Sorry I haven’t blogged in a few days. I was in Philadelphia for the opening of a zine show I co-curated with Street Tech co-founder Sean Carton (now a Dean at the school). The show, housed at the Design Center, features most of my late ’80s/early ’90s zine and mail art collections, with additional zines from Scott Huffines’s collection (he used to run Atomic Books in Baltimore).
Kudos to the Design Center for doing such a creative job of hanging the show. There are three rooms, the first is set up like a viney jungle of zines, with dozens of pubs in plastic bags hanging from fishing line at different heights, filling the volume of the space. The second room has two shelving insets densely packed with my mail and collage art collections and a few zine reading stations. The third room has a ratty reading couch and a coffee table covered with zines and more reading stations along the walls. There are also giant posters of zine covers on the walls.
It was mind-blowing to see my collection (stored in the attic for years) spread over these rooms and to realize that each item represented an exhange, either a literal exchange of my zine (Going Gaga) or a piece of mail art for someone else’s, or at least a letter with a few bucks in it, asking for a copy of someone’s pub. Scanning over the material hanging there, thinking about this connectivity (from all corners of the globe), it was like looking at a primitive, analog version of one of those network node maps. This was the “sneakernet” days of cyberspace and the blogosphere. We had the desktop computers, laser printers, copiers, and recording equipment to make this indie media, we just had to rely on a glorified pony express (the international postal systems) to distribute it.
The show is running through June 10th. Check it out if you get a chance.
UPDATE: Here are some images from the show on Sean’s Bad Blog.