“New York Cool Meets Chicago Doodly-Scratch”
The Hairy Who 1966-1969
The Hairy Who was a short-lived group of artists that graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago consisting of Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, Jim Falconer, Suellen Rocca, Jim Nutt and Art Green. Closely associated with The Hairy Who are the Chicago Imagists, which included Ed Paschke and Ray Yoshida. Art emerging from Chicago in the mid-to-late 1960s was characterized by bold graphics and an irreverent and iconoclastic spirit that spoke of a youthful bravado in the face of turbulent times. Chicago artists during this era were able to set themselves apart from Pop Art in New York and the Minimalist/Conceptual currents in Los Angeles by sourcing inspiration from comics, Art Brut, surrealism and "low-culture" humor and media.
The Hairy Who had their first exhibition in 1966 at the Hyde Park Art Center and their last show as a group was held in 1969 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. During this brief period of time, the Hairy Who distinguished themselves as transgressive voices, manipulating the everyday material and language of our culture to address sexuality, gender, politics, and other social mores, much like Pop Art, but with a particularly fiendish and freewheeling bent. The group's work continues to be a rising presence in our re-examination of the narrative of mid-century American art.
Chicago seems to me (with the great advantage of hindsight) a place to invent your world. A place that is far enough away so that you could misunderstand the rest of the world and a place unique enough to provide an actuality which no other place will. To use a title from a Sun Ra record, a place where angels and demons are at play, perhaps on the same team.
James Falconer
The most obvious spirit is irony expressed in pop terms, which ambivalently celebrates and lampoons a given subject at one and the same time. This is not unique to Chicago, but what is deeply typical of the art that comes out of this town is the hermetic mood, the occasional overt raunchiness, the dark, soiled, garrulous profusion of images and ideas.
Franz Schulze, Chicago Daily News, 1968
“Artists' books began to proliferate in the sixties and seventies in the prevailing climate of social and political activism. Inexpensive, disposable editions were one manifestation of the dematerialization of the art object and the new emphasis on process.... It was at this time too that a number of artist-controlled alternatives began to develop to provide a forum and venue for many artists denied access to the traditional gallery and museum structure. Independent art publishing was one of these alternatives, and artists' books became part of the ferment of experimental forms.”
—Joan Lyons
The Artist's Printed Extension
Cover to Cover: Artists' Books & Ephemera
Artists who publish books of documentation are, in a sense, using the artform to its simplest degree. —Tim Guest, 1981
Sharing an artwork through the very public method of printing and reproduction is the epitome of democratic dissemination. In their seminal 1981 publication Books By Artists, Tim Guest and Germano Celant begin by addressing their audience’s predictable desire to define a book. They suggest that it is not really possible – or necessary – to define what an artist book is, because any given work becomes a conceptual extension of the artist and is therefore an object of infinite incarnations.
There is too frequently a misinterpretation of printed works and editions as lesser commodities in the market. With artist’s books, the goal was often to distance an artist’s idea from the proverbial canvas, to use words and non-dimensional media as a means to engender and distribute a creative philosophy. Such efforts often led to the creation of superbly idiosyncratic editioned works that succinctly communicate an artist’s entire conceptual foundation, however ineffable. In this way, the artist’s book and the development of conceptual art are inextricably linked. Take, for example, Seth Siegelaub’s July, August, September 1969 exhibition catalogue in which the book is the exhibition. On its pages, it brings together eleven works from eleven artists working in separate locations, works that never physically shared premises themselves.
For artists like John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, whose broad outputs often hinged on the collision of word and image, the book became a quintessential medium. One of my favorites from this selection is Baldessari’s rare Brutus Killed Caesar, in which two unknown antagonists face each other with a randomized household object between them. It is understood that these objects are murder weapons, but nothing violent takes place outside of the viewer’s imagination, likely shaped by earlier historical texts like Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Brilliant. Another scarce title herewith is Ruscha’s Dutch Details. Comprised of multiple images taken by the artist showing bridges in The Netherlands, it plays off of his Every Building on the Sunset Strip from five years earlier. Oblong as well, with large fold-outs, this book was very difficult to produce and the publisher did not fulfill the edition, therefore making this the rarest of Ruscha’s coveted artist books.
The book’s potential for comprehensively documenting an ephemeral work or performance was critical for many artists, including Gordon Matta-Clark and Bruce Nauman, the latter whom made an artist’s book (Burning Small Fires) about burning another artist’s book (Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk).
The pursuit to collect such a wide and comprehensive library of these titles is a passionate endeavor, and it is my view that no collection could be complete without the artist’s book. A personal library needs this texture to augment the rigid monographs and academic surveys that equate the bulk of most collections. Whether a single rarity catches your eye or you’re drawn to group lots from the likes of Christian Boltanski, Gilbert & George, Richard Prince, and Sol LeWitt, Cover to Cover is a fantastic opportunity to bolster an existing reading room or to plant the seed of a collection to cherish for years to come.
—Peter Jefferson, Senior Specialist