Jas. W. Felter:Artistamp Activist Born near the foothills of New York States’ Catskill Mountains in 1943, James Felter was introduced to painting by his grandmother and encouraged to collect postage stamps by his father. These two childhood activities were to portend a future direction, not only culminating in the personal discovery of a new artistic […]
Learning from Friedman Ken Friedman’s Rubber Stamp Activity. John Held, Jr. Ken Friedman (American, 1949- ) was an important connection between Fluxus, Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School of Art, and the emerging amalgam of seventies networking artists gathered through the postal system and collaboratively exploring the aesthetics of communication on an international scale. The […]
May Wilson: Grandmother to the Avant-Garde by John Held, Jr. In 1995, on the 90th anniversary of her birth, the Baltimore Museum of Art held a May Wilson exhibition commemorating her life as an artist. It was a belated homecoming for this artist who left the area for New York City in her sixties to pursue […]
Notes Toward a History of Artistamps John Held, Jr. The first exhibition of artist postage stamps occurred in 1974, when James Warren Felter first identified the field in an exhibition at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The exhibition subsequently traveled to additional sites in Geneva, Switzerland, and around the United States and Canada, […]
Illogical as an Instructive Process: an Interview with Ray Johnson The interview took place on December 2, 1977, at the Mid-York Library System, Utica, New York, the day following Ray Johnson’s performance of,Barry White Ecstasy, at the Root Art Center, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, where his work was on display. John Held, Jr: Do […]
Robert Watts: The Complete Postage Stamp Sheets, 1961-1986 by John Held, Jr. There can be considerable argument on who created the first artist postage stamp. The Dada artist Raoul Hausmann, associated with the Berlin Dada group, affixed a self-portrait postage stamp to a postcard in 1919. Yves Klein, the French Nouveaux Réaliste painter and conceptualist, […]
The TAM Rubberstamp- Archive of Ruud Janssen by John Held, Jr. It has been sixteen years since Ruud Janssen became aware of mail art, and because of his interest in documentation, we have an excellent overview of his activities. In this catalog we have reprinted both his lengthy Curriculum Vitae, and his latest “information-newsletter” of […]
Greetings from Daddaland: The Fake Picabia Brothers Search Sources in the Scrap Heap of the Twentieth Century Avant-Garde By John Held, Jr. Bill Gaglione and John Held, Jr. began corresponding in the late seventies, drawn together by interests in Mail Art, and in particular, the rubber stamps used to decorate their envelopes and enclosures. Gaglione […]
Yvelyne Wood’s Auschwitz by Professor Donald Kuspit State University of New York at Stony Brook … what does statistical exactitude mean, where the orders of magnitude are so astronomic? Would the horrors of the holocaust be any less if historians concluded that it exterminated not six millions … but five or even four? Eric Hobsbawm, […]
Looking back on his time in Fluxus, German artist Tomas Schmit made the following remarks about Fluxus founder George Maciunas: “… an American/Lithuanian asthmatic, clinging to life with a large mountain of medicines. Even in the middle of crossing a street he would get out his throat spray. Sometimes he felt so bad that he […]
“Although once thought as a ‘movement’, with all the appropriate manifestos and positions, Fluxus is not a movement as such, but a tendency which cuts across the oeuvres of various artists rather than encompassing them totally. This brings Fluxus into total harmony with the art trends of the 1970s. What distinguishes Fluxus from other trends […]
KEN FRIEDMAN: EVENT, IDEA AND INQUIRY By: Carolyn Barnes Chance and opportunity led Ken Friedman to become an artist. Though he had no formal art training, he accepted the designation of “artist” as a young man in 1966 when the Fluxus impresario George Maciunas suggested that the creative activities he had pursued since childhood could […]
Ken Friedman Notes Ken Friedman began conducting what he would retrospectively realize were ‘events’ before he was aware of Fluxus. Even at a young age, performing idiosyncratic tasks and realizing small projects was a mode of inquiry into the world for Friedman. Reflecting the naturalness of these inquiries, Friedman says, “I simply built things, realized […]
Maciunas’ efforts to improve the world by finding new economies in various realms also extended into his daily life. He took a keen interest in what had been bought and for how much and how it was then used – he wanted to see neither material or financial waste. The professional experience that he brought […]
Yoko Ono "Grapefruit" The Brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. -Emily Dickinson, 632 With the emergence of relational art in the 1990’s and so much contemporary artwork that flirts with the idea of the creation of new societies, […]
I first read of the late art collector Jean Brown in a 1976 article, The Preservation of the Avant-Garde. Critic Katherine Kuh wrote of her that, “It is always the marginal she stresses – such manifestations as concrete poetry, rubber stamp art, the vagaries of video. She is after elusive connections, the small interstices that […]
You see, the reason I am so concerned with [functionalism] is that that’s an architect’s training. I mean, that’s the way the architect thinks, he thinks in functionalism otherwise he’s not an architect, he’s a sculptor or a stage designer.1 George Maciunas’s Prefabricated Building System was the most literal expression he ever made of his […]
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