Micro-post #162: A description of avant-garde zines 100 years ago

The following is pulled from the book 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design by Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne, which I'll link for an article about it at The Margainalian below the description.

An image of the cover of Merz No. 11 (found here)

IDEA N° 41 - AVANT-GARDE ZINES

Magazines as laboratory for artistic experiment.

"The early twentieth century was littered with journals and gazettes created by artists to serve as soapboxes for their quirky ideas. Futurist, Dadaist and Surrealist art provocateurs wrote dissonant poetry, composed asymmetric typography, pasted expressive collages, and printed it all in crudely produced publications. Each movement, in its own way, proffered the Modernist notion that art was a total experience. These art and culture periodicals, or ‘zines’, were weapons of cultural warfare, attacking convention.

Alternative culture periodicals informed and entertained, but they also provoked action and reaction. Type and image on paper triggered visceral responses. Avant-gardists flagrantly refused to appeal to mass taste. In Italy, Germany, Switzerland and France avant-garde periodicals such as Futurismo, Noi, Dada, Merz and La Révolution Surréaliste were designed to rally the faithful while offending the conventional.

Radical ideas had to appear avant-garde to be avant-garde. Graphic design was the code of revolt. Words were the building blocks of meaning but typography, layout and image did more than simply frame ideas: they telegraphed intent. The sensory impact on the reader effected through raw type composition marked the end of beauty as the accepted standard. The design of most Dada publications during the early 1920s, for example, both intentionally and intuitively disrupted professional design standards. Dadaists, such as Kurt Schwitters, appropriated graphic elements from mainstream printing sources and wedded them to Futurist and Cubist pictorial theories of disruption and fragmentation. Standard typefaces were not just mere letterforms composed in neatly regimented columns; they were used as textures applied to a tabula rasa.

Radical design ideas, however, eventually filtered into the mainstream. Jan Tschichold’s Die Neue Typographie codified Modern design. Kurt Schwitters’s personal zine, Merz, was at various times transformed from an experimental outlet for avant-gardisms into a sample book of progressive graphic design, where he exhibited ways of applying Tschichold’s principles to commercial advertisements.

The lifespan of an avant-garde zine depended on how long it continued to offend or surprise or both. Once entrepreneurs the profitability in controlled offensiveness, radical ideas were invariably consumed by the very culture they once affronted. After the initial shock of Surrealism wore off it quickly became a favored advertising and marketing style, tapping into the public’s fascination for dreamlike allure. Strands of Futurist DNA were present in many 1970s zines, which borrowed the punk aesthetic.

As digital media rise in prominence, today’s print magazines must jump through hoops to be truly avant-garde. The twice-yearly arts magazine Esopus does not take advertising, which in itself is radical. But it also publishes art and artists who are on the fringes. If avant-garde pushes the boundaries, then print design - which could be considered retrograde - is now arguably avantgarde. That Esopus continues the tradition so boldly makes it a viable model for the new avant-garde zine."

- from 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design by Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne