Print Matters: Zines [overdue…]
[I wrote this a while back for an exhibition catalogue - some of my thoughts about zines. Meant to edit it and put it up here but just never got around to it. Anyway, better late than never. Finally, an edited version here]
I think that zine is a testament that print still matters, not as a fetishized form, but as a wonderful medium between people and the stuff they put in print. Zinesters make them because they are passionate about the content. No subject matter is too niche. Whether they are zines about feminism, punk, design, music, fashion or football, free and playful self-expression is the only rule. There is no such thing as a design crime. Cheaply made, self-published and circulated in small numbers, many zines defy the conventions of mainstream magazines. As Teal Triggs pointed out, early 70s punk zines embraced typos, misprints, messy collages and clashing fonts because they reflect the nature of punk music: immediate, incoherent and chaotic.
Zines matter not only because they are evidence of the creative ingenuity of their makers, but also because they lend, as Rob Peart of Zineswap once said, “a sense of permanence” that zinesters of this precarious Internet Age so crave. Every zine, as Stephen Duncombe explained, “is a community institution in itself, as each draws links between itself and others…zines are not only the voice of an individual publisher, but a conduit for others’ expression as well”. Certainly beyond having something ‘to hold in your hand’, as zine producers often say, each zine is a solid connection with their audiences. After painstaking work making a zine by hand, ultimately producers want to be read; the distribution, sharing and swapping of zines represents just such an initiative. Undoubtedly online social networking plays an important part of this process, but the desire for creating ‘virtual’ communities existed long before the invention of the Internet. The permanence achieved via zine-making and swapping – self-publication - overcomes not just the lack of tangibility, but also the lack of social involvement and participation.
So the zine format is not simply a reactionary response to the digital; in fact, self-initiated projects are thriving because of rather than despite web technologies. Theorizations of why print matters – and in particular of its “form vs content” aspect – need to pay closer attention, both to the agency of exchange, as performed by the “zine – swap” in the shaping and changing the hallowed status of the printed text and the intelligibility of print “forms”. The temporary and ever-changing zine-ic text offers a permanence that is not just about having a tactile and physical form; it is also about the relationships between texts, authors and readers - multiple actors of complex communities, i.e. zine scenes that thwart simple dichotomies of print vs internet, physical vs. virtual.
