Introduction: Art Periodicals Today, Historically Considered

INTRODUCTION: ART PERIODICALS TODAY, HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED OCTAVIAN EŞANU AND ANGELA HARUTYUNYAN Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment?” was not only a call to exercise reason, but also to have the courage to do so publicly. It was no accident, then, that Kant’s Sapere aude! (“Dare to be wise!” or “Dare to know!”) appeared in the pages of the Berlin periodical Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784.1 Periodical print culture is the true product of the modern age, born out of an urgent need to advance the idea of freedom and its universal application. Print periodicals turned into a battleground where words replaced swords and where skirmishes were fought over a wide range of issues and obstacles that were thought to hinder the way of universal progress toward greater autonomy and justice. The term periodical—which implies duration and iteration, but also pauses, or “writing in time” as in the German Zeitschrift —is suggestive of a temporality punctuated by short intervals during which the conditions of autonomy of the modern subject are renegotiated. Art periodical magazines, journals, reviews, and quarterlies yield to the same historical necessity of bringing artistic, cultural, social, 1 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” Berlin Monthly (December 1784). Translating the phrase from Horace, Kant deployed sapere aude as his motto for the Enlightenment. © 2016 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00155 3 ARTMARGINS 5:3 4 and political phenomena to public light, of questioning the obvious, and of keeping power in check. Art periodicals were born out of the contradictions of capitalism and the constant urge to revolutionize the means of production. Historically, they have reflected the parallel rise of various spheres of social activity (politics, economics, education, health care, news writing) as separate and self-governed entities, and in particular the advent of the institution of art as an autonomous sphere of bourgeois society. It is within this social context that art periodicals lent themselves to “using one’s own reason,” as Kant advised—specifically in relation to works of art, products of culture, and to the artist’s social and political position. Since the self-published pamphlets of the 18th century—with limited circulation and readership among philosophes, encyclopédistes, and other érudits discussing the paintings displayed at the Paris Salon—the art bulletin, magazine, and journal have come a long way, evolving into a complex industry with its distinct media, critical and disciplinary methods, audiences, and market niches. Industrial capitalism, and the separation of art as a distinct sphere governed by its own rules and mores, led to an explosion of the cultural periodical press in the 19th century. Publications dedicated themselves to reporting on the beaux arts as an element of the bourgeois way of living, or to challenging this conception of art within the context of emerging theories of emancipation and revolutionary historical transformation, understood in terms of class struggle. If the 19th-century art periodical can be perceived, more or less, as a passive medium used to disseminate knowledge about art or to question art’s social role, the early 20th-century art magazines and journals problematized the very apparatus of periodical publishing. It is to the historical avant-gardes that progressive contemporary art periodicals owe their true spirit of critique and negation. The avant-garde ethos and its revolutionary thrust positioned journals, magazines, and other periodical publications as one means of production amongst others, a means that had to be seized, revolutionized, and handed over to its true producer: the working class. And it is in this context that the avantgarde movements such as Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism called into question not only the content but also—and even more forcefully—the medium itself, in its layout, design, and typography, treating these elements as signifiers of radical social rupture. The struggle over ownership of the means of production and the 3 A R T P E R I O D I C A L S T O D AY, H I S T O R I C A L LY C O N S I D E R E D A large bibliography has focused on the 20th-century art periodicals. Some of these references include: Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); Dawn Ades, ed., Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (Hayward Gallery, January– March 1978; London: Art Council of Great Britain, 1978), exhibition catalog; Andreas Berns, New York Dada Magazines, 1915–1921 (Siegen: Universitätsgesamthochschule des Saarlandes, 1986); Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ed., Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910–1940 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Mark S. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Eric B. White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Charles Forsdick and Andy Stafford, eds., La Revue: The Twentieth-Century Periodical in French (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013); Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Many of the Abstract Expressionist artists did not welcome the blatant instrumentalization of their work for US foreign policy. For a nuanced discussion of the Cold War politics of Abstract Expressionism, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001). | 2 E Ş A N U A N D H A R U T Y U N YA N democratization of culture has remained a pertinent agenda for many art periodicals to this day, although this agenda appears in transformed historical conditions and without any social revolution on the horizon. Over the 20th century, this struggle has manifested itself in different forms in the pages of historical magazines and journals: from Proletkul’t literary and art periodicals mass-publishing workers’ clubs’ poetry and art (encouraging extensive participation in the future of a proletarian culture), to periodicals serving a more narrow vanguard politics of radical social and artistic form in the 1920s, to journals engaged in the revolution of the unconscious, or those bringing before the public the constant wrangling over meaning and interpretation in the internationalist context of the Popular Front, antifascism, and the resistance to cultural Stalinism in the 1930s. 2 In the aftermath of the Second World War, art periodicals, including ARTnews and Art Digest in the USA, as well as Iskusstvo and Dekorativnoe iskusstvo in the USSR, fought the Cold War on different fronts. On one side of the Iron Curtain, such periodicals, often covertly aided by the CIA and State Department, promoted individual freedom and US-style liberal democracy as prescribed by art critics invested in Abstract Expressionism3; on the other side, they propagated a collective conception of freedom cast in concrete or “realistically” illustrated by painters and sculptors all over the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe. Alternatively, within a wider context and the dynamics of anti-colonialism, progressive 5 ARTMARGINS 5:3 6 art and literary periodicals became weapons in the hands of the international non-aligned movement against imperialism: e.g., see in the current issue the Artist Project dedicated to Lotus magazine, the literary mouthpiece of the Association of Afro-Asian Writers. Over the last quarter of the 20th century, and into the 21st, the widening field of art periodicals has been riven by internal contradictions and Oedipal conflicts, from resistance to methodological and political authority to contestations over the right to exercise critique or interpret art works for an increasingly fragmented public. Art magazines and journals have rushed to occupy particular positions (local, national, global, historical, theoretical, cultural, political, technological, economic) from which to negate or affirm, critique or serve the expanding system of contemporary art or particular interests within the art world. In the meantime, the “invisible” hand of the market has also taken up a number of invisible editorial functions. Readers have had to learn a new set of skills—namely, how to distinguish between artistic practice and advertising, exhibition reviews, and commercial gallery ads. The art periodical—in its multiple hypostases, from the somber journal of aesthetics to the glamorous contemporary art magazine— has been increasingly affected, if not colonized wholesale, by the neoliberal consumer spectacle whereby private universities and their publishing houses, commercial art galleries, auction houses, museums, art fairs, and various other products—whose brands are often shepherded by entire public relations departments—compete for visibility with works of art or critical thought. What this schematic historical overview means to stress is that periodical art publishing is a venture that cannot be detached from the totality of economic, political, and social processes that characterize an epoch. In this special issue of ARTMargins dedicated to art periodicals, we ask: What is the function of the art periodical today, historically conceived along the outlines sketched above? If we live in a globalized world where the only progress is the progressive disintegration of history and politics, can we still conceive of the function of the art periodical in terms of critique, understood as a procedure that points at and questions the limits of truth, knowledge, and representation? Are art periodicals today mere handmaidens to the financial markets, to new cultural elites, or to a celebratory circle of global artists, curators, critics, and dealers; or are they still capable of rediscovering that critical Covers of art periodicals participating in the Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today conference (AUB Art Galleries, Beirut, 2014). Image constructed by Octavian Eşanu. ARTMARGINS 5:3 8 and disinterested attitude vested in the very first periodicals during the Enlightenment? Are there alternative ways to conceive of the role of art periodicals today? In addressing these questions, this ARTMargins Special Issue takes as its point of departure a conference organized in 2014 at the American University of Beirut, titled Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today. The organizers of the conference deployed the metaphor of “critical machines” to conceptualize the role played by art periodicals in contemporary art and culture. In the language of modern labor processes and manufacturing equipment, a “critical machine” is a piece of equipment that is programmed to monitor and report on other machines in the production chain. Critical machines are deployed as preventive maintenance measures to guard against equipment malfunctioning and disruptions in the flow of production. Today, art journals, art magazines, newsletters, websites, and blogs can be considered metaphorically as “critical machines” that monitor artists and their interactions with the cultural field. These periodicals often serve a gatekeeping function, endorsing and determining what counts as “good” or legitimate art, or criticizing and even excluding “foreign bodies” or experiences and practices that might disrupt and destabilize the established equilibrium in the contemporary art system. The most explicit link to the conference appears in the form of an edited and abridged roundtable discussion, with an introduction by Octavian Eşanu. The conference brought together the editors of various art magazines, gazettes, and journals to discuss the state of art periodicals today, to share their critical aspirations, to identify and describe their readership, and to touch upon more sensitive issues of economics and politics. The organizers invited the editors of publications as diverse as e-flux and Gahnama-e-Hunar, October, Mada Masr, Cabinet, Chto Delat, ArtLeaks, and Arteria, among others. The Q&A at the end of Eşanu’s introduction provides a glimpse of the conversations that took place during the conference, addressing persisting contradictions, antagonisms, affinities, and sympathies. Gwen Allen’s contribution, “Art Periodicals and Contemporary Art Worlds,” examines the Artforum of the early 1960s and the October of the mid-1970s to discuss some of the shifts that were taking place in the US art scene at the time. The two publications were important sites for catalyzing art world debates along distinct axes: the role of criticism in the public sphere, economic interests of the art market versus criti- A R T P E R I O D I C A L S T O D AY, H I S T O R I C A L LY C O N S I D E R E D | E Ş A N U A N D H A R U T Y U N YA N cal detachment, formalism versus anti-Greenbergian methodology. These debates outlined and influenced the ways in which contemporary art production was received and interpreted in the US art world. Allen places the discussion of Art Forum and October within the context of Arthur Danto’s 1964 text “The Artworld” and Jürgen Habermas’s theorization of the role of criticism in the early days of the bourgeois public sphere, as well as the birth of the media and spectacle society as precursors to our contemporary global condition. Ultimately, Allen argues, if Artforum and October began by creating counterpublics, they both ended up shaping influential mainstream discourses: the first for the benefit of the art market, the second in academia. Catherine Hansen’s article on the role of the rubric as an organizational and aesthetic device in Surrealist art periodicals since 1924 provides a glimpse into a surprisingly rich international network of contemporary Surrealist groups that keep the transgressive legacy of Bretonian Surrealism alive in today’s more cynical and less revolutionary world. The rubric, in Hansen’s view, is not merely a vessel for poetic content, but an implementation of Surrealism’s “poetics of objectivation” and an occasion for collective action. Within the structure of this special issue, Hansen’s contribution discusses a model of publishing, the Surrealist rubric, that presents an alternative to other, more frequently encountered models in contemporary art and its mainstream publishing apparatus. We also present, in the Artist Project section, curator and writer Nida Ghouse’s conceptual engagement with the trilingual literary publication Lotus (1968–early 1990s). This literary quarterly of the AfroAsian Writers’ Association, funded by the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the GDR—with editorial offices in Cairo, Beirut, and Tunis—presented an exemplary project of third-world nonaligned internationalism, where culture itself was seen as a viable weapon against imperialism. Entangled in the complex web of Cold War politics, the periodical slowly but surely disintegrated with the end of that era during the 1990s. Through a method of deduction and selection, Ghouse juxtaposes visual, indexical, and textual elements from Lotus to hint at ruptures, erasures, and discontinuities between our present and the historical context that enabled the publication of the journal. The Document section presents a 1975 editorial from the Slovenian journal Problemi–Razprave (Problems–Debates). Titled “Umetnost, družba/tekst” (Art, Society/Text), the essay was published 9 ARTMARGINS 5:3 anonymously, but revealed the signature of the publication’s editorial board at the same time, comprising a number of the representatives of the school of Yugoslav poststructuralism and psychoanalysis: Mladen Dolar, Danijel Levski, Jure Mikuž, Rastko Močnik, and Slavoj Žižek. Translated from Slovene by Vid Simoniti, edited by Samo Tomšić, and introduced by Nikola Dedić, the essay offers a polemic against the ideological mask of the bourgeois notion of high art, calling instead for a materialist critique of art and culture informed by poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. The text points at the ways in which editorial voices in art and culture periodicals, when tendentious and partisan, have the potential not only to reflect on the unfolding of events and address existing publics, but to change the very context in which they operate—be that context social and political, or artistic and theoretical. Kant saw Enlightenment in terms of an emergence—“man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage,” where nonage stood for “the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance.”4 Today, entirely different things tend to be addressed as “emerging”: markets, economies, companies, artists, curators. In this overall nonage of greed and self-interest—disguised as “limitless growth” and “profitability”—art periodicals are often assigned special roles. Small and independent art journals or blogs grow more aware of the extent to which they are conditioned to serve neoliberal “emergence,” often functioning as promotional mouthpieces within a global art market driven by perpetual production and reproduction: of biennial and art-fair reviews, artist profiles, or “top 10” lists of the best-selling or fastest emerging artists, critics, and curators. Perhaps a historical consideration of the critical role of art periodicals can help to reconceive them as “critical machines,” as apparatuses that can be stopped, started, monitored, adjusted, and transformed in the radical spirit of past historical ruptures. 10 4 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment,” trans. Peter Gay, in The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 384.