Andrew McClintock: What would you say is an exhibition that you did when you were at MoMA that was most aligned with that crossover into technology and media?
David Senior: There was a show of historical avant-garde magazines called The Electro-Library in 2016—the title was gleaned from a quote about new typography by El Lissitzky. The show of magazines was thinking through revolutions that were happening in technology, the advent of the moving image, how cities were organized, how we transport ourselves and how it was also related to a revolutionary moment in leftist politics but also in art and design in the 1920s.
The Whole Earth Catalog show, Access to Tools, that I did in 2011, was also engaging with this question of technology and media. The exhibition was comprised of books listed in the WEC that I found were also in the MoMA Library—many of the books would have come into the library under the scope of architecture and design but also, through the lens of Marshall McLuhan and early media studies. That scope allowed me to search through the collection from reading the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog and matching what was in the library that was listed in the Whole Earth Catalog.
There was a note in one of the catalogs—I think it was one of the last ones, maybe it was from Lloyd Kahn—but it was an editorial note to librarians, where it suggested that you can have a Whole Earth library in your library and use the Whole Earth Catalog as a map to collect books. And I think Xerox or some corporate office at that time developed a library based on the Whole Earth Catalog. And one of my primary things when I revisited the Whole Earth Catalog at that time was noticing that most of the things that were listed were books. Even though it's mostly maybe more associated with tools—I especially noted books related to early computer technology and new video tools listed in the WEC that connected to what we now associate with this lineage of Silicon Valley—the Fred Turner book (From Counterculture to Cyberculture) was something that was out and had just got published around that time that I was working on it.
Andrew McClintock: So when I was doing a little bit of research for this conversation, I was totally blown away with something — I was a little familiar with La Mamelle as a magazine and art space, but I didn't realize that they in fact launched one of the first online artist networks on the WELL too. That's so wild that these alternative print publications like the Whole Earth Catalog and La Mamelle that you think of as this totally avant-garde, totally anti-establishment thing—perhaps it's a very Bay Area thing that you just end up, because that's my experience too, you just end up synthesizing with the technology field.
David Senior: Yeah. That I don't know exactly. Carl Loeffler, who was the editor and founder of La Mamelle that then segued into Art Com…I think that was his innovation, I don't know the connections that he had to the computer community or what made him go in that direction. But it's super early in terms of thinking about it. I have some paper trail here of when they launched Art Com as an electronic magazine [...] but it also transitioned to this node as an arts section of the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link)…I came across this art intervention project by an artist, Judy Malloy, that was called Bad Information. It is an early piece of net art which used the Art Com network to generate response to queries, but it was giving the wrong answers purposefully to queries, but it was an art project on the WELL.
Andrew McClintock: That's amazing.
David Senior: That was an interesting and innovative and active space. They hosted early performances and video stuff in the physical space. They had a bookstore that was in the same network as Printed Matter and other shops and archives that were thinking about and distributing artist publications. And they hosted an early book fair and conference that had discussions with people who were making artists' magazines and books. It was called the Art Publishers' Convention, Book Fair, and Exhibition, that was hosted by La Mamelle at San Jose State's Union Gallery in 1977.
Andrew McClintock: Totally. For me, Vision Magazine and Avalanche were both such influential forces on me for starting to publish SFAQ back in the day—and also being a zine kid—I was just making tons of photo zines, fan zines—how would you define an artist publication versus a cultural magazine. [...] What is the role of an artist publication then versus now? And because the costs went down for printing then—and comparing that to the diminished costs now with making a Substack...
David Senior: I think the momentum within contemporary art in the 1960s and with art that — I think about the Information show that happened at MoMA in '70, Kynaston McShine, the curator, was theorizing and there were other people thinking along this way — that within the information age, artists became in relation to "information" as a medium, whether they were using the structure of commercial imagery and language to flip it on its head or think about ways that you could control or manipulate media information. It becomes what you can use as part of your practice. So, a manual for an industrial machine, or a circuit, or library cataloging—there's a thread in there where you could mimic it in your own art.
You could become the engineer; you could become the librarian or the archivist and have this artist hat on at the same time. And that was sort of part of this art of the Information artist, like mimicking or parroting the technologists or the industrialists but in weird ways. I think publishing was part of that as one strategy to appropriate it and then turn it into an artist's material.
Andrew McClintock: Right. Right.
David Senior: But then there's another part that was political where it was about controlling the media in a way that there were no gatekeepers and to make a cheap art object. You were doing it on your own terms—I think of it as parallel to early video practices where you could make your own film or TV—that was brand new. It wasn't that easy to self-publish in the past—so this moment where the technology situation with the development of cheap offset printing made it easier and cheaper to do. [...] But Avalanche and Willoughby Sharp is both of these things—maybe more of this latter thing as part of this post-1960s political moment of being aggressive and trying to take things into your own hands about what kind of media was being produced and with Willoughby it was all interviews.
Andrew McClintock: Right. The long-form conversational interview. Maybe we are entering the golden age of curating—where the organization of ideas and objects and vehicles through alternative distribution systems. To really go back, I'm sure you could pull some threads from even the 1920s with what you saw with the exhibition that you curated around the avant-garde magazine.
David Senior: I think there's a thread that stays really true from now to then and there's connections there and this transition into what kind of media landscape we have. But the book is a different thing now because it's always in a dialectic with the screen and that wasn't the case before. So, even if you're making a book, it's always going to be a different thing now because of our relationship to our phones and other digital media. It's inescapable, that conversation. But yeah, all these books are maybe some answer to what you're saying about trying to distill the media that you're confronted into a more stable and better designed container. Or yes, opting out in some way presenting a scale of a resource that is hand-to-hand distributed and stuff like that or economies of scale where you're not going to make any money but you might make friends.
Andrew McClintock: Yeah. But it's like making friends and creating scenes in subcultures. I think it's so important. We've maybe systematically culturally forgotten how to do that. So it gives me hope, and that's why for some reason I'm making a magazine again.