The Little Magazine in Contemporary America

Ian Morris, Joanne Diaz, Ian Morris, Joanne Diaz

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226120492, 9780226240558
• eBook ISBN: 9780226240695
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

Little magazines have often showcased the best new writing in America. Historically, these idiosyncratic, small-circulation outlets have served the dual functions of representing the avant-garde of literary expression while also helping many emerging writers become established authors. Although changing technology and the increasingly harsh financial realities of publishing over the past three decades would seem to have pushed little magazines to the brink of extinction, their story is far more complicated.

In this collection, Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz gather the reflections of twenty-three prominent editors whose little magazines have flourished over the past thirty-five years. Highlighting the creativity and innovation driving this diverse and still vital medium, contributors offer insights into how their publications sometimes succeeded, sometimes reluctantly folded, but mostly how they evolved and persevered. Other topics discussed include the role of little magazines in promoting the work and concerns of minority and women writers, the place of universities in supporting and shaping little magazines, and the online and offline future of these publications.

Selected contributors
Betsy Sussler, BOMB; Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction; Bruce Andrews, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E; Dave Eggers, McSweeney's; Keith Gessen, n+1; Don Share, Poetry; Jane Friedman, VQR; Amy Hoffman, Women's Review of Books; and more.
 

Part 1: The Editor as Visionary

This History of BOMB

Betsy Sussler

This interview was elaborated upon and adapted for The Little Magazine in America by Betsy Sussler in 2013. It is based on an interview that William Corwin conducted for the Art on Air series AirTalk and broadcast November 29, 2009. You can hear the original at http://artonair.org/show/betsy-sussler-bomb-magazine-0.

Betsy Sussler: The story of BOMB begins about a year before the publication of its first issue in May of 1981. The visual artists, filmmakers, and writers who were living in downtown Manhattan discussed its inception for that long—at dinner parties, on street corners, at clubs, and over the phone. A look at the first issue gives you an idea of who was talking: Picture Generation artist Sarah Charlesworth; avant-garde novelists Kathy Acker and Lynne Tillman; painters Duncan Hannah and Michael McClard; performance artist Joan Jonas; photographer Jimmy DeSana; and filmmakers Eric Mitchell and Amos Poe. I was acting and directing with a theater group called Nightshift, founded by my then husband, Lindzee Smith. An ensemble, Nightshift performed cutting-edge plays by Peter Handke, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras, and the Australian playwright Phil Motherwell. Lindzee had been part of a Melbourne collective working out of a theater called the Pram Factory where actors predominated, and directors and playwrights were required to understand their crafts through performance. They had to act. I took this as a mandate: if you were going to tell actors what to do and say on stage, then you needed to experience what it takes to embody that script and its directorial vision. I acted for a few years—to better understand how to write dialogue. It helped me enormously. In Nightshift, as with all ensembles, each participant’s contributions during rehearsal were organically incorporated into the final result. This was very much on my mind at BOMB’s conception.

In 1983, two years after BOMB’s first issue was published, I was still acting and making Super 8 films. I played the character “Lurleen” in Gary Indiana’s play, Phantoms of Louisiana. We rehearsed at the painter David Deutsch’s studio, and the play opened at The Wooster Group’s Performing Garage. Ross Bleckner did the sets—abstract paintings on butcher paper that had been inspired by Freud’s Wolf Man character. The paintings were hung on wires that crisscrossed the stage and, between scenes, one of the actors would walk from one end of the stage to the other trailing a Bleckner painting behind them. Disciplines were not as stratified then. There were fewer commercial considerations. For instance, James Nares painted, made films, and played music. Writers acted in friends’ underground films and videos; fellow filmmakers shot them. This creative fertility fed the idea that became BOMB. We talked about what we were doing; and we had a blast doing it. Or to put it another way—within any of those collaborative arrangements, you talked about a work of art’s evolution: what you were thinking, what you were open to, what historical works were at play—that was a natural part of the day’s conversations. And, as in any rehearsal period, the artwork evolved and transformed in a way that perhaps you’d never imagined.

It was that sort of conversation, one like the creative process itself, where you eventually come to a moment of revelation. That was the conversation we wanted to catch in BOMB. This was New York City; there was a strong sense of historical precedent. We were ambitious in the best sense of the word. We wanted to make work that was going to make a difference. Ours was the generation that followed the great minimalists and conceptualists. We were, in some ways, reared by their art and knew many of them. There was a humor and competition, a sense of play and experimentation that arose, not only from working together but from the informal conversations that occurred in each other’s studios, or bars and clubs. (Downtown Manhattan had Puffy’s Barnabus Rex, Chinese Chance, the Mudd Club, and Magoos.) And yes, there were fights, and struggles, and disagreements; there was envy and naivety.

William Corwin: Who else was at this table? I’m just curious. The historical. . . .

BS: Well, it was many tables, at bars and restaurants, and in artists’ lofts or writers’ walk-up apartments. But the formal meeting table, where we finally decided what the name would be, was at a loft on lower West Broadway where I lived. The artist, Sarah Charlesworth; Liza Bear, the editor of Avalanche, who became an important advisor later; Glenn O’Brien, who had been the managing editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview; Jeff Goldberg, an essayist; and the artist Michael McClard were there.

We had spent a long time discussing what to call this magazine. The actor Eric Mitchell, who had started an earlier incarnation of BOMB called X Motion Picture with Michael McClard and myself, had thought we should call it Blah Blah, because we would be talking all the time. I brought up “BOMB,” because of the off-off-Broadway plays I was acting in that were opening and closing with astonishing speed, as in “plays that bomb.” I thought this magazine would be a rather ephemeral, wonderful moment and would exist for three or four issues and then disappear. “BOMB?” everyone said, “No, I don’t think so.” Or “I hate it,” or “Are you crazy?” But Glenn and I had been talking of Blast and he reminded them that, “Blast was the first artists’ and writers’ magazine of the twentieth century.” Edited by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West, its content was written by novelists, poets, and visual artists. So I said, “Great, if it lasts longer than three or four issues, we can say it was named after Blast.” I’m not sure everyone agreed, but Michael McClard liked the idea as well, so it was vaguely decided upon and as no one else came up with a better title, it stuck.

Sarah Charlesworth and I thought we could hammer out a basic design because she had worked on the art and theory journal The Fox with Joseph Kosuth. Its design was spare and elegant. I wanted this avant-garde BOMB to have a classical feel. I liked the balance each gave the other, so we decided that its proportions would be based on the golden mean. But we could not remember the golden mean’s formula. We were sitting at Sarah’s desk, which was a tabula rasa, except for a bottle of Chanel No. 5. I looked at this bottle and said, “Coco Chanel used the golden mean; I just know it!” So we measured the bottle. BOMB’s first issue was proportioned in relation to its form. As it happens, it was the golden mean.

WC: It was the golden mean? Well, that’s lucky.

BS: Then at yet another dinner party, Mary Heilmann brought an artist named Mark Magill. I told him that we were starting this magazine but needed a designer. He said, “Funny you should bring that up, [because] I’m a graphic designer by training; why don’t I do it for you?” Mark Magill designed the first ten issues of BOMB along with Michael McClard. In the early years, BOMB developed along the lines of what I call “laissez-faire anarchy.” We did nothing by committee: if someone had an idea, and it was a good one, they did it. But actually editing the text—that came naturally to me. I really had learned a lot from enacting Joe Orton’s or Marguerite Duras’s lines. It gave me an innate understanding, an ear, if you will, for dialogue.

There really was a feeling, and I hope it still exists today, that BOMB belonged to its community of artists and writers, and that input is what kept it vital. That’s the sort of enthusiasm that fed BOMB. That’s what kept it alive. And that’s how BOMB started.

WC: I want to get back to your editorial style of running the magazine. I’m curious, with a bunch of writers and poets and artists and actors, where did the money come from? Where’d you find the printer? As a tutorial for people who might want to start up a magazine: How did that happen?

BS: We were so incredibly naive. I think Arto Lindsay and the Erasers and a couple of other bands did a benefit for us and raised about $1,000—that paid what it cost to print the magazine on newsprint with thin but glossy cover. I borrowed $3,000 from someone who must remain anonymous, and actually paid a lot of it back—something they did not expect to happen. Liza had published Avalanche, and she was advising us. She and Michael McClard were married at the time. Michael went around with a mock-up of the inaugural issue, first to the Leo Castelli Gallery, and Leo (being such a gentleman) bought the first ad, on trust. I mean, the magazine didn’t exist yet. Once Michael had the actual Leo Castelli ad in hand, he went to all the other galleries in SoHo. It was a small scene back then, and Mary Boone, Tony Shafrazi, Paula Cooper . . . knew some or all of us and wanted to help out. Michael would let the Castelli ad slip out of the mock-up and lest anyone fail to notice exclaim, “Whoops, oh, Leo’s ad!” Everyone adored Leo and followed his lead.

Expedi Printers, who printed the magazine for ten years, was located in SoHo then; we just really stayed in the hood. If we could walk there, we did business there. And then surprisingly enough, based on just that one issue, we got a $5,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, a windfall at the time.

WC: A very interesting point that you brought up is artists talking to artists about art. What was the feeling about the more established art magazines that were all written by art critics and art historians? Was there a general feeling that they were oppressing you? It’s a love-hate relationship. Obviously, if artists get rave reviews, they can change their lives. But also you never know what to do with these magazines. Did you want to create something to stand against that?

BS: It wasn’t to take a stand against it. We knew perfectly well that critics have an important role in society. I mean, we had all been weaned as young artists on the great Walter Benjamin. It was much more about the desire to have our own voice as a counterpoint to being interpreted by someone else. BOMB created a real niche that needed to be filled. I didn’t even fully understand it—but that the magazine is still here after 32 years certainly speaks to that need. So it was less against something but more for delivering the artists’ voice. Back then I was not seeing a written form that carried that sort of oral history. The predominant art writing was being done by critics or journalists.

And when I say “we” I mean those voices that comprise the pages of BOMB. BOMB’s contributors define each issue. Artists and writers have a stake in this enterprise; it belongs to them. For instance, when Joe Bradley and Dike Blair record their conversation, that transcript becomes the blueprint. They get to go back and develop their ideas. They get to say, I could have segued there, and I didn’t; but let me do that now. Or a BOMB editor asks for clarification or elucidation. The editorial process follows the Socratic method. We ask a lot of questions.

Conversation brings up more conversation. That’s the idea. An interview is put through several drafts but that doesn’t mean that the vernacular is lost. There is a transformation from aural/oral speech to text, because in the end it’s being read. The transformation has to be elegant, and I mean that in the sense of how the word “elegant” is used in physics; it has to be balanced between the two. Why have a conversation if you’re not going to learn something, and who doesn’t want to pass that on in a form that’s lucid? BOMB’s interviews are storytelling in one or three or five acts; there is denouement, there is catharsis. . . . What we have discovered is that two artists conversing—whether they be novelists, painters, or musicians—puts a whole new spin on understanding the art because in that conversation they make discoveries about their work that weren’t quite cognizant beforehand. That’s what I like to pull out and develop in the editorial process.

WC: So that brings us back to the point. You get a call from someone who says they’re working on an interview you had no idea [about]. Or are you having dinner with someone and you agree about this guy’s or woman’s work? And then you call them?

BS: It used to be that spontaneous. Now it’s more formal because we have so many people involved and we have a publishing schedule. We don’t want to lose that enthusiasm and spontaneity, though. BOMB currently has 90 contributing editors in the fields of visual arts, literature, film and theater, architecture, and music. Contributing editors and former contributors make suggestions. People who have been interviewed get very excited about the process, and they have ideas. It’s like carrying the torch, which I love. It’s a great act of generosity. The only hard-and-fast rule we have is that all interviews have to be generated and conducted by practicing artists so they don’t get too carried away or obsessively involved because they’re busy doing their own work. And even once in a while those rules get tossed. There are some very interesting curators and then of course there are philosophers and theorists. In any case, then the editorial staff at BOMB sits down and tries to figure out how we can accommodate all the ideas—which we can’t. So then we pick and choose: who are the most compelling, what’s the best mix. We like to include emerging artists alongside artists who have been working for thirty or forty years, because it is about a lifetime commitment and that needs to be reflected in our pages. We just really think of the mix.

WC: I read an interview you did a couple years ago with a former employer of mine, the artist Ellen Phelan.

BS: Yes!

WC: You talked about her work, but you also talked about her life. She’s a good friend of yours. How did that come about?

BS: We have become friends since the interview. Ellen is now on BOMB’s Board of Trustees. I knew she had a lot to say. The interviews are an oral history of ideas. They’re intellectual histories, but art doesn’t get made in a vacuum but rather in the world at large, as part and parcel with life. So, yes, all those things come into it to the extent that the artist wants it to come in.

WC: You met Ellen back in the scene in the ’80s?

BS: I met her when I first came to New York; Joel Shapiro brought her over to Gordon Matta-Clark’s loft. Joel had made it known that this gal was the ONE, and she was; they got married.

WC: Now where were you coming from?

BS: I had gone to school in New Orleans, to Newcomb, now integrated into Tulane. I left New Orleans for San Francisco where I attended the San Francisco Art Institute for two years and studied with the Kuchar brothers, with the performance artist Howard Fried, and the painters Jerry Hatofsky, Jay DeFeo, and Sam Tchakalian. I loved them but I wanted to come back to New York. During my last year at the institute I was working for a wonderful conceptual artist, Tom Marioni, who founded the Museum of Conceptual Art. Dennis Oppenheim came to do an installation there. Dennis arrived with Christa Maiwald, who had been a star graduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago along with Diego Cortez and Coleen Fitzgibbon, who had already moved to New York and who also became friends. I helped with the installation and Christa and Dennis said, “If you come, give us a call!” I arrived in New York with one suitcase and my Persian cat, Osmun. Christa and Dennis walked over to the subway station by Dennis’s loft to meet me: they put me up, found me a summer sublet, and got me a job here at the Clocktower. I was working for Alanna [Heiss] before she founded P.S. 1 [Contemporary Art Center] or this radio station. Pretty fast work on Christa’s and Dennis’s part. That was my start in New York.

WC: How has BOMB changed over the years? Has it always been interviews, poetry and fiction, art—or have you seen it go up and down or change politically? How has it morphed over the years?

BS: On one level, we haven’t changed—artists and writers will always edit BOMB. But we are no longer a product of one time and place; as we’ve matured, we’ve grown in vision and in formats—we now live in the digital age and our online presence has grown dramatically. But first, let’s go back, to one of my favorite issues, published in 1983 and guest-edited by Mary Heilmann. It is designed so that reproductions of artwork, poems, and short stories are juxtaposed with each other on almost every page. In the early issues, this was common practice. A typical spread has a Peter Schjeldahl story about his first poem which he showed to his fifth-grade teacher (“That’s nice Peter, very unpleasant. What does it mean?”), a Luc Sante gem of a short memoir (“History is the phone that rings during a fuck, not the phone, not the ringing, but the duration, the space between”) and images of paintings by David Salle, Lois Lane, Robert Mangold, and Ross Bleckner. Elizabeth Murray curated a “show” of paintings—a two-page spread of reproductions of artworks by Louisa Chase, Bob Gober, Moira Dryer, and Terry Winters. . . . But by the ’90s we were formalizing these informal juxtapositions into sections or series. The English novelist, Patrick McGrath, who lives and works in New York City and is a contributing editor to BOMB, interviewed an English author each time he went back to London—this was before anyone here was really aware of Ian McEwan, Julian B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Decade or So of Little Magazines: One Reader’s Perspective
• Part 1: The Editor as Visionary
• Part 2: Politics, Culture, and the Little Magazine
• Part 3: Innovation and Experimentation: The Literary Avant-Garde
• Part 4: The University Magazine
• Part 5: Today’s Magazines and the Future
• Contributors
• Index
• Notes