Evelyn Tsitas's blog

Magazines come and go in the commercial world. It's all about circulation, advertising and economics. If it doesn't make money, it shuts down.
 
Underground literary and art magazines tend to close for other reasons. As they don't make much money in the first place, they flourish instead with the creative energy of their founders.
 
As they rise above the radar, attracting readers, acolytes, public funding or donors, they establish a place in the market. But everything has its natural life cycle. When the founder's energy turns elsewhere, or the manifesto waving of youth finds life demands time away from such pursuits, these magazines are consigned to history.
 
They surface again, in whatever form they might have enjoyed, in retrospectives such as 2010 exhibition Melbourne><Brisbane: punk, art and after, at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.
 
The exhibition traces the interaction of the alternative music and art scenes between Melbourne and Brisbane during the punk and post-punk years 1975–85, through music, film, ephemeral publications, photographs and paintings.
 
Old Polaroids, scratchy hand held video, and copies of "ephemeral publications" such as Pneumatic Drill reproduced on A4 photocopies provide echoes of both a time lone gone and technologies as equally superseded.
 
At the Melbourne><Brisbane: punk, art and after opening night, a crowd thronged to hear the performance of an unrecorded song by Robert Forster. Really, what they were interested in was seeing their own history on the walls and in the display cabinets. Weathered punks from the music, art and publishing world gathered on – some on walking sticks, or with bemused children, while their partners gave them the tour.
 
"Well, when dad was a young artist back in 1980 he couldn't afford paint and ripped up newspapers to make paper mache sculptures – oh see, that's one, not many survived because –" And so on.
 
I chatted with a woman over a glass of wine and an early Jenny Watson painting. Watson was one of the group of artists I so admired as a student, exhibiting at the influential Fifth Biennale of Sydney in 1984, along with Juan Davila, Peter Booth, and Davida Allen. Did this woman also adore their work? Had she been to those exhibitions back then?
 
"I was at The Birthday Party's first concert. But I don't really remember much about – anything…." she told me. "I think I have holes in my brain from all the drugs…"
 
Just as well we've always relied on the writers to chronicle the history and write the manifestos of the era, while the musicians and artists are the show ponies. The fictional character Fred Walters, created for the TV series Desperate Romantics, is a case in point. He follows around the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, desperately wanting to be just like glamorous rake Dante Gabriel Rosetti. "Your job is to write what we do, tell the world, and make us look good," says Rosetti with a mischievous and carefree grin.
 
This is what writers have always done. Arts writer Ashley Crawford (The Age, 2005) recalls the late 1970s and early 1980s as being "a time of independent magazines such as Tension and Art & Text. A time when Tony Clark, Peter Tyndall, Nixon and others would deluge the culture with manifestos and newsletters."
 
Indeed, standing at the Ian Potter Museum and reading Pneumatic Drill's manifesto laden commentary about music - including Tyndall's statement that "anti music is style less" – provided insight into the period when sound art emerged in the early 1980s and independent publications sprung up everywhere. The creative well spring of universities and spaces such as the arts incubator gallery Arts Projects, which ran in Melbourne from 1979 to 1984, gave this era celebrated in the exhibition a robust energy.
 
Around that time, I co-edited a literary magazine called EMU with writer Fiona Capp and Catherine Jaggs. We held soirees for fundraising and Young Adult author Archimede Fusillo was part of our editorial group. You can find every copy of the magazine at the State Library of Victoria. EMU Literary Magazine for Young Australians was printed on A4, produced by a Star Trek fanzine printer out in Wantirna and bound by us and school students on work experience. We paid every contributor, courtesy of Literature Board funding from the Australia Council.
 
Up in Sydney, the magazine P76, edited by "the P 76 collective" including writer Adam Aitken, had an enviable full color cover. We published ads for each other's magazines, including Big Bang, Syllable, Going Down Swinging, Helix, Luna and On The Beach…..to name but a few.
 
We were all young, manifesto waving literary types long before the internet. We struggled with underground printers, printing costs and distribution. But we managed to get our voices heard – and archived. You can find any of these 1980s literary magazines in the state and national libraries as they were published and had ISSN numbers. Not so with web pages. So, how will a retrospective of new publishing look in 2030?
 
Performance, video and new media artists have always been aware of this problem. Performance artist Jill Orr was part of the group who exhibited at Arts Projects in the early 1980s. In 2009, she was part of RMIT Gallery's Super Human: Revolution of the Species exhibition, along with New York based Australian artist Justine Cooper. Both artists, who work with installation and performance art, have just published retrospectives of their exhibitions over the years in book form. If you want history to remember your work, you have to be the one to control its record for the future.
 
Will web publishers and bloggers be as savvy about such challenges? What will a curator use to illustrate the use of web publishing and new media to bring together new writing across the country? How will sites such as Clan Destine chart the history of its inception and early blogs? Will we rely on screen grabs? Is someone now archiving for the future?
 
Or, will it be a case of what retro-mod band 5.15 sang about in their 1982 song, "Fuck art, let's dance."? Those who know about them do so because they either saw them live, or bought the song on vinyl. History remembers the recorded, long after memories fade.