This long-overdue volume highlights a selection of writings and artists' projects from Real Life magazine, a seminal 1980s periodical edited by the artist, writer and curator Thomas Lawson and writer Susan Morgan. Published in 23 intermittent black-and-white issues from 1979-1994, Real Life was devoted to providing an outlet for a circle of artists who did not feel properly represented in the mainstream art world at the time--many of whom are now grouped with the Pictures and Post-Pictures artists. The anthology features both artists and art historians writing on art, media and popular culture--oftentimes infusing a new kind of humor into their cultural critiques--as well as original pictorial contributions. It includes writings by and about Eric Bogosian, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Thomas Lawson, Allan McCollum, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Richard Prince, David Robbins, Michael Smith, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner, to name a few, as well as visual projects by Sherrie Levine, James Welling, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Group Material, among others.

Real Life Magazine, Selected Writings and Projects 1979-1994

Arts & Photography

MORGAN, SUSAN

Lawson, Thomas

Katzeff, Miriam

History & Criticism

Primary Information

During the glory days of Something Else Press (1964-1974), its founder, the poet, editor and scholar Dick Higgins created the Great Bear imprint to publish pamphlets that were quickly printed and easily disseminated, guaranteeing wide distribution and accessibility. Ranging in length from 16 to 32 pages, saddle-stitched and printed on varying color stock, the Great Bear pamphlets showcased the work of some of the most innovative writers and artists across the twentieth century: the likes of Jackson Mac Low, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Robert Filliou, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, Dieter Roth, David Antin and Claes Oldenburg appeared alongside predecessors such as the Italian Futurist composer Luigi Russolo and John Cage's seminal Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). All pamphlets have been out of print since their original publications in the 1960s. Great Bear: The Complete Collection comes housed in a wooden box and contains a complete facsimile reproduction of each of these fabulous pamphlets, along with essays by Alison Knowles, Hannah Higgins and others.

Great Bear (The Great Pamphlet Series)

As admired for his writing as for his work in art, photography and architecture, Dan Graham was one of the first contemporary artists to embrace Punk, Postpunk and No Wave, becoming a figurehead for those movements, and an early supporter of (and friend to) Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth among many others. Rock/Music Writings collects 13 of Graham's most influential writings, on bands ranging from The Kinks to Bow Wow Wow, first published in art journals such as Real Life, Open Letter and ZG between 1968 and 1988, and in the now rare volume Rock My Religion. It includes such landmark essays as “Punk as Propaganda,” which explicates the self-packaging and media critique of The Ramones, Devo, the Sex Pistols, the Desperate Bicycles and others; “Rock My Religion,” in which Graham traces themes of ecstatic reverie in rock performance (with a focus on Patti Smith), through a beautiful composite of quotation, commentary and photography; and “New Wave Rock and the Feminine,” which discusses the onstage personae of Lydia Lunch, Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux, and the gender politics of all-female groups such as The Slits, The Raincoats, Bush Tetras and others. Throughout Rock/Music Writings, Graham's appraisals are clear-eyed, sophisticated and poetically constructed, a genre of their own within artists' writings.

Dan Graham: Rock/Music Writings

Graham, Dan

Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar founded Avalanche shortly after they met in 1968. At the time, Sharp was a New York-based independent curator and Béar an underground magazine editor who had recently moved to New York from London. They published the first issue in 1970 and collaborated on 13 issues from 1970 to 1976. Avalanche focused on art from the perspective of artists rather than critics, and investigated new forms of art that were developing in the U.S. and Europe with probing interviews, extensive use of photography and dynamic layouts. For many artists, publication in Avalanche preceded a one-person gallery or museum show. Aside from an eight-page news section, the editorial content included only interviews, artists' texts and documents of art and art making. All interviews were conducted by Sharp, Béar or done jointly. Among the featured artists were Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Philip Glass, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Yvonne Rainer, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner and Jackie Winsor. This boxed facsimile edition of Avalanche's complete run reproduces the first eight issues individually, and the final five in a single newsprint paperback.

Avalanche

Sharp, Willoughby

Bear, Liza

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Aram Saroyan's "minimal" poems of the 1960s demonstrated a completely unprecedented handling of words-often single words-that combined astounding economy with palpable textural warmth. Untitled poems that read in their entirety "eyeye" and "lobstee" evinced a pleasure in words that everybody could recognize-except Senator Jesse Helms, who publicly objected to Saroyan's poem "lighght" when its author received an NEA award-but which nobody else (except perhaps Gertrude Stein) had quite nailed until Aram Saroyan came along. In every one of Saroyan's page acts, the sound of typewriter keys inscribing blank paper are as audible to the mind's ear as the words themselves. Coffee Coffee was published as a mimeograph edition by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's 0 To 9 imprint in 1967, and was one of Saroyan's earliest collections, containing such gems as "guarantee," "added" and "rinse." Acconci has since recorded his admiration for these works: "In the late sixties, when I called myself a poet, Aram was the poet I envied."

Coffee Coffee

SAROYAN, Aram

Individual Artists

Transiting Pop art, Feminist Expressionism, Conceptualism and Minimalism, Lee Lozano (1930–1999) sits alongside Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke as a radical and influential model for younger generations of female artists. Lozano's notebooks, which she approached as drawings, and which were later dismantled and sold as individual pages, became a part of her artmaking at the height of her fame in the late 1960s. Reproduced here for the first time, as an affordably-priced facsimile reprint, the three notebooks collected here, which were kept between 1967–1970, contain sketches for her Wave paintings, writings about the trajectory of her artistic process and the language pieces that she became famous for prior to her withdrawal from the art world. They thus constitute the fullest and richest document on an artist whose relevance and profile have recently seen a steady ascent.

Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967-70

A zine-cum-artist's book, Mirror Me was developed from a collaborative exhibition and performance organized by the writer Brandon Stosuy and the artist Kai Althoff at Dispatch, and displayed at White Columns. It features new materials by artists, writers and musicians such as Adam Helms, Matt Zaremba, Mitch Kehe, Nick Z., Peter Sotos, Philip Best, Scott Campbell, Theo Stanley, Yair Oelbaum and Zach Baron.

Mirror Me

Formed in 1973, the Detroit band Destroy All Monsters was a wild and reckless synthesis of psychedelia, proto-punk, heavy metal, noise and performance art. The collective hailed from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and consisted of Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Niagara and Jim Shaw (with later members including Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Michael Davis of the MC5). Later emerging as extremely distinctive individual artists, collectively the group forged new terrain in art, music, performance, theater and video. Destroy All Monsters released very little recorded music until Thurston Moore issued a three-CD compilation in 1994, but they published six issues of a now legendary and much sought-after zine, also titled Destroy All Monsters. This publication collects those six zines, released between 1976 and 1979, and also includes parts of a lost seventh issue that never saw publication. The Destroy All Monsters zines comprise a vibrant array of collage, writing, photography and other miscellanea by Kelley, Loren, Niagara and Shaw, and together provide insight into the collective's kaleidoscopic vision of the dystopian values of their time.

Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1976-1979

Do You Love Me? arises from Bacher's videos of the same name, in which Bacher interviews colleagues, friends and family about Bacher the person and Bacher the artist. It combines interview transcripts with images of her artwork from the 1970s to the present, plus photos, letters and other ephemera.

Lutz Bacher: Do You Love Me

The paintings of New York artist Sarah Crowner (born 1974) have offered a new slant on the constructedness of the abstract-geometric painting as developed by Max Bill, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Elizabeth Murray. Crowner sews together painted panels of canvas, raw linen and monochromatic fabrics, introducing a handmade touch to modernist aesthetics that often espoused the minimizing of the artist’s hand. Crowner’s first large-scale artist’s book extends this instinct for materiality to her vast archive of ephemera (magazines, publications, posters) from the 1920s through the 1940s, which she deploys here as a source material for the creation of new images that are built up through imposition, extraction, collaging and printing. Much like her paintings, the resulting works are geometrical and optical abstractions that bring fresh vigor to the tradition on which Crowner draws.

Sarah Crowner: Format

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