Do-it-yourself publishing allows for numerous solutions to the feud between medium and message. Case in point is Kiss Machine, a photocopied foray into independent art, literary culture and political views. The mag sprang from the tiny Toronto-based Petrified Press as an effort to encourage and highlight the surrealist strategies inherent in day-to-day life.

Each issue features two seemingly discordant themes, such as elephants and media, bugs and small business, sex and condiments, or hospitals and aliens. Visual art relating to these themes weaves through poetry, short stories, interviews and articles, without any clear indication where fiction ends and non-fiction begins, or where disciplines break into new forms.

Emily Pohl-Weary approaches the magazine from a literary or journalistic writer's perspective. Paola Poletto looks at the project for its artistic merits and visual possibilities. The primary negotiation within the publication concerns how visual information is placed next to textual work. In zines, the textual message traditionally predominates, through poems, rants and short stories. In artists' books, the main communication medium is visual -- ink drawings, paintings, photographs, collages -- and conceptually (that infamous word that defies all mediums) its medium is the visual representation of an idea. Kiss Machine is an attempt to create a new kind of independent publication that exists in the grey area between artist's book and zine.

Life's Inherent Surrealism

Kiss Machine's creators have explored the notion that violence exists in the creation of art. This is a passive kind of violence, such as one might experience when staring at an eclipse. This concept of the eclipse was earlier explored by René Magritte, a key figure in the Surrealist movement. For him, as for us now, staring at a natural phenomenon becomes a metaphor for freeing the imagination. Therefore, embracing the potential for violence (as symbolized by unfiltered light) is assumed to be a necessary and even intrinsic motivation of the surrealist imagination.

With their manifesto in hand, and several more to follow, the founders of Surrealism met weekly, beginning in Paris in the early 1920's, and exhibited collectively during and beyond the 1930's, as researched by Whitney Chadwick in her seminal book, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985). This group of writers, artists, and their companions included André Breton, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington and René Magritte, not to mention artists like Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, who had staggered and tumultuous associations with the core group. They appeared to agree in principle that artistic expression carries psychological overtones. Within the surrealist paradigm, in order to truly see, one must stare directly into light and embrace the possibilities of darkness.

Kiss Machine is an open community of voices. It encourages and supports new work from its community of artists and writers. As a result, contributions are defined according to the dual themes that the submitter finds him/herself responding to, nothing else. Blind participation is voluntary. Contributors are well aware of the limitations imposed by the print medium - black and white photocopying and low DPI resolution graphics. Contributors must also secede control over their work when they submit to the machine, because what and who gets framed around their work remains a mystery until they receive the finished publication.

Therefore, the violence involved in the mag's creation is a result of the expression of discordant themes and voices, and the perpetuation of a long-standing commonality enjoyed by all art and literary magazines that exist in the world. The semblance of unity with the publication is foregrounded by editorial control. The dreaded editorial eye is overtly comprised of two very different sets of eyes, trained in distinct disciplines. What the editors share is a willingness to incorporate the other's viewpoint; that neither editor believes wholly in the legitimacy or primacy of their trained medium.

Kiss Machine is self-financed and its print run is small. Self-publishing allows for the fulfillment of certain predictions about the flexibility of art, and allows the editors to push the readers into uncomfortable situations that rely almost entirely on interpretation. Variable perspectives are always encouraged. The obscurity of the little mag, coupled with its discordant themes, and the fact that it exists regardless of supportive advertising, allows it to function outside mainstream morays and the globalization or the global dumbing down of media outlets. Is it any surprise that our most treasured contributions are those that reveal deep secrets?

Woman As Both Producer and Produced

At all times, the editors of Kiss Machine consider the surrealist movement with respect to woman as "producer" and "produced," and note that woman as artist, writer and companion has always negotiated the parallel roles of muse and subject. As zine producers, self-representation is examined from within a cultural context and create a site for both argumentation and liberation. The primary question becomes: when does self-representation become an opportunity for pleasure rather than oppression?

René Magritte's obscure photograph entitled "The Eclipse" (1935) presents viewers with two oppositional ways of looking that become crucial in defining the dichotomy between gender-specific photographic representation and feminine self-representation. In the staged image, a group of men stare straight into the eclipse (whether real or not) and point directly at it, as if to say "we are triumphant in face of the danger of looking."

In direct contrast, the women in the composition are fewer in number (just two), and they are in the foreground. They ignore the solar eclipse entirely. One lies on the ground, and the other hovers over top of her. The woman on the ground playfully raises the skirt of the woman above her, and with this gesture creates her own eclipse. It is a different sort of eclipse, but an eclipse nonetheless. The relationship portrayed proposes not only an example of female self-representation, but also poses the question whether it is through these two women that the men find the means to stare into the sun. The image is hilarious by today's standards, but the concept of a gendered means of looking invokes the very particular qualities of surrealist art.

For the editors of Kiss Machine, Magritte's photograph evokes a slew of complex feelings, not least of which is a sort of ill humor or irony. As active artistic agents, it forces the examination of Emily and Paola's relationship to the two women in the photo, not only based on shared gender, but also with respect to their position as authors, founders and co-editors of a magazine that openly celebrates surrealist strategies.

Active Agents of Representation

Kiss Machine's creators must continually consider their respective roles as visual artist and writer alongside issues of representation and self-representation. The majority of those who submit to the publication are male. This curious fact leads one to consider whether the female editors are merely the administrators and propellers of a subversive intellectual environment that is largely fronted by men? Or perhaps it is the opposite - are they the front-women?

Can a collaboration between two women possibly adhere to the theory posited by Magritte's image that only when women are on their backs are they able to stare into the sun? In "The Eclipse" basking in the sun (a highly suspicious act because of the very title of the composition and the literal construction of the photograph) is nonetheless a way of gathering strength by breathing in the moment. We must also consider the women's relationship to the bed of grass they lie on, as well as the way they ignore everything and everyone above, beside, and in front of them. Let us suppose that the women in Magritte's photograph did consciously consider their roles within the context precipitated by him. Did they see themselves as a means for Magritte to channel his own way of looking through them and beyond them to join the male surrealists in the group? In this sense, we might say that the women are foregrounded in relationship to the men.

We must always return to the question of whether self-representation functions on the level of pleasure or oppression. The two women in Magritte's composition appear to be very happy conversing with each other. The "naughty" game of peering up the skirt may be a lesbian gesture; and in a self-reflexive sense, where one woman is the mirror image of the other woman, it also becomes a gesture closely aligned to masturbation. This gesture, whether solitary or shared, seems ultimately to evoke the notion of pleasure. Underlying that pleasure, however, is the confinement of the woman lying on the bed of grass by the woman who looms over her, feet tightly secured at the other's waist, imposing the dominance of one (text?) over the other (art?).

Kiss Machine was created because Emily and Paola feel that self-publishing guarantees that text and graphics can coexist rather than be in the service of each other; that a community can make more interesting art than a company; that the juxtaposition of discordant themes can bring forth beautiful possibilities; that surrealism, despite the problematic male gaze, can be hijacked and shaped by women.

While this essay speaks in part about the specifics of an old photograph, the discussion serves to outline the multiple conversations and forms of looking that the editors see reflected in the world of independent art and literature today.