Exponent launches the Rivet, an arts and culture magazine | Rivet | purdueexponent.org

The first several visitors walk through the newly opened gallery housing the Degas Collection in the Purdue Memorial Union on Sept. 17.

It was November of 1979, and Purdue sophomore Max T. was having some trouble — the women of Purdue, "girls" as he called them, just wouldn't date him.

"They say I'm odd," he wrote to the Bar Rag, a seasonal magazine published at the time by Purdue's journalism students. Max was pleading for help to a columnist named Dr. Bird, who claimed he could give sage advice to the worriers and melancholics of campus.

"Why can't I get dates?" Max wrote in words that dripped with desperation. "Doc, save me! Save me!"

He listed a few of the things he's done to try to remedy the problem: He smiled every time he met someone, never drank or smoked, saved his money and, of course, he got his conversational topics from another popular campus magazine — the Rivet.

Dr. Bird's column, and in extension Max's worries, were clearly satirical. If the fact that Max claimed to have been a sophomore for 45 years at that point doesn't give it away, the fact that he took small talk instruction from the Rivet certainly does.

Originally started in 1947 as the Limp Rivet (until a literal FBI investigation into the sexual connotations of that name forced the publication to remove "limp"), the Rivet lasted for about 30 years as Purdue's premier student-run humor magazine.

Headed by a staff of campus rejects and deviants, as they called themselves, it spent the three decades of its existence using dry satire and cutting sarcasm to lampoon everything around it — and nobody was safe. Purdue administration, the Panhellenic Council, local businesses, the student government and even a few student clubs all regularly faced shots across the bow from the Rivet's broadsides. The Purdue Exponent, too, was a victim of its snarky attacks.

The Rivet also had a knack for resisting social norms. Not only did it make fun of some of Purdue's most beloved institutions and people, it also ignored campus censorship attempts, slinging curse words in its articles and publishing photos of naked people on its pages.

Artists’ Own on Main Street in Lafayette showcases a large variety of art from local artists including textile works as seen here.

But from what Purdue Libraries' archives show us, it appears the Rivet had ceased to exist by the end of the '70s. An Exponent article from 1977 refers to the Rivet in the past tense. And archives of the magazine itself don't appear to be accessible, save for a few volumes of the Limp Rivet stashed in Purdue's storage centers.

So why, then, do four pages inserted into the Nov. 7 edition of the Exponent bear the Rivet's name? Why am I, the editor-in-chief of the Exponent, writing a column about a magazine that seems to have long faded from collective campus memory?

This semester, a few of us editors at the Exponent noticed there was a void on campus. Save for the College of Liberal Arts' literary journal, The Bell Tower, sources to learn about the cultural happenings around campus and Greater Lafayette are few and far between.

The Exponent can write a few articles here and there about a new art gallery on the south side, a new band picking up steam in the garages of Purdue students' homes or a new short film being produced at the film school — and we have. But on a campus with an arts scene as vibrant (though admittedly buried) as Purdue's, it's a crime to not have a dedicated publication for the beautiful, quirky, amazing things people in our area are creating every day.

And so we at the Exponent happily present the Rivet, new and improved, embedded into the Exponent's newspaper pages twice a month, bursting at the seams with articles, photography, short stories, artwork, poems and more, created by and featuring a scene at Purdue that is too often overlooked.

Art lines the walls of The Spot Tavern in Lafayette. The paintings, by artist Luke Gumaelius, play a prominent role in the vibrant decor featured throughout.

In the Rivet, we will focus on the narrative and the long-form, writing in-depth features about arts and culture at Purdue and in the surrounding community with an emphasis on storytelling. The Rivet will be spearheaded by the Exponent's staff, but will exist as its own publication, printing under a different name with different principles. And in terms of what we'll cover, everything under the sun is up for grabs.

But wait, you may be asking, if the Rivet was originally a satire magazine that was so risque it needed the feds to investigate, why is the Exponent bringing it back as an arts and culture magazine?

Here's an answer: To me, and to the staff at the Exponent, it's hard to imagine an arts scene that isn't somewhat radical. "Art is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the uncomfortable" is a popular motif that circles around sometimes, and it's a philosophy I think has defined the Rivet since its birth in the 1940's.

From the beginning, its staff was bristling against authority, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable and making a whole lot of people angry — and isn't that what good art is supposed to do? So what better name to paste across the front of our new arts and culture magazine than the Rivet, perhaps Purdue's foremost historical example of resisting the machine of monotony?

Right now, this new and improved Rivet is an experiment. Over the coming months, we'll try out new ideas and play with journalistic conventions. It won't be perfect, it may not even be good at first, but the Exponent aims to make the Rivet a staple of Purdue's art scene, a one stop shop for everything weird.

I hope our readers can join us as we start this new project.

When the Purdue Theater Department began production for Mary Shelley Presents: Frankenstein, the cast had no script other than the source material. Shelley's words and the cast and crew's interpretation brought the show to life.