LECTURE: Avant-Garde Publications in Perspective “From PAN to Bridge”

LECTURE: Avant-Garde Publications in Perspective

“FROM PAN TO BRIDGE”
THE RICHARD H. DRIEHAUS MUSEUM
THU, SEPT. 23, 6PM
Tickets are required, and available here for this event.

Save the date for the first lecture in a series at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where Bridge Journal Editor-in-chief Michael Workman will trace the avant-garde lineages of the Bridge Journal going back more than a century, as well as, as the museum states: “the evolution of artists’ publications and manifestos. Using the Driehaus Museum exhibition, PAN: Prints of Avant-Garde Europe 1895-1900 and William H. Bradley and The Chap-Book from the Collection of Richard H. Driehaus, as a starting point, Workman will take us through decades of intriguing and sometimes revolutionary visual, literary and social history.”

This lecture will look at the avant-garde magazines as well as the crossover artists who published, contributed new artwork and participated in the social circles that cropped up around them. Starting with the period concurrent with PAN, such as The Savoy and Yellow Book and other “1890’s periodicals,” we will also trace the emergence of more widespread artist’s publications, including Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, Der Sturm, Der Aktion and of course the establishment of Poetry magazine in 1912, followed by Blast in 1914, Cabaret Voltaire, Tristan Tzara’s Dada magazine, Harlem Renaissance magazine Fire!!, and then heading into mid-last century, publications including Georges Bataille’s Acephale, and the transition of many of these publications in the immediate aftermath of WWII into “manifestations,” or instances of manifesto-writing and publishing, often in direct competition over membership and artistic ideology.

Later publications came to include Agrégation and many other letters, monographs and works published by the various members of the Lettrist movement, the Situationists and other splinter groups, followed by the formation of the Oulipo, the publication of Avant Garde magazine, staffed by writers including now-New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, AVALANCHE magazine, and John Barth’s 1967 “manifesto of postmodernism,” The Literature of Exhaustion. Additionally, drawing on research for a recent essay in Rain Taxi, Workman will also consider the critical pivot undertaken by Conceptual artist, thinker and theorist Ulises Carrión, publisher of Ephemera magazine, widely considered the foundation of today’s “artist’s book” movement.

Finally, as founder and Editor-in-chief of the Bridge Journal, Workman will discuss the history of the journal and the artistic collective that staffs it, as well as notable precursors such as Semiotext(e) and contemporaries, including examples such as Whitewalls, E-Flux, Cabinet, BOMB, Afterall, the variety of publications in the No-ISBN movement, Martine Syms’s The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto and Philadelphia-based Ulises (so-named in honor of the aforementioned Ulises Carrión). Workman will conclude the lecture with an overview of the available future of work in the medium, and briefly discuss new artist publishing on the horizon.