I still remember, and have never returned, the very first Hype magazine I read. I’d been bumming around Cinema City in Perth with a few crew one Saturday afternoon, when someone surreptitiously pushed a copy into my hands. Strangely enough, it was seeing Australian graffiti from outside of our own little corner for the first time that was the start of a life long passion for printed art media. I’d “acquired” a copy of Subway Art somewhere along the line, but this was the first real glimpse I’d seen of what was going on in the rest of Australia – in full blown colour – outside of a few locally made, (but cool) photocopied ‘zines. The glossy pages, the whole cars, my first glimpses of the lines here in Melbourne and across Oz, but, more importantly, the then unfamiliar names of writers that I still find myself following some twenty years later.
Before the advent of the Internet, magazines were a connecting point between far flung “subcultures” in Australia, and the rest of the world. These days, with blogs, facebook, websites, deviantart, online galleries and the sheer multitude of artists and work online, its hard to imagine the veritable isolation that the Australian graffiti and street art scene dwelled within back in the time before HTTP was a commonly sighted acronym. Magazines like Hype helped to build communication between the Australian street art community, – communication that we all too often take for granted these days – yet more importantly, however, magazines like Hype were inspirational.
With all the mutterings of Ipads, E-readers, Blogs and the web itself abounding with “print is dead” innudendo, it still feels a tactile pleasure to pick up a magazine full of inspiring work – something you can hold in your hands, turn a page, and gaze at the abundance of colour and style within.
There have been many magazines since Hype, which for Australian graffiti was game changing in many ways, and there will be many more to come, each morphing in different directions in order to encompass a modern take on urban content. It’s because of this love of the printed medium, and that inspiration found within these magazines, that we’d like to start putting the spotlight on the various Australian mags and books in print right now, and, one of the newest kids on the block, Dont Sleep Magazine, with its fresh take and style, is a perfect start.
Dont Sleep is a lush, 60 page tome with a healthy dose of the explorative – its subject matter draws primarily on the richness of citified environments, with a plethora of grime, and its influences of street art, tattooing and urban decay are prominent. Dont Sleeps editor, Chico, has a decent eye for photographic and contextual flow, and doesn’t seem to get caught up in monotonous strips of trains and walls.
So, all diatribe aside, read on and get a feel for the creative behind Dont Sleep and its sister ‘zine, The Ruins, then go and buy a copy of them when you’re fuckin done – because, though we all love blogs as much as we do, there just aint nothing like that waft of fresh ink on the turning of a new page …
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