A survey of the work of Michael Gibbs whose activities included poetry, performance, film, and publishing, and his immersion in what he called “a genuinely ‘underground’ culture… which owed nothing to the official art establishment”. As well as visual poetry and texts, the book includes his major study of blank books ‘All or Nothing’, written in 2005, a selection of critical writing that originally appeared in Kontexts, and Artzien, journals that he edited and published, as well as articles from the photography journal Perspektief, and Art Monthly, for which he wrote a regular column. A chronology of examples of his visual and concrete poems, books and photography is reproduced, along with documentation of performances.

Edited by Gerrit Jan de Rook & Andrew Wilson
With 76 pages of black and white illustrations.

Critical commentaries about aspects of Michael Gibbs’ work by: Gerrit Jan de Rook, concrete poetry and language art; Guy Schraenen, books and publishing; Marga van Mechelen, performance works; John Held, mail art; Henriette Dingemans, internet work; Rob Perrée, photographic works; Bas Vroege, critical writing.

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Michael Gibbs was born in Croydon, Surrey in 1949 and after his involvement with Beau Geste Press in the early 1970s he moved to the Netherlands, where he continued to work with experimental poetry and text, publishing, performance and installation. During the 1990s he developed ideas and formats for the web, launching the website Whynotsneeze? in 1996, “a site for critical art on and about the internet”, and continued to write commentaries and criticism up to his death in 2009.