Itinerant Texts

[Various Artists]

Itinerant Texts

London, UK: Bookworks, 1996

8 x 11.5 x 6 cm.

Edition of 40 signed and numbered copies

Itinerant Texts is a set of original slide works by Judith Barry, Robert Barry, Angela Bulloch, Tacita Dean, Jimmie Durham, Tracey Emin, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Susan Hiller, Joseph Kosuth, Tracy Mackenna and Simon Patterson. 

Each have created works commenting on travel, transience and the nature of site-specificity.

The works were originally commissioned for Artist / Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books, a touring exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts. Itinerant Texts takes as its starting point the idea of the artist as itinerant worker, continually travelling on a kind of circuit and producing site-specific work.

Robert Barry | THIS IS...

Robert Barry
THIS IS...
Brussels, Belgium: MOREpublishers, 2018
50 x 68 cm. (each print), 200 x 68 cm. (overall dimensions)
Edition of 20 signed and numbered copies [+ 10 AP]

The 104th work in the hors séries, is a suite of 4 silkscreen prints on Steinbach, 250 gr. paper.

Available for 580 € from info@morepublishers.be.

Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014)

Sculptor, writer and co-publisher of 0 to 9 magazine, Rosemary Mayer has passed away. The periodical was made in collaboration with her sister Bernadette Mayer, and her then-husband Vito Acconci. From 1967 to 1969, the three produced the mimeographed publication that featured contributions from Robert Barry, Clark Coolidge, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Jackson Mac Low, Harry Mathews, Adrian Piper, Bern Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Jerome Rothenberg, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Hannah Weiner, Emmett Williams, and many others.


"Vito and I created 0 To 9 as an environment for our own work, which did not seem to exist anywhere else.

We based the name of the magazine after Jasper Johns’ work 0 Through 9. The publishing of 0 To 9 also bypassed the sagas of trying to get work, including one’s first book, published by an established press. We found a mimeograph machine in my boyfriend Ed Bowes’ father’s office in New Jersey. We had to buy paper, stencils and ink from the A.B. Dick company. For each issue we drove there with the typed stencils when the office closed at 5pm, and by the time they reopened at 8 am, we would have an issue of 0 To 9 run off and collated. Friends would help us, including my sister Rosemary Mayer. It was an accidentally ecologically sound thing to do.

In the first issue, Vito published a poem of his, “Kay Price and Stella Pajunas”, who were the winners of a typing contest. We published a lot of anonymous work by American Indians, as well as Edoardo Sanguineti, Bruce Marcu, Hans Christian Andersen, Novalis, Robert Viscusi, Morton Feldman, Gertrude Stein, Raymond Queneau, Aram Saroyan, Ron Padgett, Stefan Themerson, Clark Coolidge, Robert Greene, Ted Berrigan, Harry Mathews, John Giorno, Steve Paxton, Emmett Williams, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Jackson Mac Low, Dick Higgins, Bern Porter, Sol LeWitt, Hannah Weiner, Dan Graham, George Bowering, John Perreault, Philip Corner, Rosemary Mayer, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer, Les Levine, Adrian Piper, Eduardo Costa, Kenneth Koch, Jasper Johns, Alan Sondheim, Lee Lozanno, Lawrence Weiner, Bernar Venet, Robert Barry, Douglas Heubler, Karen Prups-Hvarre, Larry Fagin, Nels Richardson and others. So you can perhaps see in what direction we were going.

The pages of 0 To 9 looked more like maps than literature and sometimes were maps or directions; for example, the Seneca song from Number 5 by Richard Johnny John and Jerome Rothenberg. Typing the stencils for the magazine was no mean task. The correction fluid for them made you high in an unpleasant way and the liquid had to dry on the stencil film while it was separated from the padding and backing sheets. You blew on it, having put a pencil between the sheets. Actually, the point was never to make mistakes because it was impossible to get the corrections in the same place as the original.

We’d print between 100 and 350 copies for each issue, taking them around to bookstores in New York City, sending them elsewhere and to our subscribers. Needless to say we didn’t make hordes of money. Nothing was perfect about 0 To 9 in its mimeograph form. We were trying to get far away from the idea, so promulgated, of the perfection of the poem with white space around it, set off from other things. The first cover was a mimeograph stencil — it was dark blue. Next was a rainfall map of the US. The third cover was all the first lines of work in the magazine. For the fourth issue, we wrapped all the book jackets Vito and I had in our possession around the cover. The fifth cover was a crumpled sheet of paper and the sixth was six blank sheets of paper.

Vito and I both had gone to Catholic schools, thus our earnestness and sadomasochism. I don’t think either of us had any less ambition than to change the world. My sister met some of the boys from Regis, where Vito went to high school, and Vito began courting her. He would take here to dinner at the Chateau Henri IV. When they got married, I was the maid of honor. For a time I went out with Vito’s friend Bob Viscusi, now a poet and professor at Brooklyn College. I had grown up in Brooklyn, Ridgewood to be exact, very close to the next trendy section of Brooklyn—Bushwick.

Vito had gone to Holy Cross and then joined the Marines. After that he went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with my sister, where they lived in a Quonset hut. My parents had died in their forties, so I moved in with my uncle and grandfather, probably propelled to write poetry by “the people downstairs,” who were my godmother’s son, Richard Nirengarten, his wife and their baby. They had plastic on the furniture and would fight a lot. My uncle, a devout Catholic living in the single state of blessedness, would create a pile of Ave Maria’s (a magazine unlike 0 To 9) so the unread copies were on top. My grandfather was world-weary, stingy and liked yellow pants. He would lock me out of the house at night because “I should’ve done my reading in the daylight.” In high school my sister joined the Ridgewood Saints, a gang that had garrison belts. This was the time of the ’50s and ’60s, so we learned a lot — like how to make art that had no boundaries and to expect that change was possible. After all, Robert Smithson made an upside-down tree."

—Bernadette Mayer, from 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine

Robert Barry | Something in a Box

Robert Barry
Something in a Box
Paris, France: Michèle Didier, 2014
5 x 18 x 13 cm
Edition of 24 signed and numbered copies (+6 AP)

62 statements on index cards measuring 10.2 x 15.2 cm., contained in a walnut wood box. The first card introduces the 61 following: "Something that ..." and then 61 statements that are supposed to define something whose essence remains irrevocably unknown.

Available here, for 1450 €.

Yvon Lambert to close

Sad news:

"Yvon Lambert has announced that he will close his gallery, which he first opened in 1966 on rue de L’Échaudé in Paris with exhibitions that promoted early Conceptual and Minimalist work by artists including Carl Andre and Lawrence Weiner. In 1977, Lambert opened a larger space in the Marais district, showing work by artists like Joseph Beuys, Louise Lawler, and Allan McCollum, before moving to his present space on rue Vieille du Temple in 1986, where he worked with Nan Goldin, Joan Jonas, Jenny Holzer, and Glenn Ligon among others. In 2003, he opened a gallery in New York, which closed in 2011. The dealer plans to devote his attention to his foundation, the Collection Lambert en Avignon, which he opened in 2000 to showcase his privately owned artwork, which includes more than 1200 pieces by contemporary artists."

- Artforum 

Holiday Recommendations Guest Post #12: Tim Rychaert

SETH SIEGELAUB :
New York, USA, 1941 - Basel, Switzerland, 2013


Seth Siegelaub (ed)
July, August, September 1969 / Juillet, Aout, Septembre 1969 / Juli, August, September 1969
New York City, USA: Seth Siegelaub, 1969
32 pp., 21 × 27.5 cm, stitch-bound
Edition size unknown


Description*

Documentation of conceptual or internationally-located projects curated by Seth Siegelaug with works by Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner. Descriptions of the works in pictures and tri-lingual texts. Also contains "Specific information (locations, dates etc.)" in back of book that documents exacting details of projects and installations.

* as found on specificobject.com 

Still available at Copyright Bookshop Antwerp/Ghent, Belgium, for only 70€, here (or as a downloadable PDF, here).

- Tim Rychaert




MOREpublishers is a Brussels based editorial and curatorial platform, founded in November 2009 by Amélie Laplanche and Tim Rychaert. The aim is to produce and distribute artists editions and multiples, combining this practice with a curatorial approach.

This curatorial insight is transaled in both the development of standard production formats where in artists are invited to intervene, as well as into precise (production based) answers to invitations to exhibitions and site specific projects.

MOREpublishers has a close interest in the idea to consider edition-formats as a space with its own architectural qualities and characteristics. This interest is to be found in in the development of different formats. Thus far, MOREpublishers has developed four different series : ‘sunday’, ‘hors série’, ‘INSERTS’ and ‘exhibition copy’.

David Askevold's Projects Class

[David Askevold, ed]
Projects Class
Halifax, Canada: Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design,1969.
[12] pp., 12.5 x 18 cm., loose leaves in a rubber stamped envelope
Edition size unknown

David Askevold began teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design in 1968 and the following year developed the idea for the Projects Class. Originally hired to teach a Foundation year course in Sculpture, Askevold took advantage of the number of conceptually-based artists who had visited the school at that time, including James Lee Byars, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth. When he bumped into Weiner in New York City he pitched the idea of approaching artists to submit proposals for the students to manifest. Together they secured the involvement of many of the world's most innovative conceptual artists at the time: Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Graham, Sol Lewitt, N.E. Thing Co., Byars, Robert Smithson, Doug Huebler, Lucy Lippard, Kosuth, and Weiner himself.

Askevold said "My idea at the time, as an instructor of art, was to bring students closer to the sensibilities of practicing contemporary artists by engaging them directly with the work." He planned to serve mostly as a moderator, monitor, or "midwife" to the process. The original concept involved the artists visiting the school, but when that became too costly, his compromise was to operate through the mail and via the telephone.

Several of these artists also participated in the Art By Telephone project at the Chicago MOCA that same year. Art By Telephone followed a similar premise, in which the gallery staff realized the works from the artists’ instructions, with a nod to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 Telephone Paintings, which were made by a sign manufacturer according to specifications that the artist dictated over the phone.

The projects were submitted on typed or handwritten cards, and the students enacted the works in a collaborative manner. This exchange helped initiate a pedagogical shift, where the idea of teaching or engaging with a class could itself be viewed as a work of art.

Jan Dibbets’ asked the students to document the shadows of trees every ten minutes. Mel Bochner had them measure the classroom in height, length, volume, temperature, humidity, illumination, etc. He closed his text with the statement “It doesn’t matter to me what the specific details are, or how they are presented”.

Lucy Lippard, whose curatorial project Groups at the New York School of Visual Art earlier in the year was a precursor of sorts to Projects Class, contributed the following:

"A. A group of people (anywhere from five to fifteen) are photographed in the same place and approximately the same position in relation to each other every day at the same hour for two weeks. (No diversion from the conventional group photograph taken for school yearbooks, Knights of Columbus annual picnics, etc.) The people need not wear the same clothes or pose exactly the same way each day, but the immediate impression should be almost identical.


B. These photographs are developed and dated (a record about what one person is wearing each day, or something similar, should be kept each day so that the dates will be accurate.); each photograph is then described in writing, in detail, either by the person (or persons) who took the pictures or by someone who was not present at the picture taking. (Note which case was chosen.)


C. Put the photographs together with the texts in one of the following manners: 
1. Both pictures and texts in chronological order.
2. Pictures in chronological order, but texts scrambled (they are still dated though).
3. Texts in chronological order but pictures scrambled (and dated).
4. Scramble the whole thing in some totally random manner so that sometimes pictures are with their proper texts and sometimes not (still dated), and so that the time sequence is broken entirely: “illustration” and text diverge. If more than one person is doing the project, each one should take a different last step (and take his own photographs of different groups from the others)."

Robert Smithson’s Mud Flow called for “1000 tons of mud dumped from a dump truck over a rocky or stony cliff”. Robert Barry’s piece is known only to the students who conceived of it.

One of Askevold’s favorite proposals was Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece #5, which asked that the students create a myth. They responded by creating another art school, the fictitious Haliburton. An ad in Artforum announced the institution, which was accepting students with “limited availability”. A dozen or so artists (who were not forewarned) were listed as teaching there. The only one they heard back from was Frank Stella, via his lawyer, who demanded they “take his name off this thing”.

The class ran from 1969 to 1972, when Askevold took a sabbatical to visit London, England. He arranged to have Graham, Byars, Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci replace him, each for six weeks at a time.  The project helped to initiate a very extensive visiting artists program, which in turn put NSCAD on the map as a centre of innovative teaching practices and conceptual art in general.

Bruce Barber called NSCAD “one of the pre-eminent art schools in the world, arguably as important a centre in its own time as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College had been for the fostering and dissemination of contemporary avant-garde activity” and Askevold's Projects Class is often identified as “the most innovative and interesting aspect of the NSCAD curriculum of the period,” (Gil McElroy, ARTSatlantic, Spring/Summer 1996).

The Art Metropole collection at the National Gallery of Canada houses both the original handwritten and typed cards and letters (see Robert Barry's, below) and the above multiple, which, increasingly rare, can be purchased for $500 at Printed Matter, here.




Further Reading:

Art Metropole : The Top 100 by Kitty Scott, Jonathan Shaughnessy, Peggy Gale, AA Bronson. Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Canada, 2006.

Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 by Lucy Lippard.
London, UK: Studio Vista, 1973.

Materializing Six Years : Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art by Catherine Morris, Vincent Bonin, Julia Bryan-Wilson. Brooklyn / Cambridge, NY / MA : Brooklyn Museum / MIT Press, 2012, pp. 186-187.

Conceptual Art: The NSCAD Connection 1967-1973 edited by Dr. Bruce Barber. Halifax, Canada: Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD University, 2001.

The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978 by Garry Neill Kennedy.
Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 2012.

Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts by Robert Filliou. Cologne, Germany: König Books, 1970.

The Once and Future Art School by Gary Michael Dault. Toronto, Canada: Canadian Art Magazine, Winter 2008, pp. 83-86. Online here.

Robert Barry | Belmont 1967

Robert Barry
Belmont 1967
Eindhoven, Netherlands: Van Abbemuseum, 1977
[82] pp., 21 x 28 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 750

Published in conjunction with Barry's exhibition of the same name, at the Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Museum Folkwang Essen in 1977.

Robert Barry | Sunday #16

Robert Barry
SOMETHING THAT IS HARDLY ANYTHING AT ALL
offset print on mulit-offset, 120 gr
A1 (59,4 x 84,1 cm) folded to A4 (29,7 x 21 cm)
printed in Ghent, 2012
signed and numbered edition of 100 (+7 A.P)

Released today and available for 60€, or 300€ for a subscription (six issues), which is the better deal given the consistent quality of artists they've been working with.


www.morepublishers.be

The "Xerox" Book

The Xerox Book - one of the most revered artists' publications ever - was published in New York in 1968 by dealers Seth Siegelaub and John W. Wendler. The book was conceived by Siegelaub as an exhibition in print. Seven artists (Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner) were given 25 pages and asked to respond to the format.

Seigelaub, in discussion with Hans Obrist in 1999:

“This project evolved in the same way as most of my projects, in collaboration with the artists I worked with. We would sit around discussing the different ways and possibilities to show art, different contexts and environments in which art could be shown, indoors, outdoors, books, etc. The “Xerox book” — I now would prefer to call it the “Photocopy book”, so that no one gets the mistaken impression that the project has something to do with Xerox — was perhaps one of the most interesting because it was the first where I proposed a series of “requirements” for the project, concerning the use of a standard size paper and the amount of pages the “container” within which the artist was asked to work. What I was trying to do was standardize the conditions of exhibition with the idea that the resulting differences in each artist’s project or work, would be precisely what the artist’s work was about.

It was an attempt to consciously standardize, in terms of an exhibition, book, or project, the conditions of production underlying the exhibition process. It was the first exhibition in fact where I asked the artists to do something, and it was probably somewhat less collaborative than I am now making it sound. But I do have the impression that the close working relationship with the artist was an important factor of all the projects, even when I was not particularly close to an artist, as for example, Bob Morris.”

Similar the Beatles' White Album, the book is actually untitled or eponymously titled, and has simply come to be known as the Xerox book, which itself is a misnomer. To produce a book in an edition of 1000 copies on the photocopier was far more expensive than the standard offset litho.

I had this confirmed first hand, when at Art Metropole we started a series called Bootleg, that would take existing texts that were long unavailable and reprint them on the photocopier. It turned out that making a book on a photocopier is pretty expensive. I think the series died after three issues (Sonic Youth, Genesis P-Orridge and Dave Allen, all made in cooperation with the artists. I think the last two are still available, but the SY sold out quickly).

Given the disparity between the book’s intention of affordability and it’s current market value, it is not surprising that it too has been subjected to the photocopy treatment several times over the years. However, most of these projects are also high priced and come across as a bit of a cash-grab. Now Primary Information, with permission from Siegelaub, has made the title available (along with several other important works from the time, including "One Month") as a downloadable PDF. If you’re grateful for them having saved you a few thousand dollars, there’s a donate button at the bottom of the screen:

http://primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/seth-siegelaub-archive/