Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"

[Various Artists]
Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"
New York City, USA: Eye Publications, 1986
[unpaginated], 27.9 × 22.9 × 1.9 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 200

Paul Hasegawa Overacker is a writer, director and producer best known for Gallery Beat and his 2008 film Guest of Cindy Sherman.

Gallery Beat was a gonzo video tour of the New York art scene, which ran from 1993 to 2001 on public access television, and was revived a few years later on the web as gallerybeat.net. The site is now too defunct, and has moved over to Youtube, with 133 subscribers. The show featured Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Andres Serrano, Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, Vanessa Beecroft, Sean Landers, Kevin Landers, Fred Tomaselli, Fred Wilson and many others.

Billed as "Art Coverage That Sucks Less", the show's irreverent take (shouting "those girls are hot" at the Guerrilla Girls, for example) quickly made it some high-profile enemies. Julian Schnabel called it “a masturbatory exercise in stupidity.”

One of the artists featured on Gallery Beat was Cindy Sherman, who Paul H-O (as he is often called) met when she arrived at an opening with Steve Martin. Six months later they began a relationship which lasted six years. He began his film about her while they were together and finished it many years later. Sherman issued a statement saying that she regretted her early cooperation. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like a film about the humiliation of having a more famous partner, and (in the spirit of revenge porn) seems designed primarily to humiliate Sherman retrospectively.

Years prior, in 1985, Paul H-O edited an issue of Eye Magazine. Possibly because of the generic name, this is the only issue I've been able to find any information about. Titled "Cobalt Myth Mechanics", the 14th issue featured featured contributions from Robert Atkins, Perry Bard, Jo Babcock, Roger Boyce, Lee Roy Champagne, Vincent Desiderio, Nancy Evans, Tom Finkelpearl, Karen Finley, Jeff Goodman, David Hammons, C K Kuebel, Dona Ann McAdams, Tom Sarrantonio, Lori Seid, Janice Yudell and John Zax.

Many of the works were handmade and unique. The work is in the collection of the MoMA and several other museums, and now sells for upwards of a thousand dollars. David Hammons' contribution is sometimes removed from the volume and sold individually, at up to three times that amount.

"Cobalt Myth Mechanics" was advertised as an edition of 200, but reportedly fewer than 150 were actually produced.

Individual entries will follow in the next few posts.