The Consumer Republic: Skimming The Surface

I stopped in at the Art Directors Club the morning after the opening of its new exhibition, "Five Magazines: Independents to Watch." The gallery floor was still sticky. Sponsor signage hung over what must have been a very busy bar. The prospect of seeing the Next Big Thing in magazines lured stylists, photographers, graphic artists, editors and ad creatives who make their living from pushing the envelope and cutting the edge. Among the honorees on display at the ADC until the end of May, Black Book is the most notorious. It received a publicity boost last month when GQ ran a fashion hoax piece on the short-sleeved suit: the conceptual double of a piece the independent ran a year and a half ago. (Art Cooper, however, insists he came up with the idea himself.) The most commercial of the group, Black Book is the winner of the Most Likely to Be Bought by a Magazine Conglomerate award. And isn't that why we pay attention to independent magazines in the first place? Next in terms of visibility is Icon Thoughtstyle, a "writers" magazine for men that's a little out of place in such visual-oriented company. Rounding out the group are Blind Spot, a photography magazine; Big:, a magazine with a homemade feel dedicated to "fashion/beauty/lifestyle"; and the slick *Surface, another po-mo fashion/entertainment/visual-arts book from San Francisco. It can be said of these independents that, unlike their mass-market counterparts, their tables of contents don't read as if they've been dictated by Hollywood publicists or focus groups. (The latest of issue of Icon features a story about the guy who invented the sock-knitting machine.) Maybe they can do without market research because they are their own readers. These books are self-referential images of people who make images: trade mags for those in the cutting-edge business. For instance, in Blind Spot, readers eavesdrop on a couple-of-downtown-white boys conversation between Glenn O'Brien and Richard Prince. In *Surface, Isabel and Ruben Toledo, the Nick and Nora Charles of forward-looking New York fashionistas (as well as *Surface contributing editors), share breathless pillow talk about the necessity of fashion-including a plug for Isabel's new boutique. Editors at one magazine show up as writers in another. So it's not surprising that shared trends have surfaced, hardening into clichƒs even as the magazines gain attention. Take monochrome celebrity and fashion photos - the murkier the better - coming soon to an ad near you. Or consider the latest fashion in punctuation marks, which turns these humble servants of the written word into post-literate signage. Big: has its colon. *Surface uses an asterisk as a combination trademark, beauty spot and pictogram. If you think you've seen this before, you're right. The London-based stylebook of global hipdom Wallpaper*, a onetime independent, parlayed its asterisk into a buyout by Time Warner. (I leave it to the semioticians to figure out the significance of placing it at the beginning of the title.) It's only a matter of time before a semicolon shows up on a jeans label. I'm afraid this movement from Logos to logo, though handy for branding, does not bode well for the role of writing in the magazines of the future. Yes, Icon is a writer's publication - but the writing is a bore. True, Black Book promotes itself as the only magazine to put equal emphasis on images and words, featuring "Oscar Nominee David Mamet" in the current issue. They promote it because, on the cutting edge of the magazine world, writing is a point of difference. The rest of these books are more or less photography magazines in which words have been demoted to blurbs or captions; extended pages of print are likely to be filled with Q-and-As, which need only be transcribed, not written. If words are fading from the magazine, then Big:, whose editors have severed all relations with English grammar, is in the forefront. Consider this text of a photo-essay from the "Tribes" issue, complete with original punctuation: "For more time than memory, we've been left to invent ourselves a tale. What do I see myself as? Image. .We are responsible for the reflection in the mirror. Identify. .What do I identify with? Holding onto something, someone. Belonging. .This perfect face, is never sharp, is never clear, but what it is, and what it knows, will always be that. But what, me worry? I've already got a job. The pleasures of these magazines are all on the surface. Accompanying the incomprehensible string of words quoted from Big: are far more arresting photos of red paint, like clotted blood, streaming down white porcelain into a drain. The magazine of the future may be destined to look better on a gallery wall than in your hands, a medium not to be read but watched or experienced by a part of the brain that doesn't know about semicolons or parentheses. After all, an image, what it is, will always be that.

Brand Marketing

The Consumer Republic: Skimming The Surface

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman