Print Paradox

The first zine I ever bought was Secret Bully #1, in 2014. It was mine for the low price of three dollars, plus shipping and handling, via Etsy. It’s an intricate and richly designed pamphlet with a rust-red cover, filled with creative nonfiction essays about nostalgia and New York. Secret Bully is the work of the writer and musician Cynthia Schemmer; I had started listening to her band Radiator Hospital in the depths of a postcollege winter depression and then, down in an internet rabbit hole, found the listing for her zine. I was intrigued and had three bucks to spare; I clicked “purchase.” I remember the day it arrived. I sat on the steps of my apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, reading it feverishly and feeling like a window had opened onto a new world—one where another East Coast woman, half a generation older than me and with nearly identical music taste, could show me how to live in a big city, make music, make friends, go through hardships, pick herself up, write songs and essays about it all, and then send them off into the world. I ordered Secret Bully #2 immediately.

That zine helped me glimpse both an emotionally rich past and a possible future. Eventually, I started collecting more zines; later, I’d go on to make my own. Their themes were earnest and charged—secrecy, alienation, sexism—pulling in collaborations from close friends and strangers-turned-internet acquaintances. I’d lay out text on borrowed Adobe software, print one nice color copy at a local print shop, and then run off a dozen more for free in the library of my graduate school; I’d advertise them on social media and charge just enough to cover supplies and shipping.

My foray into zines wasn’t unique, nor is it necessarily quintessential; the form is enormously diverse and always has been, ever since the earliest sci-fan fanzines of the 1930s. Zines can be black-and-white xeroxed collages given away for free, or highly-curated, glossy magazine–style publications, or anything in between. They can be handed out a dozen at a time to a group of friends; circulate from a table at a local zine fair; or get shipped out, mail order–style, in triple-digit quantities. Some zines run for years with regular monthly or annual editions, but many are solitary publications, one-off results of momentary inspiration. They can contain distinctive visual art or absurdist collages or impassioned personal essays or strident political proclamations; they sometimes contain all of the above within the same small folded and stapled pamphlet.

This wide range of formats and reach means it’d be difficult to trace an authoritative history of the zine or craft a definition wide enough to capture its many permutations. Thankfully, those weren’t quite the goals of the Brooklyn Museum’s Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Spanning fifty years, the show was massive, nearly overwhelming, with more than a thousand items on display. It honored both the revolutionary spirit and aesthetic potential of the form. Organized chronologically, it focused mainly on the relationship between zines, subcultures, and the avant-garde, and each room revolved loosely around a theme: the correspondence networks of the 1970s, punk publications of the late ’70s and 1980s, the queer and feminist publications that dominated zine-making from the late ’80s through the dawn of the new millennium, and the zine networks of the present. It was also interested, as its title suggests, in artists’ zines, and on the intersections between the crafty, communal world of zine-making and the more institutional art world. Among its collection were zines by established artists (Mike Kelley, David Wojnarowicz, Miranda July). Alongside xeroxed pamphlets of every conceivable shape, size, and topic—from the trenchant (Carolee Schneemann’s antiwar project The Lebanon Series [1983]) to the shocking (“WARNING,” says one selection from Robert T. Ford’s Thing [1989–93], “Some material in this section contains graphic depictions of homosexual sexual activity”) to the journalistic (Lizania Cruz’s traveling newsstand project We the News [2016–22]) to the personal (Tammy Rae Carland’s queer feminist zine I <3 Amy Carter [1992–95])—sat related work from these artists and their respective scenes: posters, films, paintings, garments.

The earliest pieces in the show were products of “mail art” networks: Dada-inspired collages and correspondence that often appropriated and satirized mainstream advertising and publishing aesthetics. (This section charmingly included Vile [1974–83], a San Francisco zine that parodied File [1972–89], a Toronto zine that parodied Life, each sporting black-and-white photo covers with their titles spelled out in white block letters centered on a red rectangle.) Many of these publications prefigured the aesthetics of punk and shared its concerns sex, violence, boundary-pushing music—and the DIY nature of zines mirrored punk’s anti-institutional bent. From the late ’70s to the ’90s, the relationship between zines and punk grew even closer; the show highlighted the subversive femininity of Lisa Baumgardner’s Bikini Girl (1978–90) and the satirical edge of gossip mag Dirt (1975–76) by Mark Morrisroe and Lynelle White, both of which included interviews with local punk musicians.

J.D.s, a zine from Toronto that ran for eight issues from 1985 to 1991, was influential in sparking the queer punk movement known as queercore, and it was documented lovingly in the exhibition, via, for instance, an enormous diagram by the artist Vaginal Davis laying out a timeline of LA punk, its growth resting on foundations laid by queer artists and people of color. (The diagram is too large, the wall text noted, to have been reproduced in full in the zine itself.) Throughout the show, I was constantly reminded of this impulse to historicize in a hand-drawn zine: the urge to record subcultural genealogies and the feeling that important legacies might be forgotten if you and your friends don’t write them down.

Zines that highlighted this sense of solidarity flourished in the ’90s, especially in queer communities and among feminism’s then-burgeoning third wave, and the museum’s display reflected this explosion in popularity. Zines documenting Black queer and drag scenes, like Davis’s Fertile La Toyah Jackson magazine (1987–92) and Ford’s Thing, sat alongside photos and videos from SPEW, a queer zine convention first held in 1991; nearby, there was a selection of riot grrl zines from feminist punk pioneer Kathleen Hanna and writer and musician Johanna Fateman. While the cover of the second Bikini Kill zine (1991) promotes “GirlPower,” other zines contain more inflammatory language to wonderful effect, like a Day-Glo colored sheet titled “INFECTED FAGGOT PERSPECTIVES,” dedicated to “Keeping the Realities of Faggots Living with Aids and HIV Disease IN YOUR FACE Until the Plague is Over!”

Passing over these rousing, deeply felt, identity-based publications, I couldn’t help but note the inherent strangeness of a museum display of zines. Though some of the publications on display were open to a particular internal page, revealing advice columns or essays or lists of bands to check out, the majority showed only their covers. I wanted so badly to read about the “Gay Lib!” promised on the cover of a 1987 issue of My Comrade, made by drag artist Linda Simpson, or to flip through the many contributions to Mimi Thi Nguyen’s legendary antiracist punk zine Evolution of a Race Riot (1997). (The curators somewhat got around this limitation by installing a reading room with a small selection of publications, including a few compilations that feature some of the zines in the show; the museum digitized others, publishing them on its website.)

The final room showcased work produced in the last fifteen years, much of it suited to professional gallery spaces and often less overtly focused on political agitation—a result, perhaps, of zine aesthetics being slowly adopted by the mainstream. As I headed toward it, a cohort of teenagers on a school field trip filled the space behind me. They crowded around the video pieces in particular, putting on headphones to watch short films about drag queens and radical skateboarders. But I saw them reading attentively, too, scanning the covers and laughing at the provocative titles, illustrated characters, and photographed faces staring back at them.

These children of the social media age, I thought, have probably had infinite access to the fruits of unfettered self-publication in their decade of literacy; they don’t need to find a cheap photocopier or a pirated version of Photoshop or a correspondence network to hear from like-minded strangers across vast distances. Still, while I watched them peer into the display boxes containing the foundational queer zine Homocore (1988–91) and the trans-centric Gendertrash (1993–95) and feminist punk responses to racism like Slant (1997) and Hey Mexican! (1996), their curiosity delighted me; it seemed like a tacit acknowledgement of the format’s lasting impact. The internet, even in its most niche corners, is still a public forum. Online, you’re never really looking at something alone; you’re encountering art or writing or provocation alongside the gaze of others, whether that’s a comments section or a “like” counter or an algorithm that wants to serve you more of the same. But if you make a zine, its circulation depends on you (and, hopefully, other people) talking about it; if you want a zine, you have to find one and ask for it. The vulnerability in this exchange leads to a different kind of conversation—one that’s more personal, both freeing and intimate. There’s something at once precious and disposable about the medium. Sure, every small xeroxed pamphlet is the result of hours of work, and reading one could change your life; it could also end its circulation invisible and forgotten, abandoned on a bookshelf or tossed into a recycling bin. Every encounter with a zine is both a wide-open possibility and really no risk at all. That this form, which fosters such an individual experience, can be a breeding ground for solidarity is paradoxical. It’s also beautiful.