Tag: mail art

John Held: Mail art is an interesting and fascinating network because there was so much stuff going on within it. I only dwell on mail art because it has a lot of similarities to zinedom. Around maybe 2010, somewhere around there, I placed 3,600 mail art zines in the MoMA New York Library. That just is an indication of how widespread zine publications were in mail art alone. We’re not even talking about Factsheet Five now, or anything like that. These zines were all before Factsheet Five got started in 1982. The zines I’m talking about were still in the 70s.

F5Archive: I don’t remember if Gunderloy cited a lot of involvement in mail art, because so much of what he was doing at that time was sci-fi stuff. He was doing things with fandom and sci-fi in California.

John Held: I was in Utica until 1981. He was in Rensselaer I believe.

F5Archive: He was in Massachusetts around the first issue, or first few issues, and then he moved to Rensselaer, near Albany.

John Held: Right. Well, that’s when I picked up on him, when he was in Albany. But he knew right away where I was at. You know, I was just another category. I mean, mail art was just another category in zinedom. But he knew right away what was going on. Like you said, he was more interested in science fiction, he wasn’t really an art guy, but saw that there was this whole art network that was widespread and publishing. And to me, it was… it was basically the same thing, you know?

F5Archive: How did you guys connect? Was it… did you reach out to him, or did he reach out to you, or was he reviewing your zines?

John Held: I probably reached out to him. I was just a small fish at this time. Believe me, I had no name for myself or anything like that. I was just getting started. I must have corresponded with him. I don’t think I ever talked to him on the phone. I never met him. But I started writing for him. I guess the first article I did for him was in February 1990. I wrote an article called “80s Mail Art Networking,” which was kind of an overview of what happened in mail art during the 80s. Then in April 1990, which I guess was the next issue, I wrote an article called “Networking the 90s,” foretelling what I thought was going to happen. Those are the only two articles I wrote for Gunderloy. I can’t remember if I was doing any reviews for him or not, to tell you the truth.

F5Archive: But eventually, you did… you wrote reviews for Seth.

John Held: I did, yeah. But I don’t think I did anything for Gunderloy. I just kind of kept up with him about what the mail art scene was doing, and this and that, and what happened is… in 1981, I moved away from Utica. I got divorced, and moved down to Dallas, Texas, where I became the art librarian at the Dallas Public Library. And I still stayed in contact with the mail art scene, and was becoming a big archivist at this point. I shipped two cartons down before I moved. One was my clothes. And the other box was the mail art. I started putting together the mail art thing with the library thing and started building up an archive and really going after this stuff because there’s just a lot of collectible stuff in mail art, you know? There’s the zines, there’s the artist’s postage stamps, there’s the rubber stamp works, artist books — there’s just all sorts of facets to mail art. And a lot of times, they overlap with the zine world and everything.

So anyway, I’m in Dallas from 1981 to 1995, and when I decided to leave the library in Dallas I moved to San Francisco because I had a friend in the mail art network, a real pioneer of it, named Bill Gaglione, who had a rubber stamp store in San Francisco called Stamp. He went to de Stempelplaats Gallery, you know, the gallery in Amsterdam where I had that first show. He went there with his wife at the time, Anna Banana, and they had a show there and everything. So he was very familiar with de Stempelplaats, and he brought me in so we could kind of replicate it in San Francisco. So I was moving to San Francisco, so I got in touch with Seth. I guess I didn’t know him too well. But I got in touch with him, and I said, when I come to San Francisco maybe we’d think about me doing some reviews for you. I got along really well with Seth and his second in command, Chris Becker. They were the two people running the show at Factsheet Five at the time. They asked me what I wanted to review and I said, I want to review the sex magazines… so that was my specialty. I got all these crazy titles in the mail.

I just want to share one thing with you, because before this interview I went to see what I had on my computer. [moves with tablet around the room to bookshelf] So, I’m gonna read some… some titles for you which were some of the first things that I reviewed. One is Bitches with Whips. Black Giantess… and Black Giantess was my favorite. It was this guy who was into, like, black women, you know, and would crawl in their vaginas and things like that. It was pretty weird. Another one called Bedoir Noir … Little Hustler … Meeting the Master … Stretch Marks, Pucker Up, I mean, so these were some of the sex zines.

But there was also the Cleveland Poetry Review, the Situation International, Neoism and Plagiarism, so I was keeping my head in mail art. At the same time as well, let me see some other titles here, because they’re just so amusing… Damsels in Distress, EDO’s Exotic Magazine, Hair to Stay. Hair to Stay was one of my favorites … women with a lot of body hair. The Lady O Society, Porn Free, Pucker Up, Climax Times, Sexual Heresies. But also, letter exchange and some mail art things as well. Dr. Duffy Doolittle, which was just kind of a regular zine.

So from 1995 until the end of Factsheet Five, which was 1998, I was reviewing, and then I had moved. Eventually I moved in with Chris Becker, which was about as close to Factsheet Five as you can get, quite frankly, you know, because so, from that point on, I was in on the daily decisions and the general discussions that were going on around it. And Seth became, you know, one of my best friends. He was married and had a child. His wife, Miriam Wolf, was an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which was the big alternative paper in town, so she was a force in her own right, believe me. She was a really great editor, and she gave me book reviews to do for The Guardian and all that kind of stuff, so I’m owing to her.

Things started to run down about 1997 or so. First, the place where I was working, the Stamp Art Gallery, was going bankrupt. So, I left and I started working with Chris who was working at a Borders bookstore in downtown San Francisco.  And there were things going on in Seth’s life. About this time, 1997 or 1998, there was a documentary film being made about Seth’s family: Capturing the Friedmans. And it won a major award at Sundance, was nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary film division. And what the film was about was his family caught up in a child sex thing. Seth’s father was a computer guy and he was giving classes to kids after school. He was charged with child molestation. Him and one of his sons. There were 3 sons. Seth was the middle son. And one son was a clown. The filmmakers’ focus was going to be on clowns in New York City, but when he found out about this particular clown, this Friedman clown, he did the whole documentary just on the family going to jail and trying to get their freedom back. But Seth was the only one in the family who didn’t want any part of this at all. So he wasn’t in the film. You can imagine, you know, how he felt about it.

F5Archive: Right, right.

John Held: I mean, his father died in prison. It was just a mess, so… it was all kind of coming to a head. Capturing the Friedmans came out in 2003 but I believe, you know this was weighing on his mind a lot before that. So you’ll notice that Seth kind of turned things over to Chris Becker for the last couple of issues and everything and made him editor. I just think he was floored by this whole thing that was going on and eventually he left San Francisco. He changed his name.

F5Archive: Oh, wow.

John Held: I haven’t spoken to him since he left San Francisco. It was a pretty sad ending.

F5Archive: In the final issue, he talks about starting a magazine about wine, and about wine tasting.

John Held: I think he might have put out one issue. But maybe that was just a talking point to get off the stage. I mean, he was into wine. This is wine country and everything, and it was probably, you know, a good idea.

F5Archive: But the rumors were that he was trying to sell it for some big price tag, and no one would buy it, and so it just dissolved. I think back to the Stephen Duncombe book, Notes from Underground, and there’s a chapter in there that contrasts perspectives on alternative culture at the time, which is that Gunderloy was the anarchist, and Friedman was the entrepreneur. He interviews Gunderloy quite a bit, but doesn’t really spend any time with Friedman. In some ways Friedman kinda gets thrown under the bus as a symbol of the commercialism of the 90s via the selling out of alternative culture. I don’t know if that was particularly fair.

John Held: I don’t think so. I mean, Seth had very different motives, I guess, than Gunderloy, you know, who was more of a purist. Seth was just very practical. I mean, he saw the need for this after Hudson Luce kind of flubbed up his single issue.

F5Archive: Well even Luce’s fate is sad. On the Talk page for Wikipedia’s entry on Factsheet Five, he shares a pretty tragic story. It was one disaster after another and he just couldn’t do it.

John Held: No, uh-uh. My feeling at the time was he really didn’t know a lot about zines. I don’t know where he was coming from, to tell you the truth. I never felt very confident about Luce, especially when he pulled in this one guy to be his mail art consultant who I thought was a major idiot. I wasn’t really a big fan of that single issue. But Seth did the right thing by stepping up and saving it. It probably wouldn’t have gone on otherwise if Seth didn’t take it on. He was a very practical guy. He was a computer guy and at this point Factsheet Five was so big that you needed somebody with computer skills to run this machine, you know? 

F5Archive: That’s what I think is so interesting about zine culture. Gunderloy was running bulletin board systems when he ran Factsheet Five, I think the difference was Gunderloy was working 80 or 90 hours a week and I just don’t think it was a sustainable project for him, and he just kind of, like, had a… I don’t know if he had a breakdown, or he just was like, I can’t do this anymore. I think he got divorced around the same time as well.

John Held: Well, I just think he got burnt out, you know. I think he moved down to Brooklyn or something. I mean, there just comes a natural endpoint to these things sometimes. You start with enthusiasm, and then it just gets to be a grind near the end. And you’re wondering why you’re doing it at all. That’s just the way it goes with these things. It’s the same with zine publishers, you know, they get all gung-ho when they put out 125 issues, and then forget it, you know? It’s over.

Seth had help with Jerod Poore with the bulletin board stuff and everything, too. But Seth was really good at that kind of stuff and Factsheet Five under his tutelage was huge! I mean, 150 pages, or something like that, thousands of reviews. I mean, it was quite an undertaking. Seth did full-time. That was his job. You couldn’t do that part-time. Gunderloy found that out, I think.

F5Archive: Yeah, it swelled to something he couldn’t just do anymore. I think that’s really part of it, too, is, like, it just got bigger than him.

John Held: Right, exactly. It was no longer a two-page mimeograph affair. 

F5Archive: Can we talk a little bit about the book, and how you decided to frame it around Factsheet Five, because I don’t know if even all the covers were from zines reviewed in Factsheet Five or not, or they were just from that era? I wonder how that idea came together.

John Held: Well, I’ve got a big archive of mail art correspondence…exhibitions, documentation, artist postage stamps, artist books, and zines, so I had a project where I wanted to put all my zines together from various points in the archive. I wanted to congeal them into one unit. So, that’s what I did. And, then I had an idea that I wanted to do a book on the covers. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I was doing this project, so all the zines were in order. They were all alphabetical, maybe 40 banker boxes. And I didn’t know what I was gonna do with them. Maybe I was gonna sell them as a collection. But then, Matthew [Thompson], who had done that Fluke issue on mail art, basically … we got to be friends because of that, and he asked me if I wanted to do something. So we came up with this idea on zine covers, since I’m into art. I mean, I’m an artist, so, I thought I would go at it from the art angle. So I had all the zines done, and I pulled what I thought with the more interesting covers. But it just seemed too unwieldy and there didn’t seem to be a focus. So, I decided, let’s just focus on those Factsheet Five years because it was an interesting time. The whole publishing scene shifted from analog to digital. And not only that but at the same time, there was this transition from getting in touch with people by mail, and getting touch with through the internet.

So, the whole thing was really interesting, because… [the cover of the book] was based on a cover of Factsheet Five.

F5Archive: Yeah, yeah. You have it in the book, right? You printed the original cover?

John Held: Yeah, and when was it? 1995, maybe?

F5Archive: Right.

John Held: Which was the year the internet came in and zines seem to be going online, rather than being published in print. So, this cover…

F5Archive: [Holds up page from Zinelandia] Yeah, there it is.

John Held: Yeah. And what year is that?

F5Archive: That’s the issue from June 95 [Issue 56].

John Held: It was at this crucial time, and that cover just completely encapsulates everything I wanted to put in the book about this transition from analog artwork and everything to transitioning to the computer… graphics and everything. The thing is, I tried to get in touch with the people who did this cover, and they didn’t answer… they never answered me. I figured I’d go ahead and do it anyway because it was just so perfect. I gave them credit in the intro and everything, but I’m still waiting to hear from those people.

F5Archive: Did you try to get in touch with most of the people who are included in here?

John Held: No, I didn’t get in touch with any of them. And they weren’t all reviewed in Factsheet Five. As a matter of fact, a lot of them were from the mail-art network. But they added something. I have a short introduction in there and I talk about how the mail-art thing was kind of complimentary to the zine thing. I wanted to say before that mail art is a kind of DIY art and a zine is DIY publishing. That’s kind of how I look at it. And that’s why I look at them as alternative art forms.

F5Archive: I think part of my project is to amplify those forms… the DNA in the zine culture that gets repressed or pushed out. So much of it is punk, and so much of it is sci-fi, and so much of it is Riot Girl, and feminism, and queerness, and those are all very important, and certainly have their place in zine history, but also there are these other things that get pushed out. Drug culture, occult, mail art. One thing I want to ask you, because I was so glad to see you mentioned it in your introduction to the book, was the recent Brooklyn Museum exhibit on zines. How did you feel about it? Did you see the exhibit?

John Held: Yeah. Mm-hmm. I donated to the exhibit. The first part of it… the first part of the show was on mail art basically, and they’ve got a Ray Johnson thing in here. I have this pay stub from the New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder. And these early mail art zines from 1974 called Quoz?. So I was in touch with the organizers. There were two: one was Branden W. Joseph, a professor of art at Columbia and Drew Sawyer, who went from the Brooklyn Museum, and now he’s a photography curator at the Whitney.

F5Archive: I saw that. I saw he’s going to curate the biennial next, I think, right?

John Held: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, they’re both pretty big players, and I’ve kept up with Branden. Branden is interested in neodada and neofuturism.  I’m a big specialist in Bay Area dada, which was a movement in the 70s and 80s. Gaglione, Banana, a lot of other people, Monte Cazazza.

F5Archive: For me, that exhibit and catalog opened up a whole new world of, like, that zine DNA. I was just like, wow, I didn’t really know about this. But people had mixed feelings about that exhibit, like, art zines are not really zines, or they’re too precious and valuable. I wanted to know how you felt about that. Was it DIY enough?

John Held: I was pretty disappointed in it, to tell you the truth. I mean, I was very happy that I was included in it and I liked the curators, but I don’t think the curators knew too much about zines. They were kind of picked to do it and didn’t bring it forth themselves. It was assigned to them by the director of the Brooklyn Museum. Phil Aarons, you know Phil Aarons? He’s, like, a big backer of Printed Matter and his specialty is queer zines. But he’s got a huge collection of zines, and they came to him and then assigned these two guys to do it. And, yeah, I mean, the fact that they did not mention Factsheet Five once in the catalog… it’s astounding to me. So, basically the book title was to rectify the situation of Factsheet Five being left out of the discussion. And I would tell Branden Joseph that to his face, you know. 

F5Archive: I wanted to ask if you still keep up with contemporary zines, or do you think that zine culture is sort of best left as a history. And if so, what then is the legacy of zines?

John Held: Well, you know, people are still doing it. But not in the numbers that used to happen. Zines are a kind of anachronism. There’s always gonna be people that are publishing and everything. But now there’s so many more options to getting the word out, you know? I mean, on a podcast, you could do a podcast, you could do things for YouTube. It’s not the be-all and the end-all now, as it was… I think in, like, the 70s and 80s and maybe early 90s. But when the internet came along that changed everything. I mean, people did mail art because it was the cheapest way to communicate. Locally, as well as globally. So that’s why you did it. It was cheap, and you’d get your name out to people — it was a good publicity thing, as well as anything else. But when you’re a zine maker you’re doing 50 copies at the most. You’re online, and god only knows how many thousands, you know? I mean, I don’t have a TV set. I watch YouTube. YouTube is my visual medium. So, I’ll watch people who do food eating competitions. They try to eat, you know, like a 10-pound meal in one hour. It’s that… there’s a whole subculture of that.

You know, of these eaters, they put on these 20 or 15-minute programs of them eating and everything. And they get 2 million hits on YouTube. How could you compete with that when you’re a zine maker?

F5Archive: Yeah. I think you have something on this in the intro to Zinelandia about how this internet tendency pushes zines to become more of an art form than a practical way of having an intentional community.

John Held: Exactly, exactly. Zines aren’t practical anymore. It’s practical to go online and get yourself out that way. But zines have become an alternative to this online hands-off thing. You know, this is old school, hands-on, being creative. So there’s a difference. If you want to become famous, zines are not the way to do it anymore, you know? Going online is. 

But there’s still a bunch of people who are very much concerned with making things on their own. There’s still an active mail art scene going on. Although it shifted, like in the old days. You would come up with a theme for a mail art show, print up an invitation, and mail out that invitation — which would add considerable cost — to maybe a hundred or so people and then advertise it in mail art magazines and everything. And then you get the stuff in for the exhibition, you have the exhibition, you put together a catalog for the exhibition. So there’s printing costs involved with that. And then you have to send out the documentation, there’s postage costs. So it was not inexpensive to do a mail art show in the old days. Nowadays, you’re on Facebook and all your mail art friends are on Facebook. You come up with a theme, they send it to you digitally, and you put it up on your blog and that’s it. You know, you don’t get any documentation back. It’s on the internet — that’s where the documentation is. It’s not in your hand anymore. In the old days the exhibition catalog was very important because it not only listed all the participants in a show, so you could see who was active, at a particular time and everything, but there were essays on mail art and the artwork itself. I can’t remember the last time I got a mail or catalog in the mail.

And that’s kind of gone the way of zines too, perhaps, you know? You know, people are still doing zines and everything, but it’s just so much easier and cheaper to do it online.

F5Archive: Do you think anything’s lost with that? I mean, we’re often on platforms that aren’t owned by us. Do you think anything is lost in that sense, or is that just nostalgia talking? 

John Held: Well, I just see it as evolution, you know? It’s just necessary evolution, technological evolution. But even though they’re not as efficient as blogs they still have… a meaning. There’s still a meaningful place for them. And you could do so much more with analog printed matter than you can with digital — binding it with twine, or this or that, you know? Just things that you can’t do electronically that make it so appealing and everything. Plus, people like to touch things, you know, and hold them in their hand like a book. Some people like to read still, even though there are audiobooks available.

F5Archive: Yeah, people like to collect things. I mean, I think that’s the other thing.

John Held: Exactly. I should mention, too, that somebody bought the collection of zines that are in the Zinelandia book.

F5Archive: Oh, yeah?

John Held: Matthew [from Fluke] was at a zine show in Chicago and some guy came up to him, wanted to buy a couple of zines that are portrayed in the book and he asked me about it, and I said, no, I want to sell it as a collection. So the guy bought it as a collection.

F5Archive: Was this a private buyer, or was it a museum or a library?

John Held: A private buyer. So people are still interested. It’s not like zines are dead and nobody wants them anymore, but it’s, it’s more niche now.

F5Archive: I teach college students how to make zines, and I often get invited to do workshops at other universities on how to make zines, so there’s clearly an appetite, but I wouldn’t… I don’t disagree, I think it’s pretty niche, but the reasoning is very specific. It’s really a pushback against some of the saturation of attention, the sapping of that attention via screens that people are getting tired of. So it’s like, those 2 million viewers are great, but it’s so hard to get to that level of attention when everybody’s doing it.

John Held: Yeah, but there’s niches, and there’s niches. And that’s the thing about zines, it’s so deep. These food eaters on YouTube — that’s one niche. There’s another niche where, like there’s a family singing group. Have you seen these types of things?

F5Archive: No.

John Held: You know, so they play in their living room and they do all these different songs and everything, and they could be 5 years old or up to 12 years but they get these same amount of hits. They get a million viewers, too. So it’s, like, niche upon niche upon niche upon niche. 

So, zines are an umbrella just as mail art is an umbrella for a bunch of marginal art forms. Zines are an umbrella for marginal  interest groups. But they’re important not only for the information that they convey but the communities that they build. Zines are just a start sometimes for something that could become much larger.