Form Magazine

In the 1960s I published Form, a magazine whose aims were declared in the first number: “…to publish and provoke discussion of the relations of form to structure in the work of art, and correspondences between the arts. Emphasis is to be placed in particular on the fields of kinetic art and concrete poetry.” The editors were Mike Weaver, Stephen Bann and myself. Ten issues appeared between 1966 and 1969.

We published work by contemporary artists, poets, writers and critics including Charles Biederman, Bernard Lassus, Pedro Xisto, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Simon Cutts, Ernst Jandl, Robert Pinget, Thomas Bernhard, Frank Popper, Roland Barthes, Gillo Dorfles, Peter Wollen and Abraham Moles. We also looked to precursors in the early part of the 20th century, and published Joseph Albers, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, William Carlos Williams, Pierre Albert-Birot and Walter Gropius. There were special features on De Stijl, the 1967 Brighton Festival Exhibition of Concrete Poetry, and Black Mountain College. Mike Weaver edited a regular series on ‘Great Little Magazines’ with reprinted articles and author indexes.

I designed the magazine, which was in the Swiss manner with a square format, a grid layout, and the Helvetica typeface throughout. It had been my original ambition to carry on publishing until a stack of the complete run formed a cube; but after ten numbers we ran out of money and steam.

The archives of Form are now held in the Special Collections of the Princeton University Library, catalogue C1489