THE FROM EDITOR
Here we are a@n at the bggs'nningofa 66new ~ o n ' ~ s of art, tconceP%ts, new muswms, new music MBs, a faiiling wonomypa inc m e in unmpioyed, P war aq,even though we d h o w it a d d on I I vote in C S h m i a that could be lau&&8le with the Terminator trZging to be Gubrnator, but really isn't; a season of bloc&uster shows coming up that will edi* the soul m d cost a lot mope to present, thank to the cutting of arb wrsncli budgeb thmufiout the land, and no aa br m c e , no cuke k f r WIVIAIDs, and our civil Ilbertles being thrsarrtengd a o s I write this. And yet art continues to be made every day, ewey hour, every minute througlhoua the world, and the magic continues. Mas, I will not be in Centrd Bark to see my friend, Cai Guo-Qizng, draw in the sky with fireworks tomorrow, the 1 5 of September, p d u c i n g 1* luminous pillars, a 1,080- foot halo over the Raservoir and a cascade of fiavss-months in preparation and five minutes to complete 4 1 to celebrate the 150" anniwersq of Centrd Park in New York City! This "Light Cycle" will transform the park for 5 minutes, but IP will have a lasting afterglow Cr those who see it. And speaking of New York City, I want to thank your r weather and your weather man b creating so many umbrella photographs, umbrella anecdotes, umbrella editorials about your misera)pleweather this summer. i am sorry for the weather, but a an umbmlla s afflcionado, I a m deligtptd with what your weather produced. Having not had a wery good healthy summer myself, having been taken by some &imdof "'bug" for 7% weeks, I a m happy to have dinislad this issudatae a s it is, because of my health. We also had June gloom that lasted throughout July and onfy now w e we having our late summer, which is always late, but at Beast we have more to anticipate. Idid spnd several days in Santa Fe in A u ~ s a a ts d spoke with a large audience of a r t i s t bookmakers, since The Book Arts Gr'oup in Santa Fe has over 245 members, and they are changing the landscape of artist books. They are a live4 group with an incredible amount of energy and creativity. And that was my travel, but this issue is full of repwts from Europe, Paris, and SoHo, and next issue will hawe a report of the Baltic countries and the artist book exhibition in Vilnius. A s we have alwayssaid, Umbrella covers the World now in ib 26* year.
s The cover this issue 1 by a Basque h b t , P d r o E~Puar, who s h d M at the Fine Art School o f BOIbm,lhpsc8 in the C m q islasad, moved back to Basque countv, then In 1998 mow4 to Bogof6, whew helib4 until 1996. Then, back to Bsqus c o u n f ~ and , he ream& to ColomBbia in 280 I where he now lives. The title oftha cower is "GorilOa with Vegetable Umbrella and Buaefly in View". Somettping light is definlteiy in order durlng these h d times. As fnr ;Lctidticrs this autumn, check out the book Mrs In Fmsdupt, London, New York City and elsewhere. And there Is a new history of a r t i s t s books from Martha Hallion mviewed In this issue a well, one part of which s is an homage to Ulises Carri6n. This issue is dedicated to the memory of Jules Engel, who was n firm supporter of Umbrella for many years. He died in his 94* year after influencing3 generations odanimators, having been a bundlng professor at CaI Arb, but also an animator of Fantasia, among others. s His data i recorded under "ArtPeopie" in this issue, but no one can describe how generous o f spirit was this mazing man. Talented In so many fields, he thought of each human being he met as just that, a Lllow human being. But he also had a cutting sense of humor that m d e his )if%rich and fulfilling, heelping t o weather the storms that we all k e and making his l k a creative i journey a a printmaker, bookmaker, painter, and s sxquisite (ilmmlker. Just call him up on Google and see who he is, for he i s always with us thanks to his creative practice which has left us paintings, prints, books and apecidly his amazing films. To Jules, this issue with a Cnny cover! II think he would hawe liked it.
Cover: Gorilla with Vegetabk IUpnbmlla and Batter@ in View, by P d r o Eguiluz
6 UmbrellaAssociates, 2003 Vol. 26,110.2 ( September 2003) Umbrella is gublbhed frregularly by Umbrella Associates, and the editor Q Judith A. Hornerg, P.O. Box 3640, SantoMonka, CA 90408. Phone: [phone], fmc (310)3994070. Ematl: [e-mail]. W e b s i t e 3: s http://~.cdophon.comlJ~un,d%ubdptfons rorradloblefor ate the calendar year only, payabIe in American currency or Paypal.
Helen Jones Carter, a former sculptor and wife of the composer Elliott Carter, died in May at the age of 95. She was trained as an artist at the Art Students League in New York, studying primarily with the sculptor Alexander Archipenko. During the 1930s's, she worked as one of the directors of the W A art program in New York. Her portrait head of Marcel Duchamp is in the collection of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in rd. Fernmd Fonssagrives, a photographer known for his elegant pictures of his first wife, the noted model Lisa Fonssagrives, and his later pictures of emale nudes wiht patterns of light on their skin, died in April at the age of 93. After being a fashion photographer in the 1940s and 1950s for Town and Country andHarper's Bazaar,he later became a sculptor. Maxwell L. hderson, director of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art through five stormy years, resigned in May in dismay over an abandoned expansion plan and philosophid differences with the museum's board. He will stay on b a r d until fall. Geoffrey Bardon, the white painter and teacher credited with inspiring Australian Aboriginesto depict their ancient culture in ways that could be shown and sold to the world, died in May at the age of 63. He encouraged tribal artists of the desert peoples of cenval Australia to transfer their vivid images of ancestral times from sand and rock drawings and body decoration to paintings in acrylics on hardboard and canvas, thus making them permanent and portable. This occurred in the 1970s, which led to a thriving, Australiawide indigenous art movement. Gerrit Henry, an art critic and poet, died on 1 May at the age of 52. He was best known for his widely published writings on art, in which he tended to favor contemporary combinations of traditional representation and modernist abstraction. Tahiya Halilm, 83, Egypt's top female painter, who dedicated her realist art to presenting Egyptian daily life and folklore, died in Cairo in May. She used bold colors and simplified lines to depict subjects such as war and human suffering.
Pierre Restany, 72, an influential French art critic perhaps best known for championing artists such as Uves Klein, Christo, Aman and Jean Tinguely, died of heart failure on 29 May in Paris. He coined the term "Nouveau Realisme" in 1960 to describe a group of artists with a postmodern bent. Though often compared to Pop Art, Noweau Realisrne did not celebrateartists who turned soup cans into art objects, but instead "reveled in rubbish, torn posters, abandoned meals." He was founder of the Domus Academy in Milan, a post-graduate research institute for fashion and design and beginning in 1985, he edited the Mlan-based magazine D'Ars. He frequently organized large international exhibitions, such as the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seoul in the late 1980s and the 1999 Venice Biennale, as well as shows in Shanghai and Havana (2000) and in Istanbul (2001). He served as president of the Palais de Tokyo contemporary a t center in Paris since January r 2002. Skunder Boghossian, an Ethiopian-born artist who played an important role in introducing European modernist styles into Africa and who, as a longtime resident of the United States, became one of the best-known African modern artists in the West, died on 4 May at the age of 65. He taught at Howard University from 1974 through 2000. Marilyn 6.Fischbach, founder of the Fischbach Gallery in New York City since 1960, died in Paris in June. She had the courage to recognize and present young talent exhibiting many importantartists includingEvaHesse,Ronald Bladen, Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, Jane Freilicher, and Leigh Behnke. Doug Michels, an architect and artist and a founding member of Ant Farm, a radical at and design collective of r the late 1960s and 70s, died on 12 June near Sydney, Audstralia at the age of 59. Along with Chip Lord, Hudson Marquezand Curtis Schreier, they created"CadillacRanch" in 1974, a monuental out- door sculpture in Amarillo, Texas,consisting of 10 used Cadillacs planted nose-first in the ground. The other cross-over success as a 1975 performance work, "Media Burn, " in which Mr. Michels drove a white Cadillac through a pyramid of burning television sets. Moshe Kupferman, aleading Israeli abstractartist who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust,died in June at 77.The artist held exhibitions at Paris' Mush National dlArtModeme, the International Art Fair in Basel,
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Switzerland, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Last year, Jerusalem's Israel Museum held a major retrospective of his work.Kupferman's abstract designs-painted primarily in violet, black, white and occasionally green-were influenced by his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Fred Sandback, a sculptor internationally known for his Minimalist works made from lengths of colored yam, died in late June by his own hand, at the age of 59. His work played between material fact and perceptual illusion, asking the viewer to focus on the here and now. He traveled intemationally to install his works at galleries and museums, canying all the materials he needed in a single bag. Rem Koolhaas won the $125,000 Praemium Imperiale arts award in architecture. Bridget Riley won in painting, and Mario M e n won in sculpture. Awards including a gold medal will be made in Tokyo on 23 October. Dorothy Miller, whose work at New York's Museum of Modern Art boosted the careers of American modem painters including Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, died in July at the age of 99. She not only became the arbiter of what was in vogue as modern art, but also the tutor who coaxed the public to accept it. She was one of the first curators hired by the Museum of Modem Art in 1934. She retired from MOMA in 1969.
Robert M. Batscha, who worked to preserve, archive, study and permanently exhibit two of the more ephemeral modes of mass communication as the longtime president of the Museum of Television and Radio, died at the age of 58 in early July. Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modem Art in new York City, whose influencewas defined by agile scholarship, important exhibitions on such artists as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, and a riveting speaking style that attracted standing-roomsnly audiences, died of colon cancer at the age of 57 in mid-August. Harold Altman, a painter, printmaker and lithographer whose work was shown intemationally and in major American museums including the Whitney and the Museum of Modem Art, died in July at the age of 79. He was a professor emeritus of art at Pennsylvania State University. James Romano, a longtime curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art who recently finished the installation of the museum's famed Egyptian collection, died in August as a result of an automobile accident. He was 56. Ward Bennett, a New York designer of furniture, houses and much more, whose clean lines and exquisite materials quietly defined an era, died in August at the age of 85. He was one of the earliest American designers to introduce industrial materials into the home, well before the high-tech look became popular in the 70s. Edward P. Alexander, an authority on museums, died in July at the age of 96. He had been the president of the American Association of Museums and the founder and first director of the University of Delaware's Museum Studies Program. Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, has been named the new director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. No stranger to the Whitney, he has served twice before, most recently as a senior curator. He succeeds Maxwell L. Anderson, who resigned under fire in May. When he begins his position in the fall, he plans to make the museum a center for living artists, hoping to initiate collaborations with other museums both in the United States and abroad.
C. C. Wang, a Chinese-American artist and collector, who sold important and sometimes controversial examples of classical Chinese painting to many American museums and who was viewed by admirers as the last in a centuries-old line of Chinese scholar-artists, died in July at the age of 96.
Rosalie McKenna, a photographer of Dylan Thomas and other literary lions, died in June at the age of 84. Her first portrait was of Truman Capote, whom she photographed in Florence, Italy in 1950. She also portrayed Auden, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, the actor James Earl Jones, and Robert Frost., among others.. Her autobiography, "A Life in Photography", was published in 199 1. Gertrude Samuels, a writer and photographer whose 50year career took her from the displaced-persons camps of postwar Europe to the blight of drug addition in America's cities, died in early July at the age of 93. Her early career was with the New York Times Magazine, after which she went Ereelance.
John Coplaus, a founder and former editor of Artforum
magazine, whose careeer also encompassed phases as a
painter, critic, curator, museum director and finally a photographer of discomfiting images of his own aging body, died in August at the age of 83.
Anne Little Poulet, curator emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has been named the director of the Frick Collection in New York City-the first woman to be its director in its 68-year history. Although never having directed a museum, Poulet has had over 30 years' experience in the art world. Albert Field, the designated expert in divining when the surreal is real, at least in the work of Salvador Dali, died in August at the age of 86. He was the official archivist for Dali, proceeding to catalog thousands of authentic Dali works and fakes. After being employed by the artist as his archivist, Field decided to concentrate on prints rather than on paintings and other art forms. He even got to know all but one of the major forgers personally. John Sheaman, 73, distinguished scholar of Italian Renaissanceart, product of the Courtauld Institute, and later professor at Princeton, and ending his career at Harvard from whence he retired in 2002, died in England. He was the outstanding scholar on Raphael and furthered the cause of art history inBritain beyond all others. He advised on the restoration of Prllichelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Robert Jackson, a muralist and master of trompe I'oeil artistry, died in August at the age of 72. His work appears in the American Wing period rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he created some of the ornament in the Gothic Revival Library and in the Renaissance Revival Parlor, where he painted the ceiling. He also worked on many historic houses. Cedric Price, one of the most influential British architects of the 20" century, died in August at the age of 68. He was a charismatic force in the 1960s, when the hard-edged style of Brutalism began to lose its hold on the liberal imagination and Pop Art sensibility of swinging London swept in to takes it place. Rather than create buildings, he championed an architecture of process: flexible, ephemeral, responsive to the changing needs of users and their times. Robert Koch, a decorative arts expert who helped make the name Tiffany one that every flea market browser wants to hear, died in August at the age of 85. In 1958, Koch, newly PhD7d from Yale, was cwator for an exhibition of Louis
Comfort Tiffany's work at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. That was the beginning of the boom for Tiffany's work. Lecturer, writer, and professor, Koch donated many Tiffany works to several museums.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is the winner of the Third Annual Lucelia Artist Award, an annual prize intended to encourage an atist's future development and experimentation, by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. See ArnericanArt.si.edu
The Praemiurn lmperiale is being awarded to Bridget Riley for painting, Mario M e n for sculpture, Rem Koolhaas for architecture, among others.
Jules Engel, animator, producer, film director, and abstract artist who served many years in executive capacities at UPA and Format Films and founded the ExperimentalAnimation Program at CalArts, for which he was director until two years ago, died September 6 after a three-week hospital stay. He was 94. Engel began his career in animation working for animation pioneer Charles Mintz, where Engel was first employed as an inbetweener. He moved in the late 1930sto the Walt Disney Studios, where he worked on the Chinese and Russian dance sequences ofFantasia and on Bambi. He later became one of the founding members of the studio United Productions of America and with Robert Cannon developed toons such as Gerald McBoing Boing, Madeline and Mr. Magoo. He won many awards famous for abstract animation, but he was also a painter, a printermaker and an artist book maker as well. He was a patron of Umbrella, and although he left no kin, his extended family is throughout the world with those who admired him, learned from him, became famous because of his lessons, and learned the lesson of life as well. Shereen LaPlantz, extraordinary bookmaker and writer of several books on bookmaking, died of cancer in September after a noble fight with the disease.
Haraldbp de Campos: Between eonereGsm and neoBaroque (in memoriam)
An homage by Clemente Padin @dontivideo, Uruguayl Poet, translator and essayist, the Brazilian Haroldo de Campos, passed away on August 16th in Sao Paulo. He was one of the historic concrete poets participating in the first exhibition of Concrete Poetry of 1956 in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and one of the most important figures of the 20th century in his field. His efforts intended to give legitimacy to concrete poetry, linking it to the Western tradition, seeking examples in all literatures to which it would apply. At the same time, he tried to link concrete poetry with the Theory of the Gestalt in relation to the visual syntax that it established. Born August 19, 1929, in Sao Paulo, Harold de Campos studied Law at the University of Sao Paulo. In 1952, he along with his brother Augusto da C a m p and Decio Pignatari, founded the Noigandres Group of concrete poetry. He participated in the official launching of The National Exhibition of Concrete Art, in Museum of Modem Art of Sao Paulo (1956) and in the vestibule of the MtEC of Rio de Janeiro (1957). They also published the influential magazine "Noigrandes", in 1958, participated in the edition of the Pilot Plan of Concrete Poetry, jointly with Augusto da Campo and Decio Pignartan, creating great influence in world-wide poetic circles, constituting itselfin the manifesto for the "structural" tendency of poetry. In the following years he worked as a translator, critic and literary theoretician, besides being chair in postgraduate studies in Communication and the Semiotics of Literature in the Pontifical University of Sao 505050Paulo. More than a translator, he was really a "transcreadory' or transcreator of works like the Iliad of Homer, the Divine Comedy of Dante and Goethe's Faust, among others. His "recreation" of Proven~alpoetry or Japanese poetry and his constant searchfor poetic excellence He translated in all times and places is well known. Italian, German, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, English, Japanese, Provenc;al and Chinese, some of which could be called "anthological" like some chapters of Rnnegan's Wake of Joyce or texts by Mayakovsky, Li Po, Ungaretti, Vallejo and many others. His text "Of TransIationas Criticism and as Creatio50ny'(1963) is where he delineates clearly his conception of translation which is not just a mere transcription of the content of texts, but which served to preserve the para-semantic mechanisms of what the author valued in the original language. In his book "The Operation of Text'' (1976), he spoke of "transculturation" talking about the historical projection of the concept of "transcreation", althoughthe idea comesfrom
the field of Anthropology. In relation to poetry, we hear his words: "My poetry followed two lines: a) the one of specific poetry, that was characterized by the functional use of the white space (or black) of the page and the typesetting resources, tending to syntactic geometrism and Minimalism (avant la lettre) semantics; b) the one of NeoBaroque proliferation.. .(Taken fi-omHaroldo by himself" translation by Alfredo Fressia). That is to say, it cultivated not only spatial poetry, strongly structural in classic concrete poems but also "verbal petry"50 in which the verse or the "poem in proseyy a strong Baroque component predominating had that finds its peak in the book Galaxies (1984)' "an experiment between narrative and visionary-imaginetic" in his own words...The concrete aspect of his poetry continues the tradition of the visual poetry in MallarmC (structural geometry), or of semiotic dismemberment of Cummings ,or of visual syntax as in the "figurata carminay', or of the direct-analogical juxtaposition of poems of Apollinaire, or the ideogrammatic method of Pound, etc. As in the Pilot Plan: "Concrete poetry: tension of word-things in space-time, in other words, the description of verse by p r e s e ~ n g the work in all its dimensions: the "verbi-voco-visual". He harmonized the apparent contradiction between his interest in concrete poetry and literary Baroque. (It is also known that de Campos had widespread influence on Brazilian popular music, with composers like Caetano Veloso basing songs on his poems). He published more Zhan 30 books since 1950. In all the fields in which his genius inserted itself, he left creative seeds and a universal character of his propositions. With his poetry he established a unity combining verbal, the visual and sound. A worthy life, with all its intentions.
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ARTIST BOOKS
NEWS
Article in the Los AngeIes Times on illuminating modern manuscripts on 15 June 2003. *"To Replace Paint and Page, Artists Try Pixel Power'' by Linda Yablonsky in the 17 August issue of the New York Times says that "the DVD may be becoming the new version of the artist's book or limited-edition print. Lawrence Weiner's "Moved Pictures" series is featured.
2003 &Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture: "Making Books: Rocky Stinehour Going Back and Forth" with Jeny Kelly: at Wellesley College, Clapp Library Lecture Room, 18 November at 4:30 p.m.
Dorothy Goldie has been named the new Executive Director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts as of 1 August after a national search.
*"Double-FrontedBooks" by Richard Kostelanetz speaks of a technique of combining two titles back to back, including Michael Snow's Cover to Cover (1975), "a more ingenious double-fronted book, offering two sequences of several dozen photographs that follow one another in a roughly associational way until two pictures in the middle portray Snow himself turning over a book in the presence of a cameraman". @tor's note: one of the tour de force bookworks in the past 35 years!) *"Eating Our Words" is a short article about the Edible Book High/Low Tea in Pages for July/August.
Claire Jeanine Satin will be artist of the month at the Center for Book Arts in New York from 1 December - 3 1 January 2004; is in the Converse College show, the Personalities, Art & the World of the Third Kind show at Artpool traveling to Lithuania, Belgium and France in 2003/4, is in the Beyond Reading show, will appear in the Turning Pages show celebrating South Florida Artist Made Books from 30 October - March 2004; is in the Heavy Metal show at the JaEe Collection at FAU through 5 October; is in the juried show of Florida Contemporary at the National Museum of Women in the Arts through January 2005 and much more. William Harroff received the 2003 Frank B. Sessa Scholarship of Bta Phi Mu to attend the Future of the Book Conference in Cairns, Australia in April. He is also in the national book art exhibition, Under Cover, through 1 November at the St. Louis Artist Guild. He also has an installation in the Wexford show in Ireland and at the Parallel Realities show at Artpool in Budapest. Genie Shenk was interviewed by Harriet Gamble in Expression for JulyIAugust 2003, in "Artist is a Path: An Interview."
LisC Melhorn-Bod and her participation in the exhibition Family Matters at the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, Ontario appears in Art Papers for SeptemberIOctober. Word Art is a series of ten poetry broadsides printed by letterpress on handmade paper from the Press at the Palace of the Governors. Poems are by Kim Addonizio, John Brandi, Renee Gregorio, Naomi Shihab Nye, DJ Renegade and poets to be announced. Tom Leech, the printer and papermaker, has done an edition of 70, of which 55 are for sale. Individual prints are $55.00. The series is $500 by advanced subscription. Subscriberswill receive a protective, handmade portfolio. Write to Tom Leech at the Palace Pres, P.O. Box 2087, Santa Fe, NM 87504. [phone] or tleech@,mnm.state.nm.us
RESOURCES A new archive of out-of-print artist books is at www.wsworkshop.ordartistsbooks.html.Studentsscholars, collectors, and others can now view and study the more than 150 unique books published by the Women's Studio Workshop. The archive will include every page of the outof-print edtions and selected pages of the in-print editions.
Bookbinding database: Anewbookbindingvisual database from the British Library can be viewed at
htt~:N~rodigi.bl.uk/bindines/index.as~
Book History Online (BHO), designed, managed, maintained, and published by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, in cooperation with national committees in more than 30 countries, is a bibliographical database on the history of the printed book
and libraries. The databases include bibliographical information on the history of printing and publishing, papermaking, bookbinding, book illustration, type design, and type founding, bibliophilism and book collecting, libraries, and scholars. Visit at http:/M.kb.nl/bho
BOOK FAIRS
Good DoglBon Chien, an installation piece by Michael Peven of the University of Arkansas, is now available through a CD with a small booklet that features a few installation shots, as well as a slide show of installations at various venues, plus two inteniews with the artist, one of which the artist did with the dog. These are not ordinary photographs, but they are approximately 7 feet by 11 feet, mammoth images that want to test photography as architectural elements. Peven feeds small images into a computer and then blows them up to dramatic proportions. He then has a number of "tiles", which are than reassembled to recreate the original photographs, revealing a grid created by the process. Peven is also trying to force viewers to consider the relationship between space and photography. Includes a QuickTime movie version of the presentation as well. $5.00 from Primitive Press, 514 N. Mission Blvd., Fayetteville, AR 72701-3519.
COURSES
Contemporary Creative Books, the 6th international symposium and book fair in Marseille, France from 18 19 October. Exhibitions must complete an entry form and return it by 3 1 August. Those not able to attend the fair can still have books shown (30 September deadline). Send to vlsavis0,netcoumercom for entry materials or more information. Frankfurt Book Fair, 8 - 13 October with Russia as the Guest of Honor. frankhrt@,book-fair.com Small Press Fair, in London, Conway Hall, 23 October. 35 small press publishers.
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London Artist Bookfair at the Mall in London from 28 - 30 November 2003. International in scope. Editions/Artists' Books '03 from 6 - 9 November, at the Starett Lehigh Building in Chelsea at 601 W. 26'h St. On the 14~ floor. Organized by Michele Quinn of Brooke Alexander Editions, Susan Inglett of I.C. Editions, and David Platzker of Printed Matter. sinnlett@,iceditions.com
EXHlBlTlONS
San Francisco Center for the Book has a new catalog for September through December 2003. An amazing array of courses from theory to practice of all kinds, with stellar faculty members. www.sfcb.org CBA: The Center for Book Arts in New York City has a new catalog for Fall 2003. www.centerforbookarts.org Or e-mail: info@,centerforbookats.org Book Arts Workshops will be held at Florida Atlantic University (the Arthur & Mata Jafe Collection) with courses on concertina bindings, Turkish marbling, and Practical Magic. North Bennet Street School has a schedule of Fall 2003 workshops including gilding and non-adhesive bindings. For more information, htt~://www.nbss.org or 39 North Bennet St., Boston, MA 021 13,617-227-0155, ext. 102.
Under Cover: Book Arts is a national slide-juried exhibit of book arts curated by M.J. Goerke. . Exhibit dates: September 2 1 through 1 November 2003. Under Cover sponsored by St. Louis Artists' Guild, 2 Oak Knoll Park, St. Louis, MO 63 105.
Design/Construct/Engage, an exhibition of artist books by Ed Hutchins, at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 15 August 5 October.
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Girl Printers: Talented Women Strut Their Stuff at Union College, Mandeville Gallery, Schenectady, NY through 7 December. The Peace Library: Artists Books of War and Peace Comprised of handmade books by California Artists, the purpose is to provide avenue for dialog to address the issues surrounding the theme of war and peace. The Library will travel and additional books will be added to the exhibition as a reflection of the community it is visiting. In an effort to preserve the essence of each show, an expandable handmade catalog of the entries will be created for the Peace Library.
For information on how to book the exhibit or for Entry f o m s call or ernail: Catherine Trujillo 8051756-2305 cmiill@,cd~oIv.edu Mining the Lloyd: Artists lreveah secrets and treasures from the Lloyd. December 1, 2003 - Febnmy 28, 2004, Lloyd Library and Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio. Exhibition of artists' books inspired by rare and unusual scientific texts from the LLoyd Library in Cincinnati, Ohio. M s t s included are Carol Barton, Ed Hutchins, Karen Wirth, Diane Stemper, Kate Kern, George Gessert, Diana Dunclan Holmes, Timothy R i o r h , Carolyn Whitsel, Karen F u r h a n , Gabrielle Fox, Rebecca Mo&on, Susan B Ellen Shefield, Beth Bran, Celene Hawkins, Whonda Gushee and Peg Rhein. Ninth Welrford Artists' Bmk Exlhibition (international) in September/October at Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford, Ireland. [e-mail] Coumtedom 2003, 18 September 30 October. Special Collections Gallery of M m o t t Library, University of Utal~ in Salt Lake City. Crossroads: The Hnterswtioaa of Art and Literature, 6 November - 8 January 2004 at the Marriott Library, University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Fifth Annual Artist Books Exhibition at Noosa Regional Gallery, Queensland, Australia from 29 August - 19 October. Theme is Watermarks. wvvw.noosaregionalgallew.or~./books Beyond Reading at the Ellipse Art Center, Arlington, VA from 9 September through 18 October. Massin in Continuo: A Dictionany explores the depth and range of Massin's career as book designer typographer, art director and author at the San Francisco Center for the Book through 26 September.
B80KS.03 an exhibition of artists' books at Noosa Regional Gallery, Queenslmd, Australia from 29 August to 19 October. This is the fifth annual artist book exhibition, with this year's theme of Watennaxks. www.noosare~onalp;allew.orgJbooks
Joyce CaatPer Shaw: Library QraaP-tet, an exhibition of Gunrent and retrospective works in four libraries: 1) The M&ng of a Bmk: Conversationswith Jo from the Anatomy Lesson at the Aahaneurn Music & APts Library, La J o b ; at theUGSD Ckisel Library, "WordPoems and Language Images, 1973-2003'" a retrospective of her studio and public woks, including drawings, public installations and artist books, inspired by the word as image and cdligraphies; "Drawings and Dimensional Drawings" from The Anatomy Lesson at the Earl and Birdie Taylor Library, PacSc Beach; arnd at the Mssion Valley Branch Library, "PUblic Projects: Drawing Translations for Pubic Sites, with all exhibitions opening on 20 September and closing on 8 November. This is the Grst collaboration between memkrslhip, university and public libraries in the San Diego area. Catdog available [phone].
San Diego Book Arts Members' h n u d Fall Show at San Diego State University from 4 September - 29 October. Malcolm A. Love Library.
Hea~ Metal: Metails m d the Book Arts through 5 October at the JaEe Atrium Book Arts Gallery, FAU, Boca Raton, FL. Turning Pages: South FPodda Book Arts, from 14January 2004 29 February, FAU, Boca Raton, FL.
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Liibro Latino: Latin h e r i c a n Book Arts from 8 March 24 May 2004 at the Jaffe Atrium book Arts Gallery.
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I t d i m Futudst bookworks from the JaBe Collection including items from FAU's new Rosa Tsillo-Clough Futurism Collection, from 11 October 5 January 2004 in the Wimberly Library, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.
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Mapping I t Out at the Work Space, 96 Spring St.,, New York City, curated by Lesley Heller. 1 August 26 September.
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Jane Hmmond9sBe Zany Poised H a r p w e Blue, Little Sparrows on exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library. ih New artist book wt poems by Raphael Rubinstein, created at Dieu Donne Papermill. Bright Mill Press Second Annual Bright Hill Press National Juried Book Arts Exhibition at the Bright Kill Center, 94 Church St., Treadwell, NY 6 September 2 October.
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Beyond Reading at the Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA, curated by Trudy Van Dyke and Jennifer Morningstar with artists from Canada and the U.S. Focuses on the book as installation and as a sculptural object. Open for Action: An Exhibition of Political Book Art, cocurated by Sharon Gilbert and Richard Minsky from 25 September 5 December 2003 at the Center for Book Arts, New York City. www.centerforbookarts.org
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commercial type to letter press and etchings. This unique forum also provides the ideal opportunity for a programme of talks which we organize to coincide with the fair. We have organized the London Artists Bookfair annually since 1993. The fair plays host to exhibitors from H u n g q , South Korea, USA, France, Germany, CSyprus, Russia, Italy and elsewhere. For information on booking a stand at LAB03 please email your postal address to [e-mail] Matter & Spirit: The Genesis and Evolution of the Book at Wells College Book Arts Center. Book artists are invited to participate in its juried national exhibit. This exhibit will be on display during the month of April 2004 on the Wells College campus in Aurora, New York, and will be part of the major national symposium of the same name, to be held at Wells from 29 April - 1May 2004. Artists are asked to submit up to two items for consideration, in one or two of four categories: fine press work, binding, calligraphy, and artists' books. Those whose work is se!ected will be asked to send a few key sketches, diagrams, or a mock-up of the project, as well as a brief narrative of its creation, as part of the exhibit's focus on process. Entry fee is $20 for up to two items, with checks payable to the Wells College Book Arts Center. For particulars about insurance, packing, etc., see [e-mail], or use your search engine and type in Wells Book Art Center. Stand and Deliver: Engineering Sculpture Into a Book Format, an exhibition of handmade movable books is being organized by the Brookfield Craft Center and the Movable Book Society. The show seeks to locate and exhibit books that incorporate movable parts, pop-ups, or other sculptural elements into the book structure. Books can include paper mechanisms, fantastic folds, motors, sound chips, fiber optics, wire springs, and other materials to lift the message (in word or illustration) off the page and present it to the readerhewer in an engaging fashion. The show will be curated by Ed Hutchins, a long-time book artist and the proprietor of Editions, a studio for producing artist book multiples. "The goal," says Hutchins, "is to showcase inventive and well-crafted books with a strong intellectual content."Stand and Deliver will open in the Spring of 2004 at the Brookfield Craft Center in Connecticut and then travel in the Fall to Mesa College where it will be sponsored by San Diego Book Arts. The 2004 conference of the
Design/Construct/Engage by Ed Hutchins at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts through 1 October. Paper and Metal at MCBA from 16 October - 3 January 2004. Paperworks, Eric Watier: Books at the Galerie du CAUE de la HauteVienne in Limoges, France from 17 September 10October.
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Bernard ViIlers: "Day LightH at Galerie du Caue de la Haute-Vieme, Limoges 17 October - 14 November. "Et toi tu t'appelles coquelicot parce que c'est plu vite fanen at the Bibliioth&que Nationale, Prague from 15 October - 15 November, includmg books by Louise Bourgeois, Yves Chaudouet, Claude Closky, HelenDouglas, Alec Finlay, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Jean-Marie Krauth, Stuart Mills, Jean-Jacques Rullier, Dorothea Schulz, Pierre Tilman, Didier Trenet, Erica Van Horn, Hans Wwanders, Shelagh Wakely.
OPPORTUNITIES 2003 Book Arts Jam, 18 October at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA. www.bookartsiarn.org
Converse College's 3d Biennial Exhibition of Women Book Artists is accepting entries through 1 October. Exhibition is March 2004. Submit 10 slides and resume to Teresa Prater, Dept. Of Art, Converse College, 480 E. Main St., Spartanburg, SC 29302. For additional information, contact [e-mail]
LAB is the dynamic international showcase where artists and publishers sell their work direct to the public from their own stands. It features a wide spectrum of production, from rubber stamp to livre d'artiste to commissioned work by contemporary artists. The printing methods vary from
Movable Book Society will be in San Diego as part of the program. In the Spring of 2005 the show moves to Boca Raton at Florida Atlantic University sponsoredby the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection. In the Summer the show will be sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Guild of Bookworkers at the Denver Public Library. The show concludes in the Fall at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. An illustrated catalog of the exhibition with an interactive CD will be published. Six distinguished books will be awarded trophies, cash prizes, and additional copies of the catalog1CD. The selected books will highlight: Best integration of message and engineering, selected by Robert Sabuda, author, illustrator,teacher, paper engineer, and winner of three Meggendorfer Prizes. Best crafted book, selected by Hedi Kyle, innovative book artist, conservationist, teacher, co-founder of Paper and Book Intensive, andauthor of Library Materials Preservation Manual. Best use of typography, selected by Susan E. King, artist, writer, and the proprietor of Paradise Press since 1975.Best use of serious content, selected by Tom Trusky, Director of the Idaho Center for the Book, university professor, and proprietor of Painted Smiles Press. Best use of humor, selected by Linda Costello, architect, artist, and paper engineer for the Pea Pod Pop-ups. Best use of unexpected materials, selected by Miriam Schaer, whose award-winning multimedia approach to books incorporates a wide variety of found materials and garments. The deadline for entries is November 17,2003. A copy of the call for entries can be downloaded from the Internet at www.artistbooks.com or by sending a self-addressed 6" x 9" envelope with $.60 postage to: Stand and Deliver PO Box 624, Mt Vernon NY 10552-0624 American Printing History Association: 2 p Annual Conference New Work in PrintingHistory at the Grolier Club, New York, 24-26 October 2003. For information contact American Printing History Association, P.O. Box 4519, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10163-4519or www.printinghistorv.org, APHA 2004 Fellowship in Printing History, up to $2,000 for research. Deadline: 1 Dec. 2003. Application at APHA website, or contact Fellowship Committee,APHA, P.O. Box 4519, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10163-4519.
ARTIST BOOK DEALERS (selection)
Art Metropole,788 King St. West, Toronto, Ont. M5V IN6,
Canada h~v://www.artmetro~le.com Pauie Leon Bisson-Millet has a new address at Edelrnannsweg4, 71717 Beilstein, Germany. Tel: [phone] or fax: ((49)07062-978549. Bookartbookshop, 17 Pitfield St., London N1 6HB, England. Bookstodng, 24 rue de Penthiewe (angle av. Matignon) 75008 Paris, France. Tel: [phone], fax: [phone]. Metro: ChampsElyskes C l b e n c e a ~ www.bcakStorming.com d
Boekie Woekie, books by artists, Berenstraat 16,NL 1016 GH Amsterdam, The Netherlands [e-mail] internet catalogue: http://www. boekiewoekie.com Juan Agius, Books & Multiples, features art zines, alternative publications, art magazines, mail art, ephemera, available online at agius.books!@petsurfer.ch or P.O. Box 5243, CH 1211 Geneva, Switzerland. Julia Diamond, Book & Livre, 2230 Camino del Rosario, Montecito, CA 93108. [phone]. Bookandlivre@co~.net20~ c. decorative arts, fashion, architecture and photography Paul Robertson is known as Heart Fine Art and can be reached for amazing catalogs at mail@heartf~11eart.com Ink Tree, Seestrasse 21, CH-8700, Kusnacht, Switzerland www.inktree. ch Hotel des Bains Editions, 28 rue du Pont perce, 27130 VerneuS sur Avre, France AaZbooks.com - BP NO*l La grande Bruythre - F72320 StMaixent, France www.aazbooks.com Nexus Press. www.nexuspress.org Printed Matter has a Winter 2003 Catalog fill of Productsas the New Art, multiples for purchase and gift-giving. Write to 535 W. 22ndSt., New York C t ,10011 or www.printedmatter.org iy Editions & Artists' Books Johan Deumens has issued a new Catalogue no. 24 in February 2003. hn~://ww.artistsbooks.com or Dr. N.G. Piersonstraat 1,2 104 VG Heemstede, Netherlands. Mystical Places Press has a new Artist Books Catalog (nonminiatures) a n d a M i n i a t u r e Book Catalog. Www.mvstical~laces.com Edition Hundertmark, C.Francisco Wood Quintana 17, E-350 17 Tafm Alta, Las Palams de Gran Canaria, Espana. Vamps & Tramps, 2805 Second Ave. South, # 100, Birmingham, AL2811 Volume, 530 West 24Lh Street, New York, NY 10011. [e-mail] Malcolm Campbell, 43 Holland St, London SElgJR, England. [e-mail]
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ARTIST BOOK REVIEWS
Most of the books reviewed here are available at Printed Matter, 535 West2ZndS~, York City, unless otherwise New indicated. would get a response for the first bookshop dedicated to artist's productions of all sorts. Just a few days later, the packages started arriving from Western andEastern Europe, North America and South America, Japan and Australia. They really didn't stop for the next three years, and those of us who visited Amsterdam knew that we would find the largest array of artist publications in the world at the time. We also knew that sometimes we would be put to work to make a new publication on rubberstamps, or help collate pages of a book, or whatever. When the store closed, it was turned into an archive. Now it's up to the libraries and museums of the world to buy these two slipcased volumes and make them an important reference tool for the whole realm of artists' multiples! 730 duotones, 544 pages, a hefty two volumes worth everything, since it is a labor of love that produced this important contribution to the field of artist books. Distributed by d.a.p. www.artbook.com Imagining the Book: International Contemporary Art Encounter 2002 is a stunning exhibition catalog which represented the opening of the new Alexandrian Library is a full-color catalog in Egyptian and in English of artists from all over the world who participated in this colloquium and first exhibition. The artists sent in images before the exhibition-or not-so there is a variety of illustrations, but the variety shows the diversity of book illustrated in this important opening. (You'll need to go to the Internet to see how to order this). Sand in der Vaseline: Kunstlerbiicher 1980-2002 with essays by Uwe Koch, Sabine Roeder, Dorothea Klein, Klaus Pohl and Melitta Kliege (Cologne, Verlag Walther Konig, 2002, $35.00) is a German-language catalog verifying that the artist book is alive and well and living in the world of art. With the diversity and variety one sees in this catalog, one sees how artists are treating the book in ever more varied ways and attitudes. A kind of catalogue raisonnd for Albert Oehlen, Georg Herold, Hans Peter Feldmann, Barbara Bloom, Sophie Calle, Fischli & Weiss, Gelatin, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Ida Applebroog and Heimo Zobernig. Included is work by Martin Kippenberger,Raymond Pettibon, Martin Parr, Araki, Lany Clark, Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ilya Kabakov, Roni Horn, as well as some very well-known European publishers. 400 color illustrations, softcover. Available from d.a.p.
REFERENCE Ulises Carri6n: Personal Worlds or Cultural Strategies? Edited by Martha Hellion, with essays y Issa Maria Benitez, Martha Hawley, and Claudio Goulart, 2 volumes slipcased (Turner, 2003, $49.00)is the result of a research project which culminated in two exhibitions: The Art of Artist's Books at the Institute de Artes Grafiicas de Oaxaca in 1998 and the Biblioteca de Mexico in 1999, and finally Ulises Canibn: Personal Worlds or Cultural Strategies?At Museo de Arte Canillo Gil in Mexico City in July -October 2002. The editor's main aim is to demonstrate the close collaboration between visual artists and writers, and in turn, her intention is to identify the work of Carrion, as a creator and promoter, and to highlight his contribution and active role within the vanguard of contemporary art. Volume 1 includes works created by artists, who over the years have explored, defined and applied production to artist's books, using Ulises' texts as a framework in which to present the theories that he developed for visual discourse. Volume 2 includes an exhaustive catalog of Carrion's works. Images and texts are amplified by an account of his life based on witnesses, photographs, letters, newspaper clippings and notes that have been preserved by family members and friends, from Veracruz to Amsterdam where he died in 1989. These volumes are bilingual (Spanish and EngIish) with juxtaposed texts. The only problem is that the indexes sometimes misspell the names of many artists since they have been transposed into Spanish. Citations in the bibliography also are "spanified" so that the spelling is not correct according to the published title. But these are minor considerations. The books themselves are beautifully produced with black and white reproductions with 423 entries in Volume I. Volume 11 includes an homage to Camon's work, performances, videos, family and friends with a catalog of his work, curriculum vitae, and an oral portrait by his fiiends and family. Ulises was my friend. He sent out an announcement in 1975 (March) 3 months after he had opened up a shop called Other Books & So, asking artists, writers, and publishers to send him "the sort of books you make". He had been aware of people all over the world, and knew he
General Idea Editions, 1967-1995, edited by Barbara Fischer (Mississauga, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Blackwood Gallery, 2003, $25.00 paper) is a catalogue raisonne published in conjunctionwith a major retrospective exhibition of General Idea's editions organized and circulated by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto at Mississauga General Idea Editions 1967 1995 contains over two hundred N1-page black-and-white and color reproductions. The three-hundred-twenty-page book documentsthe complete editions produced during the course of General Idea's historic twenty-five year collaboration: from 1967 two years prior to the official formation of the group in 1969 until 1994, the year in which Felix Pantz and Jorge Zontal died from AIDS-related causes. The visual documentation concludes with XXX Voto (for the Spirit of Miss General Idea), published posthumously by the group's sole s u ~ v i n member AA Bronson in 1995 g Researched by Fern Bayer, the catalogue raisonne includes a list of ephemera, film and video works, a biography, bibliography, and index to the editions. The introduction by exhibition curatorBarbaraFischeris followed by an essay by AA Bronson, excerpts from a conversation between AA Bronson and Mike Kelley, and commentaries by a host of internationally respected artists and writers JeanChristophe Ammann, Lionel Bovier, Cathy Busby, Christophe Cherix, Joshua Decter, Diedrich Diederichsen, John Miller, Philip Monk, and Stephan Trescher. All illustrations are printed in duotone, which show General Idea's work as always focusing on the link between the making of art and its dissemination in the wider marketplace. Distributed by RAM Publications in Santa Monica or through Printed fitter.
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Writers include Caroline Collier, Catsou Roberts and Michael Snow, Martha Langford, A.L. Rees, Lucy Steeds, Amy Taubin, W c o m Le Grice, Regina Cornwell, John Pruitt and Kevin McNeilly. Includes a biography, chronology and bibliography. Almost Cover to Cover plays on Snow's seminal book, Cover to Cover (1975), assessing, through reprinted and newly commissioned writing, the diversity, playllness and complexity of his work. Snow has become a cult figure for many, important for contemporary art, especially those involved in time-basedwork, interdisciplinary,narrative and film.
REV1EWS Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America by Wanen Lehrer & Judith Sloan (NewYork, W. W.Norton, 2003, $35.00 hardback) is a rhapsodic collage of words, voices, faces, and feelings of a new America, one which allows us to see our new neighbors, our larger provinces, and our States, a culture which has energy, ethnicities, and cultures in our diversity. Unlike any other book in the major New York publisher's roster, this artistcreated, conceived, compiled and written oral history portrays the largely invisible lives, images, sounds, and stories of new immigrants and refugees who live in the borough of Queens, New York-the most ethnically diverse locality in the U.S. where 138 different languages are spoken. Lehrer & Sloan are residents of Queens, where the major thoroughfare Queens BLVD-with up to 12 lanes at one point-becomes notorious for the number of pedestrians killed trying to cross its densely M ~ c k e d expanse. This serves as a metaphor of how newly arrived immigrants and refugees must traverse the way with great difficulty they navigate their way into the fabric of American life. Lehrer, a professor at SUNY Purchase, has been a connoisseurof .typographyyears before it was fashionableon the computer. With his intense knowledge of typography and design, he has created a a simulated roadway through the histories of these rekgees with concrete and yellow stripes, maps and gutters decorated with ethnic traditions. In addition, there are portraits of the people interviewed-strong, color photographs of people who have had a dream of America as the land of the free. Incorporating the very archival documents of each of their neighbors as decorative elements on the page, Lehrer and Sloan make this book a living history of a slice of America.
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Michael Snow: almost Cover to Cover is the result of Michael Snow's first retrospective in England at the Arnolfini (London,BlackDog Publishing, 2001, $26.95US, $39.95 Canada). Michael Snow is renowned as a pioneering filmmaker and conceptual artist, best known for Wavelength, one of the most influential experimental films ever made. This book traces the threads running through Snow's practice from 1960s to the present, from his early Walking Woman series to his most recent works. His primary concern with perception is always evident in the wide range of media he has used throughout his career, fkom film, photography and installation to painting and audio work.
Sloan is the director of Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through the Arts, an arts mentorship program creating collaborations between disparate communities as well as being an adjunct professor at NYU. She is an actress, writer and radio producer as well. The collaboration is intimate and sympathetic. The stories they have collected include the objects, documents and memories the families have transferred fiom home to home, historical and cultural contexts, along with the authors' commentaries. The soundtrack (the CD is in a pocket in the back) is done with great professionalism, collaging the words fiom the oral histories with music sometimes traditional, sometimes created especially for the words, but each cut is a saga, a tradition, a telling, a musical offering. The book is like a high-energy cocktail, bringing us sociology with an aesthetic bent, teaching us what America really is, not a melting pot, but a mosaic, and creating a full portrait with music, words, and the soundtrack for the movie which happens everyday on Queens Blvd. Three years in the making, this work merits a special award for intuitive understanding of a culture, of a neighborhood, ofa country. This is a grft for anyone who is sensitive to origmality, vitality and where they are living in the U.S. It is a gift to us!
Uwe Lohrer. The original project was done in 1979. The plates are glowing. The second project is a complex work in which the artist restored a sculptural work at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, during the last few months before he passed away in 1998. He expanded the work in the process. It grew and grew as he worked, bolted and gluing it to a wooden wall. The photographs were taken on 1 March 1998. A glowing tribute to an artist who always re-invented himself. German and English texts. 64 pages, 10 in color. Dist. by d.a.p.
~ m g by Santiago Melazzini is one of many flipbooks by o this exquisite Argentinian photographer. Only 4 x 2.5 inches, this small work fits in the palm of your hand, reading both fiom front to back and back to front, and becomes animated with the hand.. You can almost hear the bandoneon (Argentinian musical instrument) opening and closing and hear that tango music in your mind. One of a series available from d.a.p. (Buenos Aires, la marca, 2001, $5.99) Dieter Roth: here and there with essays by Frank Kicherer and Bjdrn Roth reflects two projects from Roth's Stuttgart period (Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz, 2003, $16.95 hardback) Roth was aRenaissance man,an artist who made no distinctions between art and life. A poet, artist, filmmaker, musician, graphic designer, Dieter Roth, Diter Rot, Dieterrot, or Karl Dieter Roth was all of the above. He changed his name with the various places he chose to live, such as Reykjavik, London, Basel, Hamburg and Providence, Rhode Island. The first of these projects is a 25-part serigraph series printed with Frank Kicherer in 1990, and photographed by
Mona Lisa Goes Russia by George Pusenkoff (Heidelberg, Kehrer Verlag, 2002, $38.00, dist. by Consortium Books) is a saga by the photographer, who takes his version of the Mona Lisa to sites of his native Russia. The editors refer to Lautrtmont's quote "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" but Mona Lisa in this case is not to be compared to the surrealism of the quote. Instead, Pusenkoff returns to his homeland and stops by such places as the Russian Museum placing Mona Lisa next to a Malevich, or in Red Square, among Russian icons, on a bus, next to statues of Lenin, in snow and in sun, at markets, and in the doctor's ofice. In most of these full-page color photographs, Mona Lisa seems somewhat "alien" to the normal routine of Russian life, thus they seem surrealistic. Instead, I believe this is an ironic, almost subversive commentary on how we deal with pictures. The Morning Star in which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine is Illuminated by Nick Bantock (San Francisco, Ckronicle Books, 2003, $19.95 hardback) is the final chapter of the Griffin & Sabine stories, in which the fate of Matthew and Isabella-and their unexpected kinship with Grmn and Sabine is tested. Isabella is drawn into her predestined journey to Egypt, a journey that forces her to explore a world beyond her imagination. In Alexandria, challenging his deepest fears, Matthew makes his own compelling discoveries in the fertile fields of both archaeology and the human heart. Relying upon myth, memory and Bantock's expansive imagination, this mystery that began with an enigmatic postcard from Sabine to Grif5n reaches its dramatic conclusion. Buy two, one for yourself and one for your friends to whom you have given the rest of the series. This epistolary romance ends with this volume.
Lu ShengZhong: First Encounter, edited by Weiqing (Chambers Fine Art LLC, 2000, $35.00, dist. by d.a.p.) serves as a catalog as well as an artist book, by one of the Chinese artists who came into their own, freed from the Cultural Revolution strictures that dictated what was and was not acceptable art. Lu ShengZhong took the direction of classical styles, deeply immersing himself in the native folk tradition of paper cutting which produced striking formal expressions of ideas both philosophical and religious in nature. Created as a softbound, stab bound traditional Chinese bookwork, First Encounter includes two floor-to-ceiling scrolls made of lacy, intricate red cutout forms pasted on a black ground, called Great Peace and Tranquillity and Poetry of Harmony. The book serves also as a diary for the presentation of his artwork, the people involved, and a "how to" papercutting lesson as well. The process almost seems more important than the end product, that which we cannot see because of the size of the works, but the book is a work of art in itself. Christophe W. Mao has written a fascinating foreword, and the introduction to Lu ShengZhong's work is by Wu Hung. The boxed edition is an exquisite book with 70 Mlpage color illustrations. Includes a biochronology.
A Penny Dreadful by Gustave Morin (Toronto, Insomniac Press, 2003, $16.95 paper) simulates the 19* century English fornl of popular literature, lavishly illustrated with garish and grotesque pictures depicting lurid crimes and shocking romance, circulating cheaply among the lower classes. Morin now revisits the penny dreadful where the crimes remain the same but all the romance is gone. 10 years in the making, this is a large suite of works that are neither literature nor graphic art, but a hybrid-and not even a graphic novel. Included is a crazy quilt of 20th century imagery collidingwith mongrel semioticsachieving a unique approach to a kind of flip-book (but it really is too big for that) and a comic book, or a tour through the margins where personal and social collapse,filteredthrough the lens of political impotence. An "appendix" by celebrated concrete poet, jwcuny, completes the volume. Lots of fun and never the same twice. Available from Insomniac Press, 192 Spadina Ave., Suite 403, Toronto, ON, Canada M5T 2C2
images from disparate sources as a way of bridging narrative structures and creating a new genre of indeterminateorigin. 12 chapters, three appendices and an index organize the materials into short works each speculating and offering a particular rumination on how siwcance is created. So there is a book of essays, or perhaps sections of a treatise or perhaps both at once. In fact, the author offers a challenge to the reader in the way we perceive information, trying to create the page spreads as long strings of emotions, theories and memories, somewhat personalized and broken down from their original forms, theories as lived in practice. They are part of the author's installations and collages, creating literary into visual art. The works are open and complex and the quote on the back from Victor Hugo, perhaps, says it all: "This will kill that. The book will destroy the building." Why not read it and see? Prisoners' Inventions by Angelo (Chicago, Whitewalls, 2003, $12 paper) is the result of a commission to Angelo, an incarcerated artist, to write and illustrate a booklet about the ingenious, practical, and sometimes bizarre things he has seen prisoners make. As a result, Angelo generated more than 100 pages of drawings and text, representing 78 different inventions or skills. It also demonstrates how prisoners personify their environment and attempt to recreate living conditions from outside of prison. From making cottage cheese to "toilet bowl" bombs, from vent covers to modesty curtains, from chess boards to pencil holders, it is all ingenious techniques for storage, bathing, cooking and dining, privacy, recreation, home beautification and so much more. Angelo's texts and drawings show you how to improvise a wake-up alarm, grill a cheese sandwich in a locker, make an immersion heater from razor blades and popsicle sticks, use a toilet to chill a soda or take a hot bath, and complete many other tasks we take for granted on the outside. The texts are often anecdotal in references to daily prison r life, including small tales about the ways prisoners ty to skirt prison rules. The pen drawings are highly detailed, allowing for clear understanding of materials used and how the objects function. This is a glimpse into the social environment of prison, where inventiveness and ingenuity are needed to satisfy even the most basic human desires. Temporary Services, which commissioned Angelo, is an expanding and contracting artists' group in Chicago. www.temporaryse~ces.org A sculptural version of
Hotel Terminus by Stephen Lapthisophon (Chicago, Whitewalls, 1999, $15 softbound) brings together text and
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Prisoners' Inventions is currently on view in Fantastic at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA) through February 2004. Of Sand I Sing by Bob Dombrowski (New York, D.P. Productions, 2003) is a small color printed chapbook of meditations on sand and gorgeous illuminations produced with a Mac and an Epson printer, a kind of tribute to the patterns that sand makes and ruminations about those patterns. For more information, contact d.p. [e-mail] The Saranac Memorandum: AProfessionaI Observation at the End ofthe Aquarian Age by Gary Richman (Exeter, N, 2003) is Number 19 of Blue Book Issues by the artist. An art professor at the University of Rhode Island since 1966, Richman came across a yellow legal pad about a year ago that was written by his own hand. He saved an evaluation he had written about a class he taught back in 1973, and threw the rest out. 30 years later, he has done this lga installment in his Blue Book series, combining text and images. He evaluated the 1973 Junior Seminar adding images without any intended meaning, appropriating from a variety of sources. Being a period when the professor saw the end of the funding for the Vietnam war, the passage of environmental laws and women's rights legislation, the beginning of the oil embargo, and the Yom Kippur War, many of the images reflect some of those thoughts.
LITTLE BOOKS Gabriele Picco by the artist (Ravenna, Edizioni Essegi, 2002, $15.00 hardback) are a series of drawings handcolored that explore life, loves, sex, and politics in a fantastic way, drawn for the exhibition he had at Le Case d7Artein Milano. Wild and wonderfid!
installations, surveillance uncovers Hearth as simulation. This catalog documents the history of the Hearth's journey to date. There is also an image of the custodial contract. Remember those logs in the fireplace? Well, in Australia and New Zealand, they are everywhere!
000: The One Who is Defined by Kasper Andreasen (Amsterdam, 2002, $18.00 flipbook) is a little book of perforated coupons (like bakery tickets) like a vocabulary test and memory game rolled into one, but not practical or logical. Each page, divided down the middle and stamped twice with the same number, presents two different ways of saying the same thing-almost. "The one who leads horses" shares the page with "some chauffeur"; "The one who needs direction" with "some navigator7'; "The ones that study" with "some students". On the back side of these statements are two identical photocopied images. You can flip the images, but this is not a flipbook. The progression goes from being dots on a map to an older woman feeding birds. The pages are also divided into four colors. Enigmatic but fascinating.
Hearth by Trevor Morgan (Melbourne, 2003, $12.00 softcover) is an interactive mobile fireplace that explores simulation and surveillance. Hearth reflects a basic reality (flickering media as the focus for family life) and the absence of a basic reality (the first as the focus of family life). Like the photographic portrait, Hearth represents a moment in the life of a fire, seen over and over again. As indicated in this postcard catalog, Hearth is installed in domestic settings and public spaces. In domestic settings, volunteers use and respond to Hearth and record these experiences as part of an evolutionary project. In public
Collected Short Stories by Daniel B l a W s (Lisbon, Power Books, 2003, $10.00) is a conceit. Designed to look like a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, these short stories are really 31 color photographs taken in nine different countries between 2000 and 2002. Filmmaker and writer, Blaufiiks' interest in narrative possibility is apparent in this series of fragmentary diptychs that often couple a human presence with an urban landscape and carry titles such as "The End of Something" or "The End of the Party" or "Dream of a Strange Land". In the introduction Sergio Mah writes, "I dare to recognize a Proustian feeling in most of the works, not only in the way they express an enormous desire of experience, but also in the way the stimulate the involuntary scope of memory." The covers look just like those pocketbooks you would buy at the airport. Blaufuks deals in aflairs, obsessions, fantasy, myth, legend and dream, fear, pity and violence-all corners of human experience. They are stunning photographs. This is a must! Craig Hutchins: Photographs (London, David RobinsonfGlass, 2002, $20.00) is an introduction to the work this British photographer who died in 1998. Excerpts from four of his projects are collected here with brief texts illuminating the thoughts behind each one: documentation of one of the first planned communities in England, a photo
study of his brother, images from a home for the mentally and physically handicapped and a series of personal poetic photographs. "And there was a kind of comic vision of just how absurd life is, this giant melodrama, played out for what purpose. This intense struggle to survive set against the comic absurdity of death being so easy to come by, by accident or design." The handwriting is nervous but quite legible. The story quite personal, and a tribute to a tense talent, nipped in the bud. Ladies' Luncheon Guild: Scranton, PA:Volume 111(New York, Squid, Inc, 2003, $12 paper) is a group of whimsical drawings, quoted texts, and puns in this miniature volume. It's up to the reader to meditate and ponder the meanings. Tick-Tockby AA Bronson (New York, 2002, $10.00) is an elegant little book which accompaniesthe installation TickTock 2002, consisting of 46 clocks representing the flags of th 45 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, plus the flag designed by Marcus Gamey in 1917to represent an African homeland for Afro-Americans. The book reproduces, in black and white, the flags from each c o u n q and annotates them with statistics about the population, the number of people living with HIV/AJDS, the adult rate of infection, the AIDS deaths to date and the number of orphans to date. Booklet: Consumed by Alyson Beaton (Chicago, School of Art Institute of Chicago, 2003, $8.00) is a collection of the artist's favorite products photographed at her kitchen table and annotated with information about the price, estimated life span and usage to-date. Alongside this presentation of empirical data, each product is also paired with a line from a love song promising eternal devotion to the dear household companions. In a final gesture of uberappreciation, the images are captioned wt an advertising ih slogan that grows over the course of the fourteen pages to staggering almost unpronounceable length. An amusing demonstration of the overblown and somehow, in this case, magically fulfillablepromises of the market. (Disclaimer (by artist): Do not view book on a full stomach or immediately after shopping. May cause a reaction ofphysical discomfort. Please show book to your children, this book has been approved for mass consumption). Flip Book: Sunny by Alyson Beaton (Chicago, 2003, $8.00) is a series of photographs taken from a mall parking lot to create a daily weather report having taken the photos every 30 minutes from morning until night. The slight rising temperature from morning until night indicates a cold day
in Chicago with the 30s up to 50 degrees as temperature during the course of the day. The love ditty tucked along the inside margin of each photograph makes it feel like things are looking up even as they are looking very much the same all day long (sunny and clear). Untitled Mail Order Catalog by Conrad Bakker (Urbana, I ,2002, $10.00 paper) includes a nose hair trimmer, L flexible comfort clog, hand-held muscle massager, 3-mile flashlight.. .and so much more, available to order, but they are carved wooden objects from the artist. Painted with oil paint, there is no mistaking these for the real thing, but who would want the real thing anyway, when you can get a sculpture from an artist. 5 in 1 digital web camera, comfort eye shades, even a digital tire gauge and much more all made by hand by Conrad Bakker. Ifyou really want these in a hurry, call 877-377-5858. And what mail order catalog has an essay by Buzz Spector called "Conrad Bakker7s Vernacular Simulation." Spector talks about the prices-and you will too for they are modest compared to their worth. We are told there is only one of a kind right now-first come, first servebut if there is a demand, the artist will make multiples. This is a wonderful Duchampian project of reverse readymades. Buy it, and buy them. You may find yourselfthe owner of a work of art as commodity. Vanuit Mijn Aquarium by S.F. Fontein (Amsterdam, basboek, 2002, $15.00 softback) is the first photography book by the young Dutch artist Bas Fontein. Translated as "From my Aquarium", Fontein claims that he felt himself to be submerged in an aquarium, looking out at the world, while taking these photos. The format of the book, divided into five segments of five double-page full bleed images, directs the viewer/reader to read them as if they were stanzas in a poem. An inscription reproduced on the back cover gives us a hint how the artist's childhood fascination with fish clearly inspired his artistic practice as an adult: "For Sebastian Fontein who is celebratinghis fourteenth birthday today. He studiedhis fish for so long that he almost became a fish himself, therefore this book is for a true expert." The book was Elseviers' Guide for the Aquarium Lover.
SOME INTERESTING BOOKWORKS Problem Pictures by Spencer Selby (Berkeley, Sink, 2003, $15.00) contains 124 collaged pieces created over the past 10 years including visual poetry, copy art and assorted graphic manipulations of found material. This is the third
and most extensive collection of hiis visual work to date. Much of the work appeared in magazines in the U.S., Canada, Australia, South America and ]Europebefore this collation. Masic far Touch, composed by Ilya Monosov (2003, $15.00) is a music score by sound artist, Monosov, to be taken literally. Unconventional notations deeply embossed into the book's otherwise blank pages invite the reader to pass his or her fingers over the surface as if it were braille, trying to udeersmd the ''mu~sic'' in interpretingthe "notes" or interpreting them. At the same time, the marks look like they might have been created by some music lrnaking device through a press. It is a sound artist's score, simply exquisite in its concept, requiring the reader to use hidher whole sensibility to read and listen to the sounds. Spiral bound and printed by letterpress. A tour de force!. A mird Party - 1" Print Luther Typeface @wklet m d cards) by Kasper Andreasen (Amsterdam, 2003, $4.0O)is a series of typographic specimen cards, screen printed stickers, and a little catalog ofphotographspresenting a new typeface, Luther, created and exhibited by Kasper Andreasen. Ail of this comes in a smalI plastic bag and the font is beautiful. Oracle by Ann Messner (New York, 2003, $25 paper)is the result of a residency at the Department of Fine Arts at Amherst College. It is a sequence of 57 full-page black and white photographic images- rephotographed from the historical archives of Gandhi, n Luther King and Malcom X, creating a visual narrative on silence. This is a meditation on non-violence, on the gesture of civil disobedience, on the power of the public voice, on what is not heard, and what is heard, spoken and non spoken, and what is silenced. Using magdied soft focus with sharp contrasts of black and white, the pages are a personal meditation place for each reader. This is a powerful statement or better yet, it is a catalyst for personal silence and public outrage. Black and White Reproductions of the Abstract Expressionists by Brian Kennon @s Angeles, 2002, $22.00 softbound) are black and white reproductions ofwell known paintings by Pollock, Motherwell, DeKooning, Rothko, Gottlieb and others accompaniedby swatches of the paintings' true colors, neatly lined up around their edges. A conceptual detailed systematictreatment of color amuses the reader, while it remains a sly comment on the celebratedand
mystified gestures of Abstract Expressionism. I'm still smiling. The fiVThe F i ~ i n by Leon Johnson (Portland, OR,Long g Bell Press, 2003, $8.00 paper) is a pamphlet of color photographs drawingfrom Leon Johnson and John Schorr's peHfonanance of the m e name, reconfiguring it as a book. Color photographs of a pretty young man imitating striking poses in a succession of exotic outfits alternate with the repeated black and white image of another anan, hands folded in lap, on the edge of his seat. The only text, tadten ce, is on the back of the book: " T m around. Stop. Is it tight?" The small photograph of The Palms Motor Hotel beneath the epigram seems to situate The Fitaing in the fitting rooms of this neon lit side-of-the-road nightspot. The author gves this information: "In 1999 I bought a collection of PhysiquePictorial muscle magazine in an estate sale. They were all dated from 1967 to 1970. In one, called Apollo, I discovered a sealed glassine envelope of negatives. The man imaged in the processed photographs was recreating poses from the magazines, in his basement. He is now my collaborator and muse. Mr. Fact and Mr. Fiction, the FITTING. " Phod Here, As by Peter Downsbrough (FRAC Bretagne and Editions Incertain Sens, Rennes, 2002, $10.00) is another in the continuing studies by Downsbrough of space, text and archtecture. Downsbrough, once based in the U.S., has been living in Belgium for many years now, and has had a major retrospective recently. This was a co-edition with two publishers, more than likely hosting an exhibition by Downsbrough. The series of black and white photographs with texts which are vertical, horizontal and reversed (how much time he's saving using the computer) with gridded images as well as distortions, creates an enigmatic conceptual work which fits into the large body of printed material he has continuallypublished throughout the past 30 years. Possible Things & Assorted Markings by LucilaMachado (Paris, 2003, $20) is a perfect bound volume of drawings creating circles, squares and fonns that make a new visual language for this frantic world. Done in pen and ink, the black and white illustrations lead one to think about each in a new way-fresh, unfinished, and perhaps quickly done,
these drawings certainly make one think of possible things with its assorted markings. Against the Dessin by Hiro Sugiyama (Tokyo, Enlightenment Publishing, 2002, $18.00) is a beautifuIIy printed over-sized artist book, a kind of drawing pad made public printed in graphite colored ink, giving a graphite sheen of a worked surface. The viewer feels that the artist has given up his privacy and made public that which he uses as a private sketchbook. But how lucky we are to see these images of portraits from advertising, snapshot contexts, cartoons, life drawings, and so much more, collaged seamlessly with the artist's persistent pencil line, creating real and imaginary creatures and humans, from boxers to beauties, serious to humorous, with even a change of papers in the center. Exquisite print job, done with skill and expertise. There is a bright red cloth cover wrapped in a blue wrapper printed in gold. This is a bargain at $18-exemplary printing by an exemplary artist.
original recipes beneath a silvery fdm, drawing inspiration from scratch-and-win lotto cards. The result is an inventive, interactive game in which the reader discovers a world of fragrances and flavors associated with the traditionalcuisine of the region. Printed in a limited edition as an artist multiple, a single copy of this oversizebook, bound with two heavy screws, contains a winning symbol that entitles the finder to receive a gxft consisting of a selection of wine and food specialties from the region. Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund, helping needy children around the world. $50.00
AUDIOVISUAL BOOKWORKS Eunoia by Christian Bok (Toronto, Coach House Books, 2001, $16.95) is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels, and the work quite literally means "beautiful thinking". The book, upon publication, excited the poetry world, sold well over 15,000 copies, and has been reprinted countless times. The book is now accompanied by a CD,in which Bijk performs the whole book in its entirety. Here, the author and performance poet reveals the distinctive personality of each vowel. A turns out to be courtly, E elegaic, I lyrical, O jocular and U shockingly obscene. Bok pushes language to its limits, and in those edges it finds its beauty. On the page, on the stage, and on the CD player, Eunoia is quite a feat! The book and the set can be purchased for only $29.95. To order in the U.S., call Small Press Distribution at 1-800-869-7553.For more information, visit www.chbooks.com ARTIST PERlODlCALS Lilacmenace, no. 1 (Sydney, Camille Ross, 2002, $15.00) is a tenific zine created by a team of artists. The energy is contemporary and explosive, delving into fashion, photography, illustration, graphics, creativewriting, art and cultural reviews, and music writing. Slick to quirky, the style covers fine photographic reproduction, innovative typography, typewriter, and experiments as well in layout using various printingpapers. WonderN overlays, duotones, color reproductionsof excellent quality, down to funky black and white reproductions on vellum make for an interesting adventure into the creative juices of quite a group of people down under. Lilacmenace, no. 2 (Sydney, Camille Ross, 2003, $15.00) is dedicated to Mother Nature, with art nouveau frames around many of the color photos, a review of McSweeneyYs,
A Hundred Years of: Lex Flex by Ruth Laxson (Atlanta, Nexus Press, 2003, $40) is the latest artist book off the press of Nexus Press. This is a joyous book, a chronology of the 20thcentury in Ruth Laxson's inimitable style of collaged words, collages phrases, an actual timeline, collaged images and a story that needed telling from Kitty Hawk to jazz, to Dada, to baseball. That was Part I: Innocence, Elegance, Riches & Rags. Part 11: Wars, right and egoecho, including lots of news words that came from war times and afterwards, a whole new vocabulary of prejudice, race relations, gay relations, feminism, and the 60s done in her inimitable style. Part 111: Cyber Self & The Etherlother brings us another new vocabulary including AIDS, all the isms, nanotechnology, the danger of losing so many languages, the growth of so many new words at the same time, and so much more. If you love words, if you love artist books, if you love Ruth Laxson, this is the book for you! Hardbound in silver cloth, it is elegant, delicious, enticing, regaling, and a joy!
R-FVG: Recipes Friuli Venezia Giulia by John Armleder with essays by Gianni Salvaterra,Luigi Veronelli and Sergio Dressi (Milano, Charta, dist. by d.a.p., 2003) is a collection of recipes written by the world's foremost chefs. Each recipe has been specially created using ingredients from the culinary traditions of Friuli Venezia Giulia. In designing the book, Swiss artist John M. Armleder has hidden the
architecture, fashion and much more. Terrific zine for every and all. Ante: Journal of the Students of the Yale University School of Art, vol. 1, no. 2 (The Issues Issue), edited by Nicholas Herman with art direction by Dmitri Siegel along with design by Siegel and Jefliey Lai, is dedicated to the "Issue Issue", a take off on magazines which rise and fall on the issues that link the publisher to the public. And personal issues have become the currency of choice of our popular culture-emphasizing that the etymology of the word magazine, from French to Arabic to Aramaic, relates to the safe storage of something important. There is an inteniew with the founder of EN magazine, one with the founder of Giant Robot, a phone conversation with the founder of Cabinet, a zine fan with covers of lots of zines, a special interview with A.A. Bronson and lots more. This is a stunning magazine, student or otherwise, and at $8.00, it's a bargain. Fairy Tale 11E for Spring/Summer 2003 for the design company, Vier 5, presents a slice of youthful, international fashion life, New Fashion and Work. Included in this issue is Best Company designer Olmes Carretti, artist Claus Richter, and Kate Pierson of the B-52s writing on social engagement. The special supplement on "Work" features interviews with assistants of artist Haim Steinbach, director Sofia Coppola, and stylist Marie-Amelie Sauve. In English, French, German and Italian. Published in Paris with editors, Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichert. $11
very particular form of inner space: the computer screen. Printed in delicate iridescent inks, the strange and familiar lines, waves, spheres, and three dimensional grids pass in front of the reader's eyes like objects seen from the window of a space ship, effectively transforming the landscape of computer graphics and design into a virtual last frontier. GM Log I: Into Unknown Territories and GM Log 1 : 1 The Research Mission are two very large silkscreened poster-size folded sheets and the pamphlets are all done by a team of Dutch artists. There is also a CD which indicates that there are sounds from various solar systems. A trip one can afford to take for only $15.00. Libertinage Dadazine is an Anarchist Dadazine from the College of Pataphysics, Los Feliz Chapter to the World, created by Fazulito Reet. Reet is just an amazing collagist and combines images and text in such a Max Ernst way that I love every issue. Cover stock is a warm cappuccino color with images such as Schwitters, Jany, Ernst on the cover or wonderful poems and essays about movements of Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, etc. This is not to say that they are not political, but the politics are subservient to the presentation. This is an amazing zine which everyone should subscribe to. For more information, contact Fazulito Reet, 3230 Gr=th Park Blvd. #1, Los Angeles, CA 90027. You will definitely be a happy recipient!
NEW TITLES BEING OFFERED Remembrance by Judith Mohns, where the artist uses the 26 August 200 1 obituary page from the New York Times to create new readings of the existing text by isolating various words and lines. The visible and underlying structures of obituaries, families, society, and the qualities of life and death itself are explored, revealing both the cold commonalities and the very personal specifics of the lives of the deceased. Offset on Newsprint text and cover, pamphlet sewn, $18.00 plus $5.00 postage. Send to WSW, P.O. Box 489, Rosendale, NY 12472.
Knit Knit #2 by Jesse Alexander, Peter Coffin, Emily Drury, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Aya Kani, Lee Krist, Elliot Winard (New York, 2003) contains i n t e ~ e w sprofiles, and , articles by craftmakers who work at the intersection of traditional, utilitarian craft and contemporary art. This issue has instructions for making your own I-pod cozy and a little how-to-make-a-tank-top-from-a-turtleneck artist book. These treats and other articles and illustrations come packaged in envelopes, inserts, all bound by thread around and around. An assembling of sorts. The covers are made of industrial felt. You can read issue 1 online at www.knitknit.netfissue_l.hunl November in New York In City, they will be screening textile-related films and videos by artists Yayoi Kusama, Jack Smith, and Annabel Nicholson, among others. See www.ocularis.net $12 Howtoplays (Amsterdam, Stichting Jack, 2002, $15.00) comes in a plastic bag with two issues of MiniJack 01 and 02. The two pamphlets are narrated like a fantastic voyage through outer space, but the space actually turns out to be a
Beauty by Steven Holt, designed and produced by Patrice Baldwin, is the story of what passed for beauty throughout the ages and cultures. Why do we respond to some things and call them beautiful? Then there is "fashion." Why is it so compelling? The answer to these and other burning questions will be found in this 2% x 2%" 142-page miniature. Silver and handmade paper over boards. There is a Peruvian shrine to beauty embedded into the front cover. Pretty ribbons fluff up the spine. Signed and numbered
edition of 50. $90 plus $2 postage and handling. Send to Pequeiio Press, 1505 BuckskinDr., SantaMaria, CA 93454. [e-mail]
MAIL ART EDITIONS Bank of f i n is a portfolio of creative currencies from the Funtastic United Nations. Printed in a limited edition of 400 copies. It includes a descriptive 24-page booklet in English and Italian and 21 banknotes in full color from the imaginary worlds of L. Angelo, V. Baroni, K. Bates, E. Biancuzzi, A. Bocchi, P. Ciani, A. Corradi, C. Del Sal, Dogfish, P. Echaurren, M. Ciacon, H. King, T. Mancusi, G. Manenti, E. Michieletto, Prof. Bad Trip, G. Scarabottolo,R. Wood, C. Zanelli and Z. Zograf. These banknotes are beautifully printed in full color, and what a wonderful world if we could spend them! Each portfolio costs $15.00 or 15.00 Euro, including postage, to be paid cash on delivery, or send cash well concealed in a letter to: AAA Edizioni, Via Latisana 6, 33032 Bertiolo, Italy. www.aaa-edizioni.it
AUDIO ART Edition Hundertmark has published a new CD from Emmett Williams, A Cellar Song for Five Voices (Solo Version), for 19.50 Euros. Order from Edition Hundertmark ? Records, C. Francisco Wood Quintana no. 17,35017 Tafira Alta, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain. You can send to Barklays Bank, 35002 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Espana, acct.: 00650129-74-001291500980.
VlSUAL POETRY Yr Cream Dip by John M. Bennett and Reed Altemus (Columbus, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2001, $5.00) 0 0 ' s Involvement, A Collaborationby Mark Sonnenfeld &Reed Altemus (Portland, ME, Postmark Editions, 200 1, $3.00) Avant Hybrids by Andrew Rope1 and Reed Altemus (Portland, ME, Tonerworks, 2003, $3.00) all to be ordered fromP.0. Box 52, Portland, PvDE 04 112.
MAIL ART NEWS
NEWS
Julio Campal ExperimentalPoetry Collectionhasbeen set up by critic and poet Fernando Millin and Professor Laura Lopez (mostly in Spanish). You can visit the Collection on t h e w e b a t : httv://suider. ~eor~etowncolle~e.edu/librarv/Internet Linksliulio c a m ~ aexuerimental poetrv.htm l where books and other documents can be checked out from any library of the United States through the Interlibrary Loan service. You can also contact Laura Lopez directly at v i c e d o @ , m i n d s ~ r i n ~ . c o mo r If you Laura Lopez~,~eor~etowncollep;e.edu wish to send your publications, the mail address is: Dr. Laura Lopez Fernandez, 400 East College St., Georgetown, KY 40324 USA.
Kairan 7: Mail Art Forum, published by Gianni Simone, has as its guest editor, Padin, Clemente who has written an article on "The Origins of Mail Art in Latin America." There are interviewwith Hlda Paz, Jesus Romeo Galdamez, Isabel Aranda YTO, Roberto Keppler, and Tulio Restrepo. In addition, there is an article y Elias Adasrne on "Mail Art in Latin America: A Gamble on Utopia." And Graciela Gutierrez Marx has written "My Life in Mail Art Invisible Artists or Fishing Nets and No Fisherman". For copies, send $2.00 or 2 IRC's to Gianni Simone, 3-3-23 Nagatsuta, Midori-ku Yokohama-shi, 226-0027 Kanagawa-ken, Japan. Avai1able:Poems to Eye by Clemente Padin, published by the Runaway Spoon Press in English. Orders to Bob Gmmman, Box 495597, Port Charlotte, FL 33949 USA or for e-mail: BobGrumman@,nut-n-but.net
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Mail Art for sale by subscription: Pavel Zoubok gallery is offering a year's mail art subscription to Robert Warner's monthly maiI art piece being offered to 50 collectors for $1,200 for the year. Warner is a letterpress artist using old typefaces and plates to print, often in unusually bright inks and on variedd surfaces including metallic foil, images that he manuallycuts and pasted into Dada-esque compositions. He was a friend of Ray Johnson's. For more information, contact Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 10 14 Madison Ave., NYC 10021.
GAME:New Research Project: Specific Research Institute Canada announces a new research project, Calling all AKA'S, If you, or someone you know, use and are known by an assumed name, nickname/pseudonym, and are willing to engage in a research project that will ask for detaiIs of how that name came about; how, why you chose to use it rather than your given name@), how using it has s e c t & your self image, your life, work, relations with fiends, family, workmates, etc., they want to hear from you. The project sets out to explore the relationship between one's name, identity,creativeactivities, llife style, and more. Stage 1) to identify individuals who fit the description, 2) A questionnaire probing the above issues and more, and to i d e n w those individuals who would be willing to engage in ...3) Meet with, conduct a video inteniew and tape or photograph your work/collection/whateverit is you have that relates tolreflects your assumed name for an eventual...4) installation/presentaiton/possiblepublication of the results of this research. Contact Anna Banana, RR22,3747 Hwy. 101, Roberts Creek, BC, Canada VON 2W2 or a banana@,sunshine.net
Artistamps: An International Invitation,includes work of twenty of Patricia Taverner's favorite artists from around the world. 20 September - 3 1 October 2003 at the Design Gallery of the University of California Berkeley Extension, 55 Laguna St., San Francisco. The Cleveland Public Library has just made accessible a small online exhibition of mail art. Barton's Mail Art Collection is a recent acquisition in the Library's Special Collections. The address is:
del Sol, Apartado 861 43080 Tanagona, Espaiia. Put your own image in: htt~://boek86l.codnowarlindelehtml
Brain Cell Fractals. Ryosuke Cohen. Send him 150 stickers, artistamps, rubberstamps, etc. and he will send you a list of participants, a beautifully produce color print of all participants' work. Send to Ryosuke Cohen, 3-76-1A613Yagumokitah0, Moriguchi-City, Osaka 570, Japan. braincell63k6.dion.ne.i~ Venus or the secret language of 1ove.Any medium, Postcard size, A4 andlor envelopes. No jury, no returns, documentation, show in December and exhibition on the web. HttD://ar.geocities.com/venusmai1art Send to: Irene Ronchetti, Fraga 1060, c.p. 1427, Capital, Argentina. Deadline: 31 October 2003. Neo DADA. Ongoing project. Send self made postcards 4 x 6" (10.1 x 15.2 cm). Any medium, no envelopes, documentation to all, no returns. Online gallery and possible exhibition. P.O. Box 66 1, New York, NY 10116. Shadow Play. Slightly serious artist seeks fun,intelligent shadowsfor international art project. Blondes, brunettes and redheads preferred, but all shadows welcome. Please send a photograph of your shadow with your name written on the back. Shadows to feature in upcoming exhibition. Send to Wei-Ho Ng, Chelsea College of Art, Manresa Rd., London SW3 61S, England. artshadow~,hotmail.com Dead1ine:ongoing. The Passage du Font-Neuf. Size: max. A4 (21 x 30 cm.) Any medium, deadline: 25 October 2003. Send all works to 7 St. Kitts Close, Whitley Lodge, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear, NE26 lJF, England. Documentation to all. All work will be shown. No returns. Curator: Carl Drummond Milne. For more information, send to: [e-mail] Violence Against Women. Group 78, Tokyo's Englishlanguage local group of Amnesty International, the worldwide human rights organisation, will adopt the theme "Violence Against Women" as a major campaign priority next year. To publicize this and to reach out to progressive women's groups, human rights groups and other concerned people, we are appealing to the mail art network for suitable submissions on the theme. We intend to exhibit in Tokyo and possibly other cities in. Japan, and to produce a
www.cul.org/ExhibitHall.as~?FonnMode=Exhibit&ID=23
Ifthis link does not work, try www.cpl.org. Go to the exhibit hall tab on the upper heading bar. This should lead you to a selection of exhibitions. The mail art exhibition is the newest exhibition and is top on the list at the lefi of the screen. Steven Leiber has a terrific catalog called A Succulent Dilemma offering lots of mail art collections+visual poetry for sale. Contact him at 37 Toledo Way, San Francisco, CA 94123 or [e-mail]
MAIL ART CALL
Images Against War. Any medium, no deadline. Jpegs or any snail mail. NO jury, no returns. Exhibition in the web: Image Gallery Against War from Boek 86 1. Send to:Taller
documentation of the submitted works. Every contributor will receive a copy. Any medium, A3size (42 x 29 cm.) 2D only. Deadline: 31 December 2003. Send to Chris Pitts, Kyoritsu Women's College, 3-27 Kanda-Jinbocho, ChiyodaAku101-0051 Tokyo, Japan.
many works as you tixel l3@,hotmail.com
wish
to
send.
E-mail:
Welfare Over the World - to Universalize Welfare.Organizedby the Official College of Physicians of Tarragons in collaborationwith Taller del Sol and Universal Forum of Cultures (Forum 2004). Deadline: 31 October 2003. Any medium, format: A4, No jury, no selection, no returns. Documents and catalog to all participants. Works will be kept by the organizers for future exhibitions. Exhibition to be held inside the Universal Forum of Cultures. Address to: Taller del Sol, CCsar Reglero, Apartat de correus 861 43080-Tarragons, Spain. FisblLe poisson. Any size, any technique. Documentation to all. Deadline: 31 May 2004. Curated by Baudhuin Pig Dada Simon. Send to Monaville Francois, 42 rue des 14 Verges, B-4000 Liege, Belgium. Black Gold: Any medium, any technique (artist's books, photos, drawings, collage, visual poems, graphics, etc.) No jury, documentation to all participants. Deadline: 30 September 2003. Send to Espacio Esmeralda, Esmeralda 486 9'C, (1007)Capitol Federal Argentina.
post] Colonial Post] Cards. What are the effects and consequences of colonial domination throughout the developingworld? And how do these colonial ideologiesstill influence the lives of their [exlsubjects? Works will be shown at local venue (place to be determined) and showcased over the net. Deadline: 1 November 2003. Postcard size only. Documentation to all participants. No returns. Send your work to MMA., #2 Kudu close, Highlands, Harare, Zimbabwe. 100" Anniversary of the birth of Joseph Cornell. 24 December 2003 will be the 100h anniversary of Cornell's birth. Exhibition is to honor and celebrate his life and work. See hm://www. ~eocities,com/bobclaut~art/mailartcall.html Deadline: 13 October 2003. Media: stamp art, mail art, postcards, envelopes. All entries exhibited, exhibition begins on-line on 24 December 2003. The live exhibition in Modesto, California is early January 2004. No r e t m , nothing larger than 9.5 x 7 x linch or 24 x 18 x 3 cm. Send entries to: Joseph Cornell Mail Art Exhibition, 404 Patrick Lane, Modesto, CA 95350. bobclaut@,vahoo.com Frogs. Any medium, except e-mail. Postcards, envelopes, collage, to Heather Dawkins, 5 Lindsay Place, Wick Caithness, KW14PF, Scotland. All items will be displayed on website also. Call for Art: Galley Night & Day, 24 and 25 October 2003 with 2, 3, and 4 dimensional mailed media. Deadline: 10 October 2003. Goal of Gallery is to draw art/comrnunicationworks from across the globe. All profits from the sales of art work will be donated to Wisconsin Community Fund, supporting grassroots organizations working for social change. All artworkbecomesthe property of Bliss Gallery. Donations are tax-deductible. For more information, inf@,bliss~hoto.com Small Scale Artist Books . Any theme on a day in your life, tea, trees,hornets, turtles, rock stars, ec. Any medium. Max. size: 5.5" x 8.5". Response mail in return. Deadline: 3 May 2004. Send to: Tracy Brown, Box 54, Fort Simpson, NT XOE ONO, Canada Sense of Place. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is requesting mail art for exhibition in February 2004.
es~acioesmeralda@,uo1.com.ar
World Trading Cards. In 2001 Field Study invited artists to contribute to an edition of artist trading cards. Due to the success of the project, a second edition is envisioned. Please send 100 Artists Trading Cards, size 8.8 x 6.3cm, open theme and medium. All contributors will receive the finished edition Deadline: 1 December 2003. Send to Field Study, c/o David Dellafiora, P.O. Box 1838, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia. Gallery TME. This gallery, a block away from Times Square in New York City, is devoting one section of the gallery to the exhibition and collection of mail art. There will also be an online gallery with a selection of works from, and a catalog of, the complete collection. Open to the public 6 days a week. Works may be for sale, if you wish. Full details are available at htt~://www.chashama.ordl13 Janusz Jaworski, director, looks forward to receiving as
Participants are encouraged to respond by providing work that examines changing conceptions of place, borders and nationalism on a global scale since 9/11, and the subsequent conflicts in the Near and Middle East, and how the spread of internet communications has altered perspectives on near and far. Nothing larger than 20 inches. Can be threedimensional. Include name, address, e-mail, and in the case of mixed media, all materials used. Not all submissions are guaranteed to be shown. Limitations on space dictate that the show will be curated by the director with support of other experts in the field of mail art. All submitting artist will be acknowledged. No returns, unless artist requests a return, in which case a SASE is necessary. Deadline: 30 October 2003. Send to A Sense of Place, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750- 1 3 St., Boulder, CO 80302. ~ [e-mail]
Contributions to Umbrella Museum Klaus Groh, Paula Hocks, Jan Baker, Claire Isaacs, Toti 07Brien, Kate van Houten, Johan van Geluwe, Anna Banana, Stuart Copans, Judy & Chuck Goodstein, Richard E. Brock, Melinda Altshuler, Sharon McGovern, Dan Talley, Johanna Todd, Nancy Weber, Beth Bachenheimer, Robin DruGermany, Dan Talley, Elena SiE, Annie Wittels, Ross Wolfe, Moore Crossey, Charlton Burch, Nat Dean, Craig Martin, Picasso Gaglione, Vaughan Rachel, Carole Stetser, Claire Isaacs
the rain and were photographed holding umbrellas for the news coverage, but things look fairly bleak with the Canadian authorities not giving an inch.
* Personal Umbrella Hmdlers were discussed in the New
York Times Magazine for 15 December 2002. In the entourage of most celebrities, there is one member assigned the task of ensuring that the celebrity is, at all times, covered by an umbrella. Included are P. Diddy (first to be noticed with a personal assitant), then Robert De Niro, Gwyneth Paltrow, Britney Spears and Meg Ryan have been all photographed witht personal umbrella handlers oftheir own, trailing in their wake, umbrellas held aloft.
* Proyecto Paraguas in Rafaela, Argentina had well over
UMBRELLA NEWS In San Francisco on a very rainy day, activists protested the war among a sea of umbrellas, many decked with a peace sign on it. Betty Price, a 68-yearsld retired San Franciscan, stood under an umbrella from which was hung half a dozen George W. Bush voodoo dolls. She says she has sold hundreds of the dolls at protests over the last year, and that they were her way of expressing displeasure with the president.
-A South African family allergic to sunlight are battling the authorities in Canada for permission to live in overcast Prince Rupert, British Columbia. They have a genetic allergy which causes skin to burn, blister and scar. Other symptoms incIude migraines, nausea, vomiting and chronic pain. They loved the rain so much in Princz Rupert, B.C. about four years ago when they visited and noticed their sjmptoms all but vanished. With two applicationsand twice being turned down, they have become desperate. They love
100 entries from countries throughout the world, which opened on 1March at the Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes. The premise was to summon artists of the world to send by conventional mail a collapsible or a folding umbrella, which could be taken apart by means of any technique, painted, embroidered,written, sealed, drawn, transformed. The only condition was that the umbrella could be opened and be closed not losing its functionality. As usual, an opened umbrella is much larger than a closed one, giving the artist a great surface to do work. All works were excepted, all works exhibited. The show opened and can be seen on the website: htt~://~.martinmolinaro,com.ar/lOO~aninauaraws/id ex.htm and a beautiful statement accompanied the show. "It is raining here in this small city and probably like here in any comer of the world, rain is something special: miracle, melancholy, rest, announcement, privacy. It is part of that exceptional and surprising scene in which we live, we grow and we have been. Water, weeping, humidity, winds, leaks that arise unexpected between the air which we breathe. Rain miracle, rain hope, rain catastrophe, rain umbrella. Umbrella. Resistance. And while it rains in this small city, the proposal is born: to resist the thought that distances separate. To resist faded umbrellas that walk the streets rainy days eternally condemned to protect those subjects which fear rain as much as colors. Then we thought about having artists participate in this, to take part to resist this and to summon them." Sunbrella is a synthetic fabric which is being used for indoor-outdoor upholstery, soft to the touch but resistant to water, mildew, sun and soil, created by Donghia.
ANNABANANAONTHEROAD
Berlin April 6 - 15 Transportale is a series of fifteen artistic interventions in the stations of the S-Bahn line of Berlin's subway system. It is sponsored by Art Berlin, Berliner Stadtram, and many other cultural institutions. Karla Sachse's proposal for the Nordbahnhof Station (located next to where the wall between East and West Berlin stood), was one of the 15 chosen for this year's event. Each artist had one station in which to execute their work. Karla's concept was to work with the theme of knots, crossings, and ties; to reflect the crossings of the subway line and to illustrate the international ties in her artistic life. To this end, she invited four "primary" collaborators; myself, and three others from Asia, Africa and Australia, to represent the major continents of the world. Each of us, in turn, invited 12 artists, "secondary" collaborators, from our continent, to create large knots and a related text, to be installed in the station. The four primary collaborators were invited to Berlin to assist in the installation of the resulting sixty-five works by all participants. Since Karla still had several days of teaching after our arrival, the first job we had was to photograph all 65 knots for documentation of the project. The following day, we loaded all the boxed knots (most the size of a soccer ball or larger) into a van for transport to the Nordbahnhof, where we unboxed them and worked out and mapped the arrangement in which we would hang them. They were then reboxed and put into a storage room until Friday when we would have the necessary platform to get to the ceiling beams from which they were to be hung. Thursday each of us collaborators made a presentation of our work (slides and video) and concepts to the students in Karla's school, who had also made knots which were installed elsewhere in the station. Friday, with the help of several students, we installed the knots, hanging them at varying heights from the metal beams that support the ceiling of the station. Two of the collaborators were busy videotaping the process and taking stills. On Saturday we returned to the station to install the texts on the 30 x 30 cm. tiles below each knot. Karla had translated all our texts into German, and they were printed on an adhesive plastic generally used for advertisementsplaced on floors of shops. The grand opening took place on Sunday April 13th at the Naturpark Schoenberger, with speeches from the mayor of
Berlin, and several dignitaries fiom the sponsoring arts organizations. After the formalities, all dignitaries, artists and invited arts people piled into an antique train which ran the length of the 15 stations, accompanied by a spoken commentary about which artists had done what at each of the stations. In an amazing contrast to the wintery snow and winds that greeted my first day in Berlin, these events took place in blazing sun and balmy breezes. The Nordbahnhof station was headquarters for information about the works, and the tour stopped there, giving our installation a plentiful and appreciative audience. While I had planned to do my "tie a knot on me" interactive event on the 15th, I decided to take advantage of the milling crowd to start immediately, and acquired twenty four knots, the names, ages and places of birth of 24 individuals who accepted my invitation, spoken in German. The act, I explained, is a symbolic gesture to unite all the peoples of the world. I repeated this interactive event on Tuesday the 15th, outside the station, as the room in which our knots hung was the entry to the elevators only, and the majority of persons entering and leaving the station used the escalator, which came up closer to the outside doors. On that day, between 11 a.m. and 1p.m., I collected another thirtythree knots, names, ages and places of birth. Another forty one individuals were approached, but declined to engage with me for a variety of reasons given or indicated by pointing at their watches and looking away. For these actions, I wore a black jacket with my Specific Research Institute Canada logo stitched on the front. On the back were a series of long, loose woolen threads which I had stitched into the jacket for the purpose of knot-tymg. With the assistance of a native G e m speaker in Canada, I memorized my introduction: For my research project, may I ask you to tie a knot on me? Please use the colored threads on the back of my jacket. This is a symbolic gesture to a connection with allpeople of the world. For my research, Wouldyou give me your name? Your age? Whereyou were born? Many thanh good-bye. Because I mastered this speech fluently, many began to engage in conversationwith me, and then I had to resort to: I can speak a little German, but I don't understand much. Do you speak English? . . . or Karla would come and speak with them. I received many favorable comments about the message I was conveying. Roskilde, Denmark April 21-22 Visiting with mail-artists Witta and Frank Jensen for the
first time after many years of mailed exchanges. A few years ago, I wrote an article about this creative couple for Rubberstampmadness, so I was quite familiar wt their ih story, but wanted to meet them in person and see their archives. Witta was just arriving back from a book fair in F the afternoon I arrived, so I had a chance to speak with Frank at length about his archives. Before getting into mail-art (which he did after seeing years of colorful envelopes arrive for Witta), his passion was Tarot Cards . . .and still is. He has complete sets of all decks ever issued, and, for a number of years, published a newsletter about these esoteric cards. Jensen had not given much thought to his mail art archive, which he never felt any urge to register in the same way as he has the Tarot and playing cards which were a costly collection. However, after my visit and enquiries, he used the reorganizationprocedure they were going through after having the roof renewed, to attempt to get an overview of the scope of his mail art archive. He reported that by weight, it came to about 90 kilo of mail art stored in Ning boxes and ring binders. Besides those, he has about 4 meters of shelves with documentation catalogues, magazines, newsletters and related literature, 30 large PIPS-boxes and a lot of file charteques with correspondence from mail artists (without art pieces enclosed). He has also created thematicboxes in which he has archiveddecorated envelopes (nonnal and large size in separate boxes), artistamps on envelopes, postcards, copy-art, fax-art, erotic art, artists' books (2 boxes), 3-D art, "artyart"(which are nice art pieces that don't belong in any particular categoly).He also reports having boxes (6-7) that he considers of minor importance and not really worth keeping; bad documentation (address lists only etc.). invitations he's not responded to, junkmail and stickers, printed postcards of only minor interest.. Then there are the boxes of his own more spectacular projects: Mail Artists' Tarot Deck, Mail Artists' Lenonnand Deck, Mail Artists' Trunk ,Mail Artists' Personality Boxes. From 1993-1996, he did four Mail Artists' Tarot projects (not the deck project) which are mounted in ring binders. His artistamp sheets are in 14 presentation books with transparent pages plus the single stamps are in a special book. His long-term involvement with Crozier's Memories and Wanda projects take up another 11 presentation books, and his co-working with Mike Jennings and Michael Fox is another 9 volumes. In addition, there are 8-9 named boxes with material from artists he corresponded with frequently, like Marilyn Dammann, Louise Heroux, Litsa Spathi and
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Gianni Simone. I did not get to see Witta's studio or archive, but we spent the evening looking at and exchanging Artist Trading Cards. Witta was the only mailartist I visited who had ATC's to trade, so when she went for thirty-two of mine, I was happy I had brought my collection with me. As Witta writes, " My M.A. archive. it is not as orderly as Frank's, all labelled, dated etc. I've just got boxes with 'postcards', 'special envelopes', 'compilations' etc. Some artists I corresponded with very much over the years, like Shrnuel and Larry Angelo, have their own boxes. Most of my 'spare' time, I spend doing my Picture Diary of a Danish Housewife in which I've drawn a picture every day since August 1984. There must be over 6000 small pics now, and about 700 of them I have used as postcard motives for my m.a. activities, further 600+ have been used for artist trading cards. To be able to find each of these many motives on either postcard or ATC is craving quite an ingenious system, especially as I have up to 10 of each motif for trading purposes!" Edewecht-Klein Scharrel, Germany - April 23 A brief visit with Klaus & Hanelore Groh ,talking late into the night, as I had only one night to visit with them. They have been putting on cabaret shows in their large living space in the past 15 years, with Klaus spending much less time in recent years on mail art, than in the 70's and 80's. However, his archive is well organized and catalogued, and he recently donated his collection of works by eastern European avantgarde and experimental artists to the Institute of Eastern European Research Center at the University of Bremen. He was co-organizer of a big show of mail art in the Museum Schwerin, which is apparently specializing in researching and documenting the works of artists who lived "behind the Iron Curtain." This is the museum, according to Karla Sachse, to which Joseph Huber sold his archive, before his death in the fall of '02. Klaus was the first of three mailartists who demonstratedhow they can access individual artists and their artwork through his cataloguing system, especially the huge amount of material from Latin America. He has also been working these past 15 years, on the Micro Hall Art Center/ Literaturium, presenting, besides the performance (theatre-programs) about ninety exhibitions, mainly in the fields of mail art, visual and concrete poetry with international characters. Many of the materials of the Micro Hall Archive have been shown in Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw and Luxembourg.
Koln, Germany April 24 26: Geza Perneczky's archive is the largest, best organized, and completely catalogued of all the collectionsI saw during this trip. It occupies two long walls in his studio, and is divided into categories and sub-categories. The longer wall, perhaps 10 meters long, and stacked from floor to ceiling with shelves of archive boxes, containing publications; books and periodicals, in sub-categoriessuch as Bookworks, Book(or singlepublication), CatalogueMetwork,Catalogue1 Graphic, CatalogueLiterature, CatalogueIArtists books, Magazine, MagazineIGraphic, Magazinepanzine, Magazine/Radical-Political, Mailart Network Assembling, MailartNetwork, Mailart NetworMMagazineArt, Magazine Literaturelconcrete and visual experiments. The second wall, perhaps 8 meters long, is divided into color-coded sections. The largest of these is of binders containing individual works, each in a protective sleeve, arranged in alphabetical order by the artists; 90% is mailart, 10%visual poetry. Another section of about 8 binders is all artistamps, another contains "all the rest," ie. envelopes, letters, etc. There are 5 binders of his Atlantis project, and 24 binders of invitations to shows, projects and publications that have circulated in the network. He gave me copies of the three large catalogues that are printed out from his database of all the material in his archive. He is interested in selling his archive to support his retirement, and has had curators from the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie (which houses Archive Sohm) come to see his collection, but no offers or negotiations have been forthcoming as yet. The other institution he is considering for this impressive collection, is the Museum Schwerin. He says if he is unable to sell it, he will leave it to one or the other after his death. . . but it seems an impossibility that some museum would not leap at the chance to have such a comprehensive collection all ready catalogued. The other half of his storage space is crammed full of his own works; paintings, book works of a beautiful and experimental nature, most of it never shown. The man is a well known criticlart historian in his native Hungary, but scarcely known outside the mail-art network in Koln or Germany at large. Thomas BaumgiirteUBanana Sprayer The other outstanding artist I visited in Koln is Thomas Baumgmel, othexwise known throughout Germany as the Banana Sprayer. Twenty years into his work, Baumgmel is still using his distinctive banana stencil design in his works,
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but has branched out from graffiti onto large canvasses and 3-D works. I first learned about him years ago, when a friend sent me a full color book of photos of his bananas sprayed on the galleries and art establishments of Koln. When I was doing my 1993 research into the New German Banana Consciousness, I intended to meet and get him to do my two tests (the Roar Shack Banana Peel test, and the Personality Inventory for Banana Syndrome), but he was in New York at the time, spraying his bananas on the galleries there. The first work he showed me on my tour of his studios, was halfa giant 3-D banana, constructed from yellow plasticized fabric stretched over a huge aluminum pipe frame. This item sits collecting dust and pigeon droppings in a giant industrial space, but in its heyday, it was assembled and installed, in a brief 6 minutes (they rehearsed it) at the main entry to the Koln cathedral . . . without any official permissions. Unfortunately, I iteft behind the CD documenting the project, so I can't say how long it got to stay there, but to be sure, it was well photographed and video-taped however long it took the authorities to get him to clear it away. The next project of that scale he has planned is to install a giant banana inside the Brandenberg Gate. He's done paintings of this scenario, and had sponsors lined up to proceed, but then the sponsoring company was split up, and the new powers that be decided against it. I'm sure in due course, he will accomplish this project as well. Of his other two studios, one houses works coming back from shows, and a large spray booth where he works. The other is his show room, with a wall displaying a large number of smaller canvases (perhaps 2' x 2') which are all variations on his banana stencil, a meeting area with large coffee table and leather couches to seat eight, his desk and computer, and a wall of files and records of past works, a rack of postcards, catalogues, etc. The most I could get out of him regarding his choice of bananas (a question I'm always asked myself), was that it started while he was doing his conscientious objector service in a Catholic hospital. Each bed had a crucifix above it, and one morning he came into a ward to find a broken crucifvr on the floor. He took it and affixed a banana peel to it in the configuration of the Christ figure, and that was the start of it all. I wanted to get a more detailed discussion out of h m i on the subject, but time was short, and he got a call from his dealer. Then we had to go to an opening where he'd had his last exhibit, and after that, it was time for my train, so I
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never did get the whole story. . .and while I have two of his catalogues which might tell the story, they are, of course, in German, which makes them virtually impenetrable to me. The picmes, however, speak to me.
Maastricht, Holland, April 27 - 29 Rod Summers is one of my earliest correspondents whom I first visited in 1978, when touring Futurist Sound. He is an audio artist, with a long-term,serious interests in long term serious interests. Currently he is the possessor of a considerable quantity of a fine selection of unused tea bags. Just prior to my visit, he was busy revisiting and digitally recording (audio and photos) three locations; in Holland, Germany and England for the second stage of his Environmental Reactions 1978-2003project. This work will be exhibited in the Nahval History Museum of Maastricht in the fd1 of 2003. Interested in everything, with a special love for birds, and Iceland, which he has visited 13 times, he c live wire N 1of questions and stories. 1 is a As for his archive, it is completely catalogued, a process he began when he began exchanging works through the mails. For starters, he has a card file with the name and address of each correspondent, on which he has date stamped his incoming and outgoing mail. From there, he goes to a second card file on which he has recorded by name and number, audiotapeshe's received and fi-omthere, he can go to the drawer where the tapes are stored, and pull out anyone's exact tape. Needless to say, I was impressed. The other materials that arrive with the tapes, letters, postcards, printed catalogues, invitations, etc., are accumulated in a file box, which is then numbered, dated and put on the shelf with the 30-t years of similar files. WhiIe it requires a little shuffling of papers in order to find something in one of these boxes, the boxes are small enough that there are not that many items to go through, and of course, the dated entry on the original file cards directs you to the exact box. Like Perneczky, Rod has a compIete system of classification of works which includes: ACIArt Catalogue, PORoetry, LIILiterature, MA/Nailart, MC/Mailart Catalogue, ABlArtist Book, NPlNewspaper (clippings1 reviews),FZlFanzine, MZRMagazine, M e w Music, AU/ Audio Publication, MI/miscellaneous, ARIArt Review, ASIArtistamp, EAE5lectron.i~ OS/Outsized, SBISmall Book, CAICopy Art, Art . John Bennett has generously offered to take this highly accessible collection of Rod's into the archive of Ohio State University in Columbus, but was not able to offer
compensation for it, not very useful to anyone with an artist's income. Rod plans to hang on to his archive because it is his reference library, and still very active with new projects planned for 2004. Eventually, he hopes to find an even more glorious home for it. Rod has year long, ongoing projects with Vittore Baroni (an email collaboration creating an epic poem) and experimental poetry works with John Bennett, Jesse Glass Jr., and Tom Winter Jr., and probably many others that didn't get mentioned in our lively conversations. Rod also gets the top award for banana cookery . . . the only host in the course of this trip who prepared a dish involvingbananas . . .well, actually, plaintains. It was delicious, and I must get that recipe.
Hengelo, Holland April 30-May 3 Jenny de Groot is another long-term correspondentwho has slowed her participation in the network in recent years, and moved most of her correspondence over to the Internet where she has a &&site where visitors can leave messages and make comments. The transition came for her, I think, when she found she had insuBicient funds to produce a cataloguefor her last mail-art project, and decided to put the works onto a web site as a way of documenting the project. I think many of us have slowed our postal activities due to the constantly rising costs of mailing, not to mention the problems of storing and moving our archives, and the development of new ideas and ways of working. While initially denying she had an archive, in the course of my visit, Jenny brought out more and more binders of mail-art works documenting her exchanges with many artists, and of course, her projects. Her most recent was the Devil's Picture Book; a set of playing cards createdby herself and 3 other artists, (each taking one suite), which she exhibited with playing card designs by many networkers in the Turnhout National Museum, of Playing Cards in Belgium, and again in a gallery in a former bomb shelter in Dalfsen, Holland. Of her other binders, three consisted of postcards, 1986-88, '89-91 and '91-97. There was also a book of Memory Pages from her interactions with Robin Crozier's Memory Project; probably the longest-running mail-art project ever. Besides our discussions about the network and archives, Jenny and I took a bicycle ride (something we did in '86 when I visited), to the next town where we visited the Twickel Castle, garden estate and nursery. Now a vast commercial nursery for all manner of flowering plants, it
was once the walled garden for growing the foods consumed on the estate. Across the road, we went into the gardens proper, and were amazed at the extent of the landscaping, the wonderNly whimsical topiary in the formal gardens next to the moated castle, the lakes, pen of small deer, and incredible variety of imported trees, beautiful flowering shrubs, etc. It was a blustery, cold day with clouds racing across the sun in rapid succession. Then the sky filled with dark clouds the purple of a bruise, and it became apparent that a thunderstorm was about to happen. We kept walking until the first flash of lightening and crashing thunder, then took shelter in a little garden hut with a tall pointy thatched roof. To our relief, it was furnished with wicker chairs, where we sat for half an hour, watching the storm do its thing; continuous overhead lightening and booming thunder, sheets of rain, then hail, bouncing off the grass, and wind whipping the trees and shrubbery as birds dashed across the grass and fluttered into the bushes. When the storm was spent, the sun returned, glinting off all the rain drenched greenery. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me.
Minden & Kalletal, Germany - May 3-4 Petra Weirner is a relative newcomer (5-7 years?) to the network, entering through rubber stamping. After meeting Peter & Angela Netmail at Hein Design's annual stamp fair, she got connected to the network, and hasn't looked back since. While she started out using commercially produced rubberstamps (she has thousands!), she began carving her own designs, and since then has not purchased another stamp. (one of the reasons stamp magazines like RSM rarely feature carvers!). Fascinated with artistamps, Petra pursued (as many have) the purchase of her own pin-hole perforator. Just missing the one Kusterman sold to Hein Design after he got Joki's, she approached Hein only to find they had sold it to someone in California! In the end, however, she purchased a desk-top perforator, and launched into a very productive time of creating sheets of artistamps. Given the short duration of her involvement with the network, her archive is small, and while not catalogued, is filed by artist in alphabetical order, in expanding file boxes, or displayed on her kitchen wall. Peter Kusterman & Angela Paehlerlthe Netmails, on the other hand, have been diligently networking for the past 20 years, and have produced mountains of documentation from
their travels abroad ( their round-the-world, private mail delivery project, conducted wearing German Postal uniforms) and their many mail-art projects and local festivals at the Buz Centrum in finden. Every year they put out an annual catalogue of their activities, each a gigantic tome in itself. While I did not participate in their annual Mail-art Mekka Minden festival in September last year, I was f l e d with the deluxe edition (with pages of color reproductions of their Make your own Euro project and artistamps and tickets tipped in) of their Net Mi Year Book al 2002. A smaller format than in other years, this annual has a table of contents and page numbers to guide you &rough the many events and performances hosted by the Netmails at the Buz Centrum, and theirvisits to artists in other countries, Another venue where Peter organizes cultural events is in the senior's home, Robert-Nussbaum-Haus. During my previous visit to Minden in 1993, (when I was researching the "new Gennan banana consciousness," with my Roar Shack Banana Peel test and Personality Inventory for Banana Syndrome) hearranged for a bus full of the residents to come to Buz Centrum to do a Bananology workshop. All participants received a Master's Degree of Bananology for completing the Roar Shack test. This year, Peter arranged for me to do a session at the home, and to my amazement, one of the participants from the previous event, 87-year-old Hildegard Peitsch came in brandishing her Bananology Degree, gung-ho to complete the test again! I came away from that event with fourteen completed Roar Shack forms. Given the incredible number of events and travels Peter and Angela undertake each year, I was hardly surprised to find that their archive is not catalogued. What was surprising was to find it in such relatively organized (alphabetical, except for some filed by artist name or country) and up-to-date order. Like many working mail artists, they have opted to spend the majority of their time creating events, publications and connections, rather than tending to the more secretarial tasks involved in filing and cataloguing the material that comes in.
Noordgouwe, Holland - May 6-7 Johan Everarts is a French teacher at the Pieter Zeeman Zierikzee high school, where he has voluntarily run the Gallery "GalerijNforthe last 15 years, presenting mail-art exhibitions and works by individual mail artists in the halls of the school. During that time, he has presented solo exhibits of works Paolo Batile, Piennario Ciani, Lucien Suel, Ryosuke Cohen, among others. He has twenty large
frames at his disposal, and I was fortunate to get there in time to see his exhibition of Cees Francke's computergenerated sculptures in the landscape. I first met Francke in 1978 during my Futurist Sound tour, and participated in his various mail-art projects over the years. We lost touch for a number of years, but he contacted me again in the last 5 years, after he had moved to northern Holland and was growing a garden. I'd sent him some Hollyhock seeds, and after his death, Johan sent me a packet of seeds from the plants Cees had grown from the seeds I'd sent him; a kind of "operation round trip" of the plant world. Tien Heestermans is Johan's wife, an artist in her own right, but not involved in the network. studio. Back at their home, Tien and I waked the short block to her studio, where I got to see some of the components of her upcoming installation, and a previous work. She used a lot of broken wine glasses, contents spilled onto a canvas or board. Time, clocks and the passage of time are combined with old photographs of artists and authors illustrate her concern for the passage of time. . .somethingwe're all grapplingwith as it marches incessantly on. We then sat in their wonderful garden, had a glass of wine and talked about mail art, gardens, life, and had a good laugh about it all. I photographed Johan's archive which is very orderly, all works filed in boxes by the name of the artists, except for a few maybe ten, which are filed by country when he hasn't enough from anyone to constitute a box. While he hasn't got it catalogued, he can easily access individual works because the artists have their own boxes. This part of his archive constitutes a wall of about 12 feet in his office. The other part, a small room, contains boxes and suitcases ofthe works sent to his various projects; Birds and Borders, a collaboration he did with Rod Summers, The Oil Seal, L'Heure Bleue, Etc. His most important project is "Professor Zeeman goes Crea," which is in a large crate which Johan lugged around to five towns in Holland and Belgium, in order to install the exhibit, before he got fed up of all the work involved for no remuneration. We opened this enormous box and went through some of the works, but I only took a few shots because it is so diacult to photograph small works without the proper lighting and lens. Unfortunately I didn't make notes about the other shows, but the materials are all properly preserved in these tidy travelling cases.
Sint NiMaas, Belgium - May 8 -12 Geert de Decker, the youngest mailartist I visited, is an intense, highly focussed man with a mission . . . to create a comprehensive Mail Art Encyclopedia, amongst other equally demanding projects. Geert has been doing mail art since 1986, but because his archive is so well organized it takes less space than one less organized. As an example, Geert explains, a tape in a box of letters, makes a lot of air, but that does not happen in his Archive. The reason I mention his age at all, is that I found the majority of mailartists don't get around to thinking about archiving or cataloguing until they reach their 60's; a time when it becomes apparent one can no longer look forward to endless years of creative work, and thoughts about what will become of one's collection come to mind. Obviously Geert won't have to wony about that, as his collection is being catalogued as he goes along. He started organizing it when he noticed that when he wanted to find something, it took lots of time or had to say to the person "sorry I cannot find, next time. Today it takes me only a few seconds or minutes to find specific artworks or an artist among specific artworks." If you want to check it out, you can view it at his web site: http://www.sztuka-fabrvka.be/ Besides this painstaking work, Geert is dedicated to bringing live, experimental art to his home town of Sint Niklaas, not an easy row to hoe, since there isn't exactly a lively artist community there, youthful or grey-haired. However, he has developed a good working relationship with the O.J.C. KompasYouth Center, where he staged this year's Independent Music and Art Festival, and 15th International Mail Art meeting. His enthusiasm is quite amazing given the stress and fatigue he was feeling prior to the Saturday festival; the evening after the events were over, he was already planning next year's event! Geert spared no energy when it came to decorating the room in which I presented Banana Splitz; he hand cut over 300 individual bananas, and these were taped all over the walls of the room, and up through the stairwell from the 1st to the 3rd floor. Banana Splits is a risky interactive event, in that depends on having a large audience, and flamboyant audience members who can play the contestants. It wasn't the exuberant presentation of the piece I had hoped for, as we had a small audience (maybe 30. four of whom spoke no English), and the six contestants struggled to "make it up" in response to the questions from the Bananica. Obviously none of them were "born liars!" Geert's comment was that "There is a large difference between the Belgians, for
example and the Dutch. Probably in the Netherlands you would encounter more "liars" and a more lively public. Belgiansare more quiet and diacult to get them crazy lively." Following my event, Gunter Schroth presented his very popular bar code music. He uses a laser to read the bar codes, which are interpreted by some computer programs, and amplified so the audience can hear the sounds. A whole new media component of the weekend's program which was to include workshops, had to be cancelled due to illness on the part of the presenter. Schroth's bar code music was all that was left of that part of the program, but one what was much appreciated by the audience. Two floors down, the club's usual fare of beer and supersonic rock music thudded through the building. In the afternoon, performances were presented by Giovanni and Renata Strada, Emilio Morandi from Italy, Dawn Redwood from England, Peter Netmail and Karl Friedrich Hacker from Germany. Jose vdBroucke came with his archive of mailart, to give it away, and what was left (most of it) was taken by Geert for inclusion in his archive. Guy Stukens and Luc Fierens also came for the festivities, and the only outstanding absence was Belgian mailartist Guy Bleus, who is apparently suffering from post operation pain and depression. I was disappointed not to be able to visit him, as I've seen his archive on two previous visits ('86 and '93) and had hoped to photograph them and discuss his plans for their future. The week after our festival, Belgian Post Office was releasing a new, official postage stamp commemorating Mail Art, designed by Guy Bleus and Jean Spiroux, with the usual postal tradition of First Day Covers. We all lamented that this historic occasion couldn't have been the weekend of Geert's festival. Besides the performances there were a number of videotapes to be viewed, one in particular of interest to me, on French artistamp makers. Mail-Art -Art Postal: a TVproduction shown on French television from Christian Balmier (France). In French language but with lots of images and information about Mail-Art and with interviews of Mail-artists. (Ben Vautier, Fernand Barbot, ...).Another video was about performance experiments into the world of electronic and mechanical extensions of the body, including interviews with Australian artist Stelarc, who hangs his body from hooks, swallows a miniature video camera, etc., and San Francisco's Mark Pauline who, in spite of losing most of his hand to one of his misfires, still creates explosive/destructive machinery and events I would think better fit for the movies. There were also displays of mail-art
chess sets and chessmen created by networkers, a large chess board sent piece by piece as postcards by Christian Balmier, and various artworks by De Decker's young collaborators. Paris, France May 13-17 Enrico Sturani was my host and guide in Paris. To get from Sint Niklaas to Paris, I had to transfer in Brussels, and my train was cancelled due to the transit strike, but I only had to wait an hour and a half for another. I was met by Enrico, and by the time we battled through the line-ups for a cab, and got to where I was staying, all there was time for that day was a meal out. However the days after that were crammed with galleries and visits and lots of walking due to the transit strikes. While not a native to Paris, Sturani has spent plenty oftimethere, sowas anxious to show methe sights. We first visited the Buren Columns at the Palais Royal -. a huge courtyard of columns of diminishing height, in lines which exaggerate the perspective. While simple, the work is spectacular. After that, it was the Magritte exhibit in a wing of the Louvre, with the most peculiar entry and exits . . . difficult to find, tents stuck against the side of the building. It was a huge exhibit with many works I had not seenbefore, and I was certainly impressed with both the man's ability to paint, and his conceptualization. The next day we had a lunch date to meet sculptor/collector Yvette Dubois, and Mona Lisa collector Jean Margat. Dubois' collections are impressive and well housed; African art, both contemporary and early sculpture, a huge teapot collection, and many smaller items. Then at her studio, came the really amazing collection, 230,000 postcards, all filed in boxes according to subject matter! Later, we visited the Musee de la Poste, and found the tiny room which houses "mail art" amongst the many many rooms of historical exhibits. There were works by a few mailartists, but I would say most of the works were what I am calling "postal art," i.e. those works that play with postal forms (including sculpture of mail-boxes, or large canvases with stamps affixed), rather than mail art as most of us have come to know it; a networkingprocess of exchangesbetween artists. We also caught a Ben Vautier exhibit which was a huge installation/sculpture, the size of a summer cottage, and inside and out covered with all manner of useless things ow civilization produces, along with poignant quotes in Ben's famous handwriting. Souvenir shopping, meals, and then had an early morning departure the next day, with a flight from Paris to FrankfUrt, transfer to flight to Vancouver . . . end to an exciting, stimulating, trip.
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ART READER
"When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get it Free" by Greg Allen appeared in the Sunday New York Times for 17 August 2003. Bootleg videos are the subject of this article, its pluses and minuses. "Finding a Museum that Says 'I Do"' in the New York Times 17 August features the museums that couples have chosen in which to get married depending upon their interests and proclivities. "Lartigue's Albums: The Well-Lensed Life" by Alan Riding tells how Lartigue recorded his life in large-fonnat albums, with anecdotes and highlights of a life well-lensed. In 6 July issue of New York Times. "Missing in Action7' by Calvin Tornkins documents the missing years of Lee Bonecou as a major artist, her dropping out, and now her re-entry with a major exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum opening in October. New Yorker, 4 August. "The Painted Desert" by Geraldine Brooks tells how Aborigines in Australia turned ancient r i m s into chic contemporary art in the New Yorker, 28 July.
"Too Much of a Good Thing: Photography, Forgery, and the Lewis Hine Scandal" by Richard B. Woodward in Atlantic Monthly for June 2003. "The Mission: The Dia Art Foundation and its ambitions" by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker, 19 May 2003. In the same issue, an interview with Yoko Ono on the occasion of her 70" birthday in "The Talk of the Townyy. "Beacon of Light" by Amei Wallach in the Smithsonian for September 2003 discusses the new Dia: Beacon museum. "Yosemite and the Invention of Wilderness" by James Gorman is an amazing article involving a project by Rebecca Solnit, Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, who are considering the American concept of wilderness with Solnit writing, and Klett and Wolfe who are rephotographing some of the great landscape photographs of the 19'h and 20'h centuries. New York Times, Science Section, 3 September. Art Journal for Fall 2003 is dedicated to Thematic Investigation: Photography and the Paranormal which includes writing by Mark Alice Durant, Louis Kaplan, Karl Schoonover, Alison Ferris and Jane D. Marsching. The projects are by Moira Roth, Shimon Attie and Marco Maggi & Linda Weintraub.
"The Secret of the Black Paintingsnby ArthurLubow asks the question whether Goya painted his most celebrated work. This new study questions whether Goya did them. Artlink for June 2003 covers the New Brisbane, a city finding itself with the arts as a major emphasis. It's called "critical mass" and by this issue, you'll want to visit!
"Our Comic Meanwhiles: the criticism and comics of bpNichol" appears in Rain Taxi for Summer 2003. It is an extended essay on bpNichol Comics (Talonbooks, $24.95) and Meanwhile: The Critical writings of bpNichol (Talonbooks, $29.95).
Zine World 18 is out and is packed full of information on the underground press. This is a Reader's Guide to the Zine World or Underground Press, but also includes lots of articles. Available from P.O. Bo...