OEI # 86-87. Publiceringspraktiker, publiceringspoetiker

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures,publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers,editors, theoreticians,curators, scholars, and art bookstores,OEI# 86-87 reflects upon the challenges,pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in differentcontexts and places in atime of far-reaching - economical, medial, political,social, technological - transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversityof practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form ofart, a collective or micro-collectivework with shared responsibilities, it isalso a never-ending process of "crafting a variegated approach to how youcreate, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem aroundyour efforts",of trying to "build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms"(Temporary Services).

It is theconviction ofOEI#86-87that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of socialspaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of theessays inthe issue, "conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as wellas making things public is not a pun - insofar as the artists/publishersencompass, beyondthe book itself, its possible 'lives', imagining the differentspaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate."This is what Michael Warner has called "apublic [as] poetic worldmaking", implying "that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterizethe world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for thatworld aconcrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world throughaddress."

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can makepublishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publicationsand publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that inpublishing as practice - perhaps more than in any other art field - "artistshave been able to assert the aesthetic value of their ownsocio-politicallyinformed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in culturalactivities fully aligned with their political values."

OEI#86-87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry fromCanada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD(Öyvind Fahlström); LarsFredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud's poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser;OEI#79:edit/publish/distribute!; "detoffentligas försvinnande"