Archizines LIVE - A Review

I dropped in at the AA for Archi-zines Live, an exhibition curated by Elias Redstone of fanzines about architecture. The exhibition was, in true AA style, really well put together and the zines on display featured from around the world, NYC, Chile, Japan, China, Canada, France, Netherlands and including familiar UK ones such as lovely newspapers from Preston is My Paris and P.E.A.R., some traditional A5 zines from Mat.zine (‘Material Zine’), a really interesting set featuring research ideas from Dundee Sch of Architecture and my personal favorite from Touching Architecture Series #1 that has some lovely drawings from Hackney to Herne Hill, London. There were, however, some publications there that I felt really stretched the definition of ‘fanzine’ to its breaking point:  really well-finished, big-budget, glossy mini-magazines such as Log, Mark Magazine and Criticat. Urm, I’m not so sure these are fanzines.

Also watched a thought-provoking roundtable chat with zine-makers of America Deserta Revisited, Beyond, P.E.A.R. and Face B, chaired by Mimi Zeiger, maker of Maximum Maxim MMX zine about the role of printed matter in the digital age. For them, their fanzines play the role of “artifacts” or ‘things on paper”. They all talked about a “nostalgia for printed matter”, the obsession, as Tom Keely said, “with something you can hold..that is personal, lo-fi and scruffy”. Pedro Gadanho talked about a “slowness” of printed narratives in Beyond, that tries to “compete with the speed at which people read images these days”. These comments confirmed some of the already-existing defenses of print circulating in the design community or, I thought, a kind of anxiety about the overwhelming amount of ‘stuff’ on the Internet.

I’m not sure that digital can be so easily opposed to print in terms of immaterial and material, intangible and tangible or that such nostalgia for print is necessarily, as Matthew Butcher (of P.E.A.R.) says, ‘polemical’. Is the thirst for ‘slowness’ polemical? After all, the material aspect of the Internet can make reading a laboriously slow process - ever experienced a bad broadband connection? It also seemed ironic that the roundtable was talking about a nostalgia for printed matter whilst sitting underneath two massive digital TV screens projecting their fanzines. Elias himself acknowledged the perversity of having a “project that fetishises printed matter [Archizines] to begin life online”. The roundtable also acknowledged although their zines aspire to share ideas with a wide general audience, the distribution and production of these zines often means that they remain within specialists circles; these zines risk, as Tom warns,”preaching to the converted”.

Nevertheless, the roundtable brought up some intriguing ideas and I wished Mimi opened questions to the floor. I really wanted to ask the roundtable what decisions did they take about the material aspects of their zines: i.e. how did they decide on the paper, design, layout, pagination, colors, treatment for their various architectural subject-matter? For me, that would have been more helpful for showing why printed matter, well, matters.

The exhibition will continue to run til 14 December, before the entire collection will be transferred to the National Art Library at the V&A to become a public resource. Well worth a visit!