Aspen - "The multimedia magazine in a box" - Part one

Independent art magazines have been around for a long time. I’m sure that there were many published earlier than Aspen which began in 1965 as “a multimedia magazine, designed by artists”, published by Phyllis Johnson. The magazine’s unique feature for it’s 10-issue life was that it was published not in standard format, but in a box which contained other objects as well as the paper you would expect. For instance, issue “5+6 included a reel of motion picture film” reproduced here along with the referenced text for this paragraph (scroll up on the page). The web page includes instructions for co-ordinating the film clips with audio files copied from the original phonograph recordings. I played Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Lightplay’ along with Alexander Scriabin’s ‘Prelude D’ and they really do go well together.

The web version of the magazine has been digitized and presented on the UbuWeb site so that even if you can’t see the magazine in it’s original form (except for the paper if you were to print it) you can at least get an idea of how it looked when it first appeared.

[July 8/09 - Most links to artists added through the magic of Zemanta, although I had to find Claus Oldenburg myself. I wouldn't ordinarily link all personal names but if Zemanta is going to do it for me, fine.]

Issue 1, "The Black Box", is made up of 9 items, including a letter from Phyllis Johnson. To see the separate articles, click on the Issue 1 link, and explore. While I would like you to read the articles I mention, in the interest of promoting wandering as a method of discovery, I’m not providing direct links. There’s also an mp3 of the St. James Infirmary Blues, if you like jazz.

Issue 2, "The White Box", contains a variety of material, including excerpts from speeches by actresses Carroll Baker and Eva Saint Marie and movie director Jean Renoir, and one sentence from screen writer Abby Mann which could apply to artists in all mediums.

Issue 3, “the Pop Art issue”, includes an article by Lou Reed [check out the videos]; cards reproducing art, with commentary, by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, William deKooning, and others; and much, much more from a time we read about now but was happening as this issue was written.

Issue 4, “The McLuhan issue”, doesn’t necessarily contain much about the subject indicated.

Issue 5+6, “The Mimimalism issue”, on the other hand, provides an embarrassment of riches. There are poem excerpts spoken by William Burroughs; essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes; instructions and diagrams for a very simple, or very complicated, (read the artist’s description) Maze; readings from Merce Cummingham and Marcel Duchamp; four film excerpts, including one by Robert Rauschenberg with hens; and various other projects.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of videos, sound files, and texts. When I started the draft for this post in April of 2006, (procrastination is sometimes a fault, sometimes a virtue) the first video listed was of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte fish, a huge download (180 mb., MP4) just to watch an anti-war activist cooking fish. [Now, of course, UbuWeb has streaming video and audio.] But, hey, I did it and I think it is always good to see an iconic figure doing everyday tasks. It reminds us that ordinary people can do extra-ordinary things. For more info on Hoffman, see his Wikipedia entry or do a Google search.

One of UbuWeb's excellent resources is the material it has on Fluxus. 37 Short Fluxus Films shows those films in MPEG format. It may take a while to load, but all 37 files will show as black boxes on one page and each can be played from there. The resources listed at the bottom of the page link to other UbuWeb Fluxus material. The film and video section lists "over 300 avant-garde films and videos" (not all by Fluxus artists) and is well worth browsing. As for me, I'm looking at a "dada film by Marcel Duchamp" before I upload this blog entry. Incidently, Duchamp was born in 1887, not 1940.

Read their FAQ which is a good explanation of UbuWeb's reason for being.

Turning the Pages : the British Library's Online Gallery

I found this webpage through an article in the provincial newspaper, The ChronicleHerald, about the display of William Blake's notebook for his poem, The Tyger. The URL given there was a bit different so I've used the link recommended by the British Library's technical information page. That page explains why you should use this URL and which version (broadband or narrowband) you should try for. As far as I could see, I ended up in the same place no matter which URL I used. I also found that my computer is woefully unready for this type of display. Actually, when it worked, it worked very well.

The Turning the Pages Gallery includes fifteen online manuscripts as of today, as well as links to other Turning the Pages sites. Among the titles shown here are works by Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, and the Flemish Masters, as well as images from the Sforza Hours, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Diamond Sutra, a Hebrew Prayer Book, and the Qu'ran. There are many other things to explore on this website.

Leafing through the pages of the digitized books is likely easier if your computer is faster than mine. I was able to move through the books fairly well, and use at least one of the added features. There is a magnifying glass which works well (no in-depth zooming though), page-rotation when needed, a text explanation of the work, and audio files which follow the text. For the Qu'ran, there is also a reading of the text of the book.
I hope to do more exploring and reporting on those resources but I do tend to get distracted so be sure to explore on your own.

National Palace Museum, Taipei

I love the way that one thing leads to another on the Web. I find an article in the New York Times, or somewhere else, I do a Google search, and suddenly I'm looking at an exhibit from the other side of the world.
The exhibits page at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan has links to past exhibits back to 1999. The earliest one that I found was on The Art of Embroidery from early 1999. The presentation is much simpler than the latest one I saw which was Grand View:Ju Ware from the Northern Sung Dynasty. This is a beautifully set up site but can be memory eating and Flash-intensive. The 'Introduction' (Flash plugin needed) and 'Sections & Selections' tabs go in entirely different directions. On my laptop, I found that it was a good idea to have something to read while the pages were loading. The careful thought behind the site is evident, although I would have liked a pause button in some of the displays.

Discovered via an article in the New York Times Rare Glimpses of China’s Long-Hidden Treasures.