Glad Rag. - periodical review

ArtForum, April, 2002 by Diedrich Diederichsen

ARTIST-PUBLISHED MAGAZINES around 1972 were concerned primarily with art. This is not as tautological as it sounds. While artists' magazines have always dealt with art, criticizing, representing, or promoting it, what was new in the late '60s and early '70s was that certain forms of art could happen only in such publications. Be it Interfunktionen or Extra, magazines followed the Conceptualist lead and operated as alternatives to, or expansions of, the gallery or museum; at least after Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, magazines became a place where art was not only reviewed but realized.

The first issues of FILE, the publication launched in April 1972 by the Toronto-based group General Idea (comprising artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal), leave a different, less sober impression than previous magazine-based Conceptual art projects. Lifting its name and logo from the most famous (and popular) postwar US glossy, Life, FILE clearly anticipated a strategy that today is an everyday youth-cultural ploy: namely, logo-busting, an ironic game with the powerful markers of consumer culture, a small act of semiotic subversion whereby one borrows power from the public side of capital--and momentarily uses it against itself.

FILE magazine--after 1975, "Megazine"--presented itself in a much friendlier fashion than that suggested by such a subversive scenario. Or rather, in 1972. friendliness was to be understood as a central strategy of a magazine that retrospectively, in its final issue in 1989, declared its aim as a search for "an alternative to the Alternative Press." Unlike most artists and art magazines at the time, FILE's politics were worldly and engaged, invested in pop and mass culture, architecture and design; the magazine's stance was always humorous, light on its feet, and ironic. The first cover featured Mr. Peanut, a figure who would show up with increasing frequency in the pages of FILE, and the debut issue named as its "Image of the Month" Robert Cumming's photograph of a Ritz cracker, its dimples superimposed with assholes.

In 1972 and for many years to come, puckish good humor was but rare in the counterculture. An alternative to the alternative at that time was not automatically and undialectically an affirmation of the status quo--as it is in most cases today. Earlier and more resolutely than any others, FILE was interested in the corrosive potential of subversive affirmation, a position that would become omnipresent in the postpunk years. General Idea had already thought through in practical terms what would be theoretically formulated again and again in the '80s. In their 1979 Test-Tube video the trio stated: "We don't want to destroy television as we know it. We want to add to it, stretch it until it starts to lose shape, stretch the social fabric....Imagine all those new sensibilities taking up more and more room, those chaotic situations on the fringe of society flooding the mainstream and doing it so quickly that it's impossible to have an overview anymore."

If this sounds like a description of today's cable-TV landscape, it was not wrong because its fantasy of subversion was falsely realized: In hindsight it wasn't only mainstream culture and those who benefited from the status quo who lost the overview but intellectuals formerly capable of critique as well. General Idea and like-minded artists and groups in the early '70s took aim at late Fordist formations of consent and conformity, a stance that may begin to feel attractive again as it becomes apparent that the explosive supply of "alternative" cultural products for living. Over the long term, given their status as commodities, these lifestyle products have mainly increased the pressure to conform, drawing Adorno's "medicinal bath" of fun that we all scrub our backs in today.

THE RELAXED STYLE OF THE EARLY YEARS of FILE had its correlate in a not to be underestimated activism of communication and networking. Lists and tables dominated the magazine, especially in the first three years: Addresses of artists and other suspects made up a burgeoning international network. Letters and works sent in by readers completed "competitions," often taking the form of beauty contests, initiated by General Idea even before the group began publishing FILE (the best-known of these "interactive" projects is the Miss General Idea Pavilion, the various facets of which were charted, in increasingly byzantine fashion, in the pages of the magazine). FILE serves as the recognizable successor to an artistic strategy that began in Toronto in the late '60s with the creation of a network of small shops in the neighborhood around Yonge Street: a mixture of social offerings to a community--hanging out to music by Van Dyke Parks--and the most basic commercial gambits of seduction and advertising.

The love of all sorts of lists, small, well-placed punchlines, and faux-journalistic dispatches concerning art-world doings, punctuated with a gratuitous number of photographs, gave rise to a specific layout that was soon less reminiscent of Life and more like a prescient send-up of the "easy-reading" USA Today-influenced publication design of the late '80s. The heterogeneity of elements and the variety of texts were pushed as far as possible without a loss of overview. Collages like the famous "Pablum for the Pablum Eaters" were usually set against the "editorial pages" with a minimum of mediating design components.