"Experimental artist Tony Conrad is known for his innovative works in performance art, music, video, and fine art as well as his contribution to arts education as a longtime media professor at The University of Buffalo. A former Harvard math student himself, Conrad is widely considered to be a pioneer of minimalism, media criticism, drone pop, and noise music thanks to his lifelong dedication to deconstruction, abstraction, and self-empowerment."
(Erin Dennison, cinemathread)
"Around the time Shub started her documentary experiments, 20th century avant-garde artists likewise began using repurposed chunks of mass-produced ephemera. Picasso and Braque threw bits of newspaper into paintings; Max Ernst cut up Victorian illustrations to create proto-surrealist collages; Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce pushed the literary practice of quotation into the realm of pastiche; Marcel Duchamp pioneered sculptural assemblage with his readymades; and photomontage blossomed in the graphic works of John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, and Alexander Rodchenko. These works rearranged reality to suit their artists' purposes but, unlike the compilation films, did not try to hide that manipulation. Whether Cubist, Dada, or Constructivist, these artists chose to disrupt the new realities of mass media rather than replicate them, savoring the illogic of dreamlike disjunctions and precipitating new ways to see all-too-common images."
(Ed Halter, 10 July 2008, Moving Image Source)
"This short book, intended for children of all ages, is perhaps the best–known work of El Lissitzky (1890–1941). Lissitzky was a Russian artist, architect, designer, typographer, and photographer who was active in the avante garde movement that flourished in Soviet Russia and in Germany, until the dominance of Soviet Realism by 1930 put a stop to its revolutionary activity. He directly influenced the typographical and display advertising innovations of the Bauhaus and 'de Stijl'. This book entirely integrates modern typographical effects, as Lissitzky intended, with his illustrations in the Suprematist style.
The original book About Two Squares was printed by letterpress, even the slanted text and illustrations. It was first produced ('constructed') in 1920 at the Soviet art institute UNOVIS in Vitebsk, and around April 1922 printed by Sycthian Press, Berlin, by Haberland Printers, Leipzig, in paperback, with 50 hardbound copies autographed and numbered, as the copyright page states."
"Jean Tinguely exhibited in a show titled 'Art, Machines and Motion' at the Kaplan Gallery, London, in November 1959. In conjunction with that exhibition, Tinguely held a conference and performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art on November 16 titled 'Static, Static, Static! Be Static!' During the event, 1.5 km of paper drawn by two cyclists on his meta–matic bicycle were spread through the audience while Tinguely read his theory of movement and machines simultaneously heard on radio in Paris."
(Rosemary O'Neill, p.159)
Rosemary O'Neill (2011). Total Art and Fluxus in Nice. "Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971: The Ecole De Nice", Ashgate Publishing Limited.
"SOUVENIRS FROM EARTH is an international Cable TV station, currently broadcasting in France and Germany, presenting a 24h art program, based on Video art, Film, Visual art, Music, Installations and Performances.
Founder Marcus Kreiss and Curator Alec Crichton conceived this channel as a platform where artists of different sensibilities can find a high–end environment to experience new forms of distribution and presentation. Our production section also produces comissioned and free video art."
"In 'What is an author?' [4], Michel Foucault says we are 'accustomed to presenting the author as a genius.' We see the author as the 'genial creator' of work in which he gives us, 'with infinite wealth and generosity,' an inexhaustible world of meanings. (Being 'creative' always has a positive ring, whatever is produced!) Foucault says that the author does not 'precede' the work: ideas and meanings are already there and the author's role is to 'choose,' to filter and synthesise to create output. (Foucault also emphasises 'limiting' and 'excluding'). The author's role is to limit the proliferation of meanings and present a personal view of the world. Yet the 'genius author' is represented as a continual source of invention–the opposite of his genuine function."
(Monika Parrinder, 2000, Eye Magazine)