A Mock-up draft of title page for Xerox Book.

Like Conceptual artists, Siegelaub explored subversive communication methods and mediums in his work and raised important questions about the making, display, ownership, distribution, and sale of art. This exhibition highlights items in The Seth Siegelaub Papers, now in The Museum of Modern Art Archives, that illustrate Siegelaub’s role in empowering artists within the hierarchy of the art world.

“This is the way your leverage lies”: The Seth Siegelaub Papers as Institutional Critique opens today at MOMA.

Anna Maria Maiolino. Desde A até M (From A to M), from the series Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps). 1972–99.

On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.

Criminal exclusion of the role of the plotter in 20th century drawing! Maybe bust in, loose some plotter robots on the floor?

The Art Worker’s Coalition (AWC) was a loose group of artists, writers, and members of the creative community formed in January 1969 after the artist Takis protested the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by removing his sculpture from their exhibition, “The Museum as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.” In the case with Takis, the artist was concerned with his ability to control the exhibition of his work after it had been sold (the Museum had exhibited his work against his wishes because they owned it and felt that their right of ownership superseded his rights as an artist to control its exhibition).

This initial protest was a spark that ignited the coalition—which gathered members and concerns exponentially throughout the early months of 1969. At the time, the Art Workers’ Coalition was concerned with the responsibility of museums to artists and aimed their efforts at building a dialogue between themselves and MoMA. Another early issue was better representation of Black and Puerto Rican artists in MoMA as well as the other local museums.

The AWC’s Open Hearing and another collection of documents can both be downloaded here.

Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon and their piece Nude, from 1966.

The reclining nude represented the first experiment to scan a photograph into a computer and reconstitute it with a gray scale, using 12 discreet levels of gray, produced by mathematical and electronic symbols. The scanning process established a certain level of gray in a certain area of the photo and replaced it with one of the symbols. This process was used to try to establish the minimum amount of information the human eye needed to resolve an image. The image of Deborah Hay in the nude was photographed by Max Mathews. The original computer output was a photograph and was given to E.E. David, who, when he became President Nixon’s science adviser, gave it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Shown in the the Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age at MOMA in 1968.