Of Piss @N' Pus & Dancing with Wolves

Of Piss @N' Pus, #5, 2002 

Of Piss @N' Pus, #5, 2002 (inside cover) 

Of Piss @N' Pus, #5, 2002 (inside pages)

Of Piss @ND Pus, #7, 2002

Of Piss @ND Pus, #7, 2002 (inside pages)

Of Piss @N' Pus, #9, 2002

Of Piss @N' Pus, #9, 2002 (inside pages) 

Of Piss @N' Pus, #11, 2002

Of Piss @N' Pus, #11, 2002 (inside pages)

Of Piss @N' Pus, #11, 2002 (inside pages)

Of Piss @N' Pus, #12, 2002

Of Piss @N' Pus, #12, 2002

Dancing with Wolves, #1, 2012

Dancing with Wolves, #1, 2012 (inside cover)

Dancing with Wolves, #1 2012 (inside pages)

Of Piss @N' Pus
(& Dancing with Wolves)

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Twenty-five years ago, when the Nazis fled from Belgium, my native country, after four years of military occupation, I saw people burning in the streets all over the country whatever had been German: books, magazines, records, films... Buildings which had been occupied, or built, by the Germans were dynamited. The Belgians wanted to erase forever whatever had been part of the Deutschland Kultur. (Toche, 1969)¹

It's not easy being Jean Toche—at almost eighty he's still waging war against the hypocrisy and stupidity of our national and political culture. Since the early '90s, from his secure location in Staten Island, he's been sending out bold, loud and outraged handbills that contain his responses and suggestions for making things better, and how to keep the bozos away from the levers of power. An exposer of fraudsters, poseurs, politicians, hypocrites, government agencies and the art world, Toche started with single sheets of text that were mailed out to around 50 people at a time, then he centralized this activity in his artists' periodical Of Piss @N' Pus (2002).² Each of the periodical's 12 monthly issues contain individually signed and designed handbills from a specific month. Using quotes from mainstream media sources (New York Times & Wall Street Journal), Toche combines these with his own texts to critique, challenge and ridicule a wide range of political and cultural events. These are serious and often outrageous attacks on the body politic but they always contain a hint of humor. Toche does not exclude himself from these critiques either. Each page is printed on different colored papers, often with assorted pre-printed designs and he creates different typographic layouts for each page. Bound together by a removable plastic binder these original page works are presented in an economical, and modest format that is in elegant contrast to the extravagance of Toche's critiques and the challenges he aims at bombastic politicians and their ilk.

At the same time as Toche started this periodical he was encouraged by Jon Hendricks, a former artistic partner, to experiment with digital technology. He acquired a new printer that enabled him to print works up to 10 feet long and a digital camera and software with which he began to create, and manipulate, an archive of self-portraits. It is from this latter collection that he chooses the self-portraits in his now standard practice of combining digitally manipulated self-portraits with his own and mass media texts. From 2002 up until quite recently he was printing his works in sizes that varied from 6 - 10 feet long. Recent issues with the wholesale supplier of this photographic paper has necessitated him working in a reduced format of 11" x 8". Once again in order to streamline distribution of these works he has adopted a folder format to distribute small groups of works. One of the first of these publications I received from Toche was in May 2012 and it was titled Dancing with the Wolves, Vol. #1. Other similar mailings have not included the periodical title, which suggests that Dancing with the Wolves might have been a one-off periodical.

Toche also has something of a history of intervening in situations in order to get his voice and opinion heard. As one of the founding members, with Jon Hendricks of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG, 1969-76), they communicated their views by writing letters & sending handbills of protest to their adversaries, and sometimes they created actions to draw particular attention to an issue.³ One celebrated event was the "blood bath" action that took place on November 10, 1969, in the foyer of the Museum of Modern Art, in which Hendricks, Toche, Johnson and Silvianna⁴ staged a fight in which the bags of blood hidden under their clothes burst and splattered the participants. The text that was left at the scene demanded the resignation of all the Rockefellers from the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art because of their involvement with the 'war machine.'

Four years later the museums would get their revenge. On February 28, 1974, Toche, under the auspices of the 'Ad Hoc Artists' Movement for Freedom,' sent a handbill to assorted museums, newspapers and individuals in New York City in which he demanded a number of things, including the kidnapping of museum "trustees, directors, administrators, curators, & benefactors," and for them to be held as war hostages until a People's Court could be convened to "...deal specifically with the cultural crimes of the ruling class..." Toche, with solidarity from the arts community, fought the kidnap charges for more than a year before the government dropped all its charges.

Toche was 12 years old when he witnessed the events he describes at the beginning of this text, and the powerful image of Belgium's WWII anti-Nazi purge and the frenzied eradication of all Deutschland Kultur provided a vivid experience of the power of culture and the culture of power. Since his arrival in the US in 1965, Toche has waged his own war against a culture he despises, and that's our culture of political corruption, inequality and discrimination, to name but a few. However, one thing can be stated with certainty—Toche's fight will be a fight to the end!⁵

Stephen Perkins, 2012

Footnotes

1. Jean Toche, ltr. (Oct. 9, 1969) concerning the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival, in GAAG: 1969-1976, Printed Matter: New York, 1978, unpaginated: Introduction.

2. Various issues of Of Piss @N' Pus have different dates: #1-5: 2003, #7-12: 2002. Despite these different dates the publication was published monthly during 2002. Confirmation of these dates can be found in Kristine Stile's exhibition catalogue "Jean Toche: Impressions from the Rogue Bush Imperial Presidency," presented at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, Duke University Center for International Studies, 2009. In footnote #5, page 14 she states that she received the periodicals by mail from Toche and they were all postdated 2002.

3. Other collaborators and members of GAAG, were Virginia Poe (Toche), and Poppy Johnson.

4. Silvianna was an artist/filmmaker and participated in this action only, (in GAAG: 1969-1976).

5. Printed Matter in New York has recently reprinted their invaluable 1978 sourcebook about GAAG, titled: GAAG: The Guerrilla Art Action Group, 1969 - 1976 : A Selection, Jon Hendricks & Jean Toche, New York, NY: Printed Matter Inc., 2011.  Printed Matter also has some of Toche's publications for sale as well as copies of Of Piss @N' Pus #2 for $3.  http://www.printedmatter.org/

An update: Jean Toche was found dead in his home by the police on Monday, July 9th, 2018, he was born in Breuge, Belgium in 1932.

Stampzine

Call for works for Stampzine #6, 2000 

Stampzine #1, 1995

Stampzine #1, 1995 (inside pages)

Stampzine #2, 1996

Stampzine #2, 1996 (inside pages)

Stampzine #2, 1996 (inside pages)

Stampzine #3, 1997

Stampzine #3, 1997 (inside pages)

Stampzine (l-r):#5, 1999, #6, 2000, #4, 1998 

Stampzine (l-r):#6, 2000, #5, 1999, #4, 1998

Stampzine (insides pages from above three issues)

Stampzine

This interview with Bill Gaglione, editor of Stampzine, took place in San Francisco in 1995. Six issues of Stampzine were published between 1995-2000.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Stephen Perkins: One thing that I am really interested in is assembling magazines and you did a Vile assembling, was that the first one you'd done?

Bill Gaglione: I think so...

SP: You adopted the assembling technique because it was the best way of working...

BG: I had just got back from Europe and I was in Eastern countries and I saw what was going on, they were doing those type of magazines, I was aware of that, but I saw a lot of it, and I said wow! Again it was the money factor, who had to money to publish? So it was a nice way to put a publication together.

SP: So you connect assemblings with the former Eastern bloc countries?

BG: Most of the publications that I saw there were assembling type publications, so I was really influenced by that. In 1970 we toured Eastern Europe.

SP: Which magazines?

BG: Off hand I can't remember, they were so obscure. Pawel Petasz type magazines or rubber stamp magazines. Galantai in Budapest, he showed me a lot of stuff. Again when I got back I said I wanted to do an issue of Vile, but I don't want to go through the hassle of getting the grant, actually Anna did most of that. And I wanted to do color and it was strictly rubber stamps and it was a weird size. I got to give credit 'cause I had to cut each page 300 times and then stamp it 300 times. It's a really nice issue, it's thick, it's huge, I think 185 artists sent pages. Another aspect of assemblings was that I liked the collating, because I used to call all my friends and it's a nice social way to get together, instead of just sitting there drinking and getting stoned, which we did, but we worked and it was fun. Especially that one, it took us all day, I had about 50 people. My friend was a teacher at a school and we laid these tables out and we walked around and we had food and drink, it was really fun. So that aspect was really nice also, plus it's inexpensive, because basically you design the cover and your course is basically putting it together and mailing it out, and you have to do that anyway. Plus you can do color, limited edition, also that's another reason why I liked this concept.

SP: In the sense of?

BG: That it's limited. Once it goes, it goes. Also, whoever contributed got a free issue that was a nice way of distributing that book.

SP: So had you contributed to assemblings before?

BG: Oh yea, Kostelanetz, a lot of stuff in Europe, all through my sort of quote "mail art career." I've liked them the best 'cause I always used rubber stamps, it's a real home made feel, real artsy fartsy.

I've got to hand it to Kostelanetz 'cause he really did a lot of them. Then I did a magazine called Stamp Art in the '80s. It was the same thing, they were all hand stamped, that was my only requirement, I told people you can do anything you want but each page has to be hand stamped at least once, and the rest you could do anything you want.

Now you might find the cover interesting [picking up a copy of Stamp Art]. This is the first four color stamp ever made, and it was basically a photograph and we got the separations made our of rubber instead of... So we did five issues there, Vile and then they called us stamp art. Eventually I will mail you a copy. So that's the only two assembling-type magazines that I did and I'm thinking about doing another in the '90s. I'm helping a woman called Patricia to do one now, she's doing an assembling-type where you mail in 50 copies, so I have been involved with that.

Assembling

Assembling #4, 1973 

Assembling #4, 1973

Assembling #4, 1973

Assembling #5, 1974 

Assembling #5, 1974

Assembling #5, 1974

Assembling #5, 1974

Assembling #7, 1977

Assembling #7, 1977

Assembling #10, 1980

Assembling #10, 1980

Assembling #12, 1986

Assembling #12, 1986

Assembling

This interview with Richard Kostelanetz, one of Assembling's editors, took place in 1996 in New York City. Assembling published 13 issues between 1970-1987. For further information about Kostelanetz and his activities see: http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/

This text originally appeared in "Assembling Magazines," exhibition catalogue, editor, Stephen Perkins, Iowa City: Plagiarist Press, 1997.

­­­­­­­­­­_________________________________________________________________________________________

Stephen Perkins: I understand that your first exposure to an assembling publication was when Dick Higgins (1938-1998) showed you Tomas Niggl's Omnibus News (1969). I wonder if you can recall your first impressions upon encountering this publication?

Richard Kostelanetz: What a wonderful way to publish! I think another fact though would be the Cage "Notations" (1969) book. The non-uniform book. Does Niggl do alphabetical?...because Cage did alphabetical. Actually I always wondered about that, because that became a sort of convention that we've kept throughout but of course it's an unnecessary convention. It interested me because as I have written, in the conventional magazine, the editors think they are putting the good stuff up front and the weaker stuff at the back and I wanted to get away from that kind of thing. So we hit upon the alphabet as a structure but in retrospect I think there are other ways to do it. I would probably do reverse alphabet sometimes and out of the middle of the alphabet some other times. [ed. note: Kostelanetz is referring here to the alphabetical sequencing of the contributions in Assembling]

SP: I wonder why you even decided to bind it because that sets up a narrative.....

RK: Because I make books. I make books.

SP: So, Assembling was a book?

RK: Yes, sure.

SP: When people review it some people call it a book, some people call it a magazine.

RK: But I come out of the tradition of books, as you can see from looking around this house. I wanted something with a spine, although we didn't mark the first spine, but then we marked later spines. I think of my life as being mostly making books...look at Dana Atchley (1941-2000), was that a book?

SP: So it doesn't upset you that some people call it a magazine?

RK: No, we actually called it a magazine, an annual magazine and we listed ourselves in periodical indices and things like that. I wanted to make a pseudo-book, something that looked like a book. Omnibus News looked like a book, Cage's "Notations" looked like a book.

SP: Looking at the first couple of issues it clearly arises from a literary tradition but very quickly it becomes as much visual as well as literary. Was that something that surprised you or was that inevitable?

RK: I consider myself both visual and literary and certainly did at that time and it didn't surprise me. I may not even have noticed it. I think it also became the nature of the thing. Karl Young in his wonderful essay pointed out that there was no cachet in publishing Assembling for literary people, who wanted to keep dossiers, because everything was accepted and so turned off a lot of people...I think that's a really important principle.¹

SP: The interesting thing about that strategy is that is puts the onus on the contributors who become the editors and you have a whole different dynamic.

RK: And also it's how much respect you have for yourself. I'm not going to bestow any respect on you, you've either got it or you don't, that's it.

SP: Were you aware of any other publications that were playing with or turning upside down publishing conventions in that manner?

RK: No, other than similar, Cage's "Notations."

SP: What about Fluxus?

RK: I never thought of their publications as books. You're getting me, catching me! Yeah, I never thought of them as books.

SP: Although you talk about the editorial process being open, new contributors were invited to send a sample of their work, did that happen?

RK: Yes.

SP: So in that sense it wasn't totally open...

RK: You had to be invited. But I must say we used to joke at the time that thank god we don't have any painful editorial meetings of whether or not X or Y should be invited or dis-invited. We never had editorial meetings, if it looked freaky invite them! I'm sure nobody was dis-invited. People might have been discouraged or encouraged to dis-invite themselves but I don't think anyone was ever dis-invited. It's not my character to do that

SP: How did you decide upon the 1000 copies that people had to submit?

RK: That seemed excessive, you know I still have a lot of storage costs that I don't know what to do about. 1000 is probably a book convention as well.

SP: It seems to be that at one level, such a large number of copies in an edition was one of the reasons that Assembling spread out so far, it must have touched a lot of people.

RK: Maybe, it became a bigger problem maybe we should have done 500. It became a problem that I still have to live with it costs me $50 a month to keep those things which I hope somebody will eventually buy. In fact it probably even costs me more than that, now I think about it.

SP: It strikes me that one could describe Assembling in terms of its material, but I also see it as operating within communities, it becomes a collaboration, it involved a lot of chance elements in it...

RK: It had a changing clientele, it's not a clique, there's no continuity of contributors from beginning to end. Very much a changing clientele. Why that is you'd have to ask them but it was also set up so it didn't matter if someone didn't show up next year, it didn't really matter within the whole.

SP: So did you see it as a kind of 'event' each time?

RK: The event, to the degree there was an event, was taking the boxes to the collator wherever that happened to be. That became the event. I remember being with Henry Korn in his parent's big Cadillac and we had this all filled with boxes going up to Providence to taken them somewhere. The second event was mailing them out.

SP: So all three editors would get together for the mailing, or would you have other helpers?

RK: No, it was too big. Although I think Mike Metz once hired a fireman and his family maybe for Assembling #3. But no we never did it ourselves at least I'm pretty sure we never did it ourselves. I'd be surprised if we did it ourselves. The other part of course was the staple, we never had that kind of staple, which I think was an industrial staple of some kind or other. You're really making me think, I always wanted to make a book dammit, I wonder what that's about. Is that just about me? I guess so. I always wanted to make a book with a tight spine and a staple and pages bound together. I think symbolically that made the community but I guess the envelopes did also.

SP: But it's a different experience looking through an envelope, you can shuffle the work...

RK: Of course, no question about that. Was anybody else so devoted to the notion of a book as I was? Maybe Jerry Bowles' No Commercial Value, I guess that was his way of doing the book. I don't remember any criticism at the time of our binding, I might be wrong about that, but I don't remember it. Certainly the instructions to the contributors always I'm sure said leave a margin because we bind.

I think the bigness of Assembling put off some people, that it could be so big. I know it put off the guys who gave out literary grant monies, "...you mean you get all these guys to give you the paper free and you make a book that big..." and we said yeah and they scratched their heads, they couldn't figure it out!

SP: At one level one could describe it as an anti-periodical or anti-book in the sense that it doesn't place a great emphasis on the thematic progression.

RK: No question about that, or alternative kind of book.

SP: So it's no surprise that funders were reluctant...

RK: Oh yeah and "...you guys don't choose, select..."

SP: Surely that didn't surprise you, that would be inevitable with the strategy that's inherent to Assembling.

RK: Well the lack of funding certainly offended me at the time, I'll tell you that. It upset me. I forget where we ran out of money, maybe it was #5, that was the one that was done down in Baltimore, when we had no money and somebody else picked it up. And of course after I was dis-involved, once I went to Berlin in the early 80s, it never got any funds again.

SP: Wasn't there an issue #13? I remember sending some work in for that and never getting a copy.

RK: Well at that time Charlie Doria was in charge, and Charlie Doria was not as good as he should have been about keeping promises. The thing I have always emphasized is that as long as I was in charge all promises were kept and I think that's why people sent so much stuff and I think that's real important in this area because you and I can think of guys who don't keep their promises.

SP: And they soon get struck off lists, you don't participate after a while; I mean it's so much built on trust.

RK: It has to be, and that I think is also Cagean, incidentally if I may digress for a second. I have this whole theory of Cage, which is that his performance practice is not about chance, but it's about trust. I will give you a score and trust you not to violate it. I'm not leaving things to chance I trusting you not to violate it. You might do something I can't expect. I think that what we did is very Cage an.

Footnotes

1.  I'm assuming Kostelanetz is referring to Karl Young's forward to Assembling #12, 1986. Read it here: http://www.spunk.org/texts/art/sp000177.html

The Acts The Shelflife

The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986

The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (inside cover)

The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (with record insert)

The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (editorial & contributors)

The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (contributors) 

The Acts The Shelflife, #1, 1986 (back cover)

The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 

The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (frontispiece) 

The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (Liz Was fold-out piece)

The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (editorial & contributors)

The Acts The Shelflife, #2, 1988 (contributors)

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.