msdm: mobile strategies of display & mediation

Russel Martin is organising a one day seminar for Artquest around the aims of the Forum project (more details if you’re not familiar with it are at http://www.artquest.org.uk/artpracticedialogue.htm), looking at how dialogue and conversation are used as parts of creative and professional artistic practice, and at art practices that don’t necessarily include making objects. It will function partly as an exploration of Forum - autonomous peer mentoring groups set up by Artquest and administered and selected by artists - through its own methodologies and hopefully suggest ways in which Artquest can provide future research projects for artists. (via Russell)

During the first meeting with the facilitators, that include myself alongside Rona Lee, Nina Pope, Jason Bowman, Shane Waltener, Binita Walia, we initiated a discussion on ways to work together. Different tactics were debated, but basically we would be interested in the idea of developing a dialogue on working together by working together on a collective task. Like the idea of knitting a common piece of knitwear or knitart out of the contributions sent in advance or brought in that day.

As you know I’m quite interested in the idea of networked projects and publications, and in particular in their combination of collective authorship and craft. On that topic, I’ve been reading this great book by Craig J. Saper Networked Art (The University of Minnesota, 2001) that you can browse online at google books.

Here, Craig discusses at lenght the concept of assemblings as collective publications built out of contributions with no editorial exclusions
“By the late 1960s, one of the most important features of the new distribution network was the periodic mailing of very small editions (fifty to five hundred) containing prints and poems, pamphlets and small art objects, collected in folios, bound volumes or boxes. such collections typically consisted of one page or object from each contributor. The assembling system generally required that each contributor send the entire run of the contribution to te compiler who in turn distributed the collection to subscribers, or sometimes simply to all participants. (p. 129)”

In this .pdf, titled Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, for the exhbition Networking Artists & Poets
curated by Craig Saper he discusses this particular project for commonpress by Chuck Welch, in which he requested the contributors to send in their favourite piece of clothing, which was then processed into paper, and used for the publication.

“The most successful project involving craft as conceptual art involved the Cracker Jack Kid (alluding to the ”surprise in every package“ slogan) (a.k.a. Chuck Welch). Welch edited the special issue of Commonpress (19) on ”material metamorphosis.“ The project involved one hundred artists from sixteen countries. Each sent a favorite piece of clothing. The items were shredded and pulverized into cotton rag pulp and then processed into purple watermarked paper and envelopes. The results were sent to the participants. Each participant was asked to comment on the project as it relates to self-identity. In a folder with a photo on the cover, Welch includes two small envelopes. One labeled ”material evidence“ contains small pieces of cloth; the other, ”evidence of transition,“ contains paper fragments. ”

Richard Kostelanetz and Commonpress are frequently mentioned so i’ve been searching a bit more at these practices of networked assemblies and collected a selection of links.

http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/invent/assembling.php
Between 1970 and 1982, Assembling Press published thirteen world-famous annuals of ”otherwise unpublishable“ (aka avant-garde) art and literature, Assemblings. Instead of selecting from submissions presented to it, Richard Kostelanetz (and, at various times, Henry James Korn, Mike Metz, Scott Helmes, and David Cole) invited potential contributors to submit a thousand copies of whatever they wanted to include, and these feasty festivals of visual and verbal waywardness were alphabetically assembled into 8 1/2” by 11“ books.

http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/examples/whyassem.php
Somewhat influenced by a beautiful German book called Omnibus (1969), we hit upon what we think is the most appropriate structure for a cooperative self-publishing channel. In brief, Assembling invites writers and artists whom we know to be doing unusual work, which we broadly characterize as ”otherwise unpublishable,“ to contribute a thousand copies of up to four 8.5- by 11-inch pages of whatever they want to include. Since each contributor is responsible for arranging, by whatever means and funds available, for the production of his own work, he becomes his own sub-self-publisher, so to speak.
We advised our invited collaborators to put their names on their work, as we ran no table of contents, and to center their contributions toward the right, leaving at least an inch on the left-hand margin, because Assembling promised to collate the contents alphabetically and then return three bound books to each contributor. The remaining copies would ideally be sold through bookstores and the mails, hopefully defraying the costs of binding, mailing, etc.

We abrogated editorial authority not because we were lazy but because we wanted a structural contrast to the ”restrictive, self-serving nature of traditional editorial processes.“ Since we are collators rather than true publishers, we customarily refuse requests to handle the printing, for necessity demands that counter-conventional writers learn some essential points about reproduction, such as discovering the method(s) most conducive to their particular work. As a result, each entry ideally represents the best that each contributor can do untouched (or unretouched) by grubby editorial hands. As ”compilers“ rather than true publishers, we also avoided the editorial pains (or pleasures) of rejecting anything, along with the anxiety of needing to fulfill a predetermined concept; and given the elasticity of our production methods, we never faced the predicament of accepting more material than could be ”accommodated by our precious space.“

http://www.zinebook.com/resource/perkins/perkins6.html
in answer to the question of where the idea of assemblings came from, I have to hesitantly conclude that at some point this technique crossed over from the science fiction community to the art community (further research in this area is needed). Coupled with the rise of science fiction fan clubs was the formation of amateur press associations or alliances (APAs).

http://www.sztuka-fabryka.be/encyclopaedia/items/commonpress.htm
Commonpress is a zine from Pawel Petasz, based upon an international artistic co-operative practice of which each edition is edited, compiled and printed by a different Mail-artist. Petasz acted as co-ordinator and assigned an issue number to each participant who wished to publish under the banner of Commonpress. The theme of the issue was a free choice of the editor and other Mail-artists were welcome to send their artwork on the specific theme. The editor had no editorial control from Petasz, he/she only was responsible for including the contributions and was also the distributor of his/her own issue, in an amount of copies to the editors choice. Even the editor was able to choose free how many copies there will be made, she/he had to serve an obligatory list of persons who received a copy: participants, editors and archives suggested by editors, so about 200 copies was a minimum.

The concepts of Commonpress, Smile and other publications such as assembling magazines are similar to the philosophy of Mail-Art that communication is much more important then a single artwork, the collective process of creating art through communication is the artwork. Different from assembling publications, Commonpress extend the assembling theory, the individual production of one whole issue of a zine owned by the whole Network, is one single part of a collective project.

This is a useful bibliography for my own work and teaching so i’m happy i spent the last hour compiling it
It can be useful background reading for the participants as well and the discussion, so i’m posting it here for your comments. Let me know what you think and also where your research has led you, by leaving a comment.

Thanks, paula