'Zines for a day: Matthew Higgs on the other art press - Writing the '80s - ZG magazine - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

In 1980 I had yet to enter an art gallery. Likewise, I was unaware of Artforum's existence--or, for that matter, any other art magazine's--until I came across ZG. Rooting through the anarchist periodicals and music fanzines at Grassroots, Manchester's most progressive bookshop, I stumbled on the debut issue. ZG didn't look out of place there. Its signature black, white, and red color scheme mirrored the revolutionary graphic style of the leftist political titles it shared shelf space with; Garrard Martin's spare, artful design echoed the austere corporate identities of influential independent record labels such as Tony Wilson et al.'s Factory Records and Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records. Curious, I forked over fifty pence, unaware that my world was about to change.

ZG's founder and editor was Rosetta Brooks, who in the early '70s had been assistant director of Gallery House, an influential experimental artists' space lodged in a run-down mansion close to London's Albert Hall. In the (very) late '70s and (very) early '80s, Britain was at loggerheads with itself. On the one hand, it was a society pregnant with potential (arising, to a great degree, from its effervescent popular cultures), while on the other, it was a society inextricably caught up in a deep, prolonged economic (and spiritual) recession. Somehow everything felt political, and ZG seemed, even to a naive fifteen-year-old, to be trying to reconcile--and interrogate--these social and cultural contradictions.

Started with a seven-hundred-pound bank loan (about $1,500), ZG was born out of Brooks's desire to expand the possibilities--and the audience--for art, a field she saw as becoming increasingly ghettoized. In her inaugural editorial Brooks laid out the territory that the new magazine would seek to address. Opening somewhat pessimistically, Brooks reflected that:

Trends in the '70s make the prospects seem gloomy for a magazine which intends to deal with diverse areas of cultural activity. [...] The loss of a mainstream has given the impression of a culture of ghettoes. This has meant the erection of false barriers between different worlds of cultural experience and a return to the safety of traditional ideas.

For Brooks, art was increasingly isolated. Describing the art world as "a cottage industry protected by a minority group of conservationists," she proposed instead that ZG would privilege newly emergent and "self-consciously borderline activities" that "refuse to accept the self-imposed limits of their cultural microcosm." What excited Brooks most was the potential offered up by "hybrid styles." Just as different types of music such as reggae, punk, and funk were increasingly "mere ingredients within an overall stylistic mix," Brooks wrote in her editorial, so too fashion was "no longer the simple identification with the lifestyle to which one aspires." Rather it was "tending to become a symbolic articulation of one image in relation to many images." As for art, Brooks saw "the rediscovery of the image as a reality of broad cultural experience" as proferring a sustainable challenge to "the purism of art fed only on its own history." Seen together, Brooks concluded, these new hybrid social and cultural manifes tations sought to "challenge our most deep-rooted orientations to the world whether they are in terms of art/culture, elite/popular or male/female."

Possessed of an almost missionary zeal, ZG would introduce me to an art world I could scarcely have imagined. Brooks's colliding of popular music with other cultural (and social) forms would stimulate this impressionable teenager's as yet unformed ideas about both. Twenty-three years on, Brooks's focus on identifying and scrutinizing overlapping, mutating, and merging cultural and social territories remains convincing. That said--and Brooks's editorial aside--the first issue of ZG was something of a disappointment. Articles on Giulio Paolini, Bruce McLean, and Duggie Fields, a curious, dandyish figure known as much for his sartorial savvy as for his paintings, hardly laid siege to art's ivory towers. Essays on Factory Records, Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979), and ska revivalists the Beat--not to mention Brooks's own "BlitzCulture," a quasi-sociological account of London's tribal nightlife, notable for its accompanying image of a seventeen-year-old Boy George--offered little more than a critical spin on the then emergent style press. (Both i-D and The Face were launched roughly contemporaneously with ZG. At that time Brooks was teaching at London's St. Martin's School of Art, where her students included Sade and John Galliano.) In retrospect ZG no. I looks somewhat hastily assembled. Brooks's desire to conflate club culture--then centered around venues like Covent Garden's Blitz, where Steve Strange hosted proto-New Romantic nights--with more traditional art practices seems unfocused and unresolved.

Indeed, little in ZG's inaugural issue prepared the reader for the complex proposition that was ZG no. 2. (1980). The sophomore issue was effectively a different magazine. Its central theme--sadomasochism--would be interrogated through conflicting inquiries into "violent images of sexuality" as they manifested themselves in film, fashion, art, and music. To my sixteen-year-old eyes (and mind), ZG's "sadomasochism issue was incendiary. It opened with "Mistaken Identities," Dick Hebdige's account-interwoven with a textual collage of contemporary news reports--of the brutal and sordid death of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious's muse and partner in crime, Nancy Spungen. (Here Spungen emerges as an almost sympathetic character, a victim at the hands of both a scandal-mongering-and patriarchal-press and the waywardly violent Vicious.) Elsewhere, reports from the subterranean worlds of s/in (straight, gay, and what have you) were framed alongside Brooks's essay "Brutality Chic," which considered the sadomasochistic tendencies in the fashion photography of Jean-Paul Goude, David Bailey, and Helmut Newton ("Clothes to be raped in, shoes to be found dead in, a scarf to be strangled by, the promises of Newton's photographs are of violence, bestiality and death"). An interview with Vivienne Westwood in her post-Sex Seditionaires Kings Road store preceded Bernard Tschumi's essay "Erotic Spaces," which was followed by a survey of sadomasochistic graphic art that would introduce me to the work of Tom of Finland. Brian Hatton's essay on Gunher Brus, the subject of a major exhibition at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1979; Raymond Durgnat's examination of Barbet Schroeder's 1976 film Maitresse; and Antonio Lagarto's essay pegged on William Friedkin's controversial Al Pacino vehicle Cruising (1980) further troubled my teenage view of the world--sexual or otherwise.