Page 23 - Studio International - July August 1975
P. 23
An editorial dialectic
io In many ways, an artist cannot be said to have Jo Instead of promoting a series of individual
`arrived' until he or she has been widely discussed and reputations, and becoming little more than a public
reproduced in the magazines: they are therefore an relations vehicle for the personality cult, a magazine
indispensable rung in the promotional ladder, and must always attempt to place particular artists within an
actively contribute to the inflated status of so many overall context of purposeful enquiry and debate about
meretricious practitioners. the objectives art should pursue as a whole.
However much magazines may realize the 11 Given that it is inextricably bound up with the
importance of maintaining an independent, channels of communication employed by the established
constructively acerbic stance vis-à-vis the excessive modern art power-structure, a magazine should
inanity which accompanies the dissemination and attempt as far as possible to stand aside from - or else
celebration of modern art, they are by their very use in a deliberately ironic way - the publicity machinery
existence an inescapable part of that same with which it might otherwise so easily be confused.
superstructure, reinforcing its pervasive presence
even as they seek to formulate a corrective.
12 The more successfully magazines involve 12 If the editorial direction of a magazine is confident
themselves in the events, the institutions and the enough about its priorities, and the issues it wants to
individuals constituting the 'art world', the more investigate, then increasing familiarity with the
difficult it is for them to resist becoming glossy trade various interests inside the art community should only
journals, tacitly approving of everything with which reinforce its ability to fulfil those aims, not lose sight of
their wide circle of friends and supporters them in a genial haze of laissez-faire diplomacy.
are identified.
13 Heavily dependent upon the willingness of writers 13 It is the editor's duty not to become a passive
and artists to articulate the issues that concern them middle-man, hovering uncertainly between the
most, magazines can become ghettos inhabited solely directives of his most forceful contributors and the
by those literate or ambitious enough to project their open pages of his magazine: he should encourage his
views, while more silent and self-effacing writers to explore the directions he believes art can
temperaments remain ignored. most purposefully pursue, and extend a hearing to even
its most retiring and undemonstrative members.
14 When all is said and done, many editors know that 14 An art magazine can be prevented from
they are competitively engaged in selling a product, deteriorating into attractively packaged fodder for
and that if their circulation is to increase they must the consumer market by developing an editorial policy
consciously play to the gallery by including the kind of so pertinent in its directives that it becomes impossible
predictable pictures and names most calculated to for anyone to ignore, and actively fosters its readers'
attract superficial, coffee-table subscribers. awareness rather than being shaped by their
gratuitous expectations.
15 The fundamental paradox is that the experience 15 Writing and illustrating can never hope to reflect
afforded by art ultimately resists both verbalization the full complexity of the experience art offers; but a
and illustration, the distorting intermediaries which magazine is nevertheless able to supply, through the
magazines employ in their efforts to pin down an various ways it approaches the theme it sets out to
essence they know will always elude them. investigate in a particular issue, a model for the
inexhaustible number of alternative avenues art makes
available to wholehearted devotees.
Richard Cork
3
