Clip Stamp Fold

My first thought upon getting my hands on Clip Stamp Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X was "Who the hell put up the money to print this thing?" Turns out it was an architecture publisher out of Barcelona: Actar. They must be well-funded because this book that accompanied a travelling exhibition is an amazing production. It is in essence an exhibition in book form with tons of interviews, transcripts of symposia, facsimiles of magazines and tons of images. The book captures a moment in publishing history when architecture magazines were infused with the spirit of littleness, counterculture, and theortical fervor, and the book itself is a form of radical architecture.

I was hoping that the exhibition made much hay with the idea of the little magazine as architecture. It does to a certain extent, particularly with a publications like On-Site and Form, which was featured in Mimeo Mimeo 3, but the connection of the magazine as a structure, a construction in itself did not dominate this exhibit.

I touched on this approach with my post on Mimeo as Junkspace and I would have loved to hear how a mimeographed architecture magazine reflected the architectural theories of the time beyond mere expediency. Clipping, stamping, folding, stapling, copying, mimeoing, silk-screening, mailing, etc are central to the little mag of the post-WWII era but also crucial means of construction in the field of architecture, as Rem Koolhaus has made clear.

Such a connection seems to be one of the major considerations in analyzing magazines right now. In Numbers and Artists Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art are spearheading this approach. The idea of the little magazine as more than just a representation of the gallery, the museum, the library, the archive, but as an actual structural object, as a radical architecture is in its foundational stage. If you need proof of the immaturity of the study of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution, revisit the Secret Location on the Lower East Side after reading Clip Stamp Fold. The research and archival work that remains to be done on the topic is staggering and very exciting.

JB