A small selection of the Hymag archive
Credit: Matt Benson
Scent creates the most acute kind of nostalgia and it is heavy in this former cannon factory in the south east London, close to the river. Inside I find Hymag, the world’s biggest collection of magazines according to the Guinness World Records, with over 150,000 magazines.
Hymag is open to visitors for a fee: to students, academics, magazine fanatics and brands, who use it, among other things, to research their own histories. (A representative of the House of Dior, for instance, is a regular visitor.) Hymag is in the process of digitalisation, to reach a wider audience and preserve the material which will, without intervention, eventually degrade.
International Times (hereafter
Yoko Ono Water Show for one week, from May 28 through June 1.
1 The next issue of
IT, however, while still listing
Water Show as continuing through June 1, lists a new exhibition,
John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Four Thoughts, opening at Arts Lab on June 2 and continuing through June 9. Although this latter exhibition marks, as I propose, Ono and Lennon s first truly collaborative exhibition, little mention of it appears in the voluminous documentation of all things Beatles or in the literature on Ono, for that matter. Its scant representation in the literature no doubt arises from the dearth of documentation of the exhibition itself, which is somewhat surprising given the amount of attention Lennon generally received from the press as a member of The Beatles, the world s most famous pop group at the time, not to mention Ono s growing reputation as an avant-garde artist. Ono caused quite a sensation with her performances of