Art Metropole

#14469

Image Bank : 1969–1977

Artist

Image Bank

Price

$85.00

Date

2020

Publisher

Hatje Cantz

Format

Catalogues

ISBN

9783775746328

Size

24 × 17 cm

Length

320 pp

Genre

Canadian, Mail Art

Edited with text by Krist Gruijthuijsen, Maxine Kopsa, Scott Watson. Text by by AA Bronson, Angie Kiefer, Hadrien Laroche, Michael Morris, Felicity Tayler, Vincent Trasov, Gilbert Zanna.

Image Bank was founded in 1970 in Vancouver, Canada, by artists Michael Morris (born 1942), Vincent Trasov (born 1947) and Gary Lee-Nova (born 1943). A model for a utopian, alternative system of art distribution operating outside institutions like the museum and the market, Image Bank engaged in an international exchange of images and correspondence by mail.

Among the artists participating in the network of exchange with Image Bank were Dana Atchley, Robert Cumming, Dick Higgins, Geoff Hendricks, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Kate Craig, Willoughby Sharp, General Idea and Ant Farm. Image Bank also maintained close ties with Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School as well as Robert Filliou and his concept of the Eternal Network. Using frequently changing Duchampian, gender-crossing aliases, and appropriating and reworking images and texts from mainstream media was a subversive take on postwar individualism and consumer culture. Image Bank’s interest in the idea of the fetish—which it shared with General Idea in Toronto—in rituals, and in archives shaped the collective’s manifold activities until 1978, when, due to a copyright challenge, it was renamed the Morris/Trasov Archive.

This volume offers the most comprehensive retrospective of Image Bank to date.

Softcover, b/w.