Art-Rite’s five-year run was marked by ambitious thematic issues (on Painting, Video, Performance, and Artists’ Books) and single-artist focus issues, charting the richness of de-materialized and alternative art practices, including publications themselves, that emerged out of conceptualism and post-minimalism. Paying tribute to the emerging generation of artists, including many of the defining artists of the era, they roamed freely through the vast community they created. Over its five year run, Art-Rite would publish hundreds of interviews, exhibition and performance reviews, statements, and projects “by, with, and about” a generation of artists who felt accessible in these pages, even as many of them were, or would soon become, the defining voices of the era. Cover: Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, A Smile Without a Cat (Celebration of Annlee’s Vanishing), 2002, fireworks display, Miami Beach, FL.

Looking at this device, which applies the principles of Rockburne’s work in folded paper to turning the issue into a mass-produced multiple, you may not realize at first that it also rephrases the notion of a cover: To make it function, the magazine’s first spread—the inside cover on the left and the facing page on the right—must be blank, since the folded-over outer cover lays them bare, including them in the work. Their attitude towards the powers-that-be is rebellious, while their attitude towards their own people is most solicitous. January 1977), mostly a group of found photographs invoking speed, violence, and rock ’n’ roll, and Kim MacConnel’s no. DeAk and Robinson commissioned Ruscha, she remembers, when they were vacationing in France; they doubted he had ever heard of them, but she felt that if they drove all night to Saint-Tropez, bought a tourist postcard there, and sent it to him with a Saint-Tropez postmark—“Hi Ed! Put in the place of “art-artness” were “art-self” and “art-viewer-other people”—immediate, subjective, and social exchanges.To keep costs low, the editors carved potatoes to the shape of the rose, manually inking and printing the stamps as many times as they could withstand before deteriorating.

Perfectly positioned between the underground and the establishment, the magazine featured artists who became defining voices of the era, including Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, and Gordon Matta-Clark. Throughout the strikingly laid-out pages are hallmarks of Vega’s personal aesthetics, including images of horse racing, Iggy Pop, Elvis, and Ghost Rider, filtered through a lens of sexuality, Americana, and Catholicism. Featuring works by Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, and Laurie Anderson, Art-Rite embodied the anarchic free-for-all that was Downtown New York. Edited by Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn, Art-Rite was published in New York City between 1973 and 1978.Robinson later noted that while the program is now very competitive, it wasn’t as structured at the time, and hadn’t yet formally included critics: “I think we just ushered ourselves right in, fit in between the art historians and the artists. Artists and Art-Rite contributors Pat Steir and Robin Winters join editor Walter Robinson in a discussion about the founding and early history of Art-Rite magazine, and explore artists in 1970s Soho. Published simultaneously in two editions, one with black cover text and one with red, containing substantial interior differences. Printed Matter’s online catalog is one of the largest and most comprehensive databases of artists’ books and related publications. Still in its formative years, the ISP, which would later count Félix González-Torres, Kathryn Bigelow, and Jenny Holzer among its alumni, only offered programs for artists and art historians.

In Robinson’s memory of the ’70s, “The art world seemed so cold and macho and then you’d see this funny William Wegman and this charming Laurie Anderson. A good deal of thought went into images, so that the issue is virtually a compendium of decisions on how to represent a book visually—whether to show the cover, or individual pages, or individual images cropped from their pages, or perhaps the book as an object, held open by somebody’s hands, which in deAk’s case might also hold a cigarette. They are authoritative in the art they promote, and are creating or are committed to the avant-clique.The role gave him familiarity with typesetting, layout and getting a publication to press, as well as unsupervised use of equipment and borrowed type.