We re-created radical covers from High Performance, the L.A. magazine made for and by artists

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

In 1978, after eating LSD-laced garlic butter toast and while crouched under a piano during a performance, artists Linda Frye Burnham and Richard Newton decided to start a magazine.Called High Performance, it would become one of a handful of magazines in Los Angeles at the time that documented ephemeral art and functioned as an alternative space for performance artists.According to Newton, Los Angeles was considered an outsider outpost in an art world dominated by New York City.

“Performance art was a blip on the cultural radar,” says Newton.High Performance directly countered that and helped put Los Angeles, quite literally, on the map.The first issue features a black-and-white photograph by Susan Mogul of artist Suzanne Lacy, dressed in a helmet and yellow jumpsuit during her 1976 performance, “Cinderella in a Dragster,” which involved her driving a dragster from L.A.

to San Diego, stopping at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where she rapidly delivered a “metaphorical tale about speed, travel, art-making, and fairy tale-telling,” according to the front pages of the inaugural issue.Elsewhere in the issue is an interview with Newton, listings for future events, and reviews and photos of performances in New York, Europe and, of course, Los Angeles.

It was printed at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in downtown Los Angeles, just a few months after the now-legendary performance art space had opened in January of ’78.From 1983 to 1995, High Performance was published by Astro Artz, renamed 18th Street Arts Center in 1990, and a bastion of performance art to this day.“We used to have this joke, and I can’t remember who said it first but it was, ‘the undocumented life is not worth living,’ and we were laughing at ourselves because we realized we had to document what we were doing,” says Anne Gauldin, one of the three of five remaining and active members of the ...