Artists as authors: three Los Angeles art periodicals of the 1970s

This thesis examines the historical space occupied by three artist driven periodicals negotiating the physical, cultural and experiential landscape of Los Angeles in the 1970s, how each provided an intellectual context to the newly developing fields of non-visual and concept art in Los Angeles, and why this specific history relates to discourse expressed through the city’s art institutions, collectives, and social networks. While radically different, Landslide, an artist magazine, the LAICA Journal, an institutional newsletter, and High Performance, a traditional art magazine, each formed sites of publicity and counterpublicity. Looked at together, each periodical historically and theoretically supported an alternate narrative within the larger dialogue of contemporary art interrogating ideas of space and spatial boundaries, artist agency, and the movement of art out of traditional institutional spaces. As a locus of subversion, resistance, and innovation, each functioned as an alternative space predicated on the idea of reception, allowing a channel for direct dialogue between artists and their audiences. Publications are not necessarily a form but a reflection of activity that relates critically to other pre-occupations. ❧ Each of these three periodicals, as either exhibition, critical, documentary, or archival spaces, appropriated and internalized the theoretical concerns and collapsing boundaries of Postmodernist artistic practices of Los Angeles’s developing city-space.