Category Archives: Periodicals
Features new subscriptions, recent acquisitions, dead runs of interest, and generally highlights the Visual Arts Library Periodicals Collection.
Scanlan’s Monthly
Scanlan’s Monthly
Volume One Number One (March 1970)
The tiny American flag and big six-figure check on the first-issue cover proclaim their audacity. No kneeling to sacred cows, least of all advertising.
Warren Hinckle came from Ramparts, which published Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Eldridge Cleaver. Sidney Zion wrote for most of the New York publications you’ve heard of, and was the one who revealed the name of the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
Together their monthly ran eight issues.
The first, in our rare periodicals archive, pretends ads don’t exist, favors the extended narrative, and pushes against journalistic hypocrisy. There’s a report offering Altamont as a refutation of Woodstock, an assertion of the normalcy of atrocity in Vietnam, a tale of CBS-CIA collusion in Haiti, the American- and British-made disaster of Biafra, Mark Twain’s radicality, high school activist thought, mobster biography, and a ski champ-turned-salesman profile by Hunter S. Thompson, whose gonzo paradigm, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” debuted in Scanlan’s third issue. Their last was boycotted by U.S. printers for covering domestic guerilla warfare.
“We will make no high-blown promises about how great this magazine is going to be,” Hinckle and Zion wrote on the cover. “Pay the buck and turn the page.”
Hunter S. Thompson, “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy”
Sol Stern, “Altamont: The Woodstock Nation’s Pearl Harbor”
Richard Severo, “The Lost Tribe of Alabama”
Ben Hecht, “The Unfinished Life of Mickey Cohen”
James D. Henry, “The Men of “B” Company”
Mark Libarle, “Another Generation Gap”
Joseph Kahn, “Dirty Kitchens of New York”
Maxwell Geismar, “Mark Twain and the Robber Barons”
Wedge
We have 2 issues of Wedge, no.1(1982:summer) and no.2(1982:fall). The 10 numbers published between 1982 and 1988 represent the entire run. Some issues were published in combined form; no issues were published for fall 1983, spring 1984-fall 1984, summer 1985-1987. They have the following subject headings in our catalog, the links for which you can follow to other material in our catalog with the same assigned subject heading:
Art, Modern–20th century–Periodicals.
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)–History–20th century–Periodicals.
Art, Modern.
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Each issue had a distinct title. You can see the title for number 1 below. Number 2 was called The Spectacle.
The First Issue of Wedge was dedicated to the poet James Laughlin.
Back Cover, n. 2 fall 1982
The content includes interviews with visual artists, writers, and filmmakers, as well as essays on various art forms. They also published poetry and various writings, such as “The Thomas Crown Affair” in which Richard Prince chronicles what he did instead of going to work (which included going to the Orleans Theater to watch porno movies and a Howard Johnson’s for a meal). Below are the table of content pages.
Table of Contents, n. 2.
Table of Contents, n. 1.
And as a last enticement, here is an insert called the License Action by the Guerrilla Art Action Group from issue no. 1. These are business card sized and all came in a tiny envelope.
It is a highly entertaining read/browse that provides a snapshot of the early 1980’s art world.
Wig Wag
Wig Wag
Summer 1988 – December 1989; June 1990 – February 1991
In an archive almost everything carries the aroma of obituary. A book’s cover resembles a mausoleum door, newspapers evoke autumn leaves, a magazine’s tint becomes a mortician’s makeup. Bylines are empty chairs. In our digital realm, which seems so lively, everything passes before we’ve finished, is made to fade into the next, which is why it all gets saved.
Wig Wag is not online. The magazine lived for three years between the minor New Yorker exodus that staffed it and the first Iraq war’s recession that killed it. Founding editor Alexander Kaplen aimed gently at “A Picture of American Life,” a little literary and not too heartlandish. Wig Wag‘s “Letters From Home” could be set against The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town.” Terry McMillan, William Maxwell, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Rush, Sven Birkerts, Sousa Jamba, Luc Sante you’ve maybe heard of; many more you certainly haven’t. But the effort to turn from city-centrism seems more significant for its failure.
A notable tool in Wig Wag‘s kit was their “Indignites: Our monthly listing of who’s beating up on whom.” Critical briefs that don’t always read as anachronistic as we might like.
Wig wag, it was pointed out to us by poet and SVA professor Ray DiPalma, is that thing you do with flags on a runway when you’re trying to keep airplanes from crashing.
February 1991
December 1990
November 1990
November 1990
October 1990
October 1990
June 1990
November 1989
September 1990
August 1990
December 1989
Summer 1988
American Illustrated Magazine
American Illustrated Magazine
November 1905-October 1906 (Volumes 61-62)
American Illustrated Magazine does not explain itself. It gets right on with the story. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, on soft, aromatic paper. Pleasantly antiquated. And illustrated of course, with photographs, like a series of bird portraits or a crocodile hunt, or with drawings that step out in front of what they were meant to describe. As if they told their own story all along.
Walter Glackens, April 1906
Arthur G. Dove, Feb. 1906
F.R. Gruger, Nov. 1905
Arthur G. Dove, Nov. 1905
Henry S. Watson, Jan. 1906
Franklin Booth, March 1906
H.E. Townsend, Jan. 1906
George Kerr, April 1906
H.E. Townsend, Jan. 1906
Philip R. Goodwin, April 1906
Philip R. Goodwin, April 1906
Karl Anderson, Jan. 1906
C.D. Williams, Dec. 1905
Rose Cecil O’Neill, Dec. 1905
Henry Heyer, Nov. 1905
Arthur G. Dove, Nov. 1905
Lynn Bogue Hunt, Feb. 1906
J.M. Conde, Feb. 1906
F.R. Gruger, Nov. 1905
Charles Sarka, Feb. 1906
Album
Album
February 1970-January 1971
(12 issues; missing #4 & #8)
Album was published in London from 1970 to 1971. Its editor was Bill Jay.
It was a magazine of photography’s incursions.
Every page is black and white. No ornament, austere blocks of text. The effect is like drawing a curtain, or dimming the lights in a theater, only without the direction dictated by film, leaving you free to wander.
There are no advertisements.
Its concern was the actuality of practice. Old essays followed new talents in a critical space where “art photography” was as ludicrous a term as “art painting,” and what appears easy and available as a technology is, like any artistic practice, much more fugitive and essential.
Duane Michals, Issue #7
Issue #1
from “On Being a Radical Photographer,” an interview with Blankfort, Issue #1
W. Eugene Smith, “Black Man’s Battleground,” Issue #2
from Issue #2
W. Eugene Smith, “Mailbox,” Ku Klux Klan series, Issue #2
from Press Cuttings, Issue #2
from Quotes, Issue #1
Gordon Bennett, “San Francisco,” Issue #11
from Opinions, Issue #1
Bill Brandt, “Friar’s Bay,” Issue #1
from Opinions, Issue #7
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, “Luz restrida,” Issue #9
from John Thomson’s “Illustrations of China and its People,” Issue #9
George N. Barnard, official photographer to Sherman’s Campaign, Issue #7
Harvey Himelfarb, from the Visual Dialogue Foundation portfolio, “Premonitions of a Tyranny of Culture,” Issue #10
SVA Library Picture & Periodicals Collections 