Big ideas in small packages.

CLIP/STAMP/FOLD 2

CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE

MONTREAL

APRIL 12-SEPTEMBER 9, 2007

"Clip/Stamp/Fold 2" is an homage to the radical, "little" architecture magazines of the 1960s and 1970s. Like firecrackers lobbed over the walls of academe, these journals became as influential and hotly debated as any avant-garde buildings of that era. With their edgy graphics and irreverent idealism, they transformed the culture of the profession, making publication a legitimate architectural project in its own right.

"Clip/Stamp/Fold 2," curated by Beatriz Colomina and PhD students at Princeton University School of Architecture, shares this sense of innovation. Too often, rare book exhibitions--with their dim lighting, hushed galleries, and static displays leach all life out of their subject matter. Here, the display is fittingly architectural: a huge, annotated timeline stamped with colorful magazine covers loops around the gallery, clipped to the walls at odd intervals. (The display itself is clipped, stamped, and folded.) Archival materials are displayed in playful plexiglass globes clustered in the center of the room. Viewers can also see a vintage Archigram cut-out-and-fold architectural model, which looks like a project from a children's activity book (if children's activity books had lofty theoretical ambitions). In other words, the show is fun.

Even so, "Clip/Stamp/Fold 2" is a connoisseur's show. The seventy magazines in the exhibit are presented in a democratic chronological format, with no effort to rank their influence. For example, the first edition of October--a hugely influential publication is tucked into a corner in the timeline and could easily be overlooked. Despite substantial captions, someone with no background in architecture would have difficulty sorting out who's who, or why any of this was important.

What is missing is context. What were these magazines rebelling against? Did their ideas influence actual buildings, or merely create a theoretical subfield of architecture? The viewer is presumed to know these answers already. For those who do, "Clip/Stamp/Fold 2" is full of delights.

The gallery handout is practically a little magazine itself, and it is every bit as important as the displays. The inexpensive, four-page tabloid (which is black and white on one side and folds out from the other side into a full-color poster for the show) features fascinating original interviews with key figures in the little magazine phenomenon.

These interviews are an unlikely combination of lofty theoretical manifestos and mundane publishing issues, such as how to get money from advertisers or what color the cover should be to make it stand out in a bookstore. Particularly amusing are stories about the shoestring beginnings of now-famous publications. For instance, Oppositions founder Mario Gandelsonas recounts:

So we were having our usual pastrami sandwich at the delicatessen on

39th and 6th avenue, with our typical waitress. We were both slightly

depressed. Architectural Design had just rejected [our] package....

The package contained explosive material and they sent it the way one

sends a grenade back: probably expecting we would explode. I remember

it contained most of what we were going to publish along the years,

starting with Oppositions 1.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The interviews also make clear to technically savvy twenty-something visitors that the "primitive" production values of some of these magazines were intentional. Archigram, for example, purposely shied away from the models of both glossy art magazines and academic journals. As editor Peter Cook notes in the gallery handout, "the 'gram' aspect was very important. It should not be a magazine; it should be a 'gram'--like an aerogram or a telegram. The key thing was that it was not a mag." (1)

What is also interesting is how later little magazines did not think the earlier ones were sufficiently radical. In an interview in the gallery handout, ARse editor David Wild complains that Archigram had become too "distanced from the radicalism that was going on everywhere in the student world ... everything that they were proposing was a rip-off of Russian Constructivism without the politics. Instead of 'workers of the world unite,' it was 'come on down and get groovy.'" (2) Saving the world collided with aesthetics, and the magazines in "Clip/Stamp/Fold 2" are a history of that battle.

Today, when desktop publishing is single and seemingly everyone has a blog, it is easy to forget how radical these little magazines were and how much they mattered. In the 1960s and 1970s, people outside of the "Establishment" did not typically have the sense of entitlement that today's bloggers and You Tube filmmakers do--the sense that their own opinions mattered as much as any mainstream expert's. Starting a little magazine back then was brazen and audacious. "Clip/Stamp/Fold 2" is a delightful time capsule from an era when someone could decide to change the world by saying, over a pastrami sandwich, "Hey, let's start a magazine!"

LISA HUNTER, a Montreal-based arts journalist, is the author of The Intrepid Art Collector (2006).

NOTES 1. Clip/Stamp/Fold 2 Interviews (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007), unpaginated. 2. Ibid.