Yayoi Kusama, RIP

Yayoi Kusama died last week at the age of 97, in a hospital in Tokyo.

George Brecht | V TRE

George Brecht

V TRE

Metuchen, USA: Self-published, 1963

2 pp., 32.2 x 24.8 cm., single sheet

Edition size unknown

The origin of the Fluxus newspapers (see previous post) can be traced back to publications that George Brecht produced to accompany his infamous Yam Festival. 

Brecht and Robert Watts met weekly for lunch at the Howard Johnson's in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where they conceived of the year-long performance art festival. It was intended to take place in Princeton, but ended up happening at George Segal's farm, on the campus of Rutgers, in New York City, and through the postal service - an early example of mail art. 

The project began in May of 1962 (Yam being May spelled backwards) and included events, Happenings and performances by Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, La Monte Young, Wolf Vostell, Watts and Brecht. These included "Yam Lecture", "Yam Hat Sale", "Water Day", "Clock Day", "Box Day" and "Yam Day". Examples of some of the printed materials that accompanied the festival are below. 

V TRE is the best known of the ephemera surrounding the event, as it became a proto-Fluxus publication, similar to Young and MacLow’s An Anthology. When Maciunas decided to produce a Fluxus newspaper, he appropriated the name, which Brecht had taken from a faulty neon sign in New Jersey. 

The two page broadsheet features announcements and works, interspersed with appropriated newspaper headlines and ad parodies. It features contributions by Ruth Kraus, Claes Oldenburg, Bob Morris, Dieter Roth, Angus Maclise, Jackson MacLow, Robert Morris, and Hans Gappmayr. 

 

Extra

The periodical that Sol LeWitt called "The only magazine not about art but as art" was not the first, and certainly not the only serial artists' publication, but produced five striking issues in a just over a year, fifty years ago. 

Edited by Walter Lippert, the magazine focused on more conceptual practices, EXTRA featured writings and artworks by artists from around the world. 

Hans Haacke wrote about the censorship of his Manet-PROJECT '74 (as he did in Avalanche Magazine that same year). The work was rejected by the museum just prior the opening and in response Daniel Buren pasted copies of Haacke’s panels onto his own black-and-white wallpaper to circumvent the museum’s attempt at censorship (the museum's response was to remove Buren’s wallpaper, also).

Buren contributed two pages of vertical stripes printed on vellum to EXTRA. Sol LeWitt provided Drawings, Duane Michals contributed Portrait of Andy Warhol and Hanne Darboven provided Manuscript for a Film. 

Other contributors included Art & Language, Terry Atkinson, Robert Barry, Lynda Benglis, Antonio Dias, Ralph Gibson, Joseph Kosuth, Roman Opalka, Giuseppe Penone, Anna & Patrick Poirier, Bernar Venet and Gilberto Zorio. 

The fourth and penultimate issue (from April 1975) was devoted to works by David Askevold, produced from 1968 to 1974. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann was a victim of censorship, not by the magazine but by their printer: 

"We are so late as our printer refused to print this issue because of Hans-Peter Feldmann's contribution. You can't believe it's possible? It is!" 

EXTRA was reportedly produced in an edition of 500 copies each. In 2016, a complete set sold at auction for $594 US, just below the low estimate of between six and nine hundred dollars. 

Art-Rite

[Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn, eds]

Art-Rite

New York City, USA: Primary Information/Printed Matter, 2019

678 pp., 8.5 x 10.75", softcover

Edition of 2000

Edit DeAk, Walter Robinson, and Joshua Cohn  met while in their early twenties, in an art criticism class taught by Brian O'Doherty at Barnard College in New York, in 1972. O'Doherty - the influential critic, artist and academic who died last November - had been hired the year prior to edit Art in America magazine. He was suitably impressed by DeAk, Robinson, and Cohn, and approached them about contributing to the publication. 

"I thought, aestheticism must be in trouble if they want baby blood," Edit told Artforum in 2003. "What’s wrong with the system that they want us?"

The trio offered a counter-proposal: a newsprint insert to accompany Art in America, which would "piggyback on the establishment, having the establishment distribute the enemy, our voice. This was the period when people talked about things like that.” 

When it was turned down, the trio began their own publishing venture, called 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. The themes included video, painting, performance, and artists' books.

The latter, issue #14, included unedited statements on artists' publications from fifty artists and art professionals, including Kathy Acker, Lucy Lippard, Ulises Carrión, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, and others. Lewitt's text ("They are works themselves, not reproductions of works", etc. - see below) became an influential statement on the subject, and was reproduced many years later on the verso of his catalogue raisonne of bookworks. 

"The artists’ book issue [came out because] - if you can believe it, in the 70s it felt like all of a sudden everybody was making artists’ books because they wanted to make something that was democratic, because the political impulses of the 60s had been anti-commodity," said Robinson, in 1979. 

What made Art-Rite so unique, deAk noted, 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.” It's perhaps reassuring to know that these things are cyclical, and the art world's current inability to move forward for fear of being on the wrong side of something politically, will give way to something perhaps less earnest. 

Most issues of Art-Rite 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.

Individual issues are scarce and sell now for upwards of a hundred dollars, making this complete facsimile from Primary Information and Printed Matter essential. Sadly, in less than four years, the publication has sold out, despite two-thousand copies printed. 

To mark the 50th anniversary of the original periodical, co-publisher Printed Matter has mounted an exhibition called From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite. The show traces the history of the publication through photographs, production paste-ups and a complete set of the periodical (below). The exhibition opened last month and continues until June 23rd, 2023. 

dé-coll/age, no. 2

Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell

dé-coll/age, no. 2

Cologne, Germany: Self-published, 1962

29.3 × 20.8 × 0.4 cm.

Edition of 500

Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics": Karen Finley

Karen Finley

I'm an Ass Man 

Folio 25 from

[Various Artists]
Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"
New York City, USA: Eye Publications, 1986
[unpaginated], 27.9 × 22.9 × 1.9 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 200

I’m an Ass Man is an early monologue by Karen Finley, often performed while smearing herself with kidney beans. It opens with the bold statement "No, Herr Schmidt, I will not shit in your mouth, even if I do get to know you. I just want to smell the gas pass from your ass" and gets increasingly provocative from there. 

The work is told primarily from the perspective of a man fascinated with women's bodies but ultimately repulsed by them. It describes a rape in the subway:

"I just wanted to get my cock inside some of the rump roast action...I wanted to get her against that cold slimy rat-turd wall and fuck the hell out of her."

However, when the rapist discovers his victim is menstruating, he flees in terror: 

"I mean bitch, you on the snatch rag. How can you be on the snatch rag during the best rape in your life?"

He runs to clean his hands and learns that he can't wash it from his cuticles, his fingernails, his lifeline. The last line of the piece (which is handwritten by Finley in coloured pencil on the photocopied page in "Cobalt Myth Mechanics") is

"It would be a long time before I used that hand to shake my dick after I pissed". 

The page is available from Printed Matter, here, for $500 US. An audio version of the work can be heard on the LP The Uproar Tapes, Volume 1 (released the same year) or at Ubuweb, here. 

"Some of her work from this period--the monologue “I’m an Ass Man,” for example--shows Finley being tough-minded and funny, at once goofing on and inhabiting a vicious kind of aggression, viscerally invoking how much people want to get inside each other’s pants, revealing the lie in every kind of decorum."

- Laurie Stone, 2000, Los Angeles Times

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