Caroline Tisdall: Joseph Beuys: Coyote (1976–)

“Coyote was the first attempt to capture a performance by Joseph Beuys in book form. Beuys’s Action, I Like America and America Likes Me, took place in May 1974, when he spent seven days and nights in a room with a wild coyote.

The artist’s activities during his confinement with the coyote followed a repeated pattern. He employed a number of objects: felt, a walking stick, gloves, a flashlight and the Wall Street Journal – fifty copies were delivered daily. Over the period of a week, man and beast developed a mode of wordless co-existence, a two-sided performance that became rich with assumed meanings. Caroline Tisdall, a longstanding friend of the artist, who has written extensively on Beuys and has directed films about him, took most of the photographs and wrote the accompanying text.”

First published by Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1976
Publisher Thames & Hudson, London, 2008
ISBN 9780500543689
160 pages
via Scribd

Commentary: Jan Verwoert (e-flux, 2008).

Publisher

PDF (226 MB, updated on 2019-11-23)

Iliazd: Lidantiu faram (1923) [Russian]

Lidantiu faram [Le-Dantyu as a Beacon] is a play typed in zaum language by the Georgian-French artist-typographer Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich). It remains an unsurpassed example of visually fascinating typographical contrivances and was to exert a decisive influence on the typographical component of international dadaist poetry.

“The book is preceded by a table of symbols which indicate how the sounds they stand for, such as a click of the tongue, are to be pronounced. The stressed symbol is given a capital letter, often large and bold, in the middle of the word, while unstressed vowels are written as pronounced, not necessarily as normally spelt.

The plot, in a parodic inversion of Gogol’s short story ‘The Portrait’, investigates the nature of reality in its relation to art. It begins with the Spirit [Zaperedukhyai] muttering a soliloquy over the body of a dead woman. The Spirit’s words do not contain vowels, an omission suggesting firmness. The villain of the piece, the realist painter [peredvizhnik] who is presented as a lisping phoney, paints a lifelike portrait of the dead woman. Then comes an obscure avant-garde artist, Mikhail Ledentu, who represents genuine liberated art and he paints an unlike portrait of the same lady. Both portraits come alive during the play, with Unlike killing Lifelike. The Spirit also dies but the forces of life are resurrected. The play ends with an ensemble superimposed on each other: the harmonious trio of the living is echoed by the dissonant octet of the dead. The forces of death include a Greek chorus of five ugly realism-loving women, usually singing in quintet. They are defined as truperdy (this combines death and decay with scatology) and their individual names are mostly rare Russian folk words with sexual anatomical meanings. The quintets show strong individualisation of each part: one of them speaks in vowels only; another hissing and lisping; another in abrupt and primitive tones adding clicks of her tongue to her words; the other two speak in a coarse and unpleasant idiom.

Le-Dantyu as a Beacon is an astonishing tour-de-force. Every page number, for instance, is created in a different and inventive manner (and there are sixty-one of them), and the variety of typeforms used must surely have entailed ransacking the typecases of several printers.” (from Alan Bartram’s Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text, 2005, altered)

Lidantiu faram (Лидантю фарам; Ledentu le Phare: poème dramatique en zaoum)
Preface by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, in French (attached at the end)
Cover by N. Granowsky
Typography by Ilya Zdanevich
Publisher Éditions du 41º, Paris, 1923
61 pages + 8-page prospectus

Commentary: Lewis Blackwell (20th-century Type, 2004: 35), Alan Bartram (Futurist Typography, 2005: 50-69).

PDF (15 MB, via Iowa Digital Library)
PDF (107 MB, added on 2020-12-5, via Kunsthaus Zurich)

Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp): Some French Moderns Says McBride (1922)

A collection of essays by the art editor and critic Henry McBride, published in the New York Sun and the New York Herald, 1915-1922, compiled and designed by Marcel Duchamp.

“In 1922, Henry McBride, who had been close to Duchamp for years, commissioned him to design a book for his art essays. The resulting pamphlet was composed of eighteen cardboard sheets, held together by three rings. Its title, Some French Moderns says McBride, is spelled out in twenty-seven separate file tabs attached to the right edge of each page; when viewed from the verso, these same tabs spell out the name of the book’s publisher: ‘SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME INCORPORATED’.” (from Marjorie Perloff, “A Cessation of Resemblances”, 2012)

Duchamp described his idea for layout in a June 1922 letter to McBride: “The brochure would have 26 or 27 pages (front–back) since each letter is on a page of its own. Now, if I have enough room, I propose the following: Set off on the first page with minute characters, ending up on the last page with big characters, making the characters progressively larger with each page. [..] I have already chosen the typeface ranging from 5 pt for the first page to 12 or more for the last page which will have 5 words (I think). With each page, the typeface, from the same family, will gradually increase in size. The first two articles on Cézanne will have to be read with a magnifying glass.” And about the illustrations: “My idea is to incorporate them into the text by gluing them onto the binding strip. I think it will be better to spread them out.” (from Duchamp, Selected Correspondence, 2000).

Publisher Société Anonyme, New York, 1922
Printed by Melomine Publications, New York
18 cardboard sheets, with 7 sheets illustrated with Charles Sheeler photographs
via Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Commentary (David Joselit, 1997)
Commentary (Caroline Cros, 2006)
A copy sold at Christies for over $35,000 (2000)

PDF (low resolution, 12 MB)
PDF (146 MB)