Special Events

Are We On The Same Page?
LA Art Journals, Artists’ Publications
and Independent Publishers & Imprints

Sunday 17 April, 2005, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)

The event took the form of a panel discussion featuring representatives from seven Los Angeles-based independent arts publishing initiatives: Afterall (Tom Lawson), art.blogging.la (Caryn Coleman), Bedwetter (Christopher Russell), Semiotext(e) (Mark von Schlegell), The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (Robby & Marc Herbst), The Rambler (Joel Mesler) and X-TRA (Jan Tumlir). The panel was moderated by historian and critic, Juli Carson.

Are We On The Same Page? assembled for the first time a group of innovative publishing ventures spanning a wide range of initiatives from semi-commercial magazines and journals to alternative blogs, zines and broadsheets. Despite the fact that Artforum started life here in the mid-1960s, the nation’s second city has long been viewed as a place where art publications are occasionally kick-started, only to wither on the bough. The afternoon’s event challenged this received wisdom. Some of the questions that emerged included:

• who has been given, and who has taken, voice in the recent text-based mini-boom?
• how have blogs and other electronic and web-based delivery systems challenged the traditional printed page?
• how do these initiatives distribute activism, gossip and ‘conventional’ criticism?
• what has happened to the question of ‘style’?
• what part do institutions, academies and local communities play in all this?
• have these ventures disturbed or simply rearticulated ideas of the local, the metropolitan, the regional and the international or global.