S.M.S. No.3
William Copley and Dimitri Petrov

11h x 7w 

$3,200 Available (1)

Contact

S.M.S. (Shit Must Stop) was subscription-based exhibition in a box conceived, edited, and produced by William Copley and Dimitri Petrov in 1968. The project derived its formal conceit from antecedents like Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise, George Maciunas’s FluxKit, and Phyllis Johnson’s Aspen, but was unique in its juxtaposition of the well-known with the unknown, and in its short-lived intensity: six editions, each featuring about a dozen artist multiples, were distributed throughout 1968 before Copley and Petrov called it quits. 

S.M.S. No. 3 includes work by John Battan, Aftograf, Enrico Baj, William Bryant, Dick Higgins, Joseph Kosuth, Ronnie Landfield, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, H.C. Westermann, Hannah Wiener, and Terry Riley.  

Highlights of this issue include Joseph Kosuth’s Four Titled Abstracts, H.C. Westermann’s meticulously reproduced Correspondence, and Man Ray’s The Father of Mona Lisa. 

This copy also includes the extremely rare Terry Riley reel-to-reel recording of “Poppy Nogoods All Night Flight” with its original box, cover art (drawn by Riley’s daughter Coleen, not credited), and pink insert card. The recording is in pristine condition. This recording was intended to be included with the proposed edition of 2500 portfolios, but it is estimated that fewer than twenty of the audio recordings were actually produced and distributed. (*A cassette version of the recording was produced and sold by Reinhold-Brown Gallery in 1988 to allow for editions to be completed.)