Whose 1980s? The renegade magazine Charley and the more established Artforum have recently offered conflicting, if similarly flawed, views of the art of the 1980s - The Art Press

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein

Over the last half year or so, there seems to have been an upsurge of interest in the art and art world of the 1980s. Last spring, Artforum devoted two entire issues (March and April) to the decade, calling upon several dozen critics, art historians and artists to revisit the era. During the summer came "Bright Lights, Big City," an exhibition of art from the 1980s and early 1990s at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, and an issue of the artist-created magazine Charley that covered more or less the same period. (In fact, the exhibition was conceived to complement the issue of Charley, which includes most of the show's 23 artists and artist groups, along with about 75 others.)

Somewhat ahead of the curve in reviewing the 1980s was the Scandinavian art magazine Nu, which, in early 2001, devoted 30 pages of an issue to the decade. Nu's '80s section featured an introduction by culture maven Glenn O'Brien (who also contributed to one of Artforum's special issues) and a kind of symposium in which 100 people offered their memories and assessments of the decade. My favorite is Laurie Anderson's succinct, poemlike comment: "Good for military spending./Bad for social activism./Good for very big paintings./Bad for my neighborhood."

As we all know, it has long been the practice of the fashion and entertainment industries to recycle "decades" with shameless regularity. Since this marketing strategy is not unknown to art-world tastemakers, a revival of'80s art could probably have been predicted almost to the month. Given this predictability, I prefer not to get caught up in the question of why the 1980s are reemerging at this particular moment. What I think might be interesting, however, is to examine the different ways in which the recent past has been presented. To this end, I want to say a few words about Charley, which takes a very unusual approach to the subject, and to contrast it with the Artforum numbers.

Founded last year by Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan, and funded by the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece, Charley has so far been published three times, on each occasion with strikingly different content and format. The first issue, which appeared in the spring of 2002, was a kind of mega survey, featuring images of works by 400 emerging international artists, selected by a group of artists, curators, critics and "art professionals." Charley 2, which came out in November 2002, was a package of 142 unbound color postcards documenting the New York City art season from fail 2001 through summer 2002. When that issue appeared, the magazine described itself as "a machine for distribution, a mechanism fur spreading and exploiting information, rumors and communication. It is a multiform creature, bound to transform at each new appearance and new issue."

This has certainly happened with the third issue, which came out in July. Edited by Cattelan, Parkett associate editor All Subotnick and Italian curator critic Maasimiliano Gioni, it is striking, first of all, for the fact that it contains not a single bit of original material. All of its contents, including the cover, are rephotographed pages from other publications, specifically art magazines and exhibition catalogues from the late 1970s through the early 1990s (only a half-dozen pages of ads in the back can be counted as "new"). The appropriated images, which include ads as well as articles and reviews, all run edge to edge, but shifts in scale, off-center cropping and witty use of the originals' margins give this issue of Charley a distinctive graphic rhythm. Design of the magazine is credited to the Purtill Family Business whose other recent projects include the art quarterly X-Tra and an artist's book by Richard Tuttle. Apart from their choice of images, the editors limit their input to discreetly inserting the names of the artists and the sources of the images on each page. They also offer an editorial on the inside front cover, which is brief enough to quote in full:

Charley 03 is a time machine, bringing out the past and casting it into a new light. Playing with memory and amnesia, Charley 03 presents--in a new frame-works from the 80s and early 90s. Suspended between nostalgia and archeology,, Charley 03 writes a small history of what-ifs: a scenario that speaks about the instability of taste, as it undermines the hierarchies of art history. Charley 03 is a minority report and a flash back: Yesterday begins tomorrow.

Cattelan, Subotnick and Gioni seem to have employed a number of criteria in making their selections from back issues of the international art press. (The magazines they mine include Flash Art, Frieze, Artforum and the defunct monthlies Arts And Artscribe; there are also quite a few pages and spreads from Art in America.) Many of the artists are figures who were prominent in the 1980s or early '90s but whose work is not much seen these days. For instance, Charley's cover shows a detail of a 1985 wax bust by Izhar Patkin, a New York-based artist who, after creating a sensation in 1986 with his robber-curtain "Black Paintings," showed extensively in the U.S. and Europe but, in recent years, seems to have dropped from sight, along with several other artists from the Holly Solomon Gallery. It's with mixed feelings that one is reminded, flipping through Charley, of interesting artists such as Patkin, Joel Otterson, Tishau Hsu and Bill Woodrow. Pleasure that images of their work are being put back into circulation mingles with dismay at the price exacted by the art market's relentless hunger for new names and styles.