Operation Manual for the Worlds Largest Paper Spaceship

Saturdays, 12–4pm
December 14, 21, 2019 and January 4, 11, 18, 2020

Curatorial walkthrough
Saturday, December 14, 1:30pm

Related Events
Most Saturdays at 1:30pm (details tbd)
Message for location

It’s a 12 x 10 foot poster, as a magazine, distributed as issue #13 of the Deschool Primer in 1974. It’s as if Mad Magazine met with Peter Max who met the Halprins, who met Dick Higgins, and they all had a conversation with Stewart Brand. A billboard printer printed one hundred copies, and its colors are still vibrant. Trust me, it’s celestial, and I’m not sure it’s meant for the classroom or the art museum.

The poster’s central image of a spacecraft is framed by two sets of directions; one describing possible uses for the preposterously sized illustration; the other is twelve imaginative suggestions on how the illustration itself couls be used.

Zephyros published sixteen issues of the Deschool Primer between 1972 and 1975. It’s best described as a magazine meant for educators (of all stripes) interested in teaching to liberate. It’s strongly representative of the rich Bay Area counter-cultural brew, where humanistic ideology and active counter-power mixed to make interdisciplinary forms aiming to trouble and advance society. Zephyros was affiliated with a collection of highly idiosyncratic Bay Area organizations interested in expanding human knowledge; among them The Whole Earth Catalog, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Farallones Institute, The Peoples Computer Company, Sunflower Source, and the New Games Foundation.

Reading Ours looks forward to sharing “Operation Manual For the Worlds Largest Paper Spaceship” with you along with other items in the Zephyros Universe.

Events

Saturdays, 1:30pm

Stay posted for updates

Image caption: Advertisement in Zephros catalog for Deschool Primer, no. 13, c. 1974