Publisher: Raquel Caballero and Emily Hunt, Sydney NSW.

Format: Five softcover magazines, glossy wrappers, unpaginated, 27.5 x 21.4cm to 29.1 x 21cm.

Full run. Numero Uno through to Fünf [1 to 5].

Founded in Sydney in 2005 by artists Raquel Caballero (El Salvador/Australia, b.1984, credited as Raquel Welch) and Emily Hunt (Australia/Berlin, b.1981), DUKE was a maximalist, anti-fashion magazine that ran for five issues until 2009, capturing a distinctly Sydney sense of irony, op-shop aesthetic, and celebrity-trash satire at a moment in the city’s independent art and publishing scene. Produced in a print run of just 2000 copies per issue, it is a niche reflection of mid-2000s Sydney visual culture: handmade, irreverent, and produced from within the artist community it depicted rather than about it.

Each issue mixed satire, fashion and original art through mad-hat and informal layouts. Sections include:

  • Vogue & Bogue: a recurring double-spread skewering taste and class. Vogue (white hair, morphine, vagrant chic) versus Bogue (happy families, thongs in public, lung cancer).
  • Grannies on the street: informal style profiles of Sydney’s best-dressed elderly women.
  • Interviews with figures including John Waters, Harmony Korine, Jenny Kee, Richard Walsh, John Safran, and the creators of Cheap Date magazine.
  • Satirical advertising for invented products such as Saliva Spit cigarettes, Gold Urine Rum, and a mind-reading machine.
  • Fashion spreads styled from local op-shops and emerging Australian indie labels of the era.
  • Artist interviews and contributions from Sarah Goffman, Cybelle Cox, Leigh Rigozzi, and Agatha Gothe-Snape – many of whom have since entered the permanent collections of major Australian institutions such as the NGA, MCA, and Powerhouse Museum.

DUKE was Caballero and Hunt’s first collaborative work, and the magazine carries early traces of both artists’ subsequent practices: Hunt’s esoterically informed drawing and ceramic work, and Caballero’s approach to joyfully hand-make everything, often using unconventional materials as an aversion to modern consumerism. Both artists have since held solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Provenance: Archive of the editors.

Complete set of all five issues. Some pages with offset.