"2 partridges 2 Mallard ducks a Dungeness crab 24 hours out of the Pacific and 2 live-frozen trout from Denmark"
(William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems 2, 208-09) An idiot interviewer complained to Williams that these items in is poem sounded like a fashionable grocery list, and Williams responed that it is a fashionable grocery list. Ray Johnson designed the cover of a New Direction book by Williams, "In the American Grain." He used the proofs and the discards in the envelopes he mailed, sometimes getting "American grain" to combine with other images and ideas so that the papers in an envelope were interrelated, and became interdependent in a wholeness that subsumed the randomness of the papers. Dan Graham printed a receipt as a work of art in Harper's Bazaar: James Meyer: ...Consider Graham's "Figurative," a shopping receipt from a Five and Dime store reproduced in the unlikely context of the March 1968 Bazaar. Interpreters of this work have argued that Graham's publication of the receipt exposes the final stage of the cycle of consumption, the sale, within the space of the ad, where the desire to purchase is conceived. However, if we consider the actual circumstances of Graham's piece, a more contradictory reading emerges. Like Smithson's and LeWitt's projects, "Figurative" served its context well. Graham's receipt was "the most out-to-lunch thing that we ever published," Peacock recalled. "I thought to myself, we're really going to get fired for this one." In fact, the project gave Bazaar a sexy edge precisely because it was not easily understood. The resistence of "Figurative" to its setting is confirmed by reproductions of the work in exhibition catalogues, which present it alone, lodged between ads for a bra and tampons. But the bricolage effect contemporary viewers of the work now find so captivating was entirely programmed by the needs of the magazine itself. (Graham himself has noted the lack of control he had in the placement of "Figurative.") Unlike Smithson's or LeWitt's commissioned interventions, which were granted full editorial spreads, "Figurative" was added at the last minute on a partial (three-quarter) page after the issue's ads had been laid out. A few pages later, a poem by the Viennese Concrete writer Ernst Jandl--whose paratactic arrangement of the word "film" suggests the progressive frames and temporal flow of the cinematic medium-was also lodged in a leftover vertical space next to a lingerie ad. The resemblance of Jandl's project to Graham's confirms that the placement of "Figurative" was no accident. As McConathy noted, the experience of reading Bazaar was meant to induce surprise: bricolage was an intended effect. The avant-gardist projects published by McConathy had no obvious role to play in a context devoted to the merchandizing of fashion. Yet the blatant discordance of these works in this very context only enhanced the "edgy" image the Hearst-owned magazine sought to project... 458 West 25th Street New York City 10001-6502 212 989 2229 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Great things are happening at Yahoo! Groups. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/do.u8A/hOaOAA/Zx0JAA/fuDrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailinglist from Sztuka Fabryka http://www.sztuka-fabryka.be/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ma-network/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
