Inclining Experiment 2 [Yellow Newspaper]

An exceptionally scarce and visually commanding artist's newspaper with a graphic vocabulary that channels Constructivism and experimental modernist typography. Jointly conceived by Nadia Coën, Andrew Castrucci, and Wm. Bruce Witsiepe and published under the EAU/Éditions Anti-Utopia imprint at 64 Union Street, Brooklyn on August 7, 1994. Three loose double-sided newsprint sheets, each approximately 30 × 23 inches unfolded, printed principally in yellow/ochre and folded into quarters. Twelve principal image fields in all. Edition of 100. Part of The Inclining Experiment Newspapers, a series of limited-edition works produced on commercial newspaper presses and distributed as public handouts, deliberately joining the everyday and disposable character of newsprint to conceptual and poetic experimentation. No. 2 is considerably more complex physically than its designation as a newspaper suggests. Its three large sheets are printed on both sides, each side divided into two principal image fields, producing twelve in all. Geometric abstraction, diagrams, typography, photographs, pictograms, and recognizable objects—including a monumental glass jug and wedge of cheese—extend across and respond to the folds. As the sheets are opened, closed, rotated, or partially unfolded, the fields fragment and recombine. The reader effectively edits the work through handling it, transforming a fixed set of printed images into a succession of changing poster-scale compositions. The publication itself explains this strategy, characterizing the newspaper as a “folded satellite” and “flying geometry.” Central to its code is the recurring “little question box,” a phrase Coën recalls her father applying to his children as they acquired language, and which she proposes as the probable cryptographic key to The Inclining Experiment. The question mark thus becomes an emblem for a work concerned with language, perception, geometry, uncertainty, and the instability of apparently fixed systems of meaning. The idea receives a particularly elegant resolution in the final field. Beneath a large question mark appears the coded colophon: “A. Castrucci / B. Witsiepe / C. oën,” followed by 8.7.94, the EAU device, and 64 Union St., Brooklyn. The A-B-C sequence turns the collaborators' names themselves into part of the publication's graphic and linguistic game. The three artists belonged to the overlapping alternative-art and publishing networks of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. Coën developed an interdisciplinary practice encompassing architecture, installation, language, and printed matter and was a co-founder of Anti-Utopia. Castrucci, artist, printmaker, publisher, and activist, co-founded the Lower East Side artist-run space Bullet Space; he and Coën were central to the collaborative artist-book and street-poster project Your House Is Mine. Witsiepe (1951–1995), a Cooper Union-trained artist, writer, musician, and member of Circle X, worked across drawing, installation, publishing, music, and performance. Institutional documentation is unusually strong for so ephemeral a publication. NYPL's Artists' Books Collection holds No. 2 and identifies its colophon at “Number 2, page [12].” Direct examination of the NYPL example confirms the present format: three sheets measuring approximately 30 × 23 inches open. The NYPL copy was additionally folded for mailing and addressed; the present example retains only the intended quarter folds, allowing the large compositions to read with appreciably fewer intervening crease lines. MoMA's library records Nos. 1–6 of the series, lacking No. 3, and thus includes No. 2. Complete with all three sheets. Expected light toning and handling to the inherently fragile newsprint, with intended quarter folds; notably well preserved for its scale, material, and ephemeral distribution. A striking survival of what is simultaneously an artist's book, poster suite, conceptual print multiple, and participatory paper object.…