Launch and presentation of Daisy Editions’ latest publication, Pati Hill’s coming-of-age novel One Thing I Know.

‘‘One thing I know, I will never be in love again,’’ writes Francesca Hollins in her diary. She is sixteen and neither Danny, a young boyfriend already haunted by bourgeois dreams, nor her mother, a woman she believes lacks all imagination, can convince her otherwise. This novel recounts how Francesca discovers an unexpected definition of her independence, something Diane Arbus perceived when she wrote to Hill: ‘‘I am more than ever convinced and maybe [Francesca] is too, that people are born old and that disenchantment is more a beginning than an end in itself… I think life has absolutely to be lived backwards and there is no covenient shortcut like forwards.’’

One Thing I Know, Pati Hill
Afterword by Baptiste Pinteaux
Designed by Ana Baliza
Published by Daisy
July 2022, 108pp., 12×18cm, softcover
Edition of 600

Wednesday March 16

Wolfgang Stoerchle, Success in Failure is the first monograph on Stoerchle’s work, written by Alice Dusapin who has dedicated extensive research into his life and work since 2017 and organized several exhibitions during this time (Overduin & Co, Air de Paris, Macro Museum). The publication (408 pages, 695 grams) includes interviews with Daniel Lentz, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Helene Winer, and a previously unpublished review by James Welling, alongside ephemera and documentation of Stoerchle’s video works and performances, as well as rarely seen sculptures, installations, and paintings.

Ana Santos & Wolfgang Stoerchle - February 19 * 7/10 pm -

Wolfgang Stoerchle is a somewhat concealed artistic figure of the early 70s who left a certain but little 

advertised mark on a generation of Californian artists, especially through videotapes and performances 

involving his body as raw material. Born in 1944 in Baden Baden (Germany), Wolfgang moved to Canada with his family in 1959. In 1962, he left Toronto with his brother on a horse, traveling in the saddle for 11 months across the breadth of the United States to finally arrive to Los Angeles. Wolfgang would eventually claim this journey as his first artwork.

Shortly after completing subsequent studies at the University of Oklahoma and at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Wolfgang became one of the inaugural teachers at CalArts (where his students included James Welling, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Paul McCarthy and Eric Fischl). This very productive time in 

Wolfgang’s work saw him adopt the Portapak camera and turn to video.

Playing with rudimentary but fundamental actions to interrogate changing forms of state and status, 

Wolfgang used often his own body as an expressive instrument. His performances, for camera or live 

audiences, played with ingredients of movement and stasis, strength and fragility, provocation and humour. Clothes, dirt, physical exertion, food and his penis would all make frequent appearances in his work.

Wolfgang was a visible and significant presence within the LA art scene of the time, but after relocation to New York in 1973 he eventually grew disaffected with the art world. He spent two years on numerous journeys and retreats– studying his dreams, experimenting with psychedelics and living as an ascetic in the Mexican mountains – before eventually settling in Santa Fe, where he slowly returned to making art. In 1976, Wolfgang died in a car accident at the age of 32.

Two of his video works are on show at Ampersand alongside a sculpture by Portuguese artist Ana Santos (1982), as part of an ongoing re-evaluation of Wolfgang’s practice and its legacy today.

**

Shoe Piece, Wolfgang Stoerchle

circa 1970-72

videotape, black and white, sound 

4’32’’

Shoe Piece is part of a series of videos Wolfgang recorded in his studio between 1970 and 1972 whilst a teacher at CalArts. Here a parade of shoes (alternatively feminine and masculine) stamp down on plastic cups that are constantly being replaced after having been dragged out of the scene with a scraping sound.

**

Sue Turning, Wolfgang Stoerchle 

1973

video tape, black and white, sound 

12’10’’ 

Sue Turning is a video made during a workshop at the American Dance Festival (Summer, 1973), held at Connecticut College, and organized by Allegra Fuller Snyder (daughter of Buckminster Fuller). For this piece, Wolfgang used three fixed cameras to film the dancer Carolyn Pfaffl, also known as ‘Sue’, from her head to her toes as she stood on a rotating platform. We could refer to the video as a dance without movement. The video is notable for having more professional production values than normally seen in Wolfgang’s work and is the last known video he made. 

**

Untitled, Ana Santos

2019

stainless steel, polyester yarn

297 x 64 x 36 cm

6 to 9 pm - Gabriel Barbi

Monday 13 January, let’s start the week properly, at Ampersand, with the opening of an exhibition from Gabriel Barbi, alongside Peau d’Ana #2 – the new installment of Ana Jotta’s monthly revised and refreshed window display.

Gabriel Barbi was born in Santa Catarina (Brazil) and has been living in Lisbon since 2007. Recent exhibitions include Numre/ Songs at Ch’ien Chien (Copenhagen) curated by Henning Lundkvist, Love & Ethnology at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, Spirit Shop (Lisbon) invited by Pedro Barateiro, and Mistake! Mistake! said the rooster... and stepped down from the duck at Lumiar Cité (Lisbon), curated by Jürgen Bock. Barbi will be part of the next issue of octopus notes.

Please note that Barbi’s exhibition is easily visited – by appointment only – until 19 January.

Happy 2020.

Friday 6 December join us at Ampersand for a special session of Moyra Davey’s work from 7 to 10 pm.

Wedding Loop (2017, 23’) and Hujar / Palermo (2010, 4’23”) will be screened throughout the evening. A selected range of Moyra’s publications will also be available to view. Moyra’s work will remain on view until Saturday night.

**

Wedding Loop sees the artist recounting a turbulent series of events at an operatic family gathering, while interspersing notes on auto-fiction, family portraiture and the legacy of Julia Margaret Cameron, alongside responses to writings by authors including Simone Weil, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. While probing the lives and relations of such individuals the artist holds dearest (her five distinctive sisters, her post-adolescent son, her ensemble of cherished wordsmiths), the film draws a kind of coda to two of the artist’s earlier essay films, Hemlock Forest (2016) and Les Goddesses (2011), each of which are organized around similar concerns relating to the dynamics of longing, loss, and artistic creation.

In Hujar / Palermo Moyra Davey navigates Peter Hujar’s 1976 book Portraits of Life and Death, animating the space between mediums, the living and the dead. “Life is a movie. Death is a photograph” – Susan Sontag

**

Moyra Davey was born in Toronto, and has been living in New York since 1988. It is tempting, although incomplete, to describe her artistic practice as that of a photographer, a filmmaker, and a writer.

Opening hours :
Friday 6 of December from 7 to 10 pm
Saturday 7 of December from 3 to 8 pm

From Autumn 2019 until the next, PEAU D’ANA, a monthly news-from-the-wall, will see Ana Jotta revising the windown display, right by our front door, with updates on the 13th of each.

On the occasion of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Ampersand hosts Accattone, and launch his new issue #6 - Saturday October 5 from 1 to 5 pm - followed by a discussion between Simon Boudvin and Giame Melonie and a screening of Christopher Roth’s movie «Architecting after Politics » (80 min).

Accattone is a project by two architects (Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon) and two graphic designers (Ismaël Bennani & Orfée Grandhomme).

#6 Piet Oudolf. Pier Vittorio Aureli. Maria Shéhérazade Giudici. Sammy Baloji. Filip De Boeck. Anne Grotte Viken. Kayoko Ota. Quentin Nicolaï. Junya Ishigami. Galaad Van Daele. Christopher Roth.

Ampersand is opening the doors of its new address Friday 27th and Saturday 28th of September with :

Slaves days, by Pati Hill (1975) - poems
An homage to Candy Darling : Your body, by Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe (2019) - video
Lil Picard (1981) and Lil Picard : Art is a party (1975), by Silvianna Goldsmith - films
Greer Lankton & David Wojnarowicz, by Marion Scemama (1985) - photographs

The new issue of octopus notes is celebrated.
N° 9 includes contributions by Ana Baliza, Tenzing Barshee, Tomas Cunha Ferreira, Alice Dusapin, Alexandre Estrela, Wade Guyton, Pati Hill, Merlin James, Justin Jaeckle, JGL, Greer Lankton, Douna Lim, Mark Melnicove, Paul Monroe, Adrian Morris, Théo Pesso, Lil Picard, Carlo Pittore, Bern Porter, Seth Price, Théo Robine-Langlois, Zoé Stillpass, Anne Turyn, Camille Vivier, Erika Vogt, Kelley Walker and Martin Wrong.
Directed by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, Baptiste Pinteaux and Alice Pialoux, octopus notes is a biannual journal that published critical essays, academic writings, interviews and artists’s projects since 2013.

Phone Conversation with Andy Warhol, n.d.
Lil Picard Papers, University of Iowa Libraries

“ I particularly recall a performance, I think on the top floor of a loft witnessed by a pretty good crowd, where he stood naked in front of us with eyes closed and tried and failed to get an erection. Such a bad idea and so good.”
– William Wegman

Wolfgang Stoerchle is a somewhat concealed artistic figure of the early 70s who left a certain but little advertised mark on a generation of Californian artists, especially through videotapes and performances involving his body as raw material.
Born in 1944 in Baden Baden (Germany), Wolfgang moved to Canada with his family in 1959. Three years later, in 1962, Wolfgang (then 17) left Toronto with his brother on a horse, travelling in the saddle for 11 months across the breadth of the United States to finally arrive to Los Angeles. Wolfgang would eventually claim this journey as his first artwork. After three years of studies at the University of Oklahoma, followed by two years of Masters at UCSB, Wolfgang became one of the inaugural teachers at CalArts (where his students included James Welling, Matt Mullican, David Salle & Eric Fischl). This very productive time in Wolfgang’s work saw him adopt the Portapak camera and turn to video. Working also in performance, he presented iconic works live in front of an audience – such as trying to get an erection (performed in Robert Irwin’s studio in 1972) or attempting to have oral sex with a man (presented in the studio of John Baldessari in 1975).
Playing with rudimentary but fundamental actions to interrogate changing forms of state and status, using his own body as an expressive instrument, Wolfgang made a significant mark on the LA art scene of the time. Often working with notions of discomfort and vulnerability, in a blurry space between sincerity and humour, his works would often not ‘work’ – but would find their effectiveness through this very fact. In a rehearsal video for one of his pieces, he describes one such performance as a “success in failure”. It’s worth thinking about that.
After relocation to New York in 1973 he eventually grew disaffected with the art world. He spent two years on numerous journeys and retreats – studying his dreams and living as an ascetic in the Mexican mountains – before eventually settling in Santa Fe, where he slowly returned to making art. As Paul McCarthy has said of Wolfgang, ‘I think he was on some sort of journey of affecting his own being’. His life and work are difficult to separate.
In 1976, Wolfgang died in a car accident in Santa Fe, at the age of 32.
A selection of video works and some fictional news items, on show at Air de Paris, will offer an introduction to Stoerchle’s work, from its early beginnings to his prolific but brief output in LA, as part of an ongoing re-evaluation of his practice and its legacy.

Alice Dusapin started her research on Wolfgang Stoerhcle in 2016 and is currently working on a monograph to be published late this year by Christophe Daviet-Thery including interviews with Matt Mullican, Paul McCarthy, David Salle, Helene Winer, Daniel Lentz and Peter Stoerchle.

**

Critic’s Picks on Art Forum by Ingrid Luquet-Gad

October 13 at Casa da Cerca - Centro de Arte Contemporanea

Ampersand presents the last issue of octopus notes – including contributions from J.G. Ballard, Nicolas Ballet, Alexandra Bircken, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jimmy DeSana, James Horton, Ana Jotta, Martin Laborde, Sibylle de Laurens, Jonathan Martin, Pascaline Morincôme, Claude Pélieu, Catherine Roudé, Clément Roussier, Marion Scemama, William J. Simmons, Sabrina Tarasoff, Charles Veyron and David Wojnarowicz.

+

Special Screening:

Last Night I Took a Man, text and performance by David Wojnarowicz, directed by Marion Scemama (4 min 20)

&

Extract of an interview Sylvère Lotringer conducted with Wojnarowicz in 1991 in David’s loft, filmed by Marion Scemama (16 min 24)




***
octopus notes is a biannual journal run by Alice Dusapin, Alice Pialoux and Baptiste Pinteaux that publishes critical essays, academic writings, interviews and artist projects since 2013.

Special thanks to Marion Scemama and Filipa Oliveira

At the invitation of Lisa Overduin, Alice Dusapin organized a solo exhibition of Wolfgang Stoerchle’s work in March and April 2018 in Los Angeles. She is currently doing extensive research on the artist Wolfgang Stoerchle (1944-1976) that will lead to a monograph to be published by &: Christophe Daviet-Thery in mid-2019. In December 2017, four of Stoerchle's 8mm films, recently discovered in Oklahoma City as part of Dusapin's research, were presented at Ampersand.

Invitation of the publisher Senhora do Monte to present its last publication, Monotipias, by Martina Manyà. A time as well to have a look at what they have produced so far. From 4 to 8 pm on February 13.

CRISIS, organized by MONA VARICHON

Jordan Wolfson, The Crisis, 2004, 4’ 50 loop
Jonas Mekas, September 19, 2017, 3’ 53
Tyler Murphy, Untitled, Video Sculpture #1 / Incence Holder, 2012, 2’ 7
Kareem Lotfy, Bakkar (Noord), 2011, 2’ 7
Lila de Magalhaes, It is the Natural Vogue, 2015 , 3’30
Kareem Lotfy, Bakkar (Noord), 2007, 1’9
Jonas Mekas, Wednesday Feb. 21, 2007 (365 Day Project), 5’45
Kareem Lotfy, Bakkar (Noord), 2011, 26’’
Ane Hjort Guttu, How to Become a Non-Artist, 2007, 10’ 27
Kareem Lotfy, Bakkar (Noord), 2011, 3’5

Total Screening Time: 37 min

November 30, 2017 – January 20, 2018

« I have remembered something about the «EAT» film since we saw it here in Norman. Unfortuna- tely, I can’t remember exactly when Wolf was talking about this, but I remember him talking about a film in which he and two friends of his would each eat a certain thing (an apple, an orange, etc.), and the images would be «run together» or over each other, and then the three of them would all be seen together eating casually and talking to each other, and then it would appear that one of them said something funny and they would keep talking and the laughing would increase, until they were all laughing really hard. And Wolf talked about how people would be REALLY curious about what was so funny, and since there was no sound on the film, they could just talk about anything, as long as they just laughed harder and harder. »

November 16th, Karen Couch Wieder in conversation with Alice Dusapin

Alice Dusapin is currently doing extensive research on the artist Wolfgang Stoerchle (1944-1976) that will lead to a monograph to be published by &: Christophe Daviet-Thery in mid-2019. Last October, she spent a week in Norman, Oklahoma, with Karen Couch Wieder – Stoerchle’s first wife and an accomplished editor– where she discovered 8mm films that Karen has kept for 47 years carefully in her home. Wolfgang Stoerchle is an essential figure of California’s 70s art scene. Under the invitation of Allan Kaprow he taught video at CalArts from late 1970 to 1972. He was close to Paul McCarthy, Miles Varner, John Baldessari, Nam June Paik and Daniel Lentz among others. His work included paintings, sculptures and performances, but the films he shot while he was teaching in Los Angeles are of particularly significance and continued influence.

Ampersand will show a selection of 8mm films Stoerchle shot whilst he was still a student in painting at UCSB between 1968-1970, freshly digitized from Karen Wieder’s collection. Viewing them as neither minor nor major works, but rather vital exercises, these films offered the perfect excuse to create a new group show: introducing works by three artist-alibis to each other, so as, to paraphrase Karen, they might “run together or over each other”, in a silent conversation.

Gathering new deconstructed paintings by Jonathan Binet (b. 1984, lives and works in Paris) together with historic mid-70s photographs from John Divola’s Vandalism Series (b.1949 lives and works in Los Angeles), the Ampersand exhibition Septembre, fueled by Stoerchle’s video-sketches, chews over the space between gestures and their depiction, remnants and results.

www.artforum.com/picks/binet-divola-stoerchle

MEASURES OF DISTANCE, organized by MONA VARICHON

Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance, 1989, 16’
Charles Atlas & Michael Clark, Hail the new puritan, 1985-86, 11’
Klara Liden, Der Mythos des Fortschritts (Moonwalk), 2008, 3’ 30
Gilles Deleuze, D Comme Désir (L’Abécédaire), 1988-89, 27’ 40
Pola Sieverding, Nocturne Arabesque, 2009, 3’44
Klara Liden, Bodies of Society, 2006, 4’52
Mark Leckey, The March of the Big White Barbarians, 2006, 5’


Total Screening Time: 1 h 10 min



***

Mona Varichon (b.1988) is an artist based in Los Angeles, currently pursuing her MFA at ArtCenter in Pasadena. Originally from Paris, Mona holds a BA in So- ciology from Paris Descartes University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

& Wall with Martin Laborde, Bern Porter & Charles Veyron
thanks to all, the artists and specially Mona Varichon.

selection by Alice Pialoux with 

Robert Breer, Form Phases I, 1952. 16mm film, color, silent, 2’
Robert Breer, Form Phases II, 1953. 16mm film, color, silent, 3’30
Robert Breer, Form Phases III, 1953. 16mm film, color, silent, 3’30
Robert Breer, Form Phases IV, 1954, 16mm film, color, silent, 3’30
Robert Breer, 66, 1966. 16mm film, color, sound, 5’
Robert Breer, 70, 1970. 16mm, color, 4’35
Ceclia Bengolea & Jeremy Deller, Bombom’s Dream, 2016. 12’48

Total screening time : 34 min 13 sec

***

Alice Pialoux (b.1989) is currently taking part of a new festival for performing arts at Centre Pompidou.
She is also the co-founder, in association with Alice Dusapin and Baptiste Pinteaux, of the magazine octopusnotes created in 2013.

We thanks very much Cecilia Bengolea, Nathalie Boutin (GB agency), Jeremy Deller, Alice Pialoux & Julia Mossé (Art Concept) for their help.

a selection by #bookadviser, available @ampersand


Bas Jan Ader, Discovery File 143/76, New Documents, 2017
Bas Jan Ader, Le Magasin, 1996
Derek Beaulieu, a, a novel, Jean Boîte Editions, 2017
Walead Beshty, Industrial Potraits -2008-2012, JRP Ringier, 2017
Beni Bischof, Texte 1, Edition Patrick Frey2015
Beni Bischof, Texte 2, Edition Patrick Frey, 2016
Karl Holmqvist, Word Squares, Motto Books, 2017
Jutta Koether, f., Sternberg Press, 2015
Enzo Mari, autoprogettazione ?, Edizioni Corraini, 2016
Enzo Mari, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Walter König, 2008
Bern Porter, Hold on To Your Hat, miekal and 2013
Wolfgang Stoerchle, Le Magasin, 1996
Daan van Golden, Made in Tokyo, Misako & Rosen, 2014
Bernar Venet, Poetic ? Poétique ?, Jean Boîte Editions 2017
Jean-Michel Wicker, e industrial, donlon books, Motto Books, 2014

" The plant is like me : too big to be cute / I often talk about that time, but she has never told anyone / You can call an ocean the lake, but you can't call a lake the ocean" a solo exhibition by Anne-Mai Sønderborg Keldsen

*****

Anne-Mai Sønderborg Keldsen (b. 1991, Denmark) is currently doing her studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and has for the past year been studying under artist Angela Melitopoulos. We met Mai in Lisboa while she was doing the ISP at Maumaus. She exhibited in 2016 at Void in Athens and produced recenlty two books that we are glad to present in the space.

Ampersand hosts Vis-à-Vis, a project initiated in 2012 by the bookseller, publisher & bookadviser Christophe Daviet-Thery on the shelves of his bookshop on Rue Louise Weiss in Paris. A reflection about forms and formats of reading an exhibition by a person who lives and works with books in a specific economic context, Vis-à-Vis is both a working method and a device : isolating two works in dialogue in a single room. Books, editions, sound recordings, sculptures, films, the possible combinations are multiple; the display format somewhere between a lecture, a double page spread and a promotional strategy. This month, we replay Vis-à-Vis numbers 2 & 4, and present two new iterations of the project, number 6 and 7.

• Vis-à-vis 6
• Olaf Nicolai
• Willem de Rooij
• 22.06.2017
• In the Woods There is A Bird, 2017
• Index, 2014-2017

• Vis-à-vis 4
• stanley brouwn
• Tim Hollander
• 26.06.2017
• tatvan, 1970
• the space between two artworks, 2014

• Vis-à-vis 2
• Hamish Fulton
• Annea Lockwood
• 29.06.2017
• Walking Beside the River Vechte, 1996
• A Sound Map of the Hudson River, 1989

• Vis-à-vis 7
• Joseph Grigely
• Bruno Munari
• 04.07.2017
• Nine Green Conversations, 2001
• Supplemento al dizionario italiano, 1958-2015

Joseph Grigely & Pierre Von-Ow
Interview dates: February 22, March 8th & 25, 2015, July 3rd 2017.
Place: Artist’s loft, Chicago, Illinois; around a table stamped ‘Property of Gallaudet College’; TV playing hockey game in the background, sound turned mute.

Pierre Von-Ow: To what extent are you deaf?

Joseph Grigely: Very rare degree of deafness, total. It’s very hard to categorize degrees of deafness since it is a logarithm of scale (frequency in Hz/loudness): 70 decibels is ten times worse than 60, 80 ten times worse than 70, etc. And I am in the realm of 120+, which means that I could only hear something really really really fucking loud. That’s like a jet taking off behind me. But there’s a big difference between being born deaf and being deafened later on life like Beethoven for example and myself, since we both spoke and other people write.

PVO: But writing is not merely a leftover in this kind of situation.

JG: I believe that writing has emotion. And I really believe that conversations are a kind of talking on paper. It is between speech and writing in many ways. But that’s not an argument I want to get in as an artist.

PVO: Are you a ‘deaf artist’ by the way?

JG: Here in America, people are more interested in the artist over the art. This country loves taxonomies. (Dog’s barking) We are obsessed with identities. In Europe, you’re much more concerned to imbricated identities. You’ve got so many countries with different languages, like Belgium or Switzerland. One conversation I had with a German dealer when I did my first show in Paris was particularly striking; he was telling me how people are going to read it as being about deafness while underlined issue is about communication and difference. And he was really right about that because what’s interesting as a sociological fact is when I approach someone or somebody approaches me and says something I say: “I’m deaf, would you write that down?” To me that is normal. My everyday life. But they become the disabled persons because they have to communicate by writing, that’s very unusual and not normal for that person. So basically, sociologically, I turned it around: I was a normal person and they were disabled by our encounter.

PVO: Would you consider yourself as a ‘conversationist’?

JG: On many ways, no. Ironically enough, no. The conversations themselves written on papers are merely a starting point for me. When I have the conversations, they are historical facts, historical documents. But when I rearrange them into the wall pieces, they become fictions at that point, just as painting squeezed out of a tube. They become the material for another structure. But that structure is often, shall we say, detached from the origins of conversations. What I am doing is juxtaposing, at one level, a verbal narrative: one paper beside another paper creates a narrative between them. Like Josef Albers said in the book Interaction of Color (1963), you can’t put one color beside another color without also changing both. You can’t put a word beside another word without also changing both. The conversations like these are also very formal pieces, dealing with grids, dealing with the color of the paper and the way the lines are inscribed on the paper. It becomes very abstract at that level too.

PVO: It reminds me of what Clement Greenberg claimed about Mallarmé in his famous “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940): “Poetry subsists no longer in the relations between words as meanings, but in the relations between words as personalities composed of sound, history and possibilities of meaning. […] The poem still offers possibilities of meaning – but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the poem would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it.”

JG: I bring some new coffee.

Ampersand is pleased to launch its program with Here Comes Everybody’s Don’t Book, a selection of Bern Porter’s works.
An American poet, writer, artist, publisher, gallerist and physicist, Bern Porter (1911-2004) is considered a pioneer of the artist book and “found poetry”. From 1941 until his death he produced hundreds of books made out of experiments in collage, text and typography.
The self-proclaimed inventor of mail art, Porter actively sent his works through the post every week of his life. A highly active and influential publisher, Porter published works by figures including Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, James Schevill, Robert Duncan and Dick Higgins.
A polymath at the crossroads of the 20th century, he was an acquaintance of, among others, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Dieter Roth and Shozo Shimamoto (Gutai Art Group). With a master's degree in Science from Brown University, Bern Porter was also an eminent physicist. He contributed to the invention of television, worked on the Saturn V rocket for NASA, and was closely involved in the Manhattan project – which he immediately renounced upon learning of the bombing of Hiroshima, dedicating the rest of his life to creative pursuits. After circling the world three times and visiting 43 countries, Porter spent the last decades of his life running The Institute of Advanced Thinking from his own home in Belfast, Maine. At this time, he developed a strong friendship and collaboration with the poet and publisher Mark Melnicove (The Dog Ear Press) with whom he performed for many years and created The Eternal Festival of Poetry.
Ampersand will offer a selection of Porter’s work including an extensive collection of his output in printed matter, alongside collages, ephemera, sounds, records and videos. The project would not have been possible without the kind support and generous help of Mark Melnicove (director of Bern Porter’s estate). This presentation prefaces a 2018 publication that will be edited by Alice Dusapin & Geraldine Beck and published by &: Christophe Daviet-Thery in close collaboration with Martin Laborde and Mark Melnicove.