Adjusted Margin by Eichhorn Kate

Adjusted Margin by Eichhorn Kate

Author:Eichhorn, Kate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-09-15T16:00:00+00:00


Figure 3.1

The cover of the first issue of Spacing magazine—a publication that grew out of a collective effort to fight against the City of Toronto’s increasingly aggressive attack on grassroots forms of communication, including postering. Image reproduced with permission from Spacing magazine.

As illustrated above, the passionate argument both against and for public postering has at times, especially in Canadian cities, taken on absurd proportions. Some city councilors and citizens have claimed that public postering is a safety hazard; others that postering is filthy and even pornographic. By contrast, advocates of postering have consistently argued that public postering should not only be recognized as a constitutional right to the extent that it is a vital form of public expression but should also be embraced as a practice integral to community building and the solidification of social bonds in otherwise alienating urban spaces. What these “poster wars” reveal—and perhaps most notably by their endurance (in Toronto, city councilors spent over a decade periodically debating the postering issue)—is the extent to which the presence of DIY photocopied posters was a salient marker of urban spaces in the late twentieth century and in some cases remains so today, despite the fact that other inexpensive modes of communication are now readily available to musicians, artists, writers, and activists. Beyond the content or aesthetics of the individual posters and flyers, we read clusters of photocopied ephemera as a sign that we’re a bit closer to the symbolic and literal margins. This is still, to some extent, part of the experience one has walking east from New York’s West Village toward Alphabet City. While Eighth Street is no longer a literal corridor of posters, as it was in the 1980s, at some point the photocopied posters reappear and you realize you’re at least a bit closer to what remains of the city’s downtown scene. This is also the experience many of us had descending on Zuccotti Park (or any Occupy site) in the fall of 2012. Though most of the protesters were posting updates on Facebook and Twitter, Occupy sites were littered with photocopied posters and flyers. Even in the age of the smart phone, the photocopy reigned at most Occupy sites not simply because it remains a convenient and inexpensive form of communication but because, as I discuss in the final chapter of this book, xerography is readily recognized by people across generations as a medium through which regular folks historically have successfully occupied public spaces. Xerography (or more precisely its digital offspring), while no longer the only way to circulate information, was integral to the Occupy movement because it was the medium through which we could most easily imagine achieving the types of public spaces the Occupy movement sought to create in cities across North America and around the world.

The Deterritorialization of Scenes and Subcultures in the Age of Xerography

While xerography’s gritty aesthetic was one of the markers of downtown scenes across North America in the 1970s to 1990s, and in some cities



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