Cabinet (magazine)

"Cabinet" is a quarterly, Brooklyn, NY-based, non-profit art & culture periodical launched in 2000 by Sina Najafi and Brian Conley.

Issue structure

"Cabinet" issues are divided into three sections.

ection 1: Columns

Each issue begins with four of Cabinet's recurring columns. Some columns have (or have had) recurring writers. Some columns appear more frequently than others:
* "The Clean Room" is David Serlin's column on science and technology. (First appearance: issue 1.)
* "Colors", which appears in every issue, presents a writer or artist's response to a specific color assigned by the editors. (First appearance: issue 1.)
* "Ingestion", a column originated by Allen S. Weiss, explores food within a framework informed by aesthetics, history, and philosophy. (First appearance: issue 1.)
* "Leftovers" examines the cultural significance of detritus. (First appearance: issue 1.)
* "Thing" invites writers in various fields to take a shot at identifying a single found object not recognizable to the "Cabinet" editors. (First appearance: issue 12.)
* "Inventory" is an occasional column that features and sometimes examines a list, catalog, or register. (First appearance: issue 13.)
* "Black Pyramid" is Peter Lamborn Wilson's column on the poetics of esoterica. (First appearance: issue 18.)
* "Object Lesson", a column by Celeste Olalquiaga, "reads culture against the grain to identify striking illustrations of historical process or principle." (First appearance: issue 20.)
* "A Minor History of," a column by Joshua Foer, examines an overlooked cultural phenomenon using a timeline. (First appearance: issue 25.)

ection 2: Main

The Main section features miscellaneous essays, interviews, and artist projects.

ection 3: Theme

The third, themed section features essays, interviews, and artist projects related to a specific theme. A theme-based CD is included in issues 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13.

Issues and Themes

* Issue 1: Invented Languages
* Issue 2: Mapping Conversations
* Issue 3: Weather
* Issue 4: Animals
* Issue 5: Evil
* Issue 6: Horticulture
* Issue 7: Failure
* Issue 8: Pharmacopia
* Issue 9: Childhood
* Issue 10: Property
* Issue 11: Flight
* Issue 12: The Enemy
* Issue 13: Futures
* Issue 14: Doubles
* Issue 15: The Average
* Issue 16: The Sea
* Issue 17: Laughter
* Issue 18: Fictional States
* Issue 19: Chance
* Issue 20: Ruins
* Issue 21: Electricity
* Issue 22: Insecurity
* Issue 23: Fruits
* Issue 24: Shadows
* Issue 25: Insects
* Issue 26: Magic
* Issue 27: Mountains
* Issue 28: Bones
* Issue 29: Sloth
* Issue 30: Underground

Magazine and Book

Though "Cabinet" is commonly called "Cabinet magazine" and is distributed to newsstands as a magazine (with ISSN), individual "Cabinet" issues are also distributed as books (with ISBN). Each issue is printed in two editions: one with a magazine barcode on the front cover and the other with a book barcode on the back cover. [cite web
title=Cabinet Magazine Online — Distributors
url=http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/distribution.php
accessdate=2007-07-04]

Other Projects

In addition to publishing the quarterly, "Cabinet" also publishes books, curates art-related exhibitions, and stages conferences and live events.

Books

* "Ilf & Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers", by Evgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf, edited by Erika Wolf, translated by Anne O. Fisher (Cabinet Books and Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) ISBN 1568986009
* "Letters From Mayhem", by Roger Andersson, with poems by Albert Mobilio (Cabinet Books, 2004) ISBN 1932698256
* "Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates" (Cabinet Books, The Queens Museum of Art, White Columns), ISBN 1932698264
* "The Paper Sculpture Book" (Cabinet Books, Independent Curators International, and SculptureCenter, 2003) ISBN 0916365697
* "Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles & Scrawls from the Oval Office", by Cabinet Magazine and David Greenberg (Basic Books, 2006) ISBN 0-46503266-4

Exhibitions

* Cabinet's 2005 exhibition "Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estates"," at The Queens Museum of Art and at the White Columns gallery was chosen by The New York Times's Michael Kimmelman as one of the ten best shows of the year.
* In 2005, Cabinet began curating a cabinet of curiosities inside an 8,000-pound safe at Proteus Gowanus, an art gallery in Gowanus, Brooklyn. [cite web
title=Proteus Gowanus ("Reading Room" page)
url=http://www.proteusgowanus.com/
accessdate=2007-07-04]
* In 2003, Cabinet co-produced "The Paper Sculpture Show," a traveling exhibition of 29 paper sculptures, each one devised by a different artist. The sculptures themselves are collected as tear-out, do-it-yourself projects in "The Paper Sculpture Book".

Conferences and Live Events

* In 2006, Cabinet presented "Iron Artist", a live artist-versus-artist competition modeled after Iron Chef, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, NY.

Flattering Accolades

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written, "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."

Notes & References

External links

* [http://www.cabinetmagazine.org Cabinet website]