Beau Geste Press

The Mexican mixed media, conceptual and performance artist Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion co-founded the Beau Geste Press collective in Devon (1970-1976) with English artist and art historian David Mayor. It became one of the most influential avantgarde independent presses of the post-war period and is regarded by art historians and contemporary artists as one of the most significant transnational collaborative projects of the 1970s. This unconventional workshop/taller and community of printers became influential by producing and publishing print objects of a new, heterogenous, radical aesthetic that was often engaged in the counterculture and in the blurring of disciplinary boundaries across creative media, gender and politics. In collaboration with international and national artists many of whom were associated with the Fluxus movement, the BGP produced diverse limited edition works, concept booklets, pamphlets, magazines,flyers and postcards using experimental techniques of graphic design including inserts, folded pages, stecil signage, applied materials, photographs,stamps and collage while also revisiting the artisanal in printing styles of production. Through this vital creative centre, Ehrenberg, a self-confessed „neologist‟ created a multidimensional web of collaborations (often eclectic and intermedial) predicated on experimental and alternative processes of image and textual interplay centred on the UK. In 1972 it launched the legendary Schmuck – a periodical of ideas and antiauthoritarian art practice organised around a specific culture or region (French Schmuck, Teutonic Schmuck etc). Key artists, poets, musicians and theorists such as Cecilia Vicuña, Ulises Carrión, Helen Chadwick, Carolee Schneemann, Claudio Bertoni, Michael Nyman, Opal L.Nations and Ben Vautier created pioneering print artefacts that have become landmarks of the international dimension of a dissident art practice exemplified by the Beau Geste Press. (Source)

Exhibitions

• Radical/Basic/Actual. 1970s Experiments in Print Media: Felipe Ehrenberg, Latin American Artists and the Beau Geste Press (Devon, 1970-1976), exhibition, Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge/UK, 2016. Captions.
• Beau Geste Press, CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 2 Feb-28 May 2017. Catalogue.

Literature

• Donna Conwell, "Beau Geste Press", Getty Research Journal 2 (2010), pp 183-192.
• Zanna Gilbert, "“Something Unnameable in Common”: Translocal Collaboration at the Beau Geste Press", ArtMargins 1:2-3, Jun-Oct 2012, pp 45-72. [1]