The cover for Red Wedge issue three: "The Return of the Crowd" (click to enlarge). Cover art by Howard Barry. Cover design by Adam Turl.
There are big changes coming to Red Wedge’s publication and posting schedule. Starting with issue three (out in July) on “The Return of the Crowd," Red Wedge will be going quarterly.
Since the founding of Red Wedge in 2012 there has been a mushrooming and further development of left-wing and explicitly socialist publishing. As readers may know, we have spent much of the past eighteen months discussing our way forward, and feel that our current moment, our current environment, demands that Red Wedge professionalize itself.
Red Wedge has something important to offer this new radical left milieu: an approach to art that rejects the conception of Marxism as an arid, outdated ideology. We also insist not only that Marxism has something to teach us about art, but that art has something to tell us about Marxism. We see our role as reviving and helping recreate a lineage of avant-gardes, dissident communists, romantic anti-capitalists, organic philosophers, artist-workers and worker-artists who seem to conspicuously escape the official histories of both socialism and art.
We cannot do this for free. Put another way, we cannot pay a substantial amount of our own incomes to make Red Wedge happen. Our editors, writers and supporters have spent thousands of dollars (annually) on the Red Wedge project. We have been glad to do it, but in the long run it isn’t sustainable.
By placing greater focus on the print issue and organizing our publishing around it, we will offset our costs dramatically. What Red Wedge contributes is worth the nominal cost of a subscription. We will not be abandoning the world of the web. Every piece that appears in our print issue will also be eventually rolled out online (those who want them when they are published will need to subscribe; more on that below). We will also continue using the site for audio, video, and other web exclusives.
We will continue, in our quarterly print publication, to feature Marxist essays and commentary on art and culture, reviews, poetry, short stories and visual art, interviews with filmmakers and musicians, etc. In fact, we think going quarterly will help us do the above better. Organizing our selection, solicitation and editing process around a three-month cycle will allow our editors and editorial collective time to more consciously respond to submissions, solicit articles and contributions more thoughtfully, take time to approach artists, etc.
It will also allow us to better organize our regular mailings (those of you waiting on posters and t-shirts: they are coming, and thank you for your patience).
The upcoming print issue (number three) is set to include:
- Neil Davidson on the influence of Leon Trotsky and Georg Lukacs on the thought of American art critic Clement Greenberg (the first in a two-part series)
- An interview with experimental rock group Algiers on their new album The Underside of Power
- Anindya Bhattacharya on the last work of late culture writer Mark Fisher
- Adam Turl on aesthetics against hierarchies.
- Reviews of Bertolt Brecht’s republished War Primer, the television version of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the “Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin” exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum
- Poetry by Sunni Hutton and Mike Linaweaver
- Reflections on the meaning of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle fifty years since its publication
- Art from Laura Fair-Schulz, Howard Barry, Arthur Sangster, Amy Madden, Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl
We’re excited to share all this. But we need two things from you.
- We need you to subscribe and/or support our Patreon account (a donation of $5 a month will automatically garner you a subscription. Larger donations reap other “rewards”). [add links]
- We need you to submit your art, essays, poetry, short-stories, interviews and commentary.
Red Wedge has gone through a number of changes over the years. Whether on point or mistake, every change has been about moving toward the goals sketched above. We will soon be announcing our new editorial collective. And we will soon be issuing calls for submissions for issues four and five. We still (and always) want Red Wedge to play a role in (re)kindling the revolutionary imagination and forging a new Marxist avant-garde. You, our readers, are central in that project.