The exhibition features no more than minimal contextualisation. This may be a deliberate evasion of editorialising as part of a flat presentation which falls somewhere between public library reading room and charity shop magazine rack.
On the face of it, the democracy of the presentation - most magazines lying equally on the central table - may encourage each browser to map an individual path through the material. But this openness may be illusory, obscuring the curatorial decision which has already been made in framing the exhibition. And the casual reader could have become more aware of the affinities and discords between the exhibited journals if the organising principles had been made explicit.
What follows is no more than a few observations of some of these affinities and discords.
Production
Most of the exhibited magazines were produced in the golden age of offset litho printing. Over that time, presentation standards rapidly improved, as personal computer development removed the formerly separate production roles (such as typesetter).
However, that classical diminution in production costs was accompanied by centralisation in the means of distribution.
Commerce or Affinity
As many of the journals could have been selected from boxes in my own cupboard, I recognise in them a variety of means of exchange. To be sure, there are those which were sought and bought on newsstands or in galleries. But there are also those whose circulation was caught up in social networks: mutual introductions in pubs and at parties, followed by exchange of one's own magazine. This barter-like networking aimed to broaden the network of writers for each magazine.
There were magazines whose exchange at price was no more than a side-issue, whose prime purpose was to elicit the reader's active collaboration. It might be argued, then, that the Internet has taken on the role of this kind of networking. So is the exhibition a celebration of a form which has been superceded? Possibly so.
Official Culture
Another fault line is evident to anyone who was involved in any of these journals. That is the distinction between those which represented "official culture" and those which aspired to be "alternative": they lie on the table, side by side, sharing the equality of the graveyard.
Obviously, the past two hundred years has shown the extent to which any "alternative" culture acts as the feeder for the mainstream and should make us cautious about celebrating anything merely by virtue of its "alternative" status. Nor would it be reasonable to rely on funding as sole criterion: placing journals which rely on State funding to one side and those which are funded by the producers to the other.
Nonetheless, that is a useful initial tool. The self-funded "amateur" journal lacks the position under patronage which constantly forces those involved in State-funded journals to demonstrate the "relevance" of what they have been producing, i.e. the extent of their conformity to an agenda set by the State organs by covering the people and productions which have been officially blessed.
If these issues are visible at all in The Magazine Show it is in the idealised magazine covers commissioned for Glasgow artists for the original Street Level show. However, the decentering there amounts to little more than shifting to a different set of names in the frames.
February 1998
*To declare an interest, Stirling Marginal Review was an invited new media participant in Tower of Babble, but is not part of the show which transferred to Stirling. [Return]