Foreward to ASSEMBLING 12
by Karl Young
It's time to assemble again -- and about time, too. It's been five years since the last issue of Assembling appeared, and that's five years too many.
Assembling represents the only major innovation in magazine publishing since Ezra Pound's experiments with The Exile in 1917. The four issues of The Exile under Pound's editorship show an all-encompassing intellect attempting to fuse the contributions of various artists into single units, something like novels or Pound's own Cantos. Assembling goes in just the opposite direction: no central intelligence controls the magazine, the magazine is a spontaneous event in which no editor or contributor dominates anything. Curiously enough, however, issues of Assembling can be read as whole entities, raising several of this century's most important art forms to high levels. Issues of Assembling can be read as chance-generated collages, and as spontaneous pieces of printed performance art. The rapid parataxis of Assembling's pages goes beyond the scope of Paris-Zurich dada; nothing conceived in the 20's dared be as democratic or as anti-authoritarian.
Assembling offers contributors as much freedom as magazine format can handle. The only restrictions placed on participants are the 8 1/2" x 11" page format and limitation on the number of sheets each can send. As far as the graphic nature of their work goes, contributors are limited only by their own abilities. This is ideal for artists who can print or otherwise produce their own work; for those who can't, a trip to a local printer should be instructive. Whatever the case, contributors don't run into editorial restrictions like "no half-tones" or "no large solids" or "no color" -- restrictions common to most magazines. Work appears as contributors want it to appear: they need fear no censorship; any typos in the work are their own fault; any compromises that may be made are their own responsibility. Anyone can contribute. Participants contribute the work that seems most appropriate to them. THEY, rather than an editor, decide what is their best work, or what they feel best represents them, or what they feel would be most useful in contacting other people working in similar modes, or what seems most appropriate to a "happening" of this sort -- some have sent work that tests the limits of the format or challenges the basic premises of the magazine.
Seasoned veterans and previously unpublished artists have contributed to the magazine. Some inclusions have been wildly experimental, others have been surprisingly conservative. Contributions have ranged from spartan minimalism to extravagant neo-baroque productions, including examples of nearly every current form of experimentation in print art. Some participants have seen Assembling as an opportunity to publish their most sober efforts; others have seen the magazine as a sort of party, an opportunity to celebrate in print.
Despite the lack of a central, selecting authority, the quality level of work presented in Assembling has been better than that of most magazines edited along conventional authoritarian lines. Some of the most amusing work that has appeared in Assembling has been of the "let's see what we can get away with" variety. Critics may condemn this sort of thing, but I have nothing against this sort of comedy -- I still get a laugh out of some of these pieces and realize that they could not have been done without a magazine like Assembling to act as stimulus and foil. If you wish, you can read something deeper into these pieces: even when given as much freedom as magazine format allows, some people will still strive for more. I'm not going to object to that impulse, particularly at a time as oppressive and complacent as the present. Contributions to Assembling range from high seriousness to slap stick, allowing each inclusion to stand out distinctly and increasing the variety of elements in the collage.
"Freedom demands responsibility" runs an old saw. Assembling demands responsibility on the part of both contributors and readers. Contributors who send inferior work must bear the consequences -- they can't blame an editor. Just as important is the responsibility placed on readers. Implicit behind magazines edited by a central authority is the assurance that the work published has value. Readers interested in high quality should always read critically, but that is not always the case. Many readers feel the need to be reassured by an authority figure; feel that a work must be consecrated by some sort of expert; feel the need to be told what is good and what is not. Assembling makes no such assurance; publication in Assembling does not consecrate or validate anything. Instead, it returns the responsibility of judgment to the reader, where it belongs.
In the past, Assembling has brought together the work of people going in radically different directions. This can help break down the self-ghettoization common in the arts today. In past issues, concrete poetry has appeared adjacent to performance scores, language-centered pieces have faced projective verse, mail art has appeared in conjunction with conceptual work, fluxus has bumped into academia, etc. This, too, increases the variety of the collage. But more important, I hope that Assembling will continue to be eclectic, not being dominated by any one clique or school or movement. Many of us seem to be hiding more and more in our own little coteries, ignoring work in other modes. I doubt that Assembling can change this general tendency, but I hope it can continue to be a place where different points of view and opposing methods can come together, encouraging interaction, constructive debate, and, ideally, mutual tolerance.
The only contributions to this issue of Assembling I've seen are my own. I'm curious to see how much this issue differs from its predecessors. I'm not happy with the one-sheet-from-each-contributor limitation, though this will make the parataxis of the collage more rapid and more pronounced. I imagine there will be quite a few new contributors not represented in previous issues. The suggestion that contributors address the theme "our place in nature and nature's place in us" may produce interesting results. I assume that many contributors will disregard this theme, so that it will appear sporadically through the magazine -- a flexible motif recurring through the collage, appearing in widely different forms.
At this point in history, printed art is largely a participatory rather than a spectator sport. Its audience is made up primarily of other artists. We may not be able to make much money or receive recognition or respect from main-stream society, but we are free in a way that no artists have ever been free before. We should be more sensitive to the advantages of our freedom, not limiting ourselves by a ludicrous sense of clique loyalty or fear of authority or anxieties about salability or acceptability. Assembling allows us to make more use of our freedom than any other magazine now going; let's make the most of it!
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Assembling 12 was compiled by Charles Doria, Robin Middleman, Jude Schwendenwein,& Leslie Hollis Soga in 1986, and published by Addembling Press/P.O. Box 1967/Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202/U.S.A.
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