“The typical definition is [a] self produced, cheaply-made publication, usually photocopied, and usually stapled down.” That is, historically, what’s made a zine a zine, says Drew Sawyer, a curator of the new exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum. For the show itself, though, he and his co-curator Branden Joseph blew the definition wide open. “We really included anything that people called a zine, or that contemporary readers called a zine, when it was made.”
The result is that Copy Machine Manifestos – a first-of-its-kind survey of zines in North America – traces the evolution of the medium over the course of five decades. What emerges is a process of broadening outward, with zine makers reacting to (and at times influencing) the technologies and politics of their age, from the punk scene of the mid-1970s, to the underground feminist and queer movements of the 1980s and their rise to the surface with the riot grrrls of the 90s. Today, Drew notes, “what a zine is is much more expansive and capacious than it was in the 1970s.”