15 posts tagged “posters”
Mister Koppa and I made the trip to the first ever Hamilton Wood Type Museum Wayzgoose.
What’s a wayzgoose? Back in the day it was the end
of summer bash thrown by the master printer for his shop underlings and
apprentices. And now, I guess, it’s the kind of event the Hamilton staff put
together for us–“us” being a gathering of type nuts, artists, letterpress
printers, typographers, graphic and type designers. About 50 were in attendance. Mister Koppa and I were just about in the middle of the pack, age-wise. It was good to see so many young people turning out, seeing this as a living thing.
We were treated to power point presentations by Rich Kegler and Juliet Shen on the first evening. Juliet Shen told the story of working with Pugent Sound Salish tribes to design a font for the preservation and continuation of the Lushootseed language, which is down to ten or less native speakers, and having the font cut as a new wood type by Hamilton.
She had an elegant explanation for why she approached Hamilton about producing a new face in wood type, and in a language that does not use the straightforward Latin alphabet. She said simply, working and printing in wood type is better for getting the young people interested in learning to read, speak, and write in the language.
The second day was organized around four different
presentations, including a demonstration of the pantograph router by Norb
Brylski, one of the old-timers from the Hamilton workforce. This man was a
printer with his own shop first, and then after leaving that part of the trade
spent years cutting wood type faces for Hamilton, in time becoming a master of
the pantograph router, understanding all the nuances of the tool. This tool,
in which the pantograph is machined to such a quality of stability and
precision that it can be attached to a router run on pressurized air, was at
the heart of the Hamilton production of wood type, and one of the main reasons
decorative faces could be produced cheaply enough to be used widely in
commercial printing.
All throughout the demonstration people got to ask him questions. Most were of a technical nature. Paul Aken asked him about the shoulder height and depth of the counter (sorry, those are cast type terms). I asked him how they measured the productivity of each pantograph operator. He said that management had figured out a standard of output, so many fonts in a given face in a given size in a given amount of time. I can’t remember if he said it was all charted out or not, but that’s how I’m picturing the information. The reason this is crazy to think about is, this was a pretty skilled kind of work, including having to cut by hand every single inside corner to a sharp angle for many faces, because the router bits all leave a round corner. Quantifying all that across the room full of pantagraph operator-craftsworkers, such that the information could be figured into larger decisions regarding the future prospects of the company, was probably a typical industrial efficiency problem for the time. I think it was one of the Moran brothers who noted that over the decades there had been a great many women in this occupation. I also asked Mr. Brylski if he was in a union. He was; I think he said it was the carpenters and joiners union.
Richard Zauft, under whom I studied about thirteen years ago, led a hands-on print session using for the first time the newly unveiled Hamilton face, Carter Latin, the first typeface designed by Matthew Carter for wood type. Matthew Carter has done just about everything a guy can do in the field of typography and type design, but it turned out he hadn’t ever designed for wood type. So this, too, was (for type nuts, at least) a pretty special moment, and super fun to do. Hundreds of proofs were made over the course of the day, including many on paper taken from a shop scrap pile, with entertaining results. Matthew Carter was there, presiding like a pleased patrician grandfather.
Jim Moran gave us a wonderful introduction to and status report on the recently acquired inventory of printing blocks from the old Globe company of Chicago. I don’t know what the proper name of the business was. It might have been Globe Print, or Globe Printing, or Globe Show Print. They were in the business of letterpress printed advertising. Movie posters, rodeo, car racing, and circus posters, and signage for grocery stores and small retailers. And some political signage, including a lot of blocks for the old Illinois US Senator Dirksen. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, in terms of a fusion of material and social history. Who were these people in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who were going to rodeos, circuses, and scary movies? The whole thing had the air of a healthy working class world, with its own amusements and nascent consumer economy. Jim made the point that some of the circus posters that feature clowns are actually quite sinister, with the clowns playing as figures of chaos and menace. So what was life like for the classes of citizenry who consumed the thrills and contrived scares of the circus midway and freak shows? Who shopped at the stores that advertised their meat discounts in the windows? And who Senator Dirksen wanted to reach? Lots to wonder about there. Unfortunately, not much is known about Globe. Jim is starting to get some leads on the company, people who may have been involved, but it sounds like that is in an early stage.
The Hamilton staff and volunteers are slowly making their way through an estimated 1400 blocks, many of them damaged, and all of them having arrived in a completely disorganized state. The story is, the Globe company cleared them out and packed them for storage, but then they were somehow left in a tractor semi-trailer for 25 years, and practically forgotten. A whole bunch of type came along with it that they are also sorting. Some of the blocks are just amazing, and the proofing of them is what is a great motivation for putting in the labor.
Most of the blocks are carved or cut vinyl. But check out this one, which is pure woodcut, handcarved.
This place is the mecca of wood type, no question. For the letterpress printer, there’s interesting stuff at every turn.
The other day Sarah received a box from her parents containing a bunch of odds and ends from her high school and college years. It was fun to look through the stuff, travel the paths of memories. The re-discoveries included these two flyers from the Carleton College campus, from 23 years ago. I still remember the Cesar Chavez lecture. He was amazing, and already a legend in 1986. The UFW was engaged in a new campaign then, this time linking the working conditions of the fruit pickers to the heavy use of pesticides by commercial growers. It was a precursor to today’s many-sided environmental and climate justice movements.
I try to tell my younger friends about how it was then, at least on the Carleton campus. Every few weeks there were campus visits from noted activists, progressive thinkers, and workers for justice and liberation campaigns. People like Michael Harrington, Dennis Banks, and Angela Davis. And lots of other less famous people. The "tenured radicals" and so-called Closing of the American Mind backlash was right around the corner, but these widespread and frequent appearances by left wing figures were yet to be targeted by the organized right. Looking back on it, it was a very free moment in liberal education. I honestly don’t recall any of those events being documented. Partly, I’m guessing, because they weren’t recognized as so unusual or worthy of archiving. And partly out of simple neglect. So these flyers, randomly saved by Sarah years ago, are an important slice of our political eduction, i.e. a documentary bit of how that education actually was delivered two and a half decades ago.
I scooted over to Milwaukee yesterday, to meet up at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Ethan Lasser, a curator from Chipstone, and, in yet another capacity of working together, good ol' Rebecca Zorach. Ethan walked us through the galleries that house the combined Chipstone + Milwaukee Art Museum displays of American decorative arts. Ethan and his team are doing some really innovative curatorial work, truly bringing rare, masterfully crafted objects into contemporary relevance, and doing it without sacrificing the preciousness. Hard to describe their exhibition strategies fully. Some of the strategies are really simple, but very effective. For example, simply elevating chairs, such that eye-level apprehension of the chairs brings fresh shapes, detail, and negative space to the viewer's eye:
The video brings in issues of historical memory, antebellum realities and myths, spoken word performance, early American economics, spectres of chattel slavery, dreams of miscegenation, and layers of beauty that expands on the aesthetics of the object itself.
Ethan, Rebecca, and I gathered to talk over Theaster's upcoming project at MAM, which will be much bigger than this installation, and think about producing texts to accompany it.
After the meeting I took advantage of the complimentary museum entry to see the Warhol Last Decade show. For anybody with any interest in Warhol (and that really should be just about anybody), the show is recommended.
But the real surprises for me were 1) the War Bonds posters in the halls of the offices (where Ethan took us for a few minutes), and 2) the temporary show of art by veterans.
I am a total sucker for old posters, of course, so the War Bonds propaganda got me and my camera going, quick.
As one would expect, the art work by veterans was intense, bringing home the war experience in ways we just don't see in the news. I was happy to see a contribution by our anti-war comrade and Iraq War vet Aaron Hughes. It was a painting titled "Checkpoint."
Of course, this being the Milwaukee Art Museum, just getting to spend some time in the sparsely visited space on a weekday was a treat. Especially since this time we got to see the insides of the Saarinen War Memorial part of the complex, as well as enjoy the grand entry lobby (which I think is called the Windhover Gallery).
Here is the scan of the first flyer I've designed and drawn for a Madison event. The gig is a benefit show being played by my pal Bill's band, Bonobo Secret Handshake. The beneficiery is the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, and the occasion is the celebration of the recent elections victory of the FMLN in El Salvador!
The original was hand drawn. Bill caught a typo and made some digital adjustments, which I will correct by hand later (he still has the original!). And he added the WORT logo at the bottom. Next time, I'll hand draw that, too.
And speaking of World War II, check out this video I shot the other day, over at Lewis Koch's East Side work studio.
Lewis Koch shows WW II posters from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.
So there have at least three kind of intense things happening while I've been in Austria. One was the sudden disappearance and subsequent discovery of the drowned artist-organizer Barbara Pitschmann, who had some role in organizing the art events happening in Linz a couple of weeks ago. Another is the violent attack that took place in a Sikh temple, setting off unrest in Punjab. But the thing I've been following with most interest remains the upcoming European Parliament elections.
This pic is of the same line of FPÖ posters I blogged on more than a week ago. I've noticed that as the June 7 election approaches, their posters are getting increasingly defaced. Here's what they're looking like now. So, clearly, somebody is not having any of the FPÖ crap.
Until May 31 I will be working in this space at Neulerchenfelder Strasse 8, first floor, in the 16th District of Vienna. Amos Kennedy will be there with me, and there are some interesting art projects on the second and third floors, too.
My cellphone in Austria is 43.650.9504732.
On Thursday I made it to the opening of the Just Seeds' exhibition in the Union Art Gallery on the UWM campus. The Union Art Gallery is one of the most difficult exhibition spaces I know of. The room footprint is highly irregular, the wall surface is that indestructible gray-tan pebbly Seventies concrete, and the ceilings are about twenty-five feet hight. In other words, it'd be a wonderful space for some really ambitious soft sculpture. But for 2-d work, it is sometimes a challenge to simply keep the space from completely overwhelming the art work. The fifteen Just Seeds members triumphed over the space and produced the most natural-feeling installation I've ever seen in that gallery, the conceit being a gallery representation of a crumbling highway overpass. That is to say, what Milwaukee will be one of these days.
Back in the run up to the Iraq War in late 2002, and then after Bush ordered the attack in March of 2003, I worked with a grassroots neighborhood antiwar group called the Hyde Park Committee Against War & Racism. This group had been working at a local level since the week following September 11, 2001. I and about a dozen or more others started attending meetings regularly beginning in late 2002, driven to action and togetherness by the dismay and outrage over the impending war. Together with others in the group who were somehow art-identified, one of the ways I contributed was to help make signs and posters. It seemed entirely reasonable to expect that the artists take on this responsibility. In grassroots activist groups, all competencies are made available to the needs of the group. But what we, the art people in the group, didn't do then was seriously critique and evaluate of our creations, or, for that matter anybody else's, apart from the casual gripes or plaudits when seeing a political graphic that somehow catches attention.
HPCAWR is for all practical purposes history. There is a Yahoo Groups mailing list but not much else. Nonetheless, some of us who first met and worked together then continue to find ways to occasionally share work and ideas. One of my comrades from that time is Amy Partridge, and it was with her that Laurie Jo Reynolds and I kicked off the evening's discussion last Saturday night at Mess Hall. For Amy and I, it was what we didn't do earlier: make time to focus on the operations of political graphics. In the sense of this event capping a process of creation we had begun back then, and that we always were aware of as an exercise in modeling a form of activism, it was a nice way to close a circle.
Of course, it is six years later, and the political situation is very different. The issues in our minds and hearts are more dispersed, and range across many specific causes. Our starting point for the evening was the Just Seeds Ten Years of Critical Resistance portfolio, a suite of prints all addressing prison-related issues. From there we turned attentions to graphics created for the Tamms Year Ten campaign, also on display. The twenty or so people who joined us contributed many useful and sometimes brilliant insights. We went for a solid two hours, with a nice break for pizza and socializing in between two sessions of focused conversation.
When Aaron Hughes and a crew of vets from IVAW dropped in for the second half the circle was completed in another way. The question of political graphics in relation to the Iraq War resurfaced.
Speaking of posters, the show Signs of Change, organized by Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald, just closed. Eric Triantafillou wrote a thoughtful review of the show here.
