The Brooklyn Rail

Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, a presentation of zines made by North American artists over the past five decades, is an ambitious undertaking. Curated by Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer, the exhibition is necessarily a sampling rather than a survey in light of the sheer volume of zines produced in that period. Nonetheless, its sprawling display of over eight hundred works, organized roughly chronologically under subheads like “The Punk Explosion: 1975–1990” and “Queer & Feminist Undergrounds: 1987–2000,” meaningfully charts cultural currents in zine production while underscoring the regularity with which artists—particularly those who hold identities that are marginalized or misrepresented by mass media—have historically turned to the zine as a form and framework.

The exhibition opens with a section devoted to zines that grew out of the mail art scene in the 1970s. The archetypal zine—a self-published, low-circulation magazine with fannish, subcultural, and/or anarchic content—has many progenitors; two of them, the correspondence-based fanzine and the Dada magazine, seem to dovetail in the output of the seventies Bay Area Dadaists. A loose group of correspondence and performance artists opposed to respectability and prone to détournement, they produced cheap, offset-printed “dadazines” containing mail art, letters, manifestos, and fake ads. Among the examples on view are Anna Banana’s Vile (1974–79), which visually mimicked the Toronto mail art “megazine” File (1972–89) (also on display), which was in turn imitating Life. On one cover, Banana poses next to the torso of mail artist Bill Gaglione, who has “Dada” shaved into his chest hair; projected above the zines is Dada Shave (1975), a video recording of the depilatory performance.

Most of the early zines appear under glass in vitrines, some of which are wall-mounted to approximate bookshelves. This display choice—presumably a necessity due to the zines’ delicacy—awkwardly confines intimate, tactile, and mobile materials to untouchable, institutionalized stasis. The exsanguinating effect is thankfully countered by the enlivening inclusion of several paste-ups and mock-ups, as well as related videos, photographs, sculptures, paintings, and clothing, which both contextualize zine production within these artists’ broader practices and emphasize that zines exist in an expanded field, extending beyond the bounds of the page.

Publications associated with punk, Riot Grrrl, and queercore movements highlight the close relationship between zines and music. Released in 1981, following duct-taped issues whose titles were inscribed with nail polish, the fifth issue of Barbara Ess’s mixed-media zine Just Another Asshole (1978–87) is a vinyl LP covered with the signatures of artist and musician contributors (among them, Jenny Holzer and Dara Birnbaum). The downtown New York photographer and No Wave musician’s scratched pinhole photograph Girls on Curb (1983) is hung nearby. Video also grew increasingly intertwined with zine production in the late 1980s with the rise of affordable camcorders. Genderqueer performance artist Vaginal Davis used the photocopier at her day job at UCLA to produce Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine (1987–91), a compilation of hot gossip, glamor advice, and reviews of performances; she would go on to make two VHS-tape volumes of the magazine. Miranda July’s “videozine” Joanie 4 Jackie (fka Big Miss Moviola) (1995–2004) treats video as collective, correspondence-based, and collaged. The filmmaker, then living in Portland, invited women and girls to mail her videos, which she compiled into “chainletter tapes” with accompanying booklets of letters from the participants. In the three-minute video segment Dear Mom (1994), excerpted from July’s Velvet Chainletter (1995), photographer Tammy Rae Carland—whose own zine is displayed nearby—nervously practices telling her mother she’s gay.

Queerness is a throughline in the show; the creation, consumption, and circulation of zines is a means by which queer-identified people have found one another and enunciated their various counterpublics across the decades. Established by K8 Hardy, Every Ocean Hughes, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi, LTTR (2002–6) was the eponymous publication of a queer feminist artist collective in New York. LTTR—which stood for “Lesbians to the Rescue,” among other names—exploded the zine as a form. Each issue, which might resemble a calendar, an LP, or a notepad, was accompanied by handmade artist multiples. The group also held workshops and performances featuring contributors and community members, which Copy Machine Manifestos highlights with a slideshow of documentation.

Throughout the exhibition, collaborations and participation by friends in one another’s projects chart a thick web of interpersonal relationships—relationships that zine-making has also served to facilitate. Yet Copy Machine Manifestos makes sure to include those operating outside of these (frequently urban and coastal) zine scenes, too. Zines by Beverly Buchanan, a North Carolina-born artist known for her small-scale shack sculptures, are a revelation. The undated Hope This Helps You Survive Your Gallery Visit is a photocopied booklet of advice for navigating art galleries. Text beneath a drawing of a light switch informs readers: “THIS IS A NEW LIGHT SWITCH. Don’t ask how much is it?” Buchanan also self-published Survivors (c. 2000) and Houses (2001), photocopied, spiral-bound booklets compiling photographs of the Southern vernacular architecture that inspired her assemblages.

Released by BlackMass Publishing, which was established by Yusuf Hassan in 2018 to amplify art of the Black diaspora, Kwamé Sorrell’s two-part zine Kreyòl Homes/Southern Homes (2020) features photographs and blueprints of homes in the US South; it pays clear homage to Buchanan’s project. Such intergenerational nods underscore that contemporary zine-making is invested in its own history, including those alternative histories that risk being marginalized within an already-countercultural form. Copy Machine Manifestos has laid important, thoughtful groundwork for art historical considerations of zines to come. Alluded to by the inclusion of Maggie Lee’s Maggie TV (2017), a single-channel video, played in a decorated monitor, that collages home videos and cell-phone videos with early web graphics, zines that live on the internet and social media feel like the elephants in the room. But maybe that’s a matter for the next show.