Zanna Gilbert

Schmuk es una revista centrada en fluxus y arte correo. Sus editores, Martha Hellion y Felipe Ehrenberg, salieron de Mexico en el 68 despues de la represion a los movimientos estudiantiles y se instalaron en Devon. Alli crearon Beau Geste Press junto con David Mayor. Publicaron libros de artistas y participaron activamente en la red internacional de arte correo.

The Mr. Peanut Summit documents a conversation between Anna Banana, Michael Morris, and Vincent Trasov on publishing, performance, and networked artistic practices moderated and introduced by curator and art historian Zanna Gilbert. Drawn from a 2017 event of the same name, Fillip’s Mr. Peanut Summit Supplement compliments a series of recent curatorial investigations into the work of Image Bank by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver.

A pseudo-corporate entity founded by Morris and Trasov (with Gary Lee-Nova) in 1970, Image Bank facilitated an international exchange network in which visual material functioned as currency. The conversation in the Mr. Peanut Summit draws on the overlapping biographical history of the artist participants, weaving the story of their practice together with those of their many collaborators and colleagues including John Mitchell, Gary Lee Nova (aka Art Rat), Ray Johnson, General Idea, Robert Fones (aka Can.D.Man), and others.

"Digital—even before this word signified research-based processing, its original meaning referred to "the fingers." The same goes for the artists Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov, whose Image Bank, founded in 1969, did not consist of ones and zeros but entirely of postal handwork. With the intent of a decentralized and network-based circulation and exchange of images, they anticipated the structures of today’s image databases on the Internet. Moreover, from sending, receiving, and collecting, a multifaceted and expansive oeuvre formed, whose creator is no longer a single person, but a collective movement. Away from established institutions such as museums or galleries, a utopia of non-hierarchical and free exchange of images first took shape here, which has lost nothing of its topicality even from today’s perspective." -- Publisher's website

À travers la notion de multiples, ce numéro thématique traitera de la question de la reproductibilité technique. Si la formulation renvoie immanquablement à Walter Benjamin et son célèbre essai de 1936, ce volume n’entend pas se limiter à la reproduction de masse inhérente à l’avènement de la photographie et du cinéma, mais bien embrasser l’ensemble des moyens de reproduction dans une perspective transhistorique, des plus rudimentaires aux plus sophistiqués. Les contributions rassemblées ici s’intéressent ainsi tant aux techniques d’empreinte et de moulage et à leurs différents usages depuis l’Antiquité, qu’aux procédés photomécaniques du XIXe siècle, à la carte postale, en passant par l’estampe au siècle des Lumières, jusqu’aux livres et aux films d’artistes aujourd’hui. Il s’agira d’interroger les présupposés ontologiques qui opposent l’original à ses copies, aussi bien que les dynamiques commerciales et les visées politiques sous-tendues par la reproduction technique, de la simpl...

... accustomed to choice. 22 So if Padín is motivated by a belief in the ability of poetic practice to mobilise ... due to the context that has produced it follows a similar empowering narrative. But asGerardo Mosquera has noted it is important to consider 'who swallows whom'. ...

In the 1980s, the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife became a major hub for the international mail art network. If an occasionally defiant northeastern regionalism marks the production of Pernambucan writers, artists and intellectuals throughout the 20th century, how would this cultural stance meet with the accelerated internationalisation of communication systems that led to the formation of increasingly cross-national artistic networks? This essay explores how local concerns, registered through performance, urban interventions and works that foreground the everyday life of the city, intersected with bodies of matter-mail art works-that travelled on behalf of the artist, transferring their bodies or their localities into varied worldwide contexts. These parallel activities were elementally conjoined both as expressions of the local and immediate and as displacements of these experiences to other localities. RESUMEN En los años ochenta, Recife, ciudad del noroeste de Brasil, se c...

Schmuk es una revista centrada en fluxus y arte correo. Sus editores, Martha Hellion y Felipe Ehrenberg, salieron de Mexico en el 68 despues de la represion a los movimientos estudiantiles y se instalaron en Devon. Alli crearon Beau Geste Press junto con David Mayor. Publicaron libros de artistas y participaron activamente en la red internacional de arte correo.

The debate about art and efficacy, mass media and messages, and the resul- tant questioning of the categories of high and low culture, were some of the most crucial topics in 1960s and 1970s Argentina. The artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) approached his vanguard experiments through a synthesis of literary and massified culture, attempting a politicized practice that neverthe- less retained connections with the artistic and literary avant-garde. Resident in the city of La Plata, at a remove of 60 kilometers from the country’s main artistic center, Buenos Aires, Vigo operated on the margins of contemporary art, in multiple senses. His oeuvre consists of conceptually-oriented mail art, visual poetry, comic strips, performative actions, and expanded publications. Beginning in the 1960s, from his quiet hometown, Vigo developed an extensive network of contacts, making the city a hub of the international experimen- tal poetry and mail art network. While he explored ideas about mass media and alternative channels of communication in his work, Vigo nevertheless maintained an intimate and artisanal touch in his handmade works, which he described as cosas (‘things’). Always concerned with the question of art’s relationship with politics, he was strongly affected by political turmoil in Argentina, particularly after his young son was disappeared by the military junta in 1976. This essay explores how Vigo deftly negotiated his concerns with mail art, or ‘marginal communication’, as he called it, and the notions of media art, and later ‘systems art’, which were circulating in the nearby capital. While media art was a relatively immaterial affair, taking place—as we shall see—in the mediums of communications themselves, Vigo’s mailed works were mul- tiple but manifestly material, artisanal, and intimate ‘objects’ or ‘things’, often designed for viewer participation.

Schmuk es una revista centrada en fluxus y arte correo. Sus editores, Martha Hellion y Felipe Ehrenberg, salieron de Mexico en el 68 despues de la represion a los movimientos estudiantiles y se instalaron en Devon. Alli crearon Beau Geste Press junto con David Mayor. Publicaron libros de artistas y participaron activamente en la red internacional de arte correo.

This article traces the roots and development of the Beau Geste Press, which developed extensive international networks through its publishing activity in the 1970s. The article suggests that these links developed because an idea of “openness” was applied to artistic practices, resulting in a shared aesthetic language that enabled cross-border collaboration. I propose the term “translocal” as a way of understanding how artists in different contexts communicated and attempted to build a system parallel to the art world.

In the 1980s, the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife became a major hub for the international mail art network. If an occasionally defiant northeastern regionalism marks the production of Pernambucan writers, artists and intellectuals throughout the 20th century, how would this cultural stance meet with the accelerated internationalisation of communication systems that led to the formation of increasingly cross-national artistic networks? This essay explores how local concerns, registered through performance, urban interventions and works that foreground the everyday life of the city, intersected with bodies of matter—mail art works—that travelled on behalf of the artist, transferring their bodies or their localities into varied worldwide contexts. These parallel activities were elementally conjoined both as expressions of the local and immediate and as displacements of these experiences to other localities. RESUMEN En los años ochenta, Recife, ciudad del noroeste de Brasil, se convirtió en un gran núcleo para la red internacional de arte correo. Si a lo largo del siglo XX, un regionalismo ocasionalmente desafiante del noreste marca la producción de los escritores, artistas e intelectuales de Pernambuco, ¿cómo se encontrará esta instancia cultural con la acelerada internacionalización de los sistemas de comunicación, que derivó en la formación de redes artísticas transnacionales cada vez más grandes? Este ensayo explora cómo las preocupaciones locales, registradas a través de performances, intervenciones urbanas y obras que colo-can en primer plano la vida cotidiana de la ciudad, se intersectan con cuerpos de materia –obras de arte correo– que viajaron por cuenta del artista, transfiriendo sus cuerpos o sus localizaciones al variado contexto mundial. Ambas activida-des paralelas estaban elementalmente unidas como expresiones de lo local e in-mediato y como desplazamientos de estas experiencias hacia otras localidades.

During the 1970s, the artists Robert Rehfeldt and Paulo Bruscky exchanged an array of experimental works by mail between East Berlin and Recife, Brazil, respectively, meeting face to face only in Berlin when Bruscky took an eventful trip to Berlin. Despite this distance, Rehfeldt and Bruscky established an enduring friendship through their exchanges, which served as proxies for the body and through which an unconventional intimacy developed. This essay explores communication over distances as an instigator of unique experiments in artistic collaboration. In particular the artists' work highlights state restriction on  reproduction technologies and the artist's body, as well as the possibility and impossibility of sending and receiving transmissions from afar.

This article explores the relationship between mail art, visual poetry and conceptual art in South America, positing that before the term 'mail art' was being used by artists there, an extensive and internationalized network of poets was already exploring notions of linguistic, participatory and conceptual experimentation producing off-center aesthetic exchanges that approximated some of the concerns of conceptualism. In this respect, the 'arrival' of mail art in South America could be thought of as a river flowing into an already existing river. Looking at the magazines OVUM 10, Diagonal Cero, and Ponto the article shows the engagement of these ideas and the shift from the 'new poetry' to 'new art', examining the relationship of this movement to conceptual art and the ways in which these expressions respond more to the interpretation of structuralist theory than to any 'influence' from North America and Europe, whilst acknowledging the tangled, two-way and constant communication with those regions.