InterMedia

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Los Angeles and San Francisco, 1974–1979 (1–7). Editor: Harley Lond.

Intermedia, an Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts, Resources & Communications, by and for the Communicator/Artist, was started by Harley Lond as a kind of yellow pages for artists, writers, and musicians in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Lond wrote in the first issue:

"The vacuum in which artists have struggled for years is now being filled by a host of political and economic organizations striving to create a stronger representationand voice for artists everywhere. There is almost a grassroots movement amongst artist to take control over their destinies in the econo/political facets of capitalist society. … One of the goals of Intermedia is to link the new art movement with these other alternative movements—to create a unified alternative force of artists, writers, workers, and radicals. … We want Intermedia to be by and for artists, to be a forum for artists’ concerns and needs, to be a mode of interdisciplinary communications between the artist and the alternative learning people, radicals, communicators, and especially a mode of communication between artists of different media."

Inspired by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, Lond borrowed the magazine’s title from Higgins’s “Statement on Intermedia” (he got the artist’s permission first). Lond, who started the magazine with his savings and donations from family and friends, did all of the layout and typesetting himself, financing the magazine largely through small grants. After moving to San Francisco in 1977, he worked at the counter of an auto supply store, saving money, and then periodically taking time off to publish the magazine. The first three issues were 8½-by-11-inch magazines that included artists’ contributions and writings plus a listing of art services, organizations, small presses, and free artists’ classifieds. The magazine expanded as Lond began to realize the magazine’s potential as an artistic medium: issue 4 was a “Special Literary Issue,” printed as a tabloid newspaper (48 newsprint pages) of experimental art and literature; issue 5 was a tabloid compendium of 17-by-22-inch posters by artists; and issue 6 was a box containing artist-designed postcards, broadsides, folders, and posters. Among its contributors were Martha Rosler, Clemente Padin, Richard Kostelanetz, Opal Nations, Dick Higgins, Anna Banana, and Lew Thomas. (Source)

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