Adieu Index
Index was started in 1995 by painter Peter Halley, who shot to fame in the mid-80s as a member of the Neo-Geo school (a movement so trendy that Ryuichi Sakamoto named one of his solo albums after it). The magazine was run out of Halley's studio on West 26th Street in New York, an elegant space up on the 9th floor with views out over the Chelsea art district.
I was drawn into the Index family by my friend Steve Lafreniere, the magazine's "Editor at Large". In 2000 Steve interviewed me in New York, then the magazine flew young Ryan McGinley out to Berlin to shoot the photos at the Hotel Intercontinental. It was his first international magazine assignment, but not his last. McGinley photographed me "peeing" in the bathroom of his hotel room, squeezing water-filled bulbs hidden between my legs. He's now perhaps the most famous photographer of his New York generation, photo editor at Vice (a destination for many ex-Index people; Vice editor Jesse Pearson also started at Index). My interview is online, like all Index's interviews, here. Another interviewee who stuck around, like me, to become an interviewer at Index was Ian Svenonius.
I sometimes found Halley a daunting figure, I must admit. He always seemed busy, or totally engrossed in conversation with Helmut Newton or someone. The only time I felt I got close to him was when Shizu and I showed him and his young son around Tokyo in 2001. My main memory of our Nakameguro conversation is discovering how little he cared for Jeff Koons (I quickly gave up trying to defend the great Pretender)!
But I have to say thanks to Peter now for ten years of Index—the most European of American style magazines—and, for me personally, a series of adventures in journalism (not to mention some excellent New York parties in places like Indochine and Park) which saw me writing not just about Ian Hamilton Finlay, but also DAT Politics, the Shobo Shobo team, and, together with Shizu Yuasa, Japanese figures like Dai Fujiwara and Toshio Iwai. There were other pieces too, a thing about style scouts and monoculture last year, an article about Japan in 2002, and a very nice little follow-up interview Index ran when I was in Hokkaido last winter. And I'll never forget how Peter wanted to publish my digital photos on a CD-ROM... a glimpse of what an enthusiast and an enabler he could be. Thanks also to Ella and Steve, who felt much more like friends and mentors than editors.
I'll forever associate Index with my happy first year in New York, the year they put an unknown performance art group called Fischerspooner on the cover. For me, it's the magazine of thirtysomething creatives, people like Susan Ciancolo or Mark Borthwick, the people who make America hum. And yet it's also, in my mind, a magazine of very specific places and people; Passerby, the tiny bar at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in the Meatpacking District, for instance. Index always gave free adspace to boutiquey little stores on the Lower East Side, so I associate it with that area's more idealistic days, and the people I used to see on the old Lower East Side. People trying to be artists, working with sewing machines, starting bands, people who wanted to read interviews with others like themselves, interviews not necessarily tied into product cycles, promo loops or PR spend. Index was a magazine by the creative, about the creative and for the creative, and it's entirely appropriate that creativity (in the form of Peter's painting) is also the reason it's ending.