Aspen Magazine, No. 8: The Fluxus Issue

A square folder serving as both container and cover for the magazine's contents. 

Featuring an original painting by minimalist artist Jo Baer.

The folder includes printed editorial materials: an introductory editorial statement by Dan Graham explaining the issue's conceptual framework, a comprehensive table of contents listing all fourteen sections, and brief biographical sketches of the contributing artists. 

 The folder functions as the primary organizational and presentational element, enclosing sections 2 through 14.

Jo Baer's cover painting reflects her minimalist aesthetic and ties to her contemporaneous work exploring optical perception and the relationship between light and dark.

Cover painting by Jo Baer, Designed by George Maciunas. Edited by Dan Graham.

Square carboard folder, printed cardboard with painting on exterior; contains printed editorial text, table of contents, and artist biographies.

A small booklet presenting an experimental text work designed as an alternative to traditional academic lectures.

Authored by Eleanor Antin and David Antin.  

The piece is structured for performance by two voices simultaneously, creating a layered textual experience. 

The work reflects David Antin's interest in "talk pieces" and performance-based poetry, combined with Eleanor Antin's conceptual approach to art and narrative.

The booklet contains text meant to be read aloud by two performers, exploring themes through overlapping or parallel narratives rather than conventional linear exposition.

This format challenges traditional presentation methods and engages with Fluxus principles of participatory art and interdisciplinary practice.

A small booklet presenting a systematic exploration of oppositional and related physical properties.

Specifically examining temperature-related terms and their hierarchical relationships. 

Authored by Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin.

 Created by founding members of the Art & Language collective.

This work exemplifies the group's analytical approach to art-making through language and classification systems.

The booklet organizes terms describing thermal properties (hot, warm, cool, cold). 

Investigates the conceptual hierarchies and relationships between similar and opposite physical states.

This piece reflects Art & Language's broader project of challenging traditional art forms by prioritizing linguistic and theoretical inquiry over visual representation.

A musical score for solo performer using an amplified tabletop as the sole instrument, composed in 1968 and representing a pivotal work in Philip Glass's early minimalist period. 

The composition employs Glass's signature additive process, derived from his study of Indian classical music with Ravi Shankar, wherein rhythmic patterns are systematically expanded and contracted by adding or subtracting individual beats. 

Side A: Young Turtle Asymmetries

Jackson Mac Low

Play Audio

Side B: Drift Study

La Monte Young

Play Audio

Side A: Lead Shot by Richard Serra.

A double-sided printed sheet presenting two related process-based artworks that explore physical phenomena through artistic means. Side A contains a textual proposal for an unrealized sculptural work involving molten lead dropped from extreme heights (fifteen thousand to thirty thousand feet) into water or soft earth, where gravitational forces and velocity would transform the liquid metal into precise spherical masses during descent. The artist references Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics and Baltimore's historic Shot Tower, a nineteenth-century industrial structure where molten lead was dropped approximately two hundred feet to create spherical ammunition.

Created by La Monte Young.

A theoretical text documenting Young's sustained tone compositions and sound installation concepts using electronically generated sine waves tuned to precise frequency ratios based on just intonation principles. The notes explain the realization of continuous periodic composite sound waveform environments, wherein multiple sine wave generators produce mathematically determined frequencies that create complex interference patterns as listeners move through space. 

This work forms part of Young's larger compositional project "Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery," begun in 1966 as a subsection of the even more expansive "The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys" (initiated 1964 with the Theatre of Eternal Music). Young developed a classification system called "The Two Systems of Eleven Categories" that established algorithms for selecting frequency ratios that exclude the number five, ensuring that not only the primary frequencies but also their combination tones maintain specific mathematical relationships. 

These sound environments became the foundation for Young's Dream House installations, permanent sonic spaces where listeners experience shifting acoustic phenomena through the interaction of sustained frequencies. The piece accompanies Section 5, which contains a recording demonstrating these principles in practice.

A double-sided folded sheet presenting three interconnected works documenting Yvonne Rainer's choreographic practice and performance concepts.

The recto side contains "People Plan," a series of schematic drawings mapping spatial relationships and movement patterns for performers, and "Lecture on moving," a theoretical text articulating Rainer's approach to choreography and the body's relationship to space and action. The verso side features "Selection of Slides from 'North East Passing'," photographic documentation from a 1969 performance at Billy Rose Theater that incorporated slides as visual material within the live performance. 

 Rainer, a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater collective and pioneer of postmodern dance, developed a choreographic methodology that rejected traditional dance virtuosity and theatrical drama in favour of everyday movements, and task-based structures.

A twenty-page theoretical essay examining the physiological and psychological principles underlying visual perception, specifically focusing on the optical phenomenon known as Mach bands. 

Created by American Minimalist artist, Jo Baer.

Named after nineteenth-century Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, who first described the effect in 1865.

Mach bands are illusory bright and dark stripes that viewers perceive at the edges where adjacent areas of differing brightness meet, caused by lateral inhibition among retinal neurons that enhances edge detection in the human visual system. 

Baer applies her graduate training in physiological psychology from the New School for Social Research to explore how these perceptual mechanisms relate to the experience of edges, boundaries, and contours in modern abstract painting.

The essay connects scientific understanding of how the eye processes visual information.

Contrast intensification at borders where light areas appear lighter and dark areas appear darker, to aesthetic concerns central to minimalist art practice.

Baer, a leading minimalist painter who studied biology and Gestalt psychology, argues for painting's continued relevance against claims by minimalist sculptors that the medium had become obsolete.

She demonstrates how her own geometric works engage fundamental aspects of human vision through their emphasis on boundaries between fields of colour.

Created by Jackson Mac Low. An explanatory text printed on five detachable cards that provides instructions and contextual information for performing chance-generated poems designed for simultaneous reading by multiple voices. 

 The work documents Mac Low's compositional methodology for creating the "Young Turtle Asymmetries," poems generated through systematic chance operations using source material derived from scientific descriptions of turtle mating habits and life cycles.

Mac Low employed what he termed "acrostic reading-through nonintentional text-selection procedures," wherein objective systems rather than authorial intention determine the selection and arrangement of linguistic units from existing texts. 

The poems are described as nonstanzaic, meaning they lack traditional stanza structure, and are notated as performance scores requiring five simultaneous readers whose voices overlap and interact to create complex sonic textures. 

This introduction accompanies the audio recording on Section 5 (the flexidisc), where the asymmetries are performed by Carol Berge, Spencer Holst, Iris Lezak Mac Low, and Anne Waldman. Mac Low's work, influenced by John Cage's experimental music and informed by Buddhist philosophy and anarchist-pacifist politics, challenges conventional notions of authorship and meaning-making in poetry by removing ego and intentionality from the creative process.

Created by Dennis Oppenheim. 

A double-sided printed sheet documenting proposals and descriptions for large-scale environmental art projects that intervene in the landscape outside traditional gallery settings. 

The recto side features "Cancelled Crop," Dennis Oppenheim's 1969 executed earthwork in Finsterwolde, Holland, where a farmer seeded a 154 by 267 meter wheat field following a scaled-down route (reduced by factor of six) between the field and the nearest grain storage silo in Nieuweschans. When mature, the wheat was harvested in a giant X configuration, a symbol Oppenheim frequently employed, and withheld from processing, thereby removing it from both agricultural function and exchange value to exist purely as art. 

 Additional texts include "Forest Project" and "Notes on Ecologic Projects" by Oppenheim, which elaborate his theoretical approach to environmental interventions. The verso side presents Robert Morris's "Los Angeles Project," another large-scale environmental proposal. 

These works exemplify the land art movement's rejection of traditional museum and gallery contexts, using the earth itself as medium and canvas while documenting ephemeral interventions through photography, maps, and descriptive text that become the permanent record of temporary actions performed in real time and actual space.

A text work exploring the intersection of geology, photography, and artistic fiction, created by Robert Smithson, the pioneering land artist best known for Spiral Jetty. 

The piece unfolds as a large four-panel folded poster that combines theoretical writing with photographic and textual elements to examine relationships between geological formations, photographic representation, and conceptual frameworks. Smithson developed theories distinguishing between "site" (outdoor location-specific works) and "non-site" (gallery-displayable works consisting of photographs and materials from remote locations), and this work engages these ideas through its format and content. The title references both geological stratification, the layering of rock and sediment over time, and the conceptual layering of representation through photography. 

Smithson's theoretical interests centered on entropy, the thermodynamic principle describing systems' tendency to lose energy and order over time, which he saw manifested in industrial decay, geological processes, and the relationship between landscape and documentation. His writings frequently recovered eighteenth and nineteenth-century concepts of landscape architecture and the picturesque while engaging dialectical methods to examine how art relates to environment, temporality, and transformation. This work represents one of Smithson's rarest publications and exemplifies his practice as both artist and theorist.

Created by Edward Ruscha and Art Alanis (Photographer). 

A single photographic image extracted from Edward Ruscha's seminal artist's book "Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles" (1967), presented as Section 13 of this issue. The photograph is an aerial view of a parking lot, captured from above to reveal its geometric patterns, surface details, and abstract formal qualities.

 For the original book project, Ruscha hired professional aerial photographer Art Alanis to shoot bird's-eye views from a helicopter of thirty-four Los Angeles parking lots, including locations such as Dodger Stadium, Universal City, The May Company, Century City, and Gilmore Drive-In Theatre. All lots were photographed devoid of cars, emphasizing the structures' essential forms, patterns (particularly herringbone configurations), and unexpected visual features like oil droppings on asphalt surfaces revealed by the absence of vehicles. 

Ruscha's fifth artist's book (first published 1967, edition of 2,413 copies; second edition 1974, 2,000 copies), "Thirtyfour Parking Lots" represented the largest format among his self-published works of the 1960s. The book exemplifies Ruscha's pioneering approach to photography as a medium for communicating information and ideas rather than fine art, what he called "no-style" photography with deadpan documentation of banal suburban structures.

 His straightforward, conceptual approach influenced later typological photographers including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, and Taryn Simon. Ruscha's photographic books challenged traditional visions of urban landscape and the accepted dichotomy between documentary and artistic photography. This work is part of his broader practice documenting Los Angeles vernacular architecture and landscape, including gas stations, apartment buildings, swimming pools, and the entirety of Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard.

As a detachable component, it served both practical and archival purposes, capturing a moment when Aspen was still actively soliciting new subscribers before its eventual cessation in 1971.