Mike Kelley,Tony Arefin, Gert Jonkers, Jop van Bennekom | RE:CIRCULATION No. 008 | Complicit But Uncredited
"As a designer you're never credited but always complicit," Tony Arefin told the critic Anne Burdick in Eye magazine in 1996, "in adding value to works of art, in forming market value and history." He was describing his own job — the invitations, catalogues and announcement cards through which other people's exhibitions travelled. He died in 2000, four years later, at which point his own career became exactly the kind of material he was talking about: uncredited groundwork, quietly forming the history of something else.
Three objects here make an argument about how design behaves when nobody is treating it as the point.
BUTT Magazine, Nos. 20, 23–29, Amsterdam, 2007–2011. Eight front covers.
The first is pink.
Eight issues of BUTT Magazine — No. 20 through No. 29, with a small gap, spanning 2007 to 2011 — sit in pocket format, offset-printed almost entirely in black and white on stock the colour of a healing bruise. Gert Jonkers edited; Jop van Bennekom designed. The two of them had founded the title in Amsterdam in 2001, and by this run — its final one before a 2022 revival — the format had settled into something close to a method: photograph a porn performer, a bartender, an unknown man from Rotterdam and a pop star with the same unhurried intimacy, print them all the same size, on the same paper, in the same interview-plus-portrait template, and let the reader do the work of deciding who mattered.
Nothing about the layout tells you which subject is famous. That's the design decision, and it's not a small one. No. 24 carries a rarely reproduced portfolio of Keith Haring's 1978 penis drawings, made years before the vocabulary that would become his public iconography — presented at the same pocket scale as an interview with a stranger two pages later. No. 26 gives Wolfgang Tillmans sixteen colour pages for Der Unterwäschekatalog. The magazine doesn't scale its own attention to its subjects' fame. It refuses to.
BUTT Magazine, back covers: six American Apparel campaigns, one Calvin Klein Jeans, one Dior Homme.
The back covers run a second, unofficial argument in parallel. Six of the eight issues carry American Apparel campaigns — the company's relationship to the title went beyond simple advertising; when the magazine's sale was legally challenged in Canada in 2009, American Apparel defended it publicly, by name. Calvin Klein Jeans and Dior Homme each take a single issue. And in No. 25, the American Apparel page becomes something else entirely: a memorial advertisement for a BUTT contributor, Quetzalcóatl "Quetzal" Rangel Sánchez, 1985–2008 — commercial real estate handed over, without irony, to grief. No. 29 closes the run with "Queer Employee Style at American Apparel," nine staff portraits arranged as a typology, advertising photographed in the exact idiom it usually sells.
Read the run front to back and two histories are running at once: a small magazine assembling a culture through adjacency, and a specific slice of 2007–2011 fashion capital queuing on the reverse of every issue to be seen next to it. The design — deadpan, uniform, refusing hierarchy — is what makes both histories legible at all.
The second object insists on being handled as an object, not a text.
Arefin & Arefin: The Graphic Design of Tony Arefin was published by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2012 — the first comprehensive survey of a designer whose own line, cited in every account of his career since, was that he'd spent the early 1990s "single-handedly processing the print needs of the entire British art scene." Catalogues for the ICA, Chisenhale, Serpentine and Ikon; the printed matter for Damien Hirst's Freeze in 1988 and Modern Medicine in 1990. Born Abed Mohammed Arefin in Karachi, raised partly in Dhaka before his family settled in London in 1974, he styled his own practice "Arefin & Arefin" — half joke corporate identity in the Saatchi & Saatchi mould, half genuine split between two names for one person. He left for New York in 1993, worked at I.D., Bomb and Blind Spot, moved into advertising, and died at forty.
Arefin & Arefin, Ikon Gallery, 2012. Interior spread, printed ephemera on yellow ground.
The catalogue's designer, James Langdon, makes a specific choice that turns out to be the whole argument: Arefin's catalogues, cards and institutional ephemera are photographed as physical objects sitting on a saturated yellow ground, edges visible, scale legible — not reproduced flat, the way graphic design usually gets reproduced, as if it were simply information. Printed matter becomes specimen. It's Arefin's own trick, the one Emily King's accompanying essay describes him practising in reverse — he "would rather look at art in colour transparencies on a light box than see the real thing in galleries," a designer converting three-dimensional work into flat, saturated, sellable images. Twenty years later, someone does the same thing to his own output.
The cover carries the sharpest version of the argument. The object reproduced there is Arefin's own 1993 publication for Douglas Gordon, made for Gordon's exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow, reproducing a text-work Gordon had first shown the year before. An original copy of that same 1993 publication has separately passed through The New Rare. Which means the object exists at four removes and counting: Gordon's 1992 text-work, translated into Arefin's 1993 publication, photographed for a 2012 catalogue cover documenting Arefin's career, and — independently, on its own terms, unconnected to any of that documentation — still circulating today as an object in its own right. The support becomes document. The document becomes image. The image becomes another publication. And the original keeps moving regardless of which version of its own history anyone happens to be holding.
The third object has a label stuck to it that nobody asked for.
Mike Kelley's Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile was published by New City Editions with Artists Space in 1986 — "Designed by Mike Kelley with Patti Podesta," the credit line reads, which is already a small departure from Arefin's uncredited invisibility: here the artist and the designer share a byline, because for Kelley there wasn't a clean seam between the two jobs. The book translates a fifty-five-minute performance poem Kelley gave at Artists Space in December 1985 — accompanied by incidental music from Sonic Youth — into prose paired with black-and-white photographs, running from cave paintings to the Kensington Runestone, an archaeological object whose contested authenticity makes it an unusually apt Kelley subject. Evidence, fiction and historical authority, held in the same unstable relationship the title's three reference points already promise.
Mike Kelley, Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, 1986. Front wrapper with gold Strand Rare Book Room label.
This particular copy carries a gold sticker on the front wrapper: FROM THE STRAND / RARE BOOK ROOM / EST. 1927. A book about the instability of evidence and authenticity has, at some point in its own circulation, been classified, labelled, and sold back into the market as exactly the kind of object its own contents treat with suspicion. Nobody designed that label to sit on this particular cover. It arrived later, from an entirely different system — a bookshop's own apparatus of value — and it's still there. The mark doesn't argue with the book. It just confirms that the book kept moving.
Arefin's sentence is the one to hold onto across all three: never credited, always complicit, adding value and forming history from a position that isn't supposed to be part of the story at all.
A magazine's back cover does that. A yellow photography ground does that. A bookseller's gold foil sticker does that. None of them are the artwork. All three are running arguments of their own, printed in the margins of something else, and in each case the margin has turned out to carry information the main text doesn't.
The object remains unchanged. Its placement does not.