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| The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (inside cover) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (with record insert) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (editorial & contributors) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (contributors) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (back cover) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (frontispiece) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (Liz Was fold-out piece) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (editorial & contributors) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (contributors) |
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| The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (back cover) |
The Acts The
Shelflife
This interview with Liz Was (1956-2004) and Miekal
And took place in Dreamtime Village, West Lima, Wisconsin on August 26, 1996. The Acts The Shelfife has been published
in two issues: #1, 1986 (theme: Visual Verbal Networking) and #2, 1988 (theme:
Polyartistry).
Miekal And continues to publish, check out his Xexoxial
Editions http://xexoxial. org/is/new_releases This
text originally appeared in "Assembling Magazines," exhibition
catalogue, editor, Stephen Perkins, Iowa City: Plagiarist Press, 1997. A big shout-out to Liz Was—a wonderful polyartist who left us way too early.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Stephen
Perkins: Why is the third issue
still waiting to be assembled?
Miekal And: That's a good question! Because of lot of the
Xexoxial projects are on hold because we've been kind of setting it up so
apprentices have been doing a lot of the publishing and we haven't had an
apprentice for a few years. We actually have all the material for it collected
sitting in a file cabinet. So really the only thing that were waiting for is
somebody to come up with a cover, to collate the whole thing, and to put it
together.
SP: What was it about the assembling format that
attracted you?
MA: Well, the idea with it was that it was really an
extension of the mail art activities that we were already involved in, and we
wanted to create a publication that extended what we were already doing in mail
art and that we wouldn't have to pay all the publication costs for. The other
thing was we were really interested in having pages that were hand manipulated,
so really the only sort of format that's available is the assembling format,
because then each artist can have complete control over their page and send it
in.
SP: Is The Acts
The Shelflife a book or a magazine?
Liz Was: Both and neither I would say. We have always been
interested in these genres and forms that can't be labeled quite so simply, it
feels like a book in the way it's bound and perhaps in the way that it feels
when it's in your hands flipping the pages. It's a magazine more than a book in
the sense that it involves many other people and I always think of magazines,
although there are compilation books, it seems like magazines are the kind of
thing that involve many others. It's unlike a magazine in that it doesn't come
our periodically, but then again we have aperiodic periodicals that we've
published too.
SP: I think it's also interesting the role of the
editor, because really they aren't editors anymore!
MA: Yes, that was probably one of the main reasons why
we were interested in it, we'd already done so much in the realm of editing
that we were looking at ways to really change what the editor was about and to
create a different kind of forum and, at the point when we did The Acts The Shelfife, there weren't a
lot of those kinds of things out there, there were a few mail art things and
Kostelanetz's Assembling and there
wasn't a lot of people doing it in 1986.
SP: Would you say that Kostelanetz's Assembling provided you with a model?
MA: Our project was most informed by what he was
doing and then the things that were already happening in the mail art world,
not necessarily assemblings, but just the whole notion of mail art activity.
SP: Why the title The
Acts The Shelflife?
MA: It comes from a poem that I wrote and it's sort
of a reference actually to Charles Olson, it's a discrete reference, it's not
like a quote from a book of his or anything, but it's a more certain sort of
notion that came out of Charles Olson for me about projectivist verse and
having texts that extend out from themselves. So my notion that collectively The Acts The Shelflife would be by
people putting their things together in the same book, it would become a larger
text that people sort of discretely participated in but had no idea of the
final outcome of it. So the notion is that The
Acts The Shelflife, the literal interpretation would be 'the acts"
that somebody did and how it related to being on a bookshelf years later and
people interacting with it.
SP: Did The
Acts The Shelflife succeed?
LW: Yes, every time I look at the two issues we've
done I feel like they're a success, in terms of diversity and they are from
people from all over, I think the way there were put together is successful in
that they're lovely looking and the information is there of addresses and
names. People pretty much responded to the themes (#1: Visual Verbal
Networking, #2: Polyartistry), although like a lot of open invitations works
there are some, you know people send things they just felt like doing which didn't
necessarily respond to the theme.
MA: Succeed, I don't know what success means. We're
very process oriented so I think in the notion of creating a process for it to
interact, it succeeded in that notion and it was never a great seller and never
really, in terms of books for Xexoxial, never really generated a lot of
interest. The one thing that was kind of nice for Xexoxial was normally we are
very frugal with how we distribute copies of our books and stuff because we
have to pay for the copies each time, so with The Acts The Shellife we felt a lot more generous with getting
copies out and distributing them.