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marketing.colony /
equiptment acquisition /
symptom hall.space /
phoenix.cinecycle /
ancient futures.the net /
performance.women's work /
gender.performance /
do it yourself ethos-zines /
robot writing /
pamphlets.women's work /
oca.zines /
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pamphlets.women's work
Files full of stone-age faxes, home-made postcards and pamphlets are the residue from Rumour's close creative link with Anne Turyn, responsible for publication projects and readings at Hallwalls Gallery in Buffalo. "Top Stories", a pamphlet series she edited, included a wide array of writing and image/text hybrids by women : new fiction, performance scripts, photo-novels and comics, each by an individual author, including Laurie Anderson, Constance de Jong, Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Janet Stein, and many others. The "Top Stories" pamphlets received some NEA funding, were priced between $1.50 and $2.50 and sold in a few stores. However, as with zines, the vast majority of distribution was through the mails, often for trades with women who were writing/publishing themselves. "Top Stories", a precursor to the powerful flood of zine activity by "riot girls" in the late eighties and nineties, marks an axis of shared content and distribution tactics between women artists utilizing language in their performances and publications. Points of intersection include the unapologetic use of first-person accounts and personal experience; cannibalized imagery from lingerie and fashion advertising, home economics texts, typing manuals and so on targeted at women, reworked into defiant new insignia; recycled family photographs and kiddie cartoons, charged with sexual or personal meanings; and texts that expose the systemic sexism encoded in language, technology and the representation of women's bodies.
In the past and now, correspondence networking between women goes on, oblivious to nationalisms or state-imposed readings of national culture. Reducing these sensuous, colourful, sticker-laden souvenirs to the form of an "E-Zine" seems impossible, for each collage and tip-in is singular, with the powerful talismanic properties of a gift exchange, yet reveling in a cheapo, thrift-store approach, free of the elite, limited-edition mannerisms of fine art bookworks.
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