Lele Buonerba is a graphic designer based in Chicago, working in the contemporary art industry.
GAGARIN: A Journal of Artists’ Writings
October 2018 • File under: Exhibition Graphics, Contemporary Art
During my time as an intern at Printed Matter in New York, I designed exhibition graphics and ephemera for GAGARIN: A Journal of Artists’ Writings, an exhibition exploring the artists’ periodical published and edited by Wilfried Huet. The installation draws from and excerpts artist contributions to the magazine alongside related archival documents, a selection of artworks, and GAGARIN-produced editions.
GAGARIN (2000-2016) was envisioned as a place for “The artists in their own words”, providing contributors with a singular platform to share new and unpublished writing projects that fell outside of the typical boundaries of an art magazine. Borrowing its guiding ethos from a John Baldessari interview — “Talking about art simply is not art. Talk can be art, but then it is not talking about art” — GAGARIN was guarded against over-verbalization around artmaking, and set out to open up a space where talk and language could itself be an artistic act. Free of advertisements, criticism, and introductory preambles, each issue was comprised of text works by artists (with the occasional text-driven visuals), including a mix of conceptual poetry, discursive works, as well as longer form writings with a non-specialist bent.
Read more about GAGARIN: A Journal of Artists’ Writings on Printed Matter’s website.