'Zines for a day: Matthew Higgs on the other art press - Writing the '80s - ZG magazine - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

anyone looking for innovative work [in New York] had better steer clear of the commercial galleries, for in the current recession most dealers are playing an extremely safe game. As a result, younger artists look to the publicly funded spaces for support, or improvise and find their own means for getting the work out into some kind of public space. Unfortunately, little attention is paid any of this by the press and the audience tends to remain a small group of artists and friends who live in the neighborhood.... By simply reporting on a cross-section of these low-key events, this column will attempt to attract the attention of that wider public. At the same time, a record of things as they happen may help bring the range of current interests into focus. In the long run it ought to be possible to build a set of critical distinctions out of this information. Should that happen, this publication will have served its purpose.

Of the activities discussed, the most intriguing was a group show (organized by Janelle Reiring at Artists Space) that involved Cindy Sherman's daily appearance in the gallery dressed in '50s costume, complete with wigs and accessories. The issue also included an interview with Robert Moskowitz; a polemical piece by Dee Axelrod, which opined that "pluralism is theory for the nontheoretical"; an appreciation of Levine's work; and a report on Bernard Tschumi's "Architectural Manifestos" show (also at Artists Space). Over the next few years Real Life's extraordinary circle of contributors would come to include Barbara Kruger, David Salle, James Welling, Richard Prince (who also contributed under the pseudonym Fulton Ryder), Dan Graham, Kim Gordon, Jennifer Bolande, Paul McMahon, Douglas Blau, Laura Cottingham, Peter Nadin, Laurie Simmons, Ken Lum, John Roberts, John Miller, Dara Birnbaum, Allan McCollum, Michael Smith, David Robbins (who masqueraded as the magazine's Rome correspondent, Rex Reason), Judith Barry , Eric Bogosian, and Howard Singerman, whose 1981 essay "The Artist as Adolescent" considered the work of Chris Burden and the then little-known Mike Kelley.

ZG's print run began at fifteen hundred and ended at an impressive seventeen thousand copies; Real Life printed a more modest one to two thousand copies. Initially, both magazines would appear roughly every three to six months. Reading these early issues, one gets a clear sense of the urgency felt by the editors as they struggled to report on the cultural developments rapidly unfolding before them. By 1984, as the once marginal activities the magazines had embraced were increasingly assimilated into the mainstream, both titles sought to adjust their radar.

By its ninth issue, "Breakdown" (1983), ZG would be published between London and New York, a natural development given the magazine's persistent interest in--almost fixation with--Manhattan's downtown scene. (Brooks even relocated to New York the following year.) Embracing the city's burgeoning rap and graffiti scenes, ZG no. 6, "Street Vision" (1982), focused on the urban milieu of the street as a site for both political provocation and cultural production. Music critic (now filmmaker) Mary Harron's essay "Rapping--A Postcard from the Ghetto to the City" and short pieces on "break-mixing" and the "Crew Style"--the appropriation of white middle-class leisure wear by New York's b-boys--sat alongside a consideration of the awkward courtship of graffiti art by the booming downtown art market. "Desire" (1982), ZG's seventh issue, featured a Marilyn-like self-portrait by Cindy Sherman on its cover and included an extensive interview with Malcolm McLaren, whose post--Sex Pistols project Bow Wow Wow, featuring the f ourteen-year-old Annabella Lwin on vocals, was the subject of Dan Graham's "McLaren's Children" (the groundwork for which--his November 1980 essay "Bow Wow Wow"--had been published in Real Life no. 6 [Summer 1981]).