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"BAY AREA DADA, 1970-2000"

COLLECTING CACOPHONOUS NETWORKING

by
JOHN HELD, JR.

A collection of flyers, leaflets, zines and postcards.

- printed on various types of paper.
- with inlaid postcards and leaflets.
- 20 x 25 cm limited edition book.
- Ring binding.
- 60 pages
- 150 numbered copies.
- September 2024
- price: 40 euro / 36 GBP / 45 $US





you can order also by email at info@redfoxpress.com

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For three decades San Francisco artists, collectively known as the Bay Area Dadaists, intuited artistic and
cultural futures. Their self publishing in the early 1970s anticipated punk and zine cultures. Mid-decade they
engaged with emerging alternative art spaces in the presentation of new artistic genres, such as performance,
photocopy, rubber stamps, visual poetry and artist's books. Organizing Interdada Festivals in 1980 and 1984,
they invigorated social networking of correspondents internationally. Throughout the 1990's, core members of the
group supported the Stamp Art Gallery, showcasing a sustainable means preserving past histories and encouraging
contemporary creativity.

The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a petri dish for emerging artistic trends. The San Francisco Beat scene
exported cultural agitation and progressive lifestyles, much as the hippies that followed. Bay Area Dada, formed
in the wake of the hippie explosion, continued this tradition of advancing globally resonating lifestyles and art
alternatives.

Just as the original Dadaists sprang from the debris of World War I, the Bay Area Dada group of the early 1970s
sprang from political instability and the turbulence of war. Young American artists of the Vietnam era, like those
associated with San Francisco's Bay Area Dada group, dealt with overhanging induction notices and sudden existential
decisions capable of changing their lives in an instant. As group member Robert Rockola asked in a performance
announcement, "Liberty - to do what?"

The moment encouraged a heightened sense if social engagement by creative artists countering prevailing cultural
currents of commercialism, conservatism and the cult of personality. Adapting the bureaucracy of communication,
Mail Artists embraced the postal system, employing the rubber stamp as an effective distributor of ideas. One read,
"We believe it is our right and duty to pose an unrelenting threat to your value system-The Bay Area Dadaists."
A self-reflective retrospective reported in the last issue of the NYCS Weekly Breeder, stated: "You played it Safe.
We didn't. Bay Area Dada. 25 Years of Broken Boundaries."

Bay Area Dada was founded by cousins Bill Gaglione and Tim Mancusi, who were joined by Charles Chickadel and
Steve Caravello, working beside them at Baron's Art Supply in 1970. Their zine publishing activity (NYCS Weekly
Breeder, West Bay Dadaist, Dadazine) drew international attention including Canadian Anna Banana (Sometimes Yearly
Rag), who relocated to San Francisco, married Gaglione, and joined fellow female artists Patricia Tavenner,
Irene Dogmatic, Ginny Lloyd, Eleanor Kent, in the creation of a cacophonous network beside male counterparts
Buster Cleveland, Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), Winston Smith, Robert Rockola, Joey Patrickt, all of whom
(along with many others) extended the range of the makeshift art movement.

The flyers produced by members of the Bay Area Dada group in support of their publications, performances, events
and exhibitions, trace their beginning as a pre-punk publishing consortium (Trinity Press [Gaglione, Mancusi,
Chickadel]) in the early 1970s influenced by Fluxus and Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School, to performance
art later in the decade under the auspices of the alternative art space, La Mamelle. Fueled by their national and
international correspondence, the group initiated festivals featuring Dadaistic events in 1980 and 1984. When the
alternative artspace scene faltered in the late eighties as a result of government censorship and inadequate national
funding, artists turned to self reliance in sustaining their practice, including William Gaglione's Stamp Art Gallery,
which supported his rubber stamp activity, and Anna Banana's International Art Post, continuing her interest in artist
postage stamps (artistamps).

Through flyers documenting Bay Area Dada and their associates, we can follow the arc of their activities over three
decades. Spanning familial relationships began in adolescence and continuing into maturity, despite the turmoil of
divorces and relocations, members of the group sustained their artistic practice well into a new millennium.
Derived from sources that first steered them (Fluxus and Mail Art), assisted by new communication technologies
contemporizing their practice (the Internet), their non-competitive socially engaged approach to artistic practice
has found favor in an era of electronic social networking, which they perceived some five decades previous.




ALSO BY JOHN HELD, JR. AT REDFOXPRESS





John Held, Jr. "PUNCTURING THE PANDEMIC" A portfolio of perforated prints. - 15 x 21 cm limited edition book. - Hard cover. - 48 pages - 150 numbered copies. - July 2022 - price: 35 euro / 32 GBP / 38 $US

JOHN HELD JR. & MIKE DICKAU (USA) "We'll Chop His Suey When He's Gone" Homage to Ray Johnson drawings, photographs and computer graphics / artistamps 2008, 40 pages € 15 / $ 20 / 13 UK St.

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