Leonard Abrams, "¡Presente!"

Photo of Leonard recently, by Angie Sloan

Last night was un poco loco, sitting in a hotel in a beach town in Catalunya in the middle of the night, watching the live stream of the memorial for Leonard Abrams in faraway NYC. Despite the many absences of friends and influenced (those whom Leonard enabled), the event at the Bowery Poetry Club succeeded in evoking the spirit of our dear departed friend. I am sure a few cocktails helped those present. I wrote a text for the memorial, which I’ll shape up later, but for now I’m posting a text by Leonard himself.

In 2022, Howl gallery hosted a panel discussion for my book Art Worker, and Leonard spoke then. I found the text he read odd, but he rolled around to explain it at the end. His sudden death a year later was a shock to the Lower East Side creative community. He was a key figure, a linchpin there, a person who never ceased to engage with the recollections and continuations of that golden period in American art and culture which the the magazine he ran chronicled. Leonard’s passing in the spring of 2023 marked the unraveling of the first-hand knowledge of our bohemia.

“I still can’t believe he’s not here with us. It’s like a bird swooped down and carried him off.” – Bonny Finberg

The Broken-Open People
by Leonard Abrams
What I wanted to talk about today was the importance of breaking things open. One of the reasons there was so much creative activity going on in downtown New York in the 1970s and ‘80s is that there was a convergence of people that had been broken open in some way. And this allowed a lot of stuff to dribble out. It was the kind of thing we all find so interesting because the typical state of people and other living things is to cover up your brokenness so as to present an unblemished, impermeable exterior to the outside world so that the outside world would be less prone to destroying it. And we love looking at broken people because it saves us the hassle of being broken open ourselves at any given moment.
I’m not suggesting that these broken people were just dying to turn up in New York and show everyone their wounds. Perhaps it’s more likely that they thought they were doing a pretty good job of covering them up, but maybe their wounds were easier to see than before. So I’m saying that New York became a magnet for broken open people. Why? Well maybe it was because New York had gotten such a bad reputation that the broken people thought: Well, hey, I can’t make it any worse. Or maybe their brokenness caused them to look for a place in which it was easier to survive because so many people didn’t want to live there. Or maybe their brokenness caused them to see it as some kind of paradise instead of the godawful wreck that John Q. Public thought it was.
In any case, all these cracked, bleeding [inaudible] people came here to play out their lives in relative peace and anonymity. Or to make a project out of their brokenness, to use it as a starting point for some kind of narrative about the condition of all of us. Of course every good artist’s drive depends upon the kinds of wounds that tear the facade away from themselves and those around them.
Now this is not to imply that everybody making some kind of art in the inner city neighborhoods of New York came here with that purpose in mind. Some had nowhere else to go, and some were just born here. But ask yourself, what would make you climb over a barbed wire fence and risk electrocution and getting crushed to death just to write your name on a train? Or pull apart a 100 amp streetlight to power a block party sound system? Now if you calculate that the risk of not painting a train or throwing a party was worse than getting killed, you take it. That’s just common sense. Of course this works better with teenagers.
Pretty soon comes the unbroken people, or rather the ones who have hidden their cracks and breaks better, and have no interest in showing them to anyone else, but prefer building up layers of armor to displaying their soft spots. And these folks do a pretty good job of displacing the other ones. And this is when the party starts to end. By “party” I mean a real explosion of creativity and more than a little bit of bacchanalia, and chances are we won’t see anything like it for a while. Unless of course things fall apart again. I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen, but not everyone is with me on that one.
– recorded at Howl Happening Gallery, May 2022 by Stephen Zacks

LINKS

EV Grieve, April 4, 2023
RIP Leonard Abrams
https://evgrieve.com/2023/04/rip-leonard-abrams.html

Marc H. Miller, “Leonard Abrams (1954 – 2023): Remembering the Publisher of the East Village Eye”, April 6, 2023
https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/leonard-abrams-1954-2023-remembering-the-publisher-of-the-east-village-eye/

East Village Eye, 1979-1987 - Gallery 98
https://gallery.98bowery.com/exhibition/east-village-eye/

Leonard's East Village Eye website news section chronicles his continuous festive organizing around the community his magazine brought together
https://www.east-village-eye.com/news.html

Leonard's film "Quilombo Country" website
https://www.quilombofilm.com/
"We can't leave, because if we leave we could lose our land. So we have to stay in our place. If we leave to work, we lose the land. Because farmers from outside will come in and take the land." Sounds like NYC.

Via expatriate ex-Eye comrade Tony Heiberg -- "Here’s my tribute to my dear friend Leonard Abrams that will be shown tonight - along with many other testimonials - at his memorial in New York at the Bowery Poetry Club. I hadn’t intended to post this here but technical requirements meant it was necessary before I could send it on to Leonard’s sister, Bethany Haye". Tony's tribute did not play in NYC, but you can see it here --

Chris "Daze" Ellis, Club Amazon, MCNY, Martin Wong collection

Pichifest Speaks: Lifting the Lid on Spain’s Underground Zine Scene

Page of a Pichifest zine, 2021

An interview with the Pichifest crew, producers of a series of zine fests in unusual venues in Madrid. The Pichis are a non-hierarchical collective working outside of state institutions. In this interview they tell why they don’t ask for cultural subsidies, but follow the “DIY/DIWO ethos”. In a followup question, I asked them to describe the zine scene in Spain. They responded with a blizzard of info on festivals nationwide. I’ve tried to provide the hyperlinks in this text.

Back in November, I set up at the Pichifest fanzine festival at the squatted social center La Enrededera. I blogged about it, not here on my art-specific blog, but at my squatting blog “Occupations & Properties”. I was amazed that this non-political artistic event, crowded with ordinary folks, was taking place at an occupied resistant venue. It seemed like a crossover moment, and a revelation of a new underground.
I asked the Pichifest crew for an interview some time ago. Now the dynamic Madrid-based cultural animateurs have responded to my queries in perfect English.

Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. I had such a fun time at your November ‘23 event at La Enrededera, even being on the periphery. It was clear that much more fun was had at the after-party, the talleres, etc. I have many questions to ask you guys, but first, can you describe your project in your own terms?

No problem, Alan, it's our pleasure. Glad you had a good time :)
Pichi Fest is an independent and self-managed fanzine festival that has been held in Madrid since 2017 in the Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado Eko, with the latest edition in 2023 being held at Centro Social Okupado La Enredadera de Tetuán.

Around 50-odd [self-publishing] projects pass through each edition of Pichi Fest, which we choose giving priority to affordable prices, originality, and zine spirit. Our festival is transfeminist and anti-oppression. We try our best to provide a platform and a safer space overall for non-hegemonic/underrepresented groups and individuals, foster newcomer zinesters, and tackle accessibility issues. Our aim is to run the festival following a DIY/DIWO ethos as well: we are a non-profit, non-hierarchical collective operating with no official cultural funding or external financial support whatsoever. We try to run our events as low cost as possible and make them self-sustainable while not charging exhibitors for tabling and keeping admission totally free.
We also celebrate several other events throughout the year, such as:
“Mini Pichi”, a smaller, one-day festival where we give priority to new and local projects in a more intimate space. Past Mini Pichi editions have been held in Vaciador (now defunct) and Ateneo La Maliciosa.
“Pichi Cafés”, relaxed meetings to share fanzines, snacks, and good chats.
Workshops and talks related to the world of fanzines
We celebrated Pichi Fest 2023 on November 3-4th, and we are planning the next edition in October, as well as a series of zine-making workshops for this spring.

I run two blogs, “Occupations & Properties” mainly about squatting, and “Art Gangs” primarily about artists collectives. What thrilled me about the Pichifest project is that your group sits in the middle, equally at home in art and solidarity with the social movement of squatting. Can you explain why you have been holding your festival events in occupied spaces in Madrid? Other zine fests and artist book fairs have been in institutional venues. Why did you not try to go that way? Are you seeking public money to support your project? If not, why not?

We are not and will not be going the institutional route, as we believe that would compromise our core values, especially being completely independent and not having to pander to the prevailing political agendas or deal with any sort of cultural bureaucracy that we think doesn’t belong in the zine scene. We feel our festival should be as DIY as zines themselves and we’ll stick to that.
One of the ways Pichi Fest may deviate from other fellow festivals is that we try to focus mainly on zines, as opposed to a more broad interpretation of self-publishing and self-produced art. Actually we try to actively stay away from the idea of the zine as an art object but that’s a whole other discussion. Also, as an event, we don’t really have growth plans. Our aim is just to make the festival better but not necessarily bigger. Given that we often operate in squatted spaces, we would hate to act as involuntary gentrification agents while doing all this.

La Enrededera social center in Tetuan

We have to point out that we don’t always celebrate our events in occupied spaces. Past Mini Pichi editions have been held in Vaciador, a self-managed underground venue, and Ateneo La Maliciosa, an independent space with ties to several local social initiatives. And during the pandemic we put together La Ruta del Fanzine, which was held across several local bookstores. We have also hosted Pichi Cafés and talks at La Oveja Negra (a vegan tavern) and Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, CNT’s archive library [CNT is the Spanish anarchist union]. Plus casual meetings aimed at zine-sharing in different open air parks, the Pichi Picnics.
We think our bottom-up approach ties in nicely with squatted social centres, initiatives that we stand for and are much needed in this city given the problem with the obscene rent prices, the amount of vacant housing and abandoned spaces, alienation and hyper-individualism and the subsequent demand for local cooperation.
We believe they can also act as spaces of resistance against lackluster, hegemonic, greedy and boring mainstream cultural offerings. Squatted spaces allow us a freedom we know we won’t find in other places. This of course presents its own problems, for example a lack of running water or the tables and chairs needed for all the stalls. But we have somehow made it work so far, and the feedback has always been positive despite the drawbacks.

Historically, dating back to some violent conflicts in the Amsterdam movement of the 1970s, squatters with cultural interests (artists, musicians, etc.), and activist squatters have often been in conflict, or at least have not had an easy time together. Politicals are suspicious of artists, and artists are exasperated with the politicals. Did you experience this kind of tension in your dealings with the assemblies at ESLA Eko and CSOA La Enredadera?
If you did not, maybe you can explain this new mood among artists and squatters in Madrid?

Not really, but we experienced what maybe was an echo of that tension when we were first starting. There was this preconceived notion from squatters that a zine and self-publishing event would mean self-employment and profit, and anti-capitalistic squatted spaces are of course strongly against that, at least if the potential gains are not in favor of a social cause. We took our time to explain that in zine culture the returns, if any, are mainly to sustain the production itself, that we were looking for projects and artists that adhere to that principle, and that content-wise we wanted to feature as many political and critical thinking zines as we could. During all these years we have hosted several projects that directly supported different social causes. It has always been a priority for us.

Crack! annual festival of comics-oriented artists’ zines in Rome, at the enormous squatted Forte Prenestino social center, 2023. The Pichis participated recently. This photo from a gallery of photos from one 10 years ago.

In general, our experience so far has been rewarding in every way to say the least. Some of us were not familiar at first with the squatted spaces in our own city and a whole new world opened. We have also brought in zinesters and fans that probably up until that point were just attending institutional events, and some squatters felt encouraged to get more into zines by coming into direct contact with a scene that thrives in Spain and moves through the network of graphic self-publishing fests.
We’d say the mood is shifting. Maybe it's because squatting has been persecuted and demonized in this city that these counter-cultural events can serve as a hint of what these spaces have to offer. But apparently in other squatted spaces they saw and still see zine events as self-employment, and we have heard stories of other festival organizers, past and present, that haven’t had the welcoming experience we had at El EKO or La Enredadera and had their proposals rejected.

Maybe you could spell out a little the "scene that thrives in Spain", and the "network of graphic self-publishing fests"?

There are several zine fests currently going on in Madrid: Autozine (our good pals who are also taking the non-institutional route), Fanzimad, Guindazine, the Feria de Fanzines events at La Maripepa or Periferia Silvestre in Alcalá de Henares.
[LINKS: @autozinefest on I'gm; doing stuff here early next month; fanzimad.com, festival just past; @guindazine on I'gm, late fall fair; "Feria de Fanzines" impulsed by @LibritosJenkins on Twtr/X; @periferiasilvestre on I'gm]
We’d also like to mention our local predecessors: MEA, which lasted for a run of 3 editions and had a remarkably anti-establishment and DIY philosophy that served as a huge inspiration for us, and last but not least the one-shot Breve Encuentro de Fanzines in 2017 put together by Bombas Para Desayunar and Aplasta Tus Gafas de Pasta which was the spark from where Pichi Fest was born.

[LINKS: MEA, meamaravilloso.blogspot.com; Breve Encuentro of 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170328120902/http://breveencuentrodefanzines.tk/; http://bombasparadesayunar.com/ (blog of Andrea Galaxina); https://aplastatusgafasdepasta.bandcamp.com/ (musical group, "smash your big pasty glasses", a signature of Spanish yuppies)]

As for the rest of the country, and just to name a few: Tenderete (Valencia) – the longest running graphic self-publishing event in Spain – Gutter Fest (Barcelona), Skisomic (Sevilla), Guillotina Festa (Donostia), Autobán (A Coruña), Vaia Vaia (Lugo), Turbo (Guadalajara), Nosotros Feriantes (Cuenca), Entropia (Málaga), Pliegue (Tenerife), Mallorzines (Mallorca)…

[LINKS: tenderetefestival.com/, January, website includes interviews with participants; @gutterfestival on I'gm, mid-May in BCN; @gutterfestival on I'gm & http://gutterfest.org/; skisomicfest.tumblr.com, Sevilla; @guillotina_festa on I'gm, Donostia, aka San Sebastián in Basque country; autoban.gal & @autobanbd on I'gm in A Coruña; @vaiavaia.lugo on I'gm in Lugo; @turbo_guadalajara in Guadalajara; Nosotros Feriantes amosa.es/actividades/eventos/159_nosotros-feriantes, Cuenca; Entropia in Málaga, @entropia.llll on I'gm; Pliegue in Tenerife, teatenerife.es/actividad/pliegue-6/2787; @mallorzinesfira on I'gm; and "dot" "dot" fucking "dot"!]

Before the pandemic we were reaching a point in which there was a zine festival in every province, or at least some small self-publishing market. Now a similar situation seems to be slowly developing again. Of course some fests just disappeared or are struggling to make a comeback. Such is the nature of these events, as they are mostly run by one individual or very few people, and burn out is common. However, new ones keep emerging. Zinemaking has a very infectious energy and the existence of festivals is a direct consequence.

That’s amazing. Actually, it’s rather overwhelming.

I wonder if you have any thoughts on the difference of the zine scene with say, the artists' book network of the 1970s (e.g., the NYC bookstore Printed Matter, Ulises Carrion’s shop in Amsterdam, etc.) that became institutionalized, grant funded, acaddemically collected, etc., and the countercultural media movement of the '60s in USA and '80s in Spain (e.g., Pepe Rivas Ajoblanco, et al.). Maybe that's too geeky historical.

We are sorry to say we lack the historical knowledge to give a proper answer, and besides, we feel we are very distanced from those examples both as a festival and as individuals. The Pichi Crew has grown over the years to become quite a diverse group, some of us are just too young to have had any direct exposure to such cultural moments. Others are Latin American immigrants in Spain, and we each have a different relationship with the arts, if any. As an organization we constitute a mixed background that is Spanish-speaking but doesn’t necessarily always look to the Spanish scene nor is solely influenced by it. The only common ground is that we met each other in this city and our shared love for zines. Sorry, at some point we had a zine historian that could have given a good reply but they are not in the house right now, hahaha.

Ulises Carrión at Other Books and So, Amsterdam, 1975-79. Courtesy: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

However, we’re not strangers to the phenomenon of institutions co-opting the zine scene – zinesters seen as fodder to provide institutional events “content”, and people using zines merely as portfolio flex to try to get into the art world (something that apparently art schools have been pushing in the last few years). We won’t judge how anyone tries to make a living as an artist, but this is not our approach to zines nor is it something we want in our festival and the scene we are building. We also get a lot of submissions that are someone’s master’s thesis in the form of a zine, and many people that ask us questions as research for class papers, so definitely there seems to be a buzz around zines in art schools.
There’s also the topic you pointed out in your earlier email about a permanent space for zine related activity in Madrid – it is something that has been discussed and proposed several times in our circles – but rent is still the main problem. There are some ongoing zine archive initiatives both in the city and nearby, but it's hard for them to get established to the point of having a permanent space to check or borrow (there are notable exceptions, like Marcablanca or the Local Anarquista Magdalena). And as far as commercial spaces go, Madrid lacks something like Fatbottom Books in Barcelona, which also serves as a meeting point for zinesters and cartoonists.

[LINKS: La fanzinoteca de @lasosteniblealcala on I'gm; http://marcablanca.press/; https://localanarquistamagdalena.org/; https://fatbottombooks.com/]

Sure, zines have acquired a wider presence in the last few years, but zines are still usually found scattered in the least pleasant shelves of comic-book shops, alternative bookstores or anarchist spaces. They are never the main attraction.

About other questions you mention in the email, we think it would be especially interesting to talk about the possibility of a permanent space for zine-ifying in Madrid.
Thanks, and talk to you soon!
Gracias a vosotrxs!


Epilogue:
Clearly the zine scene in Spain is on fire.
From my perspective, there seems to be precious little room for independent non-commercial culture in this thoroughly neo-liberalized (and recently rather obviously corrupt) capitol city. Since the right-wing regained power in Madrid, watching the few bright spots fall away and be closed has been too depressing to blog. Moreover official Madrid culture has gotten really boring. The Pichifest is a bright spark of spirit in the gloom of this city.
Libros Mutantes, the Madrid Art Book Fair, will take place 26-28 April. That's cool; it's very crowded; it’s fun, and there was an open call. But it’s much more attuned to a normative “artists’ book” scene which the Pichis are at pains to disavow (curricula, grants, juries). Libros Mutantes is held in the administrated institutional space La Casa Encendida. (Few remember that the programs in that place were inspired early on by the late-'90s self-organized squatted social center El Laboratorio.)
For the most part, this elderly Anglo is seeing only two ends of the cultural spectrum, the institutional and the self-organized left. I got hip to the Pichis through following the okupa ESLA Eko’s activities. As the blizzardly rundown of Spanish zine fairs above makes clear, I simply did not get the memo.
It’s been some months since zine fever gripped me. I took positons in two festivals, one artistic and the other anarchist. “Tabling” fairs is a bunch of work for these old bones. But I love it. I love setting up my stuff, seeing other exhibitors, sitting and watching the browsing crowds. I love the ticklish engagement (or not) with a person looking closer, which might become a conversation, or just a “humph!”. Working a book table at a fair is something preciously real in our meat-starved screen-driven world.

LINKS

My blog post, “Art + Squat = Pichifest”
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2023/11/art-squat-pichifest.html

Pichifest – @pichifest is everywhere – Tumblr, Instagram, "X", YouTube, podcast, woof!
See – https://linktr.ee/pichifest
(“link” what? Right.)

Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado Eko
https://eslaeko.net/

Ateneo La Maliciosa
A meeting place run by Ecologistas en Acción de Madrid, Fundación de los Comunes and Traficantes de Sueños bookstore. They host regular events and classes.
https://ateneomaliciosa.net/

Ulises Carrión, 2016 exhibition at MNCARS, "Dear reader. Don’t read"
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/ulises-carrion

Exposición: “Ruptura, contestación y vitalismo (1974-1999)”; about the journal Ajoblanco and its times
https://www.ajoblanco.org/historico/exposicion-ruptura-contestacion-y-vitalismo-1974-1999-2-2

For links to the blizzard of zine fests referenced by the Pichis, see the text above. Most are on Instagram, so I’ve given the @hashtags only.

“Call It Something Else” in Madrid, Part 2

Ben Patterson

Your blogger continues to tussle with an account of the recent show about Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press. We meet Benjamin Patterson, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, John Cage and John Giorno and Carolee Schneeman. And spend some time witih Alison Knowles’ “House of Dust”, a faux free school, and her “Big Book” hooked up to a toilet.

As per my last post on the recent “Call It Something Else” exhibition at Reina Sofia museum, it feels a bit silly to crank on for justice for the losers in the contest for recognition in their contemporary artworld. Of course my frustration is about me and all of us, back then and even now. The Fluxians were the classic la-dee-dah outsiders, the marginalized in the NYC artworld of their day. Their revenge is their influence today, and their status as diffident heroes of all those marginalized by the artworld made by the 1%.
As my internet searches reveal, they’re doing pretty well in recent widely distributed academic exhibitions. Scholars love puzzles.
The Fluxians laid a crooked path for others to follow in the conventional way artists move from one generation to the next. Rather than classic emulation and variation, or Bloomian reaction, the Fluxians proceeded by repetition of creative games and actions. This was true to their roots in music and theater with those genres' scores and scripts, but rather a spanner in the works of visual art. And from that grinding of the gears comes much of value for today’s concept work, performance art and social practice.

Bern Porter

The Fluxus cohort did undertake some large and influential projects, material remnants of which I'll describe eventually. But first I'll trot through the Reina Sofia exhibition and poke into just a few of its nooks and crannies.

Books Under Glass

As a publishing project, the Something Else Press was prolific, and the books it issued were extremely eclectic. A large number of these are nailed to the walls in a first room of the exhibition, in their hard and softcover editions. Among the earliest is The Four Suits (1965), like playing cards, with works by Alison Knowles, Benjamin Patterson, Tomas Schmit and Philip Corner. Knowles was Higgins’ partner, and an early silkscreen virtuoso. Corner is the piano guy. Schmit? No se.
Benjamin Patterson, the heart in the “Four Suits”, trained in the contrabass wind instrument. As an African-American, he could not get a job in a US orchestra and so expatriated. He met John Cage in Germany, and was a key contact in Wiesbaden, helping George Maciunas to produce the first Fluxus Festival there in 1962.

The Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden remains a bastion of Flux-thought today. You might can still take Patterson’s questionnaire online for the 50th anniversary of Fluxus: “Has Fluxus changed the world?” (2012). Did Fluxus change the world?
Four Suits was Higgins first anthological book, produced around the same time as Maciunas was issuing “Fluxkits”, anthologies of miniature artworks. Barring copies to peruse, I can’t say anything about these SEP anthologies. I’ve never seen any cited. Maciunas’ group show boxes in museums you also cannot touch. More on this condition of not touching later.

Ladrones de Libros!

Other SEP publications in this gallery include their 1967 Store Days with Claes Oldenburg. I had a copy of this, which included a business card for the Raygun Store in a pocket. (Seller’s description: “Spot of dried glue residue on front endpaper where envelope containing Oldenburg's business card was anchored upon publication, typically now lacking”.) The book is a lovely illustrated record of that inspiring proto-Pop project, and of course my copy was stolen.
SEP also did an LP record with Allan Kaprow, “How to Make a Happening” (1967). (It’s on YouTube; access from Duck Duck Go’s “Duckplayer” to avoid ads.)
Kaprow taught for years at Cal Arts. He invited Higgins and Knowles. Kaprow on this record is extremely didactic: "There are 11 rules of the game. One: forget all the standard art forms." He lists them. "The point is to make something new. Something that doesn't even remotely remind you of culture. You've got to be pretty ruthless about this…."
"Art has always been different from the world's affairs. Now you've got to work hard to keep it all blurry." In this era of Netflix and auction-driven banality, these words ring like the roar of a Tyrannosaurus. [“Wait, I can’t see! Whose mouth am I walking into?”]
After 1968, most of the exhibition’s text panels disappear. Who knows what those books on the wall are about?

Carolee Schneeman's drawing for her body house book

One that’s briefly noted is Bern Porter’s I’ve Left (1971; still $15 at Printed Matter). A scientist working in NYC in 1930s, Porter was infected by the art virus. He worked on the a-bomb, and quit after it was used. He started his own publishing imprint and art gallery in San Francisco.
Peripetetic does not do justice to this pinball of a creative scientist. The book he did with Higgins “proposes wild and revolutionary improvements to and uses for books, poetry, clothing, theater, architecture, art, food, toys, and automobiles”.

Wrong Way In

During one of my visits to the show I walked into what turned out to be the back end. I ran into Bio-Music (1974), a book the SE Press made out of brain wave sound generation experiments. There was a video of John Cage wired up and beeping.
Big vinyl sheets had John Giorno’s repetitive poems stenciled onto them: Higgins published Giorno’s Cancer in My Left Ball (1973). The publication launch card was a copy of the poet’s colossal hospital bill.
Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” project is displayed. I remember calling this line a few times back in the day. It’s different hearing it on headphones… but I did, running into John Cage’s mallomar voice intoning “slowly we are getting nowhere” and “beginning to enjoy it”. Not me. In the days of full-out nuclear war anxiety, this Buddhist stuff, a kind of religiously managed tranquility was compelling to many artists. Now I think we gotta do something.
A wall was devoted to drawings from Carolee Schneeman’s Parts of a Body House (1972). Carolee was a a wonderfully sexy artist, and these erotic representations of a fleshly architectural conception made Dick Higgins balk. He only published the text; the Beau Geste Press in UK brought it out again with the illustrations.

A Bean-Like School: Fabbed or What?

Alison Knowles, Higgins partner, produced House of Dust at Cal Arts in 1971. This was an extended project with several collaborators. It featured two constructions (one burned down) of organic pod-like chambers, and scheduled events. The architecture came out of a computer-generated poem Knowles did at Bell Labs. (Hunh? An architecture lab in Argentina tried to explain it; see links below.) In one event a helicopter drops copies of the poem onto the house. This seems of a part with the extraordinary series of E.A.T. experiments, collaborations between artists and engineers overseen by Billy Klüver.

Knowles’ bean-shaped house was a site for events, a kind of free school within a school. “That’s what most people remember, that we would decide as a group what we were going to be doing” (Knowles in Sarbanes interview, link below).
This and other architectural pecadillos were combined in the book Fantastic Architecture, edited by Higgins and Wolf Vostell (1969/1970). (Primary Information reprinted this classic in 2015.)
That book is extraordinary. I remember the moment I found it in a college library. But again, here it is nailed to the wall and unseeable. The show emphasized artwork associated with the publication. A wall text puts the book into the historical context of artists’ resistance to Robert Moses’ LOMEX – cross Manhattan expressway, which would have obliterated the Soho industrial loft district where artists were living.

The wall texts in this show were extensive. I photo’d them, but did not reread them for this text. By the time I got around to attempting this review, the catalogue also had appeared; info overload. I’ll try to describe that also.

Fantastic Architecture in the Real

Fluxus animateur George Maciunas had architectural aspirations. Today the foundation with his name front pages his Fluxhouse cooperatives, illegally set up to house artists in Soho in the 1970s, and the struggles for living space there in those days.
Higgins and Maciunas paced each other in their overlapping spheres. The Something Else Press was born from Higgins’ frustration with Maciunas’ delay in publishing his book.
Both of them had a fascination with the vernacular. Fluxus events organized by these two animateurs tried for a mix of popular elements like circus, carnival, sportive contests, theater itself, often obsolete forms which the artists sought to reinject with abstruse experimental content. (Brecht’s concept of epic theater included similar analogs as a means of putting over political content.) If you don’t undertand what’s going on, at least you understand the frame, i.e., what might be supposed to be going on.

Return of the Monster Book

Alison Knowles made another sculptural installation she called The Big Book. It was a large sculpture represented in this show by a life-sized photo blowup. It looks like a giant wood-framed folder of photos and plastic-based collages in muted colors. The wall text suggests that it could be hooked up to plumbing like a house. The Big Book was exhibited in its day with success. The video in this show is full of shaky closeup details, but is unhelpful in understanding just what this installation artwork consisted of.
An idea of what The Big Book must have been like comes from a later work, The Boat Book, exhibited in Pittsburgh in 2016.

The Boat Book in 2016

Nadine Wasserman writes of it, The Boat Book, an immersive 8-foot-tall sculpture with proportionate, movable wood-framed pages…. [T]his book, similar to earlier versions called ‘Big Book’ and ‘The Book of Bean,’ is intended to be physically and mentally navigated. As an assemblage that includes a bean turner [?], poetry, books, a soundtrack of Knowles reading nautical-related material, and (the potential) for interaction, it has [a] non-hierarchical density of experience”.
The is surely the clearest example I’ve ever seen of the artist’s book as alternative space.


NEXT: Some more on the Reina Sofia show. A visit to the Vostell Museum in Caceres, another redoubt in the Fluxus “Game of Beans”. The catalogue.

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LINKS

Dick Higgins daughter has written on the movement from the rug rat’s eye view:
Hannah Higgins, Fluxus experience (University of California Press, 2002)

re. Ben Patterson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Patterson

good precis of his life and career: Andrew Russeth, “Ben Patterson, Cornerstone of Fluxus and Experimental Art, Dies at 82”, June 27, 2016
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ben-patterson-cornerstone-of-fluxus-and-experimental-art-dies-at-82-6578/

An Alternative History of Art, Episode 8 of 10 (13:44; 2018)
Naomi Beckwith, curator at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, explores the work of overlooked artist Ben Patterson - the only African American founder of the Fluxus movement.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09v6vt8

See also "Ben Patterson Tells Fluxus Stories (From 1962 To 2002)", and many recordings of his music at
https://www.ubu.com/sound/patterson.html

Carl Little, “Bern Porter: Never Finish”, April 26, 2015
https://hyperallergic.com/201631/bern-porter-never-finish/

Rachael Morrison, "Bern Porter" in MoMA Library; online exhibition
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/lostandfound/

On Alison Knowles’ House of Dust:
Jonathon Keats, “Meet The Female Artist Who Programmed A Computer To Make A House In The 1960s”, July 30, 2022
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2022/07/30/meet-the-female-artist-who-programmed-a-computer-to-make-a-house-in-the-1960s/?sh=58edfb1e5209

See also Carlos Trilnick, "The House of Dust" (ESP; many photos)
https://proyectoidis.org/the-house-of-dust/

On Knowles’ experiences at CalArts, see:
Janet Sarbanes, “A School Based on What Artists Wanted to Do: Alison Knowles on CalArts” interview, August 7, 2012
https://eastofborneo.org/articles/a-school-based-on-what-artists-wanted-to-do-alison-knowles-on-calarts/

George Maciunas’ Fluxhouse Cooperatives
http://georgemaciunas.com/

Nadine Wasserman, “A retrospective gives Alison Knowles her due: A Fluxus artist’s journey is mapped in beans and unconventional ‘books’”, 2016
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/arts-entertainment/a-retrospective-gives-alison-knowles-her-due-1958208

"Call It Something Else”: The Tangled New Wilderness of Concept Art 1 of 3(?)

The recent exhibition "Call It Something Else: Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974)" at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid "focuses on the books, projects, and activities of Dick Higgins’s publishing house Something Else Press, as well as on his theoretical notion of Intermedia, a term the publisher reappropriated to designate the heterogeneous and category-defying forms sustained by the Something Else matrix."
Fluxus? Neo-Dada? Proto Conceptual Art? Whatever it might be called, the Something Else Press projects were essential book things which ushered experimental art into a new terrain vague, an expanded field, a fertile littoral zone that Dick Higgins, in his chatty critical writing, called "intermedia".
Fine. But this was one seriously weird exhibition. Higgins’ publication project was so idiosyncratic, so surpassingly strange that it is, or has been until now, largely unrepresentable. Or, rather, no one has tried. The museum is heroic to make the attempt to do so, but the Reina Sofia is not afraid of obscure hardtack art. It’s the art institutions in the USA who, despite holding most of the cards, are the timid ones.

The Book as Alternative Space

That feels like a Lucy Lippardism. It was a concept to wrap one's head around in 1976 when Printed Matter artists bookstore was founded in NYC.
The book as exhibition: That was Seth Siegelaub's innovation, the gambit in 1968 that made him and his gang famous, producing exhibitions that weren't sited in an art gallery, but rather existed as books. His select group of WMA's became known as the group of conceptual artists. This is canonical 'contemporary' art history in the 20th century. From time to time bleatings might be heard from the margins, but the institutional shows and market of conceptual art revolved around that loud self-description.

These were the art scientists – the very programmatic, very deliberate “look at me doing scientific things”, very well documented trials of simple actions. Measuring things.
The bleatings from the margin, indeed the first ‘books as alternative space of exhibition’, had been done some while before by the Something Else Press. And conceived some years before that. This was in the context, more or less, of the international Fluxus movement. That was named by George Maciunas, proceeding more or less (a frequent term in this terrain of shifting variables, complicated by a team of jokesters who like to move the scenery around) from the Wiesbaden events of 1962.

The Boys Are All Right

This is not to say that Siegelaub's crew were pikers. They were just packaged better, and they had the enchufe. The outsider band of Fluxus was too gangly, too inscrutable. Many of the artists involved were tied to Dada, and to European lifeways which didn't square with American values. Besides, George Maciunas was a known communist and property outlaw. Higgins was this oddball Brit whose family made medieval armor. Check with the board of directors? Fuck that guy and the horse he rode in on.
What is art now? That’s easy: It’s what can sell and be sold, what you can stand in front of in the museum and take a selfie. And your friends will be impressed because they've heard of the celebrated author of the work you are in front of. (Which was most probably not made by her or him, but who cares about the creative supply chain?)
The ideas that motivate art, the generative source code for these creative effusions of human energy – that isn't usually on display in museums or art galleries.
You have to look for that in the trash. Sift among the pile of reject misfit toys.

Sorry, Too Strange

The Something Else/Fluxus project is where that code is to be found, the algorithms of mid-20th century post-modernism. In its day the movement was too casual, too heterodox, too 'dirty' and too confusing. Seth S. and his crew nailed it down to one thing – “this book is the exhibition”. In New York City. Advertised in the art magazines.
There is a lot more in the Fluxian nexus than the minimal hard edge concept art of the mainstreamers, the canonicals, whose work has been regularly exhibited and chewed over by academics for decades. Or, let's say, Fluxianisms are quite different. More 'arty', art-derived, game-oriented, experimental, much more mixed and opaque in their motivations, sources, and manifestations.
The one who brought it together, made it seem rigorous like a scientific procedure-based art should be, was John Cage. He elaborated a theory of chance operations which could make sense of it all. Or not at all, really. But seem to.
Despite that Something Else was NYC based, and quite a number of the artists were USAians, Fluxus has always been a European thing, as evidenced by the more extensive network of institutional formations given over to the movement there. (One of which, the Vostell Museum in Spain, I will come to in this blog.) In the USA there are a lot of Fluxus collections, but they are sequestered institutional repositories, archives, and not usually seen in spaces of exhibition or activation.

So, What About the Show Already?

That’s for next time. But a good start is the text in “links”, a review by a member of a group of East Europeans studying Fluxus.
“No idea is clear to us until a little soup has been spilled on it”.
“A Something Else Manifesto by Dick Higgins”, Great Bear Pamphlet, Something Else Press, NYC, 1966.
“If you can’t do it twice, you haven’t really done it.”
-- DH, 1974

LINKS

"Call It Something Else" exhibition flyer
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/exposiciones/folletos/something-else-press-eng.pdf

Museum of Modern Art
https://www.moma.org › exhibitions: The Seth Siegelaub Papers as Institutional Critique
“This was the first show Siegelaub organized in which the catalogue, displayed in a private apartment, was the entire exhibition in itself.”
Do we detect a bit of mirror-gazing institutional narcissism here? Siegelaub, BTW, was also a Red. Maybe just quieter about it.

Book as Exhibition
https://book-as-exhibition.org
Seth Siegeulab "Xerox Book"
“A well-known example of a book as exhibition is the catalogue published in 1968 by Seth Siegelaub, which was the sole site for exhibitions of conceptual artists…”

An intelligent review of the show, drawing on the extensive wall texts
Aga Wielocha, “Call It Something Else: Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974)” at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 10, 2023
https://activatingfluxus.com/2023/10/10/call-it-something-else-something-else-press-inc-1963-1974-at-museo-reina-sofia-madrid/