This is so great: a hockey team sponsored by N. E. Thing Company. Though I’m a longtime fan, I did not know about “the team” before seeing it as part of Lucy Lippard’s archives.
Carl Andre, From Map of Poetry @Autobiography, 1966
Just as Carl Andre’s sculptures are “cuts” of elemental materials, his writings are condensed expressions, “cuts” of language that emphasize the part rather than the whole. Andre, a central figure in minimalism and one of the most influential sculptors of our time, does not produce the usual critical essay. He has said that he is “not a writer of prose,” and the texts included in Cuts—the most comprehensive collection of his writings yet published—appear in a wide variety of forms that are pithy and poetic rather than prosaic. Some texts are statements, many of them fifty words or less, written for catalog entries and press releases. Others are Socratic dialogues, interwoven statements, or in the form of questionnaires and interviews. Still others are letters—public and private, lengthy missives and postcards. Some are epigrams and maxims (for example, on Damian Hirst: I DON’T FEAR HIS SHARK. I FEAR HIS FORMALDEHYDE) and some are planar poems, words and letters arranged and rearranged into different patterns. They are organized alphabetically by subject, under such entries as “Art and Capitalism,” “Childhood,” “Entropy (After Smithson),” “Matter,” “My Work,” “Other Artists,” and “Poetry,” and they include Andre’s reflections on Michelangelo and Duchamp, on Stein and Marx, and such contemporaries as Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Damien Hirst.
Carl Andre’s writing and its materiality—its stress on the visual and tactile qualities of language—takes its place beside his sculpture and its materiality, its revelation of “matter as matter rather than matter as symbol.” Both assert the ethical and political primacy of matter in a culture that prizes the replica, the insubstantial, and the virtual. “I am not an idealist as an artist,” says Andre. “I try to discover my visions in the conditions of the world. It’s the conditions which are important.”
— James Meyer, Intro to Carl Andre, CUTS: Texts 1959-2004
Dieter Roth, Black page with holes (poetry machine), 1961
Diter Rot developed this piece as a contribution to the Fluxus publication An Anthology, which appeared in 1963. When the book was first planned in 1961, he sent to George Maciunas a black page with holes in it and the following instructions for use:
Please take the sheet with holes in, but do it like this: take any printed matter, for instance pages of book, catalogs, logocats, folders, posters, newspaper, emballage cut in size of fluxus make the holes there in to through, put in to fluxus, loose (as the black sheet) would have been; loose, i mean : don’t take black sheet, take pages of book, catalogs, logocats, folders, posters, newspaper, emballage, tricotage camouflage, cut as fluxus in size, make the holes therein, put into it fluxum, i mean put the loose sheet then into fluxus.
In other words: the black page is intended as a master for perforating found printed material through which changing views will then be available. On publication, An Anthology included a “white page with holes” but not the associated printed matter.
courtesy medienkunstnetz
Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg
In 1966 ten New York artists and thirty engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music and theater performances, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, held at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York City, in October 1966. The artists included are John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman.
Archival material has been assembled into ten films, each of which reconstructs the artist’s original work and uses interviews with the artists, engineers and performers to illuminate the artistic, technical and historical aspects of the work. Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg is the first film to be released in a series that will bring to life a historic moment in contemporary art history.
courtesy Microcinema
Hanne Darboven 1941 – 2009
I built up something by having disturbed something: destruction becomes construction. Action interrupts contemplation, as the means of accepting something among many given alternatives, for accepting nothing becomes chaos. A system became necessary: how else could I in a concentrated way find something of interest which lends itself to continuation? My systems are numerical concepts, which work in terms of progressions and/or reductions akin to musical themes with variations. In my work I try to expand and contract as far as possible between limits known and unknown. Generally, I couldn’t talk about limits I know. I only can say at times I feel closer to them, particularly while doing or after having done some conceptual series…. The most simple means for setting down my ideas and conceptions, numbers and words, are paper and pencil. I like the least pretentious and most humble means, for my ideas depend on themselves and not upon material; it is the very nature of ideas to be non-materialistic. Many variations exist in my work. There is consistent flexibility and changeability, evidencing the relentless flux of events.
—Hanne Darboven, Hamburg, 1968, as quoted in “Artists on Their Art,” Art International 12, no.4 (20 April 1968): 55.
courtesy Dia Center
It doesn’t really start with a drawing, but with words.
— Claes Oldenburg
Why then, have to be human?
Oh not because happiness exists,
Not out of curiosity …
But because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us … To have been
here, once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth –
this is beyond undoing.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Martha Rosler’s library was the subject of a touring exhibition and it is catalogued here, through e-flux. Besides being a wonderful, generous idea, I love the implicit alternative pedagogy that it suggests.
Tristan Tzara
A Note On Negro Poetry (1918)
“I don’t even want to know that there were men before me” (Descartes), but some essential & simple laws, pathetic & muffled fermentation of a solid earth.
To fix on the point where the forces have accumulated, from whence the formulated sense springs, the invisible radiance of substance, the natural relation, but hidden and just, naively, without explanation.
To round off and regulate into shapes, into constructs, the images according to their weight, color and matter; or to map the arrangements of the values, the material and lasting densities, subordinating nothing to them. Classification of the comic operas sanctioned by the aesthetic of accessories. (O, my drawer number ABSOLUTE.)
I abhor to enter a house where the balconies, the “ornaments”, are carefully stuck to the wall. Yet the sun, the stars continue to vibrate and hum freely in space, but I loathe to identify the explanatory hypotheses (asphyxiant probable) with the principle of life, activity, certainty.
The crocodile hatches the future life, rain falls for the vegetal silence, one isn’t a creator by analogy. The beauty of the satellites – the teaching of light – will satisfy us, for we are God only for the country of our knowledge, in the laws according to which we live experience on this earth, on both sides of our equator, inside our borders. Perfect example of the infinite we can control: the sphere.
To round off and regulate into shapes, into constructs, the images according to their weight, color and matter; or to map the arrangements of the values, the material and lasting densities through personal decision and the unswerving firmness of sensibility, comprehension adequate to the matter transformed, close to the veins and rubbing against them in the pain for the present, definite joy. One creates an organism when the elements are ready for life. Poetry lives first of all for the functions of dance, religion, music and work.
— Translated by Pierre Joris
Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover is one of the most incredible artist books ever made and a testament to their relationship to film. Video by Peter West.
