Counter Print - The Alternative Art Press in Britain After 1970

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.

Through case studies it tells the story of an independent media culture of artists, critics and historians operating on the edges of mainstream institutions. It examines the queer, feminist, black and transnational communities that reshaped Britain's cultural landscape through ground-breaking publications including Black Phoenix, Bazaar, Artscribe, Spare Rib, Mukti, Feminist Arts News, and Urban Fox Press, and tracks changes to an expanding field of post-digital publishing through Inventory, e-flux, and The White Pube. 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.

About the author

Victoria Horne is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle

Product details

• Assisted by: Horne Victoria (Editor)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 09.09.2025
• EAN: 9781526183057
• ISBN: 978-1-5261-8305-7
• No. of pages: 376
• Illustrations: 81 colour illustrations
• Series: Rethinking Art's Histories
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; Theory of art, ART / Art & Politics, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century, Press & journalism, History of Art, History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, Publishing industry and journalism, Political activism / Political engagement, ART / History / 20th & 21st Century