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'Zines for a day: Matthew Higgs on the other art press - Writing the '80s - ZG magazine - Interview
ArtForum, March, 2003
In the summer of 1982, ZG and Real Life would be joined by Wedge, Brian Wallis and Phil Mariani's more theoretically (and politically) inclined journal, which would publish ten issues, in various formats, until 1988. Positioned somewhere between October and Real Life, Wedge conflated the former's privileging of the essay as a critical form with the latter's embrace of artists' writings and projects. "The Spectacle," Wedge's seminal second issue (Fall 1982), featured the portrait of Ronald Reagan from Hans Haacke's Oil Painting: Hommage a Marcel Broodthaers, 1981, on its cover and included contributions from Jonathan Crary, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Martha Rosler, in addition to the spectacle's chief nemesis himself, Guy Debord. Issue 3/4/5 (1983) would prove to be Wedge's most ambitious. Titled "Partial Texts: Essays and Fictions," the issue comprised a series of fourteen individual artists' books, housed in a red folder, that sought to consider the "viability of a politically engaged form of writing" and included among its discrete projects important contributions from Kathy Acker, Sarah Charlesworth, and Silvia Kolbowski. Kolbowski would later edit the sixth issue of Wedge ("Sexuality: Re/Positions" [Winter 1984]), which accompanied the 1984-85 touring exhibition "Difference: On Representation and Sexuality."
In 1983 Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, the ubiquitous New York--based curatorial (and critical) tagteam, who would throughout the '80s (and beyond) organize innumerable exhibitions and pen countless articles in a foreign-seeming language uniquely their own, joined the fray with their own magazine, Effects. Subtitled "Magazine for New Art Theory," Effects--which, paradoxically, appeared to be fairly theory-free and, like Real Life, consisted mostly of artists' projects--would publish only erratically, capitulating after three issues (the last, winter 1986).
Effects, and to a lesser extent Wedge, lacked the editorial urgency that made both ZG and Real Life so vital. As the mid-'8os approached, the new, market-led landscape of the New York (and international) art world was firmly established. Writing in ZG no. 14 in summer 1985, on the occasion of the magazine's fifth anniversary--in what would prove to be the magazine's last regular issue--Brooks considered ZG's future in light of the increased assimilation of its once peripheral concerns by the mainstream. Suggesting a move away from the thematic format of the past, which Brooks had seen as being necessary "in a culture of fragmentation and marginalisation," ZG's editor felt the need for a change of direction. During this time, described by Brooks as a "period of consolidation, entrenchment and a move towards the center," Lawson and Real Life would also seek out "other artists, other ways of working." Real Life no. 11/12 (Winter 1983) introduced a shift away from the media-obsessed appropriation practices of the early '80s; instead it invoked a more complex alliance between aesthetic and political intent, where questions of sexual politics, sexual orientation, and grassroots political activism would predominate. The issue contains a substantial interview with the core members of Group Material--an artists' collective described by participant Tim Rollins as "an aesthetic boot camp"--which was accompanied by individual statements from members including Rollins, Mundy McLaughlin, Julie Ault, and Doug Ashford. An interview by Rex Reason with Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, codirectors of Nature Morte, illuminated the unfolding drama that would become the late-'80s boom-and-bust art economy:
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