Internal Memorandum

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM [ART MAGAZINES IN 1976] JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

Entrance to ‘The Art Press’ exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1976. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I ORIENTATION 'The Art Press': an exhibition on the history of art periodicals at the Victoria & Albert Museum ... an international conference on the art periodical at Sussex University in April 1976 and another at Bologna the following month ... a surge of new art magazines in recent years ... a spate of articles on the new magazines in established art journals ... a display featuring Artforum at The Gallery, London .. a whole issue of Studio International devoted to the subject of art magazines.

A display unit produced by Nicholas Wegner shown at The Gallery, London, in March-April 1976. Wegner, the artist-director of The Gallery, is developing the notion of 'Standard art'. He argues that since art marketed through the gallery

system becomes standardised, this process should be made explicit. The standardisation and packaging of art is carried to greater extremes in art magazines, Wegner's display is based on the premise that the package - the art magazine - has become more impressive as art than most of the art it describes and illustrates. The Artforum display unit - an art gallery’s homage to an art magazine is also a tribute to the fact that in recent years the power of the art magazine to define and legitimise new developments in art has become greater than that of the art gallery and museum. Photo courtesy of N. Wegner. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------There is no doubt that, at the moment, there is an unprecedented interest in the art magazine. A harsh critic might argue that the burgeoning of titles is a forced growth caused by the frustrations of too many artists chasing too few galleries and collectors in a period of economic recession. And that the art magazine's current self-obsession indicates that the diseases of narcissism and cannibalism typical of avant-garde art have now spread to the support languages of art. There is some truth in these views But they are not the whole story. All magazines address themselves to readerships which are delimited in some way, either by age, sex, race, subject-matter, locality, income, class, or by combinations of these factors; consequently, all magazines may be described as specialised. Nevertheless, the charge of over-specialisation so often levelled against art magazines is a just one. In size, the audience for an art magazine can extend

from a few hundred to 50,000. It comprises a highly educated readership of cognoscenti located primarily in the urban centres of Europe and North America. The ingrown character of this art world is confirmed by the fact that most advertisements for art magazines appear in the columns of their rivals: they all compete for the same restricted readership. It is clear that the art magazines cannot themselves externalise beyond this narrow readership until the art they feature itself addresses a different audience. However, as the 'Art & Social Purpose' issue of Studio (March/April 1976) confirmed, a significant number of artists are now working to that end. This welcome change of direction came about, in part at least, as a result of a process of self-reflection and self-criticism on the part of artists. An auto-critique by art magazines is therefore a necessary prelude to change.

II THE POWER TO DEFINE ART AND TO MAKE ART HISTORY 'Art has entered the media system', remarks Harold Rosenberg. (1) To the question 'How then do we distinguish between the products of the media and works of art?' he answers: 'The power of defining art is vested in art history, whose physical embodiment is the museum'. The art magazine can also be regarded as a museum - in the sense of Malraux's 'museum without walls' - and given the expansion and growth in influence of the art magazine and art criticism in recent years, its power to define art and to determine art history is greater now than at any time since its emergence in the 18th century. A defining characteristic of magazines is periodicity: they appear regularly month after month and are deposited in public and private libraries and archives

like geological strata whose formation traces the evolution of art. Yet as records magazines must be treated with caution. When we study back issues our reading should always be symptomatic - we should look for absences as well as presences, for exclusions as well as inclusions. Such a reading of Studio International's issue on the theme of contemporary Italian art, for example, immediately reveals the absence of De Chirico (the vehement anti-modernist) and thereby clarifies the pre-suppositions 'modernism' and 'avant-garde' underlying the construction of that issue. (Modernism has been attacked in the pages of Studio International and yet its ideology continues to dominate the magazine: unfashionable art by none and anti-modernists are repressed; no explicit discussion of post-modernism has yet taken place). Clearly, the art featured in art magazines is only a part of the whole, but as far as future historians are concerned the art which goes unrecorded and uncollected might just as well have never existed.

Promotional advert that appeared in Art and Artists magazine. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Promotional claim made by Artforum magazine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Promotional claims made by the American magazine Arts Magazine. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John A. Walker seeks to come to terms with the plethora of art magazines. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the self-advertisements of art magazines two claims are made: first, we make art history; and second, we are history. These claims reveal the double character of the human project: we produce, construct history and simultaneously we are part of it. Human beings are, as Marx puts it. 'at the same time the authors and the actors of their own drama'. However, he also reminds us that although 'Men make their

own history ... they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past'. And he advises that ‘the history of humanity must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange'. A research task for the future: trace the development of The Studio from its inception in 1893 to the present day relating changes in content, physical format and editorial style to the social, cultural and economic conditions within which it was produced.

Promotional claim made by Studio International. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AUTHORITATIVE/AUTHORITY Studio International claims to be 'authoritative'. Whence derives this authority? An authoritative judgement or evaluation of anything is that of an expert in the subjectfield in question; therefore an art magazine gains authority from the expertise and specialist knowledge of its contributors and in this way it establishes itself as a standard source of reference. Am I an authority on art magazines? I don't feel like one though I am an avid reader at them, have indexed hundreds and have undertaken research on the history of art periodicals since 1945. Let us assume I am an expert on this topic. Art magazines intersect with history, politics, economics, etc; here my specialist knowledge begins to peter out and I am driven to appropriate the work of others - Marx, Marcuse, Bateson - in the form of quotations to bolster my authority. What this process illustrates is the interdependence of all branches of knowledge, and that the production of knowledge is a shared enterprise, that is, it confirms the social nature of the production of knowledge. Writers generally wish to make their findings widely known, but in our mixed economy system contradictions are bound to occur, for example, between the need of commercial publishers to make a. profit and the need of public libraries to serve the whole community, or between the publisher's need to prevent unauthorised copying and the educationalist's need to provide multiple texts for his students. In our present society it is inevitable that the specialist's knowledge will serve the need of capital. A blatant instance of this is provided by an advertisement for Sotheby's which reads 'Capitalise on Sotheby's expertise; Sotheby's consistently obtain the

highest prices for sellers of works of art. How do we achieve this? Simply by our expertise. The accurate identification of a work of art is one of the most important of the many services we provide, for it ensures that your object will realise its true value ... Your assurance is our expertise - why not capitalise on it?'

Pages from The Collector an Art in America promotional booklet. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------IV MAGAZINE ART: THE CONFLATION OF ART AND THE ART MAGAZINE Analytically three kinds of art magazine can be distinguished:

(A) The magazine which is about art. These are meta-linguistic in character; they consist of writings about art and reproductions of art works. (B) The magazine as graphic art. Any periodical can be regarded as an art work in its own right in the sense that it is a fine example of printing and graphic design. Art magazines of this type are mixed-media, collaborative products; they have temporal and tactile dimensions (they are read sequentially and are touched); they are issued in editions. (C) The magazine as anthology or gallery. The magazine format often serves as a means of presenting examples of other art forms, that is, those which have an existence independent of the magazine itself. For example, literature (fiction, poetry, criticism), photography, and graphic arts such as lithography and etching. If a magazine is used as a vehicle for publishing a set of photographs or prints, then it functions as a kind of portable art gallery. If the prints are individually mounted and displayed, the magazine ceases to exist. In practice most art magazines combine characteristics from each of the above categories. A conflation of all three is particularly likely to occur when an artist or group of artists contributes to an existing magazine or publishes their own journal. During the last decade a number of artists have taken advantage of newspaper and magazine media as a means of disseminating their work. Furthermore the development of photo-textual works has given rise to new magazines which present themselves as art. Although such magazines represent a significant departure from previous practice, the art works they contain can be criticised on

the grounds that they are addressed to the international art world audience, that is, their status is that of INTERNAL MEMOS. However, these magazines demonstrate the possibility of an art periodical, or newspaper, consisting of phototext works addressed to a non-art audience which would appear on news-stands alongside Club International, Woman, Time and Punch. Such a magazine does not exist but certain of its characteristics can be discerned in such disparate publications as Oz, Interview, Private Eye, Spare Rib and Audio Arts: Collective ownership and decision-making. Pertinency and speed of response to events. A critical perspective allied to humour and satire. A sense of urgency and excitement. Variable formats and media (tapes, video, records). Works addressing the real day-to-day problems of the populace (e.g. housing, sexism, racialism, alienation, exploitation, etc). To succeed - in terms of reaching a wide audience and covering its production costs - such a magazine would need to match the appeal of the mass circulation magazines cited earlier. But to achieve this goal without compromising artistic/political integrity is an extremely problematical enterprise, because the pictorial/linguistic codes dominant in our culture are, so it is argued, riddled with bourgeois ideology and therefore the transformation of society which is desired also includes transformation of those very codes upon which communication with a non-specialist audience depends.

In short, the paradoxical demand is that language be transformed by means of language. A classic double-bind. I suggest that the exit from this impasse is as follows: a hammer cannot be used to hammer itself but one hammer can be used to hammer another; therefore by using codes in rotation to perform critiques on each other the ideological hegemony of all codes can be constantly challenged. As Gregory Bateson points out, images present a special problem: because of the absence of the negative in iconic communication, it is necessary to show what one is opposed to before one can show one is opposed to it. (2) For example, to criticise male chauvinist images of women it is necessary to illustrate them before opposing them with other images or with graffiti disfigurements. The danger here, of course, is that in showing them one reinforces the very attitudes one is trying to change. Defiance of existing society includes defiance of its language, argues Adorno, but if the defiance is total then the artist is reduced either to a condition of complete silence or to a condition of noisy gibbering. These responses can have only one signification: total opposition. But they reproduce precisely those characteristics of so much recent avant-garde art, which it was hoped would be superseded. More importantly, the strategy of total opposition leaves the majority

of the populace still subject to the dominant language codes utilised by the mass media. In his recent study of Gramsci, Carl Boggs notes that one of the reasons why vast sectors of the working class were attracted to Fascism rather than Socialism in the 1920s was the failure of the left to develop a 'mass psychology' (Reich) 'that would permit it to "speak the language of the broad masses" with imagination and emotional appeal'. As Wilhelm Reich observed at the time: 'While we presented the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of their emotional being. As Marx would have put it, we left praxis of the subjective factor to the idealists; we acted like mechanistic economistic materialists. (3) These strictures are equally applicable today. A task for the artist is to make politics a pleasure and to examine the politics of pleasure. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------References (1) Harold Rosenberg, ‘Art and its double’, Artworks and Packages, (New York: Dell, 1971), pp. 11-23. (2) Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (London: Paladin, 1973), pp. 113-14. (3) W. Reich, quoted in Gramsci's Marxism, by Carl Boggs (London: Pluto Press, 1976), pp. 56-57. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article first appeared in the British art magazine Studio International, vol 193, no 983, September - October 1976, pp. 113-18. See also my article on the history of modern art periodicals:

http://www.pdfcoke.com/doc/20727899/Art-Periodicals-1945-75 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of many books and articles on contemporary art and mass media. He is also an editorial advisor for the website: "http://www.artdesigncafe.com">www.artdesigncafe.com