Gwen Allen on Artists’ Magazines

Gwen Allen has devoted her time to the impressive undertaking of documenting independent art publications in her new book, Artists’ Magazines (MIT Press, March 2011). Through her comprehensive research, she examines the social and critical underpinnings behind artists’ motives to publish from the 1960s to 1980s, raising awareness of how the printed page provided a vehicle for exchanging ideas outside the traditional gallery space. Highlighting several key publications, the book emphasizes the risks as well as the opportunities created by the pioneering medium. Also included in the appendix, Allen compiled a detailed directory of over 200 examples of magazines, each distinct in their experimental history.

It was a pleasure to learn more about the book from Allen:

What lead to your interest in artists’ publications?

When I was a graduate student, I was using art magazines from the 1960s and 1970s as more traditional, secondary sources in my research. In the process of tracking down articles in old issues of Artforum and other magazines, I began to realize that these publications were not just a means to an end, but fascinating objects in their own right with a history and a materiality that deserved attention.

Very little scholarship exists about the topic and each magazine must have been hard to find. How did you research such a difficult subject?

Through a combination of perseverance, intuition, and luck. I started with better known publications that I had access to–such as Aspen and Avalanche, but I soon realized that these were just the tip of the iceberg, and that there were hundreds of lesser known magazines, many of which seemed to have been completely forgotten, and I began to more systematically try to discover as many of these as I could. I mined the libraries and special collections at the Getty Research Center, the MoMA, and the SFMOMA. I also talked with artists and editors who were publishing magazines during the period, as well as collectors of ephemera from this time.

The pioneering spirit of these publications grew out of artists seeking autonomy from established galleries and the art press, yet this cross-current was not strictly reactionary. How did the printed page provide artists with their own platform to collaborate and discuss work informally in the community?

There are so many different ways in which magazines provide artistic communities with a platform for communication and collaboration. And yet the magazines in my book also reveal the fragmentary and socially constructed nature of these communities themselves. For example, Avalanche is often seen as a vehicle for an alternative art community in SoHo in the 1970s–which it was. And yet the magazine is far from a transparent document of this community, no matter how much we might want to read it this way, but a highly mediated representation. It presents one version of this community, perhaps, but it leaves other equally valid versions out.

Most magazines started as an experiment and an inexpensive medium to circulate ideas. Printed on non-archival papers, the artist-created documents also questioned the commercial aspect of art by celebrating the disposable value of magazines. Since many publications are now re-printed as box sets or sought out as rare and collectable, what purpose do they serve today?

They serve so many different purposes: they certainly foster nostalgic recollections of the past and fuel the accumulation of market value by ephemera of all kinds from this era;  however, they also serve scholarship, and provide critical models for the present. And these various functions are not always mutually exclusive.

The barrier to entry involved with publishing is almost nonexistent with blogs and self-publishing. Do you see a similar interest in developing a conversation among artists through new media?

Yes, definitely–though I think blogs and other online forms of communication provide a very different set of conditions than the printed page for such conversations. I am also interested in the fact that in spite of the plethora of opportunities for self-publishing in a digital age, artists are still turning to printed publications.

Advertisement