Egozine

Egozine Issue 1 1975

Egozine is a zine published in Hollywood, California, U.S.A. by Robert Lambert.

The first issue was published in 1975. Contributing editors included The Cultural Camelion, Les Petites Bon-Bons, Art Hoax, The James C. Duncan Memorial Society, Bobby Shaftow Fan Club, and Children For E/ART/H. Cover photography was by Greg Jeresek. Other photographs were by Emerson & Lowe, Frank Ford, Suzan Carson, and Richard Creamer. The editor outlines his art career, beginning in Minneapolis and then moving to Hollywood, California. Much of the first issue included recollections of Lambert's career as Boby BonBon, who, along with Jeri BonBon (Jerry Dreva), made up the performance group Les Petites Bon-Bon. The zine features clippings of their appearances in magazines such as People, Newsweek, and Star, at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, and with Sable Star in 1973. Later articles feature their involvement in mail art, and other artists involved in mail art, and performance art.

Nicholas Ballet, in the 2021 article, "Jeans as a Fact of Art", writes of the duo, "The American art group Les Petites Bonbons, formed in particular by the artists Jerry Dreva and Robert Lambert, hijacked the visual and behavioral codes of the Hollywood glitter rock scene from the beginning of the 1970s through performance and mail art, in order to explore gender identities and to subvert the starification process of a subculture. By exposing the very construction of celebrity and its myth through public staging, documented by the specialized newspapers of this period, Dreva and Lambert intended to turn the superficiality of mass media back on itself."

Issue two featured three pages on the famous 1976 COUM Transmissions performance at L.A.I.C.A. with photos and a note from Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti; a contribution from avant-garde Chicano conceptual/performance art group Asco; other contributors include John Jack Baylin, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, and Barbara O'Mary.

Issue three was released in 1978.

Egozine is included in the archival collection of MACBA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, in Barcelona, Spain, and at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky in Paris, France.

Egozine was one of the titles featured in the 2023-2024 Brooklyn Museum exhibition of artist-made zines, Copy Machine Manifesto.