Artzine, Daniel de Culla, Grupo Poetico, [email protected], price not listed
What the fnord is this zine about? It talks a great game about itself: “You hold in your hands one of the Great Books of our century.” This might be true, but the text of the book is almost totally comprised of quotes by other people. Iconoclasts such as Nietzsche, Timothy Leary, and Niels Bohr have their say on truth and enlightenment.
Heartache comes off as an instruction manual for liberating your mind, but it’s missing the actual instructions. This might lead to a boring read were it not for the wonderful and weird illustrations and collages by Spanish mail artist Daniel de Culla. The drawings are a complete series: it starts off with amoebic shapes, unicellular organisms undulating in the void, and then moves into simpler line drawings which seem to depict the fertilization of an ovum. The sexual theme is subtle here but completely overt in the collages. De Culla sources images of ancient architecture, ‘50s photography, old comics, occult drawings, and (lots and lots of) modern grainy Internet porno to make works provocative, mysterious, and obscene.
De Culla uses many quotes from the Principia Discordia, an old Zen/beatnik book about worshiping the goddess of chaos (it’s a classic!). The chaos is certainly rife here. Despite the grandiose pronouncements that open the book, this zine is just a sustained exercise in making something out of nothing, of pulling order out of disorder and printing it. It is a pleasant excursion into strangeness for dadists, surrealists, and a breed of weirdos not yet named. (Neal Armstrong)