Wednesdays at A's

In the late 1970s, artist Arleen Schloss's New York loft was a a place of extraordinary expression. It hosted concerts and exhibitions there, during Wednesdays at A's evenings. Featured in the book are the flyers that announced the event tell as closely as possible what these meetings were like, to the beginnings of new artistic practices. The New York apartment of artist Arleen Schloss has seen a succession of, from from October 1979, the experiments of an improbable tribe between no wave, sound poetry and visual arts. These are the Wednesdays at A's, whose program hybrid and radical fills the loft of 330 every week, for eighteen months Broome Street of concerts, performances, readings or exhibitions, always driven by a festive requirement. To announce the events, dozens of flyers are produced photocopier by guest artists and friends. Drawings, collages, Diversions, typographic games and handwritten annotations thus populate a motley set of traces destined for the ephemeral, although already somewhat fetishized by the protagonists. These flyers tell the adventure as closely as possible Wednesdays at A's, chronologically, as they testify to the concerns of a fertile period where bodies and machines meet, beyond genres and disciplines, in a city on the edge of the bankruptcy. Baptiste Brévart and Guillaume Ettlinger met Arleen Schloss in New York in 2011. They began archaeological work together on this memory evanescent and they have collected a large number of exceptional documents and unpublished. With the valuable contribution of Pauline Chevalier and Guillaume Loizillon, they thus trace a parallel history of the arts in New York in the 1980s.