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Artists Talking

Artists Talking

A (mini) oral history of BOMB Magazine’s early years.

26 Jun

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Left: Summer 1983; Right: BOMB’s first cover (Spring 1981)

“Reading BOMB interviews was one of the ways I began to conceive of myself as an artist,” Miranda July once said, and she’s not the only one. When BOMB’s co-founding editors, a group of friends and creative collaborators in 1970s and ‘80s downtown New York City—Betsy Sussler, who continues today in her role as founding editor-in-chief and publisher, Michael McClard, the late Sarah Charlesworth, and the late Glenn O’Brien, then of Interview—launched their now-legendary arts magazine in 1981, they sought to shift focus away from critics’ perspectives. Instead, they invited artists to talk directly to each other: a visionary idea at the time, and one that’s seemingly everywhere we look now.

While the magazine’s transcript editing process has been gradually refined (“I would go through maybe one or two drafts in the ‘80s. By now, it could be 13 drafts,” Sussler tells me), early BOMB interviews radiate personality, with cheeky questions (covering nearly every topic but one’s ~creative process~) eliciting even more unpredictable answers. Take this excerpt from a July 1983 exchange between writer and performance artist Kathy Acker and BOMB’s first designer, Mark Magill, published when Acker was 35. “We did it in a bar on Greenwich Street,” Magill recalls. “She didn't drink. We were sitting at a table, I had a questionnaire, and I was just writing the answers.”

16. Occupation: Writer or not…not occupied.

17. Position desired: At times dead. I’ve been fighting against that one. Otherwise, enough money to buy clothes.

18. World outlook: (circle one) a.) Pessimistic b.) Optimistic c.) Zen-like detachment d.) Manic confusion: Enough money to buy clothes.

19. Do you regularly abstain from any of the following: a.) Red meat b.) Sugar c.) Boiled vegetables d.) Pizza e.) Hard Liquor f.) Coffee g.) Herbal tea h.) Black bean sauce i.) Shellfish j.) Potatoes k.) Chef salad l.) Hot sauce

Kathy Acker answering questions for BOMB.

20. How often do you bathe? (circle one) Daily 5 4 3 2 1 times per week: No one’s allowed in my house.

21. Do you brush your teeth after every meal? Fuck you.

22. Do you have any large outstanding debts? I don’t owe no one nothing.

23. Does free will exist? What else is this about? I’m no superstar shit and never will be. If anything, I’m what happens after death, which is writing.

Over 40 years later, BOMB continues to publish expansive, in-depth conversations between artists across mediums, from their Oral History Project centering the voices and stories of African Diasporic visual artists to their free archive: a vast universe of perspectives on what it means to be a person making art—novels, poems, paintings, plays, dance works, operas, you name it—through the decades.

On a Thursday morning in May, Sussler brewed a pot of coffee as late-spring sunlight streamed across stacks of back issues housed in the magazine’s Fort Greene office. Below, Sussler recalls the people, places, spaces, funding, and early conversations that sparked BOMB. Magill shared additional recollections on a phone call in mid-June.