A zine can be a manifesto, a dirty joke, or a way of telling someone to fuck off in print. The photocopier doesn’t object.

Copy Machine Manifestos brought five decades of this activity into Brooklyn Museum, from the artist correspondence scene of the 1970s to the present. For work with an anti-institutional streak, becoming the subject of an encyclopedic museum exhibition is a fairly awkward compliment.

The design draws on desktop-publishing type and early zine layouts. The work follows the exhibition from street posters and the façade banner into murals, section panels, and labels. A custom-designed mobile zine-making station gave visitors somewhere to answer back.

The wild postings reproduced zine covers and turned out to be a little too desirable. People started taking them home. I caught my downstairs neighbor with a shredded-up Raymond Pettibon on his wall.