Descent Into The Street.

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.: University of Newcastle., 1966. Three-part folded sheet with text and illustrations printed both sides + three additional loose text leaves with typed catalogue entries. Slight foxing to covers, otherwise good.. (21 x 15 cm).. With five black-and-white illustrations. The catalogue for a long-forgotten documentary exhibition which used mainly photographs and texts on panels as display materials. Compiled and curated by Ron Hunt, then librarian in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle, the exhibition was actually installed in the Physics department at Newcastle University, 1967. Hunt had joined the university library on the instigation of Richard Hamilton in 1962, and Descent into The Street was one of his first curatorial endeavours. The exhibition encompassed a wide spread of material - Constructivist design, Rodchenko, Malevich, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Dada and Surrealist actions; recent art including such things as Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Yves Klein and Allan Kaprow happenings; Chinese mass callisthenics; and crucially Black Mask, the New York based militants and anti-artists. The exhibition moved to the Bristol Arts Centre the following year. Accompanying the catalogue are two rare original posters publicising the exhibition. The first of these has an appropriated image from 1922 of the conductor of Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Factory Sirens, where the conductor stands on the roof of the tallest house and conducts by means of flags. The male figure here is printed in green, with surrounding text in purple (poster measures 70.5 x 45 cm); the second poster appears to be an unused proof - printed in black on a yellow sheet, the poster design consists purely of text, using five quotes by Lissitzky, Tzara, Breton, Kaprow, and Black Mask (75 x 50 cm). Both posters with handling creases and wear to edges, commensurate with age, and the first with pinholes and remnants of old tape on verso. (Rare. WorldCat lists only two copies of the catalogue at The Tate and Liverpool John Moores University).