This weekend La Superette pops up again for two fun filled days of holiday shopping, music, and art!  La Superette will open this Friday December 4th for musical performances (no shopping) and will continue on Saturday December 5th from noon-8pm and Sunday December 6th from noon-6pm at 210 Front St. New York, NY 10038 in the South Street Seaport.  It looks like two art mag / art zines will be sold this year: Threads and How to Stay Warm in the Winter.  Secret Project Robot will have an art installation in the space and I will be selling goods from Edible Winter: Snowballs, Walnuts, Icicles, Coal, and Pine Cones next to some rad new friends from Supercore who will be selling chili and cider.  So stop by for some artist made presents, great music, and delicious food this weekend!

The annual Giftland gift sale at Printed Matter begins this weekend.  Originally conceived in the 1980s by CoLab/Collaborative Projects,  this years event will be curated by Denise Kumpferschmidt and Joshua Smith of Apartment Show.  You can shop for goods beginning this Friday December 4th through December 24th.  The Holiday Party is on Saturday December 19th from 5-7pm.  Check the Printed Matter website for a list of participating artists.

So to make this fair we’ll do it like this: 9:30am at attla boardstore, 1 little castle street, truro, cornwall the limited number of copies that we have of the brand new “Volcomics #2″ will be available for free. It’s going to have to be a first come first served kind of thing so may I suggest you set your alarm clocks as it looks SICK!

PLUS: We have a super-limited number of Volcom official “Volcomics” art series tee’s available from Saturday morning too!

I will return with photographs and stories of art magazines and books abroad.  I hope to visit Les Archives de la Presse, Librarie Florence Loewy, Librarie des Archives…

Today – a brief survey of a few art/culture magazines.

The following websites are a good introduction to the respective publications, but of course there’s no substitute for the physical, printed object itself.  And, because most of these magazines are produced with extensive attention to detail, and printed on high quality material, it’s worth making a trip to your local bookstore to browse them.

BOMB | interviews between artists, new portfolios

http://www.bombsite.com/

Corduroy | ‘part gallery space and part storybook’

http://www.corduroymag.com/issues/current-issue

Photoworks | ‘celebrate photography and encourage critical debate’

http://www.photoworksuk.org/about/default.asp

FOAM | international photography magazine

http://www.foammagazine.nl/index.php?pageId=2

Beautiful Decay | ‘a go-to, first exposure sourcebook’

http://beautifuldecay.com/mission/

Angie Taylor is the European Creative Director of GridIron Software

Last week I spoke about the Punk revolution in the UK and how inspiring it was to young people like me. Today I’ll talk about some of the great designers who emerged from that scene. I’ll start by looking at two of the key players who defined the style of the Punk Rock movement in the UK. 

There’s not one person responsible for the style of Punk, it was a coming together of minds and styles. A collective, group activity gained momentum, and as a result, the various styles of the people involved merged into an established fashion. But the pivotal people were the ones who recognized the elements that would excite and brought them together with style, panache and, of course an eye for design.

The punk movement grew out of a basic disillusionment, with the establishment, the music scene, fashion, the media. What better way to show your dissatisfaction than to tear it all up and start again? That’s exactly what punks did. Essays on design refer to this as “Deconstruction”. This wasn’t a new concept, post-modern art movements like the Dadaists and, ironically, the Constructivists used techniques of disassembly and reassembly to shake up the status quo and embrace a new way of looking at things.

In New York in the early seventies, bands like the New York Dolls would dress up in womens clothes in an attempt to shock away the apathy that existed in the music scene. Richard Hell was the one who became a blueprint for thousands of young punks, defining the spikey hair and ripped t-shirt look before anyone else. But it was really Vivienne Westwood who took the look and developed it into a recognizable style. Now one of our top designers, she started off with a small clothes shop on the Kings Road in London. She and Malcolm McClaren owned “Let it Rock”, a shop selling biker gear and teddy boy clothes. In 1974 this was revamped and renamed SEX, catering to the S&M scene and positioning itself nicely to shock the nation and take punk rock to the headlines.

The Sex Pistols hung out in the shop and that’s where the whole thing took off, the band formed, McClaren became the manager, and Vivienne designed clothes for them under the label, “Seditionaries” – it was a symbiotic relationship. At Art School Malcolm McClaren metJamie Reid, a political activist and Situationist who was producing a radical magazine called Suburban Press. He used a cut and paste style of graphics in this magazine, and it was then that he defined his trade-mark ransom-note lettering that was made famous by the Sex Pistols first album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols“.

In the next installment we’ll take a look at the designers who emerged from, or were directly influenced by the Punk movement. 

Patti Smith - Smells Like Teen Spirit, listen free on Last FM

Herbert Pfostl, the buyer for The New Museum Store, has just started a blog on their site called Bookmark.  Each entry contains an image and short synopsis of a book.  I’m looking forward to some posts about art magazines, as they have a good collection for sale.  You can also sign up for The Hotlist, a monthly email with details about new publications and media in the store.

Angie Taylor - Art School ID card

I was asked on Twitter to write a blog about the early days of Punk in the UK and it’s influence on the world of design. I, probably more than most, am influenced strongly by the punk movement that started in the seventies in New York and London. I was 12 when it all started to kick off in the UK with the Sex Pistols and their entourage, the Bromley Contingent causing joyful havoc in the UK media.

Before the punk scene things had become very sterile and safe. Politically, the UK was in a mess with regular strikes and power cuts disrupting everyday life. The music scene was drowning in boring “prog rock” and endless, indulgent guitar solos. Something had to give!

Then along came the idea that you didn’t have to put up with what you were being spoon-fed. The disillusioned youth of Great Britain realized they could make their own music, art, magazines and fashion. Using the influence of the New York underground music scene (Patti Smith, The New York Dolls, Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground, The Ramones) the kids of the UK took it upon themselves to create a whole new genre and to revolutionize a complete culture in a way that had never been done before (or has ever been done since).

As you can imagine, this was a really exciting time for a teenager to grow up. It wasn’t really till 1977 that I got hooked into the Punk scene. I loved it! Before then I was an awkward, funny-looking, scruffy, Tom-boyish kid with glasses who didn’t really fit in. I survived at school by being the class clown, and that way avoided any physical abuse from my fellow classmates, but I was regularly ridiculed for being “the outsider”. Suddenly with the Punk scene I could belong! It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the movement that purported to be all about being different, and not caring what other folks thought, became a lifeline of acceptance to kids who didn’t fit in anywhere else. It wasn’t that we wanted to be different, and didn’t care, it’s that we cared and desperately wanted to belong to anyone who’d have us. It’s human nature to want to feel like part of a gang, or a movement.

Anyway, inevitably, the vultures descended, and what started as a revolutionary, do-it-yourself, creative movement turned into just yet another fashion. Mainstream media quickly gobbled it up and spat it out as a kind of bastardized version of what it one was, and things have never been quite the same again.

However, the marks and influences of the punk movement are still alive and kicking today. Next week I’ll look at some of the deigns of today that were influenced by this movement.

Angie’s Punk shuffle Track of the day – Anarchy in the UK – The Sex Pistols, listen free on Last FM

Look how happy Kenzie is! Get your copy of Locksmith Project online now.

WATCH MARTA’S SEX TAPE on BUTACA.TV FOR ONLY $1.99

ART, SEX and CINEMA!
Excellent Interview with Anthony Rivero Stabley (Writer-Director of Marta’s Sex Tape) from Canada’s Toro Magazine penned by Louise Bak.

For more details about this Pop Art Film visit… Super Grande Films.
You can watch Marta’s Sex Tape for $1.99 on Butaca.TV

Art magazines operate in a sphere of journalism that knows none of the rules of logic, grammar, coherence or entertainment value that generally prevail in the world of the published. To get published in an art magazine you need to follow criteria that are almost the total opposite of what you need to write for general publications. Anything that might interest or enlighten the general reader – or any reader – is to be ruthlessly avoided.

This is why there is almost no crossover between such magazines and the mainstream press. But, amazingly, there has in recent years been a feeding frenzy in the bizarre media subculture of art magazines. The vogue for art has apparently convinced many publishing titans that there’s money to be had in art fairs. What with all the idiots who’ve been buying art (until recently that is), there must surely be a market for an idiot’s art magazine?

ArtReview, for example, having gone through innumerable changes of editor and style, now features big celebrity interviews that treat artists as if they were not so much gods as something much greater than gods – say, reality television stars. There’s also one, I believe, called Art World (ugh) while Modern Painters has intensified what was always a fairly celebrity-struck gloss.

Other magazines have adapted to the frenzied popularity of art without entirely losing their souls. Frieze has obviously had a massive boost since its publishers founded an art fair. This is one that I actually wrote for. I’ve recently been reading it again – and have been amused by its funny pedantry. A piece I was looking at last night cited the old children’s television programme Why Don’t You? and some intern had actually checked the dates the series ran. Who knew it was on the air until 1995? And who says you learn nothing from art magazines?

I’m relieved that I haven’t needed to fork out more than I have on magazines during a period of intense contemporary art research. Google goes a long way. One journal I have enjoyed looking at, however, is Afterall. This magazine is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary and I was pleasantly surprised that it kept me diverted during a train journey yesterday.

Afterall is the very opposite of the slick, ugly new breed of mags that try to feed off art’s perceived glamour. It publishes essays rather than interviews, and the essays do try to explore real ideas. I found an article on the return of the “spiritual” in art pertinent and provocative. It pointed out something I hadn’t quite noticed, that the vogue for the gothic in art so visible in a show like Mythologies at Haunch of Venison is related to the anti-Darwinian religious resurgence in society. Afterall seems aware that art exists within a larger world. That’s much more worthwhile than offering pathetic secondary access to a glamorous “art world” that doesn’t exist.

Jonathan Jones
Guardian

garage door left open

Originally uploaded by micahnova

I want an art magazine that I can enjoy thoroughly. The at/design/illustration magazines at the bookstore just all miss the mark. For awhile I liked Art Papers, but it isn’t quite the thing I’m looking for. Is there an art magazine out there that does something other than declare itself to be art, write hideous articles, or look like one continuous magazine advertisement? I’m looking for you, wherever you are. The art magazine I’m envisioning is well designed, has a love for collections of things, is not text-heavy, contains more artist interviews then self-indulgent critiques, and doesn’t take itself too seriously (please… if only this last point is realized, I’ll be a loyal subscriber in no time flat). I want an art magazine that I can flip through and then feel inspired to sit down and make some art myself… and it would be nice if it were thick enough to display on a bookshelf or seriously swat a fly with. If you know about this publication and are holding out on me, please disclose!

I picked up an old copy of Artforum today and noticed the pages inside were ripped and chewed. Then I remembered it was part of a performance art piece done in collaboration with my studio assistants in late 2007, I believe. Here’s a shot of the piece, entitled Untitled (Artforum), in process:

.

Now a shot of my assistants during the performance:

That’s Cream on the left and Rex on the right. They are quite skilled and dedicated collaborators. I was pleased with their work.