UbuWeb

UbuWeb is a total triumph.......get involved!

UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. 

All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). 

UbuWeb is completely free.

It's amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the end, we're giving to all. UbuWeb is as much about the legal and social ramifications of its self-created distribution and archiving system as it is about the content hosted on the site. In a sense, the content takes care of itself; but keeping it up there has proved to be a trickier proposition. The socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we're still going strong. We're lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket bandwidth, we've consented to be objects of university research in the ideology and practice of radical distribution. 

But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it. Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We don't touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham,Julian Schnabel’s country music, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the diaries of John Lennon, the rants of Karen Finley, and pop songs by Joseph Beuys—all of which was originally put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly. 

However the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video, sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say, painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art history, one based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, or market-based, center. Few people, for example, know that Richard Serra makes videos. Whilst visiting his recent retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was no sign of TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973) or BOOMERANG (1974), both being well-visited resources on UbuWeb. Similarly, Salvador Dalí’s obscure video,IMPRESSIONS DE LA HAUTE MONGOLIE—HOMMAGE Á RAYMOND ROUSSEL from the mid-70s can be viewed. Outside of UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), it’s the only other film he completed in his lifetime. While you won’t find reproductions of Dalí’s paintings on UbuWeb, you will find a 1967 recording of an advertisement he made for a bank.

(Image is a clip from 'Equation: X + X = O  (1936)')