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Profile: How a storied artists' book publisher brought 1970s conceptual art into the hands of a new generation

- Dan Fox

The best-named periodical of the 20th century was Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. It was founded in 1962 by Ed Sanders – poet, activist and member of the rock band The Fugs – and ran for 13 issues until 1965. Fuck You came on the heels of Yeah (1961–65), another anti-establishment zine, started the previous year by Sanders’s fellow Fug, writer Tuli Kupferberg. Sanders’s title and subtitle encapsulate a mind-body problem that has often troubled the more recondite corners of small-press publishing culture. On the one side is the Fuck You part, as in: you’re not cool enough, not smart enough, not sat comfortably enough on the right side of history to get what we’re talking about. On the other side is the Magazine of the Arts part: a helpful, demure product description, suggesting that the publication offers something for everyone, with the hope that its ideas will be widely disseminated, adopted by the general public, perhaps made into law and, against all the evidence of reality, provide its editors with a healthy living.

In the mid-2000s, if you were interested in reading artist-made publications from the Fugs’ beatnik Manhattan – or from the heydays of happenings, fluxus, conceptual art, mail art and other influential postwar movements – you were out of luck. It was easy enough to find an art history book that would tell you about the existence of magazines such as Art-Rite (1973–78), Aspen (1965–71), Black Phoenix (1978–79), File (1972–89), Heresies (1977–93) and Newspaper (1968–71)