MALONEY, Martin. Materialization by Individual Occupation (Five Days and Five Nights).

(Brussels, Belgium): galerie MTL, [1971].   First edition.  Softcover.  14cm by 11cm.  [28]-pages.  Published in an edition of 500 copies in the framework of Maloney’s one man show at the MTL gallery in Brussels where Maloney locked himself for five days and five nights in the gallery to work on this resulting booklet of poetic statements. The conventional presentation of objects in a gallery made room for the direct communication of ideas in print.  Today you must scrape the bottom to find literature mentioning the name Martin Maloney  and even then you will find only loose fragments and faint traces of an oeuvre. However, this American artist once was amongst the founders of conceptual art. He had close contacts with the, now classical, conceptual artists and took part in a number of key exhibitions in the late sixties and early seventies. During this period he was represented by the top galleries of the avant garde , such as Seth Siegelaub in New York, Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and Art & Project in Amsterdam. But the man did not refrain from criticizing the art establishment and his fellow artists , and even used criticism explicitly as the starting point for a number of postcard sized ” language pieces ” (”Designation Deposits” This unruly and polemical art practice, coupled with his radical views and his particular temperament , isolated the artist more and more from the artistic context .  Moreover, he himself destroyed much of his own work . All this results in his absence from the major, canonizing, publications since the seventies devoted to conceptual art. By putting his radical critique in relation to the art world down on paper, Martin Maloney literally wrote himself out of art history.  This a very good copy in printed wrappers, small stain to cover.