CABINET: WHAT IS IT?

Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words "art," "culture," and sometimes even "magazine." Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet's hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet's omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

Cabinet was named "Best New Magazine" of 2000 by the American Library Association's Library Journal and "Best Art and Culture Magazine" for 2001 and 2003 by the New York Press.

CABINET: HOW IS IT STRUCTURED?

Columns
Each 128-page issue of Cabinet begins with four regular columns. "The Clean Room" focuses on science and technology. Subjects addressed have included homemade prosthetics constructed from recycled materials; the repercussions of the arrival of the first Japanese atomic bomb victims in America in the 1950s; and the early film jukebox called the Scopitone. "Ingestion" examines the intersection of cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy. Past columns have addressed recipes for cooking imaginary animals; the fear of eating (and being eaten by) octopus; and a recently discovered photograph of Futurist theoretician Marinetti devouring pasta shortly after writing his famous manifesto denouncing the dish. In "Colors," guest writers take on a color assigned to them by the editors. Past writers have included Jonathan Ames on bice; Lynne Tillman on chartreuse; Jonathan Lethem on hazel; and David Byrne on pink. In "Leftovers," a writer investigates the larger context of some form of cultural detritus. Examples have included the fate of Las Vegas's old neon signs; the 19th-century vogue for hemacite, a hard material made from slaughterhouse blood and sawdust; and a tour of modern-day Madrid on the lookout for physical traces of Franco's fascist regime.

Main
The unthemed second portion of the magazine allows for a wide variety of articles, short essays, interviews, and artist projects. Writers have included Slavoj Zizek on capitalism's current fascination with Buddhism; Barry Sanders on the intersecting histories of guns and typewriters; and Marina van Zuylen on the right to laziness.

Interview subjects have included John Cliett, discussing the problematic status of his classic photographs of Walter de Maria's Lightning Field; scholar Scott Sandage tracing the history of failure in American culture; and philosopher Alain Badiou on the political uses of the rhetoric of evil.

Theme
In the third and final section of each issue, Cabinet looks at one subject from a broad range of perspectives. Past themes include Weather, Animals, Evil, Horticulture, Failure, Property, Childhood, Flight and The Enemy. Typically, this section consists of essays, interviews, and special art projects, all linked by a shared association with the theme. For example, the "Failure" issue included an essay by Tom Vanderbilt on airplane black boxes; Elizabeth Esch's ground-breaking history of the Ford motor company's ill-fated rubber operation in the Brazilian jungle; and a reproduction of a William Safire speech written for Richard Nixon in the event of the failure of the Apollo 11 mission. The issue's CD, "Syntax Error," contained sound works by artists including Yasunao Tone, Andrew Deutsch, Claude Wampler, and Pauline Oliveros.

Special Artist Projects
Artist projects appear in each issue and have taken the form of postcards, posters, printed drawings and photographs, postage stamps, build-it-yourself paper sculptures, meter-long foldouts, and a land give-away. Theme-related CDs and CD-ROMs have been included in seven issues so far.

CABINET: WHAT READERS SAY

Cabinet is my kind of magazine; ferociously intelligent, ridiculously funny, absurdly innovative, rapaciously curious. Cabinet's mission is to breathe life back into non-academic intellectual life. Compared to it, every other magazine is a walking zombie.
Slavoj Zizek, philosopher

Memorably quirky in its conceptual range, diversity and inventiveness, Cabinet is an ideal magazine for our times. Typically, the arcane and the quixotic orbit around a dense visual force-field whose nexus becomes the principal topic of that particular issue. At once enthralling and beguiling, its contents segue adroitly from subject to subject, the whole packaged into an unusually elegant design.
Lynne Cooke, curator, Dia Art Foundation

Cabinet is absolutely unrelenting, issue after issue, in its madcap curiosity and creativity. There's a cerebral joy to the whole enterprise—a firm and happy belief that there is still much to be discovered and said about our world, our culture. Opening an issue of Cabinet is like finding out that Karl Marx is related to the Marx Brothers.
Jonathan Ames, novelist

The editors of Cabinet are collecting some of the weirdest and brightest minds out there from different disciplines and assembling them together in a way that doesn't always make sense. This magazine is for me.
Rachel Harrison, artist

Publication or project? Cabinet magazine, the antidote for the suffocated intellectual, continually moves across and beyond all the categories, offering some of the best writing and thinking about culture to be found the world over. Few journals can truly be described as new: Cabinet, while offering rich perspectives both historical and contemporary, is one of them.
Tim Griffin, editor-in-chief, Artforum

Cabinet is the secret best art magazine.
Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic, The Village Voice

Voracious, omnivorous, and playful.
The New York Times, February 10, 2005

Curios and curiouser. The finest thing to come out of Brooklyn since our grandmother, every issue of Cabinet is a deft collection of ephemera and anecdote, a Muetter Museum of themes. Every time, we're left in the dust, wondering where they find their peculiar contributors. Cabinet functions as any good quarterly. It presents you with a sizeable wealth of information and lets you take a couple months to absorb it. Their spring issue addressed the historical and societal significance of beheading, provided a history of amputee cricket games and a history of the pigment ultramarine. The writing is densely informative (footnoted, even) while still cheerfully meandering; creative writing without the sophomoric, self-centered writing-workshop sloppiness. Like the best of artists, it's not wrapped up in gallery gossip nor weighed down by Fluxus antics. Rather than making a big deal of how creative it is, Cabinet functions creatively.
"Best Art Magazine 2003," New York Press, October 2003

Cabinet fits an enormous amount into its finely designed, small-format pages. There are other treats in store too, such as tipped-in artwork, the occasional CD and an extraordinarily broad range of articles on everything from random radio stations to weather quotes to art vandalism. Your coffee table never need lack intellectual rigour again.
Jonathan Bell, Wallpaper, October 2001

The journal's name alludes to the phone booth used by Dr. Who. From the exterior, it looks normal but inside is an entire alternative universe. Cabinet likewise brings the reader to other ways of thinking, successfully blending accessibility in its writing and diversity and originality in its content. Cabinet is lively, humorous, and fascinating and will be perused over and over again.
Michael Colford, "Best Magazines of 2000," Library Journal, 2001


Cabinet Magazine
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USA
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