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the current condition and potential of the artist’s magazine, surveying the art worlds it has created and then superseded; the commercial media forms it has critically appropriated, intervened in, or subverted; the alternative DIY cultures it has brought into being; and the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
In 2006 London’s famous Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press formed an editorial alliance to produce a new series of books. Documents of Contemporary Art combines several features that do not often coincide in publishing: affordable paperback prices, good design, and impeccable editorial content. Each volume in the series is a definitive anthology on a particular theme, practice, or concern that is of central significance to contemporary visual culture. The artists and writers included in these books, like the guest editors who conceive them, represent the diversity of perspectives, generations, and voices defining art today.