They published a raunchy book inspired by the Guardian’s Owen Jones; broadcast interviews with obscure punk legends; and make calendars to navigate the world of underground art. Now they’re going global
Stuart McKenzie turns towards a fan on a makeshift stage so his long brunette hair blows in the wind. The artist is dressed in a power suit with thick rimmed glasses, flamboyantly smoking a cigarette as he performs the confessional poetry he’s been writing since the 80s. “Stuart is this fantastic London staple who is just coming out of the woodwork now,” says Emily Pope, the director of Montez Press, who hosted the fundraiser where McKenzie performed to support their queer, feminist press and radio.
McKenzie is a typical Montez Press collaborator: an experimental artist who doesn’t fit neatly into either art, literary or music spaces (although he did recently support the indie band Bar Italia). He’s later in his career than some of the emerging artists they collaborate with but he has Montez Press’s “desire to push boundaries and ask questions,” as Anna Clark, one of the organisation’s founding members, puts it.
Established in 2012 by a group of exchange students from Goldsmiths College of Art at Hamburg School of Art, Montez Press was formed to counter a publishing landscape dominated, they say, by heteronormative journalists and academics. Instead, they wanted to celebrate more experimental forms of writing, led by artists who championed feminist and queer perspectives. Their first book was Chubz by Huw Lemmey, a nightmarish, homoerotic satire about the protagonist, who dates a leftwing journalist, inspired by Owen Jones, whom he meets on Grindr in the summer of 2011 as Nigel Farage rises to power as prime minister. It’s a story about class struggle, populism, and our dependence on technology – tied together with a lot of sex.
