SPEAKING

KING THEN TO NOW

ART MAGAZINES TORONTO .5 # 5

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SPEAKING

.5 #5

FORWARD

POINT5 With each publication comes an exploration of an encompassing theme.

This Winter 2018 edition of POINT5 is a collection of interviews with a primary focus on the beginnings of major Canadian art publications.

Through conversation with some of Canada’s top art publication contributors, POINT5 hopes to provide a lens into the creation of a community within a unique cultural landscape. These publications not only forged platforms for the dissemination of art culture but has and will continue to provide a catalyst for the participation in the political climate of its time.

The scope of these interviews are to be considered snapshots of the contributions made towards the establishment of the Canadian publication scene as well as the construction of the Canadian arts community as a whole. While showcasing these individuals, we hope to highlight the fire that was started and still lives within the industry of Canadian art publications.

POINT5 is (in alphabetical order): Taymah Armatrading, Katerine Baggio, Christina Castellano, Jercy David, Kong Cai, Dorothy Chow, Cat Ivy, Natasha Kitts, Joel Lee, Jacq Leigh, Venuri Liyanage, Reece McCrone, Hal October, Janica Olpindo, Haley Parker, Ruth Philips, Julia Rago, Rachel Scrivo, Ramis Taranmum AND Eldon Garnet as Advising Editor. We thank all of our generous interviewees for their contribution.

Design: Kong Cai, Hal October, and Venuri Liyanage ISBN: Created in Toronto, Ontario for OCAD University 2018.

6 22 26 40 46

C MAGAZINE Dyan Marie Richard Rhodes LOLA Catherine Osborne

IMPULSE Judith Doyle & Carolyn White Eldon Garnett

CANADIAN ART Bryne McLaughlin

FILE AA Bronson

54 58 62 68 76

BODY POLITIC Gerald Hannon

CENTERFOLD/ FUSE Clive Robertson

MOMUS Skye Godden

STRIKE Bruce Eves

IMPRESSIONS Issac Applebaum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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C MAGAZINE C Magazine is a Toronto-based contemporary art and criticism periodical which has been devoted to providing a forum for significant ideas in visual art and culture since the first issue printed in December 1983 edited by Richard Rhodes and co-published with Dyan Marie. Each quarterly issue explores explicit themes through criticism, original art, and artists’ projects.

With emphasis on leading edge design and conte¬nt, C Magazine filled the void of Toronto Art criticism that the Canadian Art publishing scene needed.

The magazine’s operations and mailing list previously existed as Impressions, a photo magazine edited at the time of its transition by Issac Applebaum. The first issue of Impressions was printed in Toronto in March 1970 by original editors John Prendergrast and John F. Philips, co-founder of the Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography, Toronto. Subsequent co-editors and editor would include Shin Sugino and Isaac Applebaum, and Applebaum on his own. The magazine aimed to showcase photographers whose work is “too personal to find an automatic commercial market.” by Kong Cai and Natashi Kitts

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What inspired you to create C Mmagazine?

Dyan Marie

I was in Toronto where there were so many things happening, where people were passionate about what they were doing yet there was no coverage, on stories that really spoke about the Toronto scene. There were a handful of critical Canadian publications that were seriously read, but nothing in Toronto. Toronto had been trying to claim its space amongst other cities within publications, so there was a hole to fill. There was Impulse magazine — Eldon Garnet’s magazine at the time, which was awesome — but it didn’t review art. Richard Rhodes was a critic who had edited for Parachute and Vanguard and he wanted to have a critical magazine. I knew how to put things together. It just seemed a like the natural step to start something here. That’s why we did.

Were you working in a studio together?

DM:

At the beginning, we started in a studio I had on the second floor of 30 Duncan Street, which Wused to be part of Queen Street West. At that time, I had the entire floor, the space had been empty for a couple years before we had it. The building was very large and was subdivided. Rick (Richard Rhodes) took over the space within that floor to make C and then I started Cold City gallery next door.

Marie and Buchan in ColdCity

Who was contributing to C Magazine?

DM:

The number of people working on C Magazine changed from time to time. Rick was always the editor and publisher. I came in and contributed to the editorial content while working on the design. I spent a lot of time specifically with advertising design in the early stage. Bill Wood was a contributing editor for a while as well.

There were some people who would come in

30 Duncan Street

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to volunteer. In addition, we also used different people as interns for short periods of time. But mostly, outside of the artists featured, it was Rick, Bill and I contributing to C Magazine.

How did you go about distributing C Magazine?

DM:

We distributed it by ourselves until the point where we hired a distribution company. We actively distributed the magazines to places we really wanted to reach, places like New York, MontrĂŠal, and Vancouver. We would make sure that the magazine was available and relevant in those cities.

We also had a whole slew of interns that came to help during distribution where we boxed the magazines and sent them out.

Where did you find the funding for C Magazine?

DM:

Rick was really good about dealing with the advertisers. Sometimes the major galleries would take a full-page ad where they would use a big image of the work of one of their artists, which would be visually amazing and help pay the bills. There was money from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. We also continuously tried to determine the most economical methods of getting more content into the magazine. However, we never made a living wage and most of the time it was hand to mouth, day by day. Although we did it on a poverty budget, we were excited and proud of what we were doing. We were able to cover our bills and grow into a substantial magazine that has survived to this day.

Was there a concrete structure to what you published and how it was designed?

DM:

There was no concrete structure, we just responded to the needs and current happenings within the community. At the beginning, we had decided what the size of the magazine would be and we worked around the size. But within the magazine’s content itself, we were pretty free to fool around. Because it was an artist project, it was not conceived as anything that had to have a set of consistent, concrete design standards. We made sure to stay on schedule with our deadlines.

We were excellent about maintaining regular publishing dates to upheld our responsibility to the people who advertised and sponsored us in our work, advertising the current shows and events in a timely manner.

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I understand your desire to provide a space for artists with an opportunity to be exposed to the public, could you speak a bit more about this desire?

DM:

I was passionate about providing space and opportunities for artists. It seemed like such an amazing thing to live your life as an artist, to be surrounded by people who are thinking about and making interesting work, to be able to include them in the magazine. To give their work longevity and expose it to a wider audience. It seemed like a real mission. A magazine is an amazing platform for being reflective, to think about what art and community mean, and to put different voices side by side in a close context to create an original identity. Publication is an amazing thing, a possibility.

Since C Magazine was the only Toronto magazine accepting critical and submissions for a periodical, there must have been a lot of them.

DM:

There were submissions but often, like everything else, you would commission people. We encouraged people to submit even though the magazine was small, it was about nurturing the local community. We consciously wanted to spread the opportunity to write for the magazine, always asking people: “Would you like to write about this? Would you like to change? Would you want to make an artist project for this publication?” Rather than waiting for people to come to us, we were busy reaching out to people. If we liked the work and we thought the artist was a good writer we would ask them to be a part of the magazine, open the opportunity for them to develop their ideas. Writing is a process of discovering what it is you’re really thinking about.

Like an artist’s project, it too is a creative process. When you start an issue of a magazine you don’t know how it will end. You have general idea of the content, a general idea of its layout, how many pages but you can never be sure what it will be. Each issue is an opportunity to create something different.

Was there critical feedback from the community?

DM:

People would always be critiquing because the magazine itself was a critical magazine. People would always ask us why we chose one person and not another person — there was always concern about which artist we chose to cover and who we hadn’t. Writers who couldn’t get into a particular issue, who wanted to write for us when we didn’t have the space, or we weren’t

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interested at that particular time, would also complaint. So often, people were unhappy with an issue of the magazine that they were not in. Unfortunately, we couldn’t cover everything and everybody. But looking back, it was heartbreaking that there were people that you didn’t cover or you covered them but you didn’t get it quite right. So you always have certain kinds of regrets that you could have done a better job. But really, you did the best you could. We knew it was the best we could.

Is there anything you wish you could change in C Magazine from back then?

DM:

As I said, there were some people that you just didn’t cover. But really, I have no regrets. It was an amazing time. I think we were able to capture the visual culture in Toronto of that time. We didn’t have a lot of resources, but we did an amazing job with the resources we had with the kind of technology that was out there. It was amazing that people did it at all with the resources available and how busy I was at that time being a young parent.

The first issue of C Magazine was newsprint, and then as the periodical progressed the type of paper and quality changed. What prompted this decision?

DM:

The issues kept getting smaller as the periodical progressed. As you learn what you are doing and what your style and intentions are, you start to make things simpler and finer. Which is what happened, and it was tricky. We kept playing with the format and then fell into what is necessary in terms of standardization for disseminating them in a bookstore or for being able to mail them. I think at one point, we even put the logo “C” at the wrong side so that when you see it in stores or elsewhere, it not immediately recognizable as C Magazine. We learned about all those practice things and we simplified the magazine. But at the start, we just thought that if it looks good and the size looks good that

First issue of C Magazine

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was enough. When I look back at the big issues that used newsprint paper, I think that we should have stayed there because it was fairly inexpensive.

How do you feel C Magazine has changed from how you originally envisioned it?

DM:

Earlier in my work with C Magazine, I busied myself with the concepts with and for artists’ projects. It was something that I focused on, making sure that artists had a direct voice in the magazine. Artists were getting paid to experiment with their ideas and as a designer and an artist myself, I would help them make it real. We would have conversations about their input and sometimes they would give us materials to work with together. That was something that I really enjoyed. The artists were also people that I had worked with before in other aspects, many were personal friends of mine at that time. At that point of time there was a smaller, but very hard-working and personal, spontaneous community who we collaborated with in the process of constructing what they would contribute to the magazine.

As you said, there was a rapid change in technology throughout the magazine process, can you speak to that aspect of your experience a bit more?

DM:

I know it could sounds kind of like the “middle ages”. Well, not exactly, because you would at least be able to use a typewriter. We would send that type to a specialist and they would set it for us on “gallies” — long thin strips. Then we would cut those apart, put wax on the back, and stick them down. If you make a typo, for example, if there was a “r” that shouldn’t be there that needed to be an “i”, you have to take the time to cut out the “i” from extra type, and then with a knife, and wax at the bottom you would have to roll the “i” so that it wouldn’t pull off the page.

It was phenomenally labor intensive, every typo was difficult. When you make anything there are often errors, so you really had to be as careful as you can all the time.

How do you feel about your experience during that time? Were there any difficulties being a woman in the industry?

DM:

Feminism did not have that long of a history at that point of time. I think that was during the first wave of feminism. I felt very comfortable with my role. Looking back now, I think that I was insane because I had a baby and no one else had kids. I was doing the magazine, doing the gallery,

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teaching, making my own work and being a mother. At one point I was just getting really sick. It was just way too much. I was in a hospital for two weeks and we had a meeting in my studio on the day that I got back from the hospital. There was no maternity leave. There was no time to rest. I had a baby and just went back to work. Now when people have a baby they are able to get a year off, but that option was far from anything that I could imagine when I had mine. It was phenomenal. And there wasn’t any support. I remember doing the gallery, bringing the baby in and putting it down in a crib in a quiet part of the studio where people were smoking. There are things that don’t happen now. There wasn’t a lot of consideration for a young mother. Now, a young mother gets more attention. At that point I just thought I could do it all.

How do you feel about political correctness?

DM:

There was just so much good women’s work at that time which we published. But I don’t think we were even aware of it as “women’s work”. It was just excellent work so we published it. It wasn’t politically driven. As a youngster, I was always a feminist. From high school, I was the first girl who took a woodworking course. I just assumed again I could do it all, including being a parent and making magazines. I think it’s wonderful now that people are so much kinder to women who have children. Being a woman, repeatedly, in my lifetime, I was either being underpaid, or being under appreciated for my work. It seems somewhat better now. There is a lot more equality.

Motherhood was a very important, very time consuming, very demanding role. I had many friends who were successful artists who had said they are not having children because they didn’t want anything to intervene with their career.

I have a huge empathy for boys. I have two sons who are grown up and I understand that boys commit suicide more than girls do, boys graduate university less often than girl do, and boys are more likely to be beaten up before the age of fifteen than girls. School has totally turned their resources toward girls rather than boys, empowering girls rather than empowering boys, because of the assumption that boys are really tough and they can just do anything. It is heartbreaking to assume that they are misunderstood just because they are boys, that they are supposed to be happy and supposed to be tough. I think there are a lot of important issues out there that in some ways, being politically incorrect in terms of identity is absolutely important.

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What lead you to the decision to pass the magazine on?

DM:

I think for myself, as much as I had enjoyed it, it was a huge amount of work. I don’t think I would do it again. It is an act of generosity to do a magazine. You are focused on other people’s work, helping their artwork find a place. Meanwhile, I just had a baby. I was doing layout with this little knife, glue, and wax while carrying a baby. It was tough, hairline living, so I decided to move on. Rick kept it up for a long time. At some point, he wanted to work with real artworks rather than art criticism and writing, so he passed it along to others and went to The Power Plant and became a curator there. Sometimes I look at nowadays, I think about how and why are people not making a magazine. It is so simple and inexpensive in comparison to those early times.

The Power Plant

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What inspired you to produce C Magazine?

Richard Rhodes:

C Magazine was partly a reflection of the fact that the Toronto art scene was very strong. There were two important Canadian criticism based art magazines at the time. One was based out of Montreal, Parachute, the other was out of Vancouver, Vanguard. I worked for Parachute magazine as a Toronto editor, and I was a regular reviewer for Vanguard. It struck me that neither magazine had enough Toronto content, so that was the impetus to start C Magazine. It was partly created as a professional support to local artists and the work they were making, however, it was also an attempt to have a stake in the international art scene.

Back when we started the periodical in the early 80s, it was an important moment because several things intersected. One, was that the Toronto art scene, the Canadian art scene in fact, felt very international. There was high quality work being created in Canada. We believed that the art being made in our country was equal to what was being created in England, in New York, or anywhere else in the world.

Canada always had a strong magazine publishing industry. The Canadian art scene was well informed about art being made elsewhere, which meant that Canadian artists and critics travelled well. We could go to London, New York or Paris – which meant we knew about the art that was being made all over the world, and we were able to have conversations about it.

Going back to the earlier issues, particularly the first one, what was covered in the periodical?

RR:

In terms of coverage at the time, I’ve always found artists incredibly articulate, not only about their own work but the work of other artists. I wanted to try to encourage not just critics but artists to write about another artist’s work. So, our first issues were a combination of critical voices and artist’s voices, writing in a professional capacity about work they respected, along with their connections to traditional and historical art work. Artists have always been in dialogue with art history, and I believed C Magazine could provide an anchor for all those particular articles.

How did you go about finding a crew of people to work with? Was it difficult to gather and hire a team?

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RR:

No, it seemed like a cornucopia at the time. There was so much to choose from, not just in Toronto, but in Montreal and in Vancouver – there was an amazing group of women artists working there. It was the beginning of the Vancouver photo school, in fact, C Magazine was one of the first venues to take that photography initiative seriously.

Due to the number of artists and critics who wanted to be a part of C Magazine, were there any conflicts?

RR:

There was not. There were definitely the standard conflicts that every magazine has. For example, pages are expensive to print, and so our first issue was approximately 64 pages on newsprint. The number went up from there. We were maximizing the funds available to us. We would generally end up with half of the articles as feature stories and then the other half of the publication would be a series of smaller reviews, at the back of the magazine. Reviews were written to keep people up to date, to inform about important and current exhibitions.

And so, a lot of these exhibitions were international?

RR:

Some of them. Many of the exhibitions were Canadian, however the features covered a wide range. We felt that the magazine was a critical publication, very issue oriented. Our coverage was based on the arrival of photography in the art scene, a very important occurrence at the time. It lead to discussions regarding the changing fate of painting, which was deviating from the prevalence of abstraction. Painting was in a changing world. During the time, performance art had newly arrived and was making a claim on the scene. Video had also arrived. In fact, all kinds of new media had arrived. We wanted to display and be open to all of them.

How did you manage to capture various kinds of media in your publication?

RR:

Since we were printing on newsprint, there were many limits to the reproduction. We spent a lot of time thinking: “Okay, what kind of images are we going to reproduce?” We tried to select images that were informative, as well as made the effort to communicate a sense of style.

In the end, I believe the important thing about C Magazine is that we trusted our contributors.

To some extent, as an editor, I felt it was my job to amplify the voice of the contributor. It wasn’t

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to impose a kind of structure on them, but rather, an attempt to let their work be as expressive as possible.

Many articles were in totally original formats. One article, in fact, was a script for an opera written specifically for us. We then commissioned an artist to make drawings to accompany the opera.

This was also the era where French theory kind of dawned on the academic front. We worked with a number of writers who were working in the vein of theoretical art writing. Sometimes that meant playing with innovative article formats.

We once did a piece on a Canadian writer by the name of Bruce Ferguson, who began at the National Gallery of Canada and then went down to the U.S.. He had a long career running the art department at Columbia University. Another Canadian wrote a story for us about the semiotics of the Eiffel Tower. His article was longer in its footnotes then in its text, so we came up with a format that would play up the body of the text against these footnotes and at the same time, feed into all these images of the Eiffel Tower. It was an attempt to signify the world of signage that had arrived in the 1980s. The design formats were created in discussion with the writer as a way to translate a work to the page.

Is there a decision-making process for the design layout?

RR:

The design was largely in Dyan Marie’s hands. She was the designer, and so that often meant making sure we had a readable type face, that our headlines were of a commutative font, and at the same time that we offered

Bruce Ferguson

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a transparency for the contributor’s piece. To some extent we treated the magazine as if it were a gallery, and the contributors, we thought of them as artists in the way that their work should be presented. We strived to make that happen and to create content that was timely and relevant.

October Magazine

Did you have a specific vision of what each issue of the publication would look like?

RR:

Often we would try, but sometimes people would be delayed with their stories so we’d have to find others. So again, the framework was conceptually that we always had a kind of main story, and we always tried to base the issue around that story. However, it was flexible – by nature of the job it had to be flexible.

There was a great magazine that came out in Germany at the time, absolutely theoretical. In many respects, it was the beginning of the academic journals that began to take over the publishing scene in the late 1980s. There had been theoretical publications like October, which was an important publication in the art world, Parkette based out of Switzerland was really an amazing magazine full of artist projects. The 70’s gave rise to lots of magazines that focused on artist projects and to some extent we wanted to take that idea and apply it to not just the artists but to the writers. We wanted the magazine to feel like a creative endeavor.

Parkette magazine

It was a busy time when a large part everyone’s information about the art world came out of art publications. It was one of the reasons why we would go to the Basel Art Fair with Impulse magazine. There was always incredible interest, people who would come and stop by the booth to see what Canadian artists were doing. They thought of us, they thought of Impulse and of Parachute magazine as the ones to tell that story.

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What do you believe the impact of technology has done to the world of publishing?

RR:

The internet has made all the difference. Even myself, I open my tablet every morning, and I have my book marks bar on my browser. It’s full of different publications. Even now I would say that the bulk of the information I receive is online. I read a newspaper, everything else is on the internet. Quite frankly these publishers have a better website than a publication. I’m always interested in the website, where my old eyes can enlarge the type, and make it a little more readable.

C Magazine was one of the very first to employ digital technologies. In 1984, we walked into a store on Bay Street called Computer Land, and looked at some brand-new Macintosh computers that had just come out. We sat down and learned how to code our typesetting. We had this modem that was really expensive and it would go at about 14 KB a second. We would send our coded type online to someone who was producing typesetting. It would take all evening to send because it was 14 KB. The next day we would drive and pick up these rolls of type that we then would put through a hot-waxer and roll down, cut and design onto paper flats – and that’s what went to the printer. By the end, we were using Quark Express and everything was digital, pretty much the way things are produced now.

Today, with social media frameworks the publishing field is wide open – in the way that anyone can be a photographer, all they need is their phone. Back then you had to have a piece of quality equipment to take a good photograph. Publishing is now more or less the same way, anyone can be a publisher.

Do you find yourself feeling negative/positive towards the way the industry and technology has progressed?

RR:

Totally positive, it’s a changing world. It means that important writers, important news and art work, can be communicated really quickly. The only issue, if any, is that there is just so much of it.

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How did you go about finding funds for C Magazine?

RR:

Dyan and I started with a fellow who used to run a magazine called Impressions, Isaac Applebaum. Isaac was in a show I curated, and I met Dyan because she designed the catalog.

The show travelled and one night we were sitting in Detroit, the show was in Windsor, Isaac happened to say he was closing the magazine, he was tired, it was only him and his wife making it. I said, “Well don’t close it, give it to me.” He said, “No, I won’t give it to you, but I’ll sell it to you.” So, I said, “Well fine, let’s have a meeting when we’re back in Toronto.”

Back in Toronto, I was doing my laundry one morning at Queen and Spadina. It was the day I was going to have the meeting with Isaac. The plan was that he would tell me how much he wanted for the magazine. That day I thought to myself, well how much money? I didn’t know.

I came from the art world, from journalism – I didn’t know how much it was worth. I opened the newspaper I was reading and looked at the businesses for sale. I happened to see that a laundromat was for sale. I thought, well here I am in a laundromat, how much is a laundromat worth? The ad said $15,000. I met Isaac, and I said $15,000 for your publication – but there were conditions.

I told Isaac my conditions. He had a $6,000 grant from the Ontario Arts Council for an issue he hadn’t yet made. I said, we must go and see and make sure that money is transferrable to us – he would still be part of our masthead and therefore had a stake in that money. I said, I would pay him $5,000 for three years, under the condition that the grants continue. Basically, the grants were going straight to us, but low and behold we started to sell ads as the galleries were very excited about a local art magazine. Newsstands sales were pretty good. Our American distributor gave us great profile, we were in major bookstores all over the U.S. However, he was not so good at paying us for copies sold. Everyone in New York knew about us, would follow and read us, but I think it took us four years to get a cheque out of the distributor. So, between ad sales and the money from the grant agencies we managed to make it happen.

How did you go about disseminating C Magazine?

RR:

The Canadian Periodical Publishers Association had a distribution network in Canada. There were individual distributors in the U.S and also museum book stores. You’d write them a letter,

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send them a copy of your publication, and invariably they would say, “Sure, send us five copies.”

Those were five copies in London, and Paris, and all around the world. So that was great Of course, when we did the transfer from Impressions to C Magazine, I discovered there were only 92 subscribers to Impressions magazine. In my mind, I thought there’d be a lot more – but that was all there was. We were really starting from the ground up, however, one of those 92 subscribers was Jacqueline Onassis from New York City, another one was Robert Frank, the photographer out in Cape Breton – so they were pretty good subscribers.

If you could is there anything you would go back and change with C Magazine?

RR:

It’s all ancient history for me now. It doesn’t really interest me to see how it evolves. It’s a totally different magazine compared to when I ran it. However, it seems part of its time and is certainly valid. It is very different from when we first published it. The changes in the publication is all due to a matter of time, which strikes me as completely fine. I sometimes wish that the magazine would be more playful. There’s so much pleasure to be found in art, and often times you don’t see that pleasure in much of the art publications anymore. Being playful with the images and with the tone of voice. It’s all very serious, with writers taking themselves very seriously. There’s a very big, wide tradition of art but it tends to be argued over in a fairly narrow voice.

In the 1970’s the art world was tiny, but by the end of the 80’s the world started to open up. That made it difficult for Canada, because Canada had a historical role in contemporary society between the Soviet Union and the U.S.. Canada under Trudeau stood for middle class democracy. It was a pretty unique model, and we had developed this artist run art system. All over the world people would wonder, “How did they do it? How did they make this work?” By the year 2000 most of that had changed, the government in Ottawa was not so interested in Canada on a cultural front.

The idea of collecting also became a cultural thing, and so there were many new Bay Street collectors. There was for example an art collector in the 90’s who bought a lot of important local 80’s and 90’s work. By the mid-90’s he started selling off his Canadian collection, and moving on to only collect internationally. And that’s been something that’s hurt the Canadian art scene for 20 years, there’s not as much local support as there used to be.

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If you were to publish C magazine right now, how would you envision it?

RR:

It would be digital, it would have to be. I wouldn’t just mine the PhD programs. I think it’s important to try and encourage artists to talk about art, and so that would certainly be a focus for me.

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LOLA Lola was a Toronto arts publication that ran for seven years between 1997 and 2003. Created by artist/ writer Sally McKay, curator John Massier and arts writer/ editor Catherine Osborne, Lola was made to rejuvenate the Toronto art’s scene. Writers, artists alongside the general public were encouraged to comment and critique exhibitions and art events within the city. The most popular segment, entitled Shotguns, solicited reviews from writers and “non-writers” to create a vibrant forum for discussion and commentary. Available without charge at galleries and newsstands throughout Canada, Lola was considered a magazine/ zine hybrid. Lola’s unique approach to the discouragement of art intellectualism fostered refreshing honesty and reintroduced open and clear opinions into Toronto art criticism. Interview with Catherine Osborne by Hal October

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, it g of ay fa elin buyers did y McK e o n a lot e r f u w s l s Ho ea wa he Sal t of ry a m alm, w o that as? lf with alle a lo s g w t ’ a l t n a e a e w n i r e r Lol mys ent ual Toro re wer mmerc ade o hat t by ts cont oncept iod of c e o w u e h c t o d r t. T any in a ra bou ne put ms of i very c a pe rough it a usta ng ove one. M i o r s z a b s e l a d f t o a ag tle in ive Point Five: eni it d -opera rd t ut o It was a lit terly m it was reat ery ha l happ st get go o c . n g l i l r t n a l i f t l a v i c a ju ca ce c radar, s s s a eti a ’ ’ r talk s a qu s. Wha was sh d t t p l i w o e s u y l , a tly . It e, the the ou co tb wa ob ne Dyan Marie na rent n exac nitiativ er, rent under y and star ically it r day j sce h s t d u t s es i i r e n e h o c e i a d t h z s o u g y i t u l y n e o w c n e ld Ph th tua tog en la a t I g h-to- m point pra taki k to Cou o be? t twe y when intellec of wha erril eative bac , t of friends in n e u o p o t g b l g n r r m e rs to ir ne sa mi ery ec sto ghly period rd for com en yea hard ere wa ing the was v to hav s co the sce ’s hi s hi a a s o ’ a g h v t t w i t r n h e w n I I f b s e ng T lo o e ro ing eties, for ing. ontinu list, so esti y’d art elf. r t f To as don with a e work i e s p e r n c h o i t t u x h c a w yo en re er n, iod ye ry in like nd urn ry muc per rk that cessio ning w d of th , do it es whe s reall ry a as a jo a ve sually, t e , r v Y a o e e I o v o n r i as D w nt ca yt rs cti tw lled cial were ru hat per the n as o colle ublic. I g, a wa en yea cKay w ffler Ce n, very y ge e w l nan l t t o fi a v a o M n n o n d p I k h g lik ati lly e re r se eK biti he a bi leries t t time. ’s now ided to vers and w g a bit n fo But Sa or at th to t of exhi n a l t s a o c r a p a c h n e . a ” o g t t h r , li d ted o way ed in J utside the rise at row as fee cura t into a of w chool ed star r h d t a o t e e o s o v l rp a en wa lish ay, I li rt s an , go fee tom said I w becam as, we ente re was of a and op stab f as er, who Centre w w I l la of t e a e u s n e n , a r nt t Lo dates, ve c ool, as rt th ssi e go my ee a a a g a fl n f h b h n i f r i i gna o n so, M w c o s ’ e d m a e a t t f t K s n a b h o h s e o t h wa e ug Joh at the rious l ts c ch all he m s very than ting. I d th that so mu of t I tho d I and s artis e n a t upDM:outh a s . e d e a i u w d e r n n , e p r n e o s ’ A it n m se ly, the sce nd o gall ay. mm nd ctor you cau he a -oftive ord ot acco t of the s. So s sts into “Oh, if same w ell, be date. A nt arou s, colle d to be g w t e n ar e rti te e, tist kin y w d man me artis mor t was wan nd ma ron n’t p ese ar oung a of thos king th g reall g i n s n v e a a a u n h h w of a t ls o e in in d I w with t lot of y .” One ll th t meet se goa ut the up to y i-elite, rinting ach city n a e a t t g t nto ga an fp ten itin tho tha , bu zine ’t b teself ost asn Toro s exhib bringin maga om nd o t of con ch ma ions ember g it r i t w f m n l k c i r f a t l t e n as wa ne mu dir pe o fa ren em ely itse n ar oun she ho w eeds a fferent sn’t. I r tray to he art meo n’t o omplet of low he am t so s o w u s a r o i s t t k n c e. d t rt ke s tw wa t, be urce an’t as for fre idn’ s so s out i thin oronto g from denly litis ment, i i o d o e s t h t c e in ith y, T ted and sud ions, w ed and nviron e to t? You king ea “He ple com then I wan tion, w that st ou abl t wor you se t a e a a t h e l s t g u u r a eo ve do ins nd ey hat abo ers, if ellin that. W public e thing as p ider, a rst con wer do you ncers ed t ip s d very f n t e h r a o o g c w g s a e fi , t . n t r la e in s u a la ho pe ry zine our we how as free a com t of blu d to ch zine ty e of Lo oject, an o ose ve d o o e g l S S a b y. a ve rth pr av e to as sor kly. em nte one sensiti ost s I h assion t. W te quic n of th n pa with at art w some ally wa m m e a n l c u e o a s y i e a to th re itm dn ap ver e is d in t qu , sectio eryon got e ha e also felt, ntrolleDM: nd we hat led ugh th ntially v omm er ou e d w c e e W , e t r t a a co o e, mm of we bra eviews iends. aus thro s esse ol, and at larg brow, s n ha or cele bec . They r uch r ing a f co f a , k t o m r r c w e o i h o e d o e o L lic ig sh you r fr hem wn, zine t th ere kin t to pub te of h ssible. ing kno g these abou aga or us fo t pay t ds isn’ h l t i l m o e s e e p at w f o o e m w in or writ pen th , so opp eap as lish s th o write ost nd n red w s e a b a m d n u r g p ch in ow nd wo the le t no o uld ha ’re p it as as. See peop ew a sh ng a hu ndred ame hat we d that o c w e i i u h d t b h e rit ev ske ings ice them e need rds or r well, w ew of a , which not e just a hen th i a s , v W o t n t ? ou 0w a re hotgu e. T dw ugh rial put s , an espons e 80 we tho w write t f t e i s t o r u a j r to w So sho idea We ticip big

24

e ll e o y? n’t get ess s pub- ld you you n w see th s was a ral t ustr acc t did n. But a g d u i d ould o the e n o i w d l i t l g w u n e W d s w this ritin ot me wou as i ved e co rst issu ation. minate sho views, nw e w he mo n c you s. Now peopl e fi i h e l o e , m d e r n b d e t r o an nd le ut wo we pu ve ys r th par like we gun eviews rspecti nly wa ft. A afte ng this in a ma nk two er. B big e t e h l t s c a hot r t e e u i e i s e o j s n a g p e th en h just kep the the pro en runn wome bec ent wa f us to five l fiv s and la I h l f s o a w o u L o g ran nd ion sity he one ier left wom d bein named der for volvem three just imo ar, a en at t s opin it was n r wo n e s e i t e t s a y a a h c s s a n h t ’ a re .M wa a, es a ing ohn s no wom ying to ou f azine w it was diffe ital er pinions day it t w. J n bring ere wa wo issu g two r es y g a o g a g h n e i o n t m t nd t th r in li -d s’ tk lle Th a ’ e v f o a d e out a t . l n h a o i e e t y t h e h p pre d v s r h d i c d i k s e o n o i s i i e r s d n l t s l e a k a his n’t aga cau the just . He w pub er p at the e articul de el li did oth t fe ing on utsi y y be inated st and long d. We o ’ p l t t i o o n d n y c n s f o d a m an ow O ain ith ed, writ Toro on o tId cap inue scri lish re were estion. s its ont ng. Bu elance e I felt cogniti ating w d ag some a t di c l e h t e e f e u a h th as, fre isol aus k of re dq ow owi ver min d in s, whic say ll, w t gr ing my ut bec c g. S feel goo e. I ne s discri tribute l e l p a n l i a u w a e o k e s b c t’s a allw ey helm con ust ly a ll do oman y th Tha t of pla be I w d b an mak for Sal ays tor of H overw d we j was sti w e y u w l a d a o a I k en m tc ura was four an w, m nd he feel ean use I a felt off d off, i d I thin . l, it he c m kno a l t n I , e r I ” a e e n a ? e w c w s th nev tial ide la, a wn job usly not be ce, and ery clo ’s no d very e and o o i e L r i o h e , in re ev ive ral ns rien ting ke my hre that alo we rece y did t ot take n gene xpe o can b or star e s ma f a f f i l m t l w u n a lis ust en ns on j u o a r i t o l w t n l o n s to B gazine ’ r a I T rea b, so n. jou eve . Were crimin ma We e ong minatio of my is jo r . u t d the s p s t s l i et a ne as cr fe ni gu g s I a O w i n i . r . o t d r v l t t eve mo aree hat I fe kind of at a lo going was iable c h t w t t o n m t h l l n he wit av I fe ffere I’m lish e back a di n, and o this. b s a t a es cam ope at w st d rs. I . So th re not ’s ju t e e l d i s se, nce , they’ o lo y erie t s p u x g b e e hin not ryon eve ’ve got ll I “We

25

26

IMPULSE Impulse was an important Toronto based cultural magazine from 1971 to 1990. It was remarkably global in perspective. The magazine was distributed and read internationally consistently publishing some of the most significant practitioners and thinkers of the time.

The innovative style and design of the magazine were eclectic and globally engaged. The visual arts were understood and presented as being interconnected with architecture, literature, design, music, politics and life in general. Impulse magazine is part of Toronto’s cultural history, the subject of two retrospective exhibitions at MOCCA in Toronto and White Box in New York City and the book published by University of Toronto, Impulse Archaeology. by Julia Rago

27

In the 70’s and 80’s why were magazines so important?

Carolyn White: Judith Doyle:

People still read.

Pre-internet. The internet didn’t start until the 90’s. Before that there were a lot of indie publications. The prediction was that they would disappear when the internet became widely available but they didn’t. Print still remains interesting.

Did the magazine help in a communities aspect?

JD:

It helped construct community across distances. It is how we made subcultures with shared interests and affinities.

CW:

During the 70’s and the 80’s, particularly late 70’s and early 80’s, it was a time of print and Toronto was a center of the print medium. We would attend international art fairs and people always commented, “How can Canada, which is a smaller country in terms of cutting edge art culture, produce so many incredible art magazines?” We would be there with other Canadian magazines like FILE, Parachute and C Magazine. There was a real love of publications at that time and particularly here.

JD:

I think that we were really punching above our weight. There was a lot of support from government funding at the provincial and federal level for magazine publications as a way of promoting and disseminating contemporary art practice.

CW:

It was also because the Canadian scene was not as commercially based as the American scene. In the American scene, you’re an artist if you sell work. In Canada we didn’t have a market, so we transferred our energy into other kinds of productions. We didn’t think of the magazine as a place of commerce but of information.

Carolyn White with cat

Judith Doyle

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mr leather 2

Impulse was a magazine produced by artists who did the work of editors and designers, we were not part of the established publishing world and because of that we broke rules and created something new that reached out to a multitude of communities.

3/8/05

10:55 PM

Page 1

MR. LEATHER

You encouraged a lot of freedom with the magazine.

We were very open editorially. I think that was the strength of the magazine. Eldon [Garnet] seemed to be the glue that held CHICAGO ‘79 everything together, but he had an eye for really interesting producers. He hand-picked everybody and a lot of them were women. There was a nice balance of really strong women involved in the magazine. We were given the freedom and opportunity to pursue what interested us, generating an incredible mix that became the magazine and what it was valued for. The making of the magazine was another component of our art practices which included: filmmaking, writing, photography, architecture, sculpture…

SHELAGH ALEXAN

CW:

getting dressed up to go to a mr. leather contest.

DER

no it’s called dressing down.

can you tell that i’m a girl? no, you look like a cute boy.

oh no it’s wrinkled. i hate wrinkled clothing. they’re going to say: hey look at that chick in the wrinkled shirt. agh. i wouldn’t worry about it too much. maybe i should take a bag. you should.

1979 V8N1 p37

JD:

If I was to state the editorial policy of the magazine it was interested in primary expression rather than secondary coverage.

CW:

We produced a package in which artists or cultural producers could express themselves. Impulse was a container we constructed for different voices. Even the ads were curated. Sometimes people would say, “I can’t tell the difference between the ads and the content,” because the ads were so good. We really pressured our contributors and even the advertisers to create directly for the magazine.

JD:

Artwork would be made for the magazine, the designer worked closely with the creator.

The process of design was a very creative, primary form of expression, an intimate kind of collaborative structure. There was an intimate conversation that happened with this focus on pulling content from the contributors, more so than would normally be the case.

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CW:

There was nothing to lose. We just went for whatever interested us even if it was a big “art star,” it didn’t matter. I remember contacting French artist Christian Boltanski because I really liked his work. I wanted him to do a piece for the magazine and I literally wrote him a letter and sent him a copy of the magazine. He phoned and we had a conversation and he created a piece specifically for Impulse. If that was what we were interested in we went after it, I never felt like anyone was out of our reach.

JD:

I was thinking about an intimate conversation piece in one of the issues, an interview with Stanley McDowel. He was on the editorial board of the Globe and Mail and his writing was about nuclear strategy and political will. He wrote about the escalating cold war and threat of nuclear destruction. This was a person who’s writing was totally framed politically. Nobody had asked how he felt about this, or what his own perspective was on nuclear destruction, so we asked him and I think we just went closer. He died before the piece was even done. Sometimes it was about asking. I still think the small press is distinguished by that intimacy.

You were very well known for the square dimensions of themagazine. At one point it went from square to the rectangular, why?

Golub

CW:

4/13/05

5:46 PM

I remember it being a financial joke. We had run out of money and were struggling. The grants had become tighter, it was a moment of crisis. We decided that instead of contracting, which any logical organization would do, we expanded and made the magazine bigger.

This format was awkward but amazing for imagery. It wasn’t glossy and therefore slightly less expensive, so we could go larger.

Impulse, after all these years, still seems current.

JD:

One thing I think about with Impulse is that as a magazine it ages well. An issue from 1979 still looks fresh today.

p224 V15N1 1989

Page 1

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CW:

What is still fresh, besides many of the designs, is the content within them. In the first square issues the magazine went from Chris Burden, who was a performance artist, to the B52’s to theorist Sylvère Lotringer to Andy Warhol. We were covering the cultural map, and this is in 1979. We were looking at the world and trying hard to combine the Canadian work with the international world.

Do you feel Impulse would be different if it wasn’t a Toronto magazine?

JD:

Yes. I don’t know of any other magazines like Impulse, maybe in Europe but certainly not in the US. Impulse looked at everything and presented it in an interesting and very glamorous package.

The only one I could compare it to would be Neural the magazine that Allesandro Ludovico edits out of Italy. It’s totally about digital media. It’s a very narrow thing and it’s not as original in terms of artist’ content but does have an outward facing look at new media art, activism and electronic music which makes it feel similar. It also has a nice design.

Was there any favourite artists or art works that were in the magazine?

4/13/05

4:24 PM

Page 1

W EI L

Miami

So much great work, too hard to choose!

I really loved the imagery and I loved that we did double page spreads, we had this incredible image bank going on. We worked so closely with the contributors, many often dropping by the studio and staying for drinks and discussions. There was also beautiful writing, which gave me an opportunity to experiment with text and typography. Judith is an incredible writer and when she contributed her own writing to the magazine it was often a highlight. The real bonus was the collaborative process with so many talented individuals, both locally and internationally.

B R I A N

CW:

She was in room number ten, ground floor, rear building.

She had been dead for two or three days in the small room with the windows and door shut, and it was over a hundred degrees outside. Ed took a deep pull on his cigarette and looked off into the distance as if in deep thought.

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How did you become involved with publishing?

Eldon Garnet:

Publishing a magazine becoming one of my chosen forms of expression was a happenstance manifestation of my mercurial desire to be everywhere simultaneously: intellectually and materially. Or it may have just been my disdain for the art historical, for painting and the object market place of art. I wanted to be everywhere. I had been promised that ability. If I made a magazine here in Toronto it could be read anywhere.

When you look back at the time of Impulse through the lens of today how is it different?

EG:

If I conceptually positioned what we did during the late 1970 and all through the 1980s, imagining how the current critical art academic, well read in the historical moment, would position us today, I would say: we were the children of Duchamp, McLuhan and Barthes. The museum was in collapse, as it has always been, of no interest, especially to the young artist.

It was a time before the proliferation and influence of art schools. A time before Relational Aesthetics. When I began it was McLuhan and Duchamp. The world was a global village; we could communicate using mass media devices. The world of art was the artist; whatever the artist did was art. Of course there was Barthes with his little essay on wrestling. And suddenly the world of culture was art.

Was it the beginning of cultural studies and its influence?

EG:

We looked at culture and made it our art, not merely a pop playing with culture, we appropriated culture itself. By looking and commenting reenacted the cultural moment in which we were living. There was radio, television and publishing; these were mass media before the Internet.

The contents of the magazine in many ways reflected the cultural diversity of the audience.

EG:

When one looks at Impulse at this time, it is a magazine edited, designed and published by artists. No one who worked on the magazine was trained for the function they performed at the magazine. The designers were artist’s first and fore most. I would say we were naïve, to relate an

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V8N2 (in water)

incident from early 1979. Mary Ann Hanet and myself had just published the first square issue on glossy paper, an issue that we had designed together. We received a review, which complimented us on our use of Swiss design. We had no idea that condensed Helvetica and whatever else we were doing, had any historical roots in design. We were artists who were teaching ourselves as we produced.

How about the other art magazines that we being produced at the time. Was there much activity?

3/6/05

6:17 PM

Page 1

IMPULS

SPRING 1980

INSIDE: INTERVIEWS WITH: BOB COLACELLO BUCKMINSTER FULLER IGGY POP NEW PROJECTS FROM SITE

MAC A

ARTIFICIAL IN ROBOTS

EG:

I believe it was a period without precedence and will never occur again in Canada. It was a profoundly fertile period of artist-produced magazines. In Toronto alone there was Impressions, FILE, Image Nation, Fuse, C and of course Impulse. All edited, designed and published by artists. It wasn’t as much as we were competitive with each other as supportive of each other. We knew each other and as artists we contributed to each other’s publication.

What was the first magazine you published, that would be around what year?

EG:

It would have been the late 60s, early 70s, not quite sure.

It was with Brian Trevers who I met when I was still in high school. He was a few years older, the first real artist I ever met. What we produced together was a magazine in a plastic bag where every contributor provided 100 copies of their submission — 100 Barbara Astman’s, 100 Jerry Gilbert snails crawling on receipt book pages. The magazine we produced was conceptualized as a “book

V10N1_quark

3/10/05

7:25 PM

I SUMMER 1982

Page 1

M

P

U

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SE

bite,” one of a series of publications that together would constitute a complete “book.” The “Plastic Bag” was number one. The second was a printed booklet where each contributor was asked to submit a work about “process.” A one-page submission. John Cage sent a “Note-O-Grame” message, his contribution a visual text, a poem about process.

$2

V10N2 (Webb)

3/6/05

5:09 PM

Page 1

IMPULSE WINTER 1982

$3

How did you come to become the editor of Impulse magazine?

ADAMS MYSTERIES

NTELLIGENCE

EG:

AND MORE

L

S

E $3

THE APPROPRIATION OF SUFFERING TRANSBORDER DATA FLOW INTERVIEW WITH D.A.F. DRAWINGS BY ROBERT CUMMING THE MODEL WORKER NUCLEAR STRATEGY/POLITICAL WILL THE DEATH OF CANADIAN CINEMA

It was 1974, my English literature master’s thesis proposed that I anthologize and write critical texts about the best “young” Canadian poets who were also the most experimental. Once the poets and poems were collected together with my critical texts, the manuscript, this was an integral part of the thesis, was submitted to the major Canadian literary publishers. Duly submitted and duly rejected by all the major literary publishers in 1974. The editor and founder of Impulse, Peter Such, having witnessed my futile, self-fufilling prophecy of failure decided to publish my critical anthology as a double issue of Impulse. He knew me as a young writer, as a poet I had contributed to the first issue of the magazine. Then out of nowhere, unexpectedly, Peter Such decided, this would be his final issue, if I wanted, Impulse could be mine. Why not? I was already the editor of the next double issue, I was doing the layout, designing the issue, copyediting. He gave me the magazine with a granting structure in place, a business manager and an embryonic distribution system.

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V8N4final

But the Impulse with which I am familiar was not a literary magazine — literary but much more.

EG:

By 1975 I felt that I had paid my Canadian literary dues. Even though I had edited the double issue, it was Peter Such’s editorial gesture that I was fulfilling.

The issue was extremely successful — Press Porcepic republished it as a book, George Woodcock, a friend of George Orwell, and the most important Canadian literary critic at the time, in a lengthy Globe and Mail review, attacked the book. From 1975 to 1978 I basically produced the magazine on my own with occasional editorial help from friends. I produced not merely a magazine but a conceptual creation, which I called a magazine. Some issues looked like a magazine, but many didn’t. There was the Les Levine issue, 5 OHH, a sculptural in photos in a magazine.

There was the Impressions/Impulse, a selection of news wire photographs edited from all the wire images of a particular year. And there was the Joe Hall album.

3/7/05

7:05 PM

Page 1

THE MAGAZINE OF ART AND CULTURE

MARTHA HAZ AL

V11N4_qua

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MAG

V11N2

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7:29 PM

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Isn’t this the LP release of Impulse? Quite a radical move, a print magazine released as a long-playing record.

EG:

It was simultaneously radical and conservative. Certainly to release a magazine as a record to be put out for distribution at bookstores and newsstands was out of the expected, but it was the content that was the most radical and unexpected. In the art world a-tonal music, experimental sound works from Cage to Snow were what one would expect, or at least a sound poetry compilation from an art magazine. But I was never one

F A L L

1 9 8 4

AUSTRALIA 4.50 dollars / CANADA 4 dollars / FRANCE 30 francs / W. GERMANY 9 deutschmark / ITALY 6,000 lira / JAPAN 800 yen / /NETHERLA

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$2

to satisfy expectations, so reaching back to Impulse’s recent literary background, I thought that an album of the music of Joe Hall, who I considered to be the finest unsung lyricist in Toronto (as he continues to be ignored today). Poetry, perhaps, but not silence, closer to folk music.

FALL / WINTER 19 80

THIS ISSUE

INTERVIEWS WITH NINA HAGEN LECH KOWALSKI A AND THE MUFFINS ZEL HENDERSON ON LTERNATIVE FUTURES

You seem to have been trying to destroy expectations wherever they emerged. A constant shuffle to keep your audience off balance. Isn’t this in many ways self-destructive? I’m sure the audience for the magazine was not that large in the first place, but what happens when with each issue you purposely confuse, in many ways, attempt to destroy through the expected potential audience?

PLUS

ESCAPISM THE COCKFIGHT GAZINE CENSORSHIP

ark

5/5/05

5:26 PM

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I M P U L S E

E

AND MORE

D E AT H

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EG:

W I N T E R 1985 $4

STRALIA 4.50 dollars / CANADA 4 dollars / FRANCE 30 francs / W. GERMANY 9 deutschmark / ITALY 6,000 lira / JAPAN 800 yen / NETHERLANDS 10 gilders / SWITZERLAND 7 francs / UNITED KINGDOM 2.5 pounds / UNITED STATES 4 dollars

$4

ANDS 10 gilders / SWITZERLAND 7 francs / UNITED KINGDOM 2.5 pounds / UNITED STATES 4 dollars

Yes, self-destructive but necessary. Perhaps the first act of experimentation is what you call destruction; I would rather refer to as a disjunctive. My constant question was what possible container could I construct for a magazine.

I believe in 1977 I achieved this with Impulse’s CineFiche issue, Einstein’s Joke. I’m not sure where the idea originated, whether I read it, or someone told me the anecdote, but it emerged from the story that Einstein, often invited to speak, particularly at dinner parties, where he often told a particular joke, (at least he called it a joke— its really not that funny). The issue of Impulse is a super-8 film with actors in eastern European costumes, one heavily bearded, one with a cow, in a farmer’s field just south of Algonquin part in Ontario. The issue of the magazine was what I called a “CineFiche”. In the shape and size of a microfiche card, 4” x 6”. I took subtitled frames from the film and arranged them to be read as

36

a visual narrative—that is, if you had a microfiche reader. The readers were common in many libraries in 1977 at the time of the release of the issue. The CineFiche the issue also included two invitations to screenings of Einstein’s Joke: one is Toronto and one in San Francisco at La Mamelle.

I’ve seen this issue, it consists of a thin cover into which is inserted a small rectangle of film. There must have been reaction to this minimalist issue of the magazine. It isn’t exactly something you would want to pick up on the newsstands.

EG:

With this issue I reached a new depth of obscurity in the world of magazine publishing, but it made me decide upon another experiment. What could be the most radical change I could make from a magazine that had conceptually reduced itself to invisibility, but to publish a real magazine, a glossy well designed magazine as container, easily accessible, materially substantial.

And so born, literally out of the conceptual ashes in 1978, the square Impulse. A form and an idea that was to last for 10 years. It was 1978 and the editorial read: “After 7 years of format investigation Impulse is now experimenting with the standard format. Touch the square. The seventies are ending, the eighties are beginning.” hell2

4/13/05

6:27 PM

Page 1

How would you describe this shift conceptually? You were involved in artist magazine production and then you were involving in producing what looked and felt like a trade magazine. In fact, Impulse was much more slick than any other artist magazine at the time?

EG:

It was a major shift in the late seventies where the magazine as a container for a concept shifted to the production of a cultural container. In 1978, with the aid of Mary Ann Hanet, Impulse went cultural. Of course, we were artists, Mary Ann and I saw it as just another element in our art practices. We weren’t doing it to be rich and famous, we were doing it for the fun. “If it isn’t fun don’t do it,” a phrase we often repeated. Our intellectual position was curiosity. We were as interested in architecture as we were in Patty Smith as a poet, music, food, art new technology, the juxtaposition, the mix, philosophy before Blondie next to TV dinner meals, next to Dennis Oppenheim, next to Site’s collapsing box stores, next to hockey and television. p254 V15N4 1990

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The 1980’s, what was it about the era? Why today are we nostalgic for the cultural energy of that period?

EG:

It was the time to party intellectually. The straight jacket of the structuralists was being slashed off, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s what is is the case wasn’t just the case. Piaget was left staring in Lucan’s false mirror, the French on the back of Nietzsche had arrived in North America. Semiotexte with Baudrillard and Virilio in tow were being introduced to NY and LA and Toronto by Sylvere Lotringer.

The 1980’s were a time of pop and critical studies.

Shelagh Alexander

Impulse published a lot of theory, Baudrillard and Virilio were frequent contributors. How theoretical was the magazine as a project?

EG:

We weren’t basing production on theory. Impulse wasn’t an art magazine produced to fulfill a theoretical construct of a media global village, but we were acutely aware of communication theory. The publishing of an art magazine was an art project that realized through practice a dialogue with current theoretical notions.

Sylvere Lotringer

In art schools you are constantly told you must develop a career and place yourself in the proper galleries and be included in the proper exhibitions. The funding bodies every year become more and more built on a business model of art. The edges are cut off and thrown away by both the art market in its bourgeois conservatism and in the funding bodies frantic fear of controversy.

EG:

Disruption is fundamental to the creative process. The silence, which Cage taught me, wasn’t the silence of minimalism, but rather of noise, the interference in the silence, which is the constant condition of noise. So, again, the disruptive was inherent to creative production then as it is now in my practice. From the beginning, I knew the masters were long dead;, the genius did not exist. When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra came down off the mountain to declare in the town square:

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“Have you not heard, have you not heard? God is dead.” Of course, what he was telling me, the master, the geniuses were dead. Don’t you think Hugo Ball and Stravinsky were pagans chanting to broke idols, of course, the madness of the first Word War, was this not the death of all possible faith in god and the human race? Throwing millions of bodies into the trenches. The stench is still with us and reinforced by the murderousness and genocide of the second World War and reinforced again in Hiroshima and in Cambodia and the Balkans. Why should I need to raise my voice to describe my avant-garde roots? Hardly a smudge in the soft mud compared with the historical atrocities’ perpetuated in the twenieth century? My artistic radicalism then and now is nothing compared to the behaviour of the armies of nations and religions.

Do you believe it is impossible today to start a new art magazine by a group of artists.

EG:

You don’t have to go far from home to witness the almost impossible difficulty of generating new art publishing in this country today. In many ways both on the provincial and federal level, not to mention the municipal, the support for new and relevant cultural production has taken a severe beating in the name of the status quo. Both the OAC and the CC are run by career bureaucrats who all speak protectively, like lawyers to those who were once called their clients. So, no, unless there is a fundamental change in the granting system or the art market in Canada there is no possibility for new art magazines to emerge and to survive beyond one or two issues. Impulse would never have survived almost 20 years without the generous and mostly understanding support of both councils. It was not a magazine set up to make money. Today, the smallest regional gallery operates on a million dollar budget and receives generous support from both arts councils and has an audience much smaller than even the smallest art magazine. Why not offer support where the dollars will work most effectively in the production and discrimination of Canadian cultural production. But this isn’t even a topic under discussion today.

Today there are no longer artists run art magazines, but rather curatorial and cultural studies graduates running the magazines?

EG:

The publishing of art magazines has shifted from a conceptual project to enterprises supposedly run on a business model. The creative energy has shifted to business energy. It makes sense, if a magazine is to survive in the long term it must develop a means to sustain itself. The raw energy of a group of artists and writers getting together and beginning a magazine is almost impossible

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today and even harder and more impossible in the long run to sustain. In the late 70s and throughout the 1980s Canada was a hotbed of art and cultural magazine publishing. We were part of an international movement in art communications. Today in Canada there are only well established, long-lived magazines remaining. Don’t get me wrong, I would bemoan the day we ever lost these vehicles for discriminating Canadian art production, but it isn’t a reflection of the raw energy of artistic production the magazines were during the 1980s. The real voice of culture is not the official culture of the moment, it never is and never will be.

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CRONEN B E R G

PHOTO: E. GARNET

cronenberg

ELDON GARNET and JAMES DUNN talk to

DAVID CRONENBERG.

David Cronenberg is a Toronto filmmaker with an international reputation for making horror films which are cinematically artful, thematically insightful, and very scary. He has been described

by John Carpenter (The Fog, Halloween) as being “better than the rest of us put together.” His early features — Rabid and Shivers — established him as a director who could succeed at the box-office. His more recent films — The Brood and Scanners — have been included on the Top Ten lists by two critics from the Village Voice. Cronenberg’s latest film, Videodrome, which he is currently editing, is scheduled to be released in August.

EG: What’s your fascination with genre?

DC: Well, I’m not particularly fascinated with genre. I don’t go to see every horror or science fiction film made.

It’s just that when I start to write, that’s what comes out.

The fact that most of my films are in the horror genre is just an accident. It’s just what happens. I don’t know if Videodrome, which I just did, is going to be classified as a horror film or not. I don’t think of it as a horror film at all, but it does have particular aspects of horror. I like other kinds of films as much as I like sci-fi or horror films. It’s not like a John Carpenter situation, where he wanted to make science fiction and horror films since he was two years old. For me, it just seems to be what happens when I sit down to write.

EG: Where do you get your ideas?

DC: I think they come into my typewriter. It’s a very valuable typewriter. They claw their way out.

JD: Do you think all your ideas come out of personal experiences — a fear that you have, or something that’s inside you?

DC: Well, not necessarily fears. All my films are very

personal. When I was a kid there was a magazine called “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” and I preferred it to “Astounding Science Fiction,” which was really hard core sci-fi — very technology oriented and interested in extrapolating future trends in science and technology.

That never really interested me. I always liked the other magazine better because it was on more of a fantasy level.

By fantasy I don’t mean Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings.

I mean worrying more about the metaphorical value of your imagery rather than worrying about whether it was likely to be accurate. It turns out that a lot of the things which I’ve invented are things that in fact are being developed. But that wasn’t my intention, and I’m not the kind of person who in 20 years would say: “See, in Rabid I anticipated this kind of plastic surgery.” That is not what I am trying to do. So when I talk about the genre — and we are talking about two that overlap, science fiction and horror — it functions on a level of imagery and metaphor that is very deep, very primal. And by its very nature, the audience goes into a horror film with this willing suspension of disbelief that you don’t get if 1982 V9N3 p89

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CANADIAN ART Since its inception, the magazine has gained monolithic status and reputation in Canada and internationally as it curates the contemporary happenings in the art scene. The ethos of the publication is to encourage emerging artists/writers to create a conversation which engage audiences nationwide and addresses urgent and evolving issues through the lens of contemporary art and culture. Presently the Canadian Art Foundation, the non-profit division of the magazine, organizes an array of programs aimed at creating a diverse and engaging platform for people to connect with the arts and artists in Canada. The Foundation has become a destination for artists and art enthusiasts to connect and be inspired by art, in turn creating greater local, national and global visibility for the extraordinary artistic talent in Canada. Interview with Bryne McLaughlin

by Christina Castellano and Joel Lee

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What is your role at Canadian Art? I am the Senior Editor at Canadian Art Magazine. I have worked at the magazine for 20 years. Since I started as an intern, I have had the opportunity to work as an exhibition review writer for a number of years followed by the managing editor position in 2000. It was only a couple of years ago that the long-time Editor-in- Chief, Richard Rhodes retired and we restructured and I started as the Senior Editor. Does it help to have worked from the bottom up? A lot of people in this industry, due to low wages, moved around or on to different kinds of jobs. When I began, I was at a point in my life where I could afford to live hand-to- mouth. This early experience motivated me to work on creating positions within the organization that do pay a living wage and offer space for younger people to maintain a writing practice.

The Chief Editor, David Balzer, had a similar trajectory. We both worked freelance while working at Canadian Art, so we understand how important it is to not only make space, but also ensure there is enough grounding and money for people to live and work. How would you describe your activity at the magazine and your own writing. Professionally, in my role as the Senior Editor, it is my responsibility to commission stories and

do substantive edits. Management is also a requirement in this position; working on budgets, strategies and long term planning. It is a leadership position. In regards to my personal practice, writing has always been a strange act for me. I have never considered myself a writer and I never had a basic desire to be a writer. I’m really just interested in making a publication. Writing is part of that but it’s not the only thing involved. Over the years I’ve written as a freelancer for other art publications and newspapers, and I appreciate writing, but for me it takes a while. Having had the opportunity to write a lot, I have trained myself to be a writer without feeling like I am a “writer” per say. My role at the magazine is a balance between editorial and management.

And we’ve worked really hard a Canadian Art to try and build an editorial team of people who come at it from different perspectives. Some people are just interested in writing and then other people are just interested in publishing. I think you need that mix in an editorial team, you can’t just have writers and not have anybody whose actually going to get themselves dirty in producing the magazine. In the editorial mandate, you encourage debate of contemporary issues. Do you as an editor welcome critical and even politically charged content? Our current mandate is relatively new. Since I started in 1997, up until a couple of

years ago, Richard Rhodes was the chief editor. I learned a lot from him, but he had a very specific idea of what the magazine could be. I still respect that position, but it wasn’t changing with the times. When David Balzer took over as Editor-in- Chief we developed a mandate to refresh the critical views that were represented in the magazine. We really wanted to prioritize making space for new voices that hadn’t previously had the opportunity to be published in Canadian Art. We’re prioritizing ideas and critical views coming from a broad spectrum of the contemporary cultural community. We wanted to start fresh with a new direction making sure we’re keeping the door open to as many new voices and new points of view as possible and that includes lots of communities that we haven’t previously had the opportunity to publish in Canadian

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Art. How would you describe the system of soliciting these perspectives and navigating those politics of finding contributors? We constantly invite new writers to contribute. One of the changes we made in our new structure is to do thematic issues, so we’re able to set an agenda of themes a year in advance. We have to be persistent in searching out new voices. The challenge is that legacy publications, such as Canadian Art, have for so long been represented in many people’s minds as having a very narrow point of view. So many writers are not familiar with the magazine. For us, the work is to reintroduce what we are trying to do and encourage writers to look again at Canadian Art. We pride ourselves on paying our writers well. I have written for publications where it has taken six months or a year to be paid the commissioning fee. It is hard to make a living as a critical writer especially when the fees are already extremely low and then you do not get paid for long periods of time. It is a disincentive to keep writing about visual culture. For the younger writers coming in it is hard to develop a practice because you are working for free basically.

What we are trying to do is pay our writers the most that we can pay them for their contributions and we always pay on time. We value their opinions and want to include the perspectives of young writers which can be surprising to them as they may have never thought of Canadian Art as a place for them to express their voice. Our challenge is to let them to know we support them, not only conceptually, but financially. Can you offer some insight into the editorial structure of Canadian Art? We have an editorial team were we all

have an equal voice at the table. That is unique compared to many other publications where in their editorial structure the Editor-in- Chief has full say on everything that happens and you’re delivered an editorial lineup for an issue on which you work. Whereas we do concept meetings all the time, voting on writers we might be interested in, ideas we would like to cover in the issue and which writers can match up with those ideas. Creating a collaborative environment and a team of people from different perspectives who can contribute is a must. We have an Editor-in- Chief, a Senior Editor which is me, an Assistant Editor, an Associate Editor, an Online Managing Editor, a Print Managing Editor, editorial interns, and an editorial resident in the summer. Between 5 and 7 voices, all talking about the same things, each coming from a different

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place, bringing their perspective and their knowledge and network into the conversation. What we are trying to build is a team that is well balanced. We also have an Indigenous Editor at large. When putting an issue together we hope to have arepresentative group of artists and writers from different life experiences, different parts of the art scene. That’s the strategy, to create a collaborative environment with smart, dynamic, and diverse people and let them do their thing. Has the publication ever received critical feedback?

If so how does the magazine respond? Critical feedback is rare. There are people talking about it but you never hear anything yourself. I wish we could hear more constructive critical feedback. If we made a mistake let us know.

If there is something people really like it would be nice to hear. An issue is never perfect, you try to do everything possible to make sure that what you are presenting is seamless; error free. We have always e ployed a fact-checker who vets each story. It has always been a priority for us to make sure an article is fact checked; dates, artist’s descriptions, photo captions, etc. Our aim is to provide the most accurate record of what we are covering as a timeless piece. Even though we go to great lengths, we still make mistakes, for sure, but the goal for us is to avoid mistakes, and if we do, acknowledge them and do whatever we can to correct them. Is there a specific Issue you’re

most proud of? Does it represent the essence of Canadian Art Magazine?

Probably, for me, the most important issue that we have done is the Summer 2017, Kinship. It was fully commissioned by Lindsay Nixon. She solicited the stories and we worked with her on editing. Personally, it was a really important learning experience working on this from front to back, seeing new writers and new ideas. The issue addressed perspectives on Indigenous art making and contemporary culture. It revealed a different perspective on what is going on in Indigenous contemporary art making, who the voices are and their concerns. Releasing this issue was a real risk but it was a risk Lindsay took on and successfully completed. Not only was the content groundbreaking, but the cover, the first we ever commissioned, was provocative. Usually we just take a visual from a story in the magazine, which is the standard approach, but this was brand new for us and now it is something we are doing for every issue, commissioning individual artists to do the cover and a six page article inside.

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An unconventional move for Canadian Art. It is important to make sure that people understand that this is a priority for us, we are not going to do an Indigenous completely focused issue every year, but we do have 8-10 pages, in every issues devoted to indigenous writers and artists commissioned by our Indigenous Editor. We’re dedicated to making space and making sure that it has a real place in Canadian Art. This issue set a standard for us and a benchmark to keep aiming for. How would

describe the current are magazine publishing scene in Toronto? I have been working in this field, for better or worse, for two decades, so I have seen the flow of the way things go. You have your standard magazine, Canadian Art, Border Crossing and many other great publications in Quebec.

So you have a variety of publications across the country. Some say it is a competition, but in my perspective we are each doing our own thing. Each covering our own ground. Collectively we are representing, in print, the visual culture of our time. I have seen smaller magazines, like “Lola” which flashed for a couple of years and made a big difference on how we told our stories. “Fuse” went under, that was a big loss, but there are always new publications coming up, “Vice” is a good one. “C” magazine seems to have turned a corner. We are all struggling financially and the fact of the matter, Canadian Art is the largest publication in the country. We have a support structure that hopefully can keep growing, but for smaller magazines like “C” magazine, I know it is a struggle to make it work. I would personally like to see more attention paid to the conversation that is going on in print. People are quick to criticize without actually reading the issue. That is our challenge, to get people reading.

I think the more vibrant and dynamic and critical the dialogue the more people will pay attention.

Social media has played a big part as well, there critical discussions go on everyday over a number of different platforms. It is our role as a legacy publication and as an editorial group to find ways to present those voices in a professional manner that can stand as the record of its time. We are constantly changing and I do not know what is going to happen next. Do you find the diversification of publication formats to be more successful as opposed to print? Print advertising is disappearing. There

was a time when the model was we could rely on a certain number of retail advertisers to buy a quarter or half page ad. The rise of art fairs has changed the model, galleries now choose either to buy an advertising in Canadian Art or go to an art fair and purchase a booth. In the context of Canadian Art, the revenue from print pays for the online. Although there are those that question the validity of print, in our experience, the print magazine pays for the website. Right now there is no golden ticket to make a website have a revenue stream, but you need to have a digital presence. This means creating the infrastructure to support online and at the same time there should be a synergy between print and online which is rare to find because print voices are very different from digital voices and currently our digital voice does not have the same kind of infrastructure. We are in the process of redesigning the

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website at the moment to align it with print for better consistency. We have found that a close relationship

exists between design and editorial work. Does the content influence design or vice versa? We work closely with the creative director, her name is Barbara Solowan. She comes from a background in magazine design and has tons of experience. The visual part of what we do is a challenge when trying to find images to match stories. As an editorial group we try to take a piece of the story and use it to represent the whole text. We approach the image as another creative element in the story telling. Our new editorial model has offered the creative director a lot of freedom to do things differently than we’ve done before with new graphic design models. The creative director does a fantastic job from the initial layout phase to the final layout.

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FILE In 1972, General Idea brought File Magazine to life.

Material for early issues of the magazine served as a way for members of the mail art network to keep in contact and connect with each other, the magazine becoming a record in what artists were doing in the mail-art movement. General Idea used the magazine as a platform to issue propagandistic, self-referential self-promotion for their work. The editorials for the magazine were written by the group for each issue often creating and glamourizing their self image. Through this magazines platform, the group orchestrated a stage for the groups operating concepts and principles while pushing boundaries such as LGBT+ identities, sexuality, advertising, popular culture always playing with controversial topics and ideas. The writing style of File is noteworthy for its heavily ironic use of language, a caricature of advertising, while fastened with multiple meanings. by Taymah Armatrading and Rachel Scrivo

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Can you tell me a little bit about your aims in publishing FILE magazine?

AA Bronson:

When General Idea first started in 1969 in Toronto we were well aware of the fact that in order to make art you had to have a scene that you’re part of, and so a lot of our work was built around the idea of building a scene.

For example, the early Miss General Idea pageants were a way of involving just about everybody we knew in a big performance event and pulling together people from different audiences, not only the art audience but the literary audience, the music audience, and so on to be a new sort of art audience. FILE Magazine was about making a scene visible, of faking the importance of a scene and making a scene feel like a much bigger, more established thing than it was. If people could see themselves in a magazine and see themselves reported as being a community, they might believe they were a scene. And not only that, but if you reported the Toronto scene to the international world, the international world might think, “Oh there’s a scene in Toronto,” when in fact, there wasn’t yet, but there were these little beginnings. We sort of dramatized and glamourized what was happening in Toronto.

Do you remember your mission statement that you published in a 1975 edition of FILE magazine?

AA:

You know I never really thought of it as a mission statement but it goes something like: “This is the story of General Idea, and the story of what we wanted. We wanted to be famous, we wanted to be glamorous, we wanted to be rich. That is to say we wanted to be artists

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and we knew that if we were famous, if we were glamourous, we could say we are artists and we would be, we did, and we are;, we are famous, glamourous artists.” I think Warhol’s factory scene was influential here as a way of creating an aura in which something could happen. But frankly I think Warhol has been influential on the entire western art world, not just Toronto, but in Toronto we took it a step further. It was a very interesting moment in which people started using all their friends to create extended narratives. It was a whole narrative thing that happened here. Colin Campbell’s, Lisa Steele’s and Rodney Warden’s video tapes and David Buckon’s photo pieces and so on all involved people in narrative structures and that didn’t happen anywhere else in North America, that’s very specific to Toronto.

If you were to describe the energy of Canadian publications, how would you describe it?

AA:

Let’s start with underground newspapers in the 60’s. The web offset press became available in the early 60’s, the press allows you to print short-run newspapers, like a thousand copies. It’s because of the invention of the web press that it became possible to do independent newspapers, and Canada, as you know, is 5000 miles wide and the inhabitant part is mostly within a 100 miles of the American border, so it’s like a linear country. Canada really depends on communications media of all sorts for its existence. In the alternative world, underground newspapers became very important.

It all started to grow through a network of small independent publishers, like Just Press in Toronto in mid 60’s. Small presses began to publish small journals and the 70’s was an era of independent magazines. There were an enormous number of them started up. I think this is what the art world needed to create some sort of fabric, even just to introduce all of us to each other, and to let us know what each other were doing. We were very out of touch until that started to happen. Also, the Canada Council invented the travel grant around ‘74 or so. Before the travel grant the only way you could travel was to hitchhike, but after the travel grant, more communication across the country was possible. For Canada the theme of communications is important, it is a binding force that helps brings the country together. You know Canadian publishers at the New York and LA art book fairs are the biggest number after the Americans. There is a consistency to Canadian publishing, it’s kind of hard to put your finger on it, but it tends to be possibly a little bit more theoretical than in most other places. I think there’s a lot less single voice kind of publishing and more collaboration, more people involving their friends or other people in what they do, that is a peculiar and particular Canadian thing. Canadians are more community based and that comes out in the publishing as well.

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Since FILE magazine has ended, what do you think is the future holds in publishing? And would there have been a future for FILE if it had continued?

AA:

Well FILE changed over time, it evolved and became different things, so I think it didn’t ever occur to us to end it until it became difficult to do. It was part of our identity. We produced FILE magazine—that’s who we were. It wasn’t a strategy or anything like that; it was what we enjoyed doing. I was involved with publishing right from the time I started university and I’m still involved with publishing today, so it’s just in my blood. When FILE ended in 1989 it was a hard period for independent publications. The price of printing became expensive and ondemand publishing started up and opened the door for a different type of publication and then digital printing began and the whole printing technology transformed. I ran Printed Matter in New York from 2004-2010, and we began the New York Art book fair in 2006 and started the LA Art Book Fair about four years ago.

At the beginning of the first New York book fair, we hoped to get 30 exhibitors and we got 70, and for the last fair there were 950 applications, which we accepted 350. This is all independent publishing and a lot of it is being done by artists. There is such an incredible enthusiasm and vitality in today’s publishing scene. It’s pretty amazing. There are so many little groups of people all over the world that are involved with such a high energy, even if they all just buy each other’s publications, that’s a pretty huge market. It’s amazing how it has grown, because now it seems book fairs are everywhere. I think it’s only going to get bigger, and while conventional publishing has become economically disastrous, independent art publishing is just getting busier and busier.

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What impact do you think FILE magazine had specifically on other Canadian publications?

AA:

When FILE started, we were as far as I can see, about the only visual independent art magazine around. Even something like Interview magazine was text-based. LIFE magazine was our model. We were very interested in LIFE magazine because it was the first magazine that set out to make news rather than reporting it. If you look at LIFE in the 50’s, in every issue there is an article called, “LIFE goes to a party” and it might be a BBQ party in somebody’s backyard in the midwest, it could be anything. It was taking everyday life and turning it into news, into an event. And that’s what we wanted to do in our scene here, to take what we had here and turn it into news, make it into something that was news worthy.

LIFE was also the first picture magazine, but within the art world there was no such thing as a picture magazine at the time, so it became our model for how to proceed, although with a totally different content.

FILE focused on the design and often very experimental design. Did you work on the different aspects of design as a collective?

AA:

Yes. Sometimes one person would take on a particular part of the magazine, and a lot of the ideas were developed as a group through conversations, being around the table and drinking coffee, talking about how we could push it in one way or another. I had worked previously as a graphic designer, as a book designer, so I was more the design person on the staff, but there were also other people. For example, Alan Belcher worked for

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a while as a designer for us, and there were other people who came and went doing design work in the magazine, but conceptually it was basically the three of us as a group. A lot of the breakthroughs in the design were more in our head then they were on paper, and then it was a matter of translating them onto paper. I came out of the world of underground newspapers from the 60’s and FILE essentially took that strategy of the cheap newspaper, independently published newspaper. We just wrapped glossy paper around it and pretended it was a magazine, but really it was a newspaper disguised as a magazine.

What did FILE magazine and General Idea do for the LGBT community for its time?

AA:

In my mind the art community and the LGBT community have always been interrelated and intertwined. FILE wasn’t specifically viewed as a gay publication because at that time gay publications had naked bodies in them. We were a completely different model of what a publication could be, now it’s a common model, but back then it was unique. We were independent of the existing models, we were striking new territory on our own and I think that was our forte.

If I answer a little bit more from the view of General Idea and not only FILE, one thing that we were always trying to do was to get somebody to write about us as queer artists and nobody would because sexuality just wasn’t spoken about in the art world at that time. In FILE we were doing it and also in General Idea’s work. It went hand in hand. There’s a series of paintings by General

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Idea of geometric fucking poodles and there’s one issue of FILE which is entirely these fucking poodles. We felt we were really pushing the boundaries, like how could they not talk about us in terms of sex now. But when the reviews came out they talked about our work as being a metaphor for working together. That was how they saw it. So after that in ‘86’ there was a small journal, I’m afraid I don’t remember the name, a little independent journal out of London— the whole field of queer theory was just beginning then—and the writer was one of the first graduates of the first queer theory program in England, he analyzed those paintings and other works of ours through queer theory. It opened the doors, from then on people could talk about sexuality because there was a language to do it in.

With regards to wanting people to write about you, and the work General Idea were doing, did you receive any critical feedback from different publications that were working during that time?

AA:

Well, the only one that comes to mind is there was a vicious attack on FILE in The Georgia Straight in 72’ written by someone anonymously- that was the thing that really bugged us. And it turned out it was written by a curator at the Vancouver art gallery. So we did a piece, a Mail Art piece, where we took a copy of this review, a photocopy, and put a dotted line down the middle and wrote instructions on the top saying: “tear this up and mail it to,” and it was to the curator at the Vancouver art gallery. And then at a certain point a few weeks later he contacted us and asked us if we could call off the dogs, because apparently, he was receiving literally bags of dog shit and all sorts of stuff, not just our little torn up piece of paper but lots of other things. It was really viewed as being an anti-gay attack. It was interesting that it was anonymous because he was gay, but kind of in the closet.

In March 1981, Volume 5 Issue there is a piece titled the “Relish Metaphors for Pickled Brains.” It includes a person in black face. The point of your publication was to push bounds and to be controversial, but what are your thoughts about this piece?

AA:

Actually, that wasn’t controversial at the time. You’re the first person to have ever mentioned it.

That’s how much times have changed. I would have to drag out the magazine and look at it and try and remember what we talked about at the time. It was a piece by Jorge Zontal from General Idea; the article, the photos, the text was by him, which throws it into a particular light because

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he was a Sephardic Jew. Anytime he crossed the border he would be stopped and searched because at that time there were Basque and Spanish terrorists. Therefore there was this constant fear that he was a terrorist because of his skin colour. I do not think the piece was done with any intention to be controversial and it was not controversial at the time, but I also won’t try and defend it, I don’t quite know what to say about it, without going back and looking at it again.

The way Jorge always worded it, we wanted to stretch the social fabric. We were always trying to push the boundaries. Another picture in that same issue was of a man holding a baby, and he is sitting in such a way that you can see his genitals, so it’s kind of a sexualized image of a man holding a baby, and that was a frankly more controversial.

Did you get a lash back about that issue?

AA:

Actually, not really. I think the very finely tuned voice of today is due to Facebook as much as anything. Previously there was no forum in which these things get pulled up and pulled apart, unless a particular individual did it themselves, there wasn’t any way that these conversations would get started. Things were much lower key. Controversy had to be on a very large scale before it became a controversy and had to be front page news.

THE BODY POLITIC An interview with Gerald Hannon by Reece McCrone The Body Politic was a monthly magazine published from 1971 to 1987. One of Canada’s first significant gay publications, The Body Politic played a prominent role in the development and progression of the LGBT community in Canada. First published on November 1st, 1971 an informal collective, consisting of many members associated with the underground publication Guerilla, The Body Politic was produced out of the home of Glad Day Bookshop owner, Jearld Moldenhauer.

The We Demand is considered the first gay protest in Canada. Did it have an impact on you and the forming of The Body Politic? I wasn’t here for it. In fact, I was just returning from a trip in Europe with my friend Ed Jackson.

We had become involved with a demonstration in London against Fleet Street and its portrayal of homosexuals in the media. We wanted to get involved in something when we got back to Toronto. Gerald Moldenhauer started The Body Politic in 1971, but what made you want to join?

Well as a I said, Ed and I wanted to get involved in something when we got back. We had developed a taste of it in London. It was difficult for us in those days as we were in the closet. It was the exuberance we wanted to repeat, that excitement. Do you know CHAT? Community Homophile Association of Toronto. It was a longtime social service and political organization. They were holding a dance, a gay dance, at Holy Trinity Church. It is where the Eaton Centre is now. We went there and what should we discover, the first issue of The Body Politic was being sold. I can still remember the guy I bought it from. He actually lives in this building complex. For 25 cents I bought a copy.

Both Ed and I were literary types I suppose. We had gone through English and Philosophy classes at U of T. It seemed that if we were going to get involved with something, this

seemed like something we should. It spoke to our interests and background and so when we discovered that there was a meeting with the editorial collective we went. And as it’s said, “The rest is history”. What was it like reading The Body Politic for the first time? Well the fact it talked about gay things, you couldn’t get that anywhere else at the time. It was only a tabloid, a newspaper about arrests and so on. It was clearly done by people who were proud of being gay and wanted to change society’s view of it.

How influential was Philip McCloud for you? When I was coming out I’d had the fortune of meeting Ed Jackson’s older lover named Philip McCloud. He was closet-y himself and had a real academic interest and passion for justice, specifically justice for gays and making changes in society.

He wasn’t radical in the sense that he wasn’t someone who marched in the streets, that is until after the bathhouse raids. He was intellectually radical, he wasn’t politically radical. He had the intellectual persuasive arguments to make me believe my internalized homophobia was just that. The Body Politic was a venue for those feelings and was natural fit for my interest. It seemed silly to me and Ed that Philip wasn’t actually willing to be more involved then he was.

He fought in WWII. He saw how Nazi’s treated gay people.

He was timid, but not timid intellectually. So that made us

willing to step out into the streets; he encouraged us all the way. He gave us money, he drove us around and even when he died he bequeathed both Ed and I in his will, which actually allowed me to retire. So yes, he was a great defender of gay theory.

Did Philip help you to find your voice? Yes, to start but then I started to meet people that were my own age. I learned I wasn’t much of a political thinker, I can’t say I am now even. I was learning the basics from the rest of the people in the collective that were more politically sophisticated than I was. The Body Politic labeled it self as a Gay Liberation Newspaper, when did the collective realize the BP had the ability to liberate? Well it was in the air in those years. Especially for Women and people of colour. There was a great movement for liberation generally and not just tolerance. We were influenced by the society we grew up in. The world seemed receptive to it in a way. It didn’t seem dangerous. It might be combative at times, but you never felt really in danger. Even though there were a few incidents from right wing groups, mostly it felt comfortable.

You were young enough, you didn’t really worry about hav

ing a job. I was teaching at an ESL school. Until I finally got hired by the BP. I had worked at a bookstore, the classic job for someone who has no idea what they want to do with their lives. Do you see The Body Politic or even yourself as being radical? I don’t know if I really think myself as that radical. It was all very Canadian radical. There were no fist fights. I personally didn’t think I was radical enough. I wanted to be more radical, as I admired those who were more radical within the collective. I didn’t have the political background or intellectual finesse to get there on my own. I was not a Marxist, I wasn’t even a leftist. I suppose I was a classic liberal. A useful idiot as it has been described. Eventually I began to aspire to be more radical, that is probably why I wrote Men Loving Boys Loving Men. It seemed like no one else was going to do it, and I thought it needed to be talked about. I was naive enough to figure I could just write it and that would be that and everyone would change their minds. Do you feel like you changed people’s minds or perspectives on intergenerational relationships? Well, I wasn’t doing it very coherently. I really did think that if I wrote this really good article people’s minds would change. I overestimated the impact of the Body Politic. I didn’t overestimate the police’s interest. That was my attempt at radicalism.

A little embarrassing now. I don’t know if your read the first one I wrote. It was in issue 4 or 5. It was called Men and Little Boys and it was very short. The first one was embarrassing now, but it was my first stab at being radical in a way. I wasn’t a professional writer, but I became a well

known writer, but it took training. I wasn’t trained to be writer, writing for the Body Politic made me a writer. The Body Politics gave you a platform for your “radical” voice. Where do you see radical voices finding their platforms today? It is most certainly going to be online, it is not likely going to be happening on paper. That is the big change, social media and all that stuff. It is not as satisfying to me but that may be because of my age and partly with my background in print. Online seem so ephemeral.

They appear, they blossom for a day, and then disappear.

Things like the #MeToo movement are not disappearing.

I get information online, but is all so diffuse it appears it disappears, I can only hope that the good parts have a lasting impact. But I don’t know. What would a modern Body Politic look like? The good things that everyone who loved the Body Politic or subsequent publications miss is the physical presence of a publication on the streets of the city. It was a reassuring thing to see a box with the Body Politic. To see, as we did in the beginning, people standing on the street holding copies for sale. It had a presence within the public sphere in a way most publications now don’t have. Now the present is filtered through all sorts of electronic stuff and it’s not so visible. Its is visible if you know where to look. It used to be in your face whether you wanted it or not. Boxes would be damaged and vandalized. It gave a real sense you were making an impact which would be harder to do these days. I don’t know. I’m on the board of Pink Triangle Press and we still plan to, or try to have an impact through DailyExtra.com.

“There was a great movement for liberation generally and not just tolerance.”

There are success stories, but it is never quite as satisfying. So I don’t know what the modern version of the Body Politic would look like. I suppose it would look like DailyExtra. Do you see an end to print media? Well a lot of physical publications still exist. I’ve got Toronto Life there, a lot of New Yorkers. Sometimes I read the New Yorker online. It depends on if I decide to cuddle up with a scotch and read a paper magazine. The cultural sociology of a publication is interesting, especially its ability to create a platform for a community. We were certainly a platform that people gather around both as volunteers and as writers and distributors. It really involved people and created a sense, or helped create a sense of a community. That’s what I’m proud of it. It didn’t do it single handedly either. If the Body Politic hadn’t been around the bath raids resistance would not have been anywhere near what it became. The meeting that took place immediately after the raids occurred in the Body Politic office.

We called together community members and we all decided, after some controversy and discussion, if we should wait a week before we did something or should we do something that night. People argued it out and finally we decided to do something that night. We were the only gay organization that had an office and a telephone. It drew people in at all levels. The Body Politic allowed people to get involved. You could help with distribution and mailing out subscription copies. You could

help clean the office after a work period. You could write or you could take photographs. You could do just about anything. Not always successfully. I’ll admit it was not as welcoming a place for women for a long time nor for trans people for that matter. We tried. Would you say you found both a community and a sense of self within the BP? Well yes, you’re never alone. You’re were never just self. You are yourself to a degree, but you interact with other people. Yes, it was crucial for my sense of self. What kind of guy I was. What kind of skills I had. I didn’t have all the skills necessary to do the paper on my own for example. I wasn’t a designer. I was a photographer and writer, and tried to handle the accounts, but very unsuccessfully. Rubbing up against other people in tasks helps you form a sense of self and that is what we did. What does radical mean to you? Radical from the left or the right? It can go both ways. Literally it means going to the root of the issues and finding out whether the roots are healthy or not, and whether they are worth cultivating. It is so vague a term.

It doesn’t necessarily mean walking the streets with placards or organizing. Or mowing down people in a line up.

You can be a radical thinker. In a way it is not that useful a word. It doesn’t pin anything down. It is open to lots of interpretation – that is also what makes it a good word.

Centerfold /FUSE

interview with Clive Robinson by Dorothy Chow and Janica Olpindo

Centerfold’s history as a Canadian non-profit arts and culture periodical begins in 1976 as a recording of activities at the Parachute Center for Cultural Affairs on a single sheet of newsprint paper in Calgary. Clive Robertson was the editor and Marcella Bienvenue the Associate Editor. Their first substantial editorial was the Critical Opinion, Jingoism, Vanity Press and the Exit of ‘An Audience, by Robertson. Parachute Center briefly closed, then reopened two months later as Arton’s. Centerfold announced a new direction for the center and held monthly exhibitions, as well as an “artists-in-resonance” program once every two months. Two years later, the publication moved to Toronto with an expanded editorial board that mostly consisted of visual artists. The artist-run centre also moved to Toronto and re-established itself as an “artist’s publishing space.”

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How did the magazine start? I started it in 1976 as Centerfold in Calgary. When it moved to Toronto in 1978, it gained two new editors, Tom Sherman and then Lisa Steele. With Lisa and Tom we changed the name and started FUSE magazine. We soon had a number of different collectives that ran the magazine, an editorial collective a sort of staff collective, meaning that it was never really a big magazine. In 1996, 20 years after the start, we listed all the people who had worked on the magazine, there were 2,026. So, by the end in 2013 we probably had 4,000 people working on the magazine. I worked until 1983. I stayed on the board, and wrote for the magazine until, I believe, 2009. How did FUSE change its name from Centerfold? In the beginning it was called Centerfold from its association with an artist-run centre called the Parachute Center. The Parachute Centre produced a newsprint tabloid and in the centre were two pages that you could hang on the wall that described all the programming for the Centre. That’s how the idea of Centerfold came about. Later the name became a problem. When it was first being produced out of Toronto it still had the same name. We would do all the distribution ourselves. I mean, we were sending it out to distributions, but the distributors would put the magazine in the porn section of the newsstands because the name was

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Centerfold. Later we changed it to FUSE and it because the magazine we knew for 37 years. What kind of changes did the magazine go through when the magazine’s shifted in focus from Centerfold to FUSE? I don’t think there were changes to the magazine in terms of the content because both basically reflecting the way the artist community itself, and some part of the culture, was changing at the same time. One of the things that magazines do well is they exploit what’s going on at any one time. The question is what are they giving back, what are they doing, what are they providing? They need to be more than just a vehicle for promotion. Initially through Centerfold and the beginnings of FUSE, the key people who were involved in the magazine did everything.

We all laid out our own magazines, we all wrote for the magazine, edited, produced and then we also distributed the magazine. FUSE was also busy in its early days, which now seems so crazy, organizing performance festivals and video festivals.What purpose did the magazine serve?

What was its impact on the Canadian scene? I think initially it was part of the drive that began happening in the early 70’s for artists to create an audience. It was a way to provide an infrastructure, to provide a support system for visual arts. With painting and sculpture you had commercial

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galleries, and museums that buy and show that work. But for electronic media, media art, for intermedia material there weren’t the institutions in terms of galleries and museums. What happened in the 70’s is that people are working in artist-run centres, and they’re trying to produce a different way of working with the artists and they don’t have the same history to conform to what public galleries and museums do. So what they did, because there’s money for support, was develop communities, and they did it in an interesting way. It’s also decentralized. Instead of having the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto - this is before the Power Plant or other places like that -- there were only artist-run centres in Toronto. They were also throughout Ontario. In some places, not so far outside of Toronto like Peterborough, they had a better artist-run centre than a public gallery. What happens towards the end of the 70’s is the first generation of people emerging who develop a new set of skills of working with artists and other communities. In turn, as the public gallery system is changing, the regional gallery or even some of the museums, started hiring those people trained in artist-run centres. So now, looking back today, a lot of people that are curators of museums -- most senior of those curators -- came through the artist-run centres. In that way, the magazines, the artist-run centres themselves helped change what was there before and make it more adaptable and flexible. FUSE was strident about defending artists and how artists can produce. It would have critical articles written by the people who knew first-hand about funding. It was useful in that it helped change and build a community and it helped people who were trying to figure out who to fund and how to fund. The Canadian system is different in that way, and there are people who will argue that it was different in a good way and those who will argue that it was different in a bad way, but it was there because artists here couldn’t develop an art market in the same way that they did in the US or Europe. FUSE would help organizations when they got into trouble. It’s not easy to do this. It’s hard to look at this from the perspective of Toronto, but if you look somewhere else like Halifax or Newfoundland it’s visible. It’s not that Toronto is always great, it’s just here there is a high density as there is in New York. Where did FUSE get its funding? FUSE was reasonably supported for quite a while and then it wasn’t and then it finally choked. It was always trying to adapt to how much money it had or how much money it didn’t have. Originally it got funding to produce the tabloid newspaper as part of the artist-run centre funding, and that happened all the way through the early issues of Centerfold. When it moved to Toronto, it was a strange thing. I mean in terms of funding, it’s strange to move an organization from one part of the country to another. So, when it moved to Toronto in 1978, the organization that had been an artist-run centre

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that produced these video festivals, did this thing called the Tele-Performance Festival, which was a performance festival. So what happened was that it had a different function that was part of what I wanted to do with the magazine, which was to publish and print, but also produce audio and video work under the umbrella organization name of Arton’s. We did through Voicespondence, which was the record label, release an album by Lillian Allen. What we would do is interview artists and musicians in the magazine. Sometimes, because it was much more expensive, we would make video tapes and release them in addition. When we moved to Toronto, we were doing all those things and the Canada Council, which was Centerfold’s main funder, said we can’t, we’re not funding all those things. So you have to choose.

So we chose the magazine. We had subscriptions, we had advertising. The funding for the magazine was a mix of public funding, subscriptions, sales, and advertising. We would get people to advertise in the magazine that you would just think wouldn’t. FUSE tried to print every month, which was hard to do. Then the funding agencies became more difficult. They had certain rules about how many issues you were supposed to produce a year. I think that affected a lot of magazines in Canada at once. Most of us who produced magazines and events did so while making our own art and would have acknowledge that a magazine shouldn’t last forever, that they have a period in which they are productive, and then something new should and will take over. Of course, today technology has affected a major difference between print magazines and what can be done online. The big issue for me, and for a lot of people like me, is that today the opportunity for people to do this by print is not there as much, in the way we want it to be there. The other thing is that it’s hard to translate how much work it was to do a publication before InDesign or in doing it as a digital publication.

We had to do it all by hand so it’s very different. If you had a lot more funding for the magazine, how do you think the magazine will be today? Did Fuse every run into trouble because of its logo? You know the story of FILE magazine, how it got in trouble as its logo was an inversion of what Life magazine used as its logo. Life magazine itself was distinctive, you know what it looked like. It’s a pictorial news magazine that covered everything at one time they had a massive circulation, the magazine reached 26 million people at one point.

FUSE used the design of a news magazine, and it also used this pretend fold here. We got a complaint from Time and they told us to stop using their design. When FUSE moved to Toronto and shared a space with Art Metropole as it did with Parallelogramme, I looked up what they had registered and it was this drawing of a triangle. We said, “We give up” and changed the colour of the border from red to black, and then we changed the design of course.

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Interview with Sky Godden by Ramis Tarannum Ruth Philips

MOMUS

Momus is an international online art publication and

podcast that promotes art writing and journalism that stresses a sharp and interesting return to art criticism.

Created in Toronto in October 2014, founding editor, Skye Godden, has crafted Momus into a trusted reference for the discussion of contemporary art. Momus has produced a platform of lasting value, promoting a discourse that addresses both the flaws and strengths of a fast expanding art world in need of renewed reflection.

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How did the name “Momus” come to be? It’s the Greek god of criticism. The longer answer is that it’s hard to title a publication without falling into some obvious patterning such as using art in the title, then you become one of 18 other art publications.

Momus almost sounds like “Moma” or “Momentous, “ so there is an onomatopoeic or associative quality to it. At what point did you feel that Momus needed to happen? I can remember it clearly, there was a moment around 2010, where I had graduated and was working in the field. It was a nine-month contract at the Justina M Barnicke Gallery and I was contracted to essentially edit a thousand print reviews that had been written between 1960 and 1990. My job was to sync them up in terms of style and it was a very superficial editing that I was doing, but nevertheless it was this education. It was like walking through the tall grass of our contemporary art history and seeing there was an actual urgency and a real dialogue of great import. In those pages critics, artists, curators and everyone in between, duking it out. There was a real pulse to what was happening in those decades, and not just in Canadian contemporary art, but that’s where I was focusing. In 2010, after having that deep education, I was suddenly aware that we didn’t have any of that urgency, that the pulse had left our body. The publishing that I was bearing witness to around that time was largely promotional writing, very descriptive, with very little evaluation. It was very cautious with no risk taking. I wanted to do something that would revive our art criticism and to recognize that no longer did borders apply with the advent of the internet. I wanted to bring Canadians into conversation with their international peers and forego the caveat that attends a lot of Canadian publication, that we count too. I wanted to seamlessly braid our contemporary art practitioners, our writers, in with an international conversation. It was also because the Canadian scene was not as commercially based as the American scene. In the American scene, you’re an artist if you sell work. In Canada we didn’t have a market, so we transferred our energy into other kinds of productions. We didn’t think of the magazine as a place of commerce but of information. Was running your own publication

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left: Teju Cole right: Black Bars

something you knew you wanted to do or did the interest develop somewhere along the way? My attraction to publishing was pretty early on. I’ve always been an avid reader and I, more than anything, saw a vacuum that needed to be addressed in art criticism and publishing in Canada and the international scene around the time I started Momus. What made you choose your methods of producing this publication through online platforms and podcasts? In terms of online publishing, that was a very purposeful, intentful thing for me to be doing. It wasn’t that it was secondary to print, it was very much my objective to be running a publication online, because that’s where the vacuum existed. The low overhead is a real appeal to online publishing, but more than anything it has to do with the spontaneity that it affords. You can move very quickly, you can respond to cultural moments and other critics in real time. Online publishing affords you a kind of fluidity and elasticity and it’s very important that we are able to move quickly. It immediately puts you into an international sphere. Online, as they say doesn’t, hue to provincial borders. Momus broadcasts in England with NTS Radio, would you want Momus to broadcast on a radio show locally? It’s a podcast, not grounded in England or Canada. We have a syndication deal with NTS which brings us to half a million listeners in not just England, but internationally. They’re pulling us into a different listenership we wouldn’t have been able to get ourselves. As far as grounding ourselves in a radio channel in Canada, I don’t know, maybe, but I’m very wary to appear to

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be provincializing this in anyway. I remember we held a book launch in Montréal and somebody came up to us and said, “Do you need a translator, would you like to start moving this into French?,” and I thought, actually no, because immediately you’re signaling this is a Canadian publication and it’s not, it’s an international publication, it just happens to hang its hat in Toronto. You said that Momus was based in Toronto, so with all the international contributors, do you see Momus having a base in another city or in another country in the future? Yes, I may see Momus basing itself in a different city or country, just because Toronto is becoming increasingly a playground for the rich. But then again, it is international and it is online, so you don’t need it to be based anywhere particular because our writers who are based all around the world are anchoring the publication. About 40% of our readership is in the US, another 40% is in Europe and Latin America, the rest is in Canada. Momus currently has printed one book. Would you be more open to more print versions of Momus? Definitely, the ambition is to do one a year and it wouldn’t always be an anthology, maybe we would do an anthology once every three years. I’m looking forward to single authored or themed compendiums.

Andrew Berardini, one of our best writers, he’s based in Los Angeles has exclusively done a how-to series for Momus, and I’m looking forward to publishing that as a book. As we continue to amass pieces, you start to see themes emerge, so it would be fun to sew some of those together. We have two merging writers in New York who have, through writing for us, found each other, and have pitched a book recently on the relationship between contemporary art and terrorism. So suddenly ideas are flowing through the trance and at a certain speed. I feel both completely energized by it and very reluctant to go further into it. It is this physical problem that you create for yourself and you have to solve. Whether it’s keeping all the balls in the air while you’re producing a book, which was a challenge, or finding the funds, suddenly there was a $25,000 budget line that I hadn’t anticipated. I was naïve about what I was going into, which is how good things come about, you go into them ignorantly. Then distribution, I don’t know how to do that, so I have to personally distribute. I’m about to take the book into international waters, to New York, Berlin, Mexico City, Vancouver and Los Angeles to personally hold book launches, which is all very good and well for the first book. It’s an ambassadorial thing to be doing, but it’s heavy lifting, literally and figuratively. So, I’m a little reluctant to go too

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far into this because suddenly I’m will be standing in a room full of paper, and my ambition was to make sure that this stayed a conversation that, as they say, is light on the ground. What was the process of recruiting international contributors? After three years working at Blouin Artinfo I had international peers. I was in conversation with the editors who were running the one in the UK and the one in France and so on. When you’re emailing or Skyping them, there is a kind of fluidity in the conversation. The best thing I got out of that job, aside from learning how to run a publication, was this network. When I was ready to jump onto Momus, I basically pulled on all those people and asked, “Who do you know who is writing killer art criticism in Mexico? Who do you know in Germany?” And everybody had five names and you start working with people and build a connection. You want them to be on the same page in terms of the stakes of the publication, the stakes of the conversation, but we’re still moving through those trial and errors.

The writers that we’ve had from the start, at this point, it is a relationship. Then they pull in writers that I hadn’t anticipated working with. As you grow your profile, suddenly people are coming to you who you’ve looked to for a long time. It’s an awesome feeling. We continue to ramp up our efforts at finding prospective writers, we’re not just letting things come to us through the transom.

We work with emerging writers don’t get me wrong, but you want the majority of your writers to be dependably easy edits and reliably who know how to hit a deadline and get a point across in the first paragraph. So lately, we’ve been compiling dream-lists and going to those writers and our batting average is pretty good considering these are some intimidating people. It’s an encouraging moment in our evolution. It’s important to have women take on big roles such as publishers and editors. How do you as a female, the publisher and editor of Momus, think of yourself in the industry? I don’t personally often feel my gender in this industry, but I do notice it’s a problem.

Far fewer women pitch us than men and we really have to seek out female critics and constantly make the effort, not only once a season. We have to constantly be making the effort to find female voices and populate our pages such that at least it’s half-and-half. And this goes as well for people of color, but really women are the weak link. I can speculate that it has to do with confidence and a kind of structural, systemic misogyny at work that tells women that they don’t have what it takes to stick their necks out just as much as men do. It’s troubling to me that it takes much more effort to be a female lead publication. If we were to just let things grow the way they would naturally be inclined to grow, it would be 75% men in terms of what we’re publishing, and that’s a problem.

I don’t think I’m wrong, but most art history programs, most criticism and curatorial programs are producing women graduates. There is this imbalance, and considering this it is all the more startling. What advice would you offer to anyone who would like to pursue a career in the field

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of publication? There is a lot of lack to still be addressed. It’s a fairly under populated field locally and internationally. I can share with you the list of peer publications that I’m aware of and look to on a regular basis in terms of online publishing. It’s not as many as there should be in Canada, for whatever reason, we’re very much behind the curve in terms of online publishing, particularly in art. You have Canadian Art doing an online version that is not bad, it’s where some of the best writing exists right now. You have Akimbo, which I don’t mean to malign, but it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of art criticism. It’s a blog, it’s a bulletin board and I don’t think their aspiration is to have the profile of a publication, so I’m sure they wouldn’t mind me saying that, but it doesn’t actually satisfy the need for art criticism. And what do you have between, very little.

So, I would encourage people, particularly in Canada, to consider that dearth and feel embolden to take a swing because there is a lot of room to swing. Internationally I would say more or less the same thing. It’s a pretty vibrant moment.

Momus Layouts

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STRIKE

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Interview with Bruce Eves (BE) by Jercy David and Venuri Liyanage The Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC) was an art collective that provided an important venue for the production and circulation of experimental art in Toronto from 1975 to 1978. Originally residing at 86 John Street, later 15 Duncan Street, CEAC, was the largest art space outside of institutional museums. CEAC provided an important venue for the production and circulation of experimental art in Toronto. Engaging artists, musicians, and activists from across North America, CEAC organized exhibitions in addition to hosting video production facilities, workshops, screening and performance series. CEAC encouraged artist-toartist communication and provided a platform for Canadian artists to expand their knowledge through tours.

The centre was also home to several publications.

Formerly known as Art Communication Edition, Strike was one of the highly political art magazines produced by CEAC. Bruce Eves, a member of the CEAC collective, became one of the designers of the magazine. In addition to Bruce, the editorial board of Strike consisted of other artists including Suber Corley, Paul McLellan, Amerigo Marras, Roy Pelletier and Rob Reid, most of whom were graduates from the Ontario College of Arts.

The CEAC publication had nine issues under the name Art Communication Edition between the years 1976-1977, and three issues as Strike beginning in 1978. The contents in the second issue of Strike caused major controversies that led to the withdrawal of funding from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.

The financial cut made future ventures within CEAC impossible, therefore the centre closing soon after.

The following is a compilation of email and inperson interviews with Bruce Eves on matters of provocative publications, politics, exile, and being an artist in Toronto during the 1970s.

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Could you give us a glimpse into the “art community” and films/videos entering and the environment that fostered Strike? the Centre’s library collection.

BE: One thing that’s important to stress at the outset is how different the art world was in the mid-to-late 1970s The drumbeat from how it manifests itself today. The difference is crucial at the back of to understanding the interpersonal relationships and the all of the issues interactions with the funding agencies. It’s important we were dealing to remember that most people who have given their with at the time was commentary about the period under discussion were never the realization that the actually there. The opinions expressed by those people historical avant-garde was are to be understood as third-hand accounts, educated coming to an end. In hindsight guesses based on historical research, or agenda-driven this is obvious, at the time, not uninformed opinion. so much. This was manifested most explosively with Lucy Lippard’s At that time the art world consisted of only a handful of outright denunciation of galleries, mostly secondary-market, in and around Yorkville conceptual art—a movement and a burgeoning artist-run sector consisting of CEAC, A that she was central Space, Art Metropole, Trinity Square Video and the art in creating and magazines. Everything that is in operation today came proselytizing— later. So the scene was very small, incestuous, and fraught and the ever with conflict and jealousies. It needs to be pointed out increasing that all were vying for the same small pot of government knots that it’s most funds. prominent advocates, Kosuth et al, would twist What happened that caused your group to become so themselves into to maintain politically charged, when the publication transitioned their self-identification as artists from Art Communication Edition to Strike? while spouting rhetoric about social practice and responsibility.

BE: As a monthly tabloid newspaper, Art Communication Edition began publication in September 1976 as the in- Personally I always hated the name Art house journal chronicling the activities of CEAC at its newly Communication Edition—it’s just so bland. purchased flagship headquarters at 15 Duncan Street. The I think the name change was intended to content initially was simply listings and short descriptions be provisional, with the possibility of being of upcoming events and brief reviews of past events, rebranded as something else in the future, had film and video screens, plus archival lists of publications there been a future. It’s stated very clearly on

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the front pages of issues 1 and 2, below the new logo, that the publication is “Art Communication Edition Volume 2.” It’s been said over and over that that there was a major break between the last issue of Art Communication Edition and the first edition of Strike. This is completely incorrect.

Why was the publication’s design impacted by the content?

BE: From day one the images always had some bearing on the content and vice versa. But again you cannot view Strike as being a different publication with a unique editorial policy from Art Communication Edition—one flowed directly from one to the other.

The notorious second issue of Strike has the murdered bodies in a car, but the ninth issue of Art Communication Edition has machine gun-toting soldiers rifling through the trunk of a vehicle. Hermann Nitsch’s “Orgien Mysterien Theater” is on another cover of Strike but could be interchangeable with the screaming punk rocker Stiv Bators from the

Dead Boys or an Amnesty International Torture Scene on different covers of Art Communication Edition.

You look at the imagery now and it looks, “Oh my god.”

No! The scandal issue had a photograph that was clipped out of the newspaper and blown up and put on the cover.

This was the same strategy that Warhol used. They were just like clipped out of the newspaper. Warhol’s joke that everybody in the future will be famous for 15 minutes—he was talking about car crashes! Those photographs were on the front page of the daily news. That was your 15 minutes of fame. Your death.

You said that a lot of people misunderstand the “scandal.” Can you elaborate on that?

BE: The scandal was a complete set-up in that the printer sent it to the Toronto Sun before anybody had even seen it. I was the designer. I didn’t know—I don’t read these things. My job was to make it look pretty. Or in this case, with Strike, make it look scary.

I’ve come to believe that the scandal itself was a fabrication by Peter Worthington, founder of the Toronto Sun and editor-in-chief throughout the 1970s. According to his obituary, this was a man virtually at war with the Trudeau prime minister-ship. It makes me wonder whether the scandal surrounding Strike was nothing more than a convenient way to attack and embarrass the editor’s bête noir? As “the arts are a waste of money” and “look what the Liberal government is funding: a bunch of hairy, insane radicals.”

That there were no protests from the art community is iitself the real scandal. One can only speculate on an art community forming a united front against the idiocy and

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bullying of the Toronto Sun. Would the arts councils have demolished an entire arts sector in the country’s largest city by withholding funds from everyone? I doubt it, but cowardice and self-interest prevailed. After the scandal broke the art community split into two selves—the majority fled in fear for their own funding, leaving a small minority of wolves lusting and envious for the goodies CEAC had been able to acquire. After the fall, there was what appeared to have been a concerted effort, I and others would go so far as to say a coordinated concerted effort, to write CEAC out of history. It was an art magazine!

This is the one thing that everyone sort of blips over like, “Oh, Strike, Strike, Strike!” Strike was an art magazine.

If The Sun had never gotten a hold of any of your content, do you really think you could have just continued with Strike?

BE: I think it would have continued on, yes. What’s interesting is that when the shit really hit the fan, and the arts councils freaked out, and the “art community,” ran for cover because everyone was afraid of their own grants, it collapsed. There was no more money. After the money was gone I had to leave because I had no money.

I needed a job.

It would be interesting to know how it would’ve evolved after, if that whole thing hadn’t happened. I’m of the feeling that CEAC itself wouldn’t have made it into the 80s with the Thatcher-Reagan-Mulroney sort of neoliberal, conservative governments. The art world shifted away from conceptual art, performance art, all the sort of more provocative stuff into commercial, decorative crap.

The thing to remember about CEAC is that we didn’t have exhibitions. It was talking, lots and lots of talking.

Performances, very ad hoc stuff. If someone showed up

and had an idea to do a performance: “Sure, when do you wanna do it?” Now, it’s all done by committee and it’s months away. No, you know, “Yeah, come on, do it tomorrow afternoon.”

We found when we were looking up Strike, or just CEAC in general, it was just really hard to find information.

BE: There is Dot Tuer, who is as far as I’m concerned, wrote the best commentary about CEAC so far, for C Magazine.

After it was published she would encounter people and it was, “How dare you?” There was this conscious effort by a group of people to bury it. “How dare you put this out, how dare you talk about this? This is not part of our history.” This group of artists, curators, writers were trying to bury it. Philip Monk’s book, Is Toronto Burning?, is written out of laziness., He had an agenda, and his agenda was that General Idea, and that circle was the center of the universe. Well, sorry, it wasn’t. I think what they were doing was old-fashioned. Sort of 1960s, Warhol, campy stuff 10 years too late. Philip works at York and he didn’t even bother to go and do the research in the archive. He was basing a lot of what he was writing on hearsay and it came from someone who was not there. So he was getting a lot of this information second, or third-hand. Somebody’s has to write the story properly. Somebody with no agenda and no vested interest.

What did you want to provoke people about? What were the kinds of things that Strike, or you yourself, wanted to push people’s buttons about?

BE: I don’t think we were doing anything that was necessarily, consciously provocative. What we were doing what everyone else was doing. That was the current.

The objective was to push buttons. People need to be

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provoked. I’m not interested in this passive audience of cows. That’s why we go to the theatre, or the movies, where there’s actually no interaction. The point was to get people talking, and to get people thinking about these kind of issues.

The whole point of doing performance art was because it was a total rejection of past art history. Painting and sculpture were just a thing of the past, they no longer had interest. The irony, of course, is that everything that I’m doing now would never be shown at CEAC because it’s more, quote, “traditional.” It’s a lot of photo-based stuff, it’s stuff hanging on the walls. Nothing hung on the walls at CEAC. You seem in your own practice to have moved away from the radicalism of Strike, though your work with the gay archive is essentially political.

BE: Yes, the gay archive. Well, it’s in the States. With the archive, here was an example where art just doesn’t matter anymore because when all your friends and colleagues are dropping dead all around you, maybe you should be doing something other than “making pictures about this horrible time.” So we started the gay archive to just gather all this information, gather people’s stories.

Do you think that relates to what you did at Strike, gathering these different stories?

BE: I think it’s an extension of it. I was in this period where I got to this stopping point, “Where do I go from here?” Conceptual art is complete collapse, the entire art world has completely rationally gone backwards— which I refused to do—and doing the archive was a kind of way of extending what was happening with Strike and CEAC and Art Communications and the performance art stuff, extending it in a different direction. Because the origins of the CEAC was in the gay liberation movement, and when I came on the scene in ’75/’76, I was doing all this stuff about the gay sensibility and it was like, “Okay, here that’s your stick, you take that, you take over the gay liberation stuff.”

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So, how would you define an artist, either back then or even now?

BE: It’s someone who is involved with aesthetics, history. I define it very narrowly: within art history, within visual art.

That is wide ranging, but its narrow. It’s performance artist; it’s not dealing with theatre, it’s dealing with art history.

It comes from a completely different trajectory. I am not sure artists learn art history anymore This happened, then this happened, and this happened. I‘ve met too many younger people that seem just not to know very much. I think that’s a problem. If you don’t know the rules, how can you break them? It’s like somebody who writes Broadway musicals never having heard of Cole Porter before. Or a playwright never having heard of Shakespeare.There is a sort of basic knowledge that you have to have. Even the kind of things that are described as “performance art” now are just clownish. Just junk. It’s a joke. I’m not interested in entertaining that one percent. It seems to be that everyone wants to be the next Jeff Koons—sorry, no.

What do you describe as successful performance art today?

BE: Actually, what I would consider successful performance art is that people would start walking out. It’s like, “How dare you?” Why is it so difficult for people to stick their neck out? That’s what the neck is there for, to stick out, as far as I’m concerned.

Do you think there’s a creative publication like Strike now?

BE: No, no. Because I don’t think there’s the knowledge.

Like I said at the beginning, when we were working in

the late 70’s there were at least half a dozen monthly publications outside of the glossies. If it existed at all, it would be online. I mean, there are online art publications but who reads them? I don’t. I really don’t. They are also very conservative and they are boring. But again, Strike wasn’t a stand alone publication, it was part of an organization. So maybe the question should be turned around, opposite: “Is there an art organization that would be able to put out something like Strike today?” No, absolutely not!

Why do you think that?

BE: Because art organizations are only interested in cozying up to the one percent. When was the last time you saw a really provocative exhibition at the AGO, or at The Power Plant? I haven’t been to the AGO in, I don’t know how long. I’m not interested in all that selfie stuff with what’s her name (Yayoi Kusama). I hate that stuff, I just hate it. It’s like, “Oh God! This is art for stupid people.”

Why do you want to provoke people?

BE: It’s not about taking any kind of action. It’s about causing people to think. To wake people up. And, I’m sorry, art is not a half-hour television sitcom. It’s not about being nice to the one percent. It’s to provoke people. If that means people walking away being insulted, or they are being offended, well, tough shit! If you are offended, who cares?

It’s sort of a delicate balance, because if you are intentionally setting out to be really offensive, you end up being a jerk. I don’t want to be a jerk. I don’t want to be put in a position where I am afraid to do something because if I do this maybe someone is going to get

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upset. It’s not me, I’m trying to be truthful and honest. And if you are offended by what I see as truthfulness and honesty, that’s your problem!

It’s not mine. I don’t know, nowadays everyone is so thin-skinned.

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IMPRESSIONS The first issue of Impressions was printed in Toronto in March 1970. The original editors were John Prendergrast and John F. Philips, co-founder of the Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography, Toronto. Subsequent co-editors would include Shin Sugino and Isaac Applebaum. The magazine aimed to showcase photographers whose work is “too personal to find an automatic commercial market.� by Catherine Pabitu and Haley Parker

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Tell us about yourself, and your start with Impressions Magazine.

Isaac Applebaum:

I graduated from photography at Ryerson in 1973. I was going around taking pictures, trying to figure out what I was going to do, and one day I ran into Shin Sugino – one of the editors at Impressions magazine, who I knew from Ryerson. He asked me if I had any pictures for him to contribute to Impressions. He and his friend John Prendergast were editors at the time – they had taken the magazine over from Raphael Bendahan, who had founded it in 1970. I showed them my work, and they liked what they saw and so decided to include me in an issue of the magazine.

After the issue’s publication, Sugino asked me if I wanted to get involved, but basically it was washing dishes which I did for one or two issues. After that, I was asked to be an editor.

How would you describe your personal practice?

IA:

Well, my personal practice intersects with the magazine. In 1979 I was taking photographs of this and that, trying to figure out a subject and what I was going to do. My mother and father are Holocaust survivors – they were Polish-Jews who were imprisoned in concentration camps. What happened was, my mother was asked to be a witness by the German government in a war crimes trial that took place in January 1979. My father had passed away in ‘’73, so that made me her official companion. They were offering an all-expenses paid, first-class airfare, hotel, and the whole nine yards, so I went to the war crimes trial. Before that, whatever I saw, I took a picture of – I was interested in light, but I didn’t have a subject. That experience at the war crimes trial started to develop a subject for me. I started to work when I got back on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

Did you bring some of that social consciousness into Impressions in a sort of way, or did you keep it separate?

IA:

After the trial I decided that I was going to concentrate on my own photography. Since Shin Sugino left the magazine in 1977 or so, I was basically alone on the magazine. I decided that I didn’t really want to make a career out of being an editor – I wanted to do my own work. And now, I had decided on the subject that I was going to investigate. So, I decided that I would do one more year at Impressions, and I would do it alone, so that I could really get the magazine out of my bloodstream. After that time I sold the magazine to Richard Rhodes, who changed the name to C Magazine. I worked with him for one year doing artist projects – that was our agreement.

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How did Impressions change under your direction from what it was before?

IA:

When I got involved with the magazine, it was a glossy publication featuring a number of different photographers. What was going on in photography in the mid 1970’s was documentary photography. I discovered that there was another stream that wasn’t being investigated in Toronto. I stumbled on it because I started to hang around with artists, painters, sculptors and video people – video was just starting at the time.

Basically, I got involved in the art crowd, and moved away from the photography crowd, which was all documentary photography. I found a home in the art world and not in the photography world. I brought that to the magazine. I took it out of the documentary mode and brought into the visual art word.

There are elements of a more crossdisciplinary approach within Impressions looking at a couple issues from 1977 and 1978., You had already implemented those changes by that point?

IA:

Yes, I took it off glossy paper and printed it on newsprint and I enlarged the size, from 8x10 inches to 14x18 inches. The scale and use of newsprint was a mode in the magazine world that was being explored

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by Interview and other magazines. It cost much less allowing me to make it bigger and explore more.

What was the climate of the publications field at the time, in a professional sense as well as a social sense? What was the community like between other artists working within the field of publications at the time?

IA:

The Toronto art world basically developed a community centre founded in 1980, it was called the Cameron Public House. It changed hands from being a pub for the locals to an art scene bar.

Everybody met there, the photographers, the video artists, the painters, the sculptors, illustrators –the whole visual art world found its community centre. We mingled, and that created a mixed media world in the Toronto art scene because everybody was interacting with everybody. Many artists were showing at, what was called at that time, the parallel galleries. The parallel gallery world, funded by the Canada Council, started a place where artists could get their first one-person show. The government funded artist-run spaces didn’t compete with the commercial galleries as they weren’t allowed to sell. If you wanted to buy something from the show at a parallel gallery, you had to buy it from the artist, you couldn’t buy it from the gallery itself. It was against the parallel gallery mandate. The magazine world functioned in the same way;, like the parallel galleries, it showed everybody and everything. I decided Impressions magazine would never do a review, and it would have no text. I only did artist projects. It became a kind of gallery – it became an artist’s chance to have two, or five, or six to eight pages and develop a body of work.

It’s so gratifying to see work in print, especially as a collaborative effort. Was there competitiveness with other publications at the time, or was it more collaborative?

IA:

It was friendly. It wasn’t about advertising money, and it wasn’t about ads –the great thing about our funding was that it was juried by other artists at the Canada Council, as opposed to curators or businesspeople. It was fair. We knew that if we published good stuff and we made a good magazine, we wouldn’t lose our funding.

When you first took over Impressions, did you follow the template of previous issues?

IA:

There wasn’t a complete template because what Impressions had done was monographs.

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Most of the time a single person would do an issue, or sometimes five people would do an issue. It didn’t have an established format but rather it was a mix and match.

What did the development of an issue look like from a technical perspective?

IA:

The process was very, very interesting. When you’re doing a magazine, you’re working with other people’s stuff, working with many people – not one or two, but seven, eight or nine people that are all in that issue of the magazine. I was a photographer who was trained in photography, knew nothing about anything else.

Suddenly, I had to know about design, and I had to know about editing, and I had to figure out how to put this whole thing together.

And it’s not like you had InDesign where you could just pop things in a template.

IA:

It was pre-computer of course, so typesetting and layout was a huge issue. Typesetting became more important when I started to get into articles in my last years. They were not articles about art, they were articles that were art. I connected with Joseph Beuys through his dealer in New York, at the Ronald Feldman gallery. I asked Beuys for some pieces and I expected to get visual art pieces, but I didn’t. He sent me text pieces that were written by his students about him. I ended up with these massive Joseph Beuys’ pieces, who was one of the hottest artists in the world, so I couldn’t say no. I really had to learn how to put together something, how to sequence things, and how to say, you go here and you go here.

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You worked on C Magazine for a year after selling Impressions – have you gone back and associated with any other publications?

IA:

I left the magazine world. I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair once or twice, and I went to the Chicago Book Fair once. After going, I realized that I wasn’t one of those people. I didn’t want to go that route. I wanted to go into exhibitions. I didn’t pursue the genre of publishing but decided to go into the genre of the gallery experience.

Is there anything you would have done differently if you could go back and revisit?

AA:

IA:

No, I’m very much at peace with the whole of Impressions magazine. I think that it evolved into something really good, and then evolved into C Magazine, which is also pretty good. Impressions started in 1970, and here we are 48 years later and it’s still going. Impulse now publishes books, FILE is gone, Only Paper Today is gone – all of them are gone, except Impressions/C Magazine is still going.

What prompted you to collaborate on a joint issue of Impulse and Impressions?

IA:

When I was at Ryerson as a summer job, I worked for Canadian Press in the darkroom. Outside the darkroom were all the reporters and all this activity, and all these machines where photographs were being wired from all over the world, a new photograph transmitted every 5 minutes. I fell in love with looking at these photographs.

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All day long, I would go in the darkroom, do what they needed me to do, and go out and look at these photographs. Eldon Garnet and I had talked about doing an issue together, and he said, “Well, what do you think?” and I said, “How about we do this?” He liked the idea, and then we did it, we published a selection from one year of wire photographs received at the Canadian Press.

What do you think about publication’s evolution from the medium of print to virtual online platforms?

Do you think there is still a relevance to a physical publication?

IA:

The whole physicality of art is questionable now. We’re in a period of transition. There was an article in the Globe and Mail a couple of days ago about how the Toronto Star has let go all kinds of people in the last week, and that the guy who owns the Toronto Star is saying that it’s in a fight for its life. The physical reality of different objects and even ideas is questionable, but I’m still married to the idea of the physical object. The problem in photography is that we used to have a studio, called the darkroom. We would go in the darkroom and forget about the world. You would just be with your chemicals and your images, and you could do what you wanted, create and change them. It would be your starting point.

The loss of that starting point to the computer –it just isn’t the same. Photoshop is not the same as the darkroom. Photography is in flux now – and where it will go, I don’t know. I miss the darkroom. I miss that

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process. With digital cameras, you can take the same photo a million times and select them and alter them digitally. Photography was really ascending as an art form in the 70s and 80s, and what happened was the digital revolution sort of derailed it from where it was going.

When the medium of photography started evolving in a digital direction it became a kind of painting, taking photography in a direction it had rejected. I think photography hasn’t been helped by the digital world.

That being said, photography isn’t done yet, there will be another revolution.

AA:

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