Curatorial Guided Tour on the Fanzine Anatomy

From the second half of the 1980s alternative self-published and technically inexpensive publications emerged that (unlike samizdat) were themed around (and for) a particular subculture, scene or fan community. In the 1990s, liberation of social organizing, together with the growing availability of photocopying and Western models, created the ideal conditions for the flourishing of fanzines as a genre.

In our display we present publications from 1986 to 2003 selected from the rich fanzine collection of the Artpool Art Research Center. The two themes of the selected publications—music (related to punk and other alternative subcultures and/or thematizing music) and political or social issues (mainly by anarchist and feminist groups)—are in many ways intertwined.

Behind the seemingly chaotic editorial principles that define fanzines, there is a recurring structure that draws on formats present in mainstream media as well: in the collection display, enlarged copies of the publications’ pages and the original fanzines are arranged in successive thematic groups according to these reconstructed genres or ‘columns’. In other words, we have created a fictitious anthology, revealing the typical structural basis of alternative publications, i.e. an anatomy of fanzines.

Fragments from publications such as “A Búvárok Reménykednek”, “Anarchoid”, “Ártalom”, “Dall-ass”, “Decibel”, “Életjel”, “Genyó Szívó Disztroly”, “Isten Malaca”, “Második Látás”, “Maszek Ideggyógyász”, “No Future”, “Nőszemény”, “Ordító Egér”, “Survival”, “Szeméttelep”, “Total Addiction” and “Vírus” (among others) are grouped by these ‘columns’, e.g. interviews, opinion pieces, concert reports, music reviews, fanzine reviews.