The Magazine (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262528665 ISBN 13: 9780262528665

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2016

Synopsis

The artist's magazine as a place where new ideas and forms can be imagined and created, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first.

The multiple platforms of the digital era have not diminished the role of the magazine for artists as an alternative medium and experimental space. Whether printed on paper or electronically generated, the artist's magazine continues to be a place where new ideas and forms can be imagined as well as a significant site of artistic production. Intrinsically collaborative, including readers' active engagement, the magazine is an inherently open form that generates constantly evolving relationships. It was integral to the emergence of art criticism in the Enlightenment period and to the development of artistic dialogues around notions of culture, politics, and the public from the modern era avant-gardes to the present.

This collection contextualizes the current condition and potential of the artist's magazine, surveying the art worlds it has created and then superseded; the commercial media forms it has critically appropriated, intervened in, or subverted; the alternative DIY cultures it has brought into being; and the expanded fields of cultural production, exchange, and distribution it continues to engender. In addition to surveying case studies of transformational magazines from the early 1960s onwards, The Magazine includes a wide-ranging archive of key editorial statements, from eighteenth-century Weimar to twenty-first century Bangkok, Cape Town, and Delhi.

Artists surveyed include
Can Altay, Ei Arakawa, Julieta Aranda, Tania Bruguera, Maurizio Cattelan, Eduardo Costa, Dexter Sinister, Rimma Gerlovina, Valeriy Gerlovin, Robert Heinecken, John Holmstrom, John Knight, Silvia Kolbowski, Lee Lozano, Josephine Meckseper, Clemente Padin, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Seth Price, Raqs Media Collective, Riot Grrrl, Martha Rosler, Sanaa Seif, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Scott Treleaven, Triple Canopy, Anton Vidokle

Writers include
Saul Anton, Stewart Brand, Jack Burnham, Johanna Burton, Thomas Crow, Edit DeAk, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jürgen Habermas, Martina Köppel-Yang, Antje Krause-Wahl, Lucy Lippard, Caolan Madden, Valentina Parisi, Howardena Pindell, Georg Schöllhammer, Nancy Spector, Sally Stein, Reiko Tomii, Jud Yalkut, Vivian Ziherl

About this title

About the Author

Gwen Allen is Associate Professor of History of Art at San Francisco University. She is the author of Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press).

Review

This is a remarkable collection, both capacious and rigorously focused. Through a gratifyingly readable set of texts, Gwen Allen deftly argues for a consideration of the magazine as a key medium for artistic production in contemporary art.

―Suzanne Hudson, Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California

The art world as we know it would not be the same without magazines. This valuable volume, smartly edited by Gwen Allen, brings together a compendium of material from alternative zines as well as more mainstream publications to show how artists and media producers have used magazine pages in striking ways to publicize and politicize images and ideas.

―Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Berkeley

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0262528665
• ISBN 13: 9780262528665
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Allen Gwen