Gwen Allen Libri

In 1981 Cindy Sherman was commissioned to contribute a special project to Artforum magazine. Given two facing pages, she chose to explore the pornographic centerfold, creating 12 largescale horizontal images of herself appearing as various young women, often reclining, in private, melancholic moments of reverie. As Sherman explained, "I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at it in expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be." Sherman's Centerfolds were so provocative that they were never published for fear that they would be misunderstood. Art historian Gwen Allen's essay examines one of the most iconic photographs in the series, Untitled #96-in which a young woman lies on her back against an orange and yellow vinyl floor, clutching a scrap of newspaper-exploring the production and critical reception of Sherman's Centerfolds in relationship to the politics of pornography, gender, and representation.

Intrinsically collaborative, the magazine is an inherently 'open' form, generating constantly evolving relationships. This anthology contextualizes the artist's magazine, surveying the art worlds it has by turns created and superseded; the commercial media forms it has critically appropriated, intervened in or subverted; the alternative, DIY cultures it has brought into being; and the expanded fields of cultural production, exchange and distribution it continues to engender. Surveying case studies of transformational magazines from the early 1960s onwards, this book also includes a wide-ranging archive of key editorial statements, from eighteenth-century Weimar to twenty-first century Bangkok, Cape Town and Delhi.--Publisher

How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system.