A couple of years ago I got a curious little thing in my letterbox: a dozen or so photocopied pages of drawings, poems, jokes, photographs, and recipes assembled by a group of teenage girls. It was handmade, stapled together, completely original, and entirely charming. It was a zine.
“Zines aren’t new, they’ve been around for decades,” explains Yolande Norris, administrator at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, holding in collaboration with the ACT Writers Centre their annual Zine Fair on July 3. “[But] there are still a lot of people who don’t know what zines are,”
To the uninitiated, zines are handmade, self published ‘magazines’ (hence the name), published in extremely small editions. Their heyday was the nineties, when artists and writers moved into self-publication as a means of protest against hegemonic culture.
“They were deeply rooted in DIY and punk culture, and were usually free,” Norris explains, adding also that zine culture has “an uneasy relationship” with money. The culture was anti-establishment and anti-economics, rooted in a desire to make and possess something untrammelled by commercial culture – something totally individual.
“A lot of people give them status as art objects. Often they’re unique, there’s no two the same,” says Norris, adding that they can vary from the DIY photocopy-style with a heavy emphasis on content, to elaborately bound and numbered artists books. “It’s the same as people buying records still […] wanting the object to have and to hold,”
“That often happens when people have a technological backlash.”
But, adds Norris, the zine is a different beast to the traditional artist’s book.
“Mnay artist’s books are these pristine, beautifully made objects, but […] sometimes you can’t even touch them.
“[Zines] are a more free and easy and relaxed way of approaching art.”
The zine occupies an odd, liminal position – both aesthetic object and locus for alternative ideas and fringe culture, the zine is a strange idea in capitalist Western culture. They’re often left on street corners or in cafes for readers to simply pick up, and that element of anonymity, coupled with the intimacy and immediacy of the handmade, makes the zine something quite special, like a secret shared between friends.
Since the advent of the internet, many of the original zines (such as Boing Boing, for instance) moved into the blogosphere, because what they aimed towards was not an object but an idea – a place for alternative opinions to find a voice. Sometimes, like blogs, they are about particular subjects – politics, tattoos, rollerskating. Sometimes they operate as a confessional. And, as Norris points out, the zine still has a power, both tactile and emotional, that can’t be equalled by a blog.
“If you set up a blog, it’s sometimes hard for people to find it. [Zines] are in people’s faces, and they pick them up. [People] truly believe something if it’s in print,”
Australia has a particularly strong zine culture, typified by the existence of specialist zine stores such as Bird in the Hand. Huge annual zine fairs such as those held at This Is Not Art and at the MCA attract hundreds of stallholders and thousands of punters, testament to the zine’s continuing attraction.
“We noticed last year and the year previously that there was a particular Saturday where there were heaps of people around asking where the Zine Fair was. [We thought], Zine Fair? That sounds cool.”
The ACT Writers Centre has been holding their Zine Fair for a few years now, and this year have joined forces with CCAS Gorman House to provide a bigger space for distributors and collectors to gather.
The ACT Writers Centre have been doing “headhunting” of stallholders, but have also tried to involve artists who are interested in making zines and artists books. And, rather than just being a place for people to sell zines, the fair will have a “market atmosphere with zines at the root of it,” says Norris. Stallholders sell zines, but also offer other handmade and craft objects. Sometimes the zines aren’t ‘sold’ as such, but are free – exemplifying the zine’s status as an object which can’t be squared with the normative expectations of capitalist exchange.
The Zine Fair is the latest in CCAS’s public or performance program, in which CCAS “made a bit of extra room so we can have an empty gallery […] to do non-exhibition type things,” Norris explains. The performance program had its first run in 2009 with a collaboration with tableaux artist Min Mae’s ‘I Die’ and performances from Mr Fibby. This year’s collaboration on the Zine Fair is a natural pairing, given the zine’s status as both aesthetic object and portal for different voices.
It’s a form of expression that is “challenging or ephemeral”. But it’s also exciting, unique, and very often beautiful.
“That whole aesthetic resonates really well with CCAS because we show and display art that does exist outside the commercial sphere,” says Norris. “It makes sense that we support it.”
The Annual ACT Writers Centre Zine Fair will be held at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House, on Saturday July 3 between 11am and 4pm. Entry is free.
