Monday, July 23, 2012

Zachary Scott Lawrence Stops in for a Visit

The poet and artist  and Fluxmuseum contributor Zachary Scott Lawrence stopped into the museum this past Saturday from Wichita, Kansas to scope out the collection and the space and generally enjoy Pagosa Springs. He took the above photo of the two of us with his ipad. We had an lovely visit.

Zachary contributed to Fluxhibition #3 with the following box and was a participant in the book Natural Born Fluxus


Fluxbox - Senryu - 2009
Zachary Scott Lawrence
wood container with text on slips of paper.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

News at the Museum


The latest news at the museum... Tuesday, July 2, 2012 we purchased the the space at 262 Pagosa Street (Main Street) in downtown Pagosa Springs! Part of a multi-space building, the museum is a 1,230 square foot commercial space - the largest in the building. Not really big enough to be a museum with elbow room but a good start for storing and publicly exhibiting the collection. We have added a new assemblage/sculpture out in the front - a collaborative work by Cecil Touchon and James Ferrari using found materials. This will hopefully entice passersby to come in and look around.

During the summer we will be setting up most of the space as an art gallery with works for sale by artists in the collection. We have also been gifted with the use of an Epson 24 inch, large format printer from artist Clarissa Rizal which will be used to print reproductions of works in the collection that will also be for sale to help raise funds to keep the museum open.

Additionally we have invested in 8 new flat file cabinets for storing the works on paper in the collection and a computer dedicated to the museum as well as some used office chairs and wireless internet service.

After some experimentation during the spring we have decided to focus on the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction as the main identity for the museum space. (note the signage on the front door). It is still the home of the Fluxmuseum, the Archives of the Eternal Network, the Museum of Snapshot Photography and all the various organizational offices but in order to avoid constant confusion with townfolk and passers through, the Collage Museum seems the most easily understood.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Evening of Collage at Gustavo Ramos Rivera's Studio in San Francisco - Friday April 6th

 Gustavo and ?
 Dennis Parlante and Larry Strong
 Matt Gonzalez with a collage
 left to right: Cecil Touchon, Larry Strong, Karen Imperial, Matt Gonzalez
  left to right: Cecil Touchon, Larry Strong, Karen Imperial, Matt Gonzalez
  left to right: Cecil Touchon, Larry Strong, Dennis Parlante, Matt Gonzalez
Noor-un-Nisa Touchon working on a collage

We took a week off to take a trip out to San Francisco during Noor-un-Nisa's spring break. It was a very fast moving week with little time to relax, it seemed we were always on the go. The evening before we returned, an evening of collage making was arranged at Gustavo Ramos Rivera's studio who, earlier in the day had lunch with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
I had the very good fortune to meet some great collage artists. Matt, Larry and Karen  presented me with a number of collages of theirs for the museum collection and Matt also donated a collage by Theophilus Brown.
I'll post these once I photograph them...

Visit from Keith Pace - March 29, 2012

Museum contributor Keith Pace and his wife stopped into the museum for the afternoon on March 29.
in this photo Keith sits in front of one of his collages (made with an 'add and pass' work he received from Keith Buchholz.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Assemblings Exhibit Contributor Credit

I want to mention that a number of the assemblings in the show were generously donated by Elizabeth Concannon from Saint Louis, MO including the ART/LIFE Magazines, the Bambu Assembling, and the Tensetendoned Assemblings. These were all works acquired by Ms. Concannon through her participation in them.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Assembling Magazines - Stephen Perkins, 2012

Assembling Magazines

Assembling magazines represent a genre of publishing that has been a
consistent feature within the correspondence art network from the late 1960s to
the present, and their publishing model reflects the philosophy of this alternative
network.

The term 'assembling magazine' embodies an innovative publishing model that
first gained attention in the early 1970s with the publication of the American
periodical Assembling (1970-87). The editors of Assembling, frustrated at the
limited number of distribution outlets for experimental art and literature during
this period, responded with a periodical that had an open submissions policy.
Contributors were invited to "submit a thousand 8x11" copies of whatever they
wanted to submit."1 Once the submissions deadline had passed the 'editor' took
one work from each pile of artists' pages and literally assembled the magazine —
in the case of Assembling this was in an edition of 1000 copies. Typically each
contributor received one copy of the final periodical, and extra copies were sold
in order to recover some of the publishing & mailing costs. A year earlier in West
Germany, one issue of a similar magazine was published under the title Omnibus
News (1969). Significantly larger than the first Assembling, it included 117
contributors from 8 countries and was issued in an edition of 1500 copies. In his
introductory statement, Christian D'Orville, one of its three editors writes about
his interest in creating this Blattersammlung (collection of sheets) and the chance
manner in which this mass of heterogeneous material was brought together, as
well as its place within the alternative milieu of the period.2

My interest in OMNIBUS NEWS shows itself first in my curiosity
to discover what could develop out of the possibility of such
a sheet-compilation. The heterogeneous and the accidental,
the important and the unimportant. Moreover I am interested
in knowing whether there is the formation of a common tone,
of generalities and connections, or whether it might be silly to
even ask this...One thing is for sure: the experimental aspect of
OMNIBUS NEWS should through the conscious elimination of
conventional values and elimination of thematic directions, find a
place within the opposition to the official art world.3

In important ways these magazines invert the traditional publishing model:
editorial prerogative was abolished, and both editors and contributors become
collaborators in the publishing process. Equally important was the fact that
assembling magazines, with their democratic model, offered everyone the
opportunity to step onto the omnibus of experimental publishing.

This 'open' or non-juried model of periodical publishing has arguably been
most fully realized within the international correspondence art network. As
collaborative events, assembling magazines have served as important sites for
the transaction of community, as well as locations through which community can
accessed and replenished.

Assembling and Omnibus News are two landmark periodicals that emerge out of
the broader institutional critique developed by experimental artists during the late
1960s and 1970s.4 The adoption by the correspondence art network of this anti-
formalist publishing strategy has endured as an influential model for collaborative
exchange, and assembling magazines continue to be instrumental in activating
community across this decentralized network.

Stephen Perkins, 2012

Buy Dr. Perkin's
Assembling Magazines : International Networking Collaborations
Stephen Perkins, editor and curator
Iowa City, IA: Plagarist Press. 1997
Synopsis: Published to accompany an exhibition of assembling magazines at Iowa City's Subspace in 1996, this catalog offers a comprehensive bibliography of assembling magazines, books, and audio compilations from all over the world beginning in the early 1970s. With an introduction written by curator and editor Stephen Perkins. In English.
Pages: 64 p.

Stephen Perkins, PhD
Senior Academic Curator of Art
Lawton Gallery
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Ph: 920-465-2916<tel:920-465-2916>
em: perkinss@uwgb.edu<mailto:perkinss@uwgb.edu>

________________________________________________________________


1. Kostelanetz, Richard. Assembling Assembling. New York: Assembling Press, p.14.
Assembling magazine's title is the term that was adopted to describe this genre of
publications.


2. The other two editors were Thomas Niggle and Heimrad Prem.


3. Christian d’Orville, “Marginal Comments,” trans., Curt Germundson, Omnibus
News 1 (1969): np.


4. The following two publications are good sources for further reading about the history of
assembling magazines.
Perneczky, Geza. Assembling Magazines 1969-2000. Budapest, Hungary:
Arnyekkotok Foundation, 2007.
Perkins, Stephen (editor/curator). Assembling Magazines: International

Assemblings: Opening Night

Photos from the opening night of Assemblings at 262 Pagosa Street (Pagosa Springs, Colorado). March 10, 2012 5:00-7:00pm

above: assemblage artist Monica Green with her daughter and mother.

above: on left patron Jerry Venn

above Monica Green and furniture maker husband Cappy White owners of the local upscale fine craft shop Handcrafted Interiors

above: My wife Rosalia serving food and drinks

above: Monica Green and Cappy White with daughter

above: Cookie Venn and grand daughter

above: Artist Ross Barrable soundscapesinternational.com


above: Artist Ross Barrable soundscapesinternational.com and artist Karina Silver karinasilver.com looking at issues of Art/Life Magazine donated by Elizabeth Concannon

above and below: my wife Rosalia manning the refreshments area

At the end of the evening Matthew Rose skyped in to digitally hang out with us from Paris, France. In all, about 50 people were in attendance which pretty much filled the space. The location was formerly designed as a high end real estate office with several small offices and a number of cubicles. However, for a small space - about 1,250 square feet - it works exceptionally well for exhibiting the scale of works in the collection which tend to be very intimate in size. All together, between collages, assemblages and the assemblings ephemera (postcards from a Book About Death, and multiples from the several assembling projects) an estimated 1,000+ individual works are currently on view. Much of the local audience was very excited to have the museum here in town though for nearly everyone it was a shock to see such a unique museum collection. No doubt it will take a while to locals to acclimate themselves to the depth and breadth of what the international artists' community have contributed to make the museum a unique resource of global arts culture.