Lucy Lippard
955,000, 1970
137 offset printed loose index cards, 1 blank index card. Unknown size. Missing envelope.
4h x 6w in
10.16h x 15.24w cm
LL_001
$ 950.00
Lucy Lippard is an American writer, art critic, activist and curator who played a major role in the development of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and who has also been an important activist for the Feminist Art movement.
“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious, and/or ‘dematerialized.’”
Exhibition catalogue made of loose index cards (originally housed in an unassuming manila envelope) for 2 exhibitions organized and curated by Lucy R. Lippard which featured conceptual art, process art and land art. Originating with 557,087 (the approximate population of Seattle in 1969) exhibition in Seattle, and consisting of 95 index cards, the show continued on to 955,000 (the number 955,000 was derived from the approximate population of Vancouver in 1970) exhibition which took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery from January 13 to February 8, 1970, for which 42 new index cards were added to the catalogue. Each artist in the exhibition was not only asked to contribute their artwork but they were also invited to make/design their own index card(s) for the catalogue.
“In essence, it could be argued that this catalogue (and the model it represents) comes closer to communicating the ideas of each artist and their raw proposals and is more authentic than traditional art catalogues that tend to remove or filter out certain nuances by way of such restrictions as page sizes and counts, the process of editing available content and even designer preference. And regardless of the fact that this catalogue is void of the parts and systems that many of us enjoy and expect from more traditional approaches, it reveals itself in an equally as intriguing way as catalogues that are defined by comprehensive and thoughtful orderliness…”_______Ryan Gerald Nelson, Friday Finds: 955,000 — An Unconventional Exhibition Catalogue, The Gradient, 2008.
