Art-Rite

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Mike [Robinson] was multitalented: He had eloquence, brilliant descriptive gifts, he was a fine critic, and he was going to be a really fine artist. On graduation from Columbia, the three editors were accepted to the 1972–73 class of the Whitney Independent Study Program as part of the Art History / Museum Studies Program. They add that he “was one of the most prolific makers of excellent books, and his work has an allusive Duchampian wit, a Magrittian mystery, and a diabolic Lissitzkyan mastery of design.

CAN OR SHOULD AN INDEPENDENT CRITIC, let alone an independent critical journal, act as the “servant” of artists? Edit DeAk, Walter “Mike” Robinson, and Joshua Cohn first met in 1972 as senior year students at Columbia University during an art criticism seminar taught by critic Brian O’Doherty. Ingrid Sischy, who had become the magazine’s editor a year or so earlier, had made Edit a regular contributor, and besides writing unorthodox articles—I remember, for example, a spectacular piece about the hip-hop artist Rammellzee, and another on, of all things, those Cabbage Patch dolls—she served as an all-purpose one-person think tank.

Primary Information brings back to life one more essential publication: this time, Art-Rite, the legendary New-York based magazine from the 1970s that made the connection between the gallery scene and the underground, punk and artists’ books, art criticism and jokes, “between craziness and clarity. Indeed, Art-Rite had a collaborative relationship with the art world (particularly with its own generation) and had a close relationship with the post-minimal and post-conceptual downtown art community that was in the process of moving away from formalism and towards an art of appropriation.

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. Here, a host of independent publishers offer their original and innovative takes on art, most notably Art/Life Magazine, which Joe Cardella published 11 times a year from 1981 through 2006.The fanzine image carries, since Art-Rite had a loving relationship with the art world and particularly with its own generation. Across nineteen issues the editors created a space for criticism that was heady and smart, offbeat and irreverent, publishing an energetic mix of artist interviews, statements, exhibition reviews, “loft reviews”, and photo editorials that transcended the interests of typical art journals. The issue was printed in an edition of 2,000 copies (a total of 6,000 rose imprints), created by the editors and the help of friends. These artists’ issues were surely one model for Artforum’s artist’s project series the following decade; in February 1980, in fact, MacConnel redid his Art-Rite project in two spreads of Artforum, using a few of the same drawings, this time partly in color.

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