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oca.zines



The Ontario College of Art student publications provided a context for student activism and oppositional art from the mid-80's until 1995. Collectivities that were spawned there reconfigured outside the school, working in self-funded contexts. In 1988, queer activist and satirist Barry Nichols started Spurious Emissions, a xeroxed one-sheet of scathing, sarcastic critique of the OCA administration, illustrated with cut and paste clip art in the spirit of John Heartfield political collage. He was assisted by Deborah Waddington, who in 1990 formed an editorial collective with sex-trade artist-activist Andrew Sorfleet and Symptom Hall Founder Jenny Keith, releasing a double issue of SPU. The collage-infested mag contained extended critiques - of mass advertising (complete with a map for finding offensive downtown billboards), the exploitation of immigrant contract-workers at OCA, alongside art projects and alternative comix. Sorfleet went on to work at Maggie's Prostitute Centre. Maggie's is a flashpoint for artists, through programming initiatives like WhoreCulture, and its zine-type publication "Maggie's Newsletter". While at Maggie's, Andrew Sorfleet developed his important analysis of censorship law, and power imbalances between anti-censorship artists and porn workers/consumers. Andrew distributed his research materials in what became a community-access file-folder of clippings and commentary, hand distributed between students, writers and organizers.

In 1992 Paul Lamothe edited just BITE, with an anti-homophobia stance, including a comic by Spirit on inadequate wheelchair access at OCA, the truth about cocksucking by Andrew Sorfleet, fierce caricatures of OCA President Tim Porteous and an article on anarchist sampling and plunderphonic strategies. After this, the OCA administration threatened to cancel the "Publication Seminar", which provided academic support for the student/publishers. Through 1994-95, queer content was nurtured by OCA editors including Raymond Helkio, Christina Zeidler and Laura Cowell, culminating in the 'Denying Queerness' issue of Pushpress, edited by Marc C. Tremblay. "Denying Queerness" takes issue with the absence of Queer curriculum at OCA. Notable was Marty Bennett's 'Internalized Homophobia', a delicious script of a make-believe course called "Cinema of Change: The Art of Gay Porn Film and Video Making: The Recent Years", attended by the Moderator (resembling David McIntosh, instructor of Cinema and Social Change in 94/95) and his students : Id, Ego and Super-Ego.

As the Ontario College of Art morphs into the Ontario College of Art and Design, downsizing, restructuring, and competing for patronage, it seems likely that the radical content prevalent in the student newspapers will disperse into the zines. Recent OCA zines include Alternazone and Fuzzy Heads are Better, edited by Patti Kim, a women-centred, mail-networked zine with music reviews, dryly satiric accounts of everyday life, and interviews with indie cultural producers including musicians, zine publishers, filmmakers and comic artists. The Remnants by Dalton (?), Freak Funnies by Mike Pender and Cash Grab by Chris Brimacombe are alternative comix with anti-heroic protagonists negotiating the minefields of popular culture; these xeroxed comix draw on a rich history of classical and alternative comic practice.

Professionelle, Marc C. Tremblay's zine of the queer rave and transgendered club scene, inhabits and subverts the fashion-lifestyle mag format, in xerox form. Rave promoters, dancers and DJ's, long engaged in a process of inhabiting the machine while reversing its effects, are active on the Internet, using advanced visual and sonic software. World Wide Web sites like NIMM, organized by Rave cultural participants, provide an anthology venue for web sites by artists. Juice!, Jame's Gardiner's zine on/for graffiti crews, combines zine and comix approaches. This is the Salivation Army , edited by Scott Treleaven, is a pagan-punk-homocore zine with an intelligent, literary edge, with pilferings from other publications, homoerotic collage, and finely-written stories and commentary. These zine's are distributed among friends and through the mail, paid for by the editor/publishers' part-time jobs.


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