From 1972 until 1989, the artist trio General Idea produced FILE Megazine. The first eight issues of FILE, published from 1972 – 1975, are the focus of this thesis. They stand apart from the later issues because their covers hijacked the look and iconic logo of Life magazine. The red rectangle with white block letters attracted the attention of Time Inc. and resulted in a lawsuit. Rather than fight the corporate giant, General Idea changed their logo after the autumn 1975 issue. FILE, like many artists’ magazines, is typically discussed in idealistic language that privileges the subversive or democratic intentions of the publication while neglecting its significance as a device for the promotion of community and collaboration. I argue that General Idea envisioned FILE as a utopian project intended to produce the world they sought to live in. Authors frequently employ FILE as a tool to discuss General Idea’s work, focusing on it as a mirror or archive of a larger project and emphasizing FILE’s humorous, bawdy, and irreverent aspects. In this thesis, I situate FILE in terms of its historical, art historical, and theoretical frameworks. I pay particular attention to General Idea’s early involvement in the mail art network, FILE’s relationship to 1960s and 1970s artists’ magazines and magazine art, the contemporaneous social and political climate in Canada, and General Idea’s investigation and employment of theoretical frameworks culled from Marshall McLuhan’s text The Medium is the Message and Roland Barthes’ book Mythologies. / text

As publicações de artistas são uma das principais formas de manifestação da arte do século 20: tanto por serem originárias da modernidade artística, quanto por marcarem aspectos próprios da linguagem contemporânea. Como formas operativas potencialmente acolhedoras do trabalho coletivo entre artistas e poetas, materializando um espírito de rede, analisamos algumas publicações de artistas brasileiras dos anos 1970 presentes no acervo do MAC USP. De livros de artistas a revistas literárias, as publicações coletivas são consideradas veículos de comunicação bem como da própria arte. Enquanto produtos do design gráfico, tais edições estabelecem relações entre ler e ver, palavras e imagens, propondo desafios críticos e museológicos. Após apresentar um estudo geral sobre as publicações de artistas, buscamos organizar nossa reflexão em dois grandes grupos, as relações entre Poesia e Visualidade e Poesia e Performatividade, como modos de se apropriar artisticamente dos objetos editáveis e publicáveis. No primeiro caso, ligados a uma tradição construtiva, os poetas e artistas estão interessados na construção visual de suas obras e em seus efeitos, criando uma poesia visual ou uma imagem visual poética. No segundo, aliados sobretudo ao tropicalismo e à poesia marginal, servem-se das publicações para atingir e interagir com o leitor ou o público, através do potencial imagético e performático da palavra e de imagens visuais poeticamente construídas enquanto enunciados discursivos e socialmente identificados na cultura de massa. / The artists publications are one of the main forms of art manifestation in the 20th century: both because they originate on the modernity period of art, and by bringing aspects inherent to the contemporary means of expression. We analyze some editions of Brazilian artists from the 1970s, as operative forms, potentially welcoming to collective work of artists and poets, which materialize a network impulse. They are all part of Museum of Contemporary Art at USP collection. From artistic books to literary journals, collective publications are considered means of communication as well as objects of art per se. As products of graphic design, such editions establish relations between reading and seeing, words and images, setting up some critical and museologic challenges. After introducing with a general study about the artists publications, we aim to organize our reflection in two larger groups: the relations between Poetry and Visuality and the one between Poetry and Performativity, as ways of appropriating artistically some editable and publishable materials. In the former, connected to a constructive tradition, poets and artists are interested in visual construction of their works and their effects, creating some kind of visual poetry or a visual poetic image. In the latter, aligned mostly to Tropicalism and marginal poetry, the artists use the publications to reach out and interact with a certain public or reader, through the imagetic and performatic potential of the words and poetically visual images constructed as discursive utterances that are socially identified in mass culture.