Stumbled across the Imprint 93 exhibit at the
Whitechapel Gallery over the weekend, what a discovery; I found the tone and pace
of this 90s mail art project curated by Matthew Higgs so energetic. And more
than a few times (notably reading the lonely hearts ads) it made me laugh out
loud. Inside this relatively small room was an intricate mass of artwork, in
the main delivered by post, for free, and unsolicited.
‘His
curatorial platform was the A5 envelope;
his production studio, the
photocopier.’
It felt like a funny coincidence; just a few
weeks ago I retrieved a stack of fanzines from my parents attic. That’s what
the exhibition reminded me of. As a teenager I would regularly send off for zines
I’d seen advertised in the back of Melody Maker (R.I.P.), Select (R.I.P.) and
NME (basically dead, therefore R.I.P.).
A quid or two sent in the post along with a
S.A.E, and a couple of weeks later I’d be reading someone’s lovingly assembled
photocopied and stapled musical musings. It’s hard to imagine that something so
laboured could at one time have seemed so immediate, so accessible.
The zine thing seems to be burgeoning on a
moment, and yet, the essential D.I.Y. factor seems to get overlooked with the
term erroneously applied to highly polished publications that are unlikely to
be blighted by uneven toner, wonky pritt-sticking or an errant stapler.
And
will cost you more than a quid or two + a S.A.E.
