Tar Magazine – a review

Tar is one of the most thoughtful, well-designed new magazines I’ve seen in a while. And yet something doesn’t feel right.

The magazine is the creation of Evanly Schindler, one of the founders of Black Book, and Diesel’s former director of advertising and communications, Maurizio Marchiori, as part of a bigger agency creating books, films, websites and brand communication.

The magazine states its intentions clearly from the beginning, in Schindler’s opening letter. “Tar magazine is about art and aesthetics with a social awareness… As a chronicle of the collective conscience of global culture, tar mag is about the process as much as the result, the ride more than the destination. And the ride is about living a meaningful life through an artful existence.”

The rallying call, repeated twice in bold caps in the opening letter, is “LET THE WORK SPEAK!”

So what does it say?

The first thing it says is that this is an ambitious, thoughtful, creative and well-designed magazine.

On the cover, the distinctive, ghostly photo plays a supporting role to the white splurging masthead and then the handwritten cover line.

The masthead itself is reproduced in a delightfully 3D varnish, with all of the ridges of the white paint represented beautifully.

Inside, the magazine opens with the usual long line of ads (Barney’s gets the first pages, and they also devoted window space on Madison Avenue to the mag), and then, before even the contents page, a surprise: a series of hyper-glossy pages, containing photos that look like ads but carry no brand names.

This is, it turns out, an installation piece within the magazine by David Sherry, called “Advertisements for myself”. It’s the first of a series of pieces that play on the magazine-ness of Tar, and demonstrate a bold and intelligent awareness about the nature of their creation, ads and all.

The design team, led by Neville Wakefield and Evanly Schindler, have created a confident and clear structure (Features / Communications / Projects), and a neat delineation of editorial and advertisements through a border that contains a splash of tar overlaid on top of the vertical folios. From editor’s letter onwards, it’s clear and consistent, the epitome of good repetitive design.

And then at one glorious moment, for the Del Toro / Che Guevara article, it becomes physical without warning, the “tar” glued onto the page and gritty to the touch (perhaps this is the way they delineate the cover story?). Again without warning, it drops back into 2-dimensionality at the next piece. Lovely.

It’s one thing to have a big budget, but quite another to spend it wisely. What we have here is a number of different papers (I count five including the cover and subscriber card), and they’re used intelligently. The start of each section has a semi-translucent opening with a splash of that tar across it; translucent also makes an unexpected appearance during a discussion about television news, and most successfully, in a self-promotional feature where the photos are printed on the special paper, the captions underneath underlaying each image.

If only every society party page were done this way.

Scattered throughout are fake business cards for artists, some of whose work is featured elsewhere in the magazine. It’s another art installation, recurring throughout the magazine right up to the inside back page, and one that makes you smile. Next up: business cards for other kinds of well-known people?

In the vast majority of articles, pre-existing art is used to illustrate features, rather than commissioning photos / illustration. It’s a bold idea, but for me doesn’t work often enough. I’m accustomed to images drawing me into the article, and somehow enhancing it – this just feels like two parallel reflections on a theme, and they don’t always coincide enough.

Far stronger are the opening spreads to many of the articles, bold and graphic in their own way.

Also great is an unexpected double gatefold Andreas Gursky image used as the opening for a piece on overpopulation, for me the best designed feature in the magazine.

There’s also a reprint of material that they admire and has dropped out of print, in this issue being an essay from Joan Didion’s book The White Album, designed in the dimensions of a book, with white printed on white to form a shiny background for the “book” on the page.

In the back section, monochrome Ryan McGinly photoshoot of adolescents is counterpointed with a bright series of photos called (with a slightly colonial tone) “Fashion Anthropology”, of African woolen ritual costumes.

And the back page is used as a mini gallery again, where Nate Lowman has created his own, childlike take on a Warhol classic.

So, some clever ideas, a clear and coherent structure, intelligence without being too clever, and some good-looking graphic design and physical playfulness that could only work in the format of a magazine. It’s well worth picking up for these reasons alone, and I’m very interested in seeing what other work will emerge from the agency.

Some of the features make great reading too, including Matthew Barney and David Cronenberg discussing opera and film design, the story of Labeisha the Diva, and the entertainingly silly Third Dates with World Leaders.

Some of the articles, however, feel more than a little out of place. On the face of it, this isn’t Tar’s fault per se. Fashion + art + social conscience have always sat uneasily together. Long before Benetton tried to Unite the Colors, fashion and art have tried and mostly failed to get a conscience by addressing the most basic human needs, while completely ignoring them in the process.

What we have in Tar is a story about a Lebanese Arab-focused news service, an anti-establishment piece about the fall of journalism by John Pilger, a short admiring discussion with CNN’s Christine Amanpour and a squabble about Israel/Palestine and the use of women as sexual torturers in Abu Graib by Naomi Wolf and Coco Fusco. On their own, they feel a little unfocussed, a scatter-gun approach to global issues via big names. Rather than a conscience, the magazine has guilt, and it doesn’t know what to do with it. So far, so New York, you might say. In the context of the whole magazine, however, these articles are somewhat more troubling.

Schindler states at the beginning of the magazine that Tar is “a chronicle of the collective conscience of global culture”, with collective conscience meaning “moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society”.

But this is not a magazine that acts as a uniting force – quite the opposite. It retails at $20. The first pages you see when you open it are ads for Barney’s, Prada, Armani. It contains expensive contemporary art for its own sake, glorious as some of it is. Though I haven’t seen Schindler talk anywhere about the intended readership, Barney’s creative director has described the magazine as the perfect fit for them to advertise in, as “we have tons of art world glitterati shopping at Barney’s.”

The magazine is aimed squarely, and accurately, towards the worlds of high fashion and art. Like Black Book before it, it feels like an essential accessory for the designer coffee tables of the New York partygoing set, and when world issues are brought up, it is done so in a context in which these people can feel safe. For all of its social pretensions, this is an elite fashion / art magazine, like so many others.

Which would be fine, if its content had remained firmly within that realm. I don’t have a problem per se with a magazine being elitist (well, not until the revolution comes), but where things jar is when the magazine claims simultaneously to be on the barricades and in the galleries. I suppose the key point is this: if many of the social conversations Tar includes in its pages were taken to their logical conclusions, then the magazine wouldn’t exist.

Though I’m not fan of everything it does, Monocle at least tries to deal with the world’s problems by focusing on social change through innovation and politics, which fit neatly with its designer aesthetics. Tar, however, seems to want change to come from the streets. I’m sure Team Tar do want their readers to think about more serious issues with a social conscience – but in this context, the issues are in danger of appearing as little more than cause celebres, bleeding hearts as accessories. The way it stands, many of the causes they’re leaning towards simply are not compatible with the world Tar inhabits.

Despite being such a clear, thought out and intelligent magazine, and one of the most gloriously magazine-y magazines around, this inherent contradiction at its heart makes Tar‘s mission feel highly problematic. It wants to be both expensive art and social conscience, which is all well and good on the face of things, but hosting a banquet in the name of world hunger feels somehow more offensive than just serving the food for the sake of it.