"Shit Must Stop"

Opening one of the S.M.S. portfolios is like unsealing a time capsule from the art world, circa 1968. Published bimonthly for that one pivotal year, each issue of this experimental periodical is a small, custom-designed folder filled with a dozen or so works by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Christo, John Cage, and Claes Oldenburg. By turns whimsical, provocative, and sly, S.M.S. often reveals a more relaxed side of these luminaries or introduces work by little-known figures: the fragmented language of the underground Russian poet Aftograf, the paper towel scribblings of asylum inmate Princess Winifred, or a painting by Congo, a chimpanzee whose efforts were often confused for Abstract Expressionist works.

The brainchild of artist William Copley, S.M.S. (short for Shit Must Stop) was a lavish, idealistic effort to circumvent the gallery system by sending art directly to subscribers through the mail. Although it only appeared between February and December of 1968, its utopian, do-it-yourself ethos perfectly reflected the countercultural spirit of its time. Copley, who died in 1996 at the age of 77, was connected to most of the avant-garde artistic currents of the mid-twentieth century: He hung out with the Surrealists in Paris in the '50s and later became a familiar presence in New York's Pop, Fluxus, and conceptual art scenes. Accordingly, S.M.S. was not the product of a single movement, but an eclectic mix of Copley's wide-ranging influences and interests. Surrealist grande dame Meret Oppenheim contributed an exquisite drawing (published as a debossed print) of a furry hand mirror with a handle that ends in a cloven hoof. Roy Lichtenstein made a folded paper hat adorned with his trademark Ben-day patterns. Yoko Ono submitted a broken teacup tethered to a tube of glue, and On Kawara created a version of his 100 Year Calendar that accounts for an entire century on a single, poster-size piece of paper. "There were a lot of collaborative political activities going on," says Copley's daughter Claire Copley, owner of the famed 1970s Los Angeles gallery, "which I think must've made my dad feel more connected, because he wasn't a person who felt all that connected with other people all the time."

Indeed, the office of The Letter Edged in Black Press, where S.M.S. was produced, had a decidedly communal vibe. Describing the office atmosphere in a 1988 catalog essay, critic Carter Ratcliff wrote, "With his long flowing hair and red velvet bell-bottom suit, [Copley] greeted visitors and presided over a buffet replenished by nearby Zabar's Delicatessen, an open bar, and a pay phone with a cigar box filled with dimes." With such free-flowing largesse, it's no wonder that the press's Upper West Side loft became a gathering place for artists, writers and musicians. In addition to painter Dimitri Petrov, with whom Copley founded the press, Duchamp, Richard Artschwager, and French pop artist Alain Jacquet were known to drop in, while Roy Lichtenstein often visited the office bookkeeper, Dorothy, whom he later married.

S.M.S. was clearly a product of its time, but it was also part of a lineage of works that sought to make art more accessible and questioned the relationship between original works and reproductions. Its most immediate predecessor is probably Aspen, a multimedia magazine that began publication in 1965. Developed by former Women's Wear Daily editor Phyllis Johnson, it appeared quarterly until 1971 and included works by Andy Warhol, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Smithson. Other likely influences include George Maciunas' "Fluxus Yearboxes," annual compilations of recent work by Fluxus artists that he began assembling in 1964, and Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise (1935-40), a series of boxes each containing 69 reproductions of the artist's own works.

Like its predecessors, S.M.S. sought to close the gap between everyday life and art—to create a direct aesthetic experience unmediated by institutional agendas and the imperatives of the market. Susan Reinhold, who organized an S.M.S. exhibition and catalog at Reinhold-Brown gallery in 1988, thinks Copley and his collaborators were ahead of their time. "They didn't like...the art market becoming so commercialized," she says. "They didn't like what art galleries were doing. So they were going to do it direct," she says, "Shit Must Stop was their protest against what they perceived was too much power in the hands of gallery ownders and museums and not enough power for the artists."

Even in 1968, Copley may have seen S.M.S. as part of a movement that was changing the very definition of art. In an interview that year for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, he observed that younger artists like his son Billy were making works that were increasingly difficult to commodify. "They're going to dig trenches in the desert and photograph them from the air," he said of a project Billy had planned with a friend, "What they're accomplishing of course, is a work of art that cannot be sold."

Of course, photographs of land art turned out to be just as salable as paintings and sculptures, and by today's standards S.M.S. might be considered a kind of relational art, transforming the relationship between artist and collector. But in 1968, the art market had yet to become the global, all-consuming force it is today. "The two of them [Copley and Petrov] were very, very interested in putting together something of real quality that was affordable, that was real art and that people could buy," says Claire Copley. An annual subscription to S.M.S. cost $125 (roughly $750 in today's dollars), a bargain by art world standards given the fact that a one-year subscription delivered more than seventy artworks, if one includes the artist-designed covers.

Copley could afford to have such noble intentions because The Letter Edged in Black was financed with his sizeable inheritance. As the adopted son of an Illinois congressman who made his fortune in the newspaper business, Copley was independently wealthy by the time he was a teenager. In 1947, after serving overseas in World War II, he developed an interest in art and opened a gallery in Los Angeles, despite the fact that the art market there was almost non-existent. Even more surprising, he was determined to show Surrealist art, which was still relatively unknown on the West Coast, mounting exhibitions of artists like Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Joseph Cornell. The gallery was open for only six months, and Copley sold only two paintings, but he ensured his artists an income by purchasing ten percent of every show himself. After the gallery collapsed, he decamped to Paris, where he devoted himself to painting for several years. At this time, he also established the William and Noma Copley Foundation, which gave grants directly to artists and published monographs of their work. "He's always been a painter, always been a collector, and always was somebody who thought that the money that he had could be put to good use to help art and artists," says Claire Copley.

S.M.S. was yet another way Copley used his fortune to support artists—each contributor was paid a flat $100 (the equivalent of $600 today), regardless of stature—but like his gallery, it was a financial disaster. Reinhold estimates that Copley spent around a million dollars on the project. Although the publication was marketed through a handful of ads and brochures, it was only able to attract a small number of subscribers. "He didn't know how to build a subscription list, and he didn't know how to market it," says Claire Copley, "I think they weren't really interested in that part. I think they just wanted to get the things made." She says her father decided to stop publishing S.M.S. due in part to the advice of his financial advisors. There were also rumors that Petrov was embezzling money from the press's coffers. (Petrov died in 1986.) Even without such subterfuge, it's easy to see where all the money went: The quality and detail of the reproductions in S.M.S. are astonishingly high, and the Letter Edged in Black paid all of the fabrication costs; in most cases, the artists had only to submit a single original work. For issue #4, Italian poet Domenico Rotella contributed six poems he had written in prison, each on a different type of scrap paper. Copley and Petrov reproduced every detail, down to the torn edges of a sheet of yellow legal paper and the singed corner of a postcard. It's unclear exactly how many portfolios were produced for each issue—estimates range from 1,500 to 2,500—but it's safe to say that hundreds of sheets of paper were torn by hand, and hundreds of cards—printed to resemble the original postcard—were individually burned. Similarly, Princess Winifred's pencil drawings were reproduced, not on paper towels (which would have disintegrated over time), but on brown paper creped to look like paper towels. And, when Richard Artschwager spilled coffee on his cover design for issue #6, the press faithfully reproduced every drip and splash. Almost all of this painstaking fabrication was done by contractors, but Copley and Petrov did recruit interns to assemble the portfolios and to re-create more unusual pieces such as Ono's smashed teacup, or Lil Picard's burnt bowtie.

Unconventional multiples like these often blurred the line between original and reproduction. Since Ono's works from the period often consisted of sets of instructions to be followed by the viewer or recipient, each subsequent enactment could ostensibly be seen as a new work. Other artists created "kits" that required viewer participation to complete (and customize) them. Hannah Wiener's booklet of "Signal Flag Poems" from issue #3 includes a disc viewers can spin to create their own poetic combinations of nautical signals. In a similar vein, for issue #6 John Giorno created "The Chinese Fortune Game," a card game based on the format of a Chinese restaurant menu where diners chose one dish from Column A and one dish from Column B, etc. Selecting cards instead of dishes, players arrived at something like a readymade, literary version of exquisite corpse. While such contributions are physical objects, the actual work of art is in fact something much more fleeting and intangible.

S.M.S. subscribers thus paradoxically experienced "original" works of art that were elicited by reproductions, resulting in a breakdown of both institutional and economic barriers to experiencing art, and the distancing effects of reproduction. As Carter Ratcliff observed, "Each portfolio is a dossier on the subject of personal singularity and the way to establish a favorable relationship between an artist's impulse and the impersonal means of mechanical reproduction." This rapprochement between the artist's intent and the technologies of reproduction could be seen as a cheeky rebuttal to Walter Benjamin's seminal 1936 essay, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." For Benjamin, the proliferation of reproductions can only diminish the power of the original, but S.M.S. operates according to a different logic. Through excessively detailed reproduction, it actually attempts to imbue copies with what Benjamin dubbed the "aura" of the original, in order to disseminate an authentic experience to a wider audience. Of course, no amount of detail could ever completely erase the difference between original and copy, but S.M.S.'s lavish production values certainly pushed the issue toward the vanishing point.

While it's doubtful that any subsequent publication has achieved the same level of verisimilitude, S.M.S.'s egalitarian, art-by-subscription model has consistently appealed to artists looking for an alternative to the mainstream art market. In the 1970s, "assembling magazines" such as Notebook and Assembling (precursors to the zines of the 1980s) took a similar approach, except that instead of creating the editions themselves, they asked the participating artists to submit an agreed upon number of multiples that were then collated into a publication. In recent years, several contemporary art presses have adopted the subscription form. Visionaire has been publishing glossy collections of commissioned art and fashion projects three times a year since the early 1990s; North Drive Press just concluded five years of its annual collection of art multiples and text; and The Thing Quarterly sends its subscribers four three-dimensional objects a year, each one conceived by a different artist.

Still, it's difficult to assess the legacy of S.M.S. It has not been widely shown or written about and collectors often don't know what to do with it. "Collectors most often like to display their art. S.M.S. is closed up and sits on your bookshelf," says Susan Reinhold, "It's for collectors who don't need to impress anyone; it's like wearing a monogram just above the cuff so only you know it's there." In this sense, the S.M.S. portfolios—with their unconventional format and diverse, eccentric contents— echo the unruliness of the 1960s, stubbornly refusing to be fully absorbed into the marketplace. "Once you opened them up, it was sort of like a Pandora's box," says Claire Copley, "You could never get them back together."

This feature originally appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of art on paper. Reprinted with permission.

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