You’re looking at a revolution 550 years in the making.
Ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450, moving written thought out of monasteries and into the mainstream, self- and small press publishing has allowed ordinary people with extraordinary ideas to spread their words to an often, unsuspecting public. The results have been extraordinary. Subverting the means of production to their own ends, defying commercial conventions, and seizing control of the technology, artists, revolutionaries, writers, musicians, and visionaries of all kinds have taken publication into their own hands, producing and distributing their own work when nobody else would.
DIY Revolution takes a look back at an extraordinary time when changes in technology and culture converged to create an explosion in do-it-yourself media and publishing art.
The outcome provides a lens for what is happening in publishing today and where it might lead in the future. Focusing on zines of the ‘80s and ‘90s and other “networked arts” of the same period, such as “mail art”, this exhibit offers a view of what happens when power is given to people to create and distribute their art to a mass audience. Some of the work you’ll see is disturbing, some beautiful, some of it will challenge you, and some will make you ask “what the hell were they thinking?” But that’s what it’s supposed to do. Zine publishing is an anybody-can-play enterprise.
What are zines? Mainly, they are non-commercial, independent publications produced in small runs using inexpensive, readily available technologies such as small presses, photocopiers, and mimeograph machines. They’re not produced to make money but as labors of love, obsession, artistic expression, adoration, or simply an overwhelming need to distribute ideas. Because they’re non-commercial artifacts by definition, zines are normally distributed via non-traditional channels, finding their way into independent record and book stores, sold through the mail, distributed at events, or simply passed hand-to-hand by fans.
Networked Media: Zines, mail art, and cassette culture.
The history of zines proceeds in a convoluted line that encompasses just about every cultural and artistic revolution over the past half-millennium. Martin Luther’s self-published 95 Theses jump started the Reformation in Europe during the 16th century. Benjamin Franklin’s broadsheets of the 18th century American Revolution helped win the propaganda war against the British. Russian samizdat (literally “self publishers”) underground newspapers and books kept the voices of resistance alive in Soviet Russia. Dadaist diatribes of the post-WWI era, French Situationist art happenings, and Beat poetry chapbooks of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance in the 1950s helped promote and solidify the avant garde in the United States and Europe. Underground comics and publications of the ‘60s anti-war movement in the United States publicized the cause and changed public opinion during a very turbulent time. They offered an alternative to the mainstream news media that, for a long time, ignored the groundswell of popular opposition to the Vietnam War. Punk flyers distributed on lampposts and city walls in late ‘70s and early ‘80s in the UK and US, and zines documenting underground shows and events, were integral to the creation of a new musical and cultural form. On through the late 1990s self-published and printed materials were a vital element of the literary, musical, cultural, and artistic avant garde.
But zine culture has always been about more than publication of “sidestream” ideas. Because they were distributed through the mail or passed along from one reader to the next, zine publishing and zine culture have been about building networks of individuals. In the days before the Web, these networks were often invisible to the mainstream. Instead, they were tenuously connected webs of like-minded people joined through existing power structures such as the mail, the telephone, and the fax machine. The do-it-yourself aesthetic of taking control of media for one’s own artistic and expressionistic purposes existed outside of the mainstream.
In the early ‘60s, American artist Ray Johnson was looking for a way to break out of the traditional arts power structures of galleries and critics. He turned to the mail as a way of distributing art to other artists. Johnson founded the New York Correspondence School in 1962 as a way of promoting “mail art”, and saw it grow into a vital and comprehensive network of people who sent and received art in the mail. The phenomenon of mail art grew rapidly and gained some acceptance in the art world. The Whitney allowed Johnson and Marcia Tucker to put on a mail art show in 1970, and groups such as Fluxus and the French New Realists grew out of the movement. The mail art movement, with its emphasis on networks, jamming the postal system, and subverting power structures in the name of art shares commonalities with zine culture, overlapping in many places.
These forms of early-networked media arose out of a need for people to find ways to work around commercial media, a media that was often at odds with the expression of outsider ideas. And while zines and mail art concentrated on printed material, other arts utilizing other forms found ways of stepping outside traditional media distribution networks. Musicians turned to cassettes and 45 records to self publish and distribute their music to those within their scenes, while labels such as Dischord in Washington D.C., and Bomp! Records in California, were published on shoestring budgets by punks for other punks. In many cases mail art merged with cassette culture when musicians with small audiences handcrafted packaging to ship their recordings to their fans.
Self-published media have always been influenced by the technology available to their creators, from broadsheets typeset by hand and printed on hand-cranked presses to mimeographed chapbooks to stamps carved out of rubber erasers. By 1985, technology revolutionized publishing much they way it did in the 16th century; this time with computers.
In 1984, Apple Computer released the Macintosh. Billed as “the computer for the rest of us,” it sported a revolutionary graphical user interface designed for non-technical users. A year later, Aldus (now Adobe) introduced the first desktop publishing program called PageMaker, allowing novices to lay out publications in a way that only professional typesetters could the year before. At the same time, Hewlett Packard released the first desktop laser printer, and soon after, Apple launched the LaserWriter, the first desktop laser printer designed for the Macintosh. The result was an explosion in new publications. For the first time, average people could create commercial quality print publications on their own desktops. Workplace copiers and copy shops supplied the technology for short-run production.
At the same time that print publishing was becoming easier, publishing on computer networks was starting to come into its own. Since Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss launched the first computer bulletin board system (BBS) in Chicago in 1978, computer users with modems had been able to dial into an ever-growing network of BBSes and commercial services (such as CompuServe) to share files, comments, and artwork. Advances like FidoNet (created by Tom Jennings in 1984) and alternative information systems such as the WELL (short for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985) allowed more and more people to communicate through Cyberspace, bringing far-flung networks of artists and writers as close together as a phone call.
This period of time -- the space between the development of desktop publishing and the advent of the first nationwide computer networks -- is examined here in the DIY Revolution exhibition. It represents a pocket of time where self-published networked media merged with technology for more rapid production and eventual distribution. From about 1984 to 1995, tens of thousands of zines were published as people began to realize that the power of publication had begun to shift from the traditional producers of media -- the large media conglomerates and publishers -- to the consumers of media. Melding the do-it-yourself ethic of punk, the vision of the avant garde art, and the power of the computer, the DIY Revolution had truly begun.
In 1990, scientist Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser for the now-defunct NeXT computer. The early browser was text-only, but in 1993, Marc Andreessen released Mosaic 1.0, a graphical Web browser that allowed the display of both pictures and text. We all know the rest of the story.
Today, just about anyone with a computer and a few bucks for an Internet connection can become a global publisher on the Web. Many of the zines that survived past the mid ‘90s have moved online, and the printed zines of the past are starting to seem like a quaint anachronism. Where communities and networks of like-minded people were once amorphic, today there are online communities for sharing words, stories, and art. And while personal printed zines on obscure topics are tough to find in the physical world, innumerable blogs have arisen to take their place, often even more obscure and more highly targeted than the amateur print efforts of the pre-Web days. The days of the old print zine may be drawing to a close, but the electronic zine (in the form of the Web site) is up and running wild.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all of this is how the DIY Revolution started by a few individuals, dedicated to taking control of the media for themselves during the past 550 years, has become a way of life for nearly everyone on the planet who consumes media. As the Web has given us access to literally all the information in the world, the line between producer and consumer has continued to blur. Consumers are clearly in control as technology continues to allow us all to create our own media streams designed to suit our individual tastes. The MP3 audio format has allowed us to create soundtracks for our lives, and iPods have become our own personal radio stations. Personal Video Recorders (such as TiVo) allow us to record and playback television at the time and in the order we want to see it, effectively turning each of us into television programming executives. And Podcasting (distributing homemade sound and video files via automated publishing technologies) allows anyone with a microphone and a computer to become their own radio (or even television) broadcaster. The DIY Revolution is still in full swing.
But the battles aren’t over. Arguments over copyright law, peer-to-peer file sharing, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, and the many lawsuits of the record and film industries can be seen as the old media giants wake up and realize that networks of people armed with the technology they need to create their own media is shifting the traditional balances of power. While zine publishers were once seen as outsiders with little impact on the culture at large, today bloggers are challenging the status quo of journalism, rogue DJs creating mash-ups are challenging the power structures of the recording industry, and amateur filmmakers with access to a few thousand dollars and off-the-shelf Macintoshes can use programs like iMovie to create films that are lauded at mainstream film festivals such as Sundance. Where we are headed is hard to forecast, but answers must begin with a look back at the past. That’s what this show is about: examining the fruits of the DIY media revolution that defines our lives, here in the early days of the 21st century.