The Really Small Press

While at the San Jose Museum of Art for the "Nothing Ever Happens" show, I also checked out the "Art of Zines '04" exhibition. The two are shown in adjacent galleries, which makes sense in that they sort of overlap each other in terms of the way that artists define their space within the artistic underground and the stream of subversive commentary that constantly bubbles and flows along with any given moment's dominant youth culture.

The current collection was assembled by Anno Domini, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art following a call to the general public for submissions. I recognized a few "major," practically glossy zines that I had seen before, like Hip Mama and Chickfactor, and also discovered some new favorites, such as The Patty Duke Fanzine.

Having erroneously assumed that blogging killed the zine-making star, I was delighted to re-discover the creative, independent perspectives that continue to flourish in the world of micro publishing.

Comments

[Jeffrey Yamaguchi]

Thanks for this post on this zine exhibit -- I wish I could check it out firsthand. Excited to see that an exhibit like this is being shown in a major museum. I'm hoping for a resurgence in the paper zine scene. Zines got to the point where "everyone has a zine," but then sort of seemed to fade a little, because Factsheet 5 went away, and of course because of the opportunities to publish on the web. But now that "everyone has a website (and there mother too)", perhaps more people will move back over to creating paper zines, and paper zines in general will catch another wave recognition.

My friend Josh Saitz is keeping the tradition alive -- he just published his fourth issue of Negative Capability -- http://www.negcap.com.

Ayun Halliday is still going strong with the East Village Inky -- http://www.ayunhalliday.com

And the Bookmobile folks -- http://www.mobilivre.org --would tell you that the zine scene never wavered and is getting stronger every day.

--JY