ARTICLE Is Back!
ARTICLE magazine is back, with a new issue available on April the 18th! With a £5 cover price, the magazine will be available nationally. You can order subscriptions now and receive a gift.
The new issue of Article will take on what it means for something to be ‘Broken’. It’s timely. Watch the news, read the papers, listen to people talk in the pub: The whole world is going to shit, and no-one is really doing anything about it, apparently.
Through a range of features and design we will explore the obsession with abandoned buildings, the failings of city centre planning, the rhetoric of Broken Britain, and what the recession actually means for art. Our interviews with artists and designers ask why people don’t study repair instead of design and what it means to break something intentionally.
Now, Article is changing a bit. We are increasing our number of pages to 84, and we are also going to get a proper cover and some glossy pages in the middle, cuz we’re posh like that. Importantly, we are no longer going to be free. The whole advertising thing turned into a bit of nightmare, and we thought we could make a better more consistent magazine if we charged readers £5 for their own copy. It was a tough call to make, but we think it will be the best deal for everyone in the long run.
You can subscribe below for £15 a year. Do the maths. We are quarterly. So, it’ll save you £5 over the year. But move quick, the first fifty subscriptions will receive our Culture tote-bag free! Or for a fiver you can just straight-up pre-order an issue to have it delivered to your house/crib/loft-apartment/squat/office/kennel when we get them from the printer.
Lastly, we will be having a launch party in Sheffield on the 18th of April. More details to follow. Watch this space!
Now, go hit the Buy Now button below!
Love,
Team Article
x x
Subscribe Here
Riding back to Mrs Claus on his snowmobile, Claus couldn’t help but feel irritated. He’d set up his factory, moved his team of elves and his wife as far north, as far away as any in his team would let him, to get away from people so that he could conduct his research in peace. But no matter where he went, there was always some local group of people that just wouldn’t play ball. In 1984 he had relocated to a tropical island to see if there would be any more peace in the ocean. Unfortunately, it too had neighbors. Within six months, Richard Branson had installed himself on the couch in Claus’s living room and wouldn’t stop flirting with his missus. There were other problems too, six of his elves were eaten by sharks in as many weeks, a few more had ended up on another island, which soon went a little bit Lord of the Flies. Claus, moved the lot back North of the Arctic Circle.
There had been other moves too, Antarctica, Brazil, Middlesbrough. The grass is always greener, Claus remembered each time. It was simplest to move somewhere with no grass at all.
It’s not fair! Claus shouted back at Mrs Claus. Mrs Claus had hidden the rest of his bullets. She didn’t like the idea of her husband having a loaded gun: just what the hell was he planning on doing with it?! Everyone the world over loved Claus, so what was getting him down so much?
The gun had been the most recent development. Over the past eight months Claus had started drinking, heavily. It was now nearing five bottles of whisky a week. Neither a cheap nor pleasant habit, thought Mrs Claus.
Claus had always been quite private, even with Mrs Claus. But his recent erratic behavior had been a trifle more eccentric than usual. Far more in fact. And his work had suffered too. All the factory elves, once hardworking, unafraid of long hours, inspired by their strong and stoic leader, now began to imitate his new found lethargy. Absenteeism grew, and fights broke out amongst the two and a half foot tall labourers. On one occasion, an elf named Jeremy Green was nearly sawn in half with a band saw for not paying a gambling debt before Mrs Claus put a stop to it by kicking one of his assailants in the head.
The north pole was more chaotic than it had ever been, and at the worst time of year too! With Christmas just around the corner, and a growing global population expecting presents, Mrs Claus had no idea what she was going to do in order to get things back on schedule. It may have to be satsumas in stockings this year.
Nearly home (Taken with instagram)
Eva and Franco Mattes for Article Magazine
Since the mid-nineties, artistic duo Eva and Franco Mattes have been creating works that force an appraisal of the world we live in. A big claim, but the two pioneers of net-art truly create work of immediate relevance. Often taking place on the internet, in Chat Roulette, video games and Second Life, their mediums are fresh, accessible, but deeply thought provoking. Many works are duplicitous performances, lies and outright pranks. Occasionally jarring and consistently challenging. For their first solo UK exhibition, the duo have brought an incredible collection of their work to Site Gallery in Sheffield. I caught up with Franco for an interview after the show had opened.
Kid Acne on Kill Your Darlings From Ashes II
The range and breadth of Sheffield-based artist Kid Acne is more than impressive. The polymath has released tracks on major record labels, painted on walls around the world and is now exhibiting a large collection of work from his 15-year career at the Sheffield Museum (rumour has it, he may even be a good cook).
I’d like to start by talking about your influences. They come from far and wide, and seem to be very important to you and your work; you talk about them, and explain them in the show. How has this shaped them, and what other influences are there?
My influences are very important to me. I find a lot of people tend to gloss over them in order to take all the credit for themselves or ‘invent’ cooler sounding ones in an attempt to appear more enigmatic than they really are. In the right situation, such as this exhibition, I’ll always tell people how my style has developed and who’s helped inform my approach over the years.
Once you created the Stabby Women, you explored this further by creating a world for them, Blood & Sand. What was the progression from making characters to making their world?
It actually happened the other way around. I came up with the title Blood & Sand and it seemed to fit with the style of drawings and paintings at the time. This was around 2002. Over the years, the female warrior characters have been through many guises and wound up becoming ‘Stabby Women’ in 2008. Since then, I’ve been interested in what their belief system might be, taking inspiration from Freemasonry, Witchcraft and the Occult. It’s still a work in progress, but in time, I hope to develop this project further…
Cole Pickett introducing Ashes and Millionaires Issue II
Autumn is an emotional time of year. The only sport on television is football, the vegetables are no longer fresh, routines pick up again, the city gets busy, leaving your house after nine at night is a threatening prospect, and buying any sort of instant food in the supermarket becomes embarrassing. Autumn is hard work. But the transition is character building.
I have to admit, after launching this magazine in May, summer looked like a dark time for yours truly. Five ten hour shifts a week at Jack Wills, moving back in with my parents, croquet with the cousins, cricket with the uncles, and to compound it all a completed English literature BA, (2.1 boom!) with no discernible job prospects that didn’t involve reheating pasties or arguing with Land Rover driving MILFs. I’m sure you can all relate.
Article - The Ports Issue
Well, after a few weeks, it is finally here. The Ports issue of Article Magazine. Although we are billing this issue as number 3, it is in fact the seventeenth issue of Article, and roughly marks the third anniversary of the magazine.
If you haven’t encountered the magazine before, it is a free art and culture magazine distributed mainly around the North of England. Each uses a theme to explores the topics of art, architecture, urbanism, regeneration, design, and fashion. This issue looked at ports and their impact on the landscape and culture.
Introducing Cole Pickett
A few weeks ago, with a couple of friends, I launched a new magazine called Ashes & Millionaires. Sheffield focused, the title looks at bands, nights and club culture. In order to edit the new title and give it a healthy difference from Article Magazine, I decided it would be best to adopt a pseudonym. The editor of Ashes & Millionaires had to be a bit more local, a bit more Sheffield than I am. But he also need to be a bit more bolshy and exotic to be interesting. And so was born Cole Pickett, a more confident and arrogant version of myself. Here are some selected pieces of his editorial from Issue 1.
Back, soz lol
It’s been quiet on here for a few months, but I am now making an effort to break the bad habit of having a blog and not using it. Apart from putting out a few issue’s of Article, there have been some other large projects in the background, and I’ll be posting them over the next few days.
