At a time when many were looking in other directions, Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci provided one of the truly germinal magazines in which experiments in poetry & language could be gathered & aimed toward an unforeseen future. 0 TO 9 they called it and made of it a necessary place for new beginnings. Nearly four decades on, the thrill of their enterprise persists in these pages newly reprinted—amazing to look at against all that has transpired, more amazing to consider what remains to be done.

Jerome Rothenberg

The re-printing of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's iconic magazine 0 TO 9 is perfectly timed. At a moment when the impact of the 1960s has reached new heights, an important strand of that radical re-definition of art is visible again. Acconci and Mayer wanted the magazine to be experienced as object. The page becomes a 'field' which the viewer can experience both visually and conceptually. The conceptual intentions of drawings and diagrams by Sol LeWitt, Steve Paxton, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, and texts by Yvonne Rainer, Dan Graham, Jackson Maclow, Adrian Piper, amongst others, are thrown into sharp relief by their juxtaposition with contemporary poets, musicians and European historical writers. Morton Feldman, John Giorno, Eduardo Sanguineti and Clark Coolidge rub shoulders with Sir Walter Raleigh, Novalis, Robert Walser, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Apollinaire and Flaubert. This lateral cut across history, disciplines and cultures takes the reader into rich, new territory, in which Lord Herbert's C16th word-plays resonate perfectly alongside the texts of Lawrence Weiner.

Chrissie Iles

Special Edition
Publication Date: May 01 2006
Series: Lost Literature