Paper Trail

The gallery invitation and press release have never enjoyed a state of innocence. Although the traditional utilitarian view of these forms of communication still prevails, there have always been artists and designers who have sought to imbue the production and distribution of printed cards and flyers with self-consciousness. It has even been said that Martin Kippenberger agreed to mount gallery shows purely as a pretext for designing a poster or an invitation.
Kippenberger’s productions are usually described as ‘works in their own right’, a convenient if enlightening catch-all term for art’s odds and ends. A couple of decades earlier Yves Klein created objects that could be put into the same category, by overprinting the postage stamps on his invitations with ‘Klein Blue’ ink. This process invalidated the stamps, but apparently Klein paid the French postal service to deliver the invitations all the same. Peculiar though it seems in these days of unapologetic mid-afternoon mail deliveries and FedEx, this business caused quite a scandal. In hindsight Klein’s antics have acquired the whiff of a marketing gimmick, but in the late 1950s establishing the status of the stamps as works of art appears to have been a more straightforward affair than ascertaining their standing vis-à-vis postal tariffs.
Other artists have produced printed communications of a more ambiguous nature. In 1969 Jan Dibbets distributed an announcement of an action but refrained from spelling out the relationship between the print material and the action itself. Would it have been the same if he had made the thumbs-up gesture at the Amsterdam window and told no one? Of course not, but exactly how the paper, ink and postage bear on the event remains deliberately elusive. Two years later, in December 1971, Lawrence Weiner sent out a text 1.AS IF IT WERE 2. AS IF IT PASSED 3. AS IF IT ROSE 4. AS IF IT FELL 5. AS IF IT WOULD that, rather than being the work itself, was merely one of its necessary conditions; in the same era Robert Barry distributed a series of invitation cards announcing periods of gallery closure. Later Barry published these printed communications as art works, but at the time, when the doors were actually locked, they were more akin to information (Closed Gallery, 1969).
By comparison the current crop of art invitations offers little in the way of stimulation. They are equally self-conscious, but their arena of concern is not the nature of art but the business of branding. A number of galleries have adopted strict identity schemes, a few of which are extremely elegant and skilfully executed, but all of which curtail experiment and idiosyncrasy. For several years one of the few exceptions was London’s Mobile Home gallery, whose collaboration with the designer Jonathan Barnbrook led to invitations that fused graphic intricacy with signature style. Sadly, however, the gallery closed, rendering the postbag that much blander and raising worrying questions about the relationship in art between good design and commercial success.
These days the requirement for galleries to communicate a singular, stable identity seems inescapable, and, because it is very difficult to carve out space for play from the edges of graphic monoliths, the result is invitations that are more concerned with display than invention. There is, however, one publication, the Newspaper Jan Mot, that stands out for its ability to resolve the delivery of identity with the creation of room for multiple, sometimes tentative, artistic gambits. Produced five times a year by Jan Mot in Brussels, this A5 publication, rather than being the result of a branding exercise, is the outcome of a piecemeal evolution. The story of the newspaper is, in fact, the story of the gallery. The most apparent precedent of Jan Mot’s publication is the Amsterdam-based Art and Project Bulletin, a newsletter that was first produced, unsurprisingly enough, in 1969.
The Newspaper Jan Mot first emerged in its current form in January 2001, at the same time as the Galerie Mot and Van den Boogaard became Jan Mot. For some five years previously the artists Pierre Bismuth and Uri Tzaig had created a bi-monthly newsletter, and the relationship between the new and old versions echoes the steps through which the gallery assumed a more formal incarnation. This story is sometimes referred to in the newspaper itself, the most complete account coming from Mot’s previous partner, Oscar van den Boogaard, in issue 39 (October 2003). The prompt for Van den Boogaard’s tale was the dropping of the word ‘Galerie’ from Jan Mot’s company name, and his story goes back to a chance meeting on a tourist boat in Amsterdam in 1987. Of course, there are many corporate histories that are suffused with longing and loss, but it is rare business that openly admits to the role of romance.
In a subsequent issue of the newspaper, number 41 (March 2004), Mot interviewed Daniel van der Velden, the co-designer of the publication (with Maureen Mooren). Van der Velden told the gallerist that his aim was to transcend the ‘banality of the folded A5 newsletter’ to create ‘a valuable or vulnerable object’. To that end, the design of the publication hinges on strategic tweaks of newspaper conventions, the most noticeable being what Van der Velden calls ‘voids’. These empty rectangles, which the designers began by edging with typographic fragments but more recently have simply shaded in, overturn the most basic commandment of newspaper design: that all available space must be filled. In the early days of the Mot newspaper there was an element of pastiche – mock headlines and writers being billed as reporters – but lately this has given way to a style that is more assured and original.
It trips off the pen to say that Newspaper Jan Mot is extremely collectable in spite of its everyday form and materials, but in truth it is more accurate to ascribe its archive-friendly quality to those very attributes (a low-budget loveliness that it shares with the Wrong Gallery’s one-off newspaper The Wrong Times). Since issue 40 (January 2004) the designers have used a different colour newsprint each time and, as a result, the publications line up to create a melancholy rainbow of the slightly flat shades that can only be achieved on cheap paper. The publication sits in the ever more lonely netherworld between press release and art ephemera; it has a value that is at odds with their extraneous nature. Maybe it is even a work in its own right, although it lack the reassuring touch of artist authorship. Those commenting on this sort of thing tend to celebrate the conundrum that it creates for museums and collectors, but actually the problems that artists’ ephemera generate for the acquisitive are relatively minor compared to the confusion that this stuff can inspire in the rest of us. Right now my collection of Mot newspapers sits by my keyboard, but, to be honest, once I have finished this piece I have no idea where I shall put them.