It is extremely pleasing to hear that Primary Information New York, a non-profit arts organisation aiming to produce artists’ books and editions out of print have been able to realise the full reprint of Avalanche Magazine. Avalanche was created by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, a magazine editor and curator respectively from 1970 to 1976. Their primal focus was to allow a full scale of collective conversation between an artist and the interviewer that was undistracted from provocative and nonsensical imagery widely employed in print today. Like Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage published three years beforehand in 1967, like this book and Avalanche not only were textual content confronting but also the developed style in which photographic, typographic [America's uptake of Helvetica] and layout elements were dramatic and graphically arresting. The magazine solely focused on the interview context and contained artists such as: Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Sol Lewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Deenis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson.

Avalanche Magazine in its full 13 editions is now available for order through Primary Information’s website.

See also: http://primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/upcoming-avalanche