Avalanche and file: the politics of alternative magazines in the field of cultural production 1968-1976
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expanding discourse surrounding the importance of magazines in the field of cultural production during the 1970s presents the alternative art press as a forum that contributed to the dematerialization of art and presented a more democratic space within which to encounter artworks. While discussion surrounding alternative art magazines has often revolved around the idea of the “museum without walls,” magazines have also been recognized as a site of contradiction within the artistic avant-garde. The alternative art press has come to be seen as a contributing factor in the failure of avant-garde movements trying to escape institutional power structures. Acting as a lifeline to the art market and institutions of art, alternative art magazines impeded artists from achieving the utopian goal of conflating art and life and escaping the confines and context of the institutional white cube. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s essay, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” this thesis aims at articulating a new space within which to consider the contributions of alternative art magazines. Through case studies of the New York based Avalanche (1970-1976) and the Toronto based File (1972-1989) I argue that focus must be shifted to consider the medium of the magazine as a fertile ground exploited by artists, editors and publishers, in order to redefine and call into question how “the game” of cultural production was being played at the time. Instead of escaping the institution altogether artists took advantage of the medium of the magazine to erect their own institutional alternatives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".