“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970. In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception. “Let’s convert all systems into poetry”…
This text was originally published under the theme “Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look”. The theme was developed in partnership with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (MSŁ). It was edited by Magdalena Moskalewicz, MoMA with Daniel Muzyczuk, MSŁ. The original content items in this theme can be found here. Depending on the type of recording, the whole apparatus changes like a…
Browse scans of the complete music scores co-published by the Polish Radio Experimental Studio below and read the essay “Alchemist Cabinet of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio: Music Scores of and for Experiments” to learn more.
Japanese artists Shigeko Kubota and Shiomi Mieko arrived in New York in 1964 at the invitation of George Maciunas. Working in sculpture, performance, and video, Kubota was active in the avant-garde art community of Tokyo in the early 1960s, and then, after her move to the U.S., among the Fluxus artists in New York. In…
Just as alchemists in the Middle Ages were the masters of arcane knowledge, so the core members of the Studio—the sound engineers—were masters of new technology in music.
The Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), established in Warsaw in 1957 under the auspices of Poland’s official state broadcaster, provides a fascinating insight into the importance of a site as a key catalyst for avant-garde exploration and production.
Inhabiting a space between studios that were dedicated solely to the production of autonomous works, Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) occupied an interesting position that enabled it to adopt a slightly unusual modus operandi.
With a healthy dose of humor, the Brazilian artist Antonio Dias explores the challenges and absurdities of his artistic career and comments poetically on his life’s work. Now in his late 60s, Dias generously shares stories of his early years in Rio, Paris, and Milan; his surprise at the dearth of women in Milan’s art…
Cildo Meireles discusses his series Inserções em circuitos ideológicos, Projeto Cédula (Insertions into Ideological Circuits, Banknote Project, 1970), in which he anonymously stamped banknotes with critical political slogans, demands, or questions, afterward putting them back into circulation. Created during a period of military rule in Brazil, one stamp asked, “Quem Matou Herzog?” (“Who Killed Herzog?”) after the…
How did the infrastructure of the former Soviet Bloc’s socialist states support experiments in the art of sound? What possibilities were created and what were the drawbacks that resulted, for artists and their art, from the desire to create an entirely new, experimental society? This talk was delivered at “About Sound,” a C-MAP seminar on…
Here lies a bibliography to be stepped on. It is composed of forty primarily English-language publications that take the form of exhibition catalogues, anthologies, artists’ books, and scholarly treatises. Together, these volumes give voice to and reflect on a movement with many histories, a movement propelled by artists living in New York, Eastern Europe, and…
Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg ruminates on the life journeys of his archive, weaving a tale that takes in personal, cultural, socioeconomic, and institutional dimensions of building—and letting go of—an artist’s file, and considering whether an archive can itself be a work of art. To most people, a file is merely a collection of objects, mostly…
