CECIL TOUCHON: THE FUSION SERIES AT SEARS-PEYTON, OPENING APRIL 4 IN NEW YORK [214]

Cecil Touchon, not only one of the artists in the NYC ABAD exhibition, but also an artist curator of the project in both Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas and Pagosa Springs, Colorado has been working on his visual diary of collage art for three decades.

Cecil will show his work in New York this coming April. Sears-Peyton Gallery has been representing Cecil's Fusion Series series from its beginnings. Come meet the artist in New York at the opening April 4 2013 -Thursday 5-7 pm http://searspeyton.com

ONTOLOGICAL MUSEUM ABAD INSTALLATION [194]

Opening March 10, 2012, A Book About Death opens The Ontological Museum's big launch in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

See more here: ONTOLOGICAL MUSEUM AT PAGOSA SPRINGS.

Assemblings At The Ontological Museum & ABAD [191]

Assemblings (Part One) – Inaugural Exhibition! From the Archives of the Eternal Network at the Ontological Museum (OM) in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, USA.

Opens: March 10, 2012 and runs through April 15, 2012
Location: 262 Pagosa Street, Pagosa Springs, Colorado 81147 – tel. 817-944-4000
Opening Reception: Saturday March 10, 2012 from 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Winter Hours: Tues through Saturday 2:00pm - 5:00pm

On view will be a selection of Assemblings including Franticham’s Assembling Boxes from Ireland; Art/Life Magazine, Tensetendoned - We Absorb assemblings; Fluxkits from Fluxpress Saint Louis, Bamboo Assemblings, KART magazine (an assembling publication from Australia); Fluxlist Fluxbox; Post cards from the assembling: A Book About Death; selections from the Fluxcase Micro Museum. Additional related works from the Permanent Collection will also be on view.

What are Assemblings?
Assemblings are collections or compilations of works of art, multiples, objects, writings, visual poetry and/or ephemera submitted by a network of participants to a single hub where a central editor collates one copy from each artists' edition of submitted materials into a number of portfolios. A common practice is for the editor to then send back one folio or assembling of works to each participating member. Assemblings might be in the form of a box of loose materials, a bound book or magazine format, etc. or even be a collection of sound works or short videos. On view for this exhibit are examples of assemblings in box form, magazine format, an unbound book and as collections of objects. In fact the museum itself is an assembling in its own right.

History of Assemblings
Assemblings - as shown in this exhibit - have been created since the early 1960’s as artists, writers, and small independent printers worked on developing alternative, underground distribution networks for their experimental art and literature. As the art and literary worlds came to be controlled by powerful and well established business interests that, in essence, were seen as cultural gate keepers, the creative community experimented with direct mailings and other self-initiated ways to reach out to their collaborators and extended audiences; what we would call today niche markets based primarily on networks of people with similar interests. This kind of experimentation led directly to the establishment of the international Mail Art community known as the Eternal Network which celebrates its 50 year anniversary this year as does Fluxus, an amorphous group of artists that has been highly influential in developing the Mail Art scene in the 60’s and 70’s and on through to the present.

About the OM
The Ontological Museum, established in 1994 as an experimental art museum, opens it’s new space in Pagosa Springs with this exhibition. The museum houses an internationally focused collection of art that numbers in the tens of thousands of items and growing through direct donations of works from artists. The museum collects inclusively within the parameters of its mission that includes several interrelated fields: collage, assemblage and constructive art in general as well as works from the contemporary Fluxus and Mail Art communities and the art groups: The International Post-Dogmatist Group, The Massurrealist Group, the International Society of Assemblage and Collage Artists and the Neoist Society. Also in the collection are snapshot photography, visual poetry, small press publications, artist books, and the plethora of documentation, correspondence art and ephemera related to these communities and groups.

The Ontological Museum - now open in Pagosa Springs, Colorado - has been a mobile museum keeping works in storage and using exhibition spaces in various locations including commercial art galleries, university galleries, contemporary art centers and museums around the country. The founding director, Cecil Touchon, has curated fifteen+ museum exhibitions and published more than twenty-five related books and catalogs since starting the exhibition program in 2007.
Visit online at http://ontologicalmuseum.org email: info@ontologicalmuseum.org

FluxFest Chicago [144]

Cecil Touchon, Director, The Ontological Museum, directed this photograph of participants of FluxFest Chicago, held recently in Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.  Many participants of this festival also participated in and hosted ABAD exhibitions. The Fluxfest was spearheaded by artist Keith Buchholz. Click the photo to enlarge full screen. (It's a fisheye!). PHOTO © 2011 CECIL TOUCHON.

One Year Later [122]

Susan Shulman and Betty Esperanza celebrate the one year anniversary of A Book About Death. 

Photo: Cecil Touchon, taken September 10, 2009, on the street outside the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery, 537 Broadway, NYC.

ABAD Texas Fluxhibition Posters [115]

Angela Ferrara's poster for ABAD Texas, curated by Cecil Touchon. See more posters, here.

Fluxhibition #4 and A Book About Death Article - Fort Worth Weekly [114]

http://fwweekly.com/ Article Click Here
(Please write a comment while at the Fort Worth Weekly site.)

Fort Worth Community Arts Center

Hanging through the end of October at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center will be Fluxhibition #4: Fluxus Amusements, Diversions, Games, Tricks, and Puzzles, a collection of more than 120 Fluxus artworks from 23 countries and five continents. Fluxus is a movement from the latter half of the 20th century defined by multimedia artworks that
explore the gray area between camp and high art and that are diagrammatic, collagist, often text-heavy, and often satirical. Fluxus has roots in the work of such Modernist luminaries as Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage and is perhaps more relevant today than ever: In an era of seemingly limitless information (visual, literary, and sonic), Fluxus art sharpens viewers’ bullshit detectors.

At the center of the international Fluxus movement today is the Ontological Museum, a virtual place founded and curated by Fort Worth’s Cecil Touchon, who came up with the idea after forming the International Post-Dogmatist Group as a student at the University of Texas-Arlington in 1987. “The International Post-Dogmatist Group intended to be totally inclusive of virtually everyone, and you have to exclude yourself from it to not be a member,” Touchon said with a laugh. “It’s not about creating a new power circle of insiders, and everyone else is out. It’s more like a sponge that absorbs everything that’s attracted to it.” Group members are also “20 minutes ahead of everybody else,” Touchon said, “which is the length of time it takes to explain post-dogmatism to anybody.”
The Ontological Museum has a wing, the Fluxmuseum, whose permanent collection is about 20,000 pieces strong –– except when they’re on exhibit, they reside in a Fort Worth storage unit.

Which brings up Touchon’s current project: achieving tax-exempt status. The hope is that by becoming a bona fide nonprofit, the Ontological Museum will be able to find a permanent home. “The museum is an experiment in global communication, cooperation, and coordination and the idea of capturing across the contemporary moment whatever’s going on within as far as our network can reach out,” Touchon said. “So in the future, if anybody ever goes back and looks over this collection, they’ll see this constantly expanding influx of new people into the thing, and I think that alone is extremely fascinating. But the whole thing is, you’ve got the internet, you’ve got global culture, you’ve got the idea of a museum and artists running it themselves as an alternative to the typical older-style wealthy collectors who go out and buy whatever they like, and later they make a museum out of it. This is more like a working anthropological idea, like gathering bugs or something like that. It’s not about the value of the individual works but about the artistic value of it, its cultural value, its value as a piece of intellectual property as opposed to its preciousness as a collectible object.”

The birth of internet culture gave rise to the Ontological Museum. “The internet created this wonderful playground for these ideas,” he said. “The internet was a tremendous leveling device, because no matter how big or powerful any museum is, you only look at it through a screen that’s the same size as everybody else’s web page. Because of that, if you make your web page look more or less like a museum web site, to anybody coming to it, it looks the equal to any other museum. I mean, how would anybody know just from looking online?”

Before founding the Ontological Museum, Touchon started an e-mail group for collage artists. It eventually became another wing in the museum, the International Museum of Collage Assembly and Construction. Collage artists began collaborating with one another via snail-mail and were encouraged to donate works to the museum. Touchon quickly amassed about 1,000 pieces.
Eventually, Touchon discovered Fluxus via the internet. “Wow, a lot of what these guys are doing, I’ve been doing since the 1970s,” he said. “I realized I was pretty much a Fluxus artist.” He started the Fluxmuseum about four years ago.

The first Fluxhibition, Party in a Box, didn’t go so well –– one of the collaborators refused to return the package that had been mailed to him (and still hasn’t, to Touchon’s great dismay). The second Fluxhibition, New and Improved Fluxus, was a statement group show and fared much better. “A lot of us have been working since the 1970s on Fluxus ideas, but we weren’t connected to those original guys,” Touchon said. “And so there’s been sort of this transition of the old first-generation Fluxus guys and now all of us, but we’re claiming to be that same group as opposed to all the artists who are working with those same ideas but are totally independent and don’t think about a group. Part of Fluxus is group activity. That’s a big element of it.” The membership in the core group is “very elastic,” Touchon said. “It might be 10, or it might be 50 to 100” artists.

For New and Improved Fluxus, “We were introducing ourselves as, ‘We are Fluxus guys, and that’s just the way it is, and if you don’t like it, tough,’ ” Touchon said with a laugh. (Photo: Right).

The third Fluxhibition, Thinking Inside the Box, was also a success. Consisting of boxes and drawing from both the Fluxmuseum and collagist wing, the group show featured a piece by Yoko Ono and was “really well received,” Touchon said, noting that it also got a “thumbs up” from Picasso Gaglione, an early Fluxus artist who happened to be in town and caught the show, at UTA.

One of the few times that contemporary Fluxus members have met in person was in New York City a couple of years ago. The occasion was the opening for A Book About Death, a massive collection of postcards inspired by the work of early mail-artist Ray Johnson. The celebration was capped by a couple of Fluxus performances, including Requiem for Rubberbands, in which a cantor sang the first few lines of Mozart’s Requiem (inserting “Fluxus” in certain parts) while Touchon and the audience played rubberbands strapped to their fingers like mini-guitars. “At the end we shot them up into the air, and rubberbands were raining down on everyone,” Touchon recalled.

(A Book About Death Installation View at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center)

Touchon has concepts for shows scheduled through 2016 and is confident that he could rotate Fluxus exhibitions every month for years “and that’s even if no one sends me any more art.”
Notable Fluxmuseum pieces include “Soul Fart,” a red-and-white-striped handheld object that is placed to the butt (and then preferably photographed) and also “The Key to the Lock is the Box,” a small box made out of keys, including the key that unlocks the box.

Upcoming Fluxhibitions include the Fluxcase Micro-Museum and Fluxface in Space, a part of Face in Space, a NASA program in which fans can upload photos of themselves to be launched into space as part of the two remaining space shuttle missions. Fluxus artists will be taking photos of themselves and their art. A group exhibition will follow, everything leading up to the Jubilee Jamboree, the Fluxmuseum’s celebration of Fluxus’ 50th anniversary.

Touchon, who is represented locally by William Campbell Contemporary Art, could focus only on his own work, but he is driven by a curatorial spirit. “I’m in galleries all over the country,” he said. “I make a living [via my artwork], which is actually kind of hard to do in the art industry, and I do pretty well. So for me, you can promote yourself, but how far does that go? You can promote your career only so much. I want to include a whole lot of other people in my process and my experiments in life.”


International Fluxhibition #4 and A Book About Death: Both thru Oct 30 at Fort Worth Community Arts Center, 1300 Gendy St, FW. Free. 817-738-1938.

Fluxmuseum ABAD Opens in Texas [113]

The Fluxmuseum opened up in Texas today with a massive exhibition devoted to games and gew gaws as well as the A Book About Death archive set and new works.  A truly amazing exhibition, spearheaded by Flux Meister Cecil Touchon. 

Take a moment to check out the initial installation shots and since Cecil paid for this out of his own pocket, please consider tossing $10 or more towards defraying his costs. You will see the PayPal button on the link page (to the right).

Photo: Fluxhibition #4 - Table with catalogs for sale and a Book About Death installation in the background.

Fluxhibition #4, ABAD Texas & More [106]

Fluxhibition 4, ABAD Texas, the work of Lenny Quarles and Nernia opening October 8.  Through October 30.  

More info here: http://fluxmuseum.org/index.html

Image: Mark Bloch performing at ABAD New York, September, 2009.

FLUXMUSEUM ABAD TEXAS ART CALL [103]

A Book About Death and Day of the Dead  Call for Works   Deadline for all works: October 1, 2010.

Send Works Of All Kinds To: FLUXMUSEUM/ABAD 2010 
6955 PINON STREET
FORT WORTH, TEXAS 76116 USA

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH was an fantastic exhibition and performance that started in New York City at the Emily Harvey Foundation in September of 2009. Since then it has been traveling around the world and will be exhibited in Fort Worth, Texas this October.

The Fluxmuseum has a complete set of the ‘pages’ of this book. Cecil Touchon and Company will be mounting the A BOOK ABOUT DEATH exhibition at the Fort Worth Community Art Center during the month of October (Oct. 8-30) We will be arranging an evening of performance as well toward the end of the exhibition. Hopefully on Halloween Eve (October 30, 2010)

In addition to the installation of A Book About Death we would like to invite artists to contribute works around the traditions of Day of the Dead and Halloween. We will set up an ofrenda on the floor below the installed book.
 
Research the Day of the Dead, ofrenda, Halloween, death masks, etc. and create works of art that celebrate or refer to this special time of the year. Works can be mementos, antique photos, objects, masks, collages, assemblages, etc.

Please send original works only. All works will be displayed, no jury, no fee, no returns. Contributed works will become a part of the Ontological Museum permanent collection. Please include a deed of gift form. To get the deed of gift form go to: http://ontologicalmuseum.org/exhibitions.html scroll to the bottom of the page to see link.

Take a photo of your contribution and send to info@ontologicalmuseum.org for the blog we will set up for this exhibit.  Images should be around 800 pixels on long side. 

Email Subject line should say: ABAD 2010

In the email include details about the work, yourself and a link you would like to have visitors go to from the blog.  Image above:Dilar Pereira, Lisbon, Portugal.

Incoming works will be posted here: http://abookaboutdeath-fluxmuseum.blogspot.com/

Fluxface in Space [93]

A Book About Death has helped in many ways to bring artists together, and the result has been a number of group projects that span the globe, tapping the enormous number of creative talents for ever new exhibitions. The most recent is Fluxface in Space, organized by artists Gary A. Bibb and Cecil Touchon.

The essentials: Create a work of art about space exploration, photograph yourself with it and upload it to the NASA web site (yes, the government web site), and then submit it to the Fluxface in Space project for exhibition. (Image, top: Angela Ferrara's poster for the event/exhibition).

Bibb and Touchon write on the Facebook Group Event Page for the project: "Gary A. Bibb in collaboration with Cecil Touchon have conceived an exciting new exhibition project for the Fluxmuseum. Using the Face In Space Program from NASA - we are organizing a 'Fluxface in Space' exhibition to be launched into orbit on the last two Space Shuttles!

"Artists are to create one original postcard sized work of art in any media (preferably collage/ photo-montage) with the themes of Space Exploration & the Arts, the Shuttle Program, Outerspace, Rockets, Astronauts, Astronomy etc . This will be a commemorative project around the fact that the Space Shuttle program is coming to an end after these last two flights."

See the Fluxface in Space Website.

Cecil Touchon On The End Of It All: Vision Of The Valley of Souls [27]

Cecil Touchon, The Fort Worth, Texas artist, performer and curator of The Flux Museum, reflects on how it will all go down in the end.

I think about death frequently. I have been contemplating the subject since the age of 14 when my younger brother Phillip, who was nine, died on a Friday, the 13th of June, 1969. He fell from a train trestle and broke his neck.

I grew up Catholic. I attended nine years of Catholic private school. I was an alter boy and the whole bit. I even considered becoming a priest except for the problem that I liked girls a lot and wasn’t planning to give up the opportunities of having sex, falling in love and all the other tragedies of life.

On the day after my brother died I went to the school fair. Back then the traveling carnival would come around at the end of the school year and set up all the rides and games and everyone – especially kids – had a great time. I had also just graduated from the 8th grade and finally out of elementary school and ready for high school. I was feeling pretty good about that except for the problem that my little brother had just died. I wanted to get away from the grief at home and have some fun but the word had already spread and I mostly had to deal with people consoling me where ever I went. This took the fun out of what should have been a great graduating weekend that I had been planning with my friends for several months. Instead, death came knocking and took the color out of everything.


When my brother died I felt as if we were on a stage and somehow he fell off of it never to be seen again. I guess I was sad about it, I remember being depressed, speculating that if a nine-year old kid can die just like that, with the snap of a finger, where was the pay off in working toward achieving anything in life? After all, no matter what, I figured, we were all going to die. And what happened to him anyway? I had always figured that the adults – and certainly the priest – knew the answers to all the heavy questions and that I really didn’t need to worry about it – I was a Catholic, I was covered or so they tell you. But when I started asking tough questions and tried to peer behind the curtain, I realized that neither my parents nor anyone else had much of a clue as to what came after this business of life. It was as much a mystery to them as it was to me. When I realized that, I became alarmed. Maybe I wasn’t so safe after all.

For Catholics, the afterlife is complicated. Getting passed the the Pearly Gates, statistically, seems unlikely, akin to the percentage of people that make straight As in high school. The more my mind wandered over my brother’s fate and his place in the afterlife, the more depressed I got.

Then one day some many months later, something amazing happened. If you talked to a psychologist he or she would say that I had some sort of psychotic episode – “a loss of contact with reality.” That seemed reasonable; I was a young Catholic struggling with death. Catholics have their own highly ornate version of reality that is much more fleshed out that anything that the field of psychology has yet to come up with. The field of psychology is so puny and underdeveloped, compared to Catholicism and its history, psychology is just a page in a book. Catholicism, on the other hand; an encyclopedia.

So...I was kneeling next to my bed scribbling away on a homework assignment. Kneeling, not because that is what a good Catholic ought to do, but because I didn’t have a chair in my room or, if I did, it was, no doubt covered with dirty clothes. All of the sudden, a brilliant white light filled my room. A flash, like a a bolt of lightning. Everything turned white; appearing in the room two beings made of light with long flowing gowns – angelic beings – appeared. I stood up, in between them; one was to my left, the other to my right, and we disappeared into some kind of a void, a nothingness.  Then all of the sudden we were in some new place; present, past or future, I couldn't tell.  But I knew I was to meet someone, and when I did, I spent time with this person, a man.  We talked; then the two angelic beings returned to retrieve me and carry me off to another place. Soon, I was in Middle Eastern-looking places; it seemed I would spend days or weeks or perhaps months with this or that person I was supposed to meet, a person who, I believed, would teach me things, tell me about life, or death. I can not recall any specifics but this went on for a very long time – going from one place to another. When I was finished in one place the beings would arrive and we would disappear in a flash of light only to reappear at the same moment in a new place where they would leave me.

This continued for perhaps a long time, I can't remember, but I do recall that I became so accustomed to this kind of life that it seemed natural. I forgot that I was a 14-year old boy in his messy teenage room doing his homework. At the end of these visits the two beings took me to a high mountain top and with a kind of mental telepathy told me to look down into the valley below, just as the being on the right passed his arm from left to right in a sweeping motion. I looked below and there before me was a vast expanse that stretched out as far as the eye could see and beyond filled with all of the people who had ever lived or ever would. Above me, perhaps 15 or 20 feet high, was a bright seething white cloud that stretched out in all directions across the sky. From every person in the valley up to the cloud above there extended an endless number of ladders – one for each person.

When I gazed upon the valley below I could see a great commotion of people going here and there. My mind seemed to soar down the side of the mountain toward the valley so that I could see it in detail. Each person was dressed in clothing that represented his or her sense of identity, of who they were, from kings to paupers. At the base of each person’s ladder were a pile of objects that represented the various things that kept that person in the valley. The things were some sort of attachment or desire or fear perhaps. What ever they were, these items could not be carried up the ladders with them and yet they could not leave these things behind. There were even thieves who went around stealing these items from others, and other thieves who were stealing from the thieves when they were out stealing from others.

It seemed that everyone’s root purpose was to climb the ladder up into the cloud above which I presumed represented God or the Divine consciousness. Everyone in the valley seemed to have forgotten about their ladders except for a place to keep their most prized objects except every now and then when, off in the distance a great rumbling got louder and louder causing everyone to become terrified, running to their ladders for safety. Then the rumbling reached its peak and passed over like a wave, leaving everyone to go back about their business. And soon people returned to acted as before until the next rumbling wave came through.

Then my attention fell upon those who were on their ladders and they were of several kinds. The first was a person who would climb a few steps up his ladder. He looked up to the great distance above, then down to the collection of items below and started shaking with fear until he returned to the ground to be with the objects of his desire. Next was a man who climbed up his ladder just far enough to get a good overview of the crowd and the valley. Then he returned to the ground, not out of concern for his objects, but rather to use his experience on the ladder as a way to teach others about what he saw from that vantage point. After this I saw a person who had freed himself from his attachments and set his sights on the cloud above but he became so enamored with his climbing that, as he sped up his climbing and, intoxicated watched himself doing it, that the ladder started going downward at the same speed that he was climbing up until he wore himself out. After this he noticed that he had gone nowhere and so he started over, slowly and soberly climbing. Then my view widened out and I noticed people of all kinds at all different stages of climbing their ladders and the higher they went, the more their clothing lost any sense of uniqueness and individuality suggesting that their ego was slowly fading away. Toward the top of the ladders I saw an old bearded man with nothing more than a loin cloth. He was moving up the ladder very rapidly with his eyes on the cloud above and a look of ecstasy and peace on his face. Then I noticed that there were a few ladders that were empty indicating that some had actually made it up into the cloud.

And when I saw all of this I knew that this was the nature of life and that there was really nothing to fear, there was only our attachments and our ladder that we must one day climb should we choose to. Then all of the sudden I was back in my room kneeling next to my bed with my hand moving between the dotting of an "i" and the crossing of a "t." I looked up in shock and then looked back over the long experience I had just had and the entire memory of this vision seemed like a screen of sand that all fell to the floor, and most of the details of the experience washed away except for what I have stated here.

From that moment the depression that had been hovering over me like a cloud completely dispersed and my feeling of joy returned in full force. That was the beginning of my spiritual journey and the end of my deep fear about death.  – Cecil Touchon, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas

Portraits From ABAD [23]

Christopher Westlund, Artist.

Portraits by Cecil Touchon from A Book About Death

A Note On : A Book About Death [21]

A week and some after the closing of A Book About Death, I'm reflective: The whole phenomenon of the show – or what should be described as an event – very closely simulated the experience of death and the dispersal of the estate.

I don't know how many of you have been through a death where family members fight over who got what when a loved one died but, the aftermath of a death – especially a familial patriarch or matriarch, causes a lot of interesting reactions in people. I saw them played out in how people are dealing with this show. It can get really emotional. I know Matthew has had at least a few responses that were very negative from participants related to the 'estate' of the cumulative corpse that was ABAD.

[By the way, ABAD is a name meaning Father in Aramaic and Arabic. So our exquisite corpse nicknamed ABAD might be thought of as a gathering together and dispersal of a Patriarch. I actually have an old Sufi friend by the name of Abad. Here are some definitions found on line...


The boy's name Abad \a-bad\ is a variant of Abbott (Old English), and the meaning of Abad is "father, priest." Or : ABAD - Arabic: Father


First name variations: Abbe, Abbot, Abba, Abbe, Abboid, Abbott. Last name origins & meanings:


1. Spanish: nickname from abad ‘priest’ (from Late Latin abbas ‘priest’, genitive abbatis, from the Aramaic word meaning ‘father’). The application is uncertain: it could be a nickname, an occupational name for the servant of a priest, or denote an (illegitimate) son of a priest. 2. Muslim: from a personal name based on Arabic ‛Abbād ‘devoted worshiper’ or ‘servant’. The banu (tribe) ‛Abbād claims descent from the ancient Lakhmid kings of al-̣Hirah. The founder of the ‛Abbadids of Seville was Muhammad bin ‛Abbād (1023"42), whose son ‛Abbād succeeded his father as chamberlain to the pretended khalif, but was soon ruling in his own right under the honorific title al-Muta‛̣did ‘petitioner for justice (from Allah)’].

The corpse, as it lay there on the gallery floor with several hundred people stooping down to gather the cards, was very much like carrion picking away at a dead body. More than one visitor commented on that to me. One lady was deeply disturbed by it. I explained that this was the whole point of the event. A gathering together from the ends of the earth of a single body into a single place and then to celebrate it as a commemoration and then let it be consumed like a Catholic communion or like the breaking of the fast at Passover. An art feast extraordinaire – a powerful art ritual.

But people clearly 'got it.' What did they get?  The whole spirit of the exhibition from the collaboration to the content to the co-ownership of the show.  For example: The number of people waiting in line outside, many of whom had to be turned away, was also extraordinary in may ways. But folks were very cool. I have been to very few openings in New York City but just imagine: There is a small, unassuming, almost invisible door that says nothing more on it than "537." On one side, a big Lucky Jeans Store, on the other side, a big Guess Jeans store (combined: Lucky Guess) The Lucky Store is having a big event trying to get people to go in the store for free drinks and food, the Guess Jeans manager is standing on the steps trying to keep the line for ABAD from blocking entrance to his store.

And the line of people waiting to get into the almost invisible art show stretches all the way to Prince Street or, in other words, about a block long - and those are LONG blocks on Broadway. Both Matthew and I went out and spent time talking to people in the crowd but eventually many had to be turned away as the time for the performances approached. I am sure there were many disappointed people although they could all come back another day for the cards.

Matthew then got everyone that were upstairs gathering cards to push all the boxes to the sides of the room and stack them so that as many people as possible could be let in for the performances which opened with my Requiem for Rubberbands and chanted by the great artist Melissa McCarthy who is actually a professional cantor. The atmosphere was electric. Everyone mulling around, talking, laughing, and diving into the card boxes. Matthew, I think, handled the event very well as the master of ceremonies. It was just cool. And then to realize later that the webcast actually worked... that was great and I heard from at least one friend – the artist participant Gary Bibb in Colorado – who experienced the entire opening and performances via the web, said that it was really exciting to be a part of it from a distance and to see people from all over the world chatting in real time and commenting on the event as it happened from as far away as Japan, Australia and all over Europe.  [Thank you Jeanne Jo for making the live webcast happen].

Sure, there could have been a number of improvements, $50,000 would have gone a long way to make it a world class event media wise but hey, for Matthew and everyone else working out of their own pockets to pull it all together around one guy's crazy idea - damn impressive! And with the wonderful participation of The Emily Harvey Foundation, Christian Xatrec (director of the EH Foundation in NYC), Deven Marinner, Phil Shinn and many others who simply walked into the space and were suddenly employed cutting apart boxes or arranging the works in a grid Matthew set up, it all came together. And all the more so that it was done on a shoestring by remote coordination and then everyone swooping in from all over the place to meet each other for the first time and pull off two evenings of fresh performances. We should all be very proud. I would say it was a landmark event.

The trick from this point forward will be to keep it alive through further exhibitions of ABAD with documentary photos, artifacts and so forth. So, let's see what some of the participants and artists come up with.  Several exhibitions are already in the works around the world.  Write your comments here...

– Cecil Touchon, Fort Worth, Texas
fluxmuseum.org
ceciltouchon.com
collagemuseum.com

Cecil Touchon Poster [16]

Cecil Touchon's poster, in high resolution PDF, free for download.  Click here now.

Visit Cecil Touchon on the net.