‘Still a very alive medium’: celebrating the radical history of zines
A medium that basks in the unruliness and unpredictability of the creative process, zines are gloriously chaotic and difficult to pin down. Requiring little more to produce than a copy machine, a stapler and a vision, zines played a hugely democratizing role in art during the 20th century and have managed to stay popular and relevant in spite of web-based innovations, like blogs, that might have supplanted a less compelling medium.
The Brooklyn Museum’s substantial and exciting new exhibit, Copy Machine Manifestos, offers a welcome, thorough examination of zines made by artists. With over 800 objects on display, Copy Machine Manifestos is a crucial step toward documenting the zine scene, even if, in zine terms this show is a proverbial drop in the bucket. As the exhibition co-curator and art historian Drew Sawyer put it in an interview: “Even if we wanted to be very inclusive and seemingly comprehensive, we knew it would be impossible to claim to be comprehensive in any way. It would be delusional to think anyone could be comprehensive on a history of zines.”
One thing that makes zines so abundant is the extreme openness of the culture surrounding them. As the exhibition co-curator and art historian
Branden Joseph explained, this openness tends to result in audience feedback – resulting in more zines. “Zines are usually associated with fan culture and characterized by an openness to reader feedback,” said Joseph. “That feedback can be readers writing in and being published – which is what happened in the earliest zines – or the exchange of personal zines. So, in other words, one person’s zine inviting the response of another person.”
According to Joseph, zines “carry a certain charge with them” that differentiates them from other artistic forms. The medium allows for greater immediacy, as zines do not go through an editorial process. They are prone to including things like typos, misspellings and handwritten interpolations that give them a raw, unfinished feel, and that often lends itself to the confes
sional and conspiratorial. Joseph said these qualities make zines a place where artists can feel greater freedom to refine and hone their voices.
Although the history of zines goes back to the 1930s with small-run, ephemeral, cheaply produced publications based around sci-fi fan cultures, Copy Machine Manifestos starts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with artists who were among the first to integrate zine production into their artistic work. A typically in-your-face example would be Anna Banana’s play on Life magazine, Vile, whose Valentine’s Day 1974 issue was fronted by a naked man who appears to have just ripped his heart out of his chest and is thrusting it at readers. Another offering from these early days is John Dowd and Stanley Stellar’s the Star, a broadsheet packed with Dada-esque collages that was distributed by Dowd at the 27 November 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden.
Typically based in networks of creators who used the mail system to build artistic communities, these early art zines were the work of outsiders and countercultural agents. Inspired by the European avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, and overlapping with rock music subcultures, these zines bristle with energy, a love for transgression, and a clear desire to build bridges between individuals. “Hopefully people who attend this show don’t come away thinking of zines as just aesthetic objects,” said Sawyer. “It’s also very much about the role they have played in the construction of cultural communities.”
According to Sawyer, the decision to start in the 1960s and 70s was integral to how the rest of Copy Machine Manifestos developed. “Beginning with correspondence networks of the late 60s and 70s in many ways allowed us to create sort of genealogies for the rest of the show. If we had taken a different starting point, the shape of the show would have been very different.” Those early decisions helped Sawyer and Joseph with the difficult decisions around which artists to include and which not to. “Some artists just didn’t make sense with our narrative, and hopefully they will appear in future zine shows.”
From the beginnings in correspondence networks, Copy Machine Manifestos fills out the rest of the century with deep looks into the explosion of zines that occurred around the punk movement, as well as the ways in which queer individuals and feminists used zines to have greater control over their own identities. Later sections continue into the 21st century, exploring the relevance of zines to queer creativity and examining how zines are continuing to remain relevant in the contemporary world.
According to Joseph, the show’s subsections correspond to waves of activity in the zine space, and these waves continue to this day. “What we found were these waves of intense production that would peter off and generate other waves. And that’s really what the six sections of the show are, they’re more of these waves than they are, say decades. And one of the things that happened was between 2019 and 2023, we really found ourselves surfing another wave of increasing interest by artists. Some of those artists really traveled along with us as we were working on the collection.”
One thing that makes Copy Machine Manifestos particularly interesting and valuable is that it attempts to look at zines from the perspective of art history. As one of the largest exhibitions of zines ever attempted, this show gave its curators the opportunity not just to present an exhibition but also to add missing chapters to the story of 20th-century art. “If art history looked the same after this exhibition, that would be a missed opportunity,” said Joseph. “It really tells an alternative history of pop art and conceptual art from the 70s onward. People who would be seen as marginal are really central to the story we’re telling. Artists who fall outside the practices of art history are central to our show.”
Sawyer said he hoped audiences would come away from Copy Machine Manifestos with a greater appreciation for the contribution that zines have made to the art world. “One big takeaway,” he said, “would be the central role that zines have played in contemporary art and visual material culture of the past 50 years.” Another key takeaway is that zines are very much flourishing. “We literally stopped collecting material for this show two days before the show opened,” said Joseph. He added: “The best contemp analogue of the zine is the zine. It’s still a very alive and capacious medium.”
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines is on display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York until 31 March 2024