The circumstances of this terminus are echoed in an interview between Art Papers‘ Editor/Artistic Director Victoria Camblin and Jay Kinney, the founder of the journal Gnosis, which operated in San Francisco from 1985 to 1999. In the excerpt below, the two discuss spirituality, technology, and alternative publishing. This article was originally published in the Sept/Oct 2014 issue of Art Papers.

Left to right: Bijou Funnies #1 (Fall 1968), illustration by Jay Lynch;
page from Bijou Funnies #1 (Fall 1968). Images courtesy Jay Kinney.

Victoria Camblin: I have this theory that society’s interest in esoterica spikes during periods of technological progress. In the late 19th century you had an Industrial Revolution, and you also had a resurgence of occult societies, the tarot came back, the mysteries of Ancient Egypt were all the rage. Now, with the tech industry boom, you have dot-commers going to healing ceremonies, and so on. I can’t help but think of the paths of the Whole Earth team: one direction gave us Wired, and the other, Gnosis, as though technology and inner traditions came out of the margins together.

Jay Kinney: Gnosis was certainly a continuation of the underground media in the 60s and early 70s, when you had cultural permission to make untraditional or alternative publications, and the sense that there might well be enough of an audience so you could get by. Underground newspapers were also made feasible by the fact that you had web offset presses starting to become available all over the country. If the printers weren’t totally freaked out by the content, then you had relatively cheap means to publish a weekly newspaper. So the underground press really benefited from that technological development.

VC: Did that impact the format, too?

JK: I more or less based the first issues of Gnosis on Weirdo magazine, which was published by Last Gasp [an underground comix publisher] and had been edited for several years by R. Crumb. I basically used the same page size, the same cover stock and interior paper, and we could gang up color covers in the same press run: Gnosiscould do a cover run with an issue of Weirdo or some other Last Gasp publication. So my involvement with underground comix made it possible to fit Gnosis into an arrangement with the printer where we only had to pay for half or a quarter of the color cover run. In terms of industrial or cultural changes, the first issue of Gnosis coincided with the year Aldus introduced the PageMaker page-makeup software, which we used to do one or two of the articles in the very first issue of Gnosis. We were one of the first magazines on newsstands to have desktop-published layouts.

VC: That’s incredible for an independent special-interest magazine. Were these alternative publications at the technological forefront just because of your proximity to the tech industry in California?

JK: Well, Stewart Brand had the idea of jumping on the bandwagon with PCs and Macs, which were just starting in 1984. He got in tight with the PR firm that was promoting the very first Macintosh, so I had the opportunity through Whole Earth to get one of the first 128K Macs at a discount—though it was still something like $3,500 bucks—to get the first Apple laser printer, and a beta version of PageMaker that had been provided to Whole Earth to try out and review in anticipation of its imminent release. I was the one who ended up learning PageMaker and doing a sort of trial run on it for a section of The Whole Earth Software Catalog, which came together around that time. I have to say, the beta version of PageMaker that I was working with was maddening. It would crash every two minutes, I would have to save constantly or I would lose my work—and I was saving to floppy discs!

Read the full interview here.

cover image: Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos

Having spent the last 5 months in Brazil as a outsider peering in, I’ve tried to pull back the curtain to discover what is essentially Brazilian about artistic modes of production. It eludes me. The constant state of flux it impossible to pause and properly articulate. Much like the boom of the Brazilian economy, the art fervor here can be hard to grasp. From this touristic snapshot view, it appears that the infamous notion of antropofagia, or cannibalism – Brazil’s successful incorporation and reinvention of external influences (a notion popularized by the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s) – has been corroded from the inside out. Artistic practices in Brazil seem to be more concerned with a dissection and alteration of systems that involve the relationships between Brazil and other countries (specifically Latin American) and a reciprocation of influence. What I can see from this viewpoint is a particularly strong process of working through.

Newton Goto (from Recibo07+9)

The shape-shifting, nomadic quality of Brazilian artistic research is exemplified in projects like Recibo, a free artist-run publication focusing on the circulation of visual art actions and theoretical/political discourse. The idea-heavy publication is decidedly un-slick and has an interventionist function in the art world, with an emphasis on articles that give the reader a glimpse into critical research that provides the skeleton for artistic production (which doesn’t often share space with the end-result art).

Originally conceived by artist Traplev (Roberto Moreira Junior), Recibo takes on a curatorial function and is always a collaboration between the artist and a co-editor, often looking beyond Brazil’s borders. Editions have explored the relationships between Brazil and Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Colombia in Portuguese, Spanish, and a smattering of English.

Jarbas Lopes, Cicloviaérea (from Recibo010)

The 3rd edition, Recibo010, edited with Nara Milioli, Paisagem portátil (Portable Landscapes), looked at the geography of urbanism and mobility. The focus on portability conceptually doubles-over the circulation of theoretical exploration and artistic practices that experimental publications like Recibo provide within the artistic landscape.

Recibo057, Malambo, is the 5th edition created as the result of a residency in Cali, Colombia and co-edited with Yolanda Chois. Through critical reflection, points of contact and overlap between the two countries are highlighted. As a consequence of the bilingual text, readers of both languages are implored to read it’s latin counterpart, opening up possibilities of new interpretations by way of imperfect translation.

Suwon Lee, el muerto no tiene dolientes, 2009 (from Recibo088)

The upcoming Recibo88, Sobre a noção de despesa (On the notion of expenditure), is co-edited with Teresa Riccardi. 10,000 copies will be released in February with the support of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture. A challenging undertaking to probe and poke the economic matrix, this edition takes it’s name and concept from a segment of French writer Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share. Bataille presents an economic theory that looks at excessive and constantly outputting solar energy; the sun never receives energy in return and the end result of this surplus is in fact loss. Value, time, material, the art market, are all in a constant state of discursive questioning. Articles like Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey’s In Defense of the Fetish (which examines the narrative of fetish worship from primitivist fetishes to sexual fetish to Western commodity fetishism) are juxtaposed with artistic projects like Cadu’s Doze meses. Over the course of a year, Cadu diligently and dramatically adjusted his energy consumption in his home, the end result of this consuming project is a simple, small arching design on his utility bill visually graphing his efforts.

Deyson Gilbert, da série Black Indexation, 2010 (from Recibo088)

If antropofagia came to prominence with Tropicália, perhaps the process now can be described as metabolizing or working through, an exercise of addressing the social, political, economic, and artistic foodstuffs that we consume everyday. Recibo takes the task of working through seriously, contributing to the dispersion of critical ideas while, importantly, acknowledging their inherent mutability.