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From 1976 to 1978, artists Jaime Davidovich and Judith Henry produced and distributed paper goods of their own design, along with additional prototypes by Fluxus founder George Maciunas, under the auspices of a company called Wooster Enterprises. The product line included pads, notecards, writing paper, postcards, and confetti. Davidovich and Henry supplied this merchandise to Bloomingdale's, Macy's, and the Plaza Hotel gift shop and over dozen other New York City outlets, and to stores in Atlanta, Cleveland, Des Moines, Denver, Fort Worth, Miami, Nashville, Providence, San Francisco, St. Louis, Toronto, Tulsa and Corsico, Italy.

The clippings collected in the previous pages-the bulk of published literature on Wooster Enterprises-suggest a general ambivalence about how the project might be categorized. Was it a mercenary venture or a conceptual art program? High design or anti-art? Does it belong to history of Fluxus or not?

As a circumvention of the traditional channels of grant funding and gallery exhibition, Wooster Enterprises almost qualifies as "radical art" in John Cage's formulation: work "defined not in terms of its form, but in terms of its disruptive function within a given social, political, economic or psychological framework." The decision to sell works of art for $2.50 may be politically motivated and may challenge the economic framework of the art market, but how radical is retail in the halls of Lord & Taylor?

Perhaps our contemporary vantage point is clouded by developments of the ensuing decades. To understand the project, we must imagine an all-analog startup predating the personal computer, digital design tools and desktop publishing. We must wind back the clock to a time when art and graphic design were not overlapping disciplines: before Keith Haring opened his Pop Shop (1986), before MoMA founded the Design Store (1989), before Bernadette Corporation launched an underground fashion label(1995), before Takashi Murakami designed for Louis Vuitton (2002), and before Tom Sachs did astronaut-themed gear for Nike(2012). We also must consider Wooster Enterprises in its geographic and temporal context: Soho, New York, in the 1970s.

Finally, we might draw a contrast between Wooster's products and the mainstream graphic design of the day. For instance, compare Davidovich and Henry's "I Hate To Write" stationery to Milton Glaser's "I[[heart]] NY" logo. The latter was commissioned in 1977 by the New York State Department of Commerce in a campaign to combat the terrible national publicity generated by the city's soaring crime rate, riots, blackouts, and near-bankruptcy. Over time, the undercurrent of economic anxiety connected with the graphic was forgotten, and it became a world-famous symbol for tourism in the city. The "I [[heart]] NY" example is significant here for a few reasons. First, both Davidovich and Henry, in interviews conducted separately, defined Glaser's work as the antithesis of the Wooster Enterprises aesthetic. Second, that aesthetic was crucially tied to the environment of the urban blight: the economic crisis in New York City was a necessary condition for the development of Soho as an artistic community and a style.

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Wooster Street was a locus of artistic activity in Soho; Fluxus headquarters and the Filmmakers Cinematheque were at number 80, and Davidovich and Henry's loft was a few doors down, at 152.1 Thus the name "Wooster" conveyed a specific style: conceptual monochromatic, low-rent, a reaction against the candy-colored, cartoonish mode of mainstream commercial design and the glossy, glamorous affectations of Pop Art. Milton Glaser Inc., on East 32nd Street, and Warhol, living on East 66th Street, epitomized the uptown scene the Soho artists were rebelling against by moving downtown.

Though the visible evidence has been eroded by subsequent decades of gentrification, the dead zone between Houston and Canal was transformed into a residential neighborhood through collaboration between artist-activists and city government. Art historian Sarah Montross writes:

In 1971, the New York City Planning Commission enacted the zoning changes within Soho's industrial area that stipulated that only artists could legally live in this area "because of their status as 'small manufacturers.' In effect the City Planners were recognizing the artists' need for light, space and inexpensive accommodations.... The processes of legally designating Soho's industrial lofts as official 'artists in residence'... inscribed the Soho industrial area as the nexus point for avant-garde practice."2

Of course, the artist in residence (A.I.R.) policy was not the city's idea, but the result of heavy campaigning on the part of artists like Fluxus founder George Maciunas. In 1966, Maciunas had launched the Fluxhouse Cooperative Building Project in Soho. In this grand property development plan, made possible by a U.S. Federal Housing Authority subsidy, Maciunas bought abandoned buildings and converted them into loft studios, then sold off the floors, or simply gave them away. Fluxus's goal was to circumvent the elitism, exclusivity and centralization of the art world by giving artists control over the exhibition and distribution of their work, and the co-ops, live-work lofts and empty storefronts created spaces to do that.3 The lofts were raw. In many cases they cam equipped with archaic plumbing, no electricity and no heat. But it was cheap real estate.

The very idea of "rezoning" resonated philosophically with minimalists, conceptualists, performance artists and Fluxus figures. All were seeking to merge disciplinary categories and blur the line between art and everyday life. Geographically distancing themselves from the crowded and competitive world of commercial galleries above 14th Street, the Soho artists adopted alternative, cooperative models for exhibiting and distributing their work: Anthology Film Archives (1969), The Kitchen (1971), Electronic Arts Intermix (1971), 3 Mercer Street (1971), Artists Space (1972) and many others.

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