“IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE BASIC IDEA OF RE-MAGAZINE, TO DESCRIBE LIFE FROM A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE, TO INCLUDE TRIVIAL INFORMATION WITHIN A BIGGER IDEA. TO FIND A LANGUAGE THAT IS PART OF THINGS AND NOT INTELLECTUALLY HOVERING ABOVE THINGS.”
By AXEL J. WIEDER

AXEL J. WIEDER: You started Re-Magazine in 1997. What was the initial concept?
JOP VAN BENNEKOM: I started Re-Magazine at graduate school, the Jan van Eyck academy in Maastricht. As a graphic designer I was already working closely with fashion designers and artists, but instead of translating information into a form I was more interested in how I could redefine communication – the whole spectrum of communication itself. So I started doing everything myself. My questions in the beginning were pretty basic: Can I write? And if so, how can I write? And, can I do photography? And if so, how can I do photography? I tried to push the boundaries all together in order to redefine design, and with that, to redefine my own position. It was very much a question of authorship; it was – and still is – an experiment of the designer as author.

The first three issues seem to have very specific themes. Issue no. 1 is “The Home Issue,” then no. 2 “The Media Issue,” and no. 3 is called “The Sex Issue.”
Yes, but despite these themes what all the early issues have in common is that I was trying to find out how I related to media and how media related to me. I was trying to get answers on questions about mediation and representation, even in a political sense. The intention of the first issue was to create a vehicle to expose things that are kind of unseen. That was what fascinated me, to make a magazine that really slows everything down, in the way of looking at things and the way of talking about things. Like this ashtray here on the table: where does it come from and how did it get here? You could talk for hours about that. Everything around us has a very broad context; you could attach a read-me-file to everything around you. I tried to show this in the first issue. I interviewed friends about their houses, why the ashtray is standing here and not there and why this table is over there, and why for instance the ashtray is not standing on the table. In the end those small things tell something about the lives of the interviewees, the way they live and the way they choose to live. All the texts in the magazines were interviews. I like the directness of an interview, as a form that is really close to the first intention, why you go out to meet someone, and what you are curious about. For the second issue “In between Media and Daily Life” I interviewed a lot of people within the field of media. It was kind of an exploration of how media and daily life are not opposed to each other but rather intertwined. How does it work, what is more real – daily life or media? This was also an everyday experience for me, because I was making the magazine from my living room in a very small apartment. Basically, I wanted to integrate my own reality within media. The third issue was about sex. I started to collaborate with a lot of writers and photographers. That was the idea and the intention of the issue, to shift my role from author to editor-in chief and art director. I found it incredibly difficult to maintain a specific tone of voice throughout the collaborations.

The form of the magazine as an instrument to question the meaning of a magazine becomes most obvious in issue no. 7 “Re-view.” I liked that it’s about social relationships as well. What happens if you start to work with other people? There’s a letter to the photographers which describes how the cover photo should look, and it’s not clear if the letter is real or written after the image was already taken. This issue works through the whole text and image relationship, but not only as a theoretical problem, but also as a social relationship between editing, writing, and producing images.
It’s difficult when things become too meta – in that issue maybe too much. Because every issue questions media itself, the danger of getting stuck in itself is always present. At the time of the “Re-view” issue we were really working collectively, like writing and editing everything together. In the issue before “Re-View” we used the idea of collectivity as the main concept. “The Information Trashcan” is one huge monologue made up of four people talking, so opinions were conflicting. We put all kinds of personal stories together and the result was an implosion of self-awareness. The text was talking to itself and collapsed into some kind of paradox, having four opinions at the same time.

How did you make the change from an individual editor to an editorial board?
If you put all the issues next to each other you can really see how it changed and what the struggle was. It’s part of the magazine itself. Like an experiment that went public. Every issue is so different, because each time it’s the result of a process that involved my or our personal wishes of what the magazine should be. So it’s changing all the time because with the start of every new issue we have to deal with the question of how we’ll work together. It’s self-correcting; there isn’t a formal structure. Re-Magazine started as a one-person-enterprise but it evolved into a collective thing that still has one voice. Most of the texts in the magazine don’t credit an author, but you can find it back in the colophon.

What was the idea of the relaunch with Re-Magazine issue 9, concentrating this time on monographs?
It became more and more difficult to start from scratch with every issue, creatively as well as financially. It took us more than half a year to produce one issue. We are working collectively, creating one voice and trying to construct something that is specific every time, in language, design, and photography. So we conceptualized this, so to speak. That one voice becomes one person, with a face and an identity. It functions as the mouthpiece of the editors. In a way it’s almost the same as in “The Information Trashcan,” only it has a face.

I found that a surprising approach, to give a magazine a personal face. It becomes subjective, and that’s the issue’s theme – it’s about a person’s subjectivity.
It’s more a magazine format, and with that, a much more mediated position. The questions that we deal with are absorbed within a story line about a person. It tells a story, and the story is always a metaphor for something else. It is, like subjectivity, a difficult construction, as you can see in the first issue on one person “John.” When that issue first came out, I heard from a lot of people that they found it so abstract.

I wouldn’t say it was abstract. It’s obviously very reflective. Re-Magazine keeps every function of the magazine visible, something like an otherwise hidden editorial voice, which you normally only find traces of in the editorial. That is quite the opposite of abstraction.
Yes that’s true. But I mean as a magazine, functioning in between other magazines, it’s rather abstract. And especially with the “John” issue which is about a guy who wants to disappear and to become anonymous. I mean, media and especially magazines are pretty much the opposite of that, aren’t they? Most magazines work with this kind of mixed information: diversity and multiplicity instead of coherence and concentration. Re-Magazine instead is a vehicle for one story. It’s like a Trojan horse, it looks like a glossy magazine, but it isn’t. It plays with the whole idea, that it has a face on the cover, and it’s shiny, but if you go inside, it’s something completely different.

Is the monographic format also a shift towards testing the magazine concept pragmatically?
I think so. But on the other hand it’s also personal, a matter of going outside to get inspiration and resources. It was so much work to edit and publish the magazine. I didn’t go outside anymore. That has changed with the new format. For instance, I do a lot of interviewing now, meet people and talk to them, record it and use the information to build up a story. In that regard it’s almost autobiographical. Having a question already solved from the very beginning: it’s about one person, and the person is fictitious.

Would you describe yourself as a media person?
Yes and no. Normally a magazine doesn’t have one signature, and in this case it really does. I’m very much identified with the magazine, almost like an artist, because the magazine is the medium that I use and abuse for my intensions. On the other hand the magazine has a constant influence on my own private lifestyle, so I’m a media person in this way too, maybe.

This is how magazines work, as part of the image economy; they influence expectations of lifestyles in general. But your relationship to magazines seems very much reflected in the magazine itself. So being an editor might almost be an experimental way of dealing with this relationship between life and image?
It has always been the basic idea of Re-Magazine, to describe life from a personal perspective, to include trivial information within a bigger idea. To find a language that is part of things and not intellectually hovering above things. I’ve read Foucault and I also smoke Marlboro Medium; they are part of the same reality, at least my own. I’m interested in these kinds of relationships. I like to re-contextualize trivial information to the point where it becomes meaningful again. In Re-Magazine you find information that you don’t find anywhere else or at least not in any other magazine. That’s something that isn’t discussed very much in the publicity we had with Re-Magazine, although 75 percent of the time we invest goes into the text and not into the art direction or design. The thing with Re-Magazine is that you have to read the whole text to get the picture or at least get all the layers within the story. It’s very analog, very old fashioned in a way, but I like that it’s harsh and takes effort to get into.

Do you imagine Re-Magazine laying in a kiosk on a bookshelf?
I always imagine Re-Magazine among other magazines. It’s not a magazine about art, design, or photography but more about life in general. It exists in between things. Of course I see a surrounding, like Purple and other independent magazines. Around the time I started the magazine in 1997 all artistic fields were blurring and merging into one another. Like Viktor & Rolf who were at the same time experimenting with ideas and concepts which were not used in the fashion world before. I found it very interesting that a magazine could actually bring all fields together. More generally, I think that Re-Magazine is part of a kind of typical Dutch approach that you can find in architecture, design, fashion, and art of the last five to ten years: a conceptualized position of self-irony and self-questioning. You can ask, whether this Viktor & Rolf show is a fashion collection just as you can ask whether this is a magazine.

So you feel closer to Viktor & Rolf than to other magazines?
Yes. Lately Re-Magazine was part of a show about independent magazines in Maastricht, and I found out that there was not much in common. Maybe there are the same practical issues like advertising and distribution struggles but content wise there didn’t seem to be a common ground for discourse. I really would like to see a kind of independent magazine culture, like zines in the US. Half of the zines are about other zines, reflecting each other. That doesn’t exist in Europe. I wish that it were a movement, like militant antimedia- media, especially now since it’s difficult for a lot of magazines to maintain their position. But the relationships between the magazines are not like that.

Do exhibitions fit your approach as a magazine?
It’s really difficult to represent representations. I used to make exhibitions with a roll of tape, pasting pages on the wall and laying down piles of magazines on the floor. Really simple. A place in the art world is so specific. I saw fashion designers having shows in galleries and museums and then they were kicked out again, when the art world was tired of the experiment. On the other hand, for magazines there is no intellectual surrounding. For instance there is no critique, and no memory.

It seems against the logic of magazines to ask for memory. Usually they’re made to be very present.
Yes to be very present and to disappear almost in the same time, like fashion. It’s a paradox, I really like that a magazine is part of daily life. It can be read as a novel, but you can put it in the cat toilet as well. And with having an international distribution system, it pushes the magazine into weird contexts like Finland or Korea. It just pops up; you can find it.

Do you expect people to collect Re-Magazine?
Yes. I’m not a person who throws away magazines. I collect stuff, like old vintage magazines. I’m interested in representations of time. In magazines from the ’70s, for instance, you can read and feel that people talked in a different way, there was another sense of freedom. I also use and recycle a lot of ideas from magazines from the ’70s. BUTT is very retro in a way and the tabloid-like format that I used for the “Claudia” – issue of Re-Magazine comes directly from Interview magazine of the early ’70s.

This is another memory, a kind of media memory, in which a magazine is reflecting on its own prehistory, as a direct reference, but also in its implications. The newspaper format also creates a specific physical reading.
Yes that really suited the idea of the “Claudia” issue since it’s about the life of a two-meter-tall woman. You have to unfold her, in a way. But it’s also really cheap to do newsprint. And fashion photography looks really good in newsprint. You can do images that you normally wouldn’t do on glossy paper, something really simple such as having fun, dressing up, and doing a fashion shoot. So the format generates the images as well. We are going to stick to that newsprint format for now. I like the idea that it is opposed to other magazines. It looks cheap, uncomplicated, is compact; it fits the idea of a magazine about one person. If you look at the state of lifestyle magazines now, you see the same advertisers everywhere, the same photographers, the same kind of paper, the same models on the cover. Design also makes everything so general. A lot of magazines fall victim to cross-marketing and advertising pressure. They integrate contents more and more with advertising. The marketing departments of advertisers trace back how many editorial pages they get; it is almost mathematical.

Independent magazines are also partly financed through advertising, but these advertisers seem to have a different interest.
Yes, or maybe they had another interest. Two or three years ago you would see the same advertisers in all the smaller independent magazines, but they seem to have withdrawn from the idea of niche marketing. A lot of advertisers wanted to be part of that new kind of emerging independent magazine culture. It’s sad to see this thing going down. Advertisers are not willing to take risks anymore, so you end up with a system where everything in a magazine is afforded by advertisers. Armani advertises, so naturally Armani had a fantastic fashion show. Although everyone in the fashion world knows they make awful clothes. It creates a world that absorbs any oppositional voice. How can you respond to this kind of system?

Do you?
Hmm, I think so, by creating alternatives.

The last issue of Re-Magazine deals a lot with photography. What was your strategy working with photographers like Inez van Lamsweerde, Terry Richardson, and Wolfgang Tillmans?
Well, these are the photographers that are very much part of the system I just mentioned. They’re in all the magazines and in that way a bit overexposed. It was part of the concept of the “Claudia” issue to work with them to create a media-reality. But of course I also admire their work.

You seem to be in a kind of love-hate relationship with these kinds of mechanisms.
Yes, it’s a media story. We work with the same photographers, questioning the status quo by using the same means – in order to destabilize the usual appearance of photography.

Your relationship with magazines seems to be a difficult one; you really like the fashion format, but you are at the same time very aware of its critical status and the impossibility of fundamental changes. The magazine seems more an inquiry, an empirical situation.
I try to incorporate that difficulty into the magazine. I used to be a designer, now a designer/editor/publisher/art director/manager. It’s always a circumstance of how to bring these things together. I feel a bit schizophrenic; I never know exactly where I am. It’s an arbitrary way of working, almost an artist’s position, to make things that are not solved yet.