PIST PROTTA

Pist Protta is a danish visual art periodical that is published twice a year. It is nearly always made and designed by artists, and it is always edited by the same three artists: Åse Eg Jørgensen, Jesper Fabricius and Jesper Rasmussen. Pist Protta has been published since 1981, and with that it is one of the oldest living visual art periodicals in Denmark.

Every single issue is different from the others as regards the design and form, because with every issue there is often experiments with size, layout. paper quality, printing method, graphic effects, punch outs, fouldouts etc. in an attempt to create every number of the periodical with an original expression - or even as a work of art on its own.

The content varies from very mixed issues with a lot of different material taken from visual art, litterature, cinema, music (and very often with inserts of original prints) to more thematic issues with a more homogeneous composition. Among the theme numbers there have been such publications about experimental cinema, experimental musical scores, concrete poetry, anamorphoses, hands, the white colour, Berlin, London, New York, interior installations, typography, text and landscape painting.

Pist Protta receives funding from The Danish Ministry of Culture and has four times been selected for Books of the Year by the danish Association for Book Design. Issues of Pist Protta has seceral times been exhibited on different museums and libraries in Denmark and other countries, including The Danish Museum of Decorative Art and The Royal Library of Copenhagen.

Each issue of Pist Protta normally costs 40-60 Dkr (5-8 Euro) and it is possible to subscribe:

Everything in this publication is related to the theme, not only the content, but also the design: The paper has a lopsided cut, the text is set up with a layout slightly distorted, and all the pictures have a lopsided or a curved trimming. Texts: Jesper Rasmussen with a preface, Umberto Eco about distorted mirrors, Peter Nansen Scherfig about his figure Un Porteur d'Ombre, excerpts from the David Sylvester interview with Francis Bacon and last but not least: Mikkel Bogh with Anamorphoses, reason and deformity in the 17th century painting. In addition a very comprehensive cataloque with deformed pictures of Winther, Kertész Holbein, Balke, Karawahn, Bacon an many more...




PP 22
Themenumber: The periodical as a museum

The so-called museum number is designed as an art museum with many works of art on the walls: On the cover the outside of the building is seen with a cut out hole in the entrance door, the first opening is the foyer with a key map (table of contents) of all the rooms and collections of the museum, and all the following openings are different halls full of various kinds of work of art. The rooms are made by photo collage and all the doors between the rooms are cut out, so that it is possible from every room (every opening) to see through doors (holes in the paper) into the preceding and the following rooms. The art collections are curated by the editors themselves: There are modernistic sculpture, interior installations with architecture, large church bells or brick walls, etnographical collections, secret xylographs by Max Ernst, and many more.

This issue begins with a section containing examples of pictures in which the white colour is the key factor, together with four texts: Reflections on the white colour by Jesper Rasmussen, about whiteness as Monet has it by Erik Steffensen, excerpts about the whiteness of the whale by Herman Melville, and finally Jakob Jakobsen and Søren Andreasen with a text about an overexposed film that end up with pure, white light. Then a second section with graphic installations made special for this issue by six artists: Christian Yde Frostholm with a latterally reversed poem, that has to be read through the white paper it is printed on, Kaj Nyborg with a series of photographs on frosted paper, on which the spectral colours plays a certain role, Jasper Sebatian Stürup with white drawings and cut outs on white paper, Milena Bonifacini with patterns and wall papers that has to be seen through holes in the white paper, Søren Jensen with an assemble sculpture on white cardboard, and finally Axel Lieber with six various sheets that catches the white colour in the common.

This issue consists exclusively of the covers of Pist Protta from number 34 up to and including number 45. The covers are executed with different qualities of cardboard, with various printing methods, and with a certain variation in size. A number of artists, among others Hanne Nielsen, Birgit Johnsen, Jonathan Monk, Bodil Nielsen, Anne Marie Ploug and the editors, have designed the covers and the collection therefore act as kind of art portfolio. On the inner sides of the covers and on various flaps there are various fictive tables of the missing content, and one can make certain what is not to be seen: Subjects on darkness, holes, doublings, children's drawings etc., and there is a special Vanitas Denmark issue with ranking lists from the art scene besides a lot of mixed issues with all kind of posibble and unpossible content.

Pist Protta 48 is a large and radically designed number, that is about text, text in works of art, works of art in text, statements, communication and layout. Four artists (Åsa Sonjasdotter, Kaspar Bonnén, Pablo Llambias and Trine Rytter Andersen), a graphical designer (Michael Jensen) and the three editors, each have made a textual contribution for the periodical. Much have been said about the typographical excesses and changing appearances of Pist Protta during the years, but it has never looked this way before: A radical typographical layout, hardly no pictures, a unique cover. Look for yourself!

In connection with the release of PP 48 and the approaching 20-year anniversary in 2001, we have made a Pist Protta 2001 compendium with a retrospective going through all the published issues of Pist Protta since the first issue in 1981. This strictly factual and accurate review with it's statistical surveys and it's many usable diagrams and curves about the periodical's position on the danish art scene, is the indispensable reference book for all scrupulous art historians and all other who wants to form a general view of the great chaos of the many issues of the periodical, and who also wants to understand the coherence between all these efforts.