A Lit Match

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Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art is a new book by Gwen Allen which surveys American and European artists’ publications from the '60s to the '80s.

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, and collectible 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 of Documenta. 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.

Looking forward to checking it out. The book is published by The M.I.T. Press; get more info and order from Printed Matter.