Introduction: Paper weight: periodicals and printed things in the contemporary art field

This essay introduces the collection by considering the material turn in both periodical studies and the contemporary art field. It aims to write a history of the present which situates this scholarship and reflects on its emergence at this historical juncture – in so doing, identifying and diagnosing a materialist periodical impulse driving academic and artistic attention towards the infrastructural print histories of the late twentieth century. It suggests that these new research directions are motivated by an impulse to understand the politicised media conditions that facilitated the queer, feminist and Black countercultural communities which so forcefully reshaped British culture, and reflects upon the readerly formats and encounters that might galvanise radical changes today. The chapter goes on to describe how the contributions to the volume allow us perhaps to understand something new about the relation of political art practice to changing media forms.