Author Description

In Numbers is the first volume to address an overlooked art form that is neither artist's book nor ephemera, but is entirely its own unique entity: the artist's serial publication. Across such groundswell moments as the small press boom of the 1960s, the correspondence art movement of the early 1970s and the DIY zine culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, artists have seized on magazine and postcard formats as forms in themselves. These are not publications that print criticism, manifestos or reproductions of artworks; rather, they are themselves artworks, in large part factured by younger artists operating at the peripheries of mainstream art cultures, or by established artists looking for an alternative to the marketplace. Dating from 1955 to the present, In Numbers begins with Wallace Berman's Semina and continues through Joe Brainard's C Comics, Situationist Times, Eleanor Antin's 100 Boots, File, Robert Heinecken's modified periodicals, the Japanese group Provoke's magazine, Ian Hamilton Finlay's Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, Fluxus, Art-Language, Raymond Pettibon's Tripping Corpse, Maurizio Cattelan's Permanent Food and contemporary examples such as North Drive Press, LTTR and Continuous Project. (Approximately 60 publications in total are surveyed.) Documenting the history of each publication―its inception, production, distribution and impact―together with a fully illustrated bibliography for each title, In Numbers is embellished with essays by Clive Phillpot, Nancy Princenthal, William S. Wilson and Neville Wakefield. An illustrated conversation between Collier Schorr and Gil Blank provides an overview.