Marshall Weber

Marshall Weber’s Zine and Pamphlet Collection

Marshall Weber

Marshall Weber’s Zine and Pamphlet Collection

Date

2012

Edition Size

1

Media

Inkjet, Letterpress, Offset print, Silkscreen, Xerox

Binding

Loose pages, Pamphlet, Stapled

Format

Box Set

Location

Brooklyn, NY

Publisher

Booklyn, Inc.

Collection

$ 22,000.00

Unavailable


View Collectors

University of Minnesota

512 zines and pamphlets of various media, collected from 1976 – 2012 by Marshall Weber, Directing Curator of Booklyn.

This collection holds a variety of material, documents of thirty years of American political activism and public opinion-making: from informative material, like the late 1970s underground newspaper Take Over, to a translation of Lenin’s The State, to the Milk and Cheese comic strips and the broadly published 9/11 photographic memorandum The Day that changed America, all the way to personal zines, which reflect the urgency of the personal creative process involved in expressing and debating political and social ideas. The here presented material, with its wealth of different approaches, offers a rich web of intellectual associations that reflect both on the nature of political debate in the United States as well as the nature of the archive as a basis for artistic research.

Selected titles:
A Squatter’s Midden, Action & Defiance, After the Flood, Artslut, Battery Park City Broadsheet, Biodevastation: Direct Action Handbook, Blind Spot, Capturing Heat, Compost Man, Copywrong: The Sad State of Intellectual Property, Cutter Photozine, Dog Dayz, Earth First!, EZLN Communiques, Fagazine, Filth, Foie Gras by Edie Fake and The Joy of Cooking, Fuck the Shut Up!!, Gaylord Phoenix, Guerilla Gardening, Handbook for Nonviolent Action, High Performance, Ker-Bloom, Lay of the Land, Live Wild or Die, Madison Review, Milk & Cheese, Mollusk, New York Nights, Nosedive, Occupied Wall Street Journal, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, Paper Tigers, Pipe Bomb, Poor, Raw, SCAM, Slug & Lettuce, Shotgun Seamstress, Starving Artists’ Restaurant Guide, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, Take Over, Thud magazine: The Hackers Underground Digest, Underground Production, Weirdo, World War 3, X-tra Tuf, Zine Librarian Zine

For a full list of the collection’s contents, please email [email protected].

A note from the curator:
“My primary motivation for collecting this miasma of paper was to document cultural and political dissent. On one hand (a pointing finger) I feel that the Walter Benjamin’s Arcade project provides a model with its constant re-organizing of myriad components in an attempt to articulate a coherent aesthetic social structure. To me, this suggests that perhaps here is a subtle but apparent integrity to the aesthetic of protest and dissent, which is instructive to investigate.

On the other hand, (a fist) my hippie punk attitude was the primary collecting guide. This collection was started in the aftermath of my childhood immersion in protesting the American/Vietnam War. My older sister worked for the New Years Gang and was a fundraiser for the Black Panthers; her boyfriend was co-founder of Takeover the pioneering underground radical newspaper published in the radical student hotbed of Madison, Wisconsin. I lived with my sister on and off in the 1970’s and was suffused with the culture of student revolution.

When I was 14 I threw out my Mad Magazines (aaargh!) and subscribed to Takeover so I could remain up to date on the resistance even while living with my parents in suburban Connecticut (where the drug police would periodically raid our house leading my older brother and sister out in handcuffs.)

From that time on I would haphazardly collect (I don’t recall ever paying for anything, I just found or was given stuff) any publication that I thought would further my above-mentioned motivation. I would pick up publications and posters (those are in a separate collection) at protests, actions, music shows, art events, and just off the street and out of the garbage.

I wanted to keep the radical stuff that I thought no one else would keep.

I started curating art shows with Artists Television Access in the 1980s and with Booklyn in the 1990s. I have probably curated and produced a few hundred shows, between that and exhibiting my own art in hundreds of art exhibits, and my extensive travelling, I have met thousands of artists and activists of a myriad variety.

Many of them have given me Zines, one-off newspaper parodies, political and religious tracts, and all other kinds of artist and iconoclast publications. I tossed these chronicles in boxes and gave them safe havens across the USA.

I have always been attracted to the underbelly of the world. I love the crappy diners and the neighborhoods up against the train tracks. I love the Old Wobblies and the crusty punk squatters.

I respect the whistleblowers, the ranters, the honest guys, and the gutsy women.

I love the stories from the itinerant workers from nowhere and everywhere. I love the strivers, and the commies, the outrageous and outraged and the angry, those who Got shafted and those whove done well but feel that everyone deserves better.

I love the diverse and extravagant, the motley crews and the mongrel folks, the ethnically unidentifiable and the unfashionable hipsters, props to the downwardly mobile.

This collection is dedicated to them; after all it’s their stuff.

Now for the first time ever the collection has been gathered into the same space and cataloged. I feel that the collection has reached its zenith; it’s a great survey of self-righteous, DIY, politically informed agitProp artist’s publications. Personally it feels like a time capsule of raw optimistic enthusiasm. It’s time for me to give it up, to let others rummage through…

You can buy it if you want but you have to promise to share it and to spread the word that this collection enshrines, the belief that ‘justice is beautiful and nothing, nothing is inevitable, together we can do better.'”
— Marshall Weber