JJ Charlesworth: The funny thing about this magazine, and having chosen the title like The Future is that we really don’t know if it has a future or not. The status of the publication is a bit odd. The New Contemporaries Board, who primarily organizes the Contemporaries exhibition every year, came to me recently and said, “what if we get you some money to do a thing?” We had been talking about, for over a year, about a need for some other form of intervention into the art magazine scene and we’ve been looking, myself and they, in different ways coming up with a solution or coming up with some kind of proposition. So they came to me and asked “can you do it quite quickly for the Biennal?”  So I said yes. They were happy to finance it as a project which goes along with the New Cotemporaries exhibition this year, and also to offer it as a kind of pilot for what might continue as an ongoing publication. So that’s the kind of space we’re entering and the status of the thing.

The aims, though, because my interest in getting something else started has been growing for a couple of years, is that I’ve found that being a freelance writer and finding some sort of living at it, one has to accommodate, or deal with, or negotiate the editorial trends that the magazine scene in the UK has developed over the past four or five years. There has been a very a very distinct development in publications, specialist publications on contemporary art in the past five years, certainly. And, I don’t think those developments have been particularly positive. They turned toward lifestyling. Which has positive aspects to it in as much as the public audience for contemporary art has broadened in a way which people I don’t think would have imagined a decade ago. This has meant there is a wider market out there, and a market which can be chased and is being chased by quite a number of glossy publications. And, in chasing—pursuing that readership and that market has brought, what myself and other colleagues tend to notice is that they drift towards turning contemporary art into just another adjunct of lifestyle-leisure-consumption culture. I don’t have a particular problem with that—I have a few problems with that. But it is certainly obvious that writing about art turned into something which associating itself more with fashion, style, design. All these kinds of other aspects of contemporary culture, which in a certain way may have been distinct from some type of it at one point in the past

At the same time, although that’s been happening, there are certain publications which carry or are producing decent critical interventions of what’s going on. They range from the kind of publications which students and academics will read, specialist publications on contemporary art, reaching into maybe things like Art Monthly, that kind of interface between different readerships take place.

However, what I was interested in trying to do with this magazine, and it being a one-off, lets me off the hook slightly more, or allows me to try it out and then let me see what happens and if it doesn’t work, too bad. But the important thing for me is I thought that “was is possible to create a publishing intervention in the mainstream scene as it is at the moment.” So, and if you look at the magazine the issue of production isn’t a given. I wanted it to both be a glossy and trashy at same time. I wanted it to be organized in such a way that all the easy readings are in the front and the tougher stuff happens in the back. These are all structural things. In terms of agenda, the important for me was that I wanted to try to see if I could find a way of putting writing together which, instead of promoting contemporary art in a way that a lot of commercial magazines do, which is to say they promote the value of artists and works that tends to already be established by the gallery-institutional system. I was trying to look for a way of pushing writers to write directly about contemporary art in a way which kept things open. And that writing is the space where the value of work, or the value of activity, was debated and criticized and kept in flux. So, I think that’s a very important difference from—and this is why it looks, it a bit like a fifth columnist. This magazine, it’s trying to pretend to be a very attractive magazine and its trying to do something particular, which is trying to present writing which is producing more questions than it does answers. I can go on about why I think that is important, and a lot of it has to do with the commerce of specialist art magazines, the market, and the economy behind them.

In terms of the audience, it is precisely trying to get into that position where the people who come casually or with a certain interest to the contemporary art field, for whatever reason, have to maybe make a choice about what it is they read. Or might have second thoughts about what it is they think of that makes.  So for me, it is entirely a mainstream ambition. And it is supposed to intersect with that quite substantial market, and potentially reach them. In terms of the audience, what the audience might be is, strictly speaking, the audience is whoever is interested in material in this particular area. The material in this magazine has to be quite carefully about, related directly to visual art that has taken place relatively currently.

In terms of editorial criteria, and mechanisms we might have for feedback: well, this is the first one, so I’ll give you what has happened so far. What I was really interested in terms of editorial structure was to have an editorial system which was dispersed. Which is to say, I was the editor but five other people commissioned work.  So people like Dave Beech in Manchester, Neil Mulholland in Edinborough, Sara James and Jennifer Thatcher in London, were primarily responsible for most of the material. Some of it was directly commissioned by me, but I felt it was important that we try to establish, even though we have a situation where contemporary art in Britain is regionalized in a way that is quite substantial, that we took note of the fact that actually that there are centers of influence which are outside of London and which they have their own culture and their own their own economy. If this is to continue on, I’d like to run that out, I want to find a way to have an editorial board which is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Particularly in terms of the UK, or rather, which particular attention to cultures in the UK, and all the different centers of art developing. And to try to keep it away from the international circuit, for the time being. There are good reasons for that, it is not about parochialism.