Hyper-local Newspapers as Museum Piece? Not Exactly
By Valerie Seckler
The first four editions of The Last... newspapers, produced at New Museum.
“Old News” by Jacob Fabricius is yesterday’s news — literally. The stacks of “Old News” newspapers tied up with twine in the ironic art work by Fabricius, contain “news” that was old when the art editions were first printed.
These stacks of second-generation newspapers, a highlight in New Museum’s “The Last Newspaper” exhibit, embody one of the show’s central questions. What is the relationship between publishing something new and collecting what already exists?
This tension informs the tug and pull of “The Last Newspaper.” It exists between the art curated and the weekly newspapers published in the exhibit. The tension is present too in asking viewers to make the leap from the fine art displayed in the galleries to the two artist-created weekly newspapers, which are available free on the museum’s stands in Manhattan’s NoLita.
Bridging the two is an ambitious undertaking. For this viewer, it meant visiting the show a second time and talking with four of the artist/editors who are producing two hyper-local weekly newspapers from New Museum micro-newsrooms — right on the gallery floor. Of course, it meant reading editions of “The Last…” tabloids and “New City Reader” broadsheets published each Wednesday and Friday, respectively, at Linco in Long Island City, N.Y.
“How is a museum, such as New Museum, no longer (just) in the artwork display business?” asks an editorial in The Last Post. “Is it a producer, a publisher or a distributor? Should a museum or a newspaper be a community, a platform or a network, for example?” The newspapers themselves are hybrids: actual publications and art object.
“The Last…” newspaper series comprises “final” editions with names like “The Last Observer,” “The Last Monitor,” and (the first edition) “The Last Post.” They are dedicated to illuminating “The Last Newspaper” fine art on exhibit. Some of the reportage ranges beyond it.
Taking a break in the micro-newsroom of The Last papers, Max Andrews, editor-in-chief, said the publications are a “parallel curating space, to complement the museum show, reporting on similar artistic themes.” Co-editor-in-chief Mariana Canepa Luna added, “It’s also a comment on what’s happening to newspapers, with the transition online.” Andrews and Luna, members of the Barcelona-based curatorial group Latitudes, are in residence at New Museum where they are producing 10 weeklies during the show’s run, through Jan. 9, 2011.
“The Last Post” itself is an arch reference to the never-ending practice of posting 21st century news online. “The Last Post’s” Oct. 6th edition’s screaming front page headline makes the humorous proposition: “Ink vs Link.” Smaller decks stacked below it read: “Lippmann vs Dewey, Fact vs Interpretation, Editor vs Curator,” and conclude with the query: “How do you get your information?”
The “New City Reader,” in contrast, bills itself as “a newspaper of public space.” It is reporting on architecture, public space and the city, the temporary newspaper says on the back page of its Nov. 5th, Leisure issue. Conceived by executive editors Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis, the newspaper says its content centers on “the spatial implications of epochal shifts in technology, economy and society today.”
ax Andrews, editor-in-chief, The Last... newspapers in the weekly's micro-newsroom at New Museum.
In “The Demise of Everyman’s Night Out,” Chappell Ellison delves into the changing movie-going experience, by way of changes in cinema design. Starting with the early 20th century hybrid, movie-theater experience of public space (box office, sidewalk, marquee) and private space (theater) and ending with today’s enveloping experience of a mega-plex theater, Dolby Digital sound, 3-D pictures, and big-seat arena.
“What was once the venue for The Everyman’s Night Out has become a more complex space physically, and implicitly more restricted socially,” Ellison writes. Current trends suggest what Chappell terms an “unsettling future for the movie theater: bigger screens and bigger spaces to serve fewer people.”
New City Reader’s 13 issues are eyeing the “intersection of public space and news space,” said associate editor Daniel Payne, in the paper’s small piece of a spacious gallery. “We see newspapers as places where people can gather, give voice to issues, create community,” he related.
New City Reader’s sensibility is reflected in what Payne described as its “guerrilla format,” or the “pasting up” of the over-sized broadsheets so they can be read in public. They have been posted in this manner, he noted, in New Museum’s windows, at Storefront For Art & Architecture in Manhattan’s Kenmare Street, and at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. (Payne holds a Masters of Architecture degree from Columbia.)
The “Editorial” edition of the over-sized broadsheet found a home on the facade of Storefront For Art & Architecture, as the group is interested in new ways the gallery’s exterior can be used, said Storefront producer Cesar Augusto Cotta. The last time the facade was used this way was in October 2008, he said, when dissidents posted to protest “White House Redux,” Storefront’s project calling for redesigns of the White House. (Storefront itself uses newsprint for its over-sized exhibit programs, like this week’s “The Bridge Project.”)
More guerrilla papers may be in the offing. New City Reader is talking with the New York City Parks Department about posting upcoming editions in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Long Island City, Queens, and near parks and bridges, including the Brooklyn Bridge and Seward Park in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Why create these new print weeklies, given the socio-economic pressures threatening traditional newspapers? “We like having a physical object,” Payne said of the group’s appreciation of ink on paper. “Some of us have published books and some of us are graphic designers.”
‘“We also like print,” Storefront’s Cotta said. In fact, the format of Storefront’s “The Bridge Project” challenges conventional perceptions of reading space. The 8 1/4-inch by 11 7/16-inch newsprint piece unfolds to 22 9/16-inches by 32 1/4-inches — and it can be read, in part, either horizontally or vertically.
Old News," by Jacob Fabricius, second-generation newspapers consisting of news that was old when the art editions were first printed. (Photo by Valerie Seckler)
Coming next week from The Last Newspaper:
The Last Evening Standard (7th edition)
New City Reader’s Food issue (6th edition)
1 of the greater sites I've previously found, superb issue.
[...] call it savvy publishing. Giving the audience what they like, tending to their needs, that’s what it is all about. If [...]