The mail art network connected hundreds of artists around the world, heralding art forms based on communication systems rather than objects. In 1981 in Mexico City, the artists’ group Colectivo 3 initiated Poema Colectivo Revolución in Mexico City in 1981 and drew upon the international mail art network, some of whose members had been exchanging artworks and…
El curador Mauricio Marcin esboza una breve historia del arte correo, a partir de diversos archivos ubicados en la Ciudad de México, argumentando que los remanentes del arte correo nos obligan a “seguir pensando”. Este ensayo es una versión adaptada y traducida del texto “Arte Correo en un Libro”, publicado originalmente en Mauricio Marcin (ed.), Artecorreo (Ciudad…
Published two years before the Poema Colectivo Revolución, these texts give an impression of the landscape of the Mexican cultural scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They appeared in the cultural supplement Testimonios de Latinoamérica, which accompanied the eponymous exhibition at the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City from September 19, 1978. Five years earlier,…
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…
Ay-O, a Japanese artist who had been part of Fluxus in New York, returned to Japan in 1966 after an eight-year absence. He organized Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo which was recorded on film and in photographs taken by some of the participants. post presents the film and selected photographs by Nishiyama Teruo, who took part in the tour.
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…
What were the main issues at stake in Brazilian modernism? How did the necessities and demands of the national context shape the country’s modernist art practices in the twentieth-century? These questions are addressed by Tadeu Chiarelli, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art – University of São Paulo, who surveys the major figures in Brazilian…
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…
We cannot always quantify change; is Istanbul changing very fast? … too fast? To document and archive in a place that has a habit of describing itself as “in flux” is of immense importance; we rely on the stories we record and tell to create a collective memory. We thank the individuals and institutions that…
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. —Peggy Phelan Figures 1–6 are scans of what remains of Circle & Square, performed at LUX in London on the October 13,…
When a stem breaks the water perpendicularly, its angle is measured to be 0 degree, and the degree gets closer to 90 as it is slanted more, and the level surface is 90 degrees.[from the Sogetsu ikebana handbook] Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.[John Cage] Arranging flowers takes…
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…
