artpunk-intl

[artpunk-intl]

2025 State of the Zine (or: What To Do When You Start Hating The Thing You've Made)

It's been a few years since we kicked things off. A lot is different.

I started this zine just before I returned to college. I've since graduated. The ways I look at Rrt, life, and culture have changed dramatically. In response, a lot of the ways I approach making Art have changed. So what, then, do I do with this? This thing I've made?

I came up with the Art philosophy (see: glorified eclectic aesthetic) of Artpunk when I was freshly 18 years old. Someone reviewed an early single from my band and called it "art punk". I thought it fit well -- I was writing loud punk rock with its head up its ass, artistically speaking. Plus, I'd been an Art school kid since high school. I always despised criticisms around things being "pretentious", always saw it as a dismissal of something that dared to be daring. and figured that I'd own it, try to make it seem punk to be a snot-nosed Arts major, openly mock people who mock Art. "I'm not pretentious, you're just a pussy." You get the idea.

So I took out the space between "Art" and "Punk" because I wanted the concepts to fuse- this wasn't punk rock for Art hoes, this was Art itself gone punk -- literature, visual Art, music. And not "gone punk" like it sewed some patches on its pants one day, I mean down to the ideological roots. Rejectionary, experimental, transgressive roots. Roots that resisted being labeled "pretentious" because we weren't fucking pretending -- "Art as a Weapon Against Reality". That rare Sonic Youth-esque balance between the noise and the intentions, like a mushroom cloud wearing sunglasses, too fuckin' cool for school. I wanted to plant the seeds for a new revue of freaks to force the conversation to a change through a mass embrace and support of the Experimental, all wrapped up not in skill, but in finesse. Art was to be a kickflip, a maneuver at once beautiful, athletic, and rad as fuck. All I had to do was kickstart this would-be movement, put the initial ideas out there and let other people be inspired by what is clearly a sick-ass idea that they wouldn't be able to resist taking part in.

Except it doesn't always work like that.

First, tumblr is a terrible platform to spread any sort of word. This is sort of by design, and by how disparate the userbase has become in recent years. Secondly, as I've come to realize and regret, that's just generally not how Art movements work.

We shall now present the case for failure in four movements:

Exhibit A: I'm only one person. The few collaborators I had at the time of the zine's founding were not quite bought in on the whole "Artpunk" boogie (though they may have found my zeal for it novel or cute). I tried to get others involved. A few agreed to contribute, and then vanished, most definitely occupied by their own passions, as is their right. What I learned when I started playing in bands is that Art is uniquely joyful when it is collaborative. What I learned when my last band fell apart in an unceremonious catastrophe of my own making was that Art can be lonely and difficult and very hollow when you do it on your own. Especially when you can remember the taste of collaboration. The zine was a relatively flaccid attempt to develop something new and collaborative. And it failed pretty bad.

Exhibit B: My work ethic is, and was, not great. I do not create Art at the rate that I did in my younger years. Since 2022, especially, it's been a struggle. A combination of a lack of discipline and too much belief placed in imposter syndrome. I won't make many excuses, I just didn't make Art as much as I feel like I should have, and I have little to blame outside of a bad work ethic. Skill issue.

Exhibit C: As far as anyone would be able to tell, "Artpunk" is little more than a series of digital collages and at least One (1) band whose sound really existed in the field of Hardcore-adjacent Punk Rock. It is not a challenge to the system, it's not a movement, it's not a genre, it's not even a well-defined aesthetic. I don't think the manifesto did a good job of explaining anything, it's mostly just a call to Anticapitalist Your Art. I stand by the content, but it fails as an Art-philosophy-launching manifesto because it says very little about what should be in the Art, or art least in the mind of the artist. Maybe I could have developed it more, but I've been hesitant, mostly because, well...

Exhibit D (and this is critical): The word "Artpunk" sucks. It just kinda sucks. It doesn't get the point across, and it's a little corny. It very much sounds like something an 18-year-old would come up with. Hard to stand by something when you hate the name you gave it.

I'm honestly not too sure what to make of it all. On the one hand, it's definitely not great to pursue ideas you don't believe in. On the other, I still believe in some version of the philosophy, though I would absolutely hate to keep referring to it by its current name.

In any case, it's time for some kind of change. The question is: how? Maybe this blog gets abandoned, left as a monument to what little I did achieve here. Maybe it gets rebranded, and its short history subsumed into the mythology of something else. Maybe I forget to make a decision and life sweeps me away. No way to tell at this point. I don't suppose it matters which way we go.

If you've read this far, I appreciate you. The entire reason I make Art is in some desperate attempt to connect with my fellow creatures. If I've connected with you even a little, made you feel something even slightly, then that's all I wanted.

Make Art today, and don't concern yourself with legacy, genre, context, any of it. Most of that's for the historians to decide, anyways. Just make your Art and don't, for the love of God, lose yourself.

Always spell Art with a capital A.

-Lucas / DOSvirus

[artpunk-intl]

We’re starting up an instagram page as a way of building a bigger audience, be sure to give us a follow over there too! Currently uploading a lot of the backlogs, but have tons of new stuff on the way as well (including interviews and video content!)

IG: artpunk_intl

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[Contact ArtpunkINTL for purchase info. 1/1.]

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[please contact ArtpunkINTL for purchase info. 1/1.]

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