Sydney Writer's Festival: MCA Zine Fair 2017

Zines as far as the eye can see. Or, more accurately, to the edge of this image.

Last week I caught the train to Circular Quay and visited the MCA Zine Fair, which was running as part of the 2017 Sydney Writer's Festival. The fair runs yearly out of the Museum of Contemporary Arts, with each featured table a little extension of a zinemaker's art and work.

Coming from a background of writing/contributing to zines, self-publishing, and distributing a variety of materials of this kind (in a life before teaching), I felt like the MCA Zine Fair was a step back into something that had moved on without me. I felt like a man released to the outside after a long stint in gaol; each zine familiar yet alien, and disconcertingly unrecognisable. I found myself squinting into this room... where were the titles I'd known? Was this fair an extension of the zine world I was once so immersed in?

I picked up a $15 A5 zine and flicked through it cautiously. This already felt very removed from the zines I'd grown up with. When did something so punk, so do-it-yourself and independent, so agency-stimulating, also become so artisanal and profitable? 

The genre has evidently transmuted into something completely different to what I'd collected and absorbed as a teenager; gone are the $2 self-made diatribes on local music, cult movies, and satire. In their place is a vast array of expressionistic art, no less interesting but a helluva lot more expensive. I dare say the audience and purpose of this text type has changed.

That aside, I still found plenty of cool stuff hidden away at the fair.

Dulwich High School stall

My absolute favourite was a stall that represented Dulwich High School of Visual Arts and Design, easily the stall that - in my eyes - represented the true ethos of what zines were and can continue to be. The creativity and passion of the teacher and her students was more than evident in the colourful array of anarchic, freewheeling, hilarious, and heartfelt zines on display. They ranged from micro-zines for under a $1 to more in-depth zines for $5.

'Digital Bread' was one of my favourites; a micro-zine on the evolution of bread-graphics in computer games. Yes, that title is not ironic or metaphorical - this zine does exactly what it says it will, and I found it hilarious.

Microzines!

A robot and its dreams.

This microzine featured finely-observed line drawings depicting different facial expressions and eyes. I really liked the artwork - clearly a talented student!

More great artwork, and experimenting with comic narrative and frame arrangement

This one featured a variety of short comics, all of which were really funny.

It's been a while since I incorporated zines into my teaching. When I first started teaching English I did a short zine-focused unit a couple of times with Year 10, and saw the students create some really amazing things. The medium of communication offered by zines is a free-form approach in which anyone who ever had anything to say can express themselves. The beauty of the genre (and its various subgenres) is that it revels in breaking rules, subverting code and convention, and highlights the independent voice of the writer. 

I don't object to the artistic, artisanal connotations of the zines at the MCA Zine Fair. It's just that some of the extreme prices jar with my understanding of the non-mainstream nature of zines... $10 or $15 is okay for a magazine or a book or whatever, but when it's a couple of home-made pages stapled together I think that you're missing the biggest (and largely-marginalised) sector of your demographic. Zines have and always will appeal to those at the margins of society; the young and the punk, the unrepresented and independent. The moment a zine goes above the price of a couple of coins then it suddenly becomes something else - something that appears to be more about making money than expressing a previously unheard voice.

That's why I loved the Dulwich High School zines so much - they represent the joyful, unabashed creativity of youth who have been given the means of expression. The traditionally low price of zines demonstrates how easy it is to exist in the economy of the zine world, and will hopefully encourage some of the Dulwich High students to continue creating on their own terms in a way that is readily accessible to those who will listen most closely.