JUXTAPOZ 17

This issue of Juxtapoz feels like a transmission from a collapsing carnival where religion, pop surrealism, underground comics and performance art are all welded together with spray paint and nervous energy. Robert Williams opens the magazine with “Like a Turd on a Bottle Rocket,” immediately setting the tone for an issue obsessed with cultural collision and beautiful bad taste. Features on Enrique Chagoya and Andres Serrano dive into identity, blasphemy and the politics of image-making, while the Aldrich Museum’s “Surrealism Goes Pop!” captures the moment lowbrow art and contemporary gallery culture began colliding head-on. Maxon Crumb’s alternate-reality illustrations and Lennie Mace’s “media graffiti” continue the magazine’s fascination with artists building entire private universes from paranoia, humour and cultural debris.

The issue grows stranger and more hypnotic as it unfolds. Bullfighting is reframed as misunderstood performance art, Anna Sea’s cathartic self-dissection blurs pain with transformation, and Mark Ryden dominates the magazine with his eerie candy-coloured dreamworlds full of giant-eyed children, meat, religion and psychological unease. Ryden’s cover painting Princess Sputnik perfectly captures the issue’s atmosphere: innocent on the surface but vibrating with hidden weirdness underneath. Mixed among record ads, underground culture fragments and savage review sections, the whole magazine reads like a beautifully corrupted scrapbook rescued from the edge of the American subconscious.