I’m a big fan of Permanent Food, the periodical of appropriated images edited by artist Maurizio Cattelan and Paola Manfrin, art director at McCann Erikson Milan. For me, the strength of Permanent Food, aside from the window into visual trends in the magazine world, is the narrative that each issue creates. The juxtaposition of images and the absence of text provide a rich, diverse, and often surprising visual language.
Here’s an interview with Paola Manfrin discussing the world of Permanent Food, and some additional images are below.
In other news, PPP Editions recently published, In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955, a survey of serial publications, dating from 1955 to the present day, produced by artists from around the world. The collection is by no means an exhaustive study of the genre but stands as a really nice survey of approximately 60 publications of various nationalities that all contain certain thematic threads. It begins with Wallace Berman’s Semina and continues through Joe Brainard’s C Comics, Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, Robert Heinecken’s modified periodicals, Maurizio and Paola’s Permanent Food, the magazine of the Japanese Provoke group Art-Language, Raymond Pettibon’s Tripping Corpse, and a few other contemporary examples such as North Drive Press and Continuous Project.
“Amid historical groundswells like the rise of the little press in the 1960s, the correspondence art movement of the early 1970s, and the DIY culture of zines in the 1980s and early 1990s, professional artists have seized on the format of magazines and postcards as sites for a new kind of art production. These are not publications that feature news items, criticism, manifestos, or reproductions of artworks, but are themselves artworks, often collaborative and idiosyncratic. In large part they are produced by younger artists operating at the peripheries of mainstream art cultures, or by established artists looking for an alternative to the marketplace.”