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

ArtForum, March, 2003

PETER NAGY: Due to massive hype and exposure, the art world is on the verge of becoming something it's never been before. More in the vein of popular culture, movies, television, fashion. It's competing for that segment of Newsweek magazine, that four-page color spread.

REX REASON: There's a statement attributed to you guys, "In the Fifties everyone wanted to have a car, in the Sixties and Seventies everyone wanted to be a rock star, and in the Eighties everyone wants to be an artist."

PETER NAGY: Yeah, or a gallery owner.[....] In '78 you open a nightclub, in '82 you open a gallery, a dayclub. The whole change in atmosphere can be attributed to Mary Boone-ism and Julian Schnabelism. It's the mass movement of popular youth culture from music into art. [...] Music flopped into art. Mary Boone gave confidence to a lot of young artists. Artists were taken more seriously, getting more press, so at least it seemed like the market, the whole environment was much more open to younger artists, to unknown people, because of the success of the biggies...

ALAN BELCHER: Of course you get a lot of schlocky work because you have more people looking at and thinking about art that had never previously done it. But it also means that soon in the future we will have art everywhere.

Nagy and Belcher were spookily on the money. Before the decade was out, art was indeed everywhere: Artists and dealers (and even collectors) were afforded the status of minor celebrities; the auction houses generated headlines as successive auction records fell. What followed--the overheated art market's crash beginning in the late '8os--is well documented.

Between 1983 and 1985, ZG's new contributors would include Peter Halley, Glenn O'Brien, Carlo McCormick, Silvia Kolbowski, Gary Indiana, and Paul Taylor, whose Melbourne-based journal Art & Text had covered some of the same territories as ZG. Taylor's alliance with ZG resulted in 1984's "Double Trouble" issue, a collaboration between the titles. After 1985's "Icons & Idols," ZG was, effectively, no more. During the second half of the '8os Real Life continued to publish innovative writings and projects by a newer generation of artists--Ronald Jones, Jana Sterbak, Mark Dion, Kay Rosen, Richard Hawkins, Jessica Diamond, the Critical Art Ensemble, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, among others. No. 20 (1990), the last issue to be published in New York (Lawson and Morgan soon decamped permanently to California), brought together new projects by its earlier correspondents. Belated issues of Real Life would be published in 1991 and 1994 under the auspices of CalArts, Lawson's new employer.

If precedents existed for ZG and Real Life, I wasn't aware of them at the time. With hindsight it's easy to see how both Sylvere Lotringer's Semiotext(e) and General Idea's FILE anticipated ZG's editorial flux, although Brooks herself has said that when she began ZG she was unaware of such precursors. Her key model was the journal of the Situationist International. For Lawson and Morgan, Walter Robinson and Edit deAk's Art-Rite was clearly a pervasive influence. Given the pioneering ambition of Real Life and ZG, it is remarkable that they survived for as long as they did. And notwithstanding the subjective fascinations of their respective editors, the contents of both magazines bear sustained scrutiny today. (Indeed, the work covered in both titles would make for an illuminating exhibition.) Despite their shared interests (e.g., their championing of the downtown New York art scene) and contributors in common (Dan Graham, Kim Gordon, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince), the two magazines remained impressively dist inct. Gordon and Graham's contributions aside, Real Life would focus little on the art/music/fashion crossovers that fascinated Brooks and ZG. Where Real Life would almost exclusively publish artists' writings and projects, ZG would approach its subjects with its own brand of what the English collective Inventory has dubbed a "fierce sociology."