A Seattle figurehead of the so-called Grunge movement of the 1990s once said, "Music driven by money deserves to fail." While we appreciate the sentiment, the founders of Pike Magazine recognize the right of local artists to eat; we also believe that art should not exist solely as commodity. Indeed, we have seen, read, heard, felt, and been penetrated by art created by those who do not identify themselves as "artists" but as "workers", or often simply as "humans". 

    Pike Magazine serves as a forum for those who create art daily not as a means to the end of landing crookedly on the cover of OK Magazine, but because art swims in their marrow. They must create it. They must share it or fold.

    Concurrently and not coincidentally, the founders of Pike Magazine are not artists. Pike is not, in the traditional sense, an artistic space. Instead it is an area where cubicle-shackled, dress code-abiding, check-to-check-existing citizens can present their art to the public – art that is formed late at night, in the hours after dinner is consumed, the kids are put to bed, and before the alarm clock howls again. Pike is a range that seeks to amplify and justify this brief but necessary tract of your day.

    Pike, too, is a journalistic space. It is a space that reports on this art only to the degree that it allows the art to tell the story it wishes. Pike is a space that could not have existed seventy years, or even a generation ago, when commodifying one’s art and allowing others to absorb it were not mutually exclusive. Fortunately, our age grants us the ability to give voice and distance to our crafts - casual though they may be - and not be forced live off oranges, tap water, and nickel coffee as Arturo Bandini did.

    But with this grand opportunity comes obligation. We investigate the spaces we expose as we utilize, even exploit, them. 

    The founders of Pike Magazine are not wo/men of letters. We are working-class Twin Cities natives who do our best to avoid working in great excess of forty hours weekly and want little more than to live, at least sporadically, artful lives. We strive to ensure the content of Pike Magazine is timely and of high quality, but more important than the appearance of this content is its very existence. The fact that (we think, very good) art is being created locally by cubicle inhabitants is an important story. Pike seeks to expose art by Minnesotans and others who seek to expose themselves: those who, for financial or other reasons, cannot remove themselves from a vocation-based existence, yet spend their hours away from the office creating and recreating. Pike Magazine seeks to be a democratic vehicle for local, national, and international art. That is, if it would be so kind as to have us.

    Throughout Ireland's colonial history but most famously during the Wexford Rebellion of 1798, the country's rebels used hooked pikes as weapons against their occupiers in acts of revolution. Pike Magazine does not aim or claim to be revolutionary. The imagery of the pike is meant to evoke the aforementioned act of penetration — a plunging into one's global and local communities. Pike Magazine seeks simply to illuminate something. (As opposed to obscuring nothing.)           

    Pike Magazine will encourage this something via our literature, visual art, commentary, music, and the uncensored thoughts of Minnesota's decision-makers and cultural leaders. Simply, Pike Magazine aims to be a survey of life both as it is and as it could be.

 

Brooks Everette Doherty

Pike Magazine Managing Editor