It seems like ages ago, but last time I was in London over Easter I was again left with another stream of new magazines, including the super lavish Twin, Arnolfini’s post-futurist Concept Store, the honest and neighborly Underscore, the user-generated I Like My Style, and the book-like Syntax full with C. S. Leigh’s “The Annotated Spectacle”…
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After a while I passed through Paris and again I was submerged by a truck load of new titles such as the totally indie Angst, the commercially ambitious Blend, the starry and trendy Contributor, the weird Dorade, the all-cycling Fixé, and the Onitsuka celebratory Made of Japan…
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However, as I feel less and less inclined to contribute to the blogosphere’s excess of information and opinion, I decided to focus on only two of these titles, before they all hit the archive.
Even if the abundance of fresh French erotic mags – like L’Imparfaite and Edwarda – is always something to muse upon, as a sort of personal homage to austerity I will only pick two revues which have nothing in common but being in black and white.
Dapper Dan magazine is conceptually austere all the way through………. Appearing under the unlikely banner of “Men’s Fashion and Philosophy,” (!…) this sober magazine is in perfect contrast with most men’s magazines typical and tit-illating Speedy Gonzalez bravado.
If one considers that the connection between fashion and philosophy – and architecture for that sake – was hype around 1905, as will resurface in Beyond’s forthcoming edition on Trends & Fads, than indeed here we’re facing fashion “as statement,” rather than “as phenomenon.”
It is yet another curatorial take on fashion, one could say, in which texts range from appealing essays on ubiquitous computing and electronic identities, on to enlightening short interviews with the likes of Jurgen Teller, Marc Le Bihan or, most interestingly, with photographer Daniele Tamagni on the street aesthetics of the Congo saveurs.
And speaking of matters curatorial, let me introduce you to the first ever magazine of curating for curators. As the profession grows and passes from its self-learning stages onto academic transmission, journals are evidently due and here comes the aptly entitled The Exhibitionist.
Appropriating the classic Les Cahiers du Cinema’s graphic lineage, and also declaredly adopting their initial, radical stance and its politics of auteurship, The Exhibitionist proudly –and rightly– presents art exhibition makers as auteurs in their own right.
Thus, subjects such as influence and reference, as well as the late 20th century most famous curators, obviously make their way into the journal’s pages so as to build up the discipline’s backgrounds and aspirations onto the future…
As I am about to announce my undoubtably irrelevant demise from exhibition making – jaded as I am with the decay of curating under the banner of a crisis that curiously affects only what lies outside the spectacular discourse of cultural tourism– I’m certainly curious to see where this revue is going….
shrapnel contemporary 