Named after an Iggy Pop song and modeled on Andy Warhol’s Interview, a remarkable newsprint magazine hit the streets of San Francisco in spring, 1977. At a dollar an issue, supported by custom-made music ads and $100 grants from the poets Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Search & Destroy was the brainchild of the Japanese-American artist Vale, who had been born Vale Hamanaka in an Arkansas wartime internment camp. Now known simply as Vale, with the help of artists and writers based in San Francisco, Los Angeles and as far afield as London, he was intent on giving the burgeoning punk rock movement the close attention it deserved. At once raw and judiciously crafted, Search & Destroy zines set a new standard for the form and content of the affordable avant-garde publication.

Two years and ten issues later, the punk music that so mattered to Vale and his collaborators had effectively run its course. So in 1979, Search & Destroy morphed into the even more elaborately engineered RE/Search books, which for decades served as indispensable, first-hand guides to countercultural trends across many media.

Search & Create charts this cultural ferment by displaying the finished publications alongside the ravishing layout pages— variously called flats, paste-ups and mechanicals—that were used to produce published pages. The "flats" exhibit a spirited collision of words and photographs, or fragments of photographs, along with elaborate hand-drawn artwork. The resulting collages are powerfully analog, and their texture, sheen and gentle decay must be experienced in the original. Building on the early twentieth-century traditions of Surrealism and Dada, Vale’s ideas anticipated the Do It Yourself spirit of post-internet culture, and continue to resonate with young and old audiences alike.

Search & Create engages with educational themes including major figures in late twentieth-century music and literature, collage, publication, zine culture, and the DIY movement. It also profiles an important, but underappreciated Japanese-American artist, musician, and publisher.

Works appear courtesy of V. Vale: RE/Search and Search & Destroy collection.