Reed Altemus is the esteemed designer of the Disembodied Art Gallery ‘silhouette logo’ - an image which is used liberally on this web site and on the associated Soundcloud.com site.

Reed has been a passionate collector of art books, mail art and visual poetry. He has donated his extensive collection of artifacts (which includes two Disembodied Art Gallery cassettes) to the department of rare books & manuscripts, Ohio State University.

So if you happening to be passing the university - check out crate 66 in his archive… For everyone else - take a look at the University’s summary of the collection.

The Disembodied Art Gallery project began around 1992 in Brighton, England.

In its first incarnation Disembodied Art Gallery was the name given to a mail art show that was held in the streets of Brighton throughout the Brighton International Arts festival during May 1992. Mail art (or postal art) was at that time a thriving activity around the globe in which artists would send or exchange items with each other through the postal network.

For this disembodied exhibition, invitations were sent by post to hundreds of mail artists all around the world - requesting them to send artwork in editions of up to 100 pieces. All of the received items were then bundled together and distributed for free on the streets of Brighton during the period of the arts festival. Invitations to participate were also published in Artists Newsletter magazine (UK) and advertised on electronic bulletin boards and email lists such as Postmodern Culture and ISEA. The invitation said: 

“The Disembodied Art Gallery Exhibition, Brighton, England, 1992. Decorative work on paper or card, originals or Xerox, 1 to 100 copies. Everything will be displayed in the streets of Brighton in May. In return, we will photograph the artwork in-place and document the comments from the towns’ people about your artwork. We will send you a copy of this documentation at the end of the exhibition. Your pictures will be fly-posted, hung from bus-stops and distributed around shops, arcades, pubs and clubs. New work is encouraged that addresses the issue of Art not being a sacred relic to be worshipped from afar and to be sold at phenomenal prices.”

There was an impressive and generous response to this call for artworks; over 300 contributors (each sending 5-100 multiples of an artwork) were received from 17 countries around the world - arriving from as far afield as India, Russia and the USA. Most of the artworks consisted of sheets of paper or card with hand-drawn, screen-printed or rubber stamped patterns. A few contributions were also made via email - making this one of the first exhibitions that also featured e-mail art.

Small bundles of 5 or so pieces of artwork were placed in clear ziplock bags bearing a sticker saying “Take me I’m free!” . A printed card was also enclosed in each bag to describe the purpose of the show, and to provide a postal address which would allow recipients to create and send their own art contributions if they wished to do so. Coloured ribbons were used to attach each bag to a lampost, fence or any other piece of street furniture; all of the items were distributed outdoors. 

The opening day of the show took place on Brighton beach by the West pier using the superstructure of this derelict pier and nearby street furniture to display the artworks. Subsequent days blitzed different parts of the town centre with bags of mail art. The event took place each weekend of the month-long arts festival, and one additional day-long event also took place in the nearby Sussex village of Saltdean in June 1992

In 1994, we defined Disembodied Art events as containing the following elements:

• they employ communications technology to allow any individual to contribute to the exhibit or event, if they wish to do so.
• the public are encouraged to contribute to each event, from wherever they are in the world. The method of contribution may be by telephone, fax, or another means of communication - depending upon the nature of the particular event.
• they develop an ‘appropriate technology’ approach to electronic arts. We are interested in exploring the relationship between people and the everyday technology that they use to communicate with each other - as opposed to, say, exploring the frontiers of new technology. However, the conventional usages of familiar technology such as FAXes and phones are often subverted in disembodied events - in a manner which has much in common with the ideas of cultural jamming.
  

The familiar fax machine, the humble telephone and postal mail have been used in the past by the Disembodied Art Gallery as channels through which people could take part and contribute to our art projects. The curators prefer these communications channels which are cheap and familiar to most people, as opposed to hi-tech computer terminals and touch screens. The Disembodied Art Gallery now intends to develop the use of the Internet in this and future projects, because only now is this new form of technology starting to become more widely available to the general public.

The curator of each Disembodied Art Gallery event construct the framework and infrastructure that is necessary for each new piece of artwork to be presented to the public. However, it is the public who then breathe life into the artworks with their contributions. The final identity of each disembodied event is therefore controlled by a large degree by the input from the public, and not by the curator. 

Interested in the history of mail-art and how the concept advanced into the fax, email and internet domains in the 1980s and 1990s?

Then take a look at this article by Chuck Welch (and all the other interesting articles linked on his website)

In the 1990s the Disembodied Art Gallery was part of this jump into cyberspace…

 One limitation of the 1993 fax show “telæsthesia” was the limited access people have to fax machines. Although these machines are commonplace in the USA (where telephone charges are also cheap) they are less common in the EEC outside of the office environment - and are even more scarce in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

To address this issue, the next disembodied installation held in Brighton focused upon the humble telephone. This was an attempt to allow even more people to take part in a disembodied show, without having to track down a fax machine in an office or shop.

I also hoped that if I focused upon the human voice, this would create a more direct mental link between the contributing artist and the visitor to the installation.

The heart of Babble was a telephone answering machine which was hidden behind a false wall inside the gallery. The telephone number to this machine was distributed world-wide once again by postal and electronic mail invitations. Leaflets were also distributed throughout Brighton in clubs, shops and cafes.

A new message was recorded onto the answering machine every few days. each message asked the caller to answer one simple question - such as “Describe what you can see around you at the moment”, “Where would you like to be now”, or “What is your favourite smell?”.

Whenever a visitor entered the installation, they encountered a red telephone in front of them, on a red pedestal. As soon as they entered the room, this telephone would start to ring; if the visitor chose to answer the telephone, s/he would then hear a sequence of answer phone messages replayed through the telephone handset. Each message was one answer left on the answer phone by a contributor. After a pause, more messages were then also replayed to the visitor through two large loudspeakers hanging on either side of the visitor. Eventually, the visitors would find themselves surrounded by a whole babble of voices - recorded by contributors who had called the installation from all around the world to answer the questions set to them by the answering machine.

Photographs of people standing in telephone boxes were strewn over the floor of the installation under the feet of each visitor. In all, over 60 people telephoned this installation from as far afield as Japan, Australia and the USA.

Back in 1994, the Disembodied Art Gallery joined with many other artists to celebrate William S Burroughs’ 80th birthday. To mark the occasion, I created a limited edition writer’s kit that was distributed for free at a WSB birthday party event held in Brighton Polytechnic’s hall. The kit contained two cut-out Tee-To-Tums which could be spun and used to stimulate the cut-up writing process. It also contained a syringe, a cut-up poem “Fault on San Andreas” which I posted recently on this blog, and also a small wrap of ‘peyote seeds’.

The same pack was also distributed one night at London’s ICA at the Abacus night (where at each night of this weekly event, the Disembodied Art Gallery made a new free giveaway for the visitors to the music/bar show).

I was more than a little surprised to find out that this kit was remembered and mentioned in an essay about William S Burroughs. The excellent article was written by Ian MacFadyen’s as a review of the 2012 “His name is Burroughs” exhibition at ZKM, in Karlsruhe, Germany.

In this essay he said…

“The Disembodied Art Gallery” would create their “Beatopoly” bag, “designed in close partnership with the ghost of Brion Gysin” — “A William Burroughs cut-up writing kit for all aspiring junkie novelists.” The kit consists of a folded half-A4 instruction card in a transparent bag with a plastic syringe.

This package came Absolutely Free and is now a highly desired collector’s item, fetching fabulous prices on the international quality lit market and art curator scenes (or maybe, hopefully, not).