Art-Rite

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Cohn dropped out of Art-Rite relatively early, after seven issues; he and Robinson got into a fistfight over—well, over deAk—and he left and went to law school. A use of the word “humble” seems a long-term habit: “We were really thinking very humbly,” she told me, and back in 1974 she told Alan Moore, who was writing an ultimately unpublished article on Art-Rite for Artforum (Edit has a copy of the hot-type-set galleys), that she saw herself as the “humble servant” of artists.

Put in the place of “art-artness” were “art-self” and “art-viewer-other people”—immediate, subjective, and social exchanges.Through its auctions, Art-Rite Auction House hopes to offer a curated variety of works of art, able to add value to the most prestigious and historical collections. 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. While the streets gave birth to graffiti, punk, and hip hop, the art world soon found itself in the throes of revolution. The fanzine image carries, since Art-Rite had a loving relationship with the art world and particularly with its own generation.

This new landscape became the perfect setting for Art-Rite’s innovative approach to criticism and reportage. Only the rare, independent outlets escape the fetters of profit hungry power brokers by existing on a shoestring, their precarious state allowing them to stand beholden to none. CAN OR SHOULD AN INDEPENDENT CRITIC, let alone an independent critical journal, act as the “servant” of artists? 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. It was unheard of to have a sense of humor at the time, or not to be talking about ‘the problem’ of art—the problem of this, the problem of that.

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. Even now, talking to her about Art-Rite and reading through old statements and interviews of hers on the magazine, I’m struck by her generosity and by an endearing modesty that runs through her general flamboyance. The magazine falls into three sections: an “Idea Poll” in which forty-five artists and other interested parties, from Kathy Acker to Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper to Richard Tuttle, answer the same general question on the subject; a “Thematic Anthology” in which artists’ books are sorted into genres, for example “British Pastoral,” “Not Photography (photography),” “Luscious Color”; and then a “Features and Reviews” section of signed articles on the medium. We had really simple ideas about assisting artists, looking forward, new things, speaking directly without jargon . Hoffberg, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Richard Kostelanetz, Sharon Kulik, Robert Leverant, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Christof Kohlhofer, Jane Logemann, Paul McMahon, Robert Morgan, Maurizio Nannucci, Rochard Nonas, Adrian Piper, Lucio Pozzi, Marcia Resnick, The Roseprint Detective Club, Carolee Schneemann, John Shaw, Bob Smith, Pat Steir, Ellen Sragow, Ted Stamm, Peter Stansbury, Richard Tuttle, Fred Truck, Lawrence Weiner, Robin Winters, Rachel Youdelman, John Howell, David Salle, Al More, Rosalle Goldberg, Lawrence Alloway, Peggy Gale, A.

and Joshua Cohn A compilation of Art-Rite, a periodical published in New York between 1973 and 1978 by . Art-Rite moved easily through the expansive community it mapped out, paying homage to an emergent generation of artists, including many who were--or would soon become--the defining voices of the era. For its collective audience, Art-Rite represents a restless but friendly, constantly evolving entity. It had something of a samizdat quality, it was passed around—I don’t think Artforum ever saw it as competition but it was hot stuff.Walter Robinson and Edit DeAk, artists and founding members of the New York nonprofit Printed Matter, Inc. That’s not what we were, we were much more formalist, but we were a very different sound than what was around us.