The Graphic Art of the Underground

Bloomsbury Visual Arts An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square

London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Š IAN LOWEY and SUZY PRINCE, 2014 Ian Lowey and Suzy Prince have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Commissioning editors: Simon Keane-Cowell and Rebecca Barden Assistant Editors: Simon Longman and Abbie Sharman British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-0-8578-5818-4 ePDF: 978-1-4725-7355-1 ePub: 978-1-4725-7356-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lowey, Ian, author.

The graphic art of the underground : a countercultural history / Ian Lowey and Suzy Prince. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-85785-818-4 (hardback) 1. Art and society--History--20th century. 2. Art and society--History--21st century.

3. Art, Modern--20th century. 4. Art, Modern--21st century. 5. Counterculture. I. Prince, Suzy, author. II. Title.

N72.S6L69 2014 709.04’07--dc23 2013048261 Designed by Ian Lowey Cover design by Jamie Keenan Project management by Precision Graphics Printed and bound in China

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CONTENTS

6 Introduction 12 REMEMBRANCE OF FINKS PAST kustom kulture and automotive art

50 OUT COME THE FREAKS

the emergence of the psychedelic underground

98 PUNK GRAPHICS

the subversion of style

160 LA LURE

the weird and wonderful world of lowbrow art and pop surrealism

220 SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW designer toys and indie crafting

266 268 272 272

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Bibliography Index Acknowledgements Image Credits

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INTRODUCTION

Opposite: Vince Ray: The Sound Effect of Sex and Horror, 2002.

The concept for this book arose out of a series of lectures which we delivered at Manchester’s Cornerhouse cinema and gallery in 2012, as part of its Introduction to Contemporary Visual Art teaching programme.

These ‘Beyond the Counterculture’ lectures explored the visual legacy of a series of iconoclastic underground youth movements which have risen to prominence in Western pop culture since the 1950s and which have challenged the perceived social and cultural complacency of the establishment. In doing so, they drew directly on our experiences as copublishers and editors of the UK alternative arts magazine Nude,1 as well as Suzy’s experience as co-proprietor and curator of the London-based Last Chance Saloon lowbrow art gallery and emporium.2 Beginning with the Californian hot rod culture (or Kustom Kulture) of the 1950s and early 1960s and finishing with the relatively recent rise of the indie crafting movement, this book serves as an overview of a number of visual means of expression that have arisen out of the need for groups of individuals to set themselves apart from, or in direct opposition to, wider society through the creation and development of their own distinct common cultural identities.

To this end, we connect some rather unlikely bedfellows. For instance, it may not be immediately apparent quite what the legendary US car customiser Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth and the erudite British graphic designer Peter Saville have in common (aside from perhaps a shared

INTRODUCTION

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Opposite and above: Nude magazine covers.

From left: issue 4, 2004 (cover artist, Jamie Reid); issue 5, 2004 (cover artist, James Cauty / Rocket World); issue 9, 2006 (cover artist Niagara); issue 11, 2007 (cover artist, Véronique Dorey).

interest in lettering and typography).3 However, over five chapters we explore the numerous links which exist not only between subcultures which are seemingly at opposite ends of the spectrum from each other, but also between protagonists from wildly different artistic disciplines.

After all, in spite of the fact that punk nihilism and hippy idealism are two immediately irreconcilable-seeming traits – each identified with subcultural youth movements which rose to prominence roughly ten years apart – were not both hippy and punk similarly underpinned by a shared spirit of anti‑authoritarianism? Likewise, could the intricate hand‑painted decoration of the car customiser be seen as the unreservedly male equivalent of the historically female pursuit of embroidery? Certainly when both are similarly informed by the wayward spirit of rock ’n’ roll, as the worlds of Kustom Kulture and indie crafting undoubtedly are, then they most definitely can.

Ultimately, the work showcased in this book has been created by individuals – some formally tutored, others self-taught – who have been energised by the specific subcultural scenes in which they were immersed.

This has been the case to the extent that many artists whose work became so intrinsically associated with the prevailing subculture in which they worked, found themselves cast into relative obscurity once the subculture in which they had made their mark was superseded by another. That is, of

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course, until such a time as their work has been rediscovered by the pop-cultural archaeologists of subsequent generations.

The spirit of youthful energy and rebellion which characterised such subcultures found its most immediate and powerful expression in rock music – or in the case of the Kustom Kulture that pre-dated the advent of rock ’n’ roll, in the roar of the souped-up engine. However, many of these alternative scenes also succeeded in developing an attendant and very distinctive visual aesthetic which went beyond shared fashions and (anti) social attitudes. As a consequence of this, much of the art showcased in this book comes in the form of LP covers, flyers and concert posters – all of which afforded the most immediate means of formulating and disseminating that visual aesthetic. But in addition, we look at how this rock ’n’ roll – or more specifically, punk – sensibility has, on the US West Coast in particular, coalesced into the development of a ‘lowbrow’ art scene – this being a creative milieu which has spawned its own galleries and supporting publications, and which continues to exist well outside of the art mainstream.

We also look at both the development of a new medium for the expression of underground art – the designer toy – which has been enthusiastically adopted by artists from out of punk and hip hop/graffiti subcultures alike, and at the resurgence of interest in mediums which long pre-date collective expressions of youthful rebellion, such as crafting.

INTRODUCTION

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Indeed, drawing on the DIY ethos that was a key component of punk, this new wave of crafting, which has its roots in the American Riot Grrrl Movement of the early 90s, has subsequently grown internationally into a self-empowering anti-corporate movement for our times. Yet, as this book highlights, it continues to share many links to the aforementioned designer toy phenomenon, as well as to both lowbrow art and street art.

Finally, by way of echoing the warning which we felt compelled to post on the promotional material for our course at the Cornerhouse – this book by its very nature may contain imagery which some people may find to be in bad taste or even downright offensive. Indeed, it is even hoped that this may be the case as, given that much of the work showcased in Opposite: Coop: ‘Good ‘n’ Plenty’.

Poster for show at the Last Chance Saloon, 1999.

this decidedly rich visual stew was created with the implicit intention of alienating ‘straight’ society and galvanising an alternative to it. As such, it would be gratifying to know that some years down the line, much of the work still serves this function and retains the power to shock.

1. The authors published seventeen issues of Nude, together with a valedictory ‘Best of…’ compilation, between 2003 and 2012 2. The Last Chance Saloon opened in Waterloo, London, in 1998 and soon after was listed in the top fifteen of Time Out magazine’s ‘Hip 100’.

Before closing its doors in 2003, it hosted a number of exhibitions showcasing the work of ‘lowbrow’ artists, including the first UK shows of Vince Ray, Coop and Frank Kozik.

3. This sense of commonality would eventually find expression in the production of a series of Ed Roth-inspired fonts by US-based type foundry, House Industries.

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OUT COME THE FREAKS

the emergence of the psychedelic underground

2

In the introduction to a special themed edition of The Observer newspaper’s colour supplement of 3 December 1967 devoted to the examination of the emergence of a pop cultural underground, the jazz musician and cultural critic George Melly notes: ‘A curious alliance has been struck between teenagers, the hippies, commercial pop, and the young intellectuals. Somehow all have crystallised into a separate society or “scene”.’1 Writing in that same issue, Melly recalls his first awareness of this nascent scene as being at an Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum during the summer of 1966 (though the seeds of this seemingly spontaneous flowering of the underground are generally acknowledged to have been sown a full year earlier by way of the International Poetry Incarnation which took place at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1965, a sell-out event promoted by the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, featuring readings by himself and other countercultural literary figures such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael Horowitz). He says: Many were clearly art students, some were beats, others could have been pop musicians; most of them were very young, but almost all of them gave the impression of belonging to a secret society which had not yet declared its aims or intentions. (The Observer, 1967)

Opposite: Martin Sharp: ‘Blowin’ in the Mind’ poster, 1967.

And having ‘stumbled for the first time into the presence of this emerging underground’, Melly – one of the first regular broadsheet

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Above: Aubrey Beardsley: Poster advertising an exhibition of works by the artist held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 19 May–19 September 1966.

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writers to consider popular culture worthy of serious analysis – goes on to point out that ‘the Underground is the first of the pop explosions to have evolved a specifically graphic means of expression’ (The Observer, 1967).

Melly takes great care to draw a distinction between his use of the word ‘graphic’ and the numerous expressions of visual style adopted by the followers of the various pop cults of the time, arguing that the underground had gone far beyond mere choices in clothing and accessories ‘to evolve a graphic imagery which would provide a parallel to its musical, literary and philosophical aspects’ (The Observer, 1967).

And the two primary media for this new explosion of bewildering graphic imagery were the pop/rock LP cover and the concert poster.

To this end, he offers up The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP cover, created by the painter Peter Blake (and his then wife, Jann Haworth), as evidence of the kind of cultural cross-pollination, affected in the art schools of the nation which had given rise to the advent of this new underground. For in being a record sleeve designed by an established fine artist for a pop band, the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band represented the formal coming together of ‘intellectual pop’ in the form of pop art, ‘commercial pop’ in the form of increasingly sophisticated product packaging, and pop music, which had demonstrated ever-increasing levels of depth and sophistication through such albums as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, amongst others. What’s more, by way of underscoring this increasing fluidity between fine and commercial art within the context of an increasingly dynamic and nuanced pop culture, the sleeve, following the album’s release in 1967, quickly established itself as a celebrated cultural artefact in itself as opposed to a mere decorative wrap for a vinyl LP. This record sleeve effectively served as both notice of the Beatles’ wholehearted embracement of psychedelia (though there had already been clear signs of the direction the band were moving in, in the music and artwork of the band’s two previous LPs, Rubber Soul and Revolver) and a snapshot of just where the underground was at spiritually and intellectually – with its cardboard cut-out representations of the likes of the aforementioned Aubrey Beardsley, as well as Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Karl Marx and sundry Hindu gurus. In spite of his artwork, Blake himself, though he may have been sympathetic to its spirit, was not ‘of’ the underground but merely an associate of it.

Certainly, the inherent Englishness and nostalgic quality of his work may have chimed with the aesthetic sensibilities of the underground with its

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Above: Hapshash and the Coloured Coat: Soft Machine poster, 1967.

interest in Edwardiana, art nouveau and the visionary art of William Blake, but he remained in essence a painter identified with an artistic movement – pop – which had emerged in the UK over a decade earlier. To this end, it could be argued that Peter Blake was as much a cultural touchstone for the underground as those he portrayed on his iconic album cover.

By way of contrast, appropriately young and looking very much the part in their brightly patterned shirts and ‘hipster’ trousers, Nigel Waymouth and Michael English, working as a duo under the collective nom de plume of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, and the Australian émigré

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Martin Sharp were the very essence of the underground. And being very much of the scene, they were able to carve out a niche for themselves as poster artists and record cover designers, creating work for musicians such as Bob Dylan, Donovan, Pink Floyd and Cream, which has come to serve as Below: Hapshash and the Coloured Coat: Pink Floyd poster, 1967.

instant visual shorthand for the heady days of the summer of love.

Certainly, commenting upon the work of these artists back in 1967, George Melly observed that their startling, psychedelic concert posters

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made ‘most contemporary commercial advertising look both uninventive and sloppy’ (The Observer, 1967).

This was a telling point. Although we have to place the work of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat and Martin Sharp together with others involved with the scene such as John Hurford and Pearce Marchbank within the realm of commercial design and advertising (and here it is to be noted that Michael English briefly worked for an ad agency), its sense of youthful spontaneity and sheer visual energy owed very little to the angular, Swiss modernist-influenced rationality that prevailed within mainstream graphic design of the time. Instead, these posters were, in the words of Melly, ‘not so much a means of broadcasting information as a way of advertising a trip to an artificial paradise’ (The Observer, 1967).

To this end, they weren’t even conceived as open forms of communication, as their wildly surrealistic concepts and distorted lettering were specifically designed to have meaning only to those who were already tuned in on an experiential level to their message. To everyone else, they succeeded in being merely alienating. Indeed, part of the very intent of the posters was to circumnavigate the rational and, working on the level of pure visual stimuli, become part of the trip – often in a very literal way. For the very notion of their function as advertising became even more questionable given that many of the posters appeared inside of the clubs that they were supposedly promoting, where their swirls of Day-Glo Opposite: Michael McInnerney and Dudley Edwards: ‘Jazz at the Roundhouse’, 1967, silk screen.

colour would react under ultraviolet light to suitably mind-bending effect.

Below: John Hurford: Gandalf’s Garden, issue 2, cover spread, September 1968.

been introduced to each other in 1966 by the trio of Joe Boyd, John

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As befitting key figures in London’s flowering underground, the countercultural credentials of Michael English, Nigel Waymouth and Martin Sharp, in particular, were impeccable. English and Waymouth had ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and Barry Miles, all co-founders of the hugely influential psychedelic club UFO (said to be an acronym for ‘Unlimited Freak Out’,

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PUNK GRAPHICS the subversion of style

3

Speaking on the BBC’s 2012 comprehensive three-part Punk Britannia documentary, the writer and musician Richard Strange posited that the period between the ending of the Vietnam War in April 1975 and the Sex Pistols’ debut gig at Saint Martins School of Art (now the college Central Saint Martins) in London on 6 November 1975, served as a metaphorical passing of the baton from one musical generation to another. Certainly the sense of instant obsolescence articulated in the same programme

by Strange and other older musicians upon first witnessing the Pistols play would seem to support this theory.1 Likewise, with both American involvement in the Vietnam War and the attendant protests against it having peaked way back in 1968, there is also much in the argument that the ending of the protracted conflict midway through the 1970s represented the final wrapping up of unfinished business from the previous decade. After all, hadn’t opposition to the war greatly sustained the counterculture of the late 1960s, galvanising it with such a unified sense of purpose that its failure to stop the bloodshed served as evidence of the ultimate impotence of the LSD-addled protest?

And yet, while it may be true that punk music truly had – in the UK at least – been propagated by and large by the ‘bored teenagers’ of its

Opposite: Jamie Reid: ‘Fuck Forever’, 1979.

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own mythology (see ‘Bored Teenagers’ by The Adverts, the B-side to their 1977 chart hit, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ [Anchor Records]), the situation with regard to those charged with representing punk visually was a far more

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Above: Jamie Reid: God Save the Queen (Swastika Eyes).

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complex story – and one which would serve to deny Richard Strange’s analogy. Indeed, while incisive analysis of the punk movement is frequently bedevilled by often highly complex debate over such issues as origination (who, if anyone, invented it?), intent (what were its aims, and did it even have any?) and constitution (was it made up principally of art-school types or the romanticised guttersnipe youth of many a punk lyric?), perhaps the one thing which helped make punk ‘the most transformative force in British popular music history’2, was that, supernova-style, it briefly sucked a variety of diverse elements into its core before violently vomiting them out again in an amphetamine-fuelled blur of creativity.

And so, whilst in terms of graphic imagery, for some younger artists punk would open up a space in which to hone a new designed graphic sensibility that would presage the coming of the so-called ‘design decade’ of the 1980s, for older practitioners such as Jamie Reid, it offered the chance to channel some of the distinctly avant-garde socio-political ideas which had risen to prominence in the late 1960s and mainline them directly into the jaded heart of mid-1970s British pop culture. Indeed, for a movement which had set itself in such flagrant opposition to the flabby, shabby, beardscratching complacency to which the rump of the hippy movement had retreated, it’s perhaps surprising to discover to what degree those credited with formulating the visual language of punk did so by drawing upon their experiences of the burgeoning counterculture of the late 1960s.

Growing up in a suburb outside of Croydon, south of London, and from old leftist/druidic stock, Jamie Reid had been a contemporary of Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren at Croydon Art School. During their time there both McLaren and Reid had become enthralled by the ideas of the Situationist International, a group of revolutionary social theorists whose philosophies are said to have played a pivotal role in underpinning the student riots in France and subsequent general strike of May 1968.

Reid first made his own mark politically and artistically with the Suburban Press. This was a Croydon-based magazine co-founded by Reid in 1970 as a kind of shit-stirring mix of local politics, cut-and-paste graphics, absurdist humour and agitprop/situationist aphorisms. Around this time Reid also collaborated with the late activist and writer Christopher Gray on the first English language publication of Situationist International writings (Gray, 1974). And having answered McLaren’s call to come and work alongside him as art director for the Sex Pistols, Reid makes no bones about having used the band as a vehicle through which to disseminate his own (and McLaren’s) strain of cultural anarchism, saying, ‘I always

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Above: Jamie Reid: Nowhere Buses, 1972.

found, particularly with Situationist theory, that in translation it became very highbrow; but working with the Pistols gave me a chance to simplify some of that stuff and put a lot of those ideas back into popular culture’ (Nude, 2004a).

Perhaps the most immediate way of putting those ideas back into popular culture was through the use of imagery which had originally been used in the Suburban Press as well as by the San Francisco-based situationist group, Point Blank. Imagery such as the ‘Nowhere Buses’, which subsequently appeared in the 1976 Sex Pistols fanzine, Anarchy in the UK (credited to the band’s management company, Glitterbest) and later on the back cover of the band’s third single, ‘Pretty Vacant’ (Gorman, 2009).

Another method was through the process of détournement – much favoured by the Situationist International – by which original works or images are doctored in order to turn their intended meaning back on themselves.

Indeed, in the words of contemporary art curator and writer, Ariella Yedgar: The now iconic early collages created as artwork by Reid for the Sex Pistols were the work of a true Detourneur who diverts existing powerful symbols towards a subversive reading . . . (Sladen and Yedgar, 2007, p. 173) Perhaps the most clear-cut example of Reid’s use of détournement is to be found on the cover of the Sex Pistols’ 1977 single, ‘Holidays in

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Above: Jamie Reid: Suburban Press, sticker collage, 1975.

the Sun’. Here, a comic strip taken from a Belgian tourist brochure3 has the original text removed from its speech bubbles and replaced with the lyrics of the song. However, other examples include the superimposition of swastika symbols over the eyes of a Cecil Beaton Silver Jubilee portrait of the queen and his use of an American Express card as the central image for the cover of the band’s 1979 (post-John Lydon) single, ‘The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle’.

Yet, irrespective of any sense of self-interest that may arise out of Reid’s use of the Sex Pistols as a means to serve his own agenda, the cut-up anti-design style honed by Reid during his Suburban Press years would serve as the perfect visual foil to the band’s anti-rock ’n’ roll. And

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Above: Barney Bubbles: Music for Pleasure by The Damned, LP cover, 1976.

the resultant package, overseen by McLaren, became one of the most brilliantly effective examples of guerrilla marketing ever seen: one which served to critique and undermine passive consumerist society whilst, at the same time, raking in ‘cash from chaos’.

Meanwhile, in a wider design sense, just as the back-to-basics approach of punk musicians effectively served to hole the grotesquely overblown pretensions of prog rock below the waterline, Jamie Reid’s startlingly simple cut-and-paste cover for Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols served as a clarion call announcing the arrival of a brash new lo-fi graphic style which was ‘the perfect manifestation of punk’s bedsit smash and grab aesthetic’ (de Ville, 2003, p. 157). Thus, alongside the notion that a simple knowledge of three chords – or less – was all that you needed to be in a punk band, Reid’s instantly iconic artwork for the Sex Pistols’ only bona fide album proclaimed, amongst other things, that you didn’t need a degree from art school to design a record sleeve (in spite of Reid himself obviously having one) – in fact, anyone could do it. And many did so, cementing the cut ’n’ paste aesthetic as a quintessentially punk one.

But while Jamie Reid presents a link back from punk to the revolutionary activism of the late 1960s, Colin Fulcher, better known as Barney Bubbles

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Above: Barney Bubbles: Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, inside fold-out cover, 1979.

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