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Little, British…
When Martin Bax founded his quarterly magazine, Ambit, in 1959, Britain was sleepwalking into the global village. Almost 50 years later, with Bax still at the helm, Ambit has become something of an institution. Recent issue no. 188 contains the usual mix of short fiction and poetry by contributors both new (Cyrus Shahrad) and familiar (Alan Brownjohn) with a colour portfolio of pictures by Dominik Klimowski. Nothing unusual about this. Except that Ambit’s insistence on giving images and literature equal weight (as opposed to making images illustrate texts) used to set artists and designers against writers.
If the magazine owes its longevity to any one thing it is the energy of Bax, a paediatrician turned novelist whose skill at riding out financial storms is surpassed only by his amazing instinct for attracting, nurturing – and keeping – talented people.
Charm of the ‘undesigned’
Ambit’s art director is the illustrator Mike Foreman, whose eye for new talent helped establish the magazine as a test-bed for the best British artists, illustrators and photographers. Soon after he joined the magazine, for issue no. 11, Foreman set the bar at maximum height by publishing graphic work by Peter Blake and David Hockney. Both artists had studied at the Royal College of Art, where Foreman himself had been a student and later a tutor, and which was to become synonymous with Swinging London after Ken Russell’s 1962 television documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, which glamorised the lives of four of its students – including Blake. And, in the 1970s, Ambit was among the first publications to recognise the merit of a then unknown artist called Helen Chadwick.
Bax and Foreman aimed to produce a magazine in which pictures and words would complement each other, but somehow Ambit got stuck with the reputation of being a literary quarterly with illustrations. So one objective of its 2000 redesign, by John Morgan studio, was to reassert the visual content. Luckily, Morgan was no stranger to the magazine, having previously worked at Derek Birdsall’s studio, Omnific; Birdsall had redesigned the title in the mid 1970s.
As Bax tells it, that first redesign came about because, hearing Birdsall speak of using Ambit extensively in his teaching, he insisted that the designer return the favour. In the event Birdsall came up with a template that endured many changes in taste and fashion. Templates are a good way for designers to have an influence ‘at distance’ (though many, like Birdsall, opt to design the covers) and they are popular with the publishers of small magazines because they save money, allowing the editors to run in copy and pictures themselves.
Morgan rejigged his mentor’s template to give the editorial team greater control. He has preserved some of the innovations that Birdsall introduced back in issue 65 (separate fonts for poetry and prose, the wrap-around cover, size and perfect binding; the masthead in Eygptian Condensed Bold) and introduced some of his own (changing some of the typefaces and moving the contents to the back cover). Morgan’s greatest inspiration was, however, Ambit itself: or at least the original typical low-budget mag with a basic paste-up format designed by Alan Kitching in 1959.
At the rear of Ambit no. 183 there is an intriguing four-page ‘advert’ that comprises two pages of found type and two pages of black and white photographs. This is Morgan’s light-hearted, personal homage to ‘the old Ambit’. Morgan believes that the issues of the 1960s and early 70s were among the best – not simply because they possess (as he puts it) the ‘charm of the undesigned’, but because they are the products of a very special convergence of culture, politics and dynamic personalities.
At a time when the literary establishment appeared steeped in the past, small magazines such as Ambit and Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds were havens of experimentation. In addition, underground titles, such as Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag, mixed literature, art and activism. What these publications may have lacked in funds and sophistication, they more than compensated for in creative risk-taking. (Hand-made, hand-stapled and hand-distributed, My Own Mag was first in Britain to champion William S. Burroughs and his radical cut-up collage technique.) While Ambit could never be described as ‘underground’, it was often a thorn in the side of the establishment (once provoking the Arts Council to withdraw its grant after announcing a literary prize for the best writing made under the influence of drugs) and provided a forum for alternative views.
Crashing through boundaries
In 1965 Bax persuaded the novelist J. G. Ballard to join Ambit as prose editor, and it was Ballard who about two years later introduced his friend, the protean artist / designer Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005, see Eye no. 21 vol. 6).
Ballard was among a handful of British authors (another was B. S. Johnson, see Eye no. 36 vol. 9) that wanted literature to be as formally innovative as visual art and to address themes about the emerging media society. Because of Ambit’s policy of pushing at the boundaries separating text and image, the novelist was free to produce several remarkable and rare works of visual fiction that might never otherwise have existed. One of these was Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy (Ambit no. 31). It is a collage of text and press pictures (depicting James Dean, Jack Ruby and Brigitte Bardot). The layout has the urgency of a newswire and its language is borrowed from forensic science. While these pages were not consistent with Ambit’s design, this was not a deterrent to further experimentation.
On five other occasions Ballard bought the back page to publish mock advertisements (the inspiration for Morgan’s recent ‘culture jamming’). One of these pseudo-commercials is dominated by an abstract ‘worm’s eye’ shot of a woman’s hands and face, with text that reads: ‘Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are written mythologies of memory and desire.’ Writer / musician Michel Delville (author of J. G. Ballard and The American Prose Poem) has argued that this page was a dry run for Ballard’s Crash (1973, see Eye no. 52 vol. 13), its text a summary of the central ideas underlying the novel. |
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