Buffalo Zine “caught with her knickers down”
Buffalo Zine didn’t get its latest issue finished on time. Determined to actually have a summer this year, the team decided to make a virtue out of the fact that they were running out of time, and theme the issue ‘Unfinished’. One of the most ridiculous features in this wonderful magazine is a “rare interview” with Angela Merkel, before she heads off “to her usual Summer holiday in South Tyrol”. The interview didn’t actually happen (no time?), so instead we’re given 11 blank pages and some Lorem Ipsum dummy text.
This is the tenth issue from the satirical fashion title, and they are having a bit of an existential crisis about it: “Changing tens is always distressing”, Adrian González-Cohen writes in his editor’s letter, “because you always have preconceived ideas of where you should be at, or how you should look when you get there.” Delivering a work in progress is a kind of escape-route.
At its most dazzlingly creative, this issue makes you rethink the nature of the ‘defining moment’’. One series by Adrian Sonderegger and Jojakim Cortis painstakingly reconstructs the world’s most famous photographs without using Photoshop — the Clash’s Paul Simonon smashing a guitar is recreated in clay; the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima is made out of cotton wool. The results are so indistinguishable from the originals it’s actually quite unsettling: if you can’t trust yourself to tell the difference between the ‘real’ moment and the cotton wool version, your sense of time collapses slightly.
The whole magazine is bound in what looks like white masking tape and annotated with notes from the editors: “replace with high res!”/ “change this. Hate the word trendy”. The illusion is that you’re getting a glimpse inside the magazine’s editing process (“This is Buffalo Zine caught with her knickers down.”). It would be interesting to know whether these are authentic editorial notes or just deeper fakes, with the annotations all laboriously made up.
