Paper and More Paper

H

a

u

s d e r kunst

Paper and More Paper

Article on the exhibition “Paper Weight” by Boris Pofalla, published in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”, July 14, 2013 An exhibition in Munich celebrates independent magazines that enjoy success because of the internet, not despite it

Encens, issue No. 0

Candy, issue No. 2

Bidoun, issue No. 28

Haus der Kunst presents paper, lots of paper. The exhibition “Paper Weight” is dedicated to independent, genre-defining magazines from 2000 to the present, and it includes some stunning publications. A few are familiar; others are so outlandish that they are not available at any newsstand.

But why the focus on this particular period? What major development has happened in the last thirteen years in publishing? The Internet, of course. Before 2000 – amazing as this now seems – it was virtually nonexistent, or at least not prevalent enough to set the tone.

Today, anything without an Internet presence seems unreal. However, the strength of the Net is also its greatest weakness: its lack of an overview. Videos and images flutter about, millions of sentences are tweeted, and, at the bottom of all this digital material, blog entries collect like fallen foliage.

Who is supposed to read and listen to all this content? Magazines are soothingly limited. One opens them and leafs through until one reaches the end, at which point one can begin the process again, or not. No search terms need to be entered, and while reading “FanasticMan” no flights to Rio are advertized simply because yesterday one read an article about Brazilian architecture in “PIN-UP”. Paper knows little about us, which these days is very reassuring.

S

t

r

e

t

c

h

y

o

u

r

V

i

e

w

H

a

u

s d e r kunst

Yet how does one convey the cosmos of a magazine in an exhibition?

Isn’t the best place to learn about magazines at the kiosk, and then on one’s own sofa? Felix Burrichter, who was born in 1978 and is a trained architect and magazine publisher, designed the exhibition. He allotted all participants the same starting place: an opened, over-sized cover of their respective magazines, and, behind each of these, an area of a few square meters which the publishers could use as they pleased.

Some participants simply built display cases in which they placed their magazines. The area occupied by “Bidoun”, a magazine that has been published in New York since 2004 and focuses on the Middle East, was filled with a pile of sand on which a small goat in sheepskin boots stood, a reference to the current issue’s cover. Lesbian-founded “Girls Like Us” makes use of neon lighting, while the tattoo bible “Sang Bleu” presents fetish objects.

The most compelling display is by “Picnic” from Tel Aviv, and presents a work by artist Alma Ben Youssef, a sculpture made out of loud speakers affixed with two marble arms. Since 2002, the editor of “Picnic”, Meir Kordevani, has also backed a record label. “Music brings people together; it, like pictures, knows no language barriers. That’s why “Picnic” contains no text. This allows us certain freedoms, because language is considered something holy in Israel.”

That one should be able to ‘enter’ the magazines makes sense, because the two-dimensional publications also create spaces. The displays present social and cultural niches with a global reach, which, like all niches, are differentiated: in relation to other magazines and the so-called mainstream, as well as from the medium itself. Magazines have a beginning and an end, a specific format and appearance – limits that do not exist on the Internet, where everything fuses with everything else, spatially and temporally. This limit with respect to the simultaneous expansion and refinement of the spectrum is a recipe for success with independent magazines. The exhibition attests to this.

Since 2006, exhibition curator Felix Burrichter has published the New York-based magazine “PIN-UP”, a new kind of architectural magazine. How he came to create the magazine reveals much about independent publishing in the twenty-first century. The Dusseldorfer studied architecture in Paris and at Columbia University in New York. While waiting for a visa between two grants, Burrichter decided to do an internship in Amsterdam, where, since 2001, Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers had been publishing “Butt”, an alternative, gay fanzine printed on matte pink newspaper. Contemporaries like Gore Vidal, Jon Savage or young noise-rock drummers talked about their sex lives; Wolfgang Tillmans contributed photographs; there were (and are) “Butt” parties and an online community, the Buttheads. Yet, after nine years, Bennekom and Jonkers felt they had said all there was to say and wanted to stop publishing the fanzine. At the time, there were more than ten thousand Buttheads, and it is for their sake that “Butt” is still available on the Internet.

The two Dutchmen then began to publish the very successful magazine, “FantasticMan.” “I thought, if just two people can create something as great as “Fantastic Man”, then I could also give it a shot,” said Burrichter.

Initially, just two editions of his architectural magazine “PIN-UP” were

2

H

a

u

s d e r kunst

planned. Since then fourteen have been published, its circulation has reached 27,500, and the magazine earns money with advertisements that are simply more profitable when published on printed paper, especially when advertising luxury goods and fashion – after all, what company wants to advertise a handbag for three thousand euros with a pop-up?

Beyond all the pleasure associated with well-designed magazines, one can also learn a lot about the relationship between digital and print in “Paper Weight”, including the fact that the first edition of “032c” appeared in 2000 as an advertising supplement for its website. Jörg Koch soon ran out of money for the website, but the magazine sold well. So well, in fact, that he continued publishing the “strange thing”, which no one initially understood in Germany, which, thankfully, was not the case at all in London, Paris, and New York. The issue of the magazine on view in Haus der Kunst is the one whose cover story is dedicated to the institution, which seems only logical to Koch. The founder and editor sits casually on a chair designed by Konstantin Grcic, with whom he has worked in the past, and he speaks of the break with Anglo-American concepts of magazines and of his early days as a young magazine publisher, characterized by “a combination of stupidity and ambition.”

The founders of the magazines presented in “Paper Weight” did not consult any market researchers because, above all, they are their own ideal audience. Commercial success is a coincidence rather than a requirement, which explains why large publishers would never come up with such ideas.

The digital revolution makes some spaces in print tighter, but also opens up hundreds of different ones: software is cheap, and less infrastructure is required. One can design a magazine in London, print it in Poland, and sell it all over the world via Paypal, for instance. Digital as the death of print? Burrichter has come to a different conclusion: “No magazine in this exhibition would have been possible were it not for the digital era.”

Boris Pofalla © All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt.

3