Their way of seeing and doing was not borrowed from a book, nor was it carefully cross-referenced and cited rather it was, if you’ll forgive the word, organic. What was amazing to me, coming from years of sterile academic and political debates on the Left, in which culture was often in the past dismissed as irrelevant to the ‘real struggle,’ was that zines seemed to form a true culture of resistance. Duncolmbe first contact with zines produced a sense of wonder. After thirty years immersed in mail art and zine networks, this is the article, expressly written for the readers of Factsheet Five, that culminates the experience.īoth Duncolmbe and McLaughlin write as if zinesters and other alternative cultural workers are unconscious theorists, blindly stumbling into the spirit of their times, and unwittingly aiding cultural theorists define some post-modern condition. I’m writing this examination of alternative cultures for zinesters, punks, the mail art community and other alt.networkers toiling in the cultural underground. Intellectually distanced, dipping in to get a sense of the scene under their own terms and preconceptions, they write for their colleagues and tenure. Both works are well-written accounts of the alternative cultural scene by post-modern academics glancing at the other. I’ve read two books recently that I grudgedly respect: Steven Duncolmbes’ Notes from the Underground: zines and the politics of alternative culture, and Thomas McLaughlins’ Street Smarts and Critical Theory. “They will go underground,” Duchamp declared.2 “What will happen to serious artists who hope to retain these qualities in their work,” she asked.
Driving Duchamp to his train after his engagement, Jean questioned him about the future of art with its current emphasis on consumer, rather than spiritual values. In 1962 Jean Brown was asked to lend a small number of works by Marcel Duchamp in honor of the artist’s visit to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. I continue Jean’s efforts in tracing, participating, and documenting contemporary manifestations of the avant-garde. The collection she amassed currently resides in the Getty Museum for the Arts and Humanities. After repeated visits, we developed a friendship based on mutual interests and our shared profession of public librarianship. She is after elusive connections, the small interstices that relate the recent past to less-publicized present-day directions…Other borderline movements she considers extensions of Dada and also perhaps Fluxus are (Mail) Art and Lettrisme.”1 As I was just becoming interested in rubber stamp and mail art, I went to visit Jean Brown to learn more about them. Critic Katherine Kuh wrote of her that, “It is always the marginal she stresses – such manifestations as concrete poetry, rubber stamp art, the vagaries of video.
I first read of the late art collector Jean Brown in a 1976 article, The Preservation of the Avant-Garde. DADA TO DIY: The Rise of Alternative Cultures in the Twentieth Century By John Held Jr.
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