Jan 21, 2014 Photos from the Road and other art zines
I couldn’t make it to the Nick Zinner and Malia James photo exhibit in Pomona the other week, but when I saw that the latter was selling a Photographs From The Road zine I immediately hit her up. I love art zines because they’re imperfect, fragile, and cheap but made with love. I don’t fool myself into thinking that artists necessarily collate, fold, and staple each piece by hand–I was on an a museum’s assembly line for a Barry McGee zine once–but I still think the form is more personal and soulful than a fancy book. They’re also more affordable. This particular booklet has thick glossy pages with intimate, frozen-in-time B&W moments from the Dum Dum Girls’ bass player and more surreal color photos by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ guitarist. Only 200 copies were made, which makes it a pretty cool artifact for any fan of the two artist/musicians like me.
And when legendary skateboard photographer J. Grant Brittain released his robust 80/90 photo zine last year, I couldn’t resist it either. The pages aren’t glossy or thick but the blacks are impressively dark in the nicely printed photos of legendary skaters in classic spots such as (clockwise from top left) The Salton Sea pool, Chris Miller at the Baldy Pipe, Holmes at Del Mar, a very young Tony Hawk at Cardiff, and The Mutt in El Segundo. In the concluding text, the ever-amicable JGB thanks his art and photo teachers and mentors for their pushing him along as well as the skaters for putting their lives on the line. The forms are powerful and artistic yet imperfect and open to disaster, just like the folded pieces of paper…
I was stoked to see the Hamburger Eyes table at last year’s LA Art Book Fair. Honcho Ray Potes and I started talking about baseball and he mentioned his World Champs zine, in which he photographed rioters in San Francisco following the Giants’ victory in the 2010 World Series. Sadly, that zine was sold out so I checked out Josie Ramondetta’s Moshpit photo zine instead. Wow is her work great. These days you can’t go to a show without the majority of people holding up phones and cameras, trying to take lousy pictures of their favorite bands. But in this booklet the performers are anonymous to all but the hardest core heshers and punks, and it’s really the audience takes precedence. Exposed in extreme black and white, the lack of gray both mirrors and conveys the harshness of the unheard music. A gorgeous edition of 100.
I apologize in advance to people with higher morals and the hardcore fans of Bil Keane, whose Family Circus strip has been running since 1960. But the daily comic’s half century of arguably numbing wholesomeness makes it the Precious Moments of the funny pages and overripe for parody. My friend Gil Sonic does just that on his Tumblr page. For each piece, he switches out the verbiage under a comic image (which is occasionally subtly doctored as well) with the most offensive caption possible. You don’t have to love the collected works of Slayer or know the Evil Dead trilogy by heart to appreciate the blackest of humor but it probably won’t hurt. Every now and then, Gil will make a physical zine just for fun, and I was one of the fortunate ones to receive Gilsonic Revelations in the mail or be handed one at Maryland Deathfest.
More traditional indie artists Deth P. Sun and Marci Washington are also friends of mine, and I appreciate how even though they make and show fine art that is priced for the people, they still print zines for the fun of it. Or perhaps for people with zero budget. Somewhere between a sketchbook, coloring book, and a collection of tattoo flash, Deth’s Please Be Brave booklet concludes with Mary Elizabeth Frye’s famous funereal poem, “Do Not Stand There at My Grave and Weep,” cementing the tone as more somber than cute. Never have kids in bird suits (or is it vice versa?) been so stoic. In Dark Mirror, Marci Washington matches her fantastically dark visions with text by Hawthorne. Seeing her elegant, somber-toned paintings of the undead and barely living on monotone pages is kind so like watching Technicolor Hammer horror flicks on a B&W television, which is rather interesting and cool. Neither zine really replaces actual artwork; they are more like fun mutations for collectors like me to obsesses over.
I love the band Quasi, and I dig that the Portland duo not only had T-shirts and records for sale at the merch table during their last tour but also interesting stuff like tour-only EPs and a twentieth anniversary zine. The slim-but-squarebound, full-color publication is thoughtfully jammed with amazing photos by drummer Janet and revealing words by keyboardist and guitarist Sam (they both sing), as well as posters, flyers, and essays by the likes of Jon Spencer of the Blues Explosion and the members of Sleater-Kinney who aren’t in Quasi. I think it’s telling that a band like Quasi–musicians for life who play and tour on a DIY level with little chance or need to become rock stars–makes zines as a way to reach out to their hardest core fans. It isn’t the most rapid or efficient manner to communicate but it is time-tested, intimate, and direct as can be.
Thanks to Eloise for holding down the pages and sharing her Quasi zine with me (she was too young to attend the show but I got her into sound check) and I look forward to catching Ray, Deth, Marci, and others at the LA Art Book Fair at MOCA next week. See you there?