Until the late 1970s, making a zine was a labor of love and money. Love as in time spent assembling the thing—the cutting out, the sticking together. Money as in paying a service to print issues. By the end of the 1970s, though, with photocopiers a fixture in public libraries, agit-propagandists could make copies of their pamphlets and artwork themselves. Zine culture flourished. Granular, black and white Xeroxed appropriated images overlaid with Letraset phrases were affordable carriers for political statements and creative theorizing. Plus, they could be pasted up wherever the artists wished (until they were taken down).

This kind of DIY approach has informed Barbara Kruger’s work since the early 1980s. The grain and the grit, the declamatory phrases, the high contrast—both visually and in polemic—were reflected in the Woman’s Art Journal’s review of Kruger’s first European solo exhibition (at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art) in 1983. The Journal positioned Kruger at the vanguard of DIY political art, saying she was “…fully aware of the politics of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Her use of photography is radical, confrontational, agitational and obviously influenced by Benjamin’s theory of montage.”

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The Benjamin in question is German art theorist Walter Benjamin, who used his 1935 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, to predict how reproduction machines would specifically benefit artists whose work has a political basis. Authenticity lost its........

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