0 to 9 and the New York Avant-Garde: Publishing by Numbers

Edited and self-published by Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci from 1967 to 1969, 0 to 9 not only documented some of the most compelling examples of intermedia performance, contemporary poetry, and post-formalist art of the period, but also pioneered new ways of conceiving (and using) the magazine as medium and instrument. 0 to 9 and the New York Avant-Garde: Publishing by Numbers examines how the magazine both responded to and helped shape key developments in New York’s often fractious avant-garde communities. The book pays particular attention to the ways in which Mayer and Acconci foregrounded the material and generic qualities of the magazine and conceived their periodical as a means of generating (as well as documenting) art and poetry.

0 to 9 and the New York Avant-Garde considers the ways in which 0 to 9 interacted with other artistic movements and theoretical concerns of the period--including cybernetics, Pop Art, structuralism, and information theory. Arguing for the enduring importance of the magazine, and its unique position in the history of New York’s experimental art and literary scenes, this study contends that 0 to 9 was both a swan song of 1960s idealism and a precursor for the directions that avant-garde art would take in the decades that followed the magazine’s demise.

Ross Hair isEmeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia, UK, and the author of Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry (2010), Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present (2016), Brilliant Absence: Pursuing the Kingfisher in the Work of Hans Waanders (2019), and, with Thomas Ruys Smith, the co-editor of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music (2016).