[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome, everybody.
Thank you for joining us today as we
present Micah Wood as part of the Wignall Museum's Home
Edition, a series of curated artists talks, workshops,
and discussions featuring artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
I'm the director and curator of the Wignall Museum.
The Wignall Museum is a teaching museum,
an interdisciplinary art space that introduces Chaffey College
students, faculty, staff, and community members
to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy, the museum seeks to enhance
the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we're situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tongva
people.
We offer our respect to the elders
both past, present and future.
Hello.
My name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm the assistant curator at the Wignall
Museum of Contemporary Art.
Please note we are recording all sessions of Home Edition.
All recorded programs in Home Edition
will be transcribed and captioned.
Please visit our website at www.chaffey.edu/wignall
to access recordings.
We will post announcements to our email subscribers
and social media when the videos are available on our site.
Thank you.
And hi, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I'm the preparator at the museum and the studio tech
for the studio arts department here at Chaffey College.
Along with Roman and Rebecca, I'm
going to be assisting with today's Zoom session.
Let me briefly share a quick breakdown of today's program.
In a moment, we're going to have Micah Wood,
and he will present for about a half an hour or so.
Thanks Roman and Andy.
So today, we're pleased to introduce you
all to Micah Wood.
Micah is an artist living and working in Los Angeles.
He works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture,
and performance.
The imagery found throughout Wood's paintings
oscillate between found images, and advertising,
to automatic drawings, and observational sketches.
Wood's paintings lie in the nexus of abstraction
and figuration, and seek to create a distinctive vision
of his environment.
He was a co-director of City Limits Gallery in Oakland,
California from 2016 to 2018 where he organized several solo
and group exhibitions.
Wood's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions
in Canada, Mexico, Russia, France, and California.
Please see his full biography in the program guide
on our website.
Micah also has a special guest joining us today, Arthur Wise.
So he'll introduce him during his presentation.
So please join me in welcoming Micah.
Hello, everyone.
Nice to e-meet you.
Yes.
Thanks for the gracious introduction, Rebecca.
I'm really excited for this next hour.
I think this will be really fun.
And also I've been teaching I'd say for the past two years.
I teach in the visual and performing arts department
and you can find me there.
And , I guess, this came about because I assign,
as my final project, a zine for students to do.
And just in terms of the assignment,
I think it's a really fun assignment
that the students can really make their own while combining
everything that we've talked about throughout the semester
and fundamentals of 2D design.
So it's a chance for them to really make
something of their own and can gift to other students
in the class and give to their family and friends.
All right.
The Zine or how to make a rad zine.
So what is a zine?
A zine short for magazine or fanzine
is most commonly like a small circulation self-published work
of original or appropriated text and images usually
reproduced via a photocopier.
Usually zines are the product of a single person
or a small group.
Zines are typically self-published booklets
sold cheaply or traded amongst friends
or in this case, my students amongst their peers.
It's like a part of a DIY, do it yourself kind of a subculture.
And in historical context, zines have
been integral to various subcultures including,
but not limited to science fiction,
punk music, third wave feminism and the Riot Grrrl movement.
So I see zines as an opportunity for students
to serve the intersection of maker, expert, and teacher.
It's always fun for me to get the zine back from them
and learn about either something that they're interested in I
had no idea existed.
Like how to be a--
one student did a zine about being like a car influencer.
Like you work on cars and then you
can be a popular YouTube with car people, I guess.
I don't know.
Or how to fly a drone.
Things I don't know anything about
and it's so fun to learn about.
This semester, someone did a fanzine
about the film Donnie Darko, which I thought
was really cool.
So it's just all across the board
and that's why-- that's the fun of it, is they become teacher
and I become the student in a lot of ways.
So students can tell their stories
and share their knowledge through both images and text,
and share this learning in a low cost easy produced fashion.
Zines first emerged in the United States
where the photocopier was invented,
and zines have always been more numerous here in this country.
They were first created in the science fiction
fandoms of the 1930s taking their name from fanzine.
It's just short for fan magazine.
So these were born out of fans making these fan magazines
for Star Trek, which is I believe a series of books,
I think before the television show if I'm not mistaken.
So these kind of.
yeah.
Just people that were really into science fiction
and really into these science fiction Star Trek books
decided to write their own kind of homages to their books.
And that's kind of some people believe that.
That's kind of the origin story, if you will.
And it wasn't just Star Trek.
This is from May, June, 1940.
Some people believe this potentially
is one of the first kind of fanzines, which I love.
I like science fiction.
But it's again, it's like just like learning about new things
I think is like in a very low cost kind of way is something
really cool about zines.
I'm going to butcher the Chinese Dazibao, or kind
of big character.
I can't read that.
Can anyone else?
Maybe it's just on my screen.
Anyway, these were kind of in the '60s,
these kind of protest posters.
And you can kind of see on the wall here,
these kind of big characters.
The pro-democracy movement happening in China.
So this is kind of an extension of--
these are maybe huge zines in a way.
And kind of going into even like a more different kind
of substrate in terms of a poster or a flyer even.
And so to me, I think zine culture also kind of alludes
itself to a wide variety of materials, including
posters and wheat pasting, kind of all about that.
So yeah. zines are an incredibly powerful method
of sharing stories and communicating ideas.
Part of this comes from the format,
which feels more casual than a paper or a presentation,
and less time intensive than a full on comic book.
The tactile nature of drawing and creating the book
is satisfying.
Putting pen to paper, and cutting,
and folding to make multiples is easy to do
and quite accessible.
And that's also why I think zines
are such a great thing to do just in general, but also as
an assignment.
Because we are especially during this pandemic,
we are on our screens.
We're digital so much.
It's like, when is the last time that you actually
put pen and paper to each other and or pencil,
or colored pencil, or collage material?
There's something really nice about working with your hands
and creating something that isn't on a screen that's
completely void of pixels.
All right.
So one overarching, I think, commonality in the zine culture
is creating community.
People who made and traded zines created communities
by having similar values, interests.
And I'm all about that.
I think I was saying to some people before this,
collaboration is such a huge part of my practice.
And I think it's a really valuable thing
to do in the classroom and just to do in general.
I think it can give results that are
way that you wouldn't expect and you might not
get just by yourself.
So yeah.
Just an example of creating community with zines, this
is maybe back in the day.
But you might not have known that the girl or guy sitting
next to you in class was into the band Black Flag
until they saw your zine on Black Flag on your desk.
And they're like, whoa, man.
You're into Black Flag.
Me too.
Or someone sees a Riot Grrrl zine,
they know that you have similar values.
You're fighting the patriarchy, you're against sexism,
you're against racism, you're against bigotry.
All these things, that kind of Riot Grrrl movements and zines
kind of stand for.
And so just little ways that zines kind of make community.
So punk zines kind of followed the same guidelines
as regular zines.
They were self written, they were self published,
they were self distributed, and were
made by fans of punk music.
But they kind of had a more narrow focus
that included punk literature, reviews of albums,
or shows, gossip, social commentary, and news.
Slash.
Slash was a punk rock related fanzine
published by Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen
in the United States from 1977 to 1980.
The magazine was a large format tabloid
focused on the LA punk scene.
It was a pretty relatively wide distribution punk scene.
And Slash helped kind of bring the LA underground scene
to the attention of the rest of the world.
And what's really cool about Slash is actually now,
the full archive is available to download
and to look at online for free.
Raymond Pettibone is kind of synonymous also
with Black Flag.
And any art historians and artists out there
will know that name.
He's known for his comic like drawings
with disturbing, ironic, or kind of ambiguous text.
Pettibones' subject matter sometimes violent
antiauthoritarian.
From the late 1970s to the mid 1980s,
he was closely associated with the punk rock band Black Flag
and the record label SST, both of which
were founded by his older brother Greg.
And his drawings come out by the hundreds.
He started to publish them as limited edition
[INAUDIBLE] booklets, otherwise known as zines, in 1978.
These are considered the some of his ideas and aesthetics.
And yeah.
They're really good.
Check them out.
I don't have a picture for this person
I'm going to talk about next.
But he would have been publishing these as well.
His name is V. Vale and he founded the publishing company
RE/Search or research.
And he also founded the magazine Search and Destroy.
He is very instrumental in the punk zine world.
I mean, yeah.
You can't really talk about punk zines in LA and the Bay Area
and around the country without talking
about V. Vale and RE/Search.
But he also published people like William S. Burrows,
and JG Ballard, Genesis P-Orridge,
and he's still around today.
You can find him usually in a non pandemic world at art book
fairs which his booth for RE/Search.
He's quite the character.
These are good examples of kind of what
you want to kind of talk about it
in terms of the aesthetics of zines.
Look at what's going on here.
There's not really a ton of fine detail.
It's more about kind of getting it out there as quickly and as
cheaply as possible.
These are appropriated newspaper cutouts
and appropriated images that are kind of collaged
onto a piece of paper and photocopied.
And then boom.
It's done.
So these are what zines used to be like
and still are and will continue to be.
Riot Grrrl zines were started in Washington DC, kind of Riot
Grrrl Publishing in 1992.
Riot Grrrl zines often describe issues
such as sexism, mental illness, homophobia, and vegetarianism.
One sort of motto that Riot Grrrl zines had is the personal
is always political.
And I really I think that's a great motto
and kind of something that can go beyond zines.
Around the same time, but a little bit before, Bikini Kill,
the band, you might have heard of Kathleen Hanna started
with Kathi Wilcox and Billy Boredom Karren.
Also it was started as a zine first Bikini Kill.
And then from that, actually the band formed.
So given out at gigs, and mailed to an ever increasing network
of girls, the aesthetics of the earliest Riot Grrrl zines
was sexy and subversive.
But kind of what tends to be forgotten
is the highlighted kind of underground cultural figures.
sometimes, they would be a kind of homage
to the artist and AIDS activist David Vojnovic.
I always butcher his last name, who sadly passed away.
But other zines paid tribute to Audre Lorde.
In a pre internet world, Riot Grrrl
spread mostly by paper, flyers, stickers, and letters.
Creating a kind of all girl space
was a key act as was a creation of an all girl mosh pit
at the front of gigs.
I love this one.
It's talking about how punk rock feminism rules.
OK?
So it's like, it's OK to be goofy.
It's OK to have some pompoms and maybe
bring your pompoms to the punk rock mosh pit or whatever.
It's OK to be goofy and dorky.
So from conventions and gigs to tiny support groups,
Riot Grrrl was about building connections and solidarity
between teenage girls.
Sometimes loosen it and sometimes tightly bonded,
Riot Grrrl collectives acted as spaces for discussion
and organizing as well as goofing around, and making up
songs, and community produce zines.
OK, a coloring book.
Another great idea for a zine is a coloring book.
Very simple, very straight to the point.
Makes a great gift.
Just saying.
A holiday gift to your loved ones this year.
Create a coloring book zine.
Why not?
Great kind of example of a photocopy black and white zine
where we have both--
it's a great example of both collage
material and hand drawn material.
Look at this.
Nothing says expensive art book here.
It says, this is [INAUDIBLE] march
for women's lives, and activism, and art, and all these really
cool things into one zine.
Yeah.
I just love the graphicness too of zines, this very much,
it's nothing to do with comics.
But it does still have this kind of very like an economy
of means to it of just pen and paper or pencil and paper.
So here we kind of have a little bit
of a teaser of kind of how we're going to be making our zines.
It's kind of called a foldy zine.
It's a one sheet of paper.
But it will be actually eight pages.
Another way is to actually, this would be a 16 page paper,
but four sheets of paper.
So you have this is what I do for my class.
You have four sheets of paper.
And it's very important you can keep the order.
Otherwise, it's going to be really crazy really fast.
Four sheets of paper is all you need.
And then you have 16 pages of original art.
And kind of when we're talking about these,
we can think of this one's for example as a master copy
where you don't staple it.
So therefore, you can kind of keep
on copying these original pages over and over again.
So when you make your zine, if you want to make a multi page
zine, remember to always have a master copy,
and then you can make copies of your master copy.
They can come in all sorts of shapes, size, formats, colors,
and styles.
Yeah.
Now would be a good time.
I can kind of just pull up my zines I've done.
So here, we have this is my first zine I ever did.
I was asked to participate in a art show slash
kind of zine show.
And it was randomly enough at the National Gallery of Moscow
in Russia.
My friend Alex [INAUDIBLE] invited me to that.
Thanks, Alex.
So yeah.
She kind of left it open ended to kind of do what I wanted to.
But the first half is kind of like a photo kind of diary
of just the time I was living in Paris doing a residency.
And so I kind of just included texts and some photos.
This is a really cute cat that I saw in Morocco
on top of some dried mint.
And then there's documentation of previous exhibitions
that I was in before this was published.
Yeah.
So it can kind of serve as both documentation as well.
And what I kind of wanted to--
we'll transition into Arthur is I definitely
have a background in books and zines.
But my being an artist, I'm kind of more interested
in art zines and art books.
And so that's kind of my background.
The next one that I was doing was this zine here.
New Drawings and Picture Poems.
So one page is what I call these picture poems.
And then one page is drawings, are drawings.
And I have another example of what I call picture poems.
This was published this year for an art fair.
Other places art fair.
It's called Fellini, Bellini, and the Mime.
And it's a risograph print done by Colpa Press in the Bay Area.
And yeah.
So I think of these poems more as a visual drawing,
more of a drawing than a piece of text.
You can kind of try to read the text.
But it's very hard.
And I kind of like that, where you kind of--
the words become almost like shapes.
And the-- and sometimes it's kind of straightforward.
Wi-Fi.
Password.
So yeah.
That's what I do.
I make picture poems usually with my zines.
Some other zines, my friend Felicia made this one.
It's like, documentation of a choreographed dance that she
was doing along with text.
A and an A. Dancer is making an A.
And that I think kind of blurs the line between, what
is an art book?
And what is an art zine?
And so I kind of wanted to kind of quick talk about that.
But our book is the artwork in itself,
it's not a catalog or a monograph.
They are projects for the page.
So you can kind of try and figure out your own definition
for an art zine slash book.
But what I think of it is as it's made by an artist,
the hand of the maker is evident,
it's generally inexpensive, limited,
but the editions are large, they are meant
to be democratically available.
So an artist book can be purely visual or purely linguistic.
Well, with that said, let's bring in Arthur, my friend
Arthur Weiss.
We know each other through the undergrad.
We went to Earlham College.
Arthur and I have been friends for many years.
We're both living in the Bay Area
and now we both live in LA.
And welcome, Arthur.
Thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
Hi Micah.
Hi, everyone.
So going on what everyone's been saying,
my experience with zines has really
kind of transcended from punk rock culture
into art publishing.
And I first got into zines in 1996.
I got a copy of Maximum Rock and Roll
and that changed the trajectory of my life.
It allowed me to be in the underground.
And I made zines all throughout my youth
and when I was in college.
And I haven't made that much work
in zines in the last few years.
But I worked in fine press publishing and art publishing,
I worked for SFMOMA, and I worked for the San Francisco
Center for the Book.
And I worked for The Book Club of California
doing fine press printing and the like.
And
And one of the really big things that I
think about with art books and zine making
is how individual it is, and how democratic it is, and how--
I mean well, I shouldn't say democratic, how just
absolutely for yourself.
You can do whatever you want.
That's the whole point of it is.
You're making a piece of art.
And your art can just be words on a page, or it can be images,
or it could be whatever you want because it's yours.
All you need is a photocopier.
And you don't even need that.
Just get a piece of paper.
And it's like, here.
Here's an example.
This is a set of four different zine art
books done by Lena Gustaffsson.
You know here, Micah.
And Peter Calderwell.
And they're all hand bound.
And they're all printed and beautiful.
And honestly, you can do what you want.
That's the beauty of it.
It's a piece of art that you can hold in your hand
and feel the energy from that piece
be able to be absorbed into you.
And that's what draws me to it.
And it really takes away from just the snobbery
that can be omnipresent in the art world, where it's
like certain people are really [INAUDIBLE] galleries are
saying like, oh yeah.
Well, this is who we're celebrating.
But you know what?
I'm going to make my own work.
And that's DIY.
And that's punk rock.
And that's what's beautiful.
And I mean, I think like--
I mean I have copies.
Here's a great example.
This is Diseased Pariah Press.
This was done in San Francisco in the late 1980s
and early 1990s of people who were dying of AIDS.
Everyone who made this zine was dying at that point.
And they made it funny, and it's artistic.
They recorded albums.
And they did whatever they wanted to do.
And this is a piece of art.
I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal.
And then you get--
let's see.
You got-- I got so much stuff.
Like here.
This is before silicon.
This is during Silicon Valley.
You get to have memory.
You get to create your own set of memories for other people.
You get to see what exists in other people's heads.
And that's so beautiful.
And Micah, you got any questions?
Anything?
No.
No, that's great.
I mean, yeah.
I'm glad you showed those because those are really
good examples of both zines and art books.
[INAUDIBLE] your background is in both of those.
Yeah, like Arthur was just--
I'll piggyback on that.
That's, I think, the, yeah.
The genius of the zine is that it's the thing that's
it's in your hands.
You've made it.
And then you can have it just be one, one and done,
or it can be a huge distribution.
It can be seen by so many people.
And you can use any kind of materials you want.
I like the binding that you showed, that stitch binding.
That's a great example of just multiple ways
that one can bind a book.
You can use staples, you can use thread.
You don't have to use anything.
Yeah.
It's what you want.
This is what, Shitty Poems That I Wrote When I Was--
[INAUDIBLE] Aged 16 to 18.
People put out their memories.
And people's memories are art.
And it begs the question.
It's like, who gets to say what art is?
And who doesn't?
What we hold, what we see, how we see it.
So--
Yeah.
Thanks, Arthur.
You're welcome.
So these are books by the artist Dieter Roth.
He was a Swiss artist but primarily lived
in Iceland, Germany, and America.
He's notorious for food pieces.
He would make these zines out of anything.
And he kind of became known for these food
pieces involved pressing or squashing, his terms of choice,
such ingredients as chocolate, lard, sausage, and fruits,
and vegetables into his books and additions
to great works that would putrefy and disintegrate.
So it was such a cool kind of anticapitalistic way
to think about art.
Right?
And he would sign his name.
He would sign his name Roth because he understood
the pronunciation was kind of a funny thing in terms
of these food zines, these food books.
I Dieter Roth as an artist and especially his books.
They're very just like, I made it.
I don't care if you like it.
And he made hundreds, probably maybe 1,000, he made so many.
Yeah, I just want to briefly touch
on just kind of these briefcase pieces or these briefcase books
that he made.
So everyone talked about, this is a quote from the gallery.
Everyone talked about it.
It was probably one of the more talked
about exhibitions in town.
This was-- sorry.
His first-- this is such a good story.
His first US gallery show was in 1970
at the Eugena Butler Gallery on La Cienega here in Los Angeles.
This is his first--
he was widely celebrated.
Huge artist in Europe, but never shown in America.
He installed 37 suitcases full of cheese
and left them to rot in the summer of 1970.
Everyone talked about it.
It was probably one of the more talked
about exhibitions in town.
People were of course outraged and intrigued by it.
It was very powerful.
You walked along this alley into the gallery.
You could smell it from La Cienega
and it was a good 100 yards from the gallery.
So these were considered art pieces or art books to him.
And this was his very first-- this
is his splash into America.
We can't talk about Dieter Roth without talking
about Ed Ruscha.
This is a great--
Ed Ruscha is a living artist here in Los Angeles.
So Ed Ruscha is known for his paintings but also his books.
And this is kind of an example of one of his books
where he documented the Sunset Strip and the gas stations
on there.
One of the most iconic maybe art books
published by an American artist.
It's incredible.
I think [INAUDIBLE] has the print.
Martin Kippenberger, one of my favorite artists.
This is called Psychobuildings.
And one thing to remember is when
you're at a college, or university, an art school,
oftentimes the library will have original copies of these art
books.
And they won't tell you that they're there.
But you can ask.
And sometimes they will let you put on gloves
and actually hold and handle these original editions.
So I've actually flipped through one of these Psychobuilding
books.
And yeah.
There is no text.
It's just an inventory of architectural detail odd things
juxtaposed with sculptures and portraits of the artist.
Kind a deep cut for art book people and art zine people.
Ulysses Carrion, this one is called The Drum.
Ulysses Carrion was a Mexican conceptual artist
but he kind of relocated to Amsterdam
and lived there until he died.
The Drum was one of Ulysses' early linguistic exercises
in English.
The artist fragments the names of musical instruments
to express a sound.
So he would just write a sound on the page
and then the reader was supposed to kind of reenact that sound,
or say aloud, or make that sound that was on that page,
or that word that's on that page.
So the trumpet, you were going to make the sound of a trumpet.
Or what does the sound of a pet pet do?
Barbara Kruger.
Part of the pictures generation.
Originally this is a poster turned
into a photographic silkscreen print.
Used a lot of text in her work.
Very subversive.
Talked about themes of power, consumerism, and sexuality.
Jenny Holzer, an artist also part
of the picture's generation.
Very similar, used a lot of text,
to talk about power and things like that.
This is kind of randomly thrown in.
This is another example of a Dieter Roth book.
Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise, of a collection
of Jenny Holzer's text pieces.
Zines are also kind of becoming very mainstream.
This is a zine published by Kanye West for the Yeezy
collection.
So if Kanye does it, it's cool.
It's reached that level.
And just really quick, shout out to some publishers
in the Bay Area where I kind of where I got really into zines.
These are Jeffrey and Gabe who are from Unity Press.
They put out a bunch of really amazing zines and skateboards
really celebrating queer culture.
They primarily only publish kind of POC artists and queer
artists.
Tiny Splendor.
My friends Max and Sonna do this.
They're also an amazing press in the Bay.
I don't know if we have time for this.
But real quick I'm going to demonstrate because this
is part of the workshop.
How to make your very own zine.
A rad zine.
So you'll have your piece of paper.
OK?
You're going to fold it lengthwise.
Open it back up.
We're going to fold it the other way.
All right?
Fold it the other way.
All right.
And you're going to fold it this side in half.
Now this side in half until they kind of meet in the middle.
[INAUDIBLE] crisp edges.
And we're running out of time.
I'm so sorry.
All right.
Fold it back again to this.
And take your scissors and cut halfway
to the middle right here.
All right.
Good.
Now fold it back out again, hold it down, and then accordion
style into each other.
OK, and then you have your very own zine.
And now you can start making your own zines.
Well, clearly we need more time to have a zine party.
Look at each other's bookshelves,
discuss zine history and culture,
and share great stories.
Just a few little bits of housekeeping.
Roman did put a link to a quick survey in the chat.
So if y'all would take a minute to do that,
we'd greatly appreciate it.
Thanks, everybody for coming.
Stay safe and be well.
Thank you, everyone.
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