Nieves

Jan-Tschichold Award 2009

1:46 pm, Sunday, March 15, 2009: Today is my deadline for writing this essay. As usual, I am late; but the persistence of the publishers has made it clear that this essay must arrive by tomorrow, early morning. And so I set out to record my relation to Nieves, as an artist, publisher, bookseller, and collector of books.

When I saw my first Nieves zines, I was charmed, of course, as everyone is. The sweet but humble format, the consistency of the product, and the editorial choreography, which is so nimble and so modern, took me first of all by surprise, and then brought a smile to my face.

At Printed Matter, the artists’ bookstore in New York City, we have some 15,000 titles by artists at any given moment. And so we are always hesitant to order too much. And zines, as we all know, get damaged, or slip between books and disappear. So we began by ordering small quantities of a few zines here and there, in a careful kind of way.

But we soon discovered that our staff was buying most of the zines as they came in the door, and people were beginning to ask after Nieves. It is a grassroots, grapevine kind of publisher - if you will excuse the mixed metaphor - and a young, hip and very smart audience were soon salivating after the Nieves products. Thus, Printed Matter placed a standing order for every Nieves zine and book, and I began collecting every zine as well.

Although I have collected artists’ books for several decades, this is the first time that I have trusted a publisher’s tastes and program to intersect so completely with my own. Perhaps this is because Benjamin Sommerhalder, who is Nieves itself, is not so much a publisher as someone taking pleasure in artists' zines and in the act of publishing itself. The zines are each published in an identical format, each in a numbered edition of only 150, and Benjamin produces the zines in a casual but very precise kind of way - absolutely Swiss! - on a copier, first at home, then at the local copy shop. The domestic aspect to this production is somehow very clear, and crucial to the charm and intimacy of the individual zines. The expression ‘a labor of love’ may be a platitude, but it is absolutely suitable here.

I respond to the do-it-yourself aesthetic of Nieves. In the mid-sixties, I was one of a group of people who founded a commune, and a free school, and published an underground newspaper improbably titled The Loving Couch Press. Our newspaper took advantage of the web offset press, the invention that first allowed short-run newspapers and spawned the explosion of underground newspapers - and hence underground culture - that appeared across North America and Europe. A newspaper became something you could cook up in your kitchen, and everyone did. A few years later, I found myself part of the artists’ group ‘General Idea’, a kind of mini-commune if you will. And in 1972 we began FILE Megazine, which was essentially a tabloid newspaper wrapped in a glossy verisimilitude of LIFE Magazine, at once glamorous and of the proletariat. Through FILE we first met John Armleder and his gang of friends in Geneva, who kept a mimeograph in the back room of Ecart, and occasionally pumped out little artists' chapbooks and passed them out to their friends. Those chapbooks, which we now call zines, are the obvious progenitor of Nieves. I am also reminded - and this seems to me a crucial ingredient - of the posters on the streets of Paris in the riots of 1968, printed by artists in their studios and in the art schools with whatever technologies were available to them. This moment announced the beginning of self-publishing, a movement in opposition to capitalism, a movement which only became truly self-evident with the intense flowering of punk zines ten years later.

The do-it-yourself aspect of Nieves carries within it a memory of a history that spans more than four decades, and yet manages to be absolutely fresh, and, in a highly improbable way, as consistent as a Swiss watch. The three monthly zines are salted with the occasional book, which adds meat to the program without losing the essential flavor.

In the last few years, a number of small publishers have mimicked the Nieves model: Utrecht in Tokyo and Islands Flow in Canada come to mind. Nieves has transformed the world of publishing, not through marketing or savvy dealmaking, but through the simple means of developing a model that exactly matches both the technological means and the spirit of today. In this time of economic recession, it is a model that accomplishes much with modest means, and it will flourish despite the difficulties of the day. While Nieves appears to represent a kind of alternative economy, it is now evident - amidst the decline of the large publishing houses and the rise of Amazon - that what was once seen as 'self-publishing' is in fact the beginnings of a new more diffuse economy, in which publishing, and many other forms of production, will be controlled from the bottom up, in a more democratic way. Joseph Beuys would be pleased! With humility and intelligence, Nieves points the way to the future, and a method of sustainable economic development that escapes the hubris of money and power.

Not only that, but Nieves does all of this by publishing unique artists’ publications in a mix that creates a conversation between peers. Each month I add three new zines to my box of Nieves zines and that makes me happy.

AA Bronson
Artist and Director, Printed Matter
New York City, USA