Chantry Art - Art Chantry speaks: a heretics history of 20th century graphic design

Contents

Ever get the feeling youve been cheated?

Johnny Rotten, 1978

T his is a book of opinions in essay form, gathered from a Facebook blog I worked on for a few years. These are thoughts and convictions gathered from over 40 years of practice in the field of freelance graphic design in America. Im firmly convinced that graphic design is a language forma language of color, shape, icon, idea, etc. It is a language everyone can read and understandand yet nobody recognizes that fact. As a graphic designer, it has been my job to use this language to change the minds of the viewerBuy this product! Go to this event! Vote for this candidate!

In that process, I use all the skills and knowledge at my command to manipulate the viewer into thinking the way that another interesta clientwants to see. Im a virtual cultural propagandist of the lowest ordera mindfucker. And I do this for hire.

Graphic design has taken on a higher reputation over the last 30 years, becoming an art form in many eyes. It is taught in art departments of the highest universities and institutions in the world. But its not art at all. Its anthropology and politics and economicsalmost ANYTHING except art. It is not a muse-driven masterpiece created by a single person in an edition of one. It is mass-produced manipulation and coercion created to maintain the current economic system of exploitation.

Throughout my four decades of design practice, I have intentionally kept one foot in the popular culture dialog (particularly the subcultures that produce so much design language for us) and one foot in the high design culture dialog where I sought recognition and professional prestige. By straddling that fence, my work and my ideas became a conduit between the two, pumping in new language and ideas from one end of the cultural spectrum to the other. This fence-sitting also gave me a soured reputation on both ends. Neither side fully accepted my work (or me) but they still wanted me and needed me. This outlaw status allowed me the freedom to pursue what I was interested in the most: to observe, study and understand the world I operated in.

I am not a scholar. Youll see no footnotes, few references in my writing. Most of these essays were written daily in a single first draft and then posted warts and all. Quite often, I would get some things wrong and the resulting corrections in comment threads acted as my only fact-checking source. Needless to say, it was humbling to face my constituency and find myself corrected over and over again. I remain in their debt forever. I thank you all, no matter how annoying you were.

In the end, I think Ive managed to express the observations and history of much of this poorly documented language form. I find it differs remarkably from the accepted mainstream narrative presented in design education, which tends to promote the great man theory of history. I discovered that there is no high or low in this historical dialog generally. And precious few great men. This graphic language I present is a dialog among peopleof all stripes and walks, some talented, some lucky, all practicing the cultural learning style of monkey see, monkey do. The truth I found is that this language has a deep, rich cultural interplay that goes back generations with many players, and thinkers and doers. Yes, there may be key links in that chain of history, but it takes all the links to make the chain.

I n 2009, I gave one of my little talks about my work and ideas to a chapter of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts, a professional design organization) in Cleveland, Ohio. Mike Burton (of Little Jacket Design) created this wonderful poster to advertise the event. It reads Art Chantry Speaks: Posters Yell. The brilliant censure of my last name changes the meaning of the image to ART SPEAKS. The use of the black bar, the Xerox rot textures, the distressed typography and crude handwriting all reflect a lot of my own design passions and stylistic nuances. Yet, Mike was able to push this image into a much higher concept that took on a more universal resonance.

For instance, within a year or so, a clothing company in Asia started to market the principal type (with my name cancelled out just like you see) on T-shirts for popular sale. As I understand it, the AIGA had their lawyers approach the company and send them a legal cease and desist order to stop the bootlegging of their copyrighted design. All of this was done without my knowledge. I was told about it some time later.

The photograph of the T-shirt on the back cover was taken by Vincent Chung on a trip (to Thailand, I seem to recall), where he spotted this version of the image still being sold on the street by bootleg vendors. Notice how cleverly they got past the legal cease and desist order! They simply altered the text to read Art Chantry SREAKS, Poster Yell Oh My God! (with my last name still crossed out with the censor bar). This is an amazing example of how the language of design takes on a life of its own when projected (like it always has been) INTO a shared cultural dialog.

So, now, Im taking the whole thing back and using it as the title of this book. However, due to fears of spelling/title confusion, Im self-correcting the title with LabelMaker. The world goes round and round and spills out here (for the moment).

NOTE: For all you Seattle people, that coffee ring on the cover is from The Dog House, c. 1992.

S ign painters are the secret brotherhood of graphic design. Before they had graphic design, before they had commercial art or illustration. Before they had printing presses (I imagine even before the written word), there were guys who painted signs. When they uncovered Pompeii and Herculaneum, they found beautiful lettering applied on the wallsthey were billboards! The Roman sign painters had a flourishing biz applying Eat at Joeseppis on the walls of the cities and towns!

This is where modern graphic design truly began. Those magic pictures were even tossed out like beer cans after their use. Thats why they are layered. Actual foreshortened perspective wasnt invented for another 10,000 years. As long as actual need for a functional visual message has been needed by mankind, there have been (what we now call) graphic designers. For most of their existence they were called sign painters.

It has traditionally been an art form taught through apprenticeship. There have always been young upstarts who simply go out and teach themselves, but most commonly it was taught by hooking up and working for an old master sign painter as an assistant and learning how to. In this way, grand traditions of functional letter designs emerged and continue today. This information was handed down and demonstrated, and