Printed Matters

N AN EW NE D D WA YS W O I AN NG OF OL : IN S D T TE EEI EC GR NG HN AT OL ING OG IES

PRINTED MATTERS

Here at Printed Matters, the printed word matters. That’s why we believe what Ellen Lupton, Roxanne Villa, Caroline Hamilton and Shepard Fairley are saying about the future, and past, of print. Just like us, these intelligent people are switched on and know what’s what when they’re talking about new technologies of design, publication and reading.

This issue is filled with delectable bits and pieces about printed matters and the state of the written world in this modern age. We want you to fall in love all over again with the printed word and support industries that support printed matter.

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CONTENTS

Page 04

Old Schol Style

Page 06

Learning to Love Software

Page 12

The Fate of Bookshops

Page 16

Interview with Obey Giant 3

while attending art school. We named that press “Pie in the Sky”, it lived there for about a year or so until I moved to New York City and sold my share.

When I moved across the United States from LA to NYC I was intent on getting another press. One day I visited The Center for Book Arts on Broadway near Houston to see about renting time and their presses. That adventure led me to another Vandercook flat bed press which was first housed with some really wacky people in a loft in Tribeca.

Getting the press into the basement apartment was quite a feat and resulted in naming the press “Permanent Press” because I had absolutely no idea how we would ever move it. Putting the press into the space had required a crane and the removal of the window, thus the adjective permanent.

Ben and his father, John, were big advocates of my printing obsession and seeking out fonts, engravings, cases, etc at print houses that were going out of business and during my trips to visit family in Argentina. During those years in NYC I printed regularly, mostly for myself and occasionally for others. As an editorial illustrator at the time I knew many art directors and designers who drooled over my small edition printed pieces.

The short run promo cards I did resulted in scoring numerous editorial assignments as well as garnering spotlights in Design books. My prints were a combination of type and image. I used my lead and wood type in combination with engravings and my own illustrations as zinc cuts.

Old School Style Roxanne Villa shares her enthusiasm of letter press During art school I fell in love with print making, particularly letterpress. The fervor caught me quite off guard during a book making class offered as an elective. So hard did I fall for creating printed matter in this ancient technique that I purchased a Vandercook flat bed press with two other friends .

The large, heavy press was delivered to my mothers home and housed in the back “pool” room which I was using as a studio 4

When I moved back across the US to LA I sold the letterpress to a designer in Williamsburg. I’m not sure if the press resides there anymore, I don’t really want to know. It was a dumb move to sell it.

For the last decade and a half instead of making limited edition prints in a process that harkens back to another time I do the same thing but with plant materials. I still tell stories, I still work with my hands and I still love the aromas related with my craft.

I knew one day I would print again and saved all my equipment for that day. Well, that day is close now. This weekend Ben brought over two presses and all my old equipment.

Wood type I bought in Argentina, old metal fonts from lower NYC along with type drawers, copper engravings, ink, composing sticks, lead, its all here in our studio garage.

The presses are small and different from my Vandercook flat bed but they will still suffice. One of them is a small flatbed hand press and the other is a beautiful platen press that looks very steam punk.

Ben will be bringing over a flat file and old oak case to put the type in and do a bit more rearranging here in the studio before we can actually print. Looking back now I can see a unifying thread drawing, painting, printing, natural perfume and bee keeping. It’s all about fine hand craftsmanship, creativity and illuminating the ancient arts of the past.

To read more about Roxanne Villa and her printing press escapades, visit http://journal.illuminatedperfume.com/

STOCKISTS VISIT: www.statusaxiety.com.au

By Ellen Lupton During the 1990s, cultural recycling and visual “scratch mixing” became graphic design’s standard operating procedures, inside and outside the classroom. The digital transformation of design processes encouraged this transformation by enabling the endless recirculation of existing material. It also forced educators to focus energy on teaching software, which was seen as a necessary evil on the path to becoming a designer.

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Yet while design educators had turned away from formal analysis towards a more impressionistic, culturally based, referential approach, software writers had been systematically organizing image-making into menus of properties, parameters, filters, and so on, converting the Bauhaus theory of visual language into comprehensive visual tools. Photoshop, for example, is a systematic study of the features of an image—its contrast, size, color model, and so on. InDesign and Quark Xpress are structural explorations of typography; they are software machines for exploring leading, alignment, spacing, and column structures as well as image

Learning to Love Software INTEGRATING NEW AND OLD TECHNOLOGIES CAN INCREASE READERSHIP placement and page layout. These tools have cast a net around our field of practice, filtering our daily production of typography, symbols, images, and information systems. To what degree do we understand the formal constraints and possibilities of these tools? No theory or pedagogical practice has appeared to address the role of digital technologies in shaping and describing the formal language of design.

In the 1920s, faculty at the Bauhaus and other vanguard schools analyzed visual form according to formal parameters: from point, line, and plane to color, texture, pattern, scale, and contrast.

The idea of looking at two-dimensional design as a universal, perceptually based “language of vision” shaped design education around the world. The Bauhaus Vorkurs or Basic Course remains today the model—at least nominally—for firstyear foundation programs in countless art programs, which aim to expose students to a common language of form underlying all the arts.

Johannes Itten, the first leader of the Basic Course, invited students to experience color, texture, and shape from

a personal, sometimes mystical point of view. In contrast, the Hungarian-born Constructivist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who taught at the Bauhaus from 1923–8, believed that the Basic Course should lay bare a system of elements ratified by a shared society and a common humanity. Similarly, Josef Albers, who came to the Bauhaus as a student and then taught alongside Moholy-Nagy in the Basic Course, created a pedagogy that favored systematic thinking over personal intuition, objectivity over emotion. The Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky contributed theories of geometry and color through his teaching and his book Point and Line to Plane, which called for the creation of a basic “dictionary of elements” and a universal “grammar” underlying all the arts.

Since the 1940s, numerous educators have refined and expanded on this systematic approach to two-dimensional design, from Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, to Itten, Max Bill, and Gui Bonsieppe at the Ulm School in Germany, to Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann in Switzerland, to the “new typographies” of Wolfgang Weingart, Dan Friedman, and Katherine McCoy

in Switzerland and the U.S.. These educators each articulated a structural approach to design from distinct and original points of view.

Since the 1960s, postmodern artists and designers have rejected the idea— cherished by the builders of the Bauhaus and other modernist institutions—that communication might have a universal basis. Postmodernism asserts that a cultural artifact can be understood only in terms of a specific place, time, and audience. This relativist position makes it futile to speak of any inherent meaning in an image or object, as all people will bring their own cultural biases and personal experiences to bear on the act of interpretation. As postmodernism itself became a dominant ideology in the 1980s and 90s, in both the academy and the marketplace, the design process got mired in the act of referencing cultural styles or tailoring messages to narrowly defined communities of users.

Is it possible now to look back to the modernist undertaking in a manner informed by postmodern theories and critiques, and bring a changed set of values to design thinking? Over the past

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We are exploring the interconnected languages of print, film, new media, and architecture, and we are looking at how software enables and limits what designers do.

year, my colleagues and I at Maryland Institute College and Art in Baltimore have been exploring form-based exercises in design, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. This essay presents some of our thinking about design and software. Over the past decade, our students had become adept at understanding design from a cultural point of view, but they have less confidence in building concepts abstractly: for example, by manipulating scale, contrast, timing/sequence, editing (in both the filmic and literary senses), hierarchy, grids, diagrammatic structures, and so on. We are exploring the interconnected languages of print, film, new media, and architecture, and we are looking at how software enables and limits what designers do.

artists since Picasso have manipulated in distinctly intellectual ways. Layering (the separation of an image into overlapping components) has been a feature of multicolor printing processes for hundreds of years. Hybridity (the mixing of typographic, photographic, and/ or linear images within a simultaneous frame or surface) was actively pursued in avant-garde posters, advertisements, and book designs. Even in the 1910s and 20s, the technologies of mechanical reproduction were all well-established: halftone process (1880s), photography (1840s), lithography (1780s), and letterpress (1450s). Avant-garde artists and designers used these existing technologies in new ways, exposing the processes of production and emphasizing disjunction, collision, and simultaneity.

industry standards, many of them now consolidated in the product line of a single company, Adobe, whose Creative Suite is licensed and taught in countless schools around the U.S. and the world. The close integration of the CS interfaces allows designers to move easily among applications. Many programs outside the Creative Suite also mirror these interfaces, implementing what has become a common language.

AfterEffects has been called “Photoshop with a timeline,” and InDesign has been called “Illustrator with pages.” Flash and Illustrator treat vector graphics in similar ways. One can envision a day when one massive application will allow the authoring of all forms of media: still and moving, vector and bitmap, print and multimedia.

In his essay “After Effects, or Velvet Revolution” (2006), media critic Lev Manovich proposes to add new terms to the dictionary of visual language: compositing, layering, transparency, and hybridity. These principles are not in themselves new. Indeed, all were explored by designers in the avantgarde period using via mechanical and light-chemical technologies by.

Compositing (the compression of multiple images onto a single surface) is seen in composite prints such as El Lissitzky’s The Constructor, date. Transparency (the visibility of one surface through another) is described in Gyorgy Kepes’s 1947 Language of Vision [check/note] as a natural effect that designers and

In today’s context, what makes layering, transparency, and hybridity new again is their ubiquitous accessibility through commonly available software. They have become universal. Manovich calls the revolution “velvet” because it happened without being much remarked upon.

Suddenly, we are here. In contrast, the historical avant-garde movements broke with history by exposing the language of production, inventing a new form language that remains very much alive today—indeed, this language fundamentally informs the contemporary software environment.

That application (let’s call it Ubershop) might look a lot like Photoshop, the first image editing software to become culturally pervasive. Used by graphic designers, photographers, animators, architects, illustrators, Web designers, and millions of amateurs, Photoshop provides the basic model for many other applications. The verb “to photoshop” has entered the general vocabulary as slang, referring to any digital manipulation of an image, as in “Let’s photoshop that zit.”

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Several software packages emerged over the course of the 1990s as

Photoshop was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, the sons of an avid amateur photographer and college professor, who kept a color and black-and-white darkroom in the family basement. The

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two brothers produced an experimental application called Display in 1987, tackling such problems as how to represent gray scales on an Apple Macintosh Plus. The following year they turned their research into ImagePro, a commercial product designed to manipulate and correct images that had been created in other software. Adobe licensed the product in 1989, releasing it as Photoshop 1.0 in February 1990 after ten months of further development.

From the beginning, Adobe marketed Photoshop as a general-use rather than professionals-only tool, releasing a Windows version in 1993.

From its earliest incarnations, Photoshop featured a palette of tools, thus implementing the GUI vernacular familiar to Mac users. The marquis, lasso, magic wand, and eye dropper, which date back to Photoshop’s earliest toolbars, represent Photoshop’s guiding principle: the ability to select elements of an image and perform changes on that selection. Photoshop’s early toolbars also included the pencil, brush, and type tools (allowing the user to author marks within the program, as in the various “paint” programs that were popular at the time). The act of selection, however, rather than creation, is at the heart of Photoshop, and it is this principle that made the program original and uniquely useful. Although Photoshop has evolved into an ever more powerful authoring tool, its origins in the alchemical darkroom—a place of dodging, burning, correcting, and balancing—remain central to Photoshop’s function. A major advance in the Photoshop interface occurred in 1994, when the Layers feature separated the image in a new way, based not on color relationships among pixels but rather on a sequence of actions performed over time.

Photoshop automatically creates a new layer whenever the user conducts certain actions, such as cut-and-paste or adding text. Layers enable parts of the image to be manipulated independently of the rest: any layer can be filtered, transformed, masked, multiplied, and so forth, and these activities can each be tweaked and reversed ad infinitum.

Adjustment layers allow global changes to the image, such as levels and curves, to be saved as separate sets of data, which can be revised or discarded at a later time. The source file becomes an archaeology of its own making, a stack of 10

The metaphor of layers comes from the physical world.

The Swiss designer Wolfgang Weingart experimented extensively in this manner in the 1970s and 80s, shifting the films used to create offset plates to produce unexpected textures and juxtapositions.

Many designers have explored an off-register or misprinted look, seeking rawness by exposing the layers of the printing process. Contemporary designers including Ryan McGuiness and Joshua Davis create graphic images composed of enormous numbers of layers that overlap in arbitrary, uncoordinated ways, allowing the layers to maintain separate identities in the final piece.

Media critic Steven Johnson points to layers as a constructive principle in contemporary media. Describing The Sopranos in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson identifies “multiple elements seen simultaneously in the main threading” as the use of a large number window, but represented as a vertical of parallel but connected stories: “a single sedimentation in the Layers palette. scene in The Sopranos will often connect The History palette, introduced in 1998, to three diffe construction is, of course, took the idea of Layers to a micro-level, a distinctly modernist principle. Although making a record of nearly every action some design instructors resent having performed and rendering the principle of to teach software, wishing to relegate it layers explicitly temporal. to lower-level technicians, software skills can be taught in a way that explores the Layers appear today in nearly every structures and metaphors found in the graphics application, from Photoshop interfaces we use. to Illustrator, Flash, FinalCut, and AfterEffects. The metaphor of layers A problem I developed for my Graphic comes from the physical world. It also Design I class uses layers to carry reflects historic methods of assembling students from the physical world to images for reproduction. Most printing the virtual one, ending in a time-based techniques require that an image be piece: the layers of a cut-paper collage separated into layers before it can be become layers that change in time. The reproduced; each color requires its project is done first by hand and then in own stone, plate, film, screen, and so Illustrator and Flash. The layers in the on. While contemporary technologies Illustrator file can be turned on and off automate this process, making it more or can be individually manipulated to or less invisible to the designer, the act produce design variations; the source of articulating a printed work into layers file becomes a secondary interface, a required conscious planning in the era of machine for creating style frames for the pre-digital design and production. final animation. Layers from Illustrator are imported directly into Flash for Prior to the early 1990s, “mechanicals” manipulation in the timeline. were art boards over which layers of acetate were precisely aligned. The Layers, once hidden in obscure designer or production artist adhered mechanical processes, have become every element of the page—type, images, intuitive and universal. Working with blocks of color—to the appropriate layer Photoshop layers can foster the visual on the mechanical, so that any element literacy of children as well as college-level touching or passing behind any other art students. I showed my six-year-old element was on its own acetate layer. daughter how to build a face in layers and Historically, designers have tended to then selectively turn them on and off to hide the layered construction of the create different portraits. Labeling each printed page, but experimental work layer (blue eyes, green eyes, and so on) uncovers visual possibilities by moving helped her see the file as a database of layers around before they are printed. assets. These same principles structure

the Flash-based fashion and makeup games she plays on the Internet.

Although the content of such games may be normative and banal, learning to recognize their underlying structure is empowering to some degree, allowing her to make the shift from consumer to producer. Now at age seven, she assembles her own virtual paper dolls from Googled images.

The twenty years ago, the idea of “visual literacy” emphasized uncovering the ideological biases of media; today, it centers on production, on learning the tools. Moreover, the tools are becoming universal, shared across a mass global society.

Lev Manovich argues in his essay “Generation Flash” that a new modernism is on the rise, in which “software critique” is replacing “media critique.” The postmodern project was to unpack the ideological bias of mass media. In the 1980s Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Richard Prince deployed the techniques of mechanical reproduction to repurpose the archive of mass communication and expose the politics

of representation.

The new “software critique” is less politico-intellectual and more technical, concerned not so much with what things mean as with how they are made. A younger generation is concerned less with challenging the systems of mass media than with building alternative communication networks. What you say is ceding to how you say it. Form has trumped content.

Something is surely lost in this turn away from the critical and towards the practical. A return to basics is not an end, however, but a beginning, a cleansing of the lens before we prepare to shoot, an examination of the hardware and software of visual language before we plunge ourselves into practice. The ends of design are determined by authors, users, publishers, and clients.

Formal studies leave those ends open, avoiding applied projects that imitate “real world” situations.

Manovich explains that his term “Generation Flash” refers not to a specific software program but rather to a broader cultural movement. It is telling, nonetheless, that he plucked the

Bon Iver, Bon Iver out now

name from the commercial realm (now part of the Adobe brand hegemony).

Flash straddles the domains of the GUI toolbar and code-based authoring. It recalls the interface models of Photoshop and Illustrator while also speaking the language of Java, albeit through its own idiosyncratic vocabulary and syntax.

Not all software follows the Photoshop interface model. Processing, created

by Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas, invites artists and designers to generate imagery through code. With its direct syntax and elegant interface, Processing enables users with minimal programming experience to create rule-based animations and interactive or self-evolving works.

Processing.org’s reference page resembles the table of contents of a post-Bauhaus design textbook, with master terms such as Structure, Shape, Color, Image, Transform, and Typography

Ellen Lupton also speaks her mind here: http://elupton.com/

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Does the Fate of Bookshops Rest on the Fate of Books?

Caroline Hamilton discusses the ability for Bookstores to survive rests in their ability to adapt to an ever changing environment of sales and reader’s needs. Local bookshops need to adapt to new ways of selling books, including e-books.

Recently, I went to Berwick St in Soho with a DJ friend of mine who was in London for a few days. Once hailed as having the greatest concentration of record shops in Britain – back in the 1990s Berwick St had more than 20 independent stores – the strip was even celebrated on the cover of an album by Oasis.

But, when I visited a few months ago, the scene was a far cry from those ‘glory’ days.

this case it happens to be a rather unpretentious café above the local library. Here there’s lots of light, some large tables to work or read and wifi. There’s also a wall of books for sale (a mix of big name and local self published products), and community noticeboards which advertise, amongst other things, courses in digital literacy, book making and creative writing. So, it’s not just a coffee shop but a literary social space.

A scant few audiophiles sifted through overflowing racks of secondhand records and CDs. Signs advertised albums for 10p.

I politely flicked through bent cardboard and cracked plastic, feigning interest while my friend searched for any loot he might strip from the wreckage. It took me only a few minutes to abandon any interest.

If Berwick St left me wondering: are bookshops – spaces easily as beloved by their public as record stores once were – eventually to suffer a similar fate? The ifBook experiment ‘cafe/ bookshop in the library’ made me speculate on whether this might be a possible solution.

This struck a particular chord with me because only a few days earlier the research partner I have been working with here in the UK, if:Book, announced its plans to transform a project we’d been working on together, an experimental community based bookshop, into – you guessed it – a coffee shop.

In his book Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened to Record Shops? Graham Jones attributes the closure of independent stores to the new market landscape in which record companies put online retailers and supermarkets ahead of independent outfits. But corporate greed and agglomeration are only one side of the story: customers have turned away from traditional shopping experiences in favour of online services. Even the local video rental store has now vanished from our streets because of these changes in consumer behavior. When we talk about the current challenges facing bookshops, there is implicit in this a concern that what such struggles really demonstrate is that books are becoming less relevant in our everyday lives. But is this necessarily the reality?

Well, not just a coffee shop, but an experiment in finding new ways to attract people to visit spaces where, for a modest expenditure they can enjoy a variety of reading experiences. In

Research I’ve been working on rather gamely claims to consider what might happen in ‘the bookshop of the future’ and many of these blog musing draw upon the qualitative research

I was struck by how relatively quickly the concept of “browsing” had moved from shelf to screen. Through no fault of its own, this record store had become a room full of junk. While I waited for my friend I asked the assistant for his predictions on the future. “It won’t be long before all these places around here will be replaced by a string of coffee shops.”

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I’ve conducted over the past 6 months with seven small, independent London-based book retailers and their customers.

Based on what I’ve learned through these conversations and observations I want to propose that, contrary to logic, a bookshop, even without (many) books on the shelves really can be more than ‘just a room’? to its customers.

The idea that bookshops have important symbolic value as well as a commercial role is evident in any analysis of popular media. In books and films the bookshop also regularly features as site for charming and whimsical personal encounters (think of 84 Charring Cross Rd, or films such as You’ve Got Mail or Notting Hill).

Bookshops are rather like holidays, not only because they are associated with relaxation and escape but because, as with taking a holiday, what we value most of all about them are the affective associations they engender. Bookshops are spaces for their patrons’ fantasies about their preferred engagements with their preferred kinds of literature. They evoke feelings.

This being the case the idea of the bookshop is arguably more valued than the actual store on any particular street corner.

This popular discourse contributes to consumer opinion on the value of bricks and mortar book stores. And so, even as sales of iPads and Kindles grow every year, and more customers turn to online shopping, bookshops are as beloved (if less patronized) as ever. In Laura Miller’s study of American independent bookshops she reflects on the cultural value that attends the work of the bookseller, suggesting that “in the valorization of the work of the bookseller there is a clear sense that books

are exceptionally moral objects deserving of protection from [destructive] forces.”

This is why the loss of our bookshops is greeted with even more concern and scandalized outrage than the disappearance of retailers such as record stores or other high street retailers because access to books is understood to contribute so much to a healthy society. Miller observes that independent stores have worked hard to harness the sense of community and being ‘in touch’ that customers anticipate, using this to set them apart from their conglomerate competition. These activities allow small, local stores to account for their undiscounted prices, and also give customers that much desired sense of being ‘in touch’.

But, however nice it is to have a ‘sense of community’ this doesn’t address the realities of our daily habits. I have no doubt that you and I both support the notion of community, we both value the democracy engendered by literacy, we both want local small businesses and local artists to succeed. We both like nice coffee. We both also buy books online.

I myself admit that I do almost all of my book purchasing online — partly these are ebooks for the ease of travel and research, but also because printed books cost a lot of money. Customers I spoke to expressed similar sentiments. They enjoyed browsing but often returned home to buy a book online at a discount.

Or download it. There is unquestionable convenience to the online system, but also, some new pleasures. Customers I spoke with told me of the value of the internet as a research tool for reading, of the pleasure and positive feeling of finding

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out about books via online networks. Here’s a typical comment: “I confess I get most of my recommendations for reading these days via things my friends post online; on Facebook, or Twitter, whatever. Maybe it’s a link to a book review of something new and I think, oh yeah, that looks interesting…Before I know it, it’s on its way to my house.”

It’s not just that interesting things aren’t happening inside small bookshops, but these days much of it isn’t traditional book buying and selling.

In the sites where I’ve been conducting field work I’ve noticed some small but significant changes. The internet and digital social networks are being used not just to link people with common allegiances who are geographically distant but also proximate. Several of the stores I work with understand that the majority of their online network is locally based and tailor their digital identity to reflect this. So for instance, one store I visited maintained a popular Twitter identity that kept followers up to date with day-to-day activities in store, from the boredom of the daily commute, to frustrations ordering stock or indecision about lunchtime sandwich selections.

Even if you’re not in-store it’s easy to keep up to date with the daily life of the bookshop. This store recognized that it wasn’t reading books or critique of books that suited social networks, but being around them in a very quotidian way that was the key. This same store also manages a slate of after-hour events that have almost nothing to do with books (quiz nights, sewing classes, music, comedy and most recently even an Avon evening). These cases illustrate how the old idea of community

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support and being ‘in touch’ can match with the immediacy and novelty of digital networks.

As definitions of “reading” and “readers” have expanded with digital communications its very like that the bookstore’s ideal customer might not even be someone who would describe themselves as having that traditional “passion for books.” Yet, they find their social and cultural tastes and allegiances well catered to by the store and its wider network. These are the book store’s new potential customers.

Bookstores need to take greater account of this change, emphasizing their role as social spaces for people, rather than store houses for stock. The bookstore’s continued ability to generate affection, even among those of us whose actions end up undermining it, perhaps speaks less to our love of books and reading and more to our desire to feel ‘in touch’ with our local environment, via the symbolic value books and bookshops represent. Bookshops need to give people ways to connect online and reasons to leave the house that don’t rely solely on the sale of their primary product. To survive, bookshops need to do something many record stores did not, that is, reinvent themselves as physical destinations within a broader network for reading, rather than being only in the business of book selling.

To find more of Caroline Hamilton’s opinions, vist: www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/

The Obey Giant PRINTED MATTERS TALKS TO SHEPARD FAIRLEY ABOUT HIS HEROS

No matter how much I love art, or try to convince myself of its relevance in society, the fact remains that music is a lot cooler and way more able to reach the bourgeois (and not so) and rock the boulevard. When I am asked about my biggest influences, my interrogator is often surprised to hear “The Sex Pistols”, “Black Flag”, “Public Enemy”, generally expecting me to list off visual artists. I guess I feel like the power of something comes from the feelings it conjures emotinally first and intellectually second. I’ve never been to an an art show and felt like the art had a hold over every person in the room, much less looked over my shoulder to see 50,000 lighters held up in a show of solidarity for Ozzy’s cause. Have you ever seen someone come out of an an art show pouring with sweat, a glazed look in their eyes, throwing their fist in the air like they just had a religious experience? Art shows don’t seem to elicit that level of enthusiasm.

Actually, at a lot of art shows, people are more worried about checking out the crowd than checking out the art. I can’t really blame them when the art itself is less engaging than the written description on the wall next to it. Art is just outgunned in the battle for the senses. Music has the ability to stimulate on so many levels and I’m not just talking about live music. Music provides a cultural eco-system in and of itself. There’s the actual music, the lyrics with their content and politics, the style and personalities of the bandmembers and the politics implicit in their lifestyles, and lastly, their art, album packaging and graphics.

I’ve had some very moving encounters with art, especially on the street, but nothing can compare with the first time I heard the boots marching and first chord of the Sex Pistol’s “Holidays in the Sun”, or the air raid sirens leading into “too black, too strong” on the intro to Public Enemy’s “It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back”. Those songs made my arm hairs stand up. Some music has affected me so powerfully that the mere sight of the album packaging induced a Pavlovian response (scientific analogy makes it sound less pathetic) of air guitar or drums!

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I mean, come on, who hasn’t secretly but whole-heartedly identified with Beavis and Butthead imitating Sabbath’s “Iron Man”? Bob Ross can only dream of as many people watching his painting show as watch “Beavis and Butthead” or now more likely “The Osbournes”. Let’s face it, music is a huge influence on popular culture and even Andy Warhol, the most successful of “Pop Artists”, is less widely known than musical acts comparably much lower on the totem pole.

Warhol can actually be credited with exploiting the potential to connect with a broader audience through Pop. His collaboration with the Velvet Underground led to the iconic banana album cover. That graphic would be just another part of the Warhol “let’s make a mundane object into high art” schtick (not that that’s a bad thing) if it weren’t associated with such an influential and enduring band.

The marriage of great art, great music, and great ideas is an incredibly powerful one. I used Public Enemy to illustrate this spread because they are one of the rare acts, along with people like The Clash and The Sex Pistols, who brilliantly crafted every aspect of what they were doing and maximized the results.

Great name, great beats, great rhymes, provocative politics, powerful graphics and presentation (can’t front on the S1W’s) and a defiant attitude that scared “The Man” made Public Enemy a force to be reckoned with. They probably raised more issues in the three years after their debut than the worlds visual artists will during their lifetimes.

For a visual artist such as myself, this harsh reality provides the challenge to make my art as much of an engaging, stimulating, provocative, visceral experience as possible. To quote Chuck D, “I want to reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard”. I don’t want people to only experience my art in the safe, tame confines of the gallery, which is why I put my art up illegally in the streets. I’m a populist and I look at it this way: I may not play an instrument, but I’m gonna rock it hard as nails anyway.

STATUSAXIETY www.statusanxiety.com.au BON IVER www.boniver.com SKULK OF FOXES www.skulkoffoxes.com.au OBEY GIANT www.obeygiant.com

PRINTED MATTERS

FOR STOCKISTS, VISIT: www.printedmatters.com OR WRITE TO US AT: PO BOX 435 Brisbane, QLD 4000

CONTRIBUTORS: Ellen Lupton Roxanne Villa Caroline Hamilton

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Shepard Fairley

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