By the time they were graduating from CalArts in 1999, Robby Herbst and his classmates were speculating about what would come after postmodernism... was it post-postmodernism? The idea that postmodernism was just a temporary stage to new modernisms felt exciting because it meant the past never really subsides, despite being constantly historicized. So, for his thesis show that May, he carved a large foam sculpture in which the years 1968 and 1999 were '69ing. Herbst, co-founder of the Journal and Aesthetics and Protest and initiator of the Llano Del Rio Collective, looks back at the collective approach to art and publishing that developed among him and his peers in the late '90s and '00s.

In my years as a student at a top-tier LA art school, now more than a decade ago, we only spent a single class period openly discussing the practicalities, logistics, and pressures of what a “real” career as a contemporary artist actually looked like. I remember my classmates clamoring for honest advice in an academic environment that seemed designed to hide its internal mechanics behind an Oz-like shroud, pointing us instead to abstract, decoy concerns like semiotics and psychoanalysis. As if Freud or de Saussure could save you when you couldn’t pay your student loans back.