POINT-BLANK 1. 1972.

Berkeley: Point-Blank!, 1972

21 x 15cm, 100pp plus pictorial cover. First edition of this proto-situ American journal with articles (all collectively published and without any claim to copyright as was the usual practice amongst most proto-situ groups) including ‘Strange Defeat: The Chilean Revolution, 1973’, ‘Self management and the Spanish revolution’, ‘The show is over – theses on the end of the Cold War’, ‘Of sexual poverty’ and many more. Published by the most prominent of the Berkeley IS inspired groups (Ford indicates that there were around five such active groups), Point Blank obtained some notoriety by fly-posting the local university area with posters giving out the elected mayor’s number and with provocative statements such as ‘Did you ever feel like killing your boss?’. We believe only one number of this journal was ever published and this example is in near fine condition.

The wrappers have appropriated and detourned imagery on them – a pointing gun (from Dick Tracy) is on the front cover aiming point blank at the reader and on the back a Marvel comic frame of Thor has the speech bubble text: ‘To create a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any given form, but produces his totality; where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming!’ above the slogan ‘for a situationist revolution’. Very scarce.