Oz Magazine (1963-73)

“Having outraged the Australian establishment with a satirical magazine called Oz, the editor and founder Richard Neville and artist and cartoonist Martin Sharp hightailed it to swinging London. They immersed themselves in the alternative culture of artists, activists, writers and musicians who operated underground of the mainstream.

This underground fuelled by the optimism and excitement of the time and financed largely by the rock aristocracy and dope dealing wanted to change the world. Richard Neville relaunched Oz magazine in the same satirical style as the Australian version, it was not long before L.S.D. altered minds and Oz exploded into a riot of colour and along with the already existing IT newspaper became a mouthpiece for the underground. Oz lasted for 48 issues from the start of 1967 to the end of 1973.” (Source)

“Oz was a focal point for many confrontations between progressive and conservative groups over a range of issues including the Vietnam War, drugs, the generation gap, censorship, sexuality, gender politics and rock music, and it was instrumental in bringing many of these concerns to wider public attention. Above all, it focused public attention on the issue of free speech in democratic society, and on how far short of the ideal Australian and English society actually was at that time.

Through both its lives, the two key figures in Oz were Neville and Sharp, but the ‘honour roll’ of Oz alumni includes many famous names like Robert Hughes, Richard Walsh, Germaine Greer, Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Charles Shaar Murray.” (Source)

Published in Sydney, 1963-69, and London, 1967-73

Wikipedia

PDFs of Oz’s precursor, The Arty Wild Oat (2 issues, 1962)
PDFs of Sydney version (42 issues)
PDFs of London version (48 issues)
OZ & Yellow House Collections, gallery (1960s-70s)

YoHa, et al.: Evil Media Distribution Centre (2013)

“Evil Media Distribution Centre is a response to the book Evil Media (2012) by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey. In that book the authors argue for a broader notion of media and a deeper, more complex understanding of how these grey media influence the way we behave, think and perceive.

‘Grey media’ produce the working environment of administrators, professionals, delivery operatives and arranges the movements and work-arounds of everyone from chief executives to intellectuals or cleaners. They are the background to contemporary society. Using them, getting round their failures, exploiting their specific qualities, forms part of the necessary knowledge of the present day. These things mediate, transform, encode, filter and translate relations. Fuller and Goffey include a broad definition of media to include things like middle management, neurotropic or suppressant drugs that treat the body as an information system, alongside things such as queuing systems or specific algorithms or data–structures.

Assisted by Transmediale, Tom Keene, Anna Blumenkranz and other members of the Open Systems Association, YoHa (Graham Harwood & Matsuko Yokokoji) had invited people to write a text of one hundred words about an object, its genealogy, any key factors that make it amenable to manipulation. This text was then presented together with the object in a cabinet of curiosities that at the same time evoked associations with a distribution centre. A key fact of grey media is its ready quality of dryness, one bordering temptingly on boredom and this is something we asked people to maintain when writing the text.

The project has been installed at Transmediale 2013 in Berlin and The Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam.” (from YoHa’s statement)

Review: Stephen Fortune (2013).

28 contributions presented in video
All 51 contributions presented in text (use menu on the left)

Mel Gordon: Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (2000–)

This sourcebook of rare visual documents and study of pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture.

Publisher Feral House, Los Angeles, 2000
Expanded edition, 2006
ISBN 1932595112
303 pages

Review: Lemons (Salon, 2000).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (64 MB, updated on 2018-5-8)

See also Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935, 1997.