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In a time where many lament that everything has already been said, references have become ineluctable. In contemporary media, references can feel more like shortcuts to understanding, a means of placing viewers on a metaphorical highway to speed them along to a piece’s natural conclusion. Why construct an argument when a familiar image can make it on your behalf?
Mass-market franchises have become self-referential to the point of near incomprehensibility (I didn’t mention a name, but Marvel popped in your head, didn't it?). Generative AI exists with the sole purpose of Frankensteining pre-existing information. Modern ad campaigns reference the past to signal a cool “in the know”-ness, gesturing at cultural currency without having the underlying scaffolding of a point of view. If originality increasingly consists of rearranging existing material, what happens when cannibalization itself becomes the medium?
Enter Permanent Food, the now-defunct “cannibal magazine” that ran from 1996 to 2007. Created by Maurizio Cattelan and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, before later welcoming Paola Manfrin, it was composed almost entirely of pages torn from other magazines. Fashion editorials sat beside sports photography, celebrity gossip collided with fine art, advertisements became abstract compositions. Every issue hid the phrase, “A second generation magazine with a free copyright” somewhere within its pages, which acted as a quasi-manifesto. What began “almost for fun,” as its creators later described it, became one of the defining artistic statements of its era.
They bought every glossy magazine they could find, tore out the pages that felt “strongest, most ambiguous, most irresistible,” and reassembled them without credits or explanations. “Looking back,” Cattelan observed, “it foreshadowed how images now circulate—looted, re-stitched, source-less. We just did it by hand, starving for it.”
The publication is perhaps best known for its iconic collaboration with Vogue Italia in 2003—a 300-page issue bound shut with pink thread, requiring readers to literally cut their way inside. The source material provided the perfect excavation site for Permanent Food—the end result being a comprehensive, subversive cultural snapshot that interrogated the inherent value of mass media and stripped away Vogue’s seemingly inaccessible glamour. With a near constant barrage of images to contend with, Permanent Food forces the viewer to pause and consider how they are digested and regurgitated by the dominant culture. How do we actually take these images in? And within what contexts?
Though Permanent Food is a cultural relic, it is fortunately survived by Maurizio Cattelan’s newest project, Toiletpaper. We thank you for taking the time to read this week’s newsletter. We sincerely hope we’ve inspired you to do some anthropological archeology of your very own.