This paper revisits the exported creative work of Australian editors Martin Sharp and author Richard Neville and their magazine - Oz. Established in Sydney on April Fool's Day in 1963 as a satirical magazine, its founders would become...
moreThis paper revisits the exported creative work of Australian editors Martin Sharp and author Richard Neville and their magazine - Oz. Established in Sydney on April Fool's Day in 1963 as a satirical magazine, its founders would become known, or rather infamous, for being charged on multiple occasions for obscenity violations. In 1967 a London version was created, where it garnered a new status as being the publication for enlightened hippies.
This paper explores three potent sites within the magazine that demonstrate the manner in which the editors were able to counter the status quo through the process of joke making: a modernist building, the medium of the poster, and a magic theatre. These sites are poignant moments that coincidence with a shift within architecture culture, where the built environment was beginning to be 'read' as a text. The emergence of this structuralist evaluation occurs throughout the pages of Oz, suggesting an alternative origin to post-modern approaches in architecture that arose as a consequence of the relationship between the magazine page and the creation of alternative environments to counter conservative hegemonic culture.
