AUB Library's Special Collections contain some rare countercultural and underground publications, from the UK and the USA. We've gathered them together for this mini exhibition, charting how magazines were a tool for artists, designers and poets in the 1960s and 70s.
The term ‘underground press’ refers to magazines and newspapers which came out of the youth-led counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. The underground press mirrored the changing way of life in the UK and USA, publishing on topics such as rock music, occultism and mysticism, drug use, pornography, sexuality, alternative lifestyles and anti-establishment thought. Often controversial, artists and poets found that these magazines gave them an uncensored voice. These publications became platforms for Avant Garde artists, offering a space for experimentation with graphic design, cartoons and the emerging art movements of the 60s and 70s.
International Times was Britain’s first underground newspaper, a radical weekly publication which covered art, literature, politics and news of alternative lifestyles. It was launched on 15 October 1966 at The Roundhouse at an 'All Night Rave' featuring Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. The event promised a 'Pop/Op/Costume/Masque/Fantasy-Loon/Blowout/Drag Ball' featuring 'steel bands, strips, trips, happenings, movies'. Following legal threats from The Times newspaper, it was was renamed IT.
As the British counterculture grew in prominence, IT covered many alternative topics including articles on Eastern mysticism, flying saucers, vegetarianism, communal living and, of course, drugs; the paper provoked controversy by including the street prices of LSD and marijuana. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were early contributors. Members of The Beatles helped to keep it financially afloat. Unsurprisingly, IT often fell foul of the establishment and was subject to a number of police raids.
According to Barry Miles, who founded the magazine with John Hopkins, “It’s very, very difficult now to imagine how straight England was, even in the mid 60s. It was a very black and white world then… The idea of anyone from our community writing for the Guardian or the Times was inconceivable. None of the papers had any popular music coverage in those days. Our group of people needed somewhere to express themselves, so in early 1966, Hoppy (John Hopkins) and I started to put it together.”
Oz magazine is one of the most important magazines of 20th century counterculture, publishing on subjects ranging from gay rights to racism, the environment, feminism, sex, the pill, acid, rock music and the Vietnam War. Produced in a basement flat in London's Notting Hill Gate by three editors, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, the magazine was renowned for its psychedelic covers by pop artist Martin Sharp, cartoons by Robert Crumb, and provocative articles that called into question established norms of the period.
In the early 1970s, Oz became the subject of the longest obscenity trial in British history after it was raided by the obscene publications division of the Metropolitan Police. The best known images of the trial come from the committal hearing, at which Neville, Dennis and Anderson all appeared, wearing rented schoolgirl costumes. The editors were convicted of two lesser offences and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, but these convictions were later overturned.
Aspen was conceived by Phyllis Johnson, a former editor for Women's Wear Daily, who wanted to break away from the magazine format. Known as the ‘Magazine in a Box’, each issue came in a customized box filled with things like booklets, flip-books, posters, records, super-8 recordings, musical scores, cardboard cut-outs and postcards.
Issues #1 and #2 of Aspen centred on the town in Colorado it was named after. Issue three, however, marked an editorial shift. Moving from place to time, issues #3-#10 demonstrated fully the concept of the magazine as artwork, capturing a specific movement or way of thinking in the late 1960s conceptual Avant Garde, with contributors including the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Yoko Ono. Although the magazine was supposed to come out regularly, working with artists proved difficult. “All the artists are such shadowy characters,” publisher Johnson said, “that it takes months to track them down.”
Read on to find out about the creation of the two issues from which this exhibition takes its name:
Issue #3 of Aspen was the first ‘themed’ issue, dedicated to Pop Art. The issue was designed by the artist Andy Warhol and David Dalton, a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine.
Published in 1966, it was housed in a box with graphics based on the packaging of "Fab" laundry detergent. Among its contents were a flip-book based on Warhol's film Kiss, and Jack Smith's film Buzzards Over Bagdad, a flexidisc by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, a "trip ticket book" with excerpts of papers delivered at the Berkeley conference on LSD by renowned psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, and a one-off copy of the Warhol Factory's one-shot underground paper The Plastic Exploding Inevitable.
Inspired by the acid trip tickets presented by Warhol in issue #3, issue #9 was devoted to the art and literature during the psychedelic drug movement. Published in 1970, it was edited by Angus MacLise and his wife Hetty MacLise, legends of the early psychedelic/avant-garde movement. Angus was known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground who abruptly quit due to disagreements with the band playing their first paid show. Hetty was an artist, poet and musician. The two were married by Timothy Leary in Golden Gate Park. Fascinated by the occult and Eastern mysticism, the MacLises relocated to Kathmandu in 1971, when their four-year old son, Ossian, became a Buddhist monk.
Subtitled ‘Dreamweapon’, the psychedelic issue contains poetry, calligraphic design, stamps, a phonograph recording and musical scores drawn in different styles. From the words “Lucifer, Lucifer, Bringer of Light” printed on the back of the cover to Neal Cassady’s quote “You gotta zig when they zag” written on the inside of the box, the Psychedelic issue is possibly the most fascinating of all of Aspen's issues.
Allen, G. (2011). Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Birch, J. and Miles, B. (2017). The British underground press of the sixties: a catalogue. London: Rocket 88.
Brennan, A. (2017). An Architecture for the Mind: OZ Magazine and the Technologies of the Counterculture. Design and Culture. Vol. 9 No. 3. pp. 317–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2017.1368828.
Dopp, B.J. (2007). Review of Aspen: The Multimedia Magazine in a Box. American Music. Vol. 25 No. 1. pp. 125–130. https://doi.org/10.2307/40071648.
Gil-Glazer, Y. (2024). Birds, bees and hippies: sex education on TV and in Oz magazine in Britain of the 1960s-70s. Sex Education. Vol. 24 No. 2. pp. 172–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2023.2167071.
Stansill, P. (2006). Life and death of International Times. British Journalism Review. Vol. 17 No. 4. pp. 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956474806074955.
