Bomb Magazine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BOMB is an arts and culture quarterly in which under-represented, emerging and established artists speak openly about the creative process. Established in 1981 as a non-profit organization by its co-Founder and Editor in Chief, Betsy Sussler, BOMB promotes a more thorough understanding and appreciation of contemporary arts and cultural dialogue.
This is accomplished through publication of BOMB’s in depth interviews between peers as well as artists’ original essays, fiction and poetry.
BOMB’s interviews offer direct, unfiltered access to conversations between artists, writers, musicians, directors and architects. BOMB editorial crosses boundaries of generation, race, ethnicity and degree of commercial success to focus on and make accessible to the public what is important: the work itself. BOMB promotes the importance of contemporary culture and political awareness in the aesthetic arena.
BOMB’s mission is to create living, breathing primary documents. In every conversation, both participants develop, through several drafts, the interview transcript into written text. This allows for complex thoughts, clarification, and discoveries to evolve throughout the editorial process. By pairing practitioners and by treating their conversation as a text in development, BOMB has not only influenced the history of cultural ideas, but has reinvented the interview as a dialectical form.
[edit] BOMB’s Archive
BOMB has published over 700 of these historical documents. In support of the magazine, Arthur C. Danto commented: It will always be of inestimable historical value to have provided these intimate glimpses into the personal centers of the creative process. But the interviews will have that value just because they are not merely documents for future reference. The interviews refer to the culture in its fluid and formative state, and in this way contribute to its direction. In and through them the culture encounters itself . . . There are plenty of venues for interpretation, but the task that BOMB has preempted on behalf of the culture is to help it find its bearing through understanding those who are helping it change.
Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library is now the permanent home for the BOMB Archives where artists, students, scholars, and researchers will utilize its holdings to their fullest capacity.
A sampling of the interviews published in BOMB includes: Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler, Kerry James Marshall and Luc Tuymans, Kiki Smith by Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray by Jessica Hagedorn, Samuel Mockbee by Judy Hudson, Valeska Soares by Vik Muniz, Glenn Seator by AnthonyVidler, Lorna Simpson by Coco Fusco and Pat Steir by Anne Waldman in art and architecture; Harry Matthews by Lynne Tillman, James Merrill by Thomas Bolt, Madison Smartt Bell by Jack Stephens, Laurie Sheck by Susan Wheeler, Alvaro Mutis by Francisco Goldman, Jeffrey Eugenides by Jonathan Safran Foer, Francine Prose by Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Ondaatje by Willem Dafoe, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante by Oscar Hijuelos in literature; and Tony Kushner by Craig Lucas, Won Kar-wai by Hand Ong; Steve Buscemi by Quentin Tarrantino, Michael Frayne by Marcy Kahan, Noah Baumbach by Jonathan Lethem, and Richard Foreman by Eric Bogosian in film and theater.
