2012 is going to be a blinder! But don’t they say that every year? The Mayans reckon it’s the end of the world and some banker blokes reckon there’s going to be another recession. So with all this doom and gloom, us guys here at ZEENE are going to pull out all the stops to bring you some joy. Our new year resolutions are – make more zines, and the usual lose some weight, get buff and prey for Leicester FC to get promotion. Hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Years.
Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and a great New Year. Zeene will be back in 2012. Bigger and possibly better.
Here is a little treat for you all on this fine day. It’s the showbiz podcast!!! Enjoy.
1st of December marks the opening and revealing of the first of 24 treats in the countdown to Christmas on many a child’s advent calendar. But wait! Surely I am too old for an advent calendar at the age of 23? Zeene comes to rescue with our very own DIY ZADVENT CALENDAR. It’s simple. Click both links here ->Page 1 + Page 2. Download and print them off. On page 1 and with the help of an adult slice along the three sides of the boxes with the numbers on creating the classic advent calendar windows. Then, simply staple page 2 to the back you are ready to go. It makes a great gift to a loved one or an acquaintance. Everyday leading up to Christmas you will be treated to a beautiful famous face. Some you will know well and there’s two you probably won’t know.
The theme will coincide with our next Zeene – SHOWBIZ!
Dear Everyone at Zeene—The person who puts together the Sticky mailout gave me issues two and four to review of Zeene, primarily to explain some of the British references littered across your content. I suppose they want to me to write a few hundred words explaining who people like Ed Balls, Tim Westwood and Christina Millian are, but hell they’ve got Wikipedia to do that job for them. I’m choosing to write an open letter instead, because I have a few questions I want to publicly ask you.
1. Why did you give a whole issue the theme of baseball when you confess to knowing absolutely nothing about it? I’m not criticising this motive by the way I’m just curious as to how that sort of decision occurs.
2. In the Onion-style spoof news article where you claim a baseball player was guilty of playing rounders throughout his career, do you mean he played games on the side or that, when he was meant to be playing baseball, he was playing it as if it was rounders instead?
3. Where can I find more information about the illustrator Rebecca Holmes? Her drawings of baseball players are easily the best thing about issue two.
4. Is the story about a cinema for dogs real? Because you’ve obviously fabricated a lot of the stuff you’ve written so now I have difficulty trusting you.
5. Where do your photos come from? Some look like the handiwork of Google Images but others, like the dog ones, look like they come from someone’s personal scrapbook.
6. Finally, can you do an issue on fish? Thanks.
I got a link to this a while ago, and to be honest, I completely forgot about it. But Fulsom Prism, here is your response..
1. Zeene fans will know that we picked our subjects out of a hat of random words. Why? Because its a challenge, and without the required knowledge to put together a cohesive fanzine, it is inevitably going to end up in hilarious lies, which is much more fun.
2. Upon making the zine, Baseball legend Mark McGwire or ‘Big Mac’ publicly admitted to using steroids for over a decade of his career, we basically copied the story, substituting ’steroids’ for ’rounders’ because you know, we thought it would be funnier, and much more of a controversy.
3. You can find her website here; http://www.rebeccaholmes.com. For a while we were considering not including those illustrations, because we thought it might make the rest of the zine look a little shoddy. We included them anyway, and we were right..
4. Thats the beauty of ZEENE, keeps you on your toes, if you want to believe it, believe it.
5. You might want to read this post. But yes, Google is also our friend.
Hello, we’ve just finished another zine, but it’s not our usual kind. We were asked to contribute to a upcoming exhibition at the IMT Gallery in London.
For this exhibition, we were given the title of ‘Haunted by Duchamp’, and asked to produce a zine around it. Like our other zines, this one is mainly Google image searches, inaccurate facts and lies.
I’m not exactly sure how we are going to fit into this exhibition, I think we are going to be a part of an accompanying publication. Either way, we are in good company, heres the full press release;
Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash
17 September – 23 October 2011
Private View: Friday 16th September 6pm – 9pm
Curator’s talk with Charles Danby: Saturday 15th October 11am
The Bruce High Quality Foundation
Ray Johnson
Alastair MacKinven
Thomas Raat
Vibeke Tandberg
Curated by Charles Danby
Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash examines how artists address the contexts, ideologies, and histories that surround them in the work of their contemporaries and predecessors.
The exhibition looks at the nature of archives, ideas of dialogue and exchange, and of education both inside and against educational institutions; a timely response to today’s climate of cultural and institutional instability.
Vibeke Tandberg’s works, produced across multiple media, cut through handed-down, inherited, and culturally generated mythologies of gender and identity. Her photographic and video series Old Man going up and down a Staircase (2003), showing manipulated self-portraits (whilst pregnant) of the artist dressed as an old man, connect through multiple channels to the work, lifestyle, and myth making of Marcel Duchamp, whilst the silhouetted portraits from her more recent (2010) Winehouse Variation (Amy) works add further dimension to this interplay.
Alongside is a new and significant work by Thomas Raat, a 1:1 scale replica in vinyl adhesive of Barnett Newman’sWho’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1966-67) following its vandalism at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1986. An extension of an earlier series (from 2006), Thomas Raat shows the slashes to be irreversible marks that confront and collapse ideas of singular and stationary origin. Also showing by Thomas Raat is the work, Das Sprechen (2010) which is a turnaround of the celebrated piece Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird Überbewertet (The Silence Of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated) (1964) by Josef Beuys.
Duchamp remained a haunting presence and recurring point of focus for Ray Johnson who, through Black Mountain College and the New York Correspondence School, challenged institutional orthodoxies and initiated the mail art programme. Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash includes selected, unseen mail art pieces that highlight the control, sharpness and play of Johnson’s conversational exchange and reflect the connective nature of his legacy to other works in the exhibition.
Alastair MacKinven’s All the things you could be now if Robert Smithson’s wife was your mother (2008) is an archival record of a performance that restages the making of Nancy Holt’s earthwork Star Crossed (1979). In conjunction with its title the work concludes as the artist crawls naked through the work, contesting the agency of inheritance and handed down futures.
Nancy Holt’s husband Robert Smithson also features in works by The Bruce High Quality Foundation. The Gate(2005) is a documented performance in which the Collective set about installing a scale replica of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) onto Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island (1970/2005). The Collective’s work draws on the circumstance of two unrelated works presented in New York in 2005.
In conjunction with Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash there will be the offsite event It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour at the Slade Research Centre and a Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening at IMT Gallery in association with the Artist Books Weekend:
Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm
Pigeon Magazine will launch their first published issue, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice. Read on…
It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18th October 2pm – 8pm at Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour seeks to open up a debate around alternative networks of arts education and artwork dissemination. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own University in 2009, and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach4Amerika (2011). This is presented through the event in whcih the Bruce High Quality Foundation will be joined by UK based groups and collectives including the Kurt Schwitters Summer School to open and share ideas on arts education.
Also accompanying Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is It Started With A Car Crash a publication produced from invited contributions from publishing collectives, zine artists, and writers. Contributors include Pigeon Magazine, The Ladies of the Press, IRP and ZEENE.
You may have just read the post below and be thinking ‘who is this Ali guy posting on zeeneblog?!’ Well, today we are pleased to announce that we have a new contributor to the site; Alistair Pett. You might remember us doing posts about him and his work previously, we have featured him a couple of times, if not, just put ‘pett’ into that search bar on the left and enjoy.
We have collaborated with Ali before for ZEENE, providing us with a audio recording and a transcript of a talk about fear he had with mates, which we put in the latest issue; fear, and is also available for you to listen to. We also have a talk completed for ZEENE #6 – showbiz, it just needs a bit of an edit, and probably will have to come with apologies to a lot of people and places.
Ali has literally today got his degree from the same place that me and Greg once studied; the Loughborough School of Art. Presumably he got a first, so we can guarantee that we are providing you with only the best here. We have given Ali free reign over what he posts, so expect a variety of excellent stuff and I would like to point out that he is the one who introduced me to ‘destroyed in seconds‘ so I’m 100% confident that he will not let us down.
Wow, remember when I used to blog here and stuff?!
So it’s been like a couple of weeks since my last proper post, the main reason for the absence is that we have all had to move out of the hallowed 12A flat. We have all gone our separate ways for the time being, I’m now in a lovely suburb of Nottingham, on a road which has it’s own gun shop, which pretty much sums up the area..
There has been lots of other stuff going on over the last month that neither have written about on here yet, but will do in due course. Highlights including the Loughborough Fine Art degree show 2011, ZEENE guest posting on Hard Workers Club, ZEENE VI in progress, and trips to Manchester.
All the regulars will be back to, starting with a new question sheet tomorrow, that has come all the way from Melbourne, Australia.
We’re both pretty busy at the moment, got to move out of our flat and stuff, and then move into another place. We should be back to normal in a week or so. DON’T GIVE UP ON US!
Being as though the football season is officially over (I think England game was the last bit of action we’ll see for a few months) I thought it was best to share with you the special that we made for the Champions League Final a few weeks ago. It was made to coencide with both the final and the Nottingham Zine fair, which was on the same day. Features include an interview with referee Massimo Busacca, celebrity predictions, best Champions players ever and my great drawing of Darren Fletcher and Sergio Busquets. It was only available for one day and quite a few were snapped up at the fair. As with the Royal Wedding special we’re not selling it again, so snooze you lose.
This is something I have been working on for the new issue of ZEENE. It’s a diagram of all our showbiz connections. As you can see, we have connections to Jay-Z, Obama and Trevor Eve! Greg will also be pleased to know that he has two possible ways to Scarlett Johansson!
All of the people that come immediately from the circle in the middle, are people we actually know, and then the rest are their connections. This makes me think that maybe we should be taking advantage a little bit more.
It’s not finished yet either, so expect more big names!
Hello, we’ve just finished another zine, but it’s not our usual kind. We were asked to contribute to a upcoming exhibition at the IMT Gallery in London.
You may have just read the post below and be thinking ‘who is this Ali guy posting on zeeneblog?!’ Well, today we are pleased to announce that we have a new contributor to the site; Alistair Pett. You might remember us doing posts about him and his work previously, we have featured him a couple of times, if not, just put ‘pett’ into that search bar on the left and enjoy.
A little notice: we’re not dead or anything.
