No muscles, no tattoos

The article titled ‘No muscles, no tattoos’ written by Alice Twemlow. This article was published on Autumn 2006. Alice is the co-founder and chair of a two-year graduate program in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She is also a PhD candidate in the History of Design department at the Royal College of Art, London. She has written about design for publications including Eye, Design Issues, Design & Cultures, New York Magazines and so many more. She is the author of What is Graphic Design for? (Rotovision, 2006), The Barnbook Bible (Booth Clibborn, 2007), Graphic Design Words/Worlds  (La Triennale Design Museum, 2011,), Design Icons (Berg, 2013), 60: Innovators Shaping Our Creative Future (Thames and Hudson, 2010,), The Aspen Complex, (Sternberg Press, 2012), and Popular Design & Entertainment, (Manchester University Press, 2009.).

 Butt magazine by Jop Van Bennekom

This article is about her interview with Jop Van Bennekom, the producer of Butt and style journal Fantastic Man. In her first paragraph of the article, she explains what typeface influence Jop in choosing the right font for his magazines headlines. She then explains about the Butt, which is was established in 2001, around the time Van Bennekom was beginning to attract critical attention for Re-Magazine, a series of self-referential explorations of the marginalia of existence.

The Butt magazine is all about the defined, almost rigid, format and a distinctive language right from the start. Meanwhile for RE, it is all about Q&A, direct and honest, like a verbal equivalent of the full-frontal nude. She also mentioned that Van Bennekom believes in showing things in context. Van told that, his Butt magazine is a sex magazine that provides a space for imperfection. He also told that, ‘I wish Butt had been around when I was 22 and insecure,’ says Van Bennekom. ‘Other gay magazines have cut-and-paste, retouched bodies unlike any you’ve ever seen in real life and certainly not like mine.’

Van is a graphic design student at the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design, that grow up in rural Holland. He told that he found inspiration in the experimental work of fashion design students. If Van Bennekom wanted to pursue a career in this field and stay in the Netherlands, he would have to start his own magazine. In the late 1990s he was drawn to a new Parisian fashion magazine called Purple. The way it juxtaposed fashion and art intrigued Van Bennekom and confirmed some of his own ideas about interdisciplinarity. The idea of Re- as a magazine began to take shape. He has not always designed for himself. Butt’s readers belong to a defined subset of hipster gay males – ‘Those with truckers’ caps from Brooklyn but also 55-year-old intellectuals from Paris, France.’ But being slightly outside the fashion and media fray is a surely a good thing. As he observes, ‘Here we’re never a threat to people.’ Van Bennekom’s relationship to his publications is equally complicated. His magazines are what he calls ‘real players’ in that he works with – calls in favours from – the best names in the business.