Personally, I prefer Italian porn to art publications, and I was aroused by the idea that young writers and artists would go down on me in return for publishing their errata. Ardent young men sucking their way into print. Like Mae West, I like to be visited between the holidays. Having spent a string of art grants on cocaine and car bodywork, I had nothing to lose.¹ – Josephine Meckseper, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, FAT magazine (1994-2000).

Created in 1994 in the Soho district of Manhattan, FAT magazine waged a war against bullshit — namely the conventions of the contemporary art publications of the time — that lasted until 2000.² The bastard child of a ménage à trois between text-based conceptual art, Artforum, and the New York Post, FAT was a frenetic collage of advertising faux and real, sensationalist journalism, of the kind more often found in tabloid newspapers, and interviews with artists such as Dan Graham. Each of the four issues — Good and Evil, Surrender, FAT on Fire and Overflow — foregrounded the conventions of the print media, in the process, subverting both the reader’s expectations and the dichotomy between high and low print culture.

The magazine was published on a non-profit basis and represented a guerilla attack against the hubris of the contemporary art scene of the 1990s, the popular appeal of chauvinist tabloid papers and the tacky and consumerist nature of much American pop culture. Most of the advertisements were illustrated by pre-existing works by established artists and photographers. The accompanying text often worked in opposition to these images: their subversive re-contextualisation undermined their claim to the status of art. Photographs and compositions by artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Tony Oursler, Tom Sachs, Vik Muniz and René Magritte, were treated as photojournalism and given only marginal credits.

All subsections of the publication collaborated to form a critique of the manipulative mix of news and advertising that typifies the media in the context of a market economy. Perhaps the best example of the appropriation and manipulation of established works, which typified FAT’s content, was the interview in FAT on Fire between Laura Emrick and Dan Graham. The text of the interview was framed by a deliberately incongruous combination of a reprint of Graham’s 1965 Figurative (the grocery receipt which adds to nothing), the advertisements for Tampax and Warner’s bras which originally accompanied this work when it appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and a promotion for Honey Graham cookies. This cheeky use of advertising was designed to expose the commodification and what might be described as the banalification of art at the hands of popular culture. Allusions to Dadaist photomontage and constructivist and De Stijl-influenced print design appeared throughout all four issues, reinforcing this critique of consumerism.

Meckseper’s work sought to force its readers to question the meaning of what [they] see first, to delve beyond what was offered by the established print media of the time.³ Every aspect of the publication, from the layout to the advertisements to the choice of paper itself, played a part in its self proclaimed celebration of pulp against pap.⁴ Super-saturated and ultra-satisfying, it is high time FAT was reconstituted.

¹ Josephine Meckseper, ‘Editorial’, FAT, issue no.1, 1994, 3
² Joe Holyfield, ‘Interview with FAT Magazine’, Thing Reviews NYC, 23 February 1996, 1
³ Philipp Zielger, Personal Interview, 10 September 2007
⁴ Holyfield, 2