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/
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