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| Omnibus News, #1, 1969 (front cover) |
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Omnibus News, #1, 1969 (back cover)
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Omnibus News
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In 1969 three Germans,
Thomas Niggl, Christian D’Orville and Heimrad Prem, issued a call for
submissions for a periodical in which interested individuals were invited to
submit up to 2 pages of art works in an edition of 1500 copies each. Contributors
were responsible for the cost of reproducing their own submissions, and all
works would be accepted with no editing or censorship. Published the same year
under the title Omnibus News, the
periodical was comprised of 192 submissions (384 pages) sequenced
alphabetically in an A4 format and in an edition of 1500. This was a
substantial publication with the contributor’s works printed on different
papers and mostly in black & white.
The front and back covers
reproduce a number of particularly grisly photographs from the aftermath of a
collision between a bus and a train. The dark humor contained within this
visual play on the periodical’s title is suggestive of the iconoclastic
attitude that informed the editor’s choice of this publishing strategy. This
theme is further expanded in Christian D’Orville’s editorial in the
frontispiece, in which he speculates upon the experimental, and unpredictable
nature of the publishing model that they had set in motion:
My interest in OMNIBUS NEWS shows itself first in my curiosity to discover what
could develop out of the possibility of such a sheet-compilation. The heterogeneous and the accidental,
the important and the unimportant.
Moreover I am interested in knowing whether there is the formation of a
common tone, of generalities and connections, or whether it might be silly to
even ask this...One thing is for sure: the experimental aspect of OMNIBUS NEWS should through the
conscious elimination of conventional values and elimination of thematic
directions, find a place within the opposition to the official art world. (1)
Contributors were asked to
donate 15 DM to help with the binding & postage and for this they would
receive 10 copies of the periodical, and thus they also became the distributors
of the periodical. The editors also hoped to distribute the remaining copies in
a variety of unconventional locations such as the libraries of military
barracks and old people’s homes.
In the editors call for
works D’Orville speculates on the extent to which this democratized publishing
model might encourage others (artists and non-artists), to step up for a ride
on this new periodical omnibus.
Does the unofficial and
non-commercial distribution lead to a manifold reaction and thus to a readiness
to participate, which will make possible a second edition with a similar but
also very new and dynamic tension? It is exactly the expansion to people who up
to this point did not want or could not participate, which awakens my interest. Everybody can be their own editor. No general achievement-expectation thus
should keep the individual from experimenting. The publishers are only the compilers and organizers of OMNIBUS NEWS. (2)
Omnibus News
contains a wide assortment of visual works, literary & theoretical texts,
proposals & documentation, and reproductions of extant works created in a
variety of media. At the end of the periodical is a three page listing of the
contributor’s names and addresses.A survey of the contributor’s list reveals
submissions from eight countries, with an 82% majority from Germany.(3)
For reasons that remain obscure the editor’s would not repeat this publishing
experiment and periodicity itself would be another convention that they discarded.(4) However, Omnibus News remains a landmark publication in establishing a new
genre of periodical publishing that would come to be known as “assembling”
periodicals. Assemblings embrace a radical new editorial model in which the
traditional authority of the editor is overthrown, and s/he now becomes an
‘assembler/compiler’ in an open and uncensored publication process.
Although this type of
editorial model had been used before, it was always within the context of
smaller and intimate friendship networks. Omnibus
News was a significant break in this tradition as it opened itself up to a
much larger international network of potential contributors. The year 1969 also
represents a watershed moment in which assembling periodicals would appear in
other countries, in particular Canada and the United States. Indeed, the name
“assembling” comes from a well-known American example appropriately titled Assembling that published 12 issues
between 1970-1986. (5)
Omnibus News remains an historical pioneer in establishing this democratized model as
an alternative to traditional periodical formats and assemblings continue to be
published up to the present day.
Stephen
Perkins, 2008
Footnotes
1. Christian
D’Orville, “Marginal Comments,” in: Omnibus
News,
1 (1969): np.
Translation Curt Germundson.
2. Ibid.,
np.
3. Foreign
submissions came from: Austria, Denmark, France,
Netherlands, Poland,
Switzerland and the USA.
4. Geza
Perneczky recently discovered that there was a later second version of Omnibus News, edited by Peter &
Susanne Schwenk in Martenbeth, Germany, 1980, in: Perneczky, Geza. Assembling
Magazines: 1969-2000. Budapest: Arnyekkotok Foundation, 2007, p. 157
5. For
an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, one of the editors of Assembling, see: Perkins, Stephen (ed). Assembling Magazines: International Networking
Collaborations, (exhibition catalogue). Iowa City: Plagiarist Press, 1996, p. 12-14.