“Until now, every magazine was a bunch of pages stapled together. It arrived in your mailbox folded, mutilated spindled — usually with more ads than editorial. Last year, a group of us enjoying the sun, skiing and unique cultural climate of Aspen Colorado, asked ourselves, ‘Why?’
Why, for example, couldn’t a magazine come in a box? Why shouldn’t an article exploring jazz be accompanied by an LP record illustrating in sound our words in print? Why couldn’t each article be a separate booklet, in the shape, color and paper most appropriate to the subject?
We kept asking why for months. Aspen magazine is the answer.” – August 1966 advertisement for Aspen
Since I first stumbled upon some excerpts from Aspen my freshman year in college, I have been enthusiastically telling anyone who will listen that the magazine stands, perhaps alongside Wyndham Lewis’ and Ezra Pound’s Vorticist journal BLAST from the 1910s, as easily the best (and, for that matter, although here the hyperbole is somewhat less warranted, most influential) publication of the 20th century. Regardless of its short run and truncated distribution – it only spanned ten ‘issues’ over six years – its influence on contemporary media radiates through to even the most somnambulant of readers, as magazines such as Visionaire (and, perhaps, even our own Dossier) have picked up on Aspen’s discursive folding-over of various, often incongruent, forms of media; and, crucially, they have appropriated its sort of lofty self-awareness of, among other things, the very implications of publishing: of calling this disseminated assemblage of various works a ‘magazine.’
But you really don’t need me to convince you of anything. The list of contributors that founding editor Phyllis Johnson brought together for Aspen’s short run is truly astounding, and should, in a sort of silent, coercive demonstration, do all of the convincing itself. Among them: Andy Warhol, John Cale, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Ken Jacobs, J.G. Ballard, John Cage, Carolee Schneemann, Morton Feldman, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Alain Robbe-Grillet Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, John Lennon, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, La Monte Young.
Like its contemporary cousin Visionaire, Aspen has had the good fortune of being regarded as a ‘collector’s item’; and, unfortunately, for most that means that getting a copy of a fully-intact issue is something of a monetary issue. Thankfully, UbuWeb has been kind enough to post every issue, in its entirety, on its site, in a very clean, navigable layout. Click on the image above (of the cover of the third issue, designed by Andy Warhol) to navigate to that page.
