Publishing Art: Alternative Distribution in Print

The essays, artists' projects, and interview that follow explore the use of the printed page as a site of alternative distribution for art. In the expanded field of the 1960s and 1970s, printed matter, in the form of criticism, interviews, photographic reproductions, documentation, and advertisements, became a new kind of medium—one that challenged formalist models of medium-specificity and prompted new kinds of self-reflexivity about institutions and audiences both inside and outside the so-called art world. Given the current interest in alternative distribution on the part of artists, art historians, and editors—exemplified by the artists' projects recently published in these pages—the time seems ripe to revisit its history in the conceptually oriented practices of the 1960s and 1970s, and to consider how it has evolved since.1