Documents 1
This staple-bound compilation of reportages, letters, communiqués, demands, press releases, and flyers also constituted an ad hoc archive of the early activities of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and was an open source for “other groups with goals similar to those of the AWC” who were invited to “make free use of the contents of this publication for the purpose of realizing our common aims”. It represents a wide-ranging countercultural critique of the structures and interests of the contemporary art world and the values that dominated the USA in the Vietnam War era. Documents 1 and Open Hearing, the second collection of documents the AWC assembled in 1969 are both alternative and oppositional to the publications and archival impulse of institutions such as MoMA, which prized their status as “high art” citadels supposedly “apart” from the politics and culture of everyday life.
Courtesy of Primary Information