hear", "N.Y. Times IV", "Headwaters", "Into Among" and "First Fables of Hysteria". he reproduced typewritten text includes the author's corrections and revisions. 5 Prose Fictions was produced for the A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-female artists cooperative gallery in the United States. 

The title is extremely rare and - when it does appear for sale - it is typically priced around a thousand dollars. New Documents republished the title earlier this year (see next post). 

"The A.I.R. Gallery was founded because, despite gains made by the early women artists’ movement, the majority of the emergent women had no place to show their art. The commercial galleries were filled up with men and, even if more good will existed than it does, it would take forever for women to sift through the extant openings. Other co-ops also tended to be run by men and to lack the cohesion that a political alliance, no matter how feeble, provides an all-woman gallery. 

[...]

A.I.R. is a non-profit, the proceeds of all sales going directly to the artist with no dealer’s commissions detached. Located in the heart of SoHo, A.I.R. participates (perhaps of necessity) in the art world’s promotion and power games, competing for reviews and attention and sales with the rest of the gang, and doing well at it. Like the commercial galleries, it has a stable of 20 artists; here the similarities end. A.I.R. has no director. According to the tenets of the women’s movements there are no leaders; everybody has her say on everything; work and money are solicited equally from all members with the usual problems of haves and have-nots, workers and non-workers, solved intramurally. Most significantly, it is committed to a diversity of styles not found in the most high-powered emporia, as befits the organ of a movement devoted to a multiple, open, flexible view of life and opposed to the single, acceptable, currently fashionable image, opposed to the rejection of self and emotion for a place in the establishment’s sunlamp. The original group of A.I.R. members was selected from slides of some 600 “unknown” artists. The resulting stylistic mix has been maintained in the turnovers, and A.I.R.’s major problem is probably the fact that there are too many good artists for its small space, especially considering the women from out of town who want to show in New York, but cannot be here to do the daily work entailed by membership.

For the most part, A.I.R. has resisted the temptation to focus inwards on its own artists rather than looking outwards towards all women artists. It holds yearly invitational shows, and recently had its first international exhibition—a group of women from Paris, none of whom was previously known in New York. A.I.R.’s non-profit status allows foundation support of parallel projects like the Monday night programs of film, panels, readings, discussions; the sponsoring of outside exhibitions, such as that of women artists from the 1930’s recently at Vassar; a possible periodical—and this portfolio, which offers a sampler of the gallery’s art for prices more accessible to other artists and to the growing feminist public which breaks art world (though not class) boundaries. It is only a pity that the space is too small to house the Women’s Art Registry of slides, from which the bulk of A.I.R.’s artists were initially selected."

- Lucy Lippard

Lucy R. Lippard | 955,000

Lucy R. Lippard

955,000

Vancouver, Canada: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1970

138 pp., 10 x 15.5 cm., loose leaves

Edition size unknown

The landmark exhibition catalogue for Lucy Lippard's landmark exhibition of the same name, which ran from January 13th to February 8th, 1970, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The title refers to the population of Vancouver at the time (it's estimated to be almost three times the number now: 2,606,351). 

The publication was the first in a series of titles by Lippard which were titled after the population of the city in which the exhibition was held (Seattle 557,087, Buenos Aires 2,972,453). For these exhibitions each participating artist was invited to produce one or two cards to represent their work. The texts consisted primarily of proposals, scores and conceptual works. These cards were then placed in an envelope, in no arranged order - alongside an introduction and bibliography - and sold as a catalogue for $3.

Among the 62 artists in the exhibition were: Vito Acconci, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Greg Curnoe, Hannah Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Dan Graham,  Eva Hesse, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, The N.E.Thing Company, Adrian Piper, Ed Ruscha, Fred Sandback, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson, and many others. 

New Documents produced a facsimile reprint in 2012, but it has already sold out. 

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. 

Mailbag

 

The above items - save for a few - all arrived in the mail in the time when this blog has been on semi-hiatus. They, and other neglected titles, will appear in the next week or two, now that things have wrapped up at Struts.