The counterculture is alive and well if you know where to look. A new zine in Somerville and an exhibition in Cambridge remind us that in an age of digital disconnect, there’s refuge in the analog.
The international publishing duo, Lucie March (Boston) and Marie Igea (Brussels/Lyon), just released issue No. 9 in its “cul de sac” zine series and distribute the zine themselves. Free copies are available in Arts at the Armory’s zine stand.
The publication is a lovely black and white, with charmingly grainy images of a dam. The envelope-style zine is folded into an informal triptych, with a large center and thin side flaps that fold open like a window to the recent past. The images inside are filled with diagonal lines and natural cross-hatching, accentuating the paper’s folds. There’s something satisfying about pictures of water printed onto such dry paper. These images of summer inject a jolt of joy into what has been a dismal fall.
A new Harvard Radcliffe Institute exhibition, “Rhyme, Rhythm and Resistance: Enacting the Art of Dissent,” displays timely ephemera from the Schlesinger Library. The show presents the intertwined nature of protest and art. In decades-old flyers for Adrienne Rich poetry readings, protest song lyrics and teach-in materials, there’s a wealth of different aesthetic styles, all politically potent and refreshing. Though printed media circulates more slowly, the show seems to say, it can be more powerful – less prone to hijacking by mass surveillance and corporate interests.
In an era in which public records are easily digitized, aggregated and even hijacked toward conservative political aims, being off the grid is looking more attractive by the day. Zine publishing and DIY printing may have had their heyday in decades past, but they are on the upswing. Printed matter connects us across time and place – it always has and it always will. And that is beautiful.
“Rhyme, Rhythm and Resistance: Enacting the Art of Dissent,” on view through March 28 at The Lia and William Poorvu Gallery, Schlesinger Library. 3 James St., Harvard Square, Cambridge.
Share your own 150-word appreciation for a piece of visual art or art happening with photo to editor@cambridgeday.com with the subject line “Behold.”
This post was updated Nov. 18, 2024, to remove references to the band Sidebody.
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