The Center for Advanced Visual Studies is offering a trip around the global art world in the form of an exhibition of contemporary international art magazines on view in the CAVS reception area.
Known collectively as the Traveling Magazine Table, the browser-friendly exhibition offers visitors a chance to dip into rare, eccentric and even glossy 'zines, some with ads, some with attitude, all available on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the CAVS office in N52-390.
Currently, the Table exhibit includes the hefty Cabinet: A Quarterly of Arts and Culture (Brooklyn, in English); Fuse (Toronto, in English); fisura (New York, in English and Spanish); Framework (Finland, in English); Shanghai Parachute (Shanghai, in English and French); Pass (Hungary, in Hungarian), Agitation (Berlin, in German) and the book-shaped Creating Spaces of Freedom: Culture in Defiance (London and The Hague, in English) among many others.
By far the most unusual publication is Transgum, a single sheet of 100 percent pink chewing gum printed with the single word, "Transgum." You have to see it to believe it.
Launched by the founders of Nomads + Residents, a sort of global kin-group of artists and itinerant speakers and performers, the Table has already traveled from its starting place in New York City to Lithuania, back to Art in General in New York and to MIT.
Like the art world itself, the Table changes constantly. Each host site sends out an open call for art magazines, and CAVS has received "almost daily contributions," according to Larissa Harris, associate director of CAVS, and Meg Rotzal, administrative assistant at CAVS, who opens the mail and shelves or stacks new Table items.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 16, 2005 (download PDF).
