In September 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), announced that it was staging The Making of a Museum Publication, an exhibition that displayed the entire production process of its own publications, step by step. From manuscript through to multiply-reproduced object, typeset and laid-out, printed and bound, the MoMA show not only reinforced the critical role of printed matter as a medium for display in a modern art museum but also ushered in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity in relation to the catalog as an object of art-historiographical attention. In the subsequent ninety years, the question of precisely how to exhibit and then (even more crucially) document and record for posterity material that it is inherently impossible to see all at once—the bind of the bound—has continued to confound art historians and curators, editors and designers alike. Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, first an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (and later at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and then a book edited by Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer, copublished with Phaidon, is perhaps no exception in this vein, confronting such a challenge head on. Indeed, the project’s working title at its inception, “An Incomplete History of Zines by Artists,” might be seen as an implicit acknowledgment of this quandary (11). Mitigation included a webpage titled “Zines: Read at Your Own Risk” that provided an opportunity to “flip through full digitized versions of selected zines,” (although for “flip” read “scroll”), as well as the inclusion in the exhibition galleries of a reading space where visitors could peruse “a selection of physical zines and reprints,” a common feature in displays of such material since at least the 1970s. Vast in scale, bringing together in one volume more than eight hundred objects, the Phaidon publication in particular nonetheless succeeds in imaginatively crystallizing the xerographic culture so essential to the format of zines.

Defying straightforward definition, given the wide range of forms and subject matters, perhaps the most useful yardstick remains media scholar Stephen Duncombe’s often-cited characterization of zines as “noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves.” Beginning with the mimeograph and later the photocopier, zines are inextricable from the rise and availability of affordable technologies of reproduction; cocurators Joseph and Sawyer were faced with the task of conveying the centrality for zines of such processes, not to mention participatory practices, in the historical account that they produced. Appropriately enough, one of the most significant residues of this lies in the material reality (and design choices) of the exhibition catalog itself, which subtly—but effectively—conjures up in physical form aspects of the historical phenomenon (and object type) that it sets out to chart.

Such a maneuver seems to be all the rage of late: from Iris Moon’s Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024), printed on light blue paper stock with a white gloss tipped-in plate section (a combination emulating the distinctive colors of the English potter’s jasperware that was the subject of her book), to Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023), a counter-monograph comprised of four individual volumes brought together in one slipcase (echoing the modularity and rearrangeability of much of the artist’s practice and output), such strategies adhere to the historiographical tendency long ago identified by Michael Ann Holly whereby representational practices encoded in works of art continue to be encoded in their commentaries, though in these instances not merely rhetorically but visually and materially. Where Moon and Bryan-Wilson’s publications, however, enact a transmedial process, turning one object type into a different one, Copy Machine Manifestos, by contrast, needed only to contend with one that was intermedial in nature: the translation of one form of printed matter into another. Such a task in relation to magazines is nothing new: for their 1975 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, for example, the collective Art & Language produced a publication consciously mirroring the exact form of their own periodical, Art-Language. Unable to replicate the at times scruffy, often homespun, and above all fragile nature of much of their material, the team behind the Phaidon book, buttressed by the need for commercial viability, innovatively committed to historical documentation via material allusion.

The four hundred and forty-eight-page perfect-bound volume adheres to the genre of exhibition catalog and its conventions in many ways: collections of photographs of objects, interspersed with thematic and contextualizing essays. And yet, in this instance these texts have been printed not on the same white matt stock as the images of the zines themselves, but instead upon a variety of pastel shades of paper: just the kind that one might expect to see stacked behind the counter in a copy shop. Xerox Symphony, a recent company brochure explains, “is a comprehensive range of colored papers that helps you diversify your presentation tools.” Irresistible as a metaphor for the entire project, if we are to imagine Copy Machine Manifestos as a Xerox Symphony then it is surely more Boulez than Beethoven, more punk than pastoral. The volume’s cover, meanwhile, similarly foregrounds the aesthetics and processes of the photocopier; G. B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce’s cover for issue 8 of J.D.s from 1991 is translated to the dust jacket of Copy Machine Manifestos, reproducing a photograph of the pair posing as Andy Warhol and Ingrid Superstar. Evidently copied over and over again, the image degraded or deteriorated over multiple iterations, it indexes, amongst other things, a culture of bootlegging and underground circulation that coalesces around zines such as this.

Whilst thoughtful design choices evoke vestiges of the milieux in which zines may have been produced, there are inevitable aspects of their facture and use that cannot necessarily make it to the pages of the catalog, most of all their tactility and interactivity. As Gwen Allen writes in her excellent introductory essay to the volume, “we all know a zine when we see one or hold it in our hands” (17). But, of course, the aura of such hapticity withers in the face of reproduction. Confronted by such challenges, a number of contemporary zine-makers have—quite literally—taken the matter into their own hands. Neta Bomani, for instance, whose work appears in the final section of Copy Machine Manifestos, regularly turns to Instagram to document her prolific practice. The posts on her account @netazines often feature multiple views of any given zine, nearly always photographed being held in her own hands, in a fashion not dissimilar to Asmaa Walton’s shots of books as part of her @blackartlibrary. Bomani has also made video works that incorporate such maneuvers. Indeed, stills from her ongoing Dark Matter Objects: Technologies of Capture and Things that Can’t Be Held (begun 2018), a work that she terms “a multimedia zine,” and which examines computational history in relation to race and gender, are reproduced in the pages of Copy Machine Manifestos.

Bomani’s work is situated alongside other zines by a number of Black artists who investigate and critique contemporary models of publishing, including Kandis Williams (Cassandra Press), and Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell (BlackMass Publishing). As contributor Tavia Nyong’o argues, drawing on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, these artists variously conceptualize the zine as “a form of communication from the undercommons” (348). The medium’s potential for “documenting and galvanizing communities and subcultural practices” has long been recognized as a cornerstone of their radical political promise (131). What Julie Chu has theorized as an oppositional media practice, zines’ capacity for, as well as reliance upon, mutual participation is one borne out across the range of auxiliary published material beyond the catalog, produced in association with the display, above all with a view to subsequent zine production: “zines encourage readers to make their own zines” (19). Available to take away from the exhibition, and afterward to download from the Brooklyn Museum website, the instructional “How to plan a zine project,” in fact written by Bomani, is coupled with the invitation for visitors to leave behind zines that they had made themselves (in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, making coworkers out of readers or spectators). Such strategies all clearly gesture to what we might consider an expanded field of open-access museum publishing fit to meet our contemporary moment.

The frontispiece of Copy Machine Manifestos reproduces the frontispiece of From Dowdaland Archives, a bound anthology from 1973 of photocopies gathered by mail artist John Dowd, and no doubt an intentional meta-commentary on the part of Joseph and Sawyer. Dowd’s playful opening page is an appropriated xerox machine maintenance call sheet, underscoring the importance of this technology not just for making zines, but also for making histories of them. From the outset, it prompts readers to reflect upon how one might display and then catalog such an array of replicated material. Whereas in 1934 the Publications Department of MoMA sought to demystify the making of a museum publication, today Copy Machine Manifestos reminds us that there is no singular effective way to stage and record an exhibition of printed matter. Rather, we should be looking to wider publishing ecologies that encompass diverse objects and platforms, much as the medium of the zine has done itself over the years: a xerox symphony of publications, all working in concert.