How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists' postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; and Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, do-it-yourself quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.

This volume is a collection of texts and documents selected from and illustrating the history of Artpool, a non-profit artist run institution in Budapest, established in 1979 by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay and operating since 1992 under the name of Artpool Art Research Center. The book focuses on Artpool’s direct antecedents (among them the events at György Galántai's Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár, 1970–1973), on the foundation, development, art projects and events, as well as the preferences and issues pertaining to art research (not independent of the historical and social environment they were conceived in) that had formed throughout the course of many years and decades. "The occasion of the publication of ARTPOOL The Experimental Art Archive of East-Central Europe is a milestone in the history of art for its documentation of a remarkable period in the chronicles of conceptual, performance, installation, and video art, as well ephemeral mediums such as mail art and artists’ stamp sheets, postcards, rubber stamp imprints, artists’ writings and samizdat publications. The work represented in the Artpool archive is astonishing in its scope and quantity, quality of imagination, intellectual force, and the courage of the artists who created it. This volume presents an opportunity to reflect on the events that brought Artpool into being, to acknowledge that while originating in the context of East-Central Europe, Artpool’s community has always been international, and to evaluate its broad contributions to world culture and society." (Kristine Stiles)

"Uncovering the legacy of [art dealer] Richard Bellamy, one of the most influential tastemakers of abstract expressionism and pop art"--