With Bottega Veneta's Help, 'Magma' Restores the Great 20th Century Art Magazine Format
Featuring works from artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, sculptors, and photographers.
Matthieu Blazy‘s Bottega Veneta is a prolific advocator of media formats, presenting everything from immersive art experiences in Brazil to printed dedications of Kate Moss and a resurgence of BUTT Magazine. Now, it welcomes Magma into its world, supporting the inaugural release of Paul Olivennes’s new print publication.
Magma is the restoration of revues d’art — think of materials such as Georges Bataille’s Documents (1929), the surrealist Minotaure (1933), or the first issues of Andy Warhol’ss Interview magazine (1969). It is a societal, cultural resurgence; the documentation of works, words, art, and more that are seminal, epochal, and definitive of an era, crafting the foundations for what we have at our disposal today.
“These magazines offered direct access to artistic creation. They were the place for the avant-garde, both artistic and literary. I started collecting them when I was very young, “says Olivennes, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Magma. “I wanted to revive this format, which has now disappeared, in all its aesthetic, graphic, and intellectual sophistication. I also wanted to put artists and writers back centre stage and to recreate a dialogue between them by weaving connections between their work. Magma will feature a large number of previously unpublished work, or work .created exclusively for the journal. I imagine it as a dive into the intimacy, the creative magma, of the art.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries London, wrote the publication preface. He adds, “Magma brings worlds into contact with other worlds.” For example, artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, sculptors, and photographers are all culminated in Magma, and most of the content is previously unpublished.
Magma is more of a history lesson than anything, and it is designed to be collected. It will release once yearly, and will continue to focus on reviving the format of great 20th-century art magazines. It can be bought here for €60 EUR (approx. $65 USD).
In other news, Alasdair McLellan has also released a new print-based offering.
