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Even back then Pedro was in very fragile health. His eyesight was rapidly deteriorating, and he was going in for kidney dialysis treatments several days a week. At one point he told us about the needle they used and said, "When I saw that thing I thought I was gonna be the newest member of Nine Inch Nails!" Even as his eyes went, his brain never stopped churning out all manner of fantastic wordplay. His liner notes for Funkadelic were not just how he wrote, but often how he spoke. After transcribing our interview with him, we went down to his little room in Hyde Park and read the whole thing back to him because it would have been too hard for him to read a printed transcript. Always attentive to detail, he would stop us and make sure we were writing things accurately based on how he said them. At one point we got to his utterance of the word "hungry" and Pedro asked, "How did you spell that?" one of us said, "The usual way. h-u-n-g-r-y." Pedro corrected us. "No, no, no. It's HONGRY. With an 'o'!"
He had many questions about the book we were making and how it would be printed and designed. He wanted to know how large the type would be and when we told him probably 9 or 10 point, he insisted it could be made smaller. As with his album cover art, the details should be crammed in, whether he could still read them or not. He grilled us on the margins too. If you've held a Temporary Services book or booklet, you know we are not generous with our margins to begin with, but Pedro was so much worse. If you check out Garrick Gott's design of that book, you'll see that the margins are up to Pedro's exacting standards. There's no holding the book without covering the text with your thumbs.
Pedro had all kinds of surprising opinions. One was that an album cover tons of people hate was one of his favorites. He loved the art for Technical Ecstasy by Black Sabbath. And of course he did. It was two robots about to fuck each other while riding on adjacent escalators.
Pedro Bell was one of those people we never could have guessed we would have had the opportunity to spend so much time with. He gave us all so much wonderful art and writing. If you don't own Funkadelic records with his work, they are some of the very best art you can live with and will provide you with many hours of visual satisfaction before you even take a moment to listen to all of that incredible music.
Printed Matter generously agreed to let us distribute the PDF of Group Work for free. This book has been out of print for years and we are thrilled to be able to share it again—particularly with those who are thinking about or already working in groups and might value its focus on collaboration, generated from the voices of practitioners rather than outside observers.
This publication provides a multitude of perspectives on the theme of Group Work by practitioners of artistic group practice from the 1960s to the present. It presents interviews with Canadian collective General Idea, Chicago collective Haha, the Dutch band The Ex, the Vienna-based WochenKlausur, the Croatian artist group What, How & for Whom (WHW), Funkadelic album designer Pedro Bell, and Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), along with essays on The Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (better known as Jane) and the anarchist guerrilla street theater group The Diggers. A list of words used to describe group practices and a working list of hundreds of collectives from the last four decades rounds out the publication.
Please share it widely and if you teach, consider using it with your students.
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