Artists' Magazines

Magazine publishing is an exercise in ephemerality andtransience; each issue goes out
in the world only to be rendered obsolete by the next. To publish a magazine is to enter into a
heightened relationship with the present moment. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an
important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the
dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced,
hand-editioned pages, using the ephemeralityand the materiality of the magazine to challenge the
conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, GwenAllen looks at the most
important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive,
illustrated directory of hundredsof others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen
(1965--1971),a multimedia magazine in a box -- issues included Super-8 films,flexi-disc records,
critical writings, artists' postage stamps, andcollectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which
expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews
and artist-designed contributions; Art-Rite (1973-1978), an irreverent zine with a disposable,
newsprint format; Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for
the Pictures generation; 0 to 9 (1967--1969), a mimeographed poetry magazine founded by Vito Acconci
and Bernadette Meyer; FILE (1972--1989), founded by the Canadian collective General Idea, its cover
design a sly parody of Life magazine; and Interfunktionen (1968--1975), founded to protest the
conservative curatorial strategies ofDocumenta. These and the other magazines Allen examines
expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their
homemade, DIY quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the
formalist orthodoxy of the day. (A work by John Baldessari from the late 1960s shows a photograph of
Artforum, captioned "THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT.") Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color
illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored
medium.