The Art & Visual Culture Magazine

Something strange has happened to the art world. Haven’t you noticed it? We live in a divided world. On the one side, you have the art world proper, on the other, what has so far been known as applied arts, or commercial art, while the most interesting work seems to be happening in the middle: when photographers, architects and graphic and fashion and all kinds of designers manage to transcend their initial brief and start thinking like artists, when artists wander outside the confines of the museum and gallery environment and become aware of trends and start thinking like designers… when creatives are not afraid of engaging with new technologies and webmasters not afraid of engaging with art history… when graphic novels become as complex as novels and novels as graphic as comics…. Not to mention all the art forms that fall directly into the gap: illustration, graffiti art, film…. Are they art, or commercial art? Some may ask, when the question should be: but who cares?

This division does not reflect the reality (and the richness) of the visual arts scene. More seriously, this division has meant that a lot of the best work has gone right under the radar. And it is this vast and vital space in the middle, with its vibrant culture and endlessly changing scene, that is the subject of ELEPHANT.

Direct, sincere and multi-disciplinary, Elephant looks for its ethos in the time before the ‘art world’ and the ‘creative industries’ took over, a time when artists didn’t value their work according to the auction prices, but by the reaction of their peers to their ideas.

With over 200 pages of visual content, Elephant aims to have more depth and breadth than any other visual art magazine. It digs deeper, ceaselessly asking and enquiring into creative trends and art movements and innovative techniques. In recent years, creative individuals have started to react against the corporate nature of things, taking initiative into their hands and starting new independent ventures. Elephant looks at how people do that. How do they go about starting a new publishing venture? How do they then move from publishing their own comics to featuring them in national newspapers? How do they turn their personal interests and design skills into hugely popular websites? How do they turn their obsessions into global trends? These questions are particularly relevant as we wake up to this post credit-crunch period. Elephant visits art and design studios, sits by desks, steps on graffiti artists’ toes, disturbs rehearsals and interrupts takes, rides fixed-gear bikes and plays with the latest computer games. The ELEPHANT is always in the room.

Issue 1 highlights:
Peter Saville on design Vs art
Fernando Gutiérrez on how the greatest things come from two people talking
The New Collage Movement sticks in the mind
Make popcorn online with Universal Everything's Matt Pyke & Rafael Rozendaal
A lesson in bike polo
Hell yes: we'll have text, type, painting & all (Liz Collini, Chris Tosic, Pietro Sanguineti)
North Wave: a new generation of Scandinavian fashion designers (Henrik Vibskov, Carin Wester, Whyred, Julia Hederus, Hope, Won Hundred)
Boris Hoppek’s naughty notebooks
Robert Nicol’s paranoid vignettes
Image, Time, Data, or the work of Minako Abe
Misake Kawai learns from Charlie Chan
Gianpaolo Pagni's graphic paintings
Mike Perry lets the images do the talking
Unit Editions: Spin's Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy tell us how to start a publishing company
Creative City Guide: things to do in Sao Paulo when you are not dead, featuring stunning work by Tuca Vieira, Ana Starling, Paula Ordonhes, Pedro Inoue and some of Sao Paulo's hottest artists
Photography by Giles Revell

Editor-in-chief: Marc Valli (Magma)
Design & Art Direction: Matt Willey (Studio8)
Publisher: Frame (Amsterdam)
Release date: 17th of November, 2009
Quarterly, 280x 200 mm, 208 pages