Art-Rite

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With a sharp editorial vision, fanzine ethos, and proto-punk aesthetic, the magazine presented up-close coverage of the art world that was at once critical, humorous, and deeply knowledgeable, avoiding the formal tone and self-seriousness that characterized other art publications of the time. Among them were Walter Robinson, his roommate Joshua Cohn, and Edit DeAk, a Hungarian immigrant living with her husband, artist Peter Grass, in a 3,500 square foot loft on the top floor of 149 Wooster Street in Soho. The cover artists were usually from an older generation than the editors or already had at least some reputation. I never quite saw them as students because they were pretty well grown up—the personalities were very rich. In a statement deAk and Robinson wrote for Studio International in 1976, the editors admitted to “some nasty comments about a few ‘major’ artists,” but those artists “were famous and successful and because they were safe we couldn’t hurt them and since we spent the rest of our life defending babies we had to attack someplace.

Back then, critics—and Artforum critics in particular—had an influence over American artists that today is diffused across a much wider spread of agencies both within and outside the media. It made its presence known with simple, witty covers designed by established artists including Joseph Beuys, Ed Ruscha, Christo, Alan Suicide, William Wegman, Vito Acconci, Robert Ryman, and Carl Andre. The result was a staple-bound, disposable newsprint arts journal with gravitas that stood in contrast to the glossier and more staid magazines of the era like Artforum, marrying a fanzine ethos and proto-punk aesthetic. This was the ambition behind Art-Rite’s authorial voice, which must have been startling at the time in its colloquial informality. Ingrid Sischy, who had become the magazine’s editor a year or so earlier, had made Edit a regular contributor, and besides writing unorthodox articles—I remember, for example, a spectacular piece about the hip-hop artist Rammellzee, and another on, of all things, those Cabbage Patch dolls—she served as an all-purpose one-person think tank.

She had something I was very sympathetic to: the enigmas of Eastern Europe, which at times mirror and superimpose on our own Irish enigmas. Complete run of all issues published of Art-Rite, periodical edited by Edit DeAk and Walter Robinson.

Yet despite the magazine's commitment to disposability, Art-Rite somehow managed to craft each issue with artist-produced covers: Dorothea Rockburne's hand-folded design intersected the cover across the diagonal for issue 6, while issue 8, designed by Pat Steir, included potatoprinted decoration in bright primary colours that were originally hand-stamped by the editors. As for the intellectual process, “I would go meet [Robinson and Cohn] in these informal sessions that might be an evening or might be two days, day and night. Meanwhile, artist-focused issues gave over the entire space to the work of individuals or collectives such as Demi, Image Bank, Kim MacConnel, Rosemary Mayer, Judy Rifka, Alan Vega (of the band Suicide), and the Vancouver-based group Western Front.Art-Rite welcomed coverage of topics like fashion and music, presenting them as naturally in conversation with visual art. Photography by Peter Grass and Yuri, Edit’s cousin, offered compelling, first-hand documentation of the worlds the magazine was a part of. A use of the word “humble” seems a long-term habit: “We were really thinking very humbly,” she told me, and back in 1974 she told Alan Moore, who was writing an ultimately unpublished article on Art-Rite for Artforum (Edit has a copy of the hot-type-set galleys), that she saw herself as the “humble servant” of artists. But no matter what subject a young publisher may choose to cover, there is nothing quite so pure and romantic as one’s first foray into the creative world with its wonderful mélange of innocence, idealism, inexperience, and pluck.

It is easy to see why deAk and Robinson prize this issue, which is focused, knowledgeable, speculative, witty, and thick with information. In keeping with the times, their stance was a demilitarized opposition to what they saw as the establishment. Into that three year gap stepped Brian O’Doherty, an obscure but admired artist working under the alias Patrick Ireland—a name chosen in solidarity with his countrymen fighting for independence. Thank you to the Estate of Edit DeAk, Daniel Csutkai, Walter Robinson, Les Levine, Judy Rifka and online Gallery 98. Art-Rite’s five-year run was marked by ambitious thematic issues (on Painting, Video, Performance, and Artists’ Books) and single-artist focus issues, charting the richness of de-materialized and alternative art practices, including publications themselves, that emerged out of conceptualism and post-minimalism.Robinson meanwhile had gotten a job as a typesetter and designer for a Jewish weekly newspaper, and, he says, “We stole all the type from there until they caught me and I got fired. The hand of the artist found its way into Art-Rite more often than not, even when the editors’ copy went unsigned.