Bay Area Dadazines and Punk Zines in 1970s San Francisco: Interactive, Ephemeral, Live

This essay recommends a revised framework for approaching periodicals by putting the Bay Area Dadaists' 1970s "Dadazines" into dialogue with San Francisco punk zines, and by linking these periodicals with each group's performances. For these artists and for punks, zines offered a shared, cheap, quick means of expression and communication. Their zines also show that periodicals have the potential to be dynamic sites, like performances, that foster cross-fertilization and interaction and productively hold in tension materiality and ephemerality, mediation and liveness. Indeed, we can understand them as performances in their own right.