RECEIVED: Edition #1 of Cheryl Penn's (Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa) AmaZing Zine w/ Bennett, TIC TAC, Tarantino, Vermeulen, Wintzer, Wahl, Skybridge, Nancy Bell Scott & more & more!

[De Villo Sloan]

Cover of the first edition of Cheryl Penn's (South Africa) mail-art zine.

 

September 23, 2012 - Like other contributors and IUOMA members who have seen the gorgeous scans, I was excited when Cheryl Penn's zine arrived in my mailbox and I could finally hold it and thumb through it at my leisure.

The care, individualization, production quality, and outstanding work of the contributors make the issues art objects - in accordance with Cheryl's book artist aesthetic. In addition to consistently stellar mail-art, the zine contains a wealth of visual poetry, asemics, haptics and other forms that have found a welcoming and sustaining place in the Eternal Network. 

 

 

The contributors range from longtime network veterans and even a few living legends to a newer generation:

 

 

For this blog, I include scans of selected pieces that caught my eye for one arcane reason or another. I had not intended or presumed to document Cheryl's project, which has been done very well elsewhere; however, the work is all so incredible I have fallen just a little short of scanning the entire thing.

In terms of trends, I do see a strong visual poetry presence as well as a healthy Fluxus representation, including Christine Tarantino (USA) and Roland Halbritter (Germany) who are not active at the IUOMA and perhaps less familiar.

The edition has a strong opening with Cheryl's introduction and the digital magic of RCBz (Minnesota, USA):

 

As with other projects, Cheryl thanks our IUOMA leader and founder Ruud Janssen (Netherlands). I suspect IUOMA again provided an ideal meeting place in cyberspace to help coordinate her project.

 

 

On the left (above) is work by Giovanni and Renata Stra DA DA (Italy) - a new discovery for me. On the right is vispo by John M. Bennett (USA). John has been a fellow traveller, more like a guide, on the dusty trail for a long time. I always like to see what he has been up to. Cheryl also included a Bennett poem, and I am forever an avid fan:

 

The piece on the right is, I think, by Morlina Marina (Italy) - new to me also. Cheryl attracted fine submissions from Italy, including work by Bruno Cassaglia, Claudio Romeo, and Tiziana Baracchi.

 

 

What a thrill to have all this under the same cover! The zine includes this fantastic piece (above) by conceptual artist TIC TAC (Germany) with more of her thought-provoking and completely distinctive, reality-bending pieces including, yes, a TIC TAC hole!

 

 

On the left is the other side of TIC TAC's page, and on the right is work by Roberto Keppler (Brazil), a fine visual  poet, asemic writer, and conceptualist, among other things.

 

 

Here is Tiziana Baracchi's contribution, solidly Fluxus and asemically inclined. 

 

 

I like Christine Tarantino's piece a great deal, and you can see more at her FLUX USA blog, which is a "must bookmark."

http://fluxusa.blogspot.com/

 

 

IUOMA staple Guido Vermeulen (Belgium) has been producing fantastic collages and poems lately at a dizzying pace. Cheryl's zine has reaped the benefits. Above is poem by Guido Vermeulen. Continued below:

 

 

 

And more:

 

 

I maintain all the greatest collage masters of the world are in Belgium, but that's just me.

 

 

Marie Wintzer (Japan) submitted some beautiful (but flaky) visual poetry and a sample of her poetry. 

 

Lesley Magwood Fraser, a vital member of Cheryl Penn's South African Correspondance School, gave this beautiful work to the zine.

Svenja Wahl's (Germany) stylized beasts are among my favs. I am an avid follower of her "Creature of the Month" postings. Additionally, I think she is an incredible collage artist, so I will treasure her zine contribution (above) for a very long time. 

 

 

And what would any project in mail-art be today were it not to include work by Katerina Nikoltsou (Greece)? 

 

 

I have participated in a number of projects with Skybridge Studios (USA) and maintain a fairly consistent correspondence with her. Part of the allure is the surprise. You never know what style or approach "Miss Lisa" might adopt on any given day. I think her zine page (above) provides a particularly fine example of a retro style she sometimes uses that references the Victorian or perhaps a turn of the 19th of the 20th century like, maybe, something out of Henry James. 

 

 

More Skybridge work can be seen on the left. I will conclude with a vispo fragment (right) by Nancy Bell Scott (USA). When considering the old question about what reading material you would take if you were to be marooned on a desert island, I would have to choose this first edition of Cheryl Penn's zine.

 

I believe the model Cheryl is using for this project is the Assembling Zine. Contributors prepare their own pages following guidelines. For instance, for a zine with an edition of 100, you would send 100 finished copies of your pages to the coordinator. The coordinator - no longer exactly in the traditional role of editor - then assembles and distributes the zine. If contributors are in geographic proximity, assembling would be a group effort and there might not be a coordinator, as in Cheryl's case there is.

 

Many assembling zines gather content through open calls, so selection is relatively egalitarian. Labor and cost are distributed in a way that seeks to be equitable and removes the need/danger of control by an individual or institution whose primary power is derived from access to capital. Rising postage costs, however, must surely be a challenge to this older model. 

 

Assembling zines are an established part of the mail-art network and akin to the add-and-pass concept. The form also seems to have roots in avant literary efforts of the 1960s. As a veteran of the Age of Zines, I have seen many of these in circulation and also others held in various archives and collections. They vary wildly in content and production quality. You can imagine Xerox or mimeo efforts.

 

For me, Cheryl's zine ranks very high among any I have ever seen in categories ranging from production quality to the range of artists represented. In addition to including many friends and contacts, it also provides a record of the state of mail-art as well as visual poetry at this moment in time. While many have concluded zines are obsolete in the Digital Age, Cheryl has modified the process and product so there is a digital component but also an art-poetic object.

All in all, stellar work by Cheryl that is deeply appreciated. For more, make sure to visit Cheryl Penn's blog:

http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/

 

MAIL-ART PSYCHIC

"No! I prefer MinXus!"

http://minxuslynxus2.wordpress.com/

 

[Marie Wintzer]

Yet anOTHer new scanner at the mink ranch? Dw is becoming very high maintenance!

[De Villo Sloan]

Thanks Marie, more support for the zine as object contingent.

OMG - scanner workout yes. On Tic Tac's scan you can see a filmy residue of one of Dw's "scannerbed compositions" that did not respond to ammonia & towel. It looks like the dumped bran cereal and milk that dried on the glass.I'm horrified. He better sell Mink Ranch souvenirs to buy a new scanner.

[Marie Wintzer]

And that gave your scanner some workout!! 

[Marie Wintzer]

Oh it's a page turner. And a great blog. I received it a couple of weeks ago and still have it on the table in front of me and enjoying a dip into  mail-art town every now and then. Yes, it gets a little expensive and time consuming (even more so for the one who is binding all this and sending them out) but totally worth the effort.

[De Villo Sloan]

Rebecca - "Miss Becca" - your are too kind. I regret I could not have written much more about the work in the zine.

Guido - many thanks for sharing your ideas for those interested in assembling zines & collab books - especially Cheryl's projects.

I think you make a great point about how these publications could be practical now and not an exercise in nostalgia or obsolete technologies, as some must surely view it.

In what I call the Age of Zines - right before the net became dominant - it seems like everyone had to have a zine where they copied mail-art and other material and then sent them on to friends. Maybe they were really newsletters. They disappeared overnight as people moved to blogs. Most were crude and utilitarian (of course that's a winning quality on one level).

Both you and Cheryl seem to suggest another model for the present involving quality and uniqueness, if that's a fair summation.

I hope we hear from Cheryl on this topic too!

Thanks again

[Guido Vermeulen]

Good observations DVS about assembly zines. the raising cost of postal services (except for commercial enterprises who distribute on a large scale their garbage) is killing slowly the creative artistic small editions!

This for me is a reason why I back Cheryl’s efforts for more than 100/100 if that would be possible!

On the other hand I would like that mail artists still participating in such efforts also increase the quality of their contributions, so they become really unique and wonderful places of gathering. This is 2 good to just produce a cheap copy in limited numbers. Okay, I know this is opposite to the mail art spirit but in the case of compilation magazines my advise is to «let’s try to make our contributions our best work possible».

I also like your appreciation of Christine T. She is quite incredible in fact.

[Rebecca Guyver]

Brilliant blog DVS! Great to see.

[De Villo Sloan]

Well there will be other opportunities. And now that your Trashpo is being translated into English, who knows? And your Trashpo exhibition is attracting some fantastic work but that's a lot of time and attention.

I'm guilty of focusing maybe a little too much on friends here, but the complete edition can be found elsewhere, as close as the Collab Books group. There's Frieder Speck, Roland Halbritter ( a legend for sure who G-Man calls Holy All Bitter), Dellaforia in Australia. Cheryl really outdid herself bringing all of it together, IMHO.

The sad thing, that you bring up, is that even these collective things are EXPENSIVE now. You can have a digital version, but people having these zines & being able to experience the haptic dimension can't be duplicated in scans. A lot is lost. A lot of the pages seem to have been done individually with collage material glued in, etc. I would hate to see that disappear.

[DKeys]

I wish I had, but had too many time and financial constraints--so I get to stand on the sidelines and enjoy the show. I really love the addition of the stamps and addressess. I can usually pinpoint whose work is whose without looking at the names, but this time I had quite a few surprises. Nancy's is the most recognizable. It's always hard to miss a project like this!

[De Villo Sloan]

Diane, I haven't followed Cheryl's lists enough to know if you are going to be in one of these editions. I hope so. That would be great! D-Kollectibles!

In addition to the amazing work, I'm really interested in what Cheryl is doing because she seems to be using the Assembling Zine concept, which has a long history in mail-art art as well as avant literature. In fact, there is an Assembling Zine group at the IUOMA.

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/group/assemblingzines

Thanks DK!