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Anna Banana (born 1940〔 as Anne Lee Long in Victoria, British Columbia) is a Canadian artist known for her performance art, writing and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an "innovator, entrepreneur and critic", and pioneered the artistamp, a postage-stamp-size medium. She has been prominent in the mail art movement since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement’s early history and its second generation.〔 As a publisher, Banana launched ''Vile'' magazine and the "Banana Rag" newsletter; the latter became ''Artistamp News'' in 1996.〔 Banana lives in British Columbia and operates Banana Productions, calling herself the "Top Banana". The color ''International Art Post'' is the sole publication of Banana Productions, with 700 copies produced for each edition. ==Career== Banana attended the University of British Columbia from 1958 to 1963, graduating with an elementary academic teaching certificate. She taught for five years: two in public schools and three in Vancouver’s New School.〔Radical School Reform, Simon & Schuster, 1969.〕 She began her career in Victoria as a fabric artist, where dissatisfaction with the marketing of her work led toward more-public expressions. Banana began her newsletter, the ''Banana Rag'', for her Town Fool project in Victoria in 1971.〔Victor Brand, ''In Numbers; Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955'', 2009 by PPP Editions in association with Andrew Roth Inc.〕 She sent a copy to Vancouver artist Gary Lee Nova, who replied with an image-bank request list providing names, addresses and image requests of contemporary mail artists. This began a forty-year relationship with a worldwide, egalitarian art-communication network. Like many mail artists, she embraced an alter ego which she incorporated into correspondence with Ray Johnson, General Idea and the network.〔 In 1973 Banana moved to San Francisco, California to join mail-art friends known as the Bay Area Dadaists, who produced Neo-Dadaist performances, mail art and publications.〔 She worked as a typesetter at a print shop, where the first issue of her magazine ''Vile'' magazine was printed in 1974. The shop—Speedprint—was a place she told writer Gretchen Wagner, "where it became apparent to me that anyone could be a publisher".〔Gretchen L. Wagner, "Riot on the Page; Thirty Years of Zines by Women", in ''Modern Women; Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art'', 2010〕 Originally envisioned as a place to document and acknowledge network activity, ''Vile'' was a combination of art, poetry, fiction, letters, photos and manipulated advertisements from ''Life'' magazine. It was predominantly a visual publication, examining the flood of images emerging from mass communication.〔 It was also a response to ''File'' magazine’s shift towards mainstream art coverage. Gwen Allen wrote, “''FILE'' would continue to publish the Image Bank image request lists until its Fall 1975 issue, but it would gradually distance itself from the mail art scene, prompting a string of takeoffs, including ''VILE''—started, according to editor Anna Banana, in response to ''FILE''’s growing disdain for mail art’—and later, ''BILE'' and ''SMILE''.”〔Gwen Allen, ''Artists’ Magazines; an Alternate Space for Art'', MIT Press, 2011 〕 Between 1974 and 1981, Banana published seven issues of ''VILE''; editions four, six and seven were edited by her partner, Bill Gaglione. During its run, ''Vile'' explored a wide range of formats and media defining the mail-art genre. Banana cited as influences Dada humor, therapeutic madness and the Bohemianism of the Bay Area during the 1960s and early 1970s. ''Vile''s nihilism fit the punk attitude on the rise in Britain and the United States at the time. After returning to Canada in 1983 Banana published ''About Vile'', a history of the magazine with a mail-art backlog and an account of a 1978 European tour by her and Gaglione (a documented conclusion of the pair's working relationship). That year Banana also organized a "Banana Art" event for the Global Television Network, held at Bridges Restaurant on Granville Island, Vancouver. From 1983 to 1985 Banana worked in the production department of Intermedia Press, where she learned full-color printing (a skill used in her 1988 publication, ''International Art Post''). ''IAP'' featured dry-gummed, pin-hole perforated sheets consisting of full-color stamps designed by artists. The works were financed cooperatively, with participating artists receiving 500 copies of their stamp and Banana Productions retaining the remainder for sales and promotion. ''IAP'' has become an annual publication; the 24th edition was released in October 2011. In 1990 Banana created the ''Artistamp Collector’s Album'', a clothbound limited edition of forty-nine silk-screened ring binders to house the ''IAP'' and the ''Artistamp News (letter) (ASN)'' (begun by Banana in 1991). Eight issues of ''ASN'' were published. Artist profiles, stamp news, new editions and several "tipped-in" (inserted and affixed as individual sheets, as opposed to being bound together in folded signatures) color stamps were featured in each issue. Banana then returned to general mail-art topics in the ''Banana Rag''; edition 41 was published in September 2011. In 1991 Banana created a miniature book and stamp sheet, ''20 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana'', as the catalogue for her twenty-year retrospective at the grunt gallery in Vancouver. Deluxe editions of the book feature stamps tipped-in over the black-and-white illustrations. She has received a number of grants from the Canada Council between 1975 and 2009. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Anna Banana」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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