Hear It, Feel It, Hang It

Aspen is a magazine for people who don't like to read much. It is designed by artists and comes in boxes containing movie film, records, sculpture, puzzles, games, posters, and a few other things that defy definition. The first publication devoted to the "mixed media" popularized by Marshall McLuhan, Aspen assaults all the senses, not just the visual. As the magazine proclaims, "You don't simply read Aspen, you hear it, hang it, feel it, fly it, project it, even sniff it."

Any reader (participant? player? victim?) who takes the trouble to wade through the latest issue, designed by Brian O'Doherty, should find his senses fully exhausted. There is the script of a "structural play" that diagrams the movements of the performers, who are instructed to costume themselves in "white bodystockings or leotards, with tight-fitting hoods covering the ears and featureless silver masks." There is a do-it-yourself poem in which the author provides the ingredients (adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, gerunds, capitalized words, etc.) and leaves the composition to the reader. There is a recording of percussion instruments with the sensible instructions that it be played so low "you almost don't hear it."

For those who seek refuge in conventional words, a few are supplied. They are, however, often as inscrutable as the rest of the contents. In a dissertation on the virtues of silence, Writer Susan Sontag declares: "Notoriously, the sensuous, ecstatic translinguistic apprehension of the plenum can collapse in a terrible, almost instantaneous plunge into the void of negative silence." Actually, the ads that are stuffed into the box are as entertaining as anything else. "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel," asks the Sierra Club, fighting a dam downstream from the Grand Canyon, "so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?"

Aspen is assembled by Phyllis Johnson, who once taught at a mission school on a Navajo reservation and later was intimate-apparel editor of Women's Wear Daily. She got the idea for her project while ski-bumming one winter at Aspen; her fellow vacationers, she felt, were ready to enjoy "culture along with play." So in early 1966, she produced her first issue to meet their desires. Today, some 20,000 subscribers receive Aspen at $4 per box, and Mrs. Johnson just about breaks even.

The publication date of each issue is as much of a surprise as the contents. Billed as a quarterly, Aspen comes out when Mrs. Johnson manages to get it out. "All the artists are such shadowy characters," she says, "that it takes months to track them down." To provide designs for issues she has called on the services of Andy Warhol and Quentin Fiore, co-author with Marshall McLuhan of The Medium is the Massage. She is collaborating with Buckminster Fuller on a future issue in which each article will be designed to fold into a geodesic dome or other geometric construction. Also in the works is an issue devoted to the Far East, with scrolls and screens scented with incense, and a wilderness issue, complete with a wild-food recipe kit for gourmet survivors.

While Aspen promotes his favorite cause, McLuhan himself has been all but silent for half a year. After undergoing a successful operation for a benign brain tumor last winter, he has been teaching at Fordham University but making no outside speeches or public pronouncements. Instead, he has been working on two books to be published next fall: Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, which he co-authored with Harley Parker, and War & Peace in the Global Village.

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