Tense is a never-realized publication, written and composed by artist Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, which has only now has been released in a very limited run.
The book accompanies their exhibition ‘Top Stories’, which takes a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn. It was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers at the time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.
During the summer of 1954, a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary met in New York. The focus of the U.S. Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency was isues of HORROR and CRIME, published by the Entertaining Comics Groupl. EC Publisher, Wililam Gaines, was the center of attention at the three-day hearing. Mr. Gaines famously defended a CRIME cover image showing an axe-severed woman's head, by saying it was in good taste...for a horror comic.
When we were talking about how to approach the Top Stories invitiateion in the 1980s we decided on a noir narrative usiing visual quotes from Entertaining Comics (EC to set the scene, establish the mood, and identify the characters. To map the script, we narrowed our choices to images from issues of CRIME and HORROR. The raw graphic force of the images are most visibke when seen in black and white. We thank the artists and William Gaines for the privilege of reproducing fragments of their work.
—Jerry Kearns and Lucy Lippard, Feb 2021.
Softcover, 40 pages, ills colour & bw, 13 x 21 cm, English.
*note: second printing is now the silver & black cover!