From an unpublished interview I conducted with Willem de Ridder in 2002: I hated Art. Shit, it kills everything. All creativity is killed by calling it fucking art. But I liked what the Fluxus people were doing - making things up on the spot. So I organized a big Fluxus concert at a very famous big theatre on the coast, near the Hague. I made big posters and a lot of people came. I invited friends to do some pieces; [George] Maciunas came, Dick Higgins, and several others. I also organized one in Amsterdam at a student theatre. Jackson Mac Low was there, and Alison Knowles, Eric Anderson. You name it, lots of people. And it generated a fair amount of interest. Maciunas later wrote me a letter announcing that he would move back to America and set up the Fluxus Mail Order Warehouse, and asked if I would like to start up one in Europe. I said, "of course, please send me stuff and I’ll sell it. I’ll make a catalogue and the whole works." Not long after, an enormous crate arrived by freight, delivered to my house.* There was a huge amount of things from Maciunas: suitcases, boxes, all kinds of work. I thought, "Shit, now I have to do something about it." So I arranged all the various editions beautifully and had a friend of mine take a photograph of the display. My girlfriend [Dorothy Meijer] at the time sat in the middle of display. The photo looked so great that I distributed it and made a catalogue of the work, which I also heavily distributed. It listed all of the Fluxus works for sale, with prices and a description. Of course, I didn’t sell anything. Not a single thing. Maybe a few things to America. There was a great family involved in make-up cosmetics. Max Factor, yes, Donald Factor was his [son’s] name. Donald Factor collected and I sold him a few little things. But most of the material stayed at my home, and sometimes I showed it to people, but not much happened. No matter what I did, I couldn’t move the material. The museums weren’t interested at all. I made a national newspaper called "Kunst van Nu"**It was a magazine about arts that came out every two months or two. We made a special issue, Wim T Schippers and I, where I announced the Mail Order Warehouse was up and running. The Art scene in Holland looked at Fluxus as a joke, it couldn’t be true. Young people loved it but it was not taken serious at all. It was too early. I did all sorts of promotion but it was all to no avail - NOTHING happened. I lived in the gallery. I moved around the corner with my girlfriend. We had all this stuff sitting in the corner. I was trying to get in touch with collectors, but there was absolutely no reaction. But I liked the warehouse as it’s own work of art. The fact that art was for sale not in a museum or a gallery anymore, but as a Mail Order project! I thought to myself “This is a great piece, don’t worry about it.” After Maciunas died I realized that it would be better to keep it together. For very little money we sold it to [The Gilbert and Lila] Silverman [Fluxus Collection] and he kept it intact and displayed it, and it became a kind of trademark for Fluxus. Which is exactly what it should be. It was a work itself and I’m glad it stayed together and didn’t become commercial. I always liked that Fluxus wasn’t official. It wasn’t museum or gallery culture. *The materials were shipped August 1964, according to a letter, housed in the Silverman collection, from Maciunas to de Ridder. ** Kunst van Nu 3, 11 [Nieuw!! FLUXUS] (Art Now).
An exhibition of contemporary correspondence art spanning 30 countries and 300 artists, with historic artwork selected from the Patricia Tavenner collection, curated by Jennie Hinchcliff and John Held, Jr. - at the SFCB from 2/14/14 through 4/27/14. This exhibition draws on these notions of egalitarian creativity and imaginative cultural production while simultaneously investigating the geographic role of the American West in these cross-genre movements. Catalog retails for $40 from sfcb.org.
“Flux Year Box 2,” 1966. Five-compartment wooden box containing work by various artists. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection: Purchased through the William S. Rubin Fund; GM.987.44.2.
Ben Vautier Theatre d'Art Total New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1967 9.5 x 12 x 1.5 cm. Edition size unknown “Did I do any Fluxus editions?", Ben Vautier asked in a telephone interview I conducted with him in 1994. "I think Maciunas did them all, for us. I used to send him ideas and I would never know what would happen with them. My ideas were more artistic, and then they always ended up in plastic boxes.” Several other artists have claimed to have not even seen the Fluxus boxed works attributed to them until many years later. However, this edition inverts that paradigm. Vautier had these cards produced himself, and sent them to Maciunas in a clear plastic bag (the way they appeared in the subsequent Flux Year Box 2, see above). So they were typeset and printed without Maciunas' involvement, and even the label design is an almost entirely unaltered image of Vautier's vehicle, containing none of Maciunas' signature typographic flourishes. Apart from a copyright credit (to Fluxus, notably) all of the text that appears was painted by Vautier directly onto the automobile. It may be the Fluxus edition with the least input from Maciunas. The box falls into the category of Fluxus multiples that aimed to provide the buyer with the "complete works" of an artist. Other examples include Hi Red Centre's Bundle of Events, George Brecht's Wateryam, and Meiko Shiomi's Events and Games. Vautier called the collection "my complete theatre, from 1964 on..." but the Fluxus Performance Workbook has compiled dozens of others seemingly not included in the boxes, which admittedly varied. The example held in the Harvard collection contains thirty cards, whereas a beat up copy in the Fondazione Bonotto collection contains only twenty-two. The above tiled image, for example, is missing "i did not kill george brecht during the fluxus festival, 1964", a card pictured in an example from Jon Hendricks' Fluxus Codex. The cards themselves address a series of concerns central to Vautier's thinking at the time. These include destruction ("The Destruction of All Art is Art Too, Please Tear This Up"), suicide ("The only piece that lasts forever is death - kill yourself"), plagiarism and influence ("Since 1958 I copy, that's why I signed copying in 1958"), found materials ("Pick up anything at your feet)", the artist's ego ("Whenever you see art think of Ben...", "Art = Ben", "Just Look at Me"), self-doubt and the futility of art ("It's all nonsense", "I Doubt Everything") and his myriad contradictions ("Only I Ben do real anonymous art", "I Sign Everything", "I do not sign anymore"). Future multiples would re-address many of these ideas, including the matchbook to burn museums, the suicide kit and the God box and bottle (below). The signing of intangible things (the truth, politics, copying) can be traced back to Yves Klein's signing the sky and the Living Sculptures of Piero Manzoni. In 1947, at age 19, Klein and his friends Arman and (composer) Claude Pascal were on a beach in the south of France and decided to divide the world between themselves. Arman chose the earth, Pascal chose words and Klein selected the sky. He then signed the sky in what he considered to be his first art work. Vautier moved to Nice a couple of years later, and in the late-fifties opened a record store called Laboratoire 32. The boutique quickly became a meeting place and exhibition area where the principal members of what was to be called the Ecole de Nice (School of Nice) got together: César, Arman, Martial Raysse, and Yves Klein. Vautier became close with Klein and set out to sign whatever remained of the world - God, time, chickens, kicking, and perhaps most notably, holes (tunnels, manholes, assholes, drinking straws, etc. - see bottom of post). The card "I did it in 1949" parodies the rush to be first in the contemporary art world, and suspicion of bogus biography (many Fluxus artists have expressed doubts about some of the dates in Yoko Ono's Grapefruit, for example). The card in which he confesses his copying illustrates his reverence to George Brecht (Cage and Duchamp are widely held as significant precursors to Fluxus, but Brecht was Vautier's contemporary). Lastly, the boxed work introduces Vautier's concept of "Total Art" with the "Total Art Theatre: Just Look at Me", "Total Art Sculpture: Pick Up Anything At Your Feet", and "Total Art Poetry: Just Say Anything" cards. Vautier would continue performing mundane acts such as eating and sleeping as "total art" works for many years.
From an unpublished interview I conducted with Willem de Ridder in 2002: I hated Art. Shit, it kills everything. All creativity is killed by calling it fucking art. But I liked what the Fluxus people were doing - making things up on the spot. So I organized a big Fluxus concert at a very famous big theatre on the coast, near the Hague. I made big posters and a lot of people came. I invited friends to do some pieces; [George] Maciunas came, Dick Higgins, and several others. I also organized one in Amsterdam at a student theatre. Jackson Mac Low was there, and Alison Knowles, Eric Anderson. You name it, lots of people. And it generated a fair amount of interest. Maciunas later wrote me a letter announcing that he would move back to America and set up the Fluxus Mail Order Warehouse, and asked if I would like to start up one in Europe. I said, "of course, please send me stuff and I’ll sell it. I’ll make a catalogue and the whole works." Not long after, an enormous crate arrived by freight, delivered to my house.* There was a huge amount of things from Maciunas: suitcases, boxes, all kinds of work. I thought, "Shit, now I have to do something about it." So I arranged all the various editions beautifully and had a friend of mine take a photograph of the display. My girlfriend [Dorothy Meijer] at the time sat in the middle of display. The photo looked so great that I distributed it and made a catalogue of the work, which I also heavily distributed. It listed all of the Fluxus works for sale, with prices and a description. Of course, I didn’t sell anything. Not a single thing. Maybe a few things to America. There was a great family involved in make-up cosmetics. Max Factor, yes, Donald Factor was his [son’s] name. Donald Factor collected and I sold him a few little things. But most of the material stayed at my home, and sometimes I showed it to people, but not much happened. No matter what I did, I couldn’t move the material. The museums weren’t interested at all. I made a national newspaper called "Kunst van Nu"**It was a magazine about arts that came out every two months or two. We made a special issue, Wim T Schippers and I, where I announced the Mail Order Warehouse was up and running. The Art scene in Holland looked at Fluxus as a joke, it couldn’t be true. Young people loved it but it was not taken serious at all. It was too early. I did all sorts of promotion but it was all to no avail - NOTHING happened. I lived in the gallery. I moved around the corner with my girlfriend. We had all this stuff sitting in the corner. I was trying to get in touch with collectors, but there was absolutely no reaction. But I liked the warehouse as it’s own work of art. The fact that art was for sale not in a museum or a gallery anymore, but as a Mail Order project! I thought to myself “This is a great piece, don’t worry about it.” After Maciunas died I realized that it would be better to keep it together. For very little money we sold it to [The Gilbert and Lila] Silverman [Fluxus Collection] and he kept it intact and displayed it, and it became a kind of trademark for Fluxus. Which is exactly what it should be. It was a work itself and I’m glad it stayed together and didn’t become commercial. I always liked that Fluxus wasn’t official. It wasn’t museum or gallery culture. *The materials were shipped August 1964, according to a letter, housed in the Silverman collection, from Maciunas to de Ridder. ** Kunst van Nu 3, 11 [Nieuw!! FLUXUS] (Art Now).
Jan J. Schoonhoven Schoonhoven Mönchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1972 21 x 17 x 2.5 cm. Edition of 300 numbered copies Exhibition catalogue for a show which ran from October 27th to - November 26th, 1972. The white cardboard box contains 33 items including leaflets and printed cards. With texts by Schoonhoven, Johannes Cladders, Hans van der Griten, Klaus Honnef, Walter Kambartel, and Jean Leering, in German.
you. me. we. all believe in FLUXUS due date 2021-10-31 theme you. me. we. all believe in FLUXUS • create one or more fluxus event scores • put them on a post-it • send them via mail Only submissions via mail and on post-its will be considered! No fee, no jury, no return! show tba. submission address Mail Art | Schillerstrasse 2 | 73312 Geislingen/Steige | Germany curator Peter Schubert info gxggxxg.wordpress.com maximum dimensions everything that fits into my letterbox
Poiesis Bruscky surveys the five-decade career of Brazilian conceptual artist Paulo Bruscky (born 1949). In the 1960s, and throughout the ensuing decades of Brazil's military rule, Bruscky used mail art, collage, artist's books, visual poetry and newspaper interventions to launch his often humorous critiques of the country's dictatorship. He is famed for his courageous, political performance works (which have often placed him in direct conflict with the law or military authorities), as well as sculpture, sound art and street art; Bruscky also exchanged correspondence with members of the Fluxus group, assembling one of the largest Fluxus collections in Latin America. In this volume, a sort of album version of the artist monograph that is well suited to the artist's fondness for printed media, Bruscky's work is oriented for readers through commentary from writer and critic Adolfo Montejo Navas.
The term \"artistic animator\" is inspired by the definition \"Kunstanimator\" given to Spoerri by his longstanding friend Karl Gerstner during an interview with Katerina Vatsella in 1995. Wherever he went, Spoerri was capable of inspiring others to make art, and at the same time he absorbed, interiorized and transformed ideas from others. His fluctuating memberships during late Modernism (Zero, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Mail Art) explain why some areas of this work have not yet received their due attention and their connection to the whole picture has often eluded scholarly inquiry. Beyond his tableaux-pièges, which gave him immediate notoriety through an early purchase by the MoMA, Spoerri discovered a new way to approach the multiples in sculpture (Edition MAT), he transformed his trap pictures into an experimental narrative form (Topographie Anécdotée du Hasard), he initiated the Eat Art movement, he tested an innovative curatorial approach (the Musée Sentimental and the Giardino). Despite constant interruptions due to his semi-nomadic lifestyle, this oeuvre presents an extraordinary coherence, where none of these ventures can be properly understood without considering all the others. This is the first monograph entirely devoted to Daniel Spoerri in the United States to date. With an introduction by Barbara Räderscheidt.
William Cobbett's A French Grammar, published in 1829. Artist Kyra Clegg took this sad, battered old book and turned it from thi...
Maurizio Nannucci boîte à poésie Braunschweig, Germany: Edition Kunstverein Braunschweig, 1980 31 x 22.5 x 3 cm. Edition of 30 signed and numbered copies boîte à poésie (or poetry box) is a brown cardboard box with the artist's name, title and imprint printed on the cover in black and red, which contains booklets, postcards, photographs, a miniature globe, a record and rubber stamp. The 45 rpm record is Parole / Mots / Words / Wörter from the previous year (see post here). The rubber stamp reads "ten letters".
Sent to Sade
From an unpublished interview I conducted with Willem de Ridder in 2002: I hated Art. Shit, it kills everything. All creativity is killed by calling it fucking art. But I liked what the Fluxus people were doing - making things up on the spot. So I organized a big Fluxus concert at a very famous big theatre on the coast, near the Hague. I made big posters and a lot of people came. I invited friends to do some pieces; [George] Maciunas came, Dick Higgins, and several others. I also organized one in Amsterdam at a student theatre. Jackson Mac Low was there, and Alison Knowles, Eric Anderson. You name it, lots of people. And it generated a fair amount of interest. Maciunas later wrote me a letter announcing that he would move back to America and set up the Fluxus Mail Order Warehouse, and asked if I would like to start up one in Europe. I said, "of course, please send me stuff and I’ll sell it. I’ll make a catalogue and the whole works." Not long after, an enormous crate arrived by freight, delivered to my house.* There was a huge amount of things from Maciunas: suitcases, boxes, all kinds of work. I thought, "Shit, now I have to do something about it." So I arranged all the various editions beautifully and had a friend of mine take a photograph of the display. My girlfriend [Dorothy Meijer] at the time sat in the middle of display. The photo looked so great that I distributed it and made a catalogue of the work, which I also heavily distributed. It listed all of the Fluxus works for sale, with prices and a description. Of course, I didn’t sell anything. Not a single thing. Maybe a few things to America. There was a great family involved in make-up cosmetics. Max Factor, yes, Donald Factor was his [son’s] name. Donald Factor collected and I sold him a few little things. But most of the material stayed at my home, and sometimes I showed it to people, but not much happened. No matter what I did, I couldn’t move the material. The museums weren’t interested at all. I made a national newspaper called "Kunst van Nu"**It was a magazine about arts that came out every two months or two. We made a special issue, Wim T Schippers and I, where I announced the Mail Order Warehouse was up and running. The Art scene in Holland looked at Fluxus as a joke, it couldn’t be true. Young people loved it but it was not taken serious at all. It was too early. I did all sorts of promotion but it was all to no avail - NOTHING happened. I lived in the gallery. I moved around the corner with my girlfriend. We had all this stuff sitting in the corner. I was trying to get in touch with collectors, but there was absolutely no reaction. But I liked the warehouse as it’s own work of art. The fact that art was for sale not in a museum or a gallery anymore, but as a Mail Order project! I thought to myself “This is a great piece, don’t worry about it.” After Maciunas died I realized that it would be better to keep it together. For very little money we sold it to [The Gilbert and Lila] Silverman [Fluxus Collection] and he kept it intact and displayed it, and it became a kind of trademark for Fluxus. Which is exactly what it should be. It was a work itself and I’m glad it stayed together and didn’t become commercial. I always liked that Fluxus wasn’t official. It wasn’t museum or gallery culture. *The materials were shipped August 1964, according to a letter, housed in the Silverman collection, from Maciunas to de Ridder. ** Kunst van Nu 3, 11 [Nieuw!! FLUXUS] (Art Now).
If you’ve never considered receiving mail in the post as art, think again and check out this entry… Another fantastic zine maker & mail artist is redletterdayzine.wordpress.com ‘Mai…
The [artists’ book] movement had its beginnings with a few individuals (conceptual artists Dieter Roth, Hansjörg Mayer, and Ed Ruscha immediately come to mind), but in the area of structural …
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PITTSBURGH — There are hardly any figures in the Alison Knowles exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, but the presence of bodies, especially that of the artist, resonates throughout the prints, scroll books, and multimedia installations.
All you need is an idea, an envelope, and a stamp.
