#primary information

From: Lawrence Weiner, (1969, unpublished), Terminal Boundaries and A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced, Primary Information, Brooklyn, NY, 2026 [Art: © Lawrence Weiner / ARS, New York]

I've been meaning to post about the extraordinary book version of Robert Gober's Slides of a Changing Painting that Primary Information just published. But to that instant pre-order rec, I will add PI's plea for donations to fill the sudden $40,000 hole the rogue NEA just blew in their tiny, non-profit budget.

2023年9月15日

【新入荷・新本】

Various Artists Newspaper, Primary Information, 2023

416 pages. 9.75 x 13.38 Inches. Paperback. Edition of 4500.

価格：7,480円（税込）

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1968年から1971年にかけてスティーヴ・ローレンスが発行し、ピーター・ヒュージャーとアンドリュー・ウルリックが編集に携わったニューヨーク発のタブロイド誌『Newspaper』の復刻版。

『Newspaper』は、言葉を使わず、写真だけを掲載した定期刊行物で、14号にわたって40人以上のアーティストの異質な活動を取り上げています。新しい作品と並行して流用された素材を掲載することに編集の重点を置き、1960年代後半の現代社会を象徴するハイカルチャーとローカルチャーの視覚的言語を体系化しようとしました。美術史的な言説からはほとんど見落とされているが、当時のアメリカで活躍し、尊敬されていた多数のアーティストと、新興のクィア・アーティストの仲間たちを紹介しています。

『Newspaper』は、1969年に創刊されたアンディ・ウォーホルの『Interview』や、レス・レヴィンの『Culture Hero』に先駆けるアーティストが発行するタブロイド誌のひとつですが、他のタブロイド紙とは対照的に、『Newspaper』はイメージに特化していました。

その全14号が初めてこの一冊にまとめられています。

Published by Steve Lawrence and edited with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick, Newspaper was published in New York City between 1968 and 1971.

Newspaper was a wordless, picture-only periodical thatran for fourteen issues and featured the disparate practices of over forty artists. With an editorial focus on placing appropriated material alongside new works, the periodical sought to codify a visual language of high and low culture that represented contemporary society in the late 1960s. While largely overlooked in art-historical discourse, Newspaper showcased many of the most revered artists working in the United States at the time, as well as an emerging coterie of queer artists.

The mid to late sixties was a flourishing period for artists experimenting with new media formats such as books, records, and magazines to create or distribute their work. Newspaper was one of the first artist-published tabloids of its era, preceding Andy Warhol’s Interview and Les Levine’s Culture Hero, both of which debuted in 1969. However, in contrast to other tabloids, Newspaper focused strictly on images.

At a time when photography was not being exhibited regularly in galleries, Newspaper provided an alternative exhibition space for the medium and some of the era’s greatest photographers. The publication’s large size and unbound format encouraged readers to take it apart and hang its pages, which was how Newspaper was installed at the Museum of Modern Art’s influential Information show in 1970.

This is not to say that Newspaper only existed within the narrow confines of the art world, far from it. It lived within (and shared contributors with) a robust network of underground and queer periodicals like The New York Review of Sex, Rags, and Gay Power, among others. Yet, unlike many of these tabloids, Newspaper has largely disappeared from the discourse around underground magazines, queer publishing, and artists’ periodicals.

All fourteen issues of Newspaper are compiled in this volume for the first time.

excerpts from DeForrest Brown Jr.'s "Assembling A Black Counter Culture," Primary Information 2022

can't put this book down. crucial is an understatement

Variable Piece 4: Secrets is a facsimile edition of Douglas Huebler’s classic artist book, which was originally published by Printed Matter in 1978. Simple and salacious, the publication collects over 1,800 secrets written anonymously by visitors to the 1970 Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum. In doing so, the book provides a fleeting glimpse into the cultural, political, and social preoccupations of the era while showcasing Huebler’s open-ended and variable approach to art making—an approach that sought to undermine the dominance of object-oriented practices in favor of a text-driven conceptualism that relied on variables outside of the artist’s control.

Pioneers of the artists’ books medium, of which Huebler was one, predicted that one day artists’ books would be sold next to detective and romance novels in drugstores and supermarkets throughout America. While this dream was never realized, Variable Piece 4: Secrets could easily find its place amongst these popular genres; a true page-turner that delivers the whodunit in succinct statements, ripped from real life, without the hassle of narrative arcs, prefaces, or chapters.

Tuesday, March 3rd 2020: Alabama primaries, American Samoa caucus, Arkansas primaries, California primaries, Colorado primaries, Democrats Abroad caucus, Maine primaries, Massachusetts primaries, Minnesota primaries, North Carolina primaries, Oklahoma primaries, Tennessee primaries, Texas primaries, Utah primaries, Vermont primaries, Virginia primaries

Lawrence Weiner, (1969, unpublished), Terminal Boundaries and A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced, Primary Information, Brooklyn, NY, 2026 [Art: © Lawrence Weiner / ARS, New York]