Rethinking Art's Histories Counter Print

This collection explores the role of newsletters, magazines, and journals in shaping contemporary art’s practices, histories, and communities, uncovering the impact of queer, feminist, Black, and transnational networks on Britain’s cultural landscape. The history of contemporary art is also a history of its newsletters, manifestos, magazines, pamphlets and journals. Those periodical publications do not simply communicate or record ideas but have worked in exciting ways to shape art’s practices, histories and communities. As a new generation of artists, activists and scholars seek to uncover the histories of alternative publishing and artistic networks, this book gathers original archival discoveries while offering methodologies for studying and thinking with those artefacts.Through case studies it tells the story of an independent media culture of artists, critics and historians operating on the edges of mainstream institutions. It examines the queer, feminist, Black and transnational communities that reshaped Britain’s cultural landscape through groundbreaking publications and publishers including Black Phoenix, Bazaar, Artscribe, Spare Rib, Mukti, Feminist Arts News and Urban Fox Press, and tracks changes to an expanding field of post-digital publishing through Inventory, e-flux, and The White Pube. As the first essay collection to focus on the periodical art press and the ways we study it, Counter Print offers readers an alternative route into contemporary art since 1970, one that is defiantly collaborative, border-crossing and disruptive.‘Like the radical publications it charts, this book intervenes into art history, offering vital new perspectives on periodicals as sites of cultural resistance, community, and world-making. Though grounded in a British context, its insights resonate far beyond, revealing the transformative possibilities of publishing about—and as—art.’ —Gwen Allen, Professor of Art History, San Francisco State University and author of Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art The history of contemporary art is also a history of its newsletters, manifestos, magazines, pamphlets, and journals. Those periodical publications do not simply communicate or record ideas but have worked in exciting ways to shape art’s practices, histories and communities. As a new generation of artists, activists and scholars seek to uncover the histories of alternative publishing and artistic networks, this book gathers original archival discoveries while offering methodologies for studying and thinking with those artefacts. As the first essay collection to focus on the periodical art press and the ways we study it, Counter Print offers readers an alternative route into the past fifty years of contemporary art, one that is defiantly collaborative, border crossing and disruptive.