Interview Puts Media Back On The Rails

Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron have become the editorial directors of Interview Magazine and Art in America and Antiques. Twenty years ago they had a dress-rehearsal, Fabien Baron designing and Glenn co-editing (with Ingrid Sischy) about a year’s worth of issues of Interview that were the most effervescent things I’d ever seen on a newsstand. The editorial perspective was dazzling and sly, with a hip sense of sharp wordplay. There was something heart-warming about Fabien Baron’s design; the photos and typographical assemblages were silent sight-gags running along beside the conversations that were audacious, but sweet, in the way that Harpo Marx had been. Then it was all over, for complex managerial reasons. Their first new issue of Interview is on the newsstands and online at the moment, but that’s just the beginning and I’m hugely optimistic about the life they’ll breathe back into the magazine world.

Online media is becoming technically and philosophically refined: the self-publishing platform and toolkit being invented and constantly finessed by WordPress, the aggregation of city desks everywhere being pinned to dynamic maps on Outside.in, the thoughtful examination of the impact and quality of the media messages by Ken Goldberg (now director of the Berkeley Center for New Media), Peter Lunenfeld and Outside.in co-founder Steven Johnson, and the dreaming-out-loud being done by Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson (and his company Union Square Ventures) which have helped incubate the bookmarking system de.licio.us and the comments organising platform Disqus, as well as Outside.in. But the link to the old world, the traditions and innovations of the print world was missing. And now it’s arrived. In a conversational age there’s a lot of blather: ranting on blogs, awkward writing from amateurs and the declining standards in the large media organisations who keep firing editors and subs. Glenn has a grasp of the big picture, a wild, and deep ability to juxtapose, link and pare-down ideas to their essence, and a great sense of humour. I think his manner and style will bring order to conversations – online and on paper – without destroying spontenaiety and naturalness of expression.

Interview, Traditions and History

In the editor’s letter in the magazine and under the ‘about’ tab on the website Glenn writes about Andy Warhol’s artistic vision of business as art, and building the magazine around transcripts of conversations at a time when tape recorders were beginning to shrink in size and become truly portable. Blogs and their comments are based on a conversational model, but it isn’t always, or often, or maybe even ever, art. The templates that are offered with blogging platforms may be good design, but they aren’t profound. I’ll bet that Glenn and Fabien Baron will be able to make art out of Interview’s history and the opportunities the internet offers for wide-ranging conversations.

The conversation between the artist Tom Sachs and the magician Ricky Jay, in the current issue of Interview is fascinating. It’s an extraordinary privilege to hang around on the edges, listening to what emerges when people really have something to say to one another, when it isn’t scripted or directed. In the New York Times today David Byrne writes a remembrance of Robert Rauschenberg, who he asked to design a Talking Heads album cover, and we can see the artistic possibilities of conversation. 

“Bob’s way of talking was a challenge to many – he spoke in constant puns and metaphors, like a stream-of-consciousness poet, and one had to suspend traditional forms of speech, understanding and discourse and go with the flow. It was liberating, if you could hang in there, and never mundane. Conversation was like one of his pieces: a crazy mishmash of images, multiple layers and references, and a spray of allusions that were simultaneously silly, profound and beautiful – he was the Neal Cassady of the art world. His life, and his relation to those around him, was just like his work; there was no separation and he never went out of character. The love of the world that was in the work was also in the man.”

Hopping Off The Wrong Train

For six months last year I was the media critic for PopMatters. I edited its media blog, ‘Sources Say’. The avatar was a Frank Capra-ish newshound. The blurb (written, I guess, by the previous, founding, editor) mentioned casting a cool, critical eye over the Fourth Estate. I never felt comfortable about that part of it. As much as I love the concept of newspapers and have taken, surprising easily, to reading the text of New York Times, L.A. Times and Guardian stories on my mobile phone over my morning coffee, I’m fatalistic about where newspapers are headed. There’s a Charles Addams cartoon of a Madison Avenue businessman in a three piece suit sitting in a railway carriage amongst ghouls, spectres, mediums and the Grim Reaper. The Ticket Collector is looking at his ticket and saying “this isn’t the 6.15 to the Hamptons”. Like the Madison Avenue executive, I was on the wrong train. Like every other media critic I was writing the pre-emptive obituaries of the media giants, but the preservation of the system and business model and the preservation of the values and necessity of great, probing journalism seemed to be different things to me. The system had already left me behind. I care deeply about writing well and the I’m almost worshipful of the City Desk and great community newspaper writing, particularly Joseph Mitchell’s stories about New York neighbourhoods and characters. Before the internet drained and disoriented the finances of newspapers I could make a good living out of freelancing for major metropolitan daily newspapers in Australia, global glossies and design magazines from New York, and there was a modest, reliable income from independent magazines. I didn’t have a huge stake in keeping the current system going. I’m happy to write around the edges of whatever system’s healthy, and being on the graveyard express made me unhappy. In an obituary for Robert Rauschenberg there’s a comment he made about art that I can apply to my attitude towards the media. “Painting relates to both life and art,” he said. “Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two.”

Glenn O’Brien’s Beat

I need magazines, editors, writers and designers to look up to. I need examples of excellent work to measure my own against. I’m happy enough with my bookbinding business on the side and doing a bit of writing when something grabs me strongly enough to write about it. Glenn O’Brien has always been my favourite music writer. ‘Glenn O’Brien’s Beat‘, in Interview Magazine when Andy Warhol was still alive, gave me something to aspire to as a music writer. He was writing about beats, but he had a beat, a territory to cover.  Growing up in rural Australia I was fascinated by New York in the first half of the twentieth century, the jazz of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, the comic sentimental essays of James Thurber, Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman in the New Yorker, and the humorous lyrics of Yip Harburg and Johnny Mercer. Glenn’s the inheritor of this tradition and the terroir. He brought its comic sensibilities into his own time, his own New York. His taglines for Barney’s ads (way back when the store was still with its founding family and only existed on 7^th Avenue) were pithy in the way that New Yorker cartoons were. I remember a lot of punchlines:  from an ad for the cosmetics department, “I have seen the future and your skin looks younger there.” And the caption for a series of ads that were based around cartoons by Jean Philippe Delholme, “Arlene couldn’t believe vegetarians could be so cruel”, and a series of Zen instructions: Simplicity. Cross out half of everything you write, don’t say half of what you think. Get rid of half your clothes, furniture and friends. Answer questions true or false. Look on the bright side, and if there isn’t one, get a flashlight.  

Glenn’s ease with his world, and rigorous curiosity is inspiring. He wrote about art a lot too. He had an occasional column in Artforum called ‘Like Art’ and the way he connected the art and the artists to their world was my introduction to the American art of the twentieth century that’s been an important point of reference for my bookbinding ideas: Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha were artists I found out about through Glenn’s writing. Then the telerobotic art projects of Ken Goldberg that made references to the projects of Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Gordon Matta Clark and John Baldessari put the last few pieces of the puzzle into place for me. At Borders on Pitt Street I saw the first issue of Art in America that Glenn and Fabien Baron have been involved with, and there were stories about Maya Lin’s new land art projects, and Tim Webster and Sue Noble, whose work I found out about when they created the cover for the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! It’s a fantastic feeling to pick up a magazine and have so many ideas and interesting things jumping out at me that I don’t know what to read first.

Typography Rules

In the early 1990’s typography was the coolest thing happening in magazines, in part due to Fabien Baron’s design of Harpers Bazaar (when it was edited by the late Liz Tilberis) and David Carson’s design of Ray Gun, a California magazine with music at its core. They were at opposite ends of the spectrum. David Carson’s designs were density personified. He layered layers upon layers upon layers. He obliterated words, moved them around on the page so that they eye couldn‘t follow where they went, struck through pieces of text, or made it so bold it dissolved into a sludge. It all but obscured, and confounded the writing. But music writing had ceased to be anything interesting by then. The whole approach to a music magazine jolted excitement back into the idea of music writing. I remember an incredible set of photographs of Yohji Yamamoto’s clothes, printed on black paper. Held up to the light brilliant jewel colours, greens, yellows, ambers, blues jumped out and the images took form. It was tremendously exciting stuff. It was music journalism as process art, made like an Ann Hamilton installation, or Robert Rauschenberg’s black paintings. It was inevitable that it would have a short life as a magazine, I think, given its inscrutability. I admired it but didn’t fall in love with it. David Carson was working with a design language that was around in independent record covers and skateboard graphics and there’s a designer working with that same language, Steven R. Gilmore, who’s brought it to life with a sense of classical beauty and a painterly eye, in multi-media. The way that he layers images and makes text move, in sync with the dancers of the Holy Body Tattoo, is sensational, and I did fall in love with it. He’s also a painter and paints massive canvases that from a distance look like giant polaroids, then when you get up close it’s amazing, detailed brush work.

‘Twister’ painting by Steven R. Gilmore

Fabien Baron’s Warm Glamour

Fabien Baron’s designs for Harpers Bazaar were based around an exhilarating expanse of blank space. There’s a tradition of graphic inventiveness in American glamour magazines, in Vanity Fair and mid-20^th century American Vogue, and in Irving Penn’s photographic assemblages and still-life’s. But Fabien Baron’s designs turned words into hieroglyphics, and had a sweet, goofy beauty, something reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy couture in Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy movies. There are tear sheets on Fabien Baron’s website and they’re all gently humorous: in one the word pink is shaped like a pedigreed cat arching its back and on the facing page a pink hairless cat bats a paw at a tangled skein of pink pearls.  

Between them Fabien Baron and Liz Tilberis brought warmth to glamour and made that warmth sexy and classy. I had my fingers crossed that David Carson’s density at one end of the scale, and Fabien Baron’s exquisitely warm minimalism at the other would seep towards the middle and inspire magazines generally. It didn’t happen that way. After these collaborations stopped magazines became very, very dull visually and editorially and arch and cynical. But what I was hoping would happen then is happening now, perhaps. I picked up an issue of Paris Vogue at the library at Customs House and it seemed charming in a way that it hadn’t when I’d last looked at a copy. I remember it having a forbidding ennui and a coolness that excluded people rather than drew them in. Now individual letters seemed like cartoons of ruined monuments, and the cut-and-paste collages of myriad small photos – the trademark of Vogue and other fashion magazines the world over —  seemed more orderly and artful. Then I looked in the credits and saw that Fabien Baron is now the creative director of Paris Vogue. The design is fluid on the page, and this fluidity is a mark of the new issue of Interview I’ve seen, particularly on the website. The navigation from left to right, and the scrolling up and down on the website flows like the mercury in a spirit level, aligning everything with the eye. I have a feeling that this is a metaphor and we’re seeing poetry forming from the digital design language.