In the Summer of 1976 I received a piece of mail art, a copy of White Arms #5. Most likely, it had been sent to me in response to a mailing of my first art comix "Premium Crackers #1". Today, White Arms would be recognized as a Zine but in 1976, it was an unidentifiable self published vanity piece. White Arms was a 1/4 letter-size "magazine" and at the first glance, I knew this was going to be the next Pure Art medium.
The Pure Art saga had begun three years earlier when in late 1973 as a graduate student at the University of Colorado I needed a "commercial" name for the comix/pop art style I was inventing for myself. My thesis advisor, Joe Clower, had been calling his printed work "Drawrof" for several years and fellow student, George DeGrazio, was occasionally using "Sky-Vu" for his work. "Premium Crackers" would have been suitable except I wanted that name for the comic book I was making as part of my masters thesis. This was not a linear process and I suspect the "Pure" in Pure Art came from the old Ivory soap slogan "...99 44/100% pure". The ironic (and iconoclastic) juxtaposition of "Pure" and "Art" in the context of a comic book was the prefect match; offensive both to the high brow fine arts community and the low brow comix world.
In 1975, Pure Art first appeared in print on the covers of a second series of 'fine art' eight-pagers, comix like drawings based on the pornographic eight page comic "books" from the 1920-30's. In the tradition of Pure art, these had more to do with nonsense than sensibility (or lack there of). By the summer of 1976, I was ready for a more substantial production, and seeing White Arms inspired me to do the Pure Art Quarterly. Being a quarterly would motivate me to produce four issues a year, a goal that ultimately proved to be more of a distraction than a incentive.
PAQ #1 was an experiment in the mechanics of producing a "booklet". It has images on only every other page and those images are out of context with the rest of the body of Pure Art. PAQ#2 was much more fully realized and is I think one of the better examples. The Pure Art Quarterly wanders over a fair piece of graphic territory and was constrained only by the physical reality of its printing medium, in this case, line art reproduced by "quick copy" low end offset printing. Print runs were 100 with the only exception being the sister publication Blind Trails which went into a second printing of 100. Late 1940's and early 1950's cheap magazine graphics were (and are) a favorite starting point to be painted over, clipped out or traced. The result was a dada comix mix, stark, black and white and ironic. Production of the next PAQ would begin as soon as the previous one was mailed to my ever changing list of art pen pals. The obligatory day job and other painting and drawing work left little time for the PAQ project, still the demand of meeting some kind of deadline was welcome discipline.
By November 1979, making a new PAQ was becoming more of a mechanical exercise than a creative one. Reasoning that the 1/4 sheet format was too "cute", I decide to move to a 1/2 sheet layout and change the name to the Journal of Pure Art. The last PAQ gives up one page to this vision of the Pure future. It was a new decade and it was time for a new Pure Art. The JPA's lasted through the 80's to be replaced by the Index of Pure Art in the 90's. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Index of Pure Art is the fact that it is done electronically. Desk Top Publishing eliminated the tedious cut and paste of the PAQ's and JPA's as well as much of the significance of the type and imagery. Simply cutting out an interesting typeset phrase from an old magazine does not hold the same cachet now that anyone can set the same phrase themselves any way they please. This has forced me to mine my sources in a different manner with results that are, I think, for the better.
In June 1996 I produced a 20th anniversary bound reprint of the complete PAQ's. This was accomplished with a curious mixture of advanced DTP for the printing and atavistic cottage industry hand binding of the covers, making it a sort of electronic Arts and Crafts object.
In 2001 the Index of Pure Art was replaced by The Pure Art Review. Issue No. 4 of the PAR introduced the Tarart Card which in turn led to another high-tech handmade project, full decks of Tarart cards with packaging
FED UP WITH ADAPTING TO CHANGE?
ALL CONTENTS ©2008 JOHN A ADAMS