Emo-Cinema in the age of Tumblr

When I was a kid I was allowed to watch men getting sliced up and peppered with metal, soft willing tits and fearsome pirate jive, killer sharks and babes from space. I sobbed in five-year-old terror through Jurassic Park (1993), dad called it an education while mum wrung her hands. So I was always surprised when friends had rules and adhered to the rating system. For most of them the Euro art house and contraband slashers came much later. More scrupulous parents tutted at my watch list. Poor innocent babes, my sister and I.

The Red Shoes (1948)

But it wasn’t Barbarella’s orgasmatron or Hannibal Lecter’s Chianti supper that fucked me up, it was Catherine Deneuve. The onscreen ice queen in La Chamade (1968) and Belle du Jour (1967), the glamorous blonde who, way before Tyra, said it all behind the eyes. And then there was Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948), the prima ballerina forced to campily decide between great talent and great love. Technicolor passion splashed across the screen and into my teens. I became a master of the loaded glare, the tragic glance. I drank Oolong tea and stole my mother’s clothes. While everyone else was out having fun in tank tops and blue WKD I was busy staring mournfully out of the window or listening to Serge Gainsbourg and reading A Certain Smile. I started smoking and thought I was as glamorous and damaged as panda-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Then one day – LOL, OMG – along came Myspace. From the glowing window in my teenage bedroom I could stare into a sea of similarly kohled-up girls and sensitive boys. And now there’s Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram and 8track to host a new generation of troubled femmes in soft grain and pastels, subtitled avatars artfully reflecting their emotional state. Not so unique a tortured soul after all.

I still like Catherine Deneuve but, for the record, I’m pretty big on tank tops now too.

Ella Plevin


This is an online extra 'Notes' feature from Garageland 14: Film. 

Figuring It Out with Some Incongruous Nudes

The photo booth at the Serpentine Gallery was ‘having technical problems’ so I couldn’t add my smiley face to Smilesfilm and participate in Yoko Ono’s ambitious plan to take a snap of every single human being in the world. Sad face. To The Light is a retrospective, presenting five decades of her work and includes two videos of her powerful performance, Cut Piece, where the audience is invited to cut Ono’s clothes off her body, piece by piece, until she is nearly nude. There are two videos of the work, from different points in her life, one from the 1960s and the other 2003. For 2012, however, her message to women is that you can be strong and do what you want to do, while letting other people do what they wish with you. You can do both. To the hard-core, that might sound like a compromise, but in our complicated age of post feminism, it can sometimes feel like 50 years of feminist art history never actually happened.

Yoko Ono's Wish Trees at Serpentine Gallery

John Currin has enjoyed much controversial attention with his kitschy female nudes that mix pornography and art history. His new series of paintings, more Beryl Cook than Cranach, are on show at Sadie Coles HQ. The majority are painted directly from life resulting in less caricature and more realistically detailed, natural-looking faces and alluring gazes. Women, with an abundance of milky white, flawless flesh, and draped with pearls, lounge seductively over sumptuous silk cloths. 

John Currin, 'Gold Coast', 2012
from Sadie Coles website

The Wild the Beautiful and the Damned at Hampton Court Palace could provide the type of soft-core, historical erotica that Currin pokes at. Provocative portraiture includes the alluring teenage gazes of Peter Lely’s Windsor Beauties or Godfrey Kneller’s Hampton Court Beauties alongside mythological seductresses, thereby conflating real portraits with lurid fantasy.

Frances Stuart, Peter Lely, c1662

'Cleopatra', Benedetto Gennari, c1674-5

But Currin’s paintings are explicit. Everything is revealed; alluring, sweet smiles are cut through with fingered labias and pubic hair and there is a particularly creepy painting called Lake Place, described as a modern day Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe.

John Currin, 'Lake Place', 2012
from Sadie Coles website

Currin is easy to write-off. Some of his imagery is knowingly and provocatively un-pc and engages our moral compass. He describes himself as an American tourist in the tradition of European painting and is the first to admit a self-conscious lack of elegance and grace, no matter how good he can paint. Currin has said that one of the joys of figuration is that it was never progressive, unlike severe modernist movements that had to be progressive with a social message. Figuration is hopelessly retrograde and doesn’t speak to the future or have that burden. But it is something that people love to do, and so it will endure. The question of it’s relevance today is at the heart of another exhibition, Perfect Nude, which opened for it’s third incarnation at Charlie Smith last night. 

Alexis Harding, 'Nude's Hole', 2012

Dan Coombs and Phillip Allen asked 100 artists to make paintings of the nude. Released from the responsibility for choosing their subject, the artists have taken up the challenge and the result is visually complex, revealing a wide range of processes, attitudes and narratives that leap from the delicately raw in Emma Talbot’s Nude, to pink, puckered skin in Alexis Harding’s Nude’s Hole. 

Emma Talbot, 'Nude', 2012

There is also a level of humour and in-jokes; Barry Reigate’s The Teacher depicts a peachy-bottomed Phillip Allen, but most reveal consideration for the subject that, in contrast to Currin, leave irony and derision at the door.

Barry Reigate, 'The Teacher', 2011

The Perfect Nude, Charlie Smith, London EC1 until 28 July
John Currin, Sadie Coles, London W1 until 18 August

Yoko Ono, To The Light, Serpentine Gallery, London W2 until 9 September

The Wild the Beautiful and The Damned, Hampton Court Palace until 30 September

Alli Sharma

Between Embodiment and Identity at Inigo Rooms, Somerset House

Alex Michon fights her fear of all things scientific to be dazzled and thought provoked by a sense of magical metaphysical melodrama

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee, 
John Donne 1

The blurb for this exhibition refers to how the development over the last twenty years in biomedical sciences have given rise to sophisticated new visualisation techniques into living cells and what lies beyond the surface of bodies and tissues. The works on show, by artists Susan Aldworth, Andrew Carnie and Karen Ingham are presented as a response and exploration of these ‘emerging and enriched images of the Self. ‘ 2

Close your eyes ... close them tight. Now what do you see? Swirling chiaroscuro shadows, maybe swirling squiggly lines or are they your own eyelashes or just an afterimage? What is it you are looking at? Is it the mind looking at the eye or the other way round? Practicing this inward looking the day after the exhibition I was reminded of the phrase seeing in my minds eye which forms part of the stream of consciousness narration for her film Out of Body by Susan Aldworth. The seeing on show here relates to an internal mapping, a journey of discovery into the sinews and tissues of the physical body and a questioning of what these hallucinatory swirls, blips, blobs and scans might reveal.

How can our 'natural' bodies be re-imagined – and relived in ways that transform the relations of same and different, self and other, inner and outer, recognition and misrecognition into guiding maps for inappropriate/d others? And inescapably, these re-figurings must acknowledge the permanent condition of our fragility, mortality and finitude. 3

Karen Ingham, Piece of Mind

So what do these artists do with these things that were previously invisible? And how do I, who always found the science lab at school boring and scary, just managed to scrape through with a pass in biology and have never watched an episode of CSI find a way into this new forensic molecular world?

Moving around the exhibition I soon ditched the idea that I needed to have any actual scientific knowledge. The artists here have taken unexpected, surprising and sometimes playful routes with their source materials and as I entered into their Cabinet of Curiosities, I was struck by a sense of theatricality, and constantly reminded of the early cinema of the Lumière brothers, perhaps not such a strange analogy as they too were at the forefront of new visual technological discoveries.

Enjoy the ride, the medicine show 4

Karen Ingham, Vanitas Seed-Head

As a sometime costume maker I was drawn to Karen Ingham’s Piece of Mind prints where images of brain cells have been transposed onto carnivalesque masks reminiscent of those worn at Venetian masquerade balls. Looking at the prints, I found myself unconsciously cutting them out as you would a craft kit and imagining how I would assemble them.

Ingham likes to subvert the way objects are collected, archived and displayed in science museums and these playful and decorative prints certainly belie the seriousness of their origins. 

Elsewhere Ingham shows her film installation Vanitas Seed-Head which incorporates an x-ray of her son’s head following an injury and uses computer morphing technology to superimpose images of mother, father and son against a blue background. This work references both Dutch Vanitas paintings and contemporary research into stem cell technology. Not knowing anything about stem cells I was drawn more to the visual filmic experience. For me, this very slow, still film had a mesmerising contemplative effect. All the participants eyes are closed which gives them the aura of death masks. They remind me too of photographs of the incorruptibles, those dead Catholic saints whose bodies when exhumed remain apparently untouched by the ravages of decay. 5

As each face fades and another appears in an ongoing cycle, like ghostly apparitions in some modern day Madame Blavatsky side show, various cinematic references came to mind. The faces enclosed in a misty blue dome, suggest a snow globe a important leitmotif in the film Citizen Kane which has been said to represent Kane’s childhood.

Kenneth Anger, Rabbit's Moon (1972)

It is interesting in this art/science context that the first snow globe created at the end of the 19th century was invented by Erwin Perzy, a producer of surgical instruments, who made his Schneekugel (snow globe) originally as an extra bright light source for use as a surgical lamp.

For me, aesthetically this piece, recalled both Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and a beautiful 1972 short film by Kenneth Anger called Rabbit's Moon, which employs a similar blue colouring and which itself undoubtedly references Méliès.

Tell me how to find you and I will tell you who you are 6

Continuing with my filmic interpretations, as I walked into Andrew Carnie’s slide dissolve installation Seized: Out of this World I felt as if I had entered into a mise-en-scene petrified forest as I arrived just at the point where spectral images of white neurons (which look exactly like branches) were being projected onto a series of huge white gauze screens which billowed softly as I walked through them. Other projections involved multiples of a floating body layered one over the next emerging and disappearing like some ghostly cadaverous Pina Bauch ballet sequence.

Andrew Carnie
image from Seized: Out of This World slide dissolve

The darkened room, the wafting gauze screens and the click-click of the slide projectors playing out their multiples of squiggly lines and bodies all worked to create a phantasmagorical viewing experience. It is not so much that I felt I was inside someone’s head but that I was inside a make believe snowy (film) landscape.

The fact that these are relatively low tech slide projections made me think of magic lanterns and zoetropes. Mentioning this to Carnie, I am pleased to learn that he approves of my analogy. To my list of pre-celluloid machinery he adds zoopraxiscopes created by photographic pioneer Eadweard James Muybridge in 1879 and considered to be the first movie projectors. I also learn that Seized: Out of this World portrays the liminal space of temporal lobe epilepsy and that the piece subtly portrays the shifting sense of body and space experienced by patients during their fits.

Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world 7

I am not embarrassed that I did not realise this, ok so maybe I did not read all the blurb properly but not knowing the scientific root of the work does not necessarily detract from my viewing of it. What is more interesting is my subsequent discussion with Carnie about how some people with epilepsy when offered tablets to control their condition decline them as do some schizophrenics and manic depressives as they feel that their condition is an integral part of their personality. I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia they rail against Freud’s Oedipal complex which they claim endorses a police state, preferring instead to see the schizophrenic as a revolutionary who resists all forms of oppressive power. 8

A series of marvelous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire 9

Susan Aldworth, image from Going Native

There is something of the archetypal Jungian trickster in the work of Susan Aldworth. This archetype is well know for bending and breaking rules, playing games and tricks which are often funny even when considered sacred or performing important cultural tasks. Far from being a malign figure, the trickster’s role is also seen as raising awareness of serious issues in a playful way. Aldworth who famously suffered a brain embolism which nearly killed her subsequently began to use the images of her brain scans as her subject matter and continues to weave together personal, medical and scientific narratives in her experimental print and film works. Aldworth is also artist iin residence at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University where she has been working on a project exploring schizophrenia. Surrounded by all this heavy stuff and considering her own medical history, Aldworth however displays a resolute artistic determination to play, adding touches of humour and glamour to leaven the gravitas of her material. Thus in her film Going Native she introduces sequences of tap-dancing inside a human brain and a Busby Berkleye-sque kaleidoscopic arrangement of dancers in gorgeous maroon and gold dresses. 'I love film' she tells me, 'You can go anywhere you want within it.' Or to quote Angela Carter it is 'the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvelous, imaginary things as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.'10

In her film Out of Body, Aldworth recalls the brain procedure she underwent where she seemed to float to the ceiling, simultaneously able to watch the doctors working on her 'I was completely at peace' the film commentary intones 'I realised I was without pain … I was hearing with an echo ... and I felt as if I was in a tunnel.' If this film is in part a re-telling of a near death experience, then the dancing girls, and the inclusion of personal Super 8 film clips with its girls in white dresses, seaside trips and family photos, real people and their interactions stand in as an insistence of life. Desire, fun and memory, are introduced as a counterbalance to the internal cell structures of which they are formed. It is as if Aldworth is asking where is the reality of existence located?

Susan Aldworth, Reassembling the Self 3

There is much of the Victorian Gothic in Aldworth’s Reassembling the Self series of lithographs, but as always there is also a subtle hint of irony. 'These are my transitions' she says. Body parts have been reassembled to suggest new forms. One is obviously feminine with two large ears, suggesting hips or a 19th century bustle, while another more aggressive assemblage suggests a male, complete with heart (liver) codpiece! The lithographs with their strong Victoriana aesthetic nevertheless suggest very contemporary issues relating to medical interventions, cyborgs, organ donation and lots of pretty scary medical stuff – which who knows may also be beneficial and life enhancing. But that’s one for the scientists.

That dialectical dance around disciplines, known as art and science has a long history from Leonardo Da Vinci’s early investigations into anatomy, all the way through to Damian Hirst’s picked sheep and pill cabinets. It is a tricky two-step around the cultural dance floor. Either it is too science heavy and too art lite or vice versa. In Between Embodiment and Identity I think they have nearly got the balance just right.

What I personally found interesting in this show was how these very contemporary scientific themes, in the hands of these artists were aesthetically re-configured to suggest magical, glittering crystalline spaces, a Victoriana metaphysical melodrama which stayed with me days after the event and rattled and dusted off a few of my little grey cells too.

Alex Michon

Between Embodiment and Identity

Inigo Rooms, Somerset House, East Wing, Kings College, London
19 April – 30 June 2012

References
1. John Donne, Song.
2. Dr Richard Wingate from catalogue notes.
3. Donna J Harroway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 1991
4. Twenty Years by Placebo: There are twenty years to go / the best of all I hope / Enjoy the ride, the medicine show. / And thems the breaks for we designer fakes. / We need to concentrate on more then meets the eye
5. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, 2006

6. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit,from The Illusion of Life, Edited by Alan Cholodenko, 1991
7. R D Laing, The Divided Self, 1960
8. Jonah Peretti, Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution. Deleuze and Guattari see the schizophrenic as capitalism's exterminating angel. For them the schizo is a radical, revolutionary, nomadic wanderer who resists all forms of oppressive power. They believe that radical political movements should ‘learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs.’ Schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire
9. Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972
10. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve, 1982

The Re-Blanding of the Seaside: Tracey Emin at Turner Contemporary, Margate

Tracey Emin’s first show in her hometown - a good curtain raising premise – but does the show itself live up to its billing?

Tracey is from Margate – we all know that from her previous celebrity building works. Tracey does not however live in Margate now and her return feels a little sheepish. There are no tents or unmade beds (although there is a piece of driftwood on a mattress). Tracey has moved on and she has in her own words ‘fallen in love with making art again’. Instead of the brash YBA she is now a mid-century Royal Academician and prefers to display her tentative watercolours and prints alongside work by Rodin and Turner (they did eroticism as well so it is ok as a subject for a real artist). The work actually reminds me more of Schiele, the extended limbs and twisted forms indulging in show and tell sex, and although she made much of the work especially for the show there is nothing very new to be seen.

The show begins on the staircase with a beautifully placed neon realisation of the show’s title She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea, its aquamarine light bathing passers-by in a Man From Atlantis glow. The balcony gallery builds the anticipation with a small painting scrawled with the words ‘I Said No’. But this promise of vulgar delights is unfulfilled by the first room, which is filled with melty blue gouaches depicting a nude woman, housed in sun and sand bleached frames. A cruel critic could describe the aesthetic as seaside chic, of the type peddled by trendy Whitstable gallery/shops. Yes there is a ‘work of adult nature’ warning but really there is little here that would shock anybody who has been to the National Gallery.

The next room is painted a Farrow and Ball (they really are one of the show sponsors) mossy green. The large-scale embroidered portraits on unbleached calico look promising from the previous room but on closer examination are disappointingly flat. More satisfying – maybe because they are the worst taste things on display – are large tapestries, which resemble cheap carpets, depicting the now familiar reclining female form in shades of lavender and mustard.

The darker corridor gallery houses a series of small-scale erotic works by Rodin and Turner (the few surviving examples of Turner erotica, most were destroyed by Ruskin). These are fascinatingly beautiful but apart from the obviously similar subject matter are unconnected by intent – Rodin and Turner were gazing at naked mostly female forms not depicting their own sexuality. Opposite these is a suite of watery Emin watercolours made in 1998 in Berlin – very tentative and beautiful.

The final room is psychiatric hospital white. It contains more of the same, calico, monoprints, erotic nude Tracey alongside the fore mentioned mattress with driftwood (which is actually made of bronze). There are also two phallic driftwood towers topped by a pomegranate and a bust respectively.

And that’s it – no big shocks, not even any film. It’s all very easily understood and digested. Tracey has said that she didn’t want to do a ‘coals to Newcastle’ type show featuring her Margate greatest hits. But maybe the reality is that she wants to be loved and respected and most of her Margate work is less than complimentary about the town. The show rather reflects someone who is no longer interested in the place she has come from, she has moved on and wants to prove that she is cultured and a cut above. Personally I find the down and dirty seaside, full of illicit sex, kiss me quick and grubby cones of chips more interesting than Tracey’s reinvented Margate which aspires to be yet another good-taste, middle class, Whitstable wannabe. 

Cathy Lomax

Tracey Emin

She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea

Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent

26 May – 23 September 2012

Mary Heilmann – Visions, Waves and Roads at Hauser & Wirth

Firstly I am ashamed to say I hadn’t really heard of Heilmann before this exhibition. I was bored and depressed from my visit to Hauser and Wirths other enormous Saville Row gallery, showing dull, formulaic paintings by not so YBA Michael Raedecker, so uninteresting, that the PV needed a huge brass band to distract from the images!

Walking into Heilmann’s show was a complete contrast and at first not a nice one, its full, there must be over a hundred painting, chairs and ceramic panels. Bright colours, odd angular shapes and busy patterns left me momentarily stunned. And slowly as I ventured further into the space, taking a seat to rest from the colourful assault, a smile crept onto my face. The exhibition is euphoric, I don’t think I would have looked twice at many of the pieces individually, yet as a whole they have an exciting energy. The exhibition's very obvious title is perfect, one is led through a completely mad series of landscapes, the natural free brushwork of ‘waves’, the man-made, severe and solid ‘roads’ and the insane primary and neon ‘visions’.

Usually such a negative word, quirky, here seems to work, Tetris like angular canvases jostle with blobby ceramic cartouches. Everything is very handmade. Heilmann is someone whose joy and excitement by making is obvious, and infectious. It makes you want to grab a brush and go wild. An almost art as therapy approach, again usually so negative, seems to work, visions of a mad artist who cannot eat, sleep or stop – a crazed need to create.

Walking around the exhibition is a full on experience, and I’m sure not to everyone’s taste, but getting over the initial onslaught leads one into a rewarding flow, as the eye is drawn to curious little patterns, odd materials and a thrilling storyline, emerging from the noise. An almost filmic backdrop of Americana starts to emerge, the long endless highways, untamed nature and a hippyish experimentation. An Easy Rider of small canvases jostling for attention.

I am so excited to have discovered Heilmann (embarrassed it took so long) and strongly advise a trip to the show on until the 5 April. And don’t be put off by initial reactions, have a sit down in one of her fabulously garish chairs- and wheel yourself around her world. You wont regret it!

Interacting with the Heilmann

Paul Kindersley



23 February – 5 April 2012
Hauser & Wirth London,
Savile Row, South Gallery

Another New Zine Land

Tooting Zine Fair
Construction Gallery SW17
Saturday 25 February 2012

Cute kittens in crisis, cupcake cut-outs, sci-fi, low-fi, nerdy, nonsensical, polemic, political, philosophical, funny, high-brow, homo-erotic and honest, hopeful and doleful, agit prop and angry or anxious and anonymous, comic and cryptic, girls with guitars, feminist and fanciful, Siberian hip-hop, communistical and cool…

Zines are now firmly established as a counter-cultural phenomenon. Each new generation of zinesters takes them lovingly to their self-penned sketched and scribed hearts. The lure and élan of DIY documentation shows no signs of abating. Zinedom continues to re-create itself like a Deluzian rhizome 'ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.' (A Thousand Plateaus – Deleuze and Guattari)

The Collector by Corinna Spencer

Thus it was that one sunny February Saturday I truddled along to Tooting Bec with my over heavy trolley filled with Garagelands, Artys (old and new), Corina Spencer’s little Collectors and a jingle jangle assortment of badges. Transition Editions on tour ready to take my assigned place on the shared Deleuzian indy-kid table

The (pop up) Construction Gallery on Upper Tooting Road is nestled between a nail bar and a pub. Slap bang in the middle of a busy shopping street with a Polish delicatessen opposite and numerous curry houses and Indian sweet shops near by.

Sally Hancox

Setting up begins… it is always thus, you realise you have too much stock and there is not enough space on the table but then with zine fairs you never know how its going to go. I am next to illustrator and printer Sally Hancox who is making a killing selling her little hand drawn and printed tags of animals with diseases (50p each). I  bought 'deer with dyslexia' but another in the series included 'the hyena with hearing impairment' and so on. Next to us, Nane Kawahara also has cards with various cute animals in crisis, she explains the whole life history of the printed cats on her canvas bag (adopted etc). I get my money out and buy a couple of her Christmas cards (spending all my float before I have even made a sale!) Arty always gets a good response, here in Tooting they are more interested in the old photocopied and stapled variety to our new Karen Kilimnik themed issue. I get interviewed by Adrian from Monocol Radio who refers to   “Arty” as “ one of the great zine successes”

Peter Whiddon a graphics design student from Winchester gives us all questionnaires to fill out about printing and zineing in general. He is doing a research paper on the death of old technologies and talks very knowledgeably about various printing techniques and is very enthusiastic about what he refers to as the 'self-publishing community'. There is much talk about the proliferation of DIY books and magazines in the era of the internet, all these zinesters are fully new media savvy, this is not some reactionary Luddite arena. More a counter-intuitive rebelliousness, a reaction against the supposed modernity of the all encompassing  virtual and a return to the book or magazine as object – more of a conceptual response.

It is not all cuteness – kittens and girls with guitars – elsewhere Hamja Ahsan who has organised the event is publicising the Free Talha Ahsan Campaign. Ahsan a British citizen and poet was arrested in 2006 and is facing extradition to America due to an alleged involvement with a series of websites one of which happened to be located on a server in America. Hamja is also the co-director and curator of Other Asias a transnational artists and writers collective. He wrote a strikingly polemic piece for the Migration issue of Garageland and I am meeting him for the first time. Struggling with a cold and having the harassed look of an organiser I mange to get a few words with him telling him I really liked his piece in Garageland, 'I’m not that angry any more' he says and then ruefully adds 'But maybe I should be'.

Image from Partisan issue 2

I also meet Misha Malsev a Siberian film–maker and organiser who is here with his Partisan zine.  I am fascinated to hear about the culture of Siberia, we talk about Siberian Hip Hop and Ska, gay clubs and fashion. 'Great title' I say and we both talk about how the word Partisan has taken on negative connotations but how 'back in the day' when it referred to resistance fighters in the forest it was a revolutionary and glorious thing. Of course I find myself buying one of his Shamanic singers CDs. 'It’s the real deal you know' he says and I do, reminding him that Rasputin came from Siberia. I have of course yet to listen to it.

This is just a small sample of the many other activities and zines that were part of the fist Tooting Zine fair – I never got a chance to see the zine making workshop or watch the films of even see most of the other publications… it is always thus. The idea of a zine community is a bit of a misconception.  The variety of aims and styles is so overwhelming but there is no denying the continuing appeal of this kind of agit prop rebellious enclave of otherness.


Alex Michon



For yet another Zine Land, Transition Editions will be at Publish and Be Damned at the ICA on 17 March 2012  between 12 and 8pm