“We Deliver. Sometimes.”

In 1987, as part of the international Mail Art movement, artist Norman Conquest rubber-stamped a dollar bill, affixed postage, addressed it to a friend,  and dropped it in a mail box in New York City. A week later he was contacted by an FBI agent who accused him of “defacing currency.”

Conquest explained that this was an act of art, not vandalism, but the agent just didn’t get it. He demanded to know how many dollars had been mailed.

“Only one,” Conquest assured him, “that’s all I could afford.”

The agent didn’t find this funny and said the FBI would be back in contact soon. The artist was left to wonder whether he’d be arrested.

As it turned out, he never heard back from the FBI.

Since his friend never received the dollar, he decided to commemorate the event. He stole a huge promotional poster from the Grand Central branch post office and collaged it. It included an enlarged facsimile of the mailed moolah and a faked postmark.

Below is a photograph of the final framed artwork titled “We Deliver. Sometimes.”

Click on image for larger view.

Black Plate Special

 
photo: Joy K. Aubrey

“Naked Lunch” (NYC, ca. 1990). Book-object by Norman Conquest. Mixed media: sliced Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch, glass eye and fork on black plate in painted wood display stand.

Click on image for large view.

Dutch Treat

Photograph by Rineke Dijkstra from her “Beach Portraits” series. See the feature in PDN.

LINK

Conversation Pie(r)ce

3-De Sade (1979). Book-object by Norman Conquest. Mixed media: book, blood, and spike. One of three examples.  [photo: bps]

Having seen this work up close, I can report that the spike driven through the cover served to elevate the edition as a display stand.

According to the artist this was not intentional, but “a fortuitous perk.”

More remarkable was how Conquest managed to achieve the nearly identical three-legged bloodstain on all three covers.

Scout’s Honor

Rare relic (1990) commemorating  the anti-censorship art collective, Beuyscouts of Amerika—a collaboration between artists Anna Banana and Norman Conquest.

N.C. in SF circa 1987

Noir for the Course

LINK

The Floating Pirate

Artist Norman Conquest plans to publish a pirated edition  of Red Cats (a collection of Russian poetry) in the form of a hardcover hologram.

“Beaming poems with automated page-flip is easy,” Conquest told me. “The technical hurdle is distribution and getting the damn bar code to work.”

Can one copyright a hologram?

“The Library of Congress has a special sky wing devoted to holograms.”

Will there eventually be a Kindle edition?

“We’re negotiating that.”

Will the book be expensive?

“Not if you’re Mitt Romney.”

Here’s the original paperback edition published by City Lights.

 

 

And here’s the Conquest work-in-progress.

 

The artist has promised to beam me a review copy as soon as it’s available.

Stay tuned.

Frieke Show

Edgy puff-portraits by Belgian photographer
Frieke Janssens.

LINK

Fug You & the Horse You Rode in On

Lordy-lordy. weirdness redux.

A rabid flashback to the 1960s and life on the lower east side through the beaming Peace-Eyes of inspired, rant-chanting rebel, Ed Sanders—poet, peace-creep, gush-flusher, porn-ape, bardic Fug-hugging tantric flame-thrower… anti-nuking nooky-guzzling communard of the cosmic piss-off.

If you think that was hard to say, you’re too young to remember.

As a flowering teen hipster, Sanders was my high school beatheart with the accent on “high’.” Despite the lurking dangers I often made the pilgrimage to the Peace Eye bookstore on Avenue A to “slouch & skulk” amid the hallowed poem-tomes and back issues of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and basked in the musty moon spew. It was there that—in an act of sheer Socialist Utopian generosity—Sanders bestowed upon this groveling word-urchin an even-then rare copy of his mimeo’d Fuck You Press edition of Roosevelt After Inauguration by William Burroughs (with hand-drawn cover* by Allen Ginsberg).

Does anyone remember the Anderson Theater where Jim Morrison and the author’s satiric cult-rock band The Fugs performed? I do.

And now you can, too!!

All those long-gone, ear-splitting, hashish’d mimeo-thrill-times are bottled inside this beatific memoir zapped out by Da Capo Press.

Nice to see that at age 72 Sanders’ spirit hasn’t dulled, even if he claims to be too “creaky” to camp-out at Occupy Wall Street. Hell, he still supports the movement in absentia with vegetarian prayer-fasts.

And—praise Rah!—he still spews exclamation marks like confetti hailing an ancient Egyptian death-bash!

Buy Fug You or…

go fug yourself!!!

 

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*The cover and many other rarities from the E.S. archives are reproduced in Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side.

R e v e n g e … (at last!)

Ellen von Unwerth’s classic Revenge (Twin Palms) has been out of print for years. I first reported on it in July 2010 when the publisher informed me that Ellen was in the process of rescanning her negatives for this third edition.

Well  it was  a long wait but happily the, uh, spanking new, black casebound volume arrived the other day—appropriately devoid of dust jacket.

A former fashion model, Ms. von Unwerth turned the tables and has for years been situated comfortably behind the camera. Her tongue-in-cheek tale of revenge—(complete with text by Harland Miller in the style of Victorian sadomasochistic erotica)—might well have been concocted as payback. After all, fashion models must often perform arduous chores and endure abusive treatment.

The sadistic Baroness in this parable

“…assembled the girls into the radiator room so that they may witness one another’s punishments.”

Ouch.

Of course the photographer gets to have it both ways as she directs her lovely, nude damsels in distress. Fashion, albeit disheveled,  is certainly on display in a cinematic romp around a chateau in France.

Helmut Newton, an obvious influence,  inspired countless  s/m fashion spreads, but von Unwerth has a style all her own. Unlike Newton, these seductive black and white  photos rely on visual spontaneity, movement defined by provocative blurs, and a flirtatious wit.

Playful and naughty, Ellen von Unwerth’s Revenge is sweet. 

 

 

You can order the book on Amazon here.