#expanded publishing

As Rupp has said, “Soon after moving to the city, I became a fascinated observer of rat behaviour, watching for patterns in feeding, social interaction, and population movement. The garbage strike of 1979 went on for three weeks, creating habitat opportunity with every accumulating pile of garbage. I started pasting these up as a way to mark areas that were infested, so people could avoid walking through dangerous areas in which rats were defending their territories.”

However, Rupp placed her posters not only around these burgeoning rat habitats, but also in places of commercial and political power such as around banks and on the steps of the City Hall. Here the work suggested socio-economic problems as much as ecological ones. Rat Patrol captures the atmosphere of New York in in the late 1970s and early 80s, an era in which the city was near to collapse, but in which downtown artists generated an anarchic, do-it-yourself culture in sites that included the streets themselves.

Wall Street Money, 1988, consists of replica bank notes, with Xeroxed $10, $50 and $100 bills on one side and slogans on the reverse. The fliers were scattered at ACT UP’s first anniversary demonstration, in Wall Street in March 1988, and were aimed at financial brokers. The slogans reflect the anger of AIDS activists at the pharmaceutical corporations that held monopolies on medications for the disease, thereby preventing the release of cheaper, generic version of drugs.

“Sture Johannesson (born 1935, Sweden) is a self-taught artist who started out as a member of the Scandinavian wing of the Situationist International. During the latter half of the 1960s, he produced a series of colourful, highly detailed and coded posters that expressed countercultural lifestyle and protest. The posters were printed in large editions and sold through mail order or at concerts, fairs and be-ins (the price was set according to how far Johannesson had to travel). The posters were never meant for public space but for the bedroom; their exploration and decoding in the laboratory of one’s home were what mattered.

Some of the texts of the posters make reference to benefits of membership of the European Union, including the latter’s enshrining of environmental principles, workers’ rights and the freedom of EU citizens to move and live across the member states. Other posters flag up the enemies of this liberal consensus, from extremist politicians such as Marine Le Pen to the press baron Rupert Murdoch. As Tillmans said, in a detailed statement issued in May 2016, “the forces driving towards the UK leaving the EU are disregarding a most crucial point – the values the EU stands for are fragile in this world of extremism.” 

There are 25 posters in the group, generated by Tillmans in collaboration with colleagues from his studios and other operations in London and Berlin. The works feel deliberately various, in a way that reflects the collaborative nature of the project, although some strategies are repeated – including the use of different weights of Helvetica for the text, and the use of aerial photographs by Tillmans as backgrounds. The posters were made easy to print and distribute – the artwork files were available on the artist’s website – and many editions were seen in bars and galleries in London in the weeks leading up to the referendum.

There are several fascinating aspects of this project. For one thing, the posters marked a shift from the implied politics of Tillmans’ photographs – which have long explored ideas of alternative community – to a more explicit form of political engagement, and one in which his sympathy with, for instance, youth and music culture, could be deployed to very pragmatic ends. It is also fascinating to see the artist’s aerial images – whose gorgeous gradients demonstrate the dissolution of barriers between, for instance, sky and sea – used to promote the European dream: the ideal of peace, liberty and cooperation within a continent without borders.

Images: a selection of the posters (the first version, produced in advance of voter registration day); an image of one of the posters on referendum day in Chichester.

“Matthew Higgs, artist, writer and current Director of White Columns in New York, produced and distributed more than fifty works through his publishing project Imprint 93 between 1993 and 1998. An administrator at an advertising agency by day and influential curator by night, Higgs invited artists to create works of art that could fit inside an envelope to be distributed, unsolicited, by mail to an informal group of friends, artists, and curators. Financed by himself and printed on an office photocopier, Imprint 93 served as an ongoing curatorial project which did not require a space, circumvented traditional art world structures, and offered a unique platform and network for artists to distribute their work.

The artists involved in Imprint 93 were often at the beginnings of their careers, working on the periphery of the then emerging 'YBA' movement, but would later be celebrated as some of the most important contemporary artists. The artists whose works will be exhibited include Fiona Banner, Billy Childish, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Ceal Floyer, Stewart Home, Alan Kane, Hilary Lloyd, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Bob and Roberta Smith, Jessica Voorsanger and Stephen Willats, among others.

Highlights from Imprint 93 include Chris Ofili’s Black (1997), a series of cuttings from his local newspaper showing crimes attributed to black suspects, Elizabeth Peyton’s Untitled (1995), made from a sequence of video-stills of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain performing in 1993, and Martin Creed’s Work no. 88 (1994) a crumpled ball of A4 paper that Higgs and Creed sent to the Tate Gallery but was returned to them, flattened inside an envelope, 'rejected' as an unsolicited donation.

Imprint 93 was closely linked to influential and emerging artist-centered initiatives such as London’s City Racing and Cabinet Gallery. Exhibiting the full collection of Imprint 93 editions for the first time the Whitechapel Gallery’s archive display offers a unique insight into a period significant to the development of the British art scene of the 1990s, and beyond.”

The result was Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit organisation founded by Giorno in 1965 and which went on to spawn various projects, the most celebrated of which is Dial-a-Poem, which ran from 1969 to 1971. On calling a phone service the user was connected with one of a number of different answering machines, on which were recordings of poetry – by figures that included William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman – as well as other material such as Black Panther speeches and Buddhist chants.

Dial-a-Poem was hosted first by The Architectural League of New York, and subsequently by other venues including MoMA (where it was included in the ‘Information’ show of 1970). The project proved to be a huge hit with the public, while its sexually explicit and politically radical content would often create a stir in the media. As Giorno remarked, “In the middle of the Dial-a-Poem experience was the giant self-consuming media machine choosing you as some of its food”.

Dial-a-Poem would also provide the material for a number of albums put out by the Giorno Poetry Systems record label. The latter issued albums from the mid 1960s until the late 1980s, building up a catalogue of forty titles, including performances by poets as well as by other figures such as Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass. A group of Dial-A-Poem albums, from the original project and after, are available for free on Ubuweb (see here).

Image above: telephone used in an installation of Dial-a-Poem created for La Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2014. Below: John Giorno, 1969.

Horvitz’s book comes with a glossary of terms that might relate to the pictures – including ‘advanced capitalism’, ‘Prozac’ and ‘copyright infringement’ – as well as a long list of unattached tags. Horvitz updates the tradition of the photographic typology for the Internet era, exploring how online images are authored, circulated and consumed, and how we deal – or fail to deal – with the speed of the contemporary image and its transformations.

Sad, Depressed, People, 2012, by David Horvitz, published by New Documents, Vancouver.