PWCW 7 (Marion von Osten)

<p><strong>Marion von Osten, <em>Don’t Breathe Normal: Read Souffles! – On Decolonizing Culture</em></strong></p> <p>Gwen Allen grasps self-published artists’ magazines as a specific, alternative space of action that gained international relevance in the 1960s and 70s, when alternative and small-scale publishers became an important medium for writers and authors to disseminate counter-narratives to hegemonic culture at low cost, using rudimentary technological means. In the medium of self-published magazines, new aesthetic formats were conceived, notions of art and literature renegotiated. Especially in North American and European Conceptual art, the self-published art magazine played a crucial role in expanding the artistic domain. The relative autonomy of the artists and writers publishing in these little magazines, their independence from the art market and the press, eroded the ability of official institutions to function as the sole arbiters defining and valuating art and culture. The self-published magazine, as a site of production, distribution and discourse for the alternative art movement, was thus able to bypass the selection criteria, contractual terms and commercial interests of official publishers…</p>