Peter Bichsel   Fine Books

Williams, Emmett. konkretionen.

Type-written letter compositions on recto side of every leaf, verso side blank. 31 unn. leaves, elaborately perforated or cut in parts. 8vo. Loose as issued between die-cut black cover sheets, four times perforated at the spine and hold together with two rivets. – Darmstadt and Krefeld, D. Spoerri and Passagebuchhandlung Jürgen Dahl, (1958).

“material”, 3, ed. by Daniel Spoerri. First edition of the first publication by Emmett Williams. With an explaning postscript by Claus Bremer, Riekert, and Daniel Spoerri. This third issue (of four published) of this periodical for concrete poetry and performing art was first planned to be an issue by Eugen Gomringer. But it was Emmett Williams who convinced Spoerri to publish first his manuscript. The US-American poet and performance artist Emmett Williams (1925–2007) was one of the co-founders of the Fluxus movement and collaborated together with Daniel Spoerri in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959. Later works were published by the Something Else Press, of which he got editor in chief from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. For the present issue no number of copies seems to be known. As for the no. 2 of “material” (by Dieter Roth) is given a number of 200 copies, we guess about the same for this present no. 3. Some copies must have been fitted out with a last double-leaf of glossy paper (see Aarons/Roth, p. 269, illus.). In no specific copy, we ever have seen, this leaf has been present. – Allen, Artist’s Magazines. an Alternative Space for Art (2011), p. 277; Aarons/Roth, In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 (2009), p. 265ff. – Rivets replacing the original rubber binding by André Thomkins. The leaves slightly faded. – Best.-Nr. 5460