Counter Print: The alternative art press in Britain after 1970

by Victoria Horne (Editor)

Overview

The history of contemporary art is also a history of its newsletters, manifestos, magazines, pamphlets, and journals. Those periodical publications do not simply communicate or record ideas but have worked in exciting ways to shape art’s practices, histories and communities. As a new generation of artists, activists and scholars seek to uncover the histories of alternative publishing and artistic networks, this book gathers original archival discoveries while offering methodologies for studying and thinking with those artefacts. As the first essay collection to focus on the periodical art press and the ways we study it, Counter Print offers readers an alternative route into the past fifty years of contemporary art, one that is defiantly collaborative, border crossing and disruptive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526183057
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Series:	Rethinking Art's Histories
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Victoria Horne is Senior Lecturer in Arts at Northumbria University

Table of Contents

Introduction: Paper weight: periodicals and printed things in the contemporary art field – Victoria Horne
1 The Magazine as manifesto: Black Phoenix and the reproduction of racial politics in 1970s Britain – Samuel Bibby
2 Spare Rib, 1972–1981: Art, activism and the WLM Press – Victoria Horne and Sonny Ruggiero
3 ‘Criticisms and practice in a continuous dialogue’: how periodicals facilitated group-work in British feminist art – Lily Evans Hill
4 ‘Images that don’t, in general, exist’: Format Photographers Agency and the politics of representation in print – Catherine Spencer
5 Escaping the straitjacket: art school influences on the development of Artscribe in the 1970s – Matthew Macaulay
6 ‘To live a life that felt meaningful’: reflections on Feminist Arts News (with Victoria Horne)
7 ‘We always emphasised the visual’: art and design in Bazaar: South Asian Arts Magazine – Alina Khakoo
8 Mukti: South Asian feminist art and activism – Alice Correia
9 Urban Fox Press: a revolutionary new publisher – Susannah Thompson
10 Inventory: the journal as post-media form – Anthony Iles
11 e-flux: a transformative paradigm in art periodical publishing – Camilla Salvaneschi
12 Against white pages: an Interview with The White Pube (with Briony Carlin and Samuel Bibby)
Select bibliography

Editorial Reviews

‘Like the radical publications it charts, this book intervenes into art history, offering vital new perspectives on periodicals as sites of cultural resistance, community, and world-making. Though grounded in a British context, its insights resonate far beyond, revealing the transformative possibilities of publishing about—and as—art.’
—Gwen Allen, Professor of Art History, San Francisco State Universityand author of Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art

From the Publisher