The Image Bank Post Card Show 1978
Standing at the nexus of neo-Dada, Performance Art, No Wave, Punk, Fluxus > Mail Art and the as then unnamed aesthetix of the early 80’s is the Image Bank Postcard Show – a box of postcards put together by Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov in 1978. The idea was that the package was ‘an exhibition destined for the mail’, and the 48 images remains a fascinating object of time and place. The roster is distinguished: Ray Johnson, Ed Ruscha, Hermann Nitsch, Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar amongst others. Many of the images are 70’s noir with more than a hint of late 60’s perceptual mind-fuckery and Warhol-style blank refraction. The brain-child of Trasov and Morris (see here pictured as Miss General Idea 1971-83), the Image Bank was a catchy name and a great idea: a collaborative exercise based on sure Mail Art principles that aimed to subvert the traditional gallery structure in an attempt to reshape the world. Soon after the publication of this box, Morris and Trasov were sued by another, existing New York organisation called the Image Bank, and the idea fell into desuetude.
Tags: Ed Ruscha, Fluxus, General Idea, Hermann Nitsch, Image Bank, Mail Art, Michael Morris, No Wave, Performance Art, punk, Ray Johnson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vincent Trasov
Posted on December 16, 2011 at 11:58 am
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The England’s Dreaming Tapes
This month (June 2009) sees the publication of The England’s Dreaming Tapes by Faber and Faber. This book collects 58 of the interviews that I conducted during 1988 and 1989 for the research of England’s Dreaming. Comparatively little of each interview was used in the original book – in some cases, only 20% or so – and so there is plenty of extra material. The transcripts are not chopped up, as in many oral histories, but run in full – giving in some cases a sense of each interviewee and their story. It was not possible to include all the interviews in the new book for reasons of space, and so I will be running some of them on this site. Ed Kuepper, Edwyn Collins and Claude Bessy are already up, and to coincide with publication there are new interviews with Ben Westwood, Bob Gruen and Adele Bertei. More will follow in the future.
Tags: Adele Bertei, Ben Westwood, Bob Gruen, Claude Bessy, Ed Kuepper, Edwyn Collins, England's Dreaming, interview, Orange Juice, punk, Saints
Posted on June 15, 2009 at 4:54 pm
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