MAGAZINE

I am relatively pleased with the final prints of my magazine response to this project. 

What am I pleased with?

• I believe the concept of the piece was definitely solid. It responds to my dissertation question, "how does feminist art appropriate media originally intended for male consumption to subvert the male gaze", as I have appropriated the porn magazine within my practice and altered it to subvert the gaze. 
• People who have seen it have immediately thought it's just a regular porn magazine when they initially look at it, which is what I was going for. It's more fun when people pick it up and look through before realising it's weird. 
• Most of the content works well. Use of photomanipulation, could have been horrible but ended up being more straightforward than thought. I think the creepiness factor is up when photography is mixed in as 'photography implies truth' when really people in magazines are edited a lot. 
• The paper! Luckily the digital print room had this thin glossy paper that was perfect for printing a magazine onto, because it made it all shiny and authentically tacky! Makes it pass as an actual porn mag better. 

Weaknesses:

•  Due to my poor time management I did not manage to do some things that would have made this more successful. 
• I would have liked to have edited some of the text so it said funny things! I did try this on an advert but it was really difficult to match the colour and retain the texture so the text could be covered. 
• A critique I got from a friend was that all the vibrators should have been replaced with hot dogs or bananas, I agree that would have been funny, but I just didn't think of that. 
• I feel like there's always room for improvement in terms of my crafting, I'm always learning. 
• I would have liked to have done more sets and have them evolve more fluidly into weirdness

I made the choice to not edit all of the images on each spread, as I thought it would help the disruption to only have a few. I think it makes people look closer at the regular image thinking there must be something wrong with it, and kind of realise how weird the images are without the extra editing. The people I've shown it to have so far found it uncomfortable that some of the images are not edited but are unsure whether it's a positive or negative.

"Did you remember to defrost the chicken" - In all honestly, I was struggling with a back cover and couldn't have nothing. I wanted to put something on it completely unrelated to sex. I experimented with a tampon box but in the end went with the quote. My thoughts behind it are that the demographic who look at this kind of thing are usually teenaged boys whose mum's will have told them to get the chicken out of the freezer for when they get home from work, so it serves as a friendly reminder to do that before she gets home!

I believe whether this is a well made piece of work or not, it's definitely achieving what I intended it to do.