02.02.

28.05.2017

BEAU GESTE PRESS

EN
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PATRONS OF THE MUSEUM

Honorary patron
Château Haut-Bailly

Founding patron
The Friends of the CAPC This gallery guide was devised for the exhibition
Beau Geste Press (02.02.–28.05.2017)
Leading patrons
Fondation Daniel & Nina Carasso, Curator: Alice Motard
With support for research in art theory and criticism
Lacoste Traiteur
by the Centre national des arts plastiques

Patrons This exhibition is supported by

SUEZ, Mercure Bordeaux Cité Mondiale, the Mexican Cultural Institute of Paris
Château Chasse-Spleen, SLTE,
Château Le Bonnat, Lafarge Granulats, Graphic Design: Rémy Sellier
Le Petit Commerce Text: Alice Motard

www.capc-bordeaux.fr
-3-
 Carolee Schneemann and Felipe Ehrenberg working on
Parts of a Body House Book, 1972. Photo Anthony McCall
 -5-

The independent publishing house

Beau Geste Press (BGP)

was founded in 1971 by the Mexican artists’ couple Martha

Hellion and Felipe Ehrenberg. Together with their two children,

they moved into a farmhouse in Devon, in the English countryside,

where, joined by a group of friends that included the artist and

art historian David Mayor, the graphic designer Chris Welch and

his partner Madeleine Gallard, they formed ‘a community of

duplicators, printers and artisans’.

Beau Geste Press was active until 1976, printing

publications by visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists

affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Specialising in limited-edition

artists’ books, it published the work of its own members, but also

that of many of their colleagues worldwide. In the spirit of cottage

industry, Beau Geste Press adapted its methods and scale of

production to its needs, keeping all stages, from design and printing

to distribution, under the same – bucolic – roof.

Although it operated from the periphery of the main

artistic centres of its time, Beau Geste Press was undoubtedly

one of the most productive and influential publishing ventures of

its generation.
Inside page of Schmuck Iceland (No. 2), conceived and edited by Kristjan Gudmundsson,
Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Hreinn Fridfinnsson & Hlif Svavarsdottir, August 1972
 -7-

The exhibition on the independent publishing house Beau

Geste Press shown at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux

as part of its programme of exhibitions and events around artists’

books opens with a manifesto-style press release.

The exhibition surveys the history of Beau Geste Press

through the 75 books published by its founding members and their

guests or occasional visitors during its five years of existence.

The exhibition is structured around these books. They

tell the story of Beau Geste Press and document the creativity,

productivity, working methods and international influence of this

short-lived community, a forerunner of today’s artists’ residencies.

All the texts in the exhibition are taken directly from the output

of the Press – from the enlarged excerpts on the walls to the

bibliographic notes, which quote the often funny and sometimes

cryptic blurbs from BGP’s sales catalogues.

 The Beau Geste Press community at Langford Court South, 1971 or 1972. From left to right: Felipe Ehrenberg, Serjio Tovar,
Madeleine Gallard, Ada Dewes, Chris Welch, Yaël Ehrenberg, Matthias Ehrenberg, Martha Ehrenberg Hellion. Photo Paul Welch
 -9-

LANGFORD
COURT
Devon, England, 1971. Introducing the location and its

inhabitants, the first room sets the stage for the story of Beau

Geste Press to unfold.

To one side, a walldrawing based on a sketch made by

one of the visitors to the Press (Sandy Nairne) captures the

magnificent setting of Langford Court. Until 1974, Beau Geste

Press rented the south wing of this sixteenth-century mansion

located in the small community of Clyst Hydon, not far from

Exeter. Sitting on a property bordering on a pond and surrounded

by fields populated by sheep and cows, this half-timbered house

with a thatched roof in true Devon style offered a living and

working environment away from the urban life that Martha Hellion

and Felipe Ehrenberg had known in London, after emigrating from

Mexico in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre1.

‘we spend our lives trying to find a place like this

we can miss later’ 2

1. The Tlatelolco massacre refers to the killing of student protesters by the Mexican
authorities shortly before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

2. Felipe Ehrenberg quoted by Carolee Schneemann, ‘Parts of a Body House Book,

1972’, in Sabine Breitweiser, ed., Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, exh. cat.
Museum der Moderne Salzburg (London: Prestel, 2016).
 - 10 -

The first room of the exhibition, which functions like

an antechamber, holds a herbarium made by Hellion and a

watercolour by Ehrenberg, both of which emphasise the rural and

idyllic dimension of life at Langford Court.

On the opposite side, the pages from C(l)ues, a play

written by David Mayor, present the house and its inhabitants

through the rooms in which they live and their occupations:

‘Felipe reads aloud from the newspaper’,

‘Pat is typing’, and so forth.

Several books bear testimony to the radical change in

the lifestyle of its protagonists: A Sightseeing Tour in Exeter

retraces a performance by the Polygonal Workshop collective

(of which Ehrenberg was a part) during a week of actions in

Exeter organised by Mayor. Another book recounts Mayor’s

and Ehrenberg’s encounter at the exhibition The Seventh Day

Chicken at Sigi Krauss Gallery in Covent Garden, London, where

Ehrenberg presented works ‘documenting’ the dustmen’s strike

in London in 1970.3

3. La Poubelle (dir. Felipe Ehrenberg, ca. 1970, colour, 16 min 48 sec), now in the
Tate Collection, London.
 - 11 -

PUBLI-
CATIONS
The backbone of the exhibition is formed by the 75 books,

flyers, leaflets and multiples published by Beau Geste Press from

1971 to 1976. The publications are presented in a chronological

display that highlights the variety of its output and offers an

insight into its organisation.

From a material standpoint, the publications evidence

the group’s attachment to craftsmanship, paired with a great

economy of means: several publications consist of plain

mimeotyped pages held together with staples. The succession of

books highlights its geographical reach – with contributors from

as far afield as Mexico, Chile, Japan, Iceland and Canada – but

also the diversity of creative practices it embraced by publishing

the work of musicians, composers, writers, poets, performers and

filmmakers. It also nurtured ties with the English scene, as can be

seen from the publications by Allen Fisher, Mick Gibbs, Michael

Leggett, Opal L Nations and Michael Nyman, to name but a few.

 Japanese Schmuck (No. 8), a work by Hiroshi Yoshimura. Photo Lourdes Grobet
Felipe Ehrenberg blowing, in the early 1980s, on an inside page of
The first resident artists at the Press were Carolee

Schneemann and her English boyfriend Anthony McCall; they

eventually married in Langford Court in 1972. The books

they produced during their stay – Parts of a Body House Book

(Schneemann) and Wipes/Fades/Dissolves: Work in Progress

(McCall) – epitomised the ‘BGP style’ and were important

stepping stones in their respective international careers. The

same can also be said of Arguments, the first book by the

Mexican artist Ulises Carrión: radical in both form and content,

it is composed exclusively of letterpress-printed first names,

which acquire new meanings through repetition, permutation

and positioning – proof, according to the author, that

‘good Spanish-
language
literature can
be written using
English’.
 - 14 -

Beau Geste Press proudly affirms its autonomy and

independence in the forewords of its magazines, books and other

promotional publications. It is not accountable to anyone, refuses

to adhere to the conventions of artistic production and refutes

the mechanisms of cultural validation. In a letter (dated 1972)

to Paul Brown, publisher of Transgravity Magazine, Ehrenberg

explains what motivated the formation of Beau Geste Press:

‘. . . the main reason we (anybody) set up our press was

to cut out all the grievous bullshit about submitting work

“for consideration”; and the ensuing stress’ 4,

he wrote.

4. Letter from Felipe Ehrenberg to Paul Brown, 5 July 1972. Tate Archive, 815.3.2.1
BGP Correspondence 1971–1973, A–F.
 - 15 -

The chronological display of books manifests the political

dimension inherent in the Beau Geste Press project: Sabor a

mi, a book by the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, was published

a few months after the coup in Chile and the assassination of

its democratically elected president Salvador Allende by the

military junta.

Finally, the atypical character of Beau Geste Press as a

changing community that gravitated around a family nucleus and

put values such as sharing and hospitality at the core of its project,

also transpires from several books, most notably To My Friends

by Takako Saito, Generación F. Ehrenberg by Felipe Ehrenberg

with Martha Hellion, and Dibujos, a collection of drawings by their

children Matthias and Yaël, aged seven and eight.

The display is strictly chronological while highlighting

key moments in the history of the Press, such as the event that

prompted its formation and gave it its raison d’être: the travelling

exhibition FLUXshoe.
Map showing the cities where the FLUXshoe toured, contained in FLUXshoe ADD END A,
edited by Felipe Ehrenberg, David Mayor, Terry Wright, March 1974
 - 17 -

When he first met Felipe Ehrenberg in London, David

Mayor was a PhD student in art history at the University of

Exeter, where he had been charged with coordinating a Fluxus

exhibition in England on behalf of his professor Mike Weaver,

head of the university’s American Arts Documentation Centre,

and Fluxus West’s American representative, Ken Friedman (with

the remote blessing of George Maciunas, the ‘father’ of Fluxus).

A few months into his research, Mayor joined Ehrenberg

and Hellion at Langford Court, where together they developed

the Fluxus show, which was initially planned to be shown in the

library of the University of Exeter and at the Royal College of Art

in London, into a much larger project.

 - 18 -

Resulting from a call for participation and a series of

invitations, the exhibition eventually travelled to seven cities

in England (Falmouth, Exeter, Croydon, Oxford, Nottingham,

Blackburn and Hastings) between October 1972 and August 1973,

deliberately avoiding the country’s artistic centres of the time.

Called FLUXshoe (after an inspired misspelling of the

word ‘show’), it acted as a springboard for many emerging British

artists at the time, including Ian Breakwell, Stuart Brisley, Helen

Chadwick, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and COUM Transmissions

(Throbbing Gristle), who were not affiliated with Fluxus but

shared its experimental spirit. The aim of the FLUXshoe was

not to resuscitate Fluxus but to present contemporary works,

many performative or participative in nature, that adopted the

philosophy and often immaterial forms of the original Fluxus

Assembled in a deliberate confusion of genres, more

than one hundred artists participated in this ‘travelling circus’,

as Ehrenberg once described it5, including nine first-generation

Fluxus artists (Eric Andersen, Ay-0, Davi Det Hompson, Alice

Hutchins, Per Kirkeby, Takehisa Kosugi, Carla Liss, Knud Pedersen

and Takako Saito) who travelled to at least one of the seven cities,

while others took part remotely (Joseph Beuys, George Maciunas,

Yoko Ono and Ben Vautier).

5. http://www.artcornwall.org/interview_fluxshoe_stuart%20reid_felipe_
ehrenberg2.htm.
 - 19 -

All tangible works fitted into a van and were displayed

in a modular system of cardboard cubes designed by Martha

Hellion. The catalogue of the show was one of BGP’s first

publications. It was followed by the FLUXshoe ADD END A, a

compendium, including photographs and press clippings, of the

highlights of each stage, from Eric Andersen’s performance

Free Drink, Free Music, Free Sex in Falmouth to the Taj Mahal

Travellers’ endless games of mahjong in Exeter.

The latter, a Japanese experimental band consisting

of Takehisa Kosugi, Yukio Tsuchiya and Ryo and Hiroko Koike,

formed a special bond with Beau Geste Press, spending several

weeks at Langford Court. Another important figure in the history

of the Press was Takako Saito, who took part in three stages of

the FLUXshoe, during which time she became David Mayor’s

partner and moved to Langford Court.

Cover of the catalogue for ICES’72 (International Carnival of Experimental Sound),
1972. Graphic Design Gee Vaucher
 - 21 -

Another key episode in the history of Beau Geste Press

had taken place a few months before the FLUXshoe. On 21 August

1972, the BGP community6, together with a host of performers

and artist collectives, embarked on a train from London to

Edinburgh chartered in the framework of the experimental music

festival ICES ’727. During the journey, using their Gestetner

manual duplicator, they produced The Thomas Alva Edison

Centenary Issue Commemorating the ICES-72 Brain Drain Music

Train, an eighty-two-page publication with artwork contributed by

the passengers of the train and collected by Carolee Schneemann

wearing nothing but roller skates (Ices Strip Performance).

Reflecting the diversity of its output, the chronological

display alternates working papers, press releases, advertising

material and personal photographs offering a glimpse into the

workings of the Press. Alas, like any collective experience, this

publishing venture too was bound to end one day. The community

effectively collapsed after the departure of Martha Hellion in early

1974. After a short stay in Belgium and a residency in Norway,

6. Felipe Ehrenberg, Allen Fisher, Martha Hellion, Jeannie Lewis, David Mayor, Dick
Miller, Patricia and Terry Wright.

7. The International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES) was an avant-garde

music festival conceived by Harvey ‘Job’ Matusow and held at the Roundhouse in
Chalk Farm, London, from 13 to 26 August 1972.
 - 22 -

Hellion settled in Maastricht, Netherlands. She took up studies at the

Jan van Eyck Academie and married the Dutch artist Jan Hendrix,

whom she had met at Beau Geste Press at the end of 1973.

Ehrenberg returned to Mexico with their two children in

March 1974. David Mayor and Takako Saito moved to Cullompton

and tried to keep the press alive under the imprint Beau Geste

Press / Libro acción libre, with Felipe contributing remotely, but

in 1975 Saito left for Italy and Mayor moved to Surrey. The press

ceased all activities in 1976. The final image on the timeline is an

enlargement of a photograph showing David Mayor in front of a

big fire. Written by the performers’ couple Genesis P-Orridge and

Cosey Fanni Tutti, the caption on the original print reads ‘The

Beau Geste Bonfire’, suggesting that what we see going up in

flames is the remaining stock of BGP publications.

This image also closes the Beau Geste Press chapter

in Mayor’s life, who for a while continued to operate the press

by outsourcing the printing operations and worked with

small distributors to disseminate the books. After a radical

career change a few years later, he has been working as an

acupuncturist since 1979 and is currently conducting research

on electro-acupuncture.
 - 23 -

SCHMUCK
While Felipe Ehrenberg can be said to have been the

‘artistic director’ of Beau Geste Press, David Mayor played a

key role in its day-to-day management and outreach. Thanks

to his editorial, linguistic and organisational skills, he became

the public-relations manager of the Press, in charge of

disseminating its activities and distributing its books.

In this function, he spent much of his time writing

letters and keeping a meticulous inventory of everything

concerning the life of the Press, from sales and production

figures to potential buyers’ lists, while also keeping an eye on

the accounts. This probably explains why he never completed

his thesis on Fluxus, which he had begun at the time of the

FLUXshoe, the travelling show he organised more or less on

his own. Mayor was also the driving force behind Schmuck, a

magazine whose name, meaning ‘penis’ in Yiddish and ‘idiot’

in American slang, contrasts with the rather dainty-sounding

imprint of the Press.

Between 1972 and 1976, Beau Geste Press published

eight issues of the magazine dedicated to the local art scenes of

Iceland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany and Japan,

respectively. Each issue was edited and assembled by one or

 - 24 -

more artists from the scene under survey, many of them more

or less closely related to Fluxus such as Robert Filliou, Kristján

Gudmundsson, Milan Knížák, Takehisa Kosugi, Endre Tót and

Wolf Vostell. Besides these ‘national’ editions, Beau Geste Press

also published two general issues, the first Schmuck (the ‘real’

Schmuck) and the General Schmuck. In his very first editorial,

Mayor writes:

‘Schmuck wants the real meat and no fancy dressing. I

have no specific ideology to push and would like to see

Schmuck develop, if not as an open forum for discussion

of some of the problems relating to art, at least as a

vehicle for artists to present their ideas as well as their

art (when the two don’t overlap!).’

The Schmuck issues, like the other books produced at

the Press, were distributed via the post, the main channel of

communication and dissemination at the time. The international

readership with which Beau Geste Press thus actively

corresponded formed a network that anticipated the Internet.

The printed matter on display is punctuated by a series

of aluminium sculptures by the French artist Xavier Antin that

conjure up operations or gestures related to the duplication

or revelation of images, purposely aestheticising the myths

surrounding the sacrosanct space of the workshop.

 - 25 -

Xavier Antin, Untitled (The Eternal Network), 2016.

Aluminium. Production Spike Island, Bristol. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris
Original loose pages from Schmuck no. 5 and no.8 (the

Japanese and General issues, respectively) are shown in a publication

mock-up in two of these sculptures, which resemble large panes of

insulation glass as used in silkscreen printing or vertical scanners.

Each of these dysfunctional machines, or sculptures

suggesting a function, captures a different moment of the same

process of image reproduction, feeding a narrative in which

‘making forms is synonymous with making sense’, in the artist’s

own words.

The ‘freeze frames’ formed by each of the elements of

this mechanical landscape function like a mise en abyme of the

exhibition; as if, in trying to understand and retell the history of

Beau Geste Press, the circulation of its entire printed output had to

be momentarily halted to be analysed and scrutinised.

 - 26 -
Felipe Ehrenberg with ‘Humphrey’, a MAN Roland two-revolution
cylinder letterpress, 1973. Photo David Mayor

HUMPHREY
This space gives an insight into the production mechanisms

at the Press. The display unfolds around the original Victorian press

owned by Terry Wright, a local printer who had been commissioned

by Beau Geste Press to print the cover of the FLUXshoe catalogue. In

1973, after becoming friends with Felipe Ehrenberg, Wright moved

his press to Langford Court and, together with his wife Pat, joined

the community to lend a hand in operating and maintaining the

equipment. This Jardine Platen Press, on loan from Wright, who has

owned it since his apprenticeship at the age of 15, bears the traces of

time and many momentous events. It was on this very machine that

Beau Geste Press printed most of its letterpress work, including the

two entirely letterpress-printed books Arguments by Ulises Carrión

and Or by Kristjan Gudmundsson.

 - 27 -

For its first books, Beau Geste Press used a stencil

duplicator, or mimeograph, bought in London. This machine, which

Ehrenberg and Hellion had come across on City Road in Islington,

inspired the name of the press, a contraction of ‘beau tiful Geste

tner’. (‘Beau Geste Press’ also refers to the exotic Victorian novel of

the same name by P. C. Wren about the adventures of British officers

in the French Foreign Legion.)

In 1973, Beau Geste Press acquired a double-cylinder press

from the 1940s, which was baptised ‘Humphrey’, in reference

to the sound it made when running in full gear. A slide show

documenting its christening in the spring of 1973 frames the print

produced during this inaugural session. This self-referential ‘birth

certificate’, which was written and laid out collectively, highlights

the community’s affinities with concrete poetry.

The use of various printing techniques lay at the heart

of Beau Geste Press, as it constantly introduced new equipment

and methods of manual or mechanical reproduction, from stencil

duplication and letterset to offset, hand-colouring and bespoke

fold-outs. The skills learned along the way were shared with its

temporary residents and helped it to operate on a shoestring budget.

 - 28 -

In the audio recording that can be heard in this space,

Felipe Ehrenberg speaks about the production process. In this

recent interview, which is interspersed with highly entertaining

anecdotes on life at the Press, he reminds us that empowerment

supposes knowledge and control of the tools of information

production and diffusion – whether this means operating a stencil

duplicator or ringing the local church bells.

The highlight in this space are the 62 plates with the

original photographs used in Generación F. Ehrenberg. The

photographs of Martha and Felipe, which were taken and instantly

developed by street photographers in Mexico, are exhibited here for

the first time. They testify to the couple’s fascination with popular

modes of image reproduction. Shown here are the positive and the

negative, which they carefully collected after each pose – a ritual

that finds its ultimate formal expression in the book they produced

from them. The protagonists of Generación F. Ehrenberg are Martha,

Felipe and their children, but also their extended family, in other

words, their circle of friends, which includes dancers, writers,

painters, anthropologists, doctors and, later, the collaborators and

residents of Beau Geste Press – all sharing Ehrenberg’s credo that

 - 29 -

‘art is just an excuse’.