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Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art ReviewAllen's book is a great chronicle of the rise and fall of artists' magazines--among them Aspen, 0 to 9, Avalanche, Art-Rite, FILE, and Real Life--that, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, provided a space for artists to colonize the discourse of the art world, and do so in their own voices. Artists like Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, and Vito Acconci created magazine art where criticism had once been, emphasizing the materiality of language, denying its ability to communicate. (Graham's "Schema," a site-specific instructional piece published in a variety of magazines in the 60s and 70s, is a paramount example; it consisted of a template to be completed by the editor, in accordance with the magazine's typography, design, and layout, producing a new work in each iteration.) They published texts that were oftentimes unresolved, propositional, exploratory--concerned with process, not product; conjecture, not conclusion. Allen, an art historian at San Francisco State University, describes their "articles" as "guerilla tactics that attempted to commandeer the commercial publicity of the magazine by manipulating its form, content, mode of address, and audience."While this suggests a certain measure of calculation, much of what is compelling about these magazines is a product of their messiness, the substitution of passion for professionalism, and the sense--inevitably inflated--of the importance of the present moment. These magazines sought to embody conceptual art's focus on the contingencies of time and space, and the activation rather than supplication of the viewer. For Smithson, the magazine was a site not unlike the Great Salt Lake, the page a material not unlike rock or sand. He described the magazine in his patent geologic vocabulary, as "a circularity that spreads into a map devoid of destinations, but with land masses of print ... and little oceans with right angles." Transforming the magazine into a venue for art was not just an aesthetic strategy, but part of a utopian program. The art historian Benjamin Buchloh, who for a time edited Interfunktionen, voiced the sentiments of many editors and artists: "We were deeply convinced in all earnestness that the elimination of the commodity object from the work of art and the reduction of the work of art to linguistic proposition had a tremendous pedagogical and political potential and an egalitarian democratic implication that would have vast consequences in terms of the collectivization of aesthetic experience."
The world of these magazines can be understood as linked to what historian Anthony Grafton has called an "information regime," the study of which considers "not just the formal content of ideas but the institutions and practices that enabled them to be created and transmitted." By doing so, Allen inevitably holds up a mirror to our own institutions and practices. In the past few decades, the galleries, museums, and magazines against which Avalanche and FILE railed have become expert at incorporating, homogenizing, and commodifying expressions of dissent and difference; ironically, these moves seem to have finally expanded art's public reach (or at least its sphere of consumption). The publication of Artists' Magazines reflects a broader resurgence of interest in the form, due in part to a nostalgia for the deeply felt intellectual communities they represent--and, as Allen recognizes, a concurrent, and paradoxical, fetishization of these magazines as art objects, and as an essential part of the twentieth-century avant-garde canon.
While this process may have drained the artists' magazines of the 60s and 70s of their radical potential, the environment that birthed them is in many ways analogous to our own, and they become newly relevant when considered as precursors to present-day experiments with the latest new media. While we like to think of the Internet as somehow, automatically, birthing such communities, breeding innovation, and spewing forth novel ideas, it tends to only offer the faintest facsimiles. And while we hail the democratic potential of today's information technologies, few artists have figured out how to make compelling work that capitalizes on it. Allen's book clarifies the potential and the limitations of the Internet as a medium for artwork, and the magazines she discusses provide a framework for considering emergent forms of publication. Artists' Magazines affords a view not just of alternative spaces but of alternative futures; they are fecund, unorthodox, genuinely social, and not yet inconceivable.Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art Overview
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