ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the mutual relationship between art magazines and archives, and the many formats a magazine’s archive may assume. As both the magazine and the archive are spaces for storage and repositories of documents, mutable over time, the magazine’s archive then becomes an “archive in the archive.” The digital era has provided art magazines around the world with new means to investigate the archive. By collecting, preserving, and creating narratives, the archive becomes one of the magazine’s vehicles to pursue historical legitimacy. The magazines and periodicals taken into consideration here are all driven by a deep archival respect. In the case of the Brooklyn based magazine Cabinet, the archive is a mnemonic apparatus and an organic continuation of the magazine itself. The archive is the response to the editors’ urge to collect, order, and catalogue all the materials produced. With Chimurenga, a South African “platform of writing, art and politics,” the archive assumes the format of an online library. Questioning its role, the archive becomes a site of self-reflection and networking, that fosters new visions, and provides a map of art periodicals in Africa. Field Notes is an e-journal launched in 2012 by Asia Art Asia Archive, with the aim of analyzing what it means for an archive to document contemporary art in non-Western regions. All these cases aspire to understand the archive’s potential to stretch boundaries, produce, and distribute knowledge, create new narratives, and ultimately, inspire historical study.