In an impressive feat of upcycling, printed detritus is stacked, glued, and shaped into log-like forms by Andrew Sutherland:
These photos are from the artist’s own inscrutable website, and this blog entry from HUH.MAGAZINE.
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Or should we call it a “printervention”? Guerrilla strategies and pro bono works aren’t new things in the design world and they certainly aren’t mutually exclusive. Cardon Webb is a designer that’s taken to merging the two. His Cardon Copy project casts Webb as an uninvited aesthetic repairman. To paraphrase his statement, he hijacks unconsidered flyers, overpowers their message with “new visual language,” and places the redesigned version into the original environment.
(Thanks to Pete Rangel for the tip.)
This will be the last installment of the Dispatches from China series of posts for a while (at least until we can find a regular correspondent). In closing up this series I wanted to reflect on the place ephemeral print occupies in Chinese culture as an artifact within a culture that has an extremely long history of sophisticated printmaking, but also as a means of constructing collective memory. With this in mind, I set about wandering with my camera ready.
It turns out I didn’t have to wander far, any neighborhood that traffics in tourists will have posters for sale. Most of the posters are great examples of various stages of propaganda poster utilized during the thirty tumultuous years following the founding the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), while a few are advertisements from the relatively short-lived Republic of China. For pocket change you can own an ‘authentic’ poster from the early days of the PRC. I say authentic because on closer examination most of what you’ll find on the street are off-set prints that have been meticulously aged (perhaps with tea?) to look the part of aged artifacts. The posters, whether real or not, contain great imagery from the early days of Chairman Mao when the artists were encouraged to turn away from a historic Chinese visual culture that had (so the story goes) supported centuries of oppression and instead make a new art for the people. This early work can be identified by the clear influence Soviet Social Realism had on the chinese artists; these were most often lithographic reproductions of history paintings. During the Cultural Revolution artists migrated back to the traditional form of the woodblock print; allowing the posters take on a more graphic quality, often using just red and black (hmm.. this work reminds me of someone). Clearly I don’t have room and you don’t have time for an art history lesson, but if this is a topic that excites you as much as it does me, I would refer to you to Art and China’s Revolution exhibition at the Asia Society and the book by Melissa Chiu ). One last thought to complicate matters, by and large the bulk of tourists on the streets of Beijing where these pictures are sold are Chinese tourists visiting their capital. The reception one of these posters must have to a survivor of The Great Leap Forward must be very different from the western view, perhaps of well-designed cold war kitsch. More pictures and less words after the jump.
Via Boing Boing, the “OG Art Gallery” at We Are Supervision showcases calling cards printed by Chicago street gangs in the 1970s and 80s.
These cards are well worth a look, but let’s take a step back. Certainly, gangs were less dangerous before the crack epidemic, but gang activity has always reflected serious racial and ethnic animosities. Cut-n-paste design gives these cards the charming naiveté common to print ephemera; however, some examples are easier to appreciate than others:
One can’t deny the appeal of unicorns with rifles, but it’s hard to believe that those Klansmen are just “hanging out together.”
Apologies to our international readers, but it’s Tax Day here in the U.S.A. File this EBay item in the category of mystery ephemera:
This bill seems to target co-ops as “big bizness” tax scofflaws. The seller lists no info about provenance or date. Any of you ‘Stingers know the backstory? While there, you might enjoy some of texasjohnnyboy’s other items for sale.
Desktop publishing and cheap full-color inkjet printers presented the promise of a people set free from the burden of having to work with a commercial printer or sign painter to create signage for home or small business needs. Over the years this benefit has slid into an expectation as fast, cheap full color printing (on the 8.5×11 inch scale) is readily available to many people. From American flags to giant breads (see above) to lost pet flyers inkjet print now abound in most public urban and suburban spaces.
Good magazine is producing a weekly series of “Good Sheets” and used select Starbucks locations as pick-up distribution points. The Good Sheets are off-set printed newsprint twice-folded 6×6″ booklets that adhere closely with Good magazine’s highly designed information graphics. In their own words, Good describes them as, “A weekly series breaking down an important issue to help make sense of the world around us”, each issue addresses a particular issue that any good latte drinking citizen should know more about. For those of you who don’t favor Starbucks (if they are even still available, it’s unclear) you can down load your own and print them out on your home offset press here. You can read more about this further at a keen post by the artist/designer Chad Kouri at the book blog Book-By-Its-Cover.
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Princeton’s Graphic Arts blog
