ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its subject two periodicals that emerged in the mid-1970s – the short-lived magazine ONE, founded by the artist Barry Martin in 1973, and the magazine Artscribe, first published in 1976. It examines how ONE appeared as a reaction by group of artists to the apparent challenge posed by new post-conceptualist and experimental art, which had come to prominence in the early 1970s. It discusses how ONE's attempt to reclaim a form of critical attention based on personal response and ‘feeling’, which prioritised the visual experience of the artwork. The magazine's brief history is discussed against the fractious public debates over art of the mid-1970s, and the perception of an art ‘establishment’ which favoured and prioritised some artists and tendencies over others. It then traces the relationship between artists formed around ONE and those who would go on to establish Artscribe. It discusses how its editors developed the question of a subject-centred form of critical writing away from the old formal criteria of modernism towards an aesthetic pluralism which equated critical authority with institutional power.
