SESSION: Prototypes: Artist Information Strategies

From Tucumán Arde, in 1968 that sought to address the governmental hypocrisy and negligence that plagued the region of Tucumán, Argentina, to Group Material, a group of conceptual artists active between 1979 and 1996 in NYC who created nearly fifty projects designed to encourage community oriented public discussions– artists and artists collectives have engaged in ‘excess information circuits’ to counter censorship and oppressive regimes. These collectives’ attempts to disseminate counter information forged new interdisciplinary collaboration, new organizational strategies, and new innovative visual mediums.

This panel proposes a start to examining these prototypes as a potential alternate narrative to conceptual and performance art practices from the 1960s to 1990. We specifically requested papers that investigate artists negotiation of identity and the production of culture through prototypes for alternative forms of systemic organization and the dissemination of information. Through this lens, we wish to examine the following contradictions: centre vs. decentring, destruction vs. reclamation, and the individual versus the collective. We are especially interested in papers that address mass media, information sharing, systems, bureaucratic structures, guerrilla journalism, archives, performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Session Convenor:

Katherine Jackson, Utah Valley University

Wylie Schwartz, State University of New York at Cortland

Session Speakers:

Fengyi Guo, University of York

Fluxus Multiples as Portable Archives: Circulation, Classification, and Institutional Reabsorption

In the 1960s, Fluxus artists developed multiples—small, portable objects produced in series that functioned simultaneously as exhibitions, containers of knowledge, and vehicles for alternative circulation. Packaged in boxes or envelopes, these works collapsed the distance between exhibition and everyday life. This paper reconsiders Fluxus multiples, particularly Fluxkit (1964–65), Flux Year Box 2 (1965–66), and Water Yam(1963/64), as prototypes for alternative systems of information organization and dissemination. Conceived as “miniature museums,” these portable boxes and mailed works condensed scores, games, and publications into distributable containers that circulated knowledge through tactile and participatory engagement. In contrast to the museum’s hierarchical visibility, Fluxus multiples proposed self-organizing, decentralized systems of exchange that both mimicked and subverted bureaucratic and archival forms.

Their subsequent institutional absorption into the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection and MoMA’s digital archive, however, exposes the paradox of such anti-institutional strategies: conceived to resist stabilization, these works are now redefined through metadata, accession numbers, and searchable databases. By tracing Fluxus’s transformation from participatory networks to digital catalogues, this paper argues that these artistic experiments in information circulation not only anticipated but also prefigured the very infrastructures that later absorbed them. In doing so, Fluxus emerges not merely as a movement of resistance, but as a prototype for new epistemic architectures, ones that reveal the persistent entanglement between decentralization and institutional control.

Curtis Eckley, Independent Scholar / Adjunct Lecturer, Brooklyn College

Impressions from Nadezhda Stolpovskaya (Online/In-person)

In Moscow, sometime in the mid-eighties, a group of KGB officers began showing up at the doors of friends of the artist Nadezhda Stolpovskaya. They were looking for so-called “literature against the Soviets,” which they happened upon during their surveillance of an unofficial art exhibition. What tipped them off were a series of typewritten documents Stolpovskaya had produced over the course of a few years, starting in the late seventies, a selection of translations of Western art texts, mostly culled from smuggled books and magazines on conceptual art. Using her basic knowledge of English to produce these translations, Stolpovskaya introduced new ways of making into her circle that were entirely foreign to the official Soviet art system they learned to navigate. She would bring these ideas into her art as well, a translation not only from one language to another but also as a form of visual translation. This paper considers the possibilities for translation in the drawings and conceptual works of Nadezhda Stolpovskaya. Through a close examination of her work, the paper argues that, by taking up the problems and social conditions of communication, Stolpovskaya provides a foil for thinking through the boundaries of self at the edge of these “Moscow Conceptualists,” playing out the role of interlocutor and interpreter of Western artistic production. Her typewritten translations not only represent an attempt to cross linguistic and artistic barriers, but also an effort to think and move beyond the confines of the self in the late Soviet Union.

Utku KAN, Master Student at Middle East Technical University

Teaching is the Message: The METU Revolutionary Poster Atelier as a Prototype for Political Pedagogy in 1960s Turkey

This paper examines a key moment in the history of political art: the Revolutionary Poster Atelier (Devrimci Afiş Atölyesi), founded by architecture students at Turkey’s Middle East Technical University in 1969. It asks how this collective created a durable infrastructure for dissent, moving beyond ephemeral representations. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s premise that a revolutionary artist must transform the means of production, the analysis frames the Atelier’s model as a multi-faceted prototype for organizational action. The core argument is that the Atelier functioned primarily as a pedagogical prototype; its innovation was not just design but the active dissemination of the means of production itself. By travelling to more than twenty cities to conduct workshops, the Atelier turned “passive spectators into active producers”, establishing a decentralised, replicable information strategy. This effort was reinforced by screen-printing, a technique that requires a simultaneous, collective workflow and inherently transforms production from an individual act into political collective action. The use of simple, reproducible silhouettes (e.g., the young man with his fist in the air) was a deliberate formal strategy to forge a visual language that collectively built and sustained political visibility over an extended period. This study contributes to the model of “production as pedagogy” as a means for building sustainable political memory (mnemonic capacity).

Daniela Mayer, University of Manchester, Art History and Visual Studies

Programa In Progress: The Shifting Foundations of Hélio Oiticica’s Exilic (Anti-)Architectures

During his self-exile (1970–1978), the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) created experimental refuges for cultivating delirium in the margins of Manhattan. Inspired by ad-hoc dwellings he first encountered in the comunidades (formerly favelas) of Rio de Janeiro (c. 1964), Oiticica embraced impermanence to conceive makeshift structures that visitors could temporarily inhabit according to their whims. These multipartite installations evolved with the artist’s peregrinations from Rio to London to New York, becoming provisional laboratories for organising new forms of artistic and social experience, blurring the boundaries between private and public, individual and collective. Initially created for museums, these “anti-architecture” structures integrated comunidade-inspired designs to translate the metaphysically liberating aspects of Afro-Brazilian marginal culture (or Oiticica’s perception of it). Beyond negating Western architectural tenets, the works represent “anti-architecture” in their political stance: “anti-,” the Brazilian authoritarian regime; critical of institutional avant-garde co-option; and resistant to oppressive social norms. Tellingly, most of Oiticica’s installations were developed outside Brazil, when his lived experience as a displaced, gay Latino and contact with Black Power, feminist, and gay liberation movements radicalised his decolonial vision. Guided by his twin philosophies of crelazer [creleisure] and the supra-sensorial—aimed at heightening participants’ creativity through sensory intervention—Oiticica devised a complex visual language that transmitted his joyous transgressions to transcultural audiences through an ever-changing “programa in progress”. This paper argues that Oiticica melded the disenfranchised status of the comunidades with the exilic experience of the marginalised; while providing temporary shelter and comfort zones, his constructions increasingly communicated the frustrations of the powerless.

Yerang Park, Ph.D. Student, Art History, University of British Columbia

Words to Be Circulated: Yoko Ono’s Sky Machine (1961/1966) and Score-based Practices

In the past few decades, art historians have diagnosed the crux of Fluxus performances as the critique of the privileged art object and its mode of production. Hal Foster and others wrote that Fluxus performances manifested a shift in artistic production “from the register of the object to registers operating somewhere between theatricality and musicality” (2016: 530). Yet, Fluxus performances were often mediated by objects of textual instructions—event scores. Actively produced in the 1960s, event scores consist of short and simple instructions for certain actions that can be performed without professionalized training, and they are printed or handwritten on white paper sheets that can be easily reproduced and disseminated. I ask: what could be the political potential of such score-based practices, in particular when the scores prompt the precarious play of gender dynamics and asymmetrical power relations in order to be enacted? For instance, Yoko Ono’s event score, Wearing-Out Machine (1964), instructs: “Ask a man to wear out various things before you use them. Such as: Women, Clothes, Books […].” How does it complicate the existing literature of event scores that conditioned score-based practices within the legacy of the readymade and as prototypes of Conceptual art (Robinson 2009; Kotz 2010; Harren 2020)? As a response, this paper examines Yoko Ono’s score-based practices in juxtaposition with Sky Machine (1961/1966), the vendor installation disseminating a stack of handwritten cards to visitors, realized by Anthony Cox in 1966 based on Ono’s 1961 score Chewing Gum Machine Piece.