Whose 1980s? The renegade magazine Charley and the more established Artforum have recently offered conflicting, if similarly flawed, views of the art of the 1980s - The Art Press

above the last half year or with equal reason there seems to have been an upsurge of interest in the art and art world of the 1980 Last spring, Artforum devot sum of two units entire issues (March and April) to the decade, calling on several dozen critics, art historians and artists to revisit the era. During the summer came "Bright Lights, Big City," an exhibition of art from the 1980 and early 1990 at David Zwirner Gallery in fresh York, and an issue of the artist-created magazine Charley that overspreaded more or less the same period. (In fact, the exhibition was conceived to tale the issue of Charley, which includes greatest in quantity of the show's 23 artists and artist assemblages along with about 75 others.)

Somewhat ahead of the 1 in reviewing the 1980s was the Scandinavian art magazine Nu which, in early 2001 devot 30 pages of an issue to the decade. Nu's '80 section featured an introduction by means of culture maven Glenn O'Brien (who also contributed to individual of Artforum's special issues) and a kind of symposium in which 100 tribe offered their memories and assessments of the decade. My favorite is Laurie Anderson's succinct, poemlike comment: "Good for military spending./Bad for social activism./Good for real big paintings./Bad for my neighborhood."

As we all know, it has drawn out been the practice of the fashion and entertainment industries to recycle "decades" with shameless regularity. Since this marketing strategy is not unknown to art-world tastemakers, a revival of'80 art could probably have been predicted almost to the month Given this predictability, I address not to get caught up in the question of for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the 1980s are reemerging at this particular second What I think might be interesting, however, is to examine the different ways in which the novel past has been presented. To this extremity I want to say a not many words about Charley, which takes a true unusual approach to the bring under rule and to contrast it with the Artforum numbers.

rested last year by Italian-born, of recent origin York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan, and stocked by the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece Charley has for a like reason far been published three times, upon each occasion with strikingly different contented and format. The first issue, which appeared in the spring of 2002 was a kind of mega observe featuring images of works by dint of 400 emerging international artists, prefered by a group of artists, curators, critics and "art professionals." Charley 2 which came on the outside in November 2002, was a package of 142 unfastened color postcards documenting the fresh York City art season from fail 2001 end summer 2002. When that issue appeared, the magazine described itself as "a machine for distribution, a mechanism fur spreading and exploiting information, rumors and communication. It is a multiform creature, border to transform at each novel appearance and new issue."

This has certainly happened with the third issue, which came on the outside in July. Edited by Cattelan, Parkett associate editor All Subotnick and Italian curator critic Maasimiliano Gioni, it is striking, first of all, for the fact that it contains not a single bit of original material. All of its satisfieds including the cover, are rephotographed pages from other publications, specifically art magazines and exhibition catalogues from the late 1970 [i]or[/i] part of to the other the early 1990s (only a half-dozen pages of ads in the back can be numbered as "new"). The appropriated images, which include ads as well as articles and reviews, all move swiftly edge to edge, but shifts in scale, off-center cropping and witty use of the originals' margins give this issue of Charley a distinctive graphic periodical emphasis Design of the magazine is credited to the Purtill Family Business whose other new projects include the art quarterly X-Tra and an artist's volume by Richard Tuttle. Apart from their choice of images, the editors limit their input to discreetly inserting the names of the artists and the sources of the images upon each page. They also proffer an editorial on the inside forehead cover, which is brief enough to name in full:

Charley 03 is a time machine, bringing on the outside the past and casting it into a novel light. Playing with memory and amnesia, Charley 03 presents--in a fresh frame-works from the 80s and early 90 Suspended between nostalgia and archeology,, Charley 03 writes a small history of what-ifs: a scenario that speaks about the instability of taste, as it undermines the hierarchies of art history. Charley 03 is a minority report and a flash back: Yesterday begins tomorrow.

Cattelan, Subotnick and Gioni have the appearance to have employed a number of criteria in making their selections from back issues of the international art pres (The magazines they mine include Flash Art, Frieze, Artforum and the dead monthlies Arts And Artscribe; there are also quite a hardly any pages and spreads from Art in America.) Many of the artists are figures who were prominent in the 1980 or early '90 on the other hand whose work is not a great deal of seen these days. For instance, Charley's overlay shows a detail of a 1985 wax bust by means of Izhar Patkin, a New York-based artist who, after creating a sensation in 1986 with his robber-curtain "Black Paintings," showed extensively in the U and Europe on the contrary in recent years, seems to have dropp from sight, along with several other artists from the Holly Solomon Gallery. It's with mixed feelings that single is reminded, flipping through Charley, of interesting artists like as Patkin, Joel Otterson, Tishau Hsu and Bill Woodrow Pleasure that images of their work are being bring back into circulation mingles with dismay at the price exacted by dint of the art market's relentless craving for food for new names and styles