The Graphic Art of the Underground: a countercultural history 9781474293914, 9781472573551

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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND

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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND a countercultural history

Ian Lowey and Suzy Prince

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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 © 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

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

Bibliography Index Acknowledgements Image Credits

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

7

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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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

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

9

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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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

REMEMBRANCE OF FINKS PAST kustom kulture and automotive art

1

According to a 1969 Time magazine report on the culture of California entitled ‘California: A State of Excitement’, the Golden State was described somewhat prophetically as ‘the mirror of America as it will become, or at least the hothouse for most of its rousing fads, fashions, trends and ideas’ (Fox, 2001, p. 193). So, it’s perhaps fitting for our purposes that a 1993 exhibition, held at the Laguna Art Museum in the affluent Southern Californian coastal resort of Laguna Beach, should choose as its focus one such intrinsically Californian fad and in doing so serve as both catalyst and rallying point for an emerging underground art movement centred around Los Angeles. The exhibition, entitled ‘Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and others’,1 served as a hugely influential reassessment of the enduring influence of the hot rod and custom car culture, which had flourished in the state during the 1950s and early 1960s, on the art scene of California and beyond. This influence can not only be seen thematically in the depiction of custom cars and hot rods in paintings by Robert Williams or Anthony Ausgang, but also in a more tangential way through the phenomenon of the ‘finish fetish’. This was a term applied to the work of a group of Southern

Opposite: Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth: Rat Fink.

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Californian artists such as Robert Irwin, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman in the 1960s and 1970s to describe their collective interest in the surface qualities of automobile lacquers and other high-tech

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materials that had developed out of the huge Southern California-based aerospace industry. Yet, this interest in surface quality had been something that had long preoccupied those within the world of car customisation as they strove to perfect and imbue their vehicles with an added sense of sleekness and flash through the use of newly available materials such as fibreglass, Rhoplex and flake paint. It is a point formally acknowledged by the American academic and curator Howard N. Fox, who draws comparison between the shiny luminosity of an untitled wall relief by the aforementioned Kauffman, and Ed Roth’s 1965 fantasy custom car, Road Agent (Barron, 2001, p. 208). Certainly, the high-tech nature of the industrial economy in California would prove to be a key determinant in the development of custom car culture in the region, alongside other social and geographical factors. Indeed, if youth subcultures are to be seen as being spawned in part by the socio-economic conditions of the time, then perhaps it should come as little surprise that the spiritual home of custom car culture within the United States was California, in and around the salt lakes of Southern California and the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Though courtesy of the sensationalist representations of the time by way of lurid magazine exposés and films such as Hot Rod Rumble (1957), Hot Rod Gang (1958), Dragstrip Girl (1957) and Dragstrip Riot (1958), custom car culture is frequently lumped in with the relatively new ‘craze’ of rock ’n’ roll,2 the phenomenon of young adults (for the teenager had not yet been christened as such) souping up and racing their cars can be traced back to the late 1920s/early 1930s. This just happened to be a time when motor car manufacturers began developing faster and more reliable cars and when, immediately prior to the Great Depression, increased affluence afforded young adults the wherewithal to develop their own cultures as separate and distinct and in some cases diametrically opposed to their parents. And in this respect, radical car customisation and the attendant social scourge of drag racing can be seen as simply a youthful perversion of mainstream American values and, to some extent, a case of reaping what you sow. Just as the expansion of the United States to the Pacific coast was seen within the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’ as the culmination of preordained history, California has long held a special place in the American psyche Opposite: Ben Brown: Mudhoney, Rocket from the Crypt, The Del Emma’s poster, 1999.

as an idealised Eden. But as well as being conducive for agriculture, the state’s benign weather made it an excellent place to build and test aircraft, with the result that California established itself as the hub of America’s aerospace industry. Further to this, California’s proximity to the Pacific theatre

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of war during World War II helped accelerate the development of a highly technological economy within the region to the extent that between 1940 and 1960, California led the nation in the production of both aircraft and ships (Barron, 2001, p. 43), which were built by a well-remunerated, skilled blue-collar workforce which had migrated to the region from across the US and beyond. And the upshot of all of this in terms of the development of custom car culture was an affluent population with disposable income to Below: Art Chantry: ‘Kustom Kulture’ poster, 1994, screen print on paper.

spend on such desirable consumables as motor vehicles.

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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

Indeed, by the mid-1960s, California boasted around ten million car owners – more than any other state in the nation (Barron, 2001, p. 201).

Above: Chris Watson: Rockers.

But, of course, during and immediately after the war, there was a shortage of cars, as precious resources were diverted to the manufacture of military hardware, and so a culture of mechanical make do and mend developed (a demonstration of DIY culture that will also recur frequently throughout this book). Add to this the phenomenon – explored in films such as The Wild One (1953) – of numbers of disaffected young men unable to adjust to the routines of civilian life following the excitement (and trauma) of war, seeking to replicate the exhilarating sense of camaraderie, adventure and danger they experienced during wartime as part of all-male gangs riding or driving ever more powerful cars and bikes, and you had the emergence of an identifiable motor-obsessed subculture of outlaw petrolheads for straight society to lose sleep over. And so, the phenomenon of customising vehicles developed apace amongst both the young disenfranchised rebels without a cause, as well as those aforementioned newly affluent, skilled blue-collar workers. Initially this began by simply souping up engines to boost horsepower before developing into the customisation of actual car bodies to create visually distinctive machines which allowed individuals to differentiate themselves from – and consciously kick against – the prevailing conformity

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Above: Robert Williams: Snuff Fink, 1988, oil on canvas.

of Eisenhower-era America. Indeed, just as the motor car can be seen as an extension of such intrinsically individualistic American values as rugged masculinity, social mobility, independence and control over one’s destiny, then the dismantling and customisation of mass-produced automobiles served both as an expression of machismo and as a means of showing one’s intrinsic personality to the world. And this is a point which can even find literal exemplification in the world of car customisation via the skilled brush work of Kenneth Howard, better known as Von Dutch, whose highly influential decorative pinstripe paint jobs often took the form of elaborate abstract caricatures of the very owners of the vehicles he’d been commissioned to decorate. But more on him later. Meanwhile, the cars emanating out of Detroit during this period were designed as exercises in baroque excess, which at once consciously bought into the romance of the open road (as due to their size they were quite impractical in the inner city) and flew in the face of prevailing modernist notions of clean lines and form following function. In essence, during a time of unparalleled optimism, cars in the US served both as fantasy objects – characterised by sleek streamlined curves, sharp tail fins, space-age rocket-shaped lights and shining chrome – and as conspicuous status symbols. So, in this sense, though those involved in customising cars were quickly demonised as teenage delinquents (though in reality many were much older), in many respects they can simply be seen as having taken the individualistic ideals of the society in which they were raised to their logical conclusions. For just as Detroit was selling the nation a sense of turbo-charged masculinity and personalised power by way of bigger, better and faster engines, then the custom car crowd simply set about tinkering with those engines to make them even faster and even more powerful. Likewise, whilst US car manufacturers were manufacturing dream machines which incorporated elements lifted from aeronautical design, rapidly evolving space-race technology and popular science fiction, it ought to come as no surprise that leading car customisers such as George Barris, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Dean Jeffries, Bill Cushenberry and Darryl Starbird should end up christening their fantastical creations with equally fantastical names such as the Cosma Ray (Starbird), Orbitron (Roth) and the Turbo-Sonic (Barris). Or that they should eventually find employment designing vehicles for Hollywood movies and escapist TV shows such as Batman and The Monkees. George Barris, for instance, created the Batmobile and the Munster Koach. He is also credited with devising and building the Monkeemobile, which featured in the hugely popular,

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Above: Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth with the Beatnik Bandit.

wacky adventures of the world’s first manufactured boy band. This claim is disputed, however, by Dean Jeffries who, amongst other vehicles, most certainly created the Black Beauty for the Green Hornet TV series. The very existence of Hollywood was another significant contributing factor as to why Los Angeles established itself as the spiritual home of custom car culture. For as well as the movie props market, there was a significant demand amongst film and music stars for purpose-built and modified vehicles. And so, George Barris, for instance, worked on custom jobs for Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield, John Wayne, Liberace, and Sonny and Cher (a matching pair of his and hers Ford Mustang convertibles) amongst others. Indeed, in an essay entitled ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’, penned for publication in Esquire magazine in 1963 (and later serving as the title of a book of collected essays two years later) by Tom Wolfe, the flamboyant American author and journalist points to a natural affinity between Hollywood and the custom scene. He describes a Dionysian ethos shared between the movie stars and those connected to what Wolfe terms ‘the alien and suspect underworld of Californian youth’ (Wolfe, 2005, p. 83); it was an uninhibited spirit of irrational hedonism that flew in the face of prevailing Anglo-European notions of restraint and taste.

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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

Above: Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth at the wheel of Tweedy Pie.

This shared ethos can perhaps be exemplified in the untimely death of James Dean in a road accident near Cholame, California, on 30 September 1955 – an event which would subsequently serve to establish him in death as the undisputed pin-up boy for a generation hooked on a nihilistic ‘live fast and die young’ philosophy. For off-screen, when he wasn’t fulfilling his role as the celluloid personification of alienated youth in films such as Rebel Without a Cause, Dean indulged his passion for racing fast cars and generally living on the edge. As such, it is to be noted that the Silver Porsche 550 Spyder in which Dean died on his way to a race meeting had been customised by two of the giants of the custom scene, the aforementioned Barris and Dean Jeffries. George Barris added tartan seating to the car, whilst Dean Jeffries hand painted a large number ‘130’ on the bonnet, doors and the engine cover, on which he also added the words ‘Little Bastard’ in script (Little Bastard being the name Dean had christened his vehicle). Wolfe’s essay – itself seen as an early example of the new journalism which would flower alongside the growth of the American counterculture throughout the 1960s and beyond, in the hands of the likes of Wolfe and contemporaries such as Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion – was quite possibly the first detailed analysis of the hot rod scene

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to be published outside of the dedicated custom magazine press. And significantly, it was certainly the first to place the work of the Los Angelesbased car customisers within an artistic context, conferring upon them the elevated status of ‘curvilinear abstract sculpture’ in a ‘streamlined modern’ (Wolfe, 2005, p. 82) style that placed it in opposition to the Mondrian-inspired geometric modernism favoured by the art and design cognoscenti. Though it namechecks others involved in the scene such as Bill Cushenberry and Darryl Starbird, the account of custom car culture detailed in ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ focuses squarely on both the characters and opposing temperaments and working philosophies of George Barris and Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth. At the time the article was written, custom car culture was beginning to emerge from the shadowy teenage netherworld which had spawned it and was actively courting respectability through the establishment of magazines, such as Hot Rod in 1948, and the safety campaigns and public relations work of the National Hot Rod Association, which had formed around seven years earlier. And whereas Barris is credited with having established the first regular custom car show in the country at Balboa Beach, California, Wolfe describes how the big car companies were beginning to muscle in on the action through the advent of touring events such as the Ford Custom Car Caravan, which began in 1962. As the self-proclaimed ‘King of the Kustomisers’, and with his connections to Hot Rod magazine for which he wrote numerous ‘how to’ articles and his advisory work for General Motors and Ford, Barris is shown to be fairly acquiescent with respect to this ongoing process of assimilation. He is portrayed very much as an artist creating what in effect were show cars primarily to be exhibited and admired rather than driven at these increasingly corporatised custom car shows. Ed Roth by contrast, as well as being lauded by Wolfe as ‘the Salvador Dali of the movement’ (Wolfe, 2005, p. 96) is acknowledged as having ‘more than any of the other customisers . . . kept alive the spirit of alienation and rebellion that is so important to the teenage ethos that customising grew up in’ (Wolfe, 2005, p. 96). Certainly, Ed Roth’s legendary status as a venerable godfather of the wider contemporary Kustom Graphics art movement undoubtedly has as much to do with that very spirit of alienation, rebelliousness and out-andOpposite: House Industries: Packaging design for Ed Roth merchandise, circa 1997.

out bohemianism which Wolfe alluded to; Roth succeeded in encapsulating these elements within the rancidly reprobate form of his comic creation, Rat Fink. However, within the context of automotive body modification,

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Above: House Industries: Pen and ink drawing of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth’s Orbitron for the House Industries’ Showcars range of T-shirts, circa 1997.

Left: Car Craft magazine cover featuring the Beatnik Bandit, 1961.

Above: Rod & Custom magazine cover featuring the Mysterion, 1963.

Above: Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth: Poster for Junkyard by The Birthday Party, 1983.

Below: Stanley Mouse: Warthead, 1993.

Above: Stanley Mouse: Screamin’ 40, 1963.

perhaps the difference between Ed Roth and contemporaries such as Barris and Jeffries was that he, more than anyone else on the scene – with the possible exception of Kenneth ‘Von Dutch’ Howard who we’ll come to later – was possessed of a maverick and anarchic artistic spirit all wrapped up in a personality even larger than his six-foot-plus frame. And it was this unbounded creative spirit which spurred him to take car customisation into hitherto unexplored territory. Not content with merely restyling cars from off the production lines at Ford and Chevrolet, Roth would sculpt his own outlandish visions from scratch, creating their aerodynamic, asymmetrical, curvilinear forms from plaster before moulding the still relatively newly developed material of fibreglass resin around the finished cast to fashion a truly astonishing series of futuristic and, at times, surreal hot rod vehicles. For Robert Williams, ‘Roth inadvertently altered the logical purpose of the automobile, from transportation and sport to a realm of vicarious

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THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

mental adventure. That experience made Ed’s bewildering hot rods “art”’ (Ganahl, 2011, p. v). And in doing so, Roth was also, in effect, turning the automobile production process on its head, from the assembly-line method devised and rationalised by the likes of Henry T. Ford at the start of the twentieth century, to individual creations being designed and built by a single craftsman (with the aid of skilled assistants such as Ed Newton and Tom Daniels). Roth completed his first fully fashioned fibreglass ‘driveable sculpture’, the Outlaw, in 1959, following which he produced approximately one show car per year up until around 1968, primarily for the purposes of exhibition at the growing number of custom car events around the country. These included the Beatnik Bandit (1960), the Rotar (1962), Mysterion (1963), Tweedy Pie and Orbitron (1964), and Road Agent (1965). However, Roth’s creative talents weren’t solely confined to the workshop. Certainly, biographical accounts such as that in Pat Ganahl’s Ed “Big Daddy” Roth: His Life, Times, Cars, and Art point to an early aptitude for mechanics and electronics as one might expect. But then there was also a flair for cartooning and graphic art developed under the auspices of a particularly tolerant and understanding high school teacher. And following a stint with the US Air Force (where it’s to the immense benefit of his legend that he just happened to have been posted to a UFO tracking station in the Moroccan desert!), Roth was employed for three years as a window dresser at a Sears department store. In the words of his younger brother, Gordon, who would later serve to inspire him towards what might have seemed an unlikely conversion to Mormonism, Ed was ‘in essence an artist’ (Ganahl, 2011, p. 3). In the words of Tom Wolfe, he was both ‘a prankster’ (Wolfe, 2005, p. 96) and ‘a thoroughgoing bohemian’ (p. 99), and speaking of himself, Roth simply says ‘I was born a slob’ (Ganahl, 2011, p. 3). With such character traits together with his goatee-bearded, proto-beatnik appearance and propensity for talking ‘jive’, Roth was one irrepressible hepcat who was never going to allow himself to be hemmed in by the constraints of working for the man. He began his custom career offering $4 pinstriping and flaming paint jobs from his own driveway, whilst working at Sears. For the uninitiated, flaming is as its name suggests: the painting of flame effects on vehicles to suggest combustion through speed. Pinstriping is the application of fine and decorative lines to enhance the natural curves of a vehicle.

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Above: Anthony Ausgang: The Close Call, 1996. Right: Anthony Ausgang: Ninth Life, 1992, acrylic and enamel on 1935 Chrysler Plymouth.

Below: Derek Yaniger: Space Gasser, digital serigraph, 2012.

Above: Isabel Samaras: Devil Babe’s Big Book of Fun!, cover, Manic D Press, 1997.

After having teamed up briefly with an old-time pinstripe artist named Bud ‘The Baron’ Crozier (who possibly inspired the ‘Big Daddy’ part of Roth’s working name) and his grandson, Tom Kelly, as the Crazy Painters, Roth stumbled onto what was to turn out to be a lucrative line of business in the form of his individually airbrushed ‘weirdo’ shirts. These began as commissions by car clubs, whereby Roth would letter the shirts of individual members with the name of their club alongside a freakish caricature of each of the members respectively. This soon developed into individually customised shirts depicting various examples of Roth’s soon-to-be trademark cartoon monsters pictured at the wheel of a hot rod. And having developed into a successful mail order operation, as well as an unfailing money-spinner at custom car events, demand for Roth’s motorised mutants soon began to outstrip Roth Studios’ ability to supply the market. That was, at least until Roth began to make use of screen printing to increase production. In doing so, he is credited with helping to popularise the screen-printed T-shirt, which would become a growing feature of countercultural attire throughout the 1960s and a pretty ubiquitous item

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of street fashion thereafter. Prior to all of this, the T-shirt was an item of underwear – available only in plain black or white – which happened to be worn as outerwear by rebellious teens, often with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in one sleeve. By the same token, it was the medium of the T-shirt along with decals, key fobs and other items of paraphernalia emanating out of Roth Studios and decorated with both Rat Fink and other speedBelow: Art Chantry: The Cramps poster, screen print, 1997.

freak grotesques, which helped propel Roth’s weirdo hot rod art into the wider consciousness and establish his reputation forever more as one of the fathers of the Kustom Kulture Movement.

Above: Jamie Reid, Nowhere Buses, 1972.

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Meanwhile, in 1962, seeking to capitalise on the burgeoning hot rod/custom movement and on Roth’s own growing popularity on the scene, the Revell model company began selling plastic kits of both his cars and his cartoonish character creations, such as Rat Fink and Mr. Gasser. This in turn inspired other model-kit manufacturers to bring out their own ranges of toys and monster kits such as Weird-Oh’s and Nutty Mads.3 Perhaps most notable amongst these was the Monogram Company, which employed the services of one Stanley Miller, aka Stanley Mouse, to create a series of ‘hobby kit caricatures’ to rival Roth’s. Significantly, Mouse had previously worked with Ed Roth at car shows and is a prime example of someone who was never involved in actual car customisation but was nevertheless fully tuned in to the wider scene as a purveyor of Roth‑inspired airbrushed monster shirts. He would later find greater fame as a psychedelic poster artist in San Francisco. As the 1960s progressed, however, the popularity of hot rod culture began to wane – which Roth blamed squarely upon the foreign influence of The Beatles. He lamented that the lovable moptops had caused ‘kids to remove their hot rods from their garages and replace them with guitars, amps and drums’ (Ganahl, 2011, p. 106). And so, as rock music established itself as the dominant expression of teenage rebellion, and as the youth subculture began to coalesce into something more pointedly politicised in the wake of the start of the Vietnam War, the fortunes of Roth Studios began to decline. The man who had created Rat Fink as a stinking, fleainfested mascot for nihilistic youth was becoming increasingly out of step with the times. There was still interest in Roth’s work from the mainstream, with the American toymaker Mattel reproducing his Beatnik Bandit in 1968 as one of its first die-cast toy cars in its new Hot Wheels series. But back in the world of custom car production, he was becoming an ever more marginalised figure due to a dramatic shift in artistic direction away from cars to more economical three-wheeler chopper-style motorcycles. By the latter part of the decade, Roth was becoming increasingly associated with self-styled ‘outlaw’ motorcycle gangs, with one leading magazine dubbing him ‘the supply sergeant to the Hells Angels’ (Stecyk, 1993, p. 30). And it was this association which is said to have led to Revell’s decision to terminate its contract with Roth in 1967, thus depriving him of a significant source of income. Relationships between the motorcycle gangs and Roth grew steadily more fractious, leading Roth to eventually disassociate himself from the bikers and close his business down in 1970.

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Above: Von Dutch, circa 1955 (photograph: Eric Rickman).

Above: Von Dutch: I Am Rabbit Too, 1956, pinstriping and airbrushing on cardboard.

Following the closure of Roth Studios, Ed returned to custom painting, working at the then newly opened Movieworld: Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame Museum in Buena Park, where Roth’s Beatnik Bandit was once on permanent display alongside other items of Kustom Kulture ephemera. Then, in a curious twist, Roth converted to Mormonism in 1974, and as well as sneaking Mormon symbols into the custom vehicles he continued designing right up to his death, he set about voicing regret about his role in lowering the moral standards of American youth in the 1960s through his grotesque monster creations and ambivalent attitude to street racing. Bizarrely, in an attempt to reconcile his famous rodent creation with his new religious values, he even went so far as to create a wife (Trixie) and two children (Gunther and Gretchen) for Rat Fink. Yet, in spite of all of this, Roth was still willing to participate – perhaps because of it being a charitable event – in the annual Rat Fink Reunion,4 which serves as a celebration of his work and the work of other figures in the world of Kustom Kulture. In addition, he also took on the odd high-profile commission, such as the cover artwork for the 1982 album, Junkyard, by Nick Cave’s old band, The Birthday Party.5 Roth’s decision to take on the Junkyard cover artwork commission is a particularly perplexing one given the violent discordant nature of the music, characterised by song titles such as ‘Big Jesus Trash Can’, ‘Dead Joe’, and ‘Six-Inch Gold Blade’. Perhaps in spite of his Mormonism, he was able to recognise that The Birthday Party’s music constituted quite possibly the most perfect summation of the spirit of Rat Fink ever committed to vinyl. Either way, it kick-started the process of generating renewed interest in the work of Roth and eventually led to the Delaware-based type foundry and design agency House Industries collaborating with Roth in the mid1990s on a set of eight fonts based on the artists distinctive style of hand lettering. The company also designed and licensed a range of Ed Roth products updated from his original designs and artwork (see Cruz, Barber and Roat, 2004). If Ed Roth’s gift to the world of countercultural iconography was Rat Fink, then that of Kenneth ‘Von Dutch’ Howard is very much the flying eyeball. The flying eyeball was Von Dutch’s personal logo which he conceived sometime around the late 1930s and which has since – much like Roth’s rancid rodent – become a key visual trope which crops up as a touchstone in the work of numerous purveyors of Kustom Graphics and lowbrow art.

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Left: Von Dutch, circa 1956, photographed for the US teen magazine Dig. Above: Von Dutch: Turn Back, It’s a Blow-Job (rare salvaged example of Von Dutch flaming and pinstriping).

Born in 1929, Von Dutch was a trailblazing pioneer of custom painting who did much to popularise the use of painted flames as decoration on hot rods and other customised vehicles. In this respect, he took inspiration from World War I fighter planes, which were often adorned with painted flames around their exhaust pipes. However, it is for the rather narrow discipline of pinstriping that Von Dutch is synonymous. Pinstriping is a way of embellishing the bodywork of vehicles through the highly skilled freehand application of abstract ornamental stripes. Some within the world of pinstriping believe the art form developed in ancient times where linebased artwork was said to adorn chariots. However, others place the origins of modern pinstriping in the steady and dependable hands of the Victorians. Indeed, with the development of the horseless carriage during Edwardian times, it comes as no surprise to learn that in the early days of the automobile industry, cars were pinstriped as standard up until the rationalisation of the production process and the advent of the mechanised production line. However, the practice of pinstriping motorcycles as standard, chiefly on the fuel tank, continued right up until the beginning of the 1960s. And certainly as a means of accentuating the gloriously exaggerated baroque curves that custom fabricators aspired towards, it’s not difficult to see why pinstriping found favour amongst customisers.

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Above: Chris Watson: ‘Race with the Devil’, detail. Opposite: House Industries: El Diablo, design for a range of pinstriping T-shirts and drinks glasses, circa 1997.

Within the contemporary custom car world, pinstriping as practised by the likes of Jimmy C (USA), Skratch (USA), Nefarious (UK), Von Sven (Sweden) and Makoto (Japan), to name but a few, continues to be a highly valued skill. Undoubtedly, though, it was Kenneth Howard who played a major part in helping to establish pinstriping as an integral part of the repertoire of the car customisers, and whose artistic outlook and personal celebrity fed into the wider counterculture, to the extent that he has been described by the American photographer and artist C.R. Stecyk as the ‘paterfamilias of the auto-as-art movement’ (Stecyk, 1993, p. 11). Certainly, there are contemporaries of Howard, such as Tommy Hrones (aka Tommy the Greek), who could stake a claim for being even more skilled and even more influential within the world of striping. Indeed, Hrones, who trained within the USA’s fledgling car repair and service industries of the 1920s, is credited with being the first amongst the striping fraternity to develop their own personal style (quite a feat within such a stylised artistic discipline), incorporating hashes, feathering and teardrops into his designs long before Von Dutch came on to the scene. However, as the publisher of Pinstripe Planet: Fine Lines from the World’s Best, Yak El-Droubie, points out, the hard-living Von Dutch, who died in 1992 from ‘alcohol-related complications’,6 was very much ‘the first big pinstriping celebrity’ (Nude, 2006) and as such was, like his friend Ed Roth, able to transcend the custom scene and find fame beyond it.

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Howard was a maverick, beatnik type of character and a jazz fan, an accomplished flautist who also embraced a talent for making and customising knives and guns. In addition, he dabbled in abstract expressionist painting and could arguably have become a successful fine artist in his own right if he hadn’t been so suspicious of the mainstream art world. Apparently, Picasso was a fan of his work, and Von Dutch was once said to have lamented to Roth, that ‘although Picasso dug my stuff, I always felt guilty that I couldn’t find anything nice to say about his’ (Stecyk, 1993, p. 19). In fact, in the early 1950s he did allow a couple of his paintings to go on display in a Los Angeles art gallery. And though one immediately Below and opposite: Illustrated envelopes sent to Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth; note that J.L. Bachs was a pseudonym adopted by Von Dutch.

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sold, the experience only caused him to conclude that ‘the art scene was just bullshit. I left the gallery and never again had anything to do with any of it’ (Stecyk, 1993, p. 19). Some years later, in 2006, one of Von Dutch’s surrealistic oil paintings, Good-Bye Cruel World, sold at auction for $115,000 (Kinney, 2006).

THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

Howard was given his nickname ‘Von Dutch’ by family members because he was ‘stubborn as a Dutchman’.7 And without doubt, Von Dutch’s cussedness and single-mindedness was a defining characteristic which would serve to frustrate and infuriate many who sought to channel and direct his artistic vision. In this respect, anecdotal stories of Howard’s stubbornness as well as his exasperatingly eccentric behaviour abound, including that of his refusal to be seen by a doctor during the severe illness that preceded his death from liver failure, reasoning to the aforementioned C.R. Stecyk, that ‘I put myself into this condition and I’ll get out of it or die trying’ (Stecyk, 1993, p. 12). Following in his signwriter father’s footsteps, Von Dutch was able to paint and letter on a professional level by the age of ten, before going on to undertake his first professional pinstriping job – on a motorcycle – as a young teen, astounding all with his technical proficiency. He then set about developing his own distinctive and original style and, as well as being credited with having popularised the flame job, Von Dutch is acknowledged as having revolutionised pinstriping via his ‘freestyle’ technique. Whereas previously pinstriping would be used to accentuate the natural curves of a particular car, around the headlamps and wheel arches etc., Von Dutch is said to have been the first to begin striping flat surfaces, such as car doors and bonnets. As a consequence, Von Dutch’s work was not so closely determined by the shape of the car as other pinstripers, which in turn allowed him to cultivate a much more fluid style that was eventually to allow the introduction of caricaturing into pinstriping.

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Von Dutch would often take inspiration from the physical appearance of those he was customising cars for. Firstly, this source of inspiration began to be utilised in an abstract way – if the vehicle owner was portly, he would work with rounded lines; or if skinny, he would use far more angular lines – before evolving into full-on caricatures. And these caricatures, sometimes applied to T-shirts as well as cars and motorcycles, became the decidedly more elegant equivalent of Ed Roth’s monster/ weirdo creations. Von Dutch once said of his work, that ‘modern automobiles need some human element on them . . . I treat striping brushes like a musical instrument and whatever I stripe becomes a melody’ (Stecyk, 1993, p. 22). This is a sentiment that not only encompasses the need to humanise and personalise the mass-produced, which is an intrinsic element of custom car culture, but which also offers up a delightfully poetic sense of Von Dutch’s artistic nature. Likewise, there exists a photograph from the 1950s, which depicts Von Dutch as a kind of free-spirited young beatnik sitting crosslegged inside the back of a van customised with abstract swirls, playing his flute with pinstriping brushes sticking out of his ears and a ‘third eye’ stuck in the middle of his forehead. And in keeping with the Eastern mystical notion of the third – or inner – eye being the gateway to inner realms of higher consciousness, Von Dutch maintained a belief that creatively, ‘nothing is original. Everything is in the subconscious, we just tap it sometimes and think we have originated something’.8 In tandem with all of this was Von Dutch’s avowedly anti-materialist lifestyle whereby he chose to live as a vagabond, residing in an old bus which doubled as a workshop. This he would drive around sustaining himself by undertaking a little custom painting here and there, as well as selling knives and guns that he had fashioned. ‘I make a point of staying right at the edge of poverty’ (Howard, 2009), he once explained. However, whilst in countercultural terms, the beats paved the way for the hippies, it would be wrong in spite of all of this to look upon Von Dutch as some kind of proto-hippy. For Von Dutch’s loner mysticism was underpinned by the straight-down-the-line blue-collar pragmatism of the artisan/craftsman. Also, he was far too misanthropic (and allegedly racist) to buy into any kind of peace-and-love vibe, and his mistrust of strangers and bouts of paranoia sometimes led him to fire his Opposite: Vince Ray: Black Shadow.

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gun in the direction of strangers who ventured too close to his domicile! Yet, given his fiercely antimaterialistic nature and contempt towards notions of copyright, it’s ironic that the name Von Dutch should be better

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known by the vast majority of people as a fashion label, Von Dutch Originals, popularised by the likes of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. So, how exactly did the personal hand-lettered logo of a misanthropic libertarian end up emblazoned across baseball caps and T-shirts worn by the kind of well-scrubbed celebrity who wouldn’t know a Von Dutch original if they fell over one? Well, some four years after Kenneth Howard’s death in 1992, his two daughters sold the rights to their father’s imagery to one Michael Cassel. Cassel was a maker of surf clothing, and his original intention with the subsequent Von Dutch Originals company, which he set up in 1999, was to market the company’s wares to the newly burgeoning hot rod set. However, having opened up a Von Dutch Originals store on Los Angeles’s internationally renowned Melrose Avenue a year later, the brand swiftly established itself as a favourite of the celebrity set. In the most recent twist of an unlikely story, Von Dutch Originals was purchased by Royer Brands International in 2009 with a view to licensing Von Dutch products worldwide. And perhaps having recognised that the brand had lost credibility through its association with celebrities, Royer is seeking to ‘return the brand to its roots’ (Von Dutch, 2014) by placing a distinctly airbrushed portrait of the legendary figure of Kenneth Howard at the centre of its marketing campaign. This in a similar way perhaps, to how the drinks company William Grant and Sons have successfully marketed Sailor Jerry rum around the name and roughneck reputation of the legendary tattooist Norman ‘Sailor Jerry’ Collins. It is to be hoped that Royer succeeds in realigning the Von Dutch brand with the life and work of Kenneth ‘Von Dutch’ Howard if it means that more people who wear the brand are aware of its countercultural lineage. That said, the man himself would hardly have approved, believing that such things as copyrights and patents ‘are mostly an ego trip’.9 Through their artwork both Von Dutch and Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth can be said to have exerted an enduring visual influence that has transcended the oily environs of car customisation workshops to inspire a whole host of international artists working in the Kustom Graphics field. Yet, it was undoubtedly Robert Williams who was most instrumental in successfully carrying the greasy baton of automotive art from its early 1960s heyday into the underground art world of the latter part of that decade and far beyond. Opposite: Vince Ray: Boneshaker Baby.

Significantly younger than both Ed Roth and Von Dutch, Williams was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1943. However, much like the two older men whose work he first became aware of through his reading of

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custom car magazines such as Car Craft and Hot Rod, Williams showed an early aptitude for painting and drawing and grew up steeped in car culture (probably due to the fact that his father owned a drive-in restaurant much frequented by hot-rodders). By the age of twelve, he was even the proud owner of a 1934 Ford five-window coupe – a present from his father. Perhaps inevitably due to his love of hopped-up cars, Williams began to drift into teenage delinquency and saw a move to Los Angeles to begin art college as a way of staying out of trouble. After a time at art school, he began touting for commercial illustration work. Quite by chance, he was sent by an employment agency to Ed Roth’s studio which was looking for an art director. And in the anarchic and creatively free, artistic environment of Roth Studios, he became responsible for creating illustrated ads for Ed Roth which would appear in custom car magazines, and he also worked with Roth on the actual building of cars. However, it was the comic-strip nature of much of his work on Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth’s ‘stuff catalogues’ and on Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth Comics which led him in the direction of San Francisco’s psychedelic underground, and specifically the Zap collective of comic artists, of which he became a member, alongside Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Kim Deitch and Spain Rodriguez, amongst others. Indeed, having begun his working career at Roth studios in 1965, Williams has seemingly effortlessly managed to find new audiences for his work amongst each new generation of disaffected youth. This, in spite of, or possibly because of, being given short shrift by the art cognoscenti and becoming a champion of a distinctly Californian style of visual art guaranteed to bring the kind of art critics schooled in the Anglo-European school of aesthetics (as identified by Tom Wolfe in ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’) out in hives. And for this reason, the work and influence of Robert Williams will be looked at in greater detail in later chapters.

1. As well as at Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, from 17 July to 7 November 1993, the exhibition showed at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, from 3 December 1993 to 23 January 1994, and the Center of Contemporary Art, Seattle, from 29 May to 17 July 1994, and featured the work of Von Dutch, Ed Roth, Robert Williams and others. 2. For instance the poster for the film Hot Rod Gang – which just so happens to feature the music of Gene Vincent – exclaims ‘Crazy kids . . . living to a wild Rock ’n’ Roll Beat’. 3. Weird-Ohs were produced by Hawk Models and Nutty Mads were produced by the Marx Toy Company between 1963–64.

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4. The Rat Fink Reunion is an annual charitable celebration of the life and works of Ed Roth, which takes place in his former home town of Manti, Utah. 5. Junkyard by The Birthday Party, 4AD Records, 1982. 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Howard (accessed 14 February 2014). 7. This apparently was a popular perception of men of the Netherlands heritage at the time, encapsulated in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s description of himself as ‘a stubborn old Dutchman’. 8. From a hand-lettered sign created by Von Dutch in 1992, it is widely quoted in numerous articles about the artist. 9. Ibid.

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Above: Vince Ray: Reverend Horton Heat.

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the emergence of the psychedelic underground

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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.

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’,

Above: John Hurford and Martin Sharp: ‘Show Your Head (Legalise Pot Rally)’ poster, 1968.

Below: Michael McInnerney: ‘Legalise Pot Rally’ poster, 1967.

Above, top: International Times, Vol 1, No. 24, 19 January 1968, cover spread. Above, top: International Times, Vol 1, No. 23, 5 January 1968, centre spread.

amongst other things) which took place on Friday nights into Saturday mornings in the basement of an Irish club on London’s Tottenham Court Road and whose house bands included Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and The Incredible String Band. Boyd, an American who had worked at the British offices of the progressive US record label Elektra (whose acts included Love and The Doors), had become aware of the growing importance of poster art to the psychedelic scene in San Francisco (which we’ll explore in detail later on in this chapter), and he was looking to employ an artist to create posters for the UFO club. He appointed English, who was then working at the underground tabloid, the International Times, which also happened to be published by Hopkins and Miles, and which was officially launched in October 1966 with a happening at London’s Roundhouse, which was

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Above: International Times, Vol 1, No. 8, cover, 13 February 1967.

Above: Martin Sharp: Disraeli Gears by Cream, LP cover, 1967.

effectively a giant coming out party for the underground. The event, which attracted some 2,000 people, was attended by Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithful and the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, amongst others. English set about creating posters for the early UFO events, including the inaugural ‘UFO Presents Night Tripper’ in December 1966. However, though he was consciously seeking to move away from conventional typography and into the free-form lettering which would characterise much psychedelic artwork, the posters produced by English prior to his teaming up with Nigel Waymouth in early 1967 lack the lush swirls and sensuous luminosity that came to characterise the duo’s subsequent output – initially as Cosmic Colours, then Jacob and the Coloured Coat, and finally Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. For Waymouth’s enthusiasm for art nouveau and fairy-tale illustration served to encourage English to give full expression to his own, similar influences, as English himself comments: I was fascinated by the sinuous yet romantic shapes found in Mucha’s posters and the work of Beardsley and Rackham. Meeting Nigel brought this to life; I responded to his romanticism. (Michael English, 1980) Significantly, in a working model which replicated that employed by the Berkeley-Bonaparte distribution agency in San Francisco, established in 1967 by Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat’s posters for the UFO club and other events began being produced in limited edition runs by Joe Boyd’s Osiris Visions poster publishing company. These were then sold in various hip underground bookshops, such as Indica in the St James’s district of London, and in fashionable boutiques, such as Nigel Waymouth’s own legendary Granny Takes a Trip on the capital’s famous Kings Road. But perhaps an even greater indicator of the creative spirit of the time is that as well as being the working name of a prolific graphic art partnership, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat also operated as an avant-garde musical partnership2 which produced two albums: Hapshash and the Coloured Coat Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids (1967) and Western Flier (1969). Indeed, it would be a model which would be replicated by the London-based Dutch design collective The Fool, who as well as producing artworks and stage costumes for The Beatles and others, also released an eponymous album of psychedelic folk in 1968.3 Martin Sharp, meanwhile, arrived in London from Sydney, Australia, in late 1966. As the art director of the original Australian incarnation of OZ magazine, he had in 1966 been sentenced alongside the publication’s

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Above: Pearce Marchbank: Friends, cover, 10 July 1970.

Left: Pearce Marchbank, Time Out, cover, December 17–23, 1972. Below: Pearce Marchbank: OZ, No. 37, front and back cover spread, September 1971.

co-editors, Richard Neville and Richard Walsh, to three to six months in jail for his part in the printing of an ‘obscene’ publication. Though these sentences were subsequently overturned on appeal, the whole farrago coupled with the prospect of ongoing harassment from the authorities in New South Wales would appear to have been major contributory factors in the decision by both Neville and Sharp to up sticks and relocate to the UK. Shortly after his arrival in the very-soon-to-be-swinging London, Sharp was introduced to the guitarist Eric Clapton, then of the supergroup Cream, at the legendary musicians’ hangout the Speakeasy Club, in the heart of the capital’s West End. A close friendship and artistic symbiosis soon blossomed, with Sharp providing Clapton with a poem he had written (as well as being a graphic artist, Sharp was also a poet/lyricist and filmmaker) in response to Clapton’s mentioning that he was looking for lyrics to accompany a piece of music he’d crafted. The resultant song, ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’, was eventually included on Cream’s second album, Disraeli Gears. In the meantime, Sharp was commissioned to produce the cover artwork for both Disraeli Gears and the 1968 follow-up album, Wheels of Fire. On this latter album, for which he won the New York Art Director’s Prize for Best Album Design, Sharp chose to push the ever more lavish boundaries of album cover design by producing a sleeve consisting of a black print on aluminium foil. Having quickly established himself as a leading light within London’s burgeoning cultural underground and been joined by his old cohort Richard Neville and fellow Australian Jim Anderson, Sharp resumed his design duties on the notorious UK version of OZ magazine, which published its first issue in February 1967. Indeed, alongside event posters and album covers, the underground press on both sides of the Atlantic provided yet another outlet for psychedelic graphics, with OZ in particular, under the art directorship of Sharp, swiftly establishing itself as one of the most visually dynamic and innovative publications of the time through the use of wraparound covers and pull-out posters designed by Sharp himself and other artists, including Pearce Marchbank and Barney Bubbles. But as well as producing some extraordinarily vivid artwork for OZ, Sharp’s place in pop cultural history is secured through the creation of some of the most iconic and highly recognisable examples of psychedelic poster art, courtesy of his intensely decorative, Klimt-influenced Bob Dylan Opposite: Pearce Marchbank: OZ, No. 37, inside page, September 1971.

‘Blowin’ in the Mind’ poster, printed like his Wheels of Fire album cover on

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reflective foil paper, and his vibrant Jimi Hendrix Explosion poster, which was based on a photograph by Linda McCartney.

Meanwhile, other notables involved in the London-based psychedelic graphics scene were the aforementioned design collective, The Fool; John Hurford who contributed illustration work to OZ, International Times and Gandalf’s Garden magazines; Michael McInnerney who became art editor of International Times and produced memorable posters such as that for 1967’s Legalise Pot Rally at Hyde Park; and Pearce Marchbank who worked on Friends (later Frendz) magazine, as well as OZ, and who would go on to shape the look of Time Out magazine (itself a product of the underground) by way of some award-winning and hardhitting covers. Just as the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the summer of 1966 served as a kind of rallying point for London’s cultural underground, over on America’s West Coast, an exhibition entitled Jugendstil & Expressionism in German Posters, held at the Berkeley campus of the University of California,4 was arguably to have a huge impact on the visual aesthetic of the American psychedelic underground which was soon to coalesce around the Haight–Ashbury district of San Francisco. By way of clarification, ‘Jugendstil’ was simply the German term for what was known as art nouveau in the English-speaking world – the decorative art movement which rose to prominence alongside the expressionist movement at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Practitioners of both art nouveau and expressionism were concerned to greater and lesser degrees with giving visual expression to the spirit, as well as the evocation of mood. Significantly, the poster was an important outlet for artists working within the art nouveau style internationally, such as Alphonse Mucha and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, as well as those allied to related art nouveau-inspired movements such as the secessionists in Austria, whose number included Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller and Alphonse Mucha. And so, it’s easy to see why the fluid and sensuous lines of the art nouveau movement in particular might chime so harmoniously with the hippies of the late 1960s. After all, the style of art nouveau, with its emphasis on organic and natural forms, was a reaction, in part, to the perceived alienation of industrialised society. Likewise, the nature-loving flower-power generation arose as a reaction against the increasingly Opposite: Wes Wilson: Grateful Dead poster, 1967.

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technocratic nature of Western society, which they saw as reaching its logical conclusion in the kind of industrialised warfare that was characteristic of the American military campaign in Vietnam. What’s more,

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Above: Alphonse Mucha: ‘Job’, 1898, colour lithograph.

it should, perhaps, come as little surprise that an art form conceived to appeal directly to the senses, as opposed to the intellect, should hit home with those seeking to bypass the rationalising function of the ego and firmly wedge open the doors of perception through the conspicuous consumption of LSD. That said, it might at first appear a little curious for the Californian art historian, Walter Medeiros, to claim that one of the most celebrated of the San Franciscan psychedelic poster artists, Wes Wilson, was initially wholly unaware of the art movement to which his work was seemingly hugely indebted. Indeed, writing about Wilson in the book High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster, Medeiros categorically states that ‘Art Nouveau had no formative influence on rock poster art,’ and he points to the psychedelic experience directly together with Western Victoriana as having a more immediate impact on the flowing aesthetic of the

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psychedelic poster.5 However, whilst acknowledging the undoubted significance of these latter components, the undeniable similarity in style between certain examples of the psychedelic poster genre and the work of, say, Alfred Roller and Alphonse Mucha of the Viennese secessionist movement, would seemingly render the claims of Medeiros as both disingenuous and absurd. Below: Wes Wilson: The Byrds poster, 1967

Yet, the crucial thing to bear in mind with regards to the majority of artists who form the focus of this chapter (as well as much of this book in general) is that they had little or no formal schooling in art and design, but

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Above: Wes Wilson: Moby Grape poster, 1967.

were instead self-taught amateurs intent on giving visual expression to the subcultural scenes in which they were immersed. Randy Tuten, for example, is described by Medeiros as a Los Angeles ‘street kid’, and the hugely influential Stanley Miller, better known as Stanley Mouse, arrived in San Francisco after having earned his chops as a graphic artist alongside the likes of Ed Roth on the custom car show circuit. Which is perhaps also why, once the moment had passed, many of the artists returned to comparative obscurity.

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And certainly, it would appear that once the similarities of style between art nouveau and their own work had been pointed out to the likes of Wilson (who was introduced to the work of Austrian secessionist Alfred Roller by a friend, via the catalogue for the aforementioned Jugendstil & Expressionism exhibition), they eventually became formally incorporated as stylistic influences. Indeed, Medeiros points out that the flowing, organic nature of Wilson’s lettering, in particular, which at first glance would seem to owe much to that of Roller’s from the turn of the twentieth century, instead owed more to Wilson’s quest to reproduce the kind of diffusion of form experienced on LSD.6 Yet, while this may indeed be the case, it is difficult to accept that the renewed interest in art nouveau on both sides of the Atlantic could not have eventually trickled down to street level through that appropriately mystical process of osmosis. Nevertheless, given Wilson’s interest in replicating his own psychedelic experiences in his designs through experimentation with unconventional form, dense pattern and heightened colour intensity, it is perhaps true to say that the work of San Franciscobased artists such as Wilson was even more intrinsically concerned with replicating the intensity and visual distortion of the acid experience than were the London artists. Another man intent on exploring the production of increased visual intensity through the optical effects of form and colour was Victor Moscoso. Yet, whilst Moscoso’s experiments with optical flicker caused by the juxtaposition of colours may possibly have been inspired in part by hallucinogens, as one of the few academically trained artists operating on the scene, a far greater formal influence on his work was the colour theory of Josef Albers. Albers had studied the physiology of colour perception and had published his theories on the differing levels of optical flicker caused by various colour combinations in the 1963 book Interaction of Color. Moscoso was a former student of Albers at Yale University and subsequently put Albers’ theories into practice in the immediately receptive environment of the San Francisco psychedelic underground, where his posters would be characterised not only with eye-boggling combinations of vibrating ‘hot colour’, but also with the text arranged in concentric circles. And just as in London, where certain inks were used to heighten the visual effect of psychedelic posters under ultraviolet light, Moscoso even went so far as to pioneer a form of rudimentary animation in some of his work. He achieved this through the use of different-coloured bands of circular text which would simultaneously appear and disappear under white light shone

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through a revolving colour wheel – such lighting effects being a common feature of psychedelic dance clubs and ‘happenings’. Although there were numerous artists drawn to the medium of psychedelic poster art in San Francisco (and indeed beyond, notably in the cities of Detroit, Denver and Los Angeles), Wilson and Moscoso were two of what have become known as the ‘Big Five’ – an artistic grouping which also included Rick Griffin as well as the creative partnership of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley. Undoubtedly, aside from the unquestionable quality of their work, a significant part of the reason that they are known as such is that between them they created the vast majority of event posters for the city’s two most celebrated concert halls: The Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. The Fillmore was run by concert promoter Bill Graham from early 1966 until its closure in June 1971 (by then it was operating at a different venue and was known as Fillmore West), and was responsible for producing some three hundred posters by a whole host of artists such as Wes Wilson, Lee Conklin, Randy Tuten and Rick Griffin, amongst others. Indeed, Wilson alone designed all but five of the Fillmore’s first sixty-two posters until a souring of relations with Graham in 1968 saw him replaced as the venue’s foremost poster designer by Bonnie MacLean, one of the few female artists of note, who also happened to be Bill Graham’s girlfriend. The Avalon Ballroom, meanwhile, was opened in February 1966 by the Family Dog Collective. Headed by Chet Helms, then manager of Janis Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, this was an organisation which had evolved out of the nascent psychedelic milieu which had originated around 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada – a venue which featured The Charlatans as its house band. Not to be confused with the later British band of the same name, The Charlatans are widely credited with being the first acid rock act, and a hand-drawn black-and-white flyer for one such event, later dubbed ‘The Seed’ is generally acknowledged as being the first psychedelic poster. A former motorcycle mechanic and self-taught artist, Alton Kelley had been closely associated with the Family Dog collective since its beginnings and had produced flyers for the collective’s pre-Avalon Ballroom happenings in San Francisco during late 1965. In early 1966, Kelley met Stanley ‘Mouse’ Miller (so named in honour of him being the son of a Disney artist) who had moved up to San Francisco after reading about the developing scene there. And, perhaps as a result of their shared backgrounds in custom car/motorbike culture, the two formed

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Above: Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley: ‘Edwardian Ball’ poster, 1966.

Above: Lee Conklin: Buffalo Springfield poster, 1968

Above: Lee Conklin: Canned Heat poster, 1968

Above: Stanley Mouse: ‘Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In’ poster, 1967.

a very fruitful creative partnership which operated under the name of Mouse Studios. The earliest Avalon Ballroom posters had been designed by the indemand Wes Wilson. However, after Wilson quit working for the Family Dog collective to concentrate on producing work for Bill Graham, Mouse Studios took over the design of posters for the Avalon Ballroom. And by way of contrast to Wilson’s ongoing acid-fuelled experimentations in form and colour, Kelley and Mouse’s work, while no less overtly psychedelic in nature, was characterised by heavy doses of irreverent and satirical humour, as well as the use of found imagery and the subversion of ‘straight’ consumer advertising and well-known trademarks. It is possibly for this reason, as well as perhaps their use of harderedged skeletal imagery in posters and album covers for the Grateful Dead, that their work, more so than Wilson’s, has succeeded in transcending the fleeting fashionability of psychedelic art to become a key influence on later generations of poster artists working in the US punk and grunge scenes of the 1980s onwards. Impressed by the output of the increasingly influential Mouse Studios, Rick Griffin arrived in San Francisco after having been immersed for much of his teenage years in the surf culture of Southern California. Indeed, having had little formal art training, Griffin had previously demonstrated his artistic flair as a staff artist for Surfer magazine. Griffin’s first commission after arriving in San Francisco was for a poster to advertise a large hippy gathering entitled the ‘Human Be-In’; after which he began working for the Family Dog, producing posters for the Avalon Ballroom. However, as well as the Avalon, Griffin also designed posters for the Fillmore and collaborated with other artists such as Alton Kelley and Victor Moscoso, with whom he would later join as part of the Zap Comix collective. Perhaps as a result of also working with such notable heavies as the Grateful Dead, Griffin’s poster work also incorporates the kind of nightmarish totemic imagery (skulls, flying eyeballs, snakes, scarab beetles etc.) which would go on to become staples of the heavy metal album cover. But Griffin’s use of such was firmly grounded in his own spiritual beliefs (death and rebirth being a common theme in his work) and his close identification with Native American mysticism. Indeed, in l970 Griffin turned to Christianity, which served as a theme for much of his artistic work up until his death in 1991 following a motorcycling accident. Outside of the Big Five, other notable names producing psychedelic art in the United States were Lee Conklin, Bob Schnepf, David Singer, Gary

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Grimshaw and the aforementioned Randy Tuten, amongst others. However, as with op art before it (also a strong influence on hippy art), radical new styles quickly lose their potency as they become assimilated into the mainstream. And with respect to psychedelia, the style quickly came to lose its direct association with the acid experience and with radicalism in favour of merely becoming a decorative, vibrant and ultimately clichéd visual shorthand for a youthful and free-spirited sensibility. That said, the style was also picked up and used sympathetically by established graphic designers who were positioned both geographically and socially well outside of Haight–Ashbury but who were nevertheless tuned in to its spirit. Notable examples of such were Peter Max, whose 1967 ‘Love’ poster worked as a comparatively minimalistic and successful marriage of hippy buzzword and art nouveau-inspired graphics and typography, and Milton Glaser, founder of the New York-based Push Pin Studios, whose ‘Dylan’ poster depicted the iconic musician as a black silhouette with an unruly head of hair comprised of vivid swirls of bright, contrasting colours. Meanwhile, no survey of hippy poster art would be wholly complete without mention of the work of the Japanese artists Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo. Both succeed in fusing Western, art nouveau-inspired expressions of hippy consciousness with the flat colour of traditional Japanese prints and nightmarish and often overtly sexual content to create a startlingly unique and often darkly decadent psychedelic vision. Back on the US West Coast though, the poster certainly wasn’t the only visual expression of the psychedelic experience; for the offset printing process, which had made it possible to mass produce posters cheaply, had also given birth to both the underground press and underground comix. Indeed, from 1965 onwards, there was an explosion of underground newspapers from both within the geographical epicentre of the hippy movement and far beyond. Examples include the San Francisco Oracle, the San Francisco Express Times, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe (Berkeley, California), The Chicago Seed, Fifth Estate (Detroit), the East Village Other (New York City), OZ and International Times (both out of London), and Actuel (Paris), to name but a few. The rapid proliferation of underground titles prompted the formation of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) in mid-1966 by the publishers of five of these early countercultural publications. The initial idea had been to use the UPS (later known as the Alternative Press Syndicate) as a means of

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Above: Rick Griffin: Jimi Hendrix Experience poster, 1968.

Below: Bonnie MacLean: Martha and the Vandellas poster, 1967.

Above: Bonnie MacLean: Eric Burdon and The Animals poster, 1967.

block-selling advertising space within the five founding titles, but instead the UPS grew into an umbrella organisation representing the interests of underground titles across the globe. Membership in the UPS was free, subject only to a written request. The conditions of membership were that members agreed to send copies of their papers, upon publication, to the UPS and, in the egalitarian spirit of the times, to allow fellow members to reprint any content from them completely free of charge. Crucially, this latter stipulation allowed a start-up publication, in the Netherlands for example, immediate and unfettered access to writings and artwork created by a panoply of emerging talents, such as Charles Bukowski, Germaine Greer, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Crumb, amongst others. Though underground magazines were by no means uniform in their look, their designers tended to share the propensity for colour-saturated visual experimentation at the expense of textual legibility with the poster artists – indeed, they were often one and the same, as was the case for example with the aforementioned Martin Sharp, at OZ magazine. Crucially, a key component of many underground magazines was the LSD-inspired comic strip. Indeed, underground titles such as Yarrowstalks (which was the first to publish work by Robert Crumb) and the East Village Other, in particular, played a vital role in incubating an anarchic, acid-raddled artistic medium which would eventually explode out of the pages of the established underground press and coalesce into a movement in its own right. Having arrived in San Francisco from Cleveland at the beginning of 1967, Robert Crumb began contributing work to both Yarrowstalks and the East Village Other, as well as the nationally distributed men’s magazine Cavalier, which published his Adventures of Fritz the Cat strip – later made into a film for which Crumb allegedly received not a cent. However, it was following a two-month period of intense artistic creativity – which Crumb attributes to the after-effects of a hit of bad acid – during which he not only generated a significant stock of new material, but also nailed what was to become his immediately recognisable style of goofy, big-footed characters, that the soon-to-be legendary cartoonist took the ground-breaking decision to self-publish the work in the form of two 24-page comic books, under the title of Zap Comix. With the help of underground publisher, Don Donahue and print shop owner Charles Plymell, the very first issue of Zap Comix was launched at a street party on Haight Street on 25 February 1968. Here, copies of the comic were hawked by Crumb from a stock transported in a pram

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Above: Bonnie MacLean: Yardbirds/Doors poster, 1967.

Above: Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso: Iron Butterfly poster, 1968.

pushed by his heavily pregnant wife, Dana. Zap #1 was also distributed in limited numbers to hippy shops across the US, where it proved to be instantly successful. In fact, through the publication of Zap Comix, Crumb is credited by many as single-handedly reinventing a medium formerly associated with children and adolescents into one that would go on to supersede the psychedelic concert poster as the visual encapsulation of the acid experience. However, according to Robert Williams, who subsequently joined up with Crumb as part of what became known as the Zap Collective, the Below: Randy Tuten: ‘Grateful Dead’, 1969.

rapid proliferation of underground comix which followed in the wake of the publication of the first Zap Comix ‘would have happened without Crumb, even at the time, because all the underground artists were going

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in that direction’ (Rosenkranz, 2008, p. 98). Likewise, in the words of S. Clay Wilson: ‘It just sort of happened. Some simultaneous synchronistic explosion. All kinds of people were doing all kinds of stuff and it congealed into underground commix’ (Rosenkranz, 2008, p. 88). Certainly, the poster artists Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso seemed to recognise that they were moving in the same direction when they both identified the development of a sequential comic book element in each other’s work and decided to collaborate, firstly on posters and then on comic strips as part of the rapidly expanding Zap Collective. But whilst it’s open to question as to whether the underground comix phenomenon would have happened in quite the same way without Crumb, what is unquestionable is the galvanising effect that the publication of Zap #1 had on a generation of visual artists both in San Francisco and way beyond. After all, there had been underground comics before Zap Comix, but in the words of Bill Griffith, creator of the long-running and widely syndicated (in the US) Zippy the Pinhead strip, ‘there are people who will tell you that the very first underground comic book was God Nose by Jaxon, or was Leny of Laredo by Joel Beck, and that’s probably true, but Crumb had the real big vision, the burning vision . . . he reinvented the form’ (Rosenkranz, 2008, p. 75). By the end of 1967, the psychedelic dance poster craze had reached its zenith. In July of that year, the poster work of Moscoso, Griffin, Wes Wilson, Mouse and others had been showcased at a successful exhibition, the ‘Joint Show’, on Sutter Street in San Francisco. International recognition followed two months later by way of a feature on the phenomenon in the 1 September edition of Life magazine. Soon afterwards, the quality of the posters began to deteriorate, both because of the rapid expansion of the artistic pool resulting from an influx of new faces seeking to grab a piece of the action and as a result of many of the original artists seeking new ways to deploy their talents. Album cover artwork proved to be a natural and logical progression for many, with Kelley, Mouse and Rick Griffin producing work for the Grateful Dead; Victor Moscoso doing the same for the Steve Miller Band and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia; and Robert Crumb providing the cover for Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills LP. But for many, what subsequently became known as ‘comix’ – which just so happened to be distributed commercially by the same organisations as distributed the posters – offered opportunities for experimentation and levels of artistic freedom that just couldn’t be found in the commercially

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Above: Mari Tepper: Moby Grape poster, 1968.

orientated music industry. After all, Crumb’s iconic artwork for Cheap Thrills had originally been intended as the back cover of the album until his original illustration for the front was rejected by Columbia Records. And so, with Zap #1 having served solely as a showcase for the work of its instigator, the second issue of Zap Comix, published in July 1968, featured not only the work of Crumb, but also of Griffin, Moscoso and S. Clay Wilson, who had come into the Zap fold following a meeting with Zap’s printer/publisher, Charles Plymell. Subsequent issues of Zap Comix would also feature the work of Robert Williams, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton and Paul Mavrides. Meanwhile, following in the slipstream of the success of Zap Comix, underground comic titles such as the ‘as weekly as possible’ Yellow Dog anthology, Shelton’s Feds ‘n’ Heads, Bijou Funnies, The New Adventures of Jesus and Hydrogen Bomb and Biochemical Warfare Funnies, to name but a few, proliferated alongside other Crumb titles, such as Uneeda, Big Ass Comics and Motor City Comics, all of which provided an outlet for the work of a whole new generation of countercultural comic artists such as Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, Rory Hayes and Vaughn Bodé, alongside those already listed above. The key to the wholly unfettered artistic freedom enjoyed by the new comix artists was that because comix could be sold through distribution systems that had already been well established as a means of supplying head shops and hippy emporia with underground magazines, psychedelic posters, bongs, beads and other lifestyle paraphernalia, they were not subject to the censorship of the Comics Code Authority. The Comics Code Authority was, and remains, an extremely restrictive regulatory scheme which was set up by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954 in the wake of a national moral panic concerning the allegedly corrupting content of some US comic books such as EC Comics’ Tales From the Crypt and Crime Suspense Stories. It forbade the depiction of such things as violence, gore, sexual innuendo and perversion in comics. And though in theory, subscription to the code was voluntary, in reality few, if any, of the major distributors of comics were willing to take on a title that didn’t bear the ‘Approved by the Comics Code Authority’ logo on its cover. Opposite: Robert Crumb: Zap Comix, No. 0, cover, 1968.

depictions of sex and violence, protected by the First Amendment (though

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Thus, free from such established comic industry interference over the FBI was not beyond using drug busts and dirty tricks to harass the

publishers of underground literature), and above all infused with the notion that nothing is sacred, it was a case of ‘excess all areas’ as underground comix artists set about gleefully raising the stiffest of middle fingers to family values, with extremely graphic depictions of both sex and violence in such wilfully provocative titles as Jizz, Snatch and the aforementioned Big Ass Comics. In many ways the exceedingly frank depictions of sucking and fucking in the new comix can be viewed as a taboo-busting satirical tool aimed at confronting a hypocritical establishment with that which they had long made a dirty secret, but as one commentator posits by way of a critique of Crumb’s Snatch and Jizz titles: The comics amount to a working out of personal hang-ups on paper, being more of a free-for-all for the artists involved than trenchant attempts at social satire – with the few exceptions invariably done by Crumb himself. (Estren, 1974, p. 11) Often singled out for particular criticism is S. Clay Wilson, whose visceral and nihilistic work pushed the limits of what was acceptable even within the genre itself and who is held by many to have opened the sluice gates for a deluge of cartoonish sex and violence. Certainly, Crumb credits both Wilson and Robert Williams as having helped liberate him from selfcensorship, saying: For better or worse, the influence of Wilson and Williams began to show in my work. I too became a rebel. I cast off the last vestiges of the pernicious influence of my years in the greeting-card business. I let it all hang out on the page. (Rosenkranz, 2008, p. 88) The immediate upshot of all of this was the launch of the abovementioned sex comics by Crumb, which also contained the work of his cohorts, Wilson, Williams and others. But the greater long-term legacy has been a series of far more nuanced work in which Crumb appears as a sweaty, leering caricature of himself, laying bare his numerous sexual neuroses and often toxic attitudes to women on the page amid a palpable fug of self-loathing. Indeed, amongst all of the artists involved with the underground comix revolution, Crumb has become by far the most celebrated and respected – his renown extending far beyond the Opposite: Robert Williams: Zap Comix, No. 5, cover, 1970.

relatively narrow realm of comic art. Acknowledged as both a highly skilled craftsman and a searing satirist by many (and as a misogynist by a great many others), Crumb’s work – even at its most seemingly

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base – encompasses a level of subtlety and complexity which is often wilfully ignored by – or is just too near the knuckle for – his critics. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the case of Crumb’s most controversial character, Angelfood McSpade, a naive female African native drawn in the fat-lipped overtly racist style of comic books of the 1930s and 40s, who Crumb deployed in his work as a totem for the repressed sexual desires of the white man and possibly also as a representation of how the African American was still perceived by white America. Irrespective of its satirical intent, McSpade became simply too hot to handle in the far more politically sensitive times in which we now live, causing Crumb to finally drop the character from his repertoire. ‘It just got so damn touchy,’ he said of the matter in an interview with The Guardian newspaper in 2005. ‘I was naive when I was young, I thought everybody would see the satire, this making fun of the racist images. . . . But I can understand it, I can see it can be hurtful, yes.’7 And so, just as the work of Crumb has long attracted the ire of those on the left as well as those on the reactionary right (most recently Crumb withdrew from a comics festival in Sydney, Australia, in 2011 following adverse publicity in the right wing press both in Australia and the UK), it’s quite possible that viewed by many as embodying chauvinistic – even counter-revolutionary – attitudes at their late 1960s peak, underground comix succeeded in drawing more fire from the liberal end of the political spectrum than they ever did from the right. In fact, underground comix appeared, by and large, to have escaped the attention of the authorities, perhaps because they were less overtly revolutionary than many of the underground press titles of the time and because they were produced in such small print runs – the first issue of Snatch, for instance, ran to just eight hundred copies (Rosenkranz, 2008, p. 89). Regardless of such controversy, the emergence of underground comix as a phenomenon provided an expansive outlet for the work of an extraordinary array of talents, many of whom, including Crumb and Art Spiegelman, would go on to produce work which was critically acclaimed in the mainstream liberal media. And though, like underground magazines, the momentum of the medium would dip in the early 1970s, its subversive attitudes and satirical influence would eventually find their way into mainstream comics – most notably via Steve Gerber’s Howard the Opposite: Robert Crumb: San Francisco Comic Book, No. 3, 1970.

Duck series for Marvel – and into popular, albeit still resolutely left-field,

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entertainment, courtesy of Terry Gilliam’s surrealistic cartoons for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Above: Robert Crumb: Footsy, 1994.

Furthermore, the anarchic and frequently nihilistic spirit of the underground comix would later pass over into punk – a movement which in certain instances self-consciously incorporated elements of the grotesquely cartoonish in the names of many of its protagonists: Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Rat Scabies etc. But ultimately, the lasting legacy of underground comix has perhaps been to open up an artistic medium that had previously been looked down upon – in the United States and the UK at least, in contrast to many European countries – as consisting of little more than one-dimensional superhero power fantasies, into one perfectly suited for the expression of highly nuanced adult concerns. This is something which has been recognised of late by the critical acclaim and literary awards for ‘graphic novels’ such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Guardian First Book Award, 2001) and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (Pulitzer Prize, 1992).



1. Much of this article was reproduced in Melly, G. (1970), Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain, London: Penguin. 2. In this endeavour, English and Waymouth were joined by various friends and musicians, including the legendary producer Guy Stevens and Mickey Finn, later of T-Rex. 3. The album was reissued on the Rev-Ola label in July 2005. 4. The exhibition ran at the University Art Gallery from 16 November to 9 December 1965 and at Pasadena Art Museum from 18 January to 20 February 1966. 5. See ‘Wes Wilson’ by Walter Medeiros, originally published in the exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Rock Poster Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, and reprinted in Owen and Dickson, 1999. 6. Ibid. 7. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/mar/18/ robertcrumb.comics (accessed 17 February 2014). Taken from a published transcript of a live interview with Robert Crumb conducted by the cartoonist Steve Bell in 2005, which was published on The Guardian website 18 March 2005.

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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).

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.

(the name to which he eventually changed to by deed poll), provides us with one from the new wave which followed punk, directly to the conscious-altering psychedelic underground of the 1960s. Having graduated from Twickenham College of Technology, just outside of London, during the early 1960s, Bubbles began to drift away from formal design as he became increasingly immersed in London’s fast developing psychedelic scene. In fact, he came to be known as Barney Bubbles in recognition of the fluid bubble effects produced by the revolving oil projectors which were a feature of the light shows which he used to operate at venues such as the UFO club and Middle Earth. During this period, Bubbles produced LP covers for bands such as Quintessence and Brinsley Schwarz before eventually becoming ‘the first graphic designer to handle every visual aspect for a single rock group’ (Gorman, 2009, p. 39) when he began a long association with the cosmic rock outfit Hawkwind. Indeed, it was as art director for Hawkwind that Bubbles developed a distinctive visual style which was christened ‘Cosmic Art Nouveau’ (Gorman, 2009, p. 39). However, with Hawkwind commonly acknowledged as a bridge between hippy and punk cultures, the arrival of punk served to revitalise Bubbles artistically. Indeed, as in-house designer for the independent Stiff Records label and later Radar Records, Bubbles succeeded in fusing the high-concept packaging extravagances of the prog-rock era with a sharp witty new graphic sensibility which perfectly complemented the brittle angularity of much of the new music. Undoubtedly, the most celebrated example of Bubbles melding of the two is the sleeve for Elvis Costello’s 1979 album, Armed Forces (produced in association with Bazooka Graphics in France). This is a truly extravagant, kaleidoscopic affair which is as complex structurally as it is visually, with the back cover of the album consisting of four fold-out panels which can be rearranged any which way you wish and which reference pop art generally, as well as more specifically the work of Jackson Pollock, Mondrian and Paul Klee. But Bubbles was also responsible for what the Australian writer and musician Philip Brophy has described as ‘one of the most influential and inspirational record covers of the whole post punk milieu’ (Brophy, 1990). The work in question is that for The Damned’s second album, Music for Pleasure, which features four caricatures of the band set amid a Opposite: Barney Bubbles: Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind, poster, 1976.

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pastiche of the Russian modernist painter Wassily Kandinsky’s 1924 work, Yellow Accompaniment. Retrospectively labelled a pre-postmodernist by Brophy, Bubbles’ playful appropriation of the masculine hard-edged modernist imagery

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that had previously been rejected by a ‘love generation’ inspired by the sensuous, feminine curves of art nouveau, ensured that his work immediately stood out from both ‘the heavy-serifs-plus-illustration look of most commercial design, and the unstructured agit-prop of Jamie Reid’s punk graphics of the period’ (Thrift, 1992). But while those very same agitprop graphics effectively called time on the kind of high-concept rock album cover artwork characterised by either surrealist photography or extravagant airbrushed Tolkeinesque fantasies,4 it was nevertheless a style which skilled artists and designers from the previous generation were easily able to adapt to and work with. For example, Pearce Marchbank, Derek Boshier and Roxy Music sleeve designer Nicholas de Ville, all produced distinctive work in the punk style – de Ville designed the cover for The Adverts’ single, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, whilst Marchbank and Boshier produced the Clash Songbooks One and Two, respectively. Yet by late 1977 the cut-up, thrown together look was fast becoming as clichéd as much of the music, and it is Barney Bubbles who is credited with pushing things forward with his linking of punk to the style of Russian constructivism via sleeves for Generation X and The Damned. In doing so, he provided inspiration for a coterie of young graphic designers whose investigations of Dada, German modernism, Italian futurism, Russian constructivism and industrial design just happened to coincide with the emergence of punk rock as a musical force. Unlike a great many of those involved in the psychedelic poster scene detailed in the previous chapter, this new generation of young British graphic designers, which included Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville, Neville Brody and Vaughan Oliver, had formally studied graphic design. However, rather than engaging with the detached ‘problem-solving’ rationale of the established UK design companies, they, like their counterparts in the late 1960s, chose to immerse themselves ‘in a milieu and subculture – the music scene – which they were passionate about’ (Poynor and Crowley, 2004). And so, taking full advantage of the comparatively high degree of creative freedom afforded them by a record industry which, when it came to punk, didn’t always fully comprehend what it had on its hands, Messrs. Saville, Garrett, Brody and to a lesser extent, initially, Oliver, taking a lead from the aforementioned Barney Bubbles, set about producing record Opposite: Barney Bubbles: Elvis Costello, Get Happy poster, 1980.

covers that were imbued with a highly reflexive design consciousness which had previously rarely been seen outside of the work of Nicholas de Ville for Roxy Music. One that was distinctly postmodern in its ability to

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Above: Pearce Marchbank: Spread from Clash Songbook, 1978.

both self-consciously ‘quote’ its early twentieth-century reference points and to critique its own position as an element of marketing. In this latter respect in particular, Garrett’s work for the Buzzcocks and Saville’s work for Factory Records seemed to turn the whole relationship between subculture and wider society on its head. That is to say that, whereas mainstream culture succeeds in neutralising the threat posed by a sub or counterculture through adopting some of its elements for its own ends, Garrett and Saville (as Reid had previously done for his ‘The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle’ sleeve) appropriated elements of business practice as a way of deconstructing the whole process of corporate branding. For Garrett, this cannot only be seen in his careful building of a visual identity for bands such as the Buzzcocks through a distinct and immediately recognisable visual aesthetic (which in this instance was dictated in part by the two-colour only restraints imposed by a cashconscious record company), but also through the prominent incorporation of the record company logo in to the finished design and the labelling of the finished artefact as ‘product’. In fact, the Buzzcocks debut album, Another Music in a Different Kitchen (1978) was made available – as a limited edition – in a carrier bag on which the word ‘Product’ and even the catalogue number appeared significantly bigger than the band’s name: something which, according to the band’s manager Richard Boon

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Below: Jamie Reid: No Feelings, 1977.

Above: Derek Boshier: Clash Songbook No. 2, cover, 1979.

Left: Barney Bubbles: Ian Dury Songbook, cover, 1979. Below: Derek Boshier: Spread from Clash Songbook No. 2, 1979.

was done ‘partly to disabuse people of a whole series of illusions about musicians being in any way special’ (The Face, 1982, p. 22). Likewise, at Factory Records, into which Peter Saville was incorporated as a partner, the ‘FAC’ catalogue number was applied not only to record releases but also posters, Madonna’s TV appearance at the Factory-owned Haçienda club (FAC 104), unrealised design concepts (Linder Sterling’s Menstrual Egg-Timer; FAC 8) and even a lawsuit against the organisation by the legendary record producer Martin Hannett (FAC 61). This appropriation of corporate concepts and imagery – together with a general fetishisation of industrial design – can also be found in the naming of John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd and similarly in the concept behind the British Electric Foundation (B.E.F) band/ production company, formed by former Human League members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, who also operated as Heaven 17. Certainly, as a pioneering record company for whom design was as important (and for some detractors, seemingly more important) as the music, Factory Records is credited with providing a generation with an aesthetic education. That is to say that ‘through sleeves, ephemera and built spaces, devotees of the label were inculcated into the nuances of design language’ (Robertson, 2007, p. 13). And so, Saville, through his work with Factory Records (and also Dindisc) – alongside Garrett through his work with the Buzzcocks and later Simple Minds and Duran Duran; Brody through his work with Fetish Records and more prominently on the style mag, The Face; and Oliver through his work at 4AD records – is heralded as the paving the way for a wider design literacy which was initially treated with suspicion and hostility by many, particularly in the traditional music press, but which is now taken for granted as an otherwise unremarkable aspect of everyday living. Meanwhile, back on the streets, the visual aesthetic of punk (and post-punk) was also being codified at grass-roots level within the staples and photocopied pages of the numerous fanzines which appeared in its wake. And just as the development of cheap, offset litho printing in the 1960s facilitated not only the proliferation of the underground press but also its intense, colour-saturated aesthetic, the increasing accessibility of photocopiers in schools, libraries and offices during the course of 1970s, facilitated both the proliferation of punk fanzines and helped dictate their look by way of their being strictly limited to black and white. And whilst there is undoubtedly a link between the punk fanzine and the underground press magazine in terms of both their mutual antipathy to

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Above: Peter Saville: FAC 1, Factory poster, 1978.

mainstream societal values and their – often untutored – graphic language (as well as more directly through the adoption of punk by some of the more enduring underground titles, such as the 1 February 1977 issue of International Times), there is a telling distinction to be made between the two. For whereas magazines such as OZ, IT and the East Village Other (EVO) operated in an open-ended way as an alternative to the mainstream press, punk fanzines by their very nature were inward looking in that they were produced, in the main, by fans of punk music for fans of punk music. Their intent, therefore, was not so much to satirise or critique mainstream

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Above: Peter Saville: Fact. 50, Movement by New Order, album cover, 1981. Right: Malcolm Garrett: ‘Love You More/Noise Annoys’ by Buzzcocks, single cover, back, 1978.

Left: Malcolm Garrett: ‘Love You More/Noise Annoys’ by Buzzcocks, single cover, front, 1978. Below: Malcolm Garrett: Buzzcocks poster, 1977.

Above: Malcolm Garrett: ‘Orgasm Addict’ by Buzzcocks, single cover (featuring collage by Linder Sterling), 1977.

values but more to serve as an authentic voice for punks who were routinely demonised and caricatured in the popular media. Therefore, ‘as independent and self-published publications, fanzines became vehicles of subcultural communication and played a fundamental role in the construction of punk identity and a political community’ (Triggs, 2010, p. 49). In this respect, the lineage of the punk fanzine probably owes far more to both the original science fiction fan magazines of the 1930s such as The Comet and Futuria Fantasia,5 from which the term ‘fanzine’ derives, and the specific music genre fanzines of the late 1960s and 70s, such as Crawdaddy! and Bam Balam6 than to OZ, IT or EVO. That said,

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Above: Malcolm Garrett: Buzzcocks, Another Music in a Different Kitchen Songbook, cover, 1978.

though the graphic style of the punk fanzine undoubtedly arose in part out of the naive and ‘cheerful amateurism’ (Poynor and Crowley, 2004, p. 222) of their creators, a case can also be made for a more considered lineage, with Jamie Reid’s Suburban Press providing a stylistic link back to the self-published journals of the Dada movement by way of mail art and situationism. It’s arguable that the first ever punk fanzine was that which lent its name to the movement. First published in December 1975 by the New York-based cartoonist, John Holmstrom, Punk undoubtedly galvanised a nascent

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Opposite: Ripped and Torn, No. 17, cover, March 1979, layout by Tony Drayton. Left: Ripped and Torn, No. 2, cover, January 1977, layout by Tony Drayton. Above left: Mark Perry: Sniffin’ Glue, No. 5, cover, November 1976. Above right: International Times, Vol Q, No. 6, cover, 1 February 1977.

Above: Linder Sterling/Jon Savage: The Secret Public, cover, 1978. Opposite: Linder Sterling: Self Montage with Cling-film, 1981. (Photograph: Birrer).

Big Apple music scene centred around CBGBs7 and helped fertilise its London equivalent by way of sales of imported copies through Rough Trade Records and other outlets. However, by way of being relatively professionally produced and featuring colour covers, Punk doesn’t quite fit the template of what would now be regarded as the graphic style of the classic punk fanzine and can perhaps be viewed stylistically as a later manifestation of the underground press. Undoubtedly, when one thinks in terms of the classic punk fanzine, one tends to think in terms of Sniffin’ Glue. First published in July 1976 by Mark Perry, the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue was, according to its publisher, put together with the aid of a ‘children’s typewriter plus a felt-tip pen’ (Perry, 2002). And thus, having helped establish the lo-fi aesthetic of the punk fanzine through the use of whatever tools and technologies were immediately to hand, Perry urged Sniffin’ Glue readers to not ‘be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzine’ (Savage, 1991, p. 279). In doing so, he effectively opened the floodgates for a plethora of similarly cut and pasted fanzines such as Ripped and Torn, 48 Thrills, Guttersnipe and Rapid Eye Movement. Yet, not all producers of fanzines within the punk subculture were interested in merely interviewing members of punk bands. Notably, for the Manchester Polytechnic student Linder Sterling and writer Jon Savage, the

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Above: Linder Sterling: Howard Devoto in Lingerie Mask, 1977.

fanzine would serve as a medium with which to showcase their collage/

Opposite: Linder Sterling: Untitled, 1977.

Public, ran counter to punk fanzine orthodoxy by being conspicuously

montage work, which was created independently of each other but was complementary in style. Their groundbreaking publication, The Secret glossy and well designed. It was financed and published in 1977 by the New Hormones record label, which had earlier blazed a trail by putting out the first independently released punk single in the form of the Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’ EP. And of The Secret Public, label boss and Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon said: ‘We put out a fanzine that says fanzines can be anything you want, they don’t have to be slavish copies of Sniffin’ Glue’ (Toland, 2008). Prior to The Secret Public, Savage had previously self-published a more conventional punk fanzine called London’s Outrage in November 1976.

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Above: Linder Sterling: Untitled, 1977.

And though he has still produced visual work – such as the cover for the Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 single, ‘Feminine Is Beautiful’ – he has gone on to establish himself as a respected journalist and author of numerous books, including England’s Dreaming and Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. Sterling meanwhile has continued working primarily as a visual artist and has recently, and somewhat belatedly, gained recognition from the mainstream art establishment in the form of published monographs, art prizes and major retrospective exhibitions. At the time of creation of The Secret Public, Linder was a pivotal figure on the vibrant Manchester punk scene, sharing a flat with Buzzcocks’ then singer, Howard Devoto, in Salford and befriending a young Stephen Patrick Morrissey. Crucially, she studied alongside the aforementioned Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett at Manchester Polytechnic and began applying her nascent skills as a graphic artist to the creation of collaged flyers and posters for the Buzzcocks and also for Devoto’s later band, Magazine. In 1977, at the height of punk, her photomontaged image of a naked female torso with a steam-iron in place of a head would grace the sleeve – designed by Malcolm Garrett – for the Buzzcocks first major label release, ‘Orgasm Addict’. Clearly for Linder, punk provided a sense of artistic liberation in the sense that, in her words, ‘Punk was cutting out the question, “Can I do this?”’ (Renton, 2006, p. 12), and providing new avenues of self‑expression – not just in terms of the production of works such as The Secret Public but also in the radical transformation of her own appearance, saying that ‘to become truly heroic, you had to be prepared to be visibly different to every other member of society’ (Renton, 2006, p. 18). Yet, viewed out of their original context, Linder’s extraordinarily disconcerting ‘Dadaist-porno’ (Renton, 2006, p. 110) photomontages – made up of components cut from ‘adult’ magazines and mail order catalogues – can perhaps now be seen viewed as less punk and more classically feminist. Certainly, feminist critiques of gender and sexuality have long been at the heart of Linder’s artistic output, whether her medium be graphic, musical or performative. However, the punk aspect of these photomontages lie in their confrontational nature. Certainly, the more articulate protagonists within punk sought to make it their aim to confront straight society head-on with its own inherent hypocrisy by rubbing the collective noses of that society in the dirt it would prefer remained hidden under the carpet (indeed, the very name The Secret Public is suggestive of this very process). And so, through its use of pornography – particularly

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at a time when such material was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now – Linder’s work succeeded in being powerfully transgressive to the point that many a feminist and radical bookshop completely missed the point and refused to stock The Secret Public. In its confrontational exploration of mediated sexuality through pornography, Linder’s work finds parallels with that of Cosey Fanni Tutti, one-time member of the artists collective COUM Transmissions, and the musical manifestation of that collective, the industrial band Throbbing Gristle. But whereas Linder used appropriated pornographic imagery of other women in her work and always took care to obscure their identities through the careful placement of domestic appliances over faces, Fanni Tutti appropriated pornographic pictures in which she herself had modelled,8 as part of the instantly notorious COUM Transmissions exhibition, entitled ‘Prostitution’, which took place at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in October 1976. Famously dubbed ‘the wreckers of civilisation’ by outraged Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn who had attended the opening night of the exhibition, COUM Transmissions was a performance art collective comprising Cosey Fanni Tutti alongside Genesis P-Orridge and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson which specialised in shamanistic rituals and extreme acts of self-mutilation. But the core, and most controversial parts of the ‘Prostitution’ exhibition, were the explicit photo spreads of Tutti which had been appropriated from numerous top-shelf magazines, such as Playbirds and Knave, and which had been signed by Tutti, framed and consciously displayed ‘as different ways of seeing and using Cosey with her consent, produced by people unaware of her reasons, as a woman and an artist, for participating’.9 And by way of a neat circular twist, the resultant – and anticipated – press outrage subsequently became an expanding exhibit itself within the exhibition, being photocopied and displayed as part of the show. In spite of the fact that COUM Transmissions had been formed amid the late 1960s counterculture, and that the ‘Prostitution’ show predated punk’s rise to national consciousness by way of the Sex Pistols’ infamous TV non-interview with Bill Grundy the following December, ‘the opening night of Prostitution represented a significant meeting point of the worlds of art and punk’ (Sladen and Yedgar, 2007, p. 9). Opposite: Cosey Fanni Tutti/COUM: ‘Prostitution’ exhibition poster, 1977.

and the Fury’11 headlines that would subsequently be generated by the

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Not least because the outraged headlines and overcooked rhetoric about the destruction of ‘the morality of our society’10 presaged the ‘Filth

Above: Dave King: Crass logo, 1977. Opposite: Gee Vaucher: Cover collage for International Anthem No. 1, 1977.

antics of the Sex Pistols and others, but also because the ‘industrial music’ performed by Throbbing Gristle on the night would go on to influence others and become a significant component of the post-punk musical landscape. Crass, meanwhile, is a band that tends to get marginalised in many a history of punk, and even during the time of their existence – 1977 to 1984 – they received comparatively little coverage in the mainstream music press and next to no airplay on the radio. This, in spite of the fact that Crass records commonly outsold many of their more fashionable punk, new wave and post-punk contemporaries. This marginalisation of Crass may have had something to do with the fact that the band operated out of rural Essex rather than the two epicentres of punk activity, London and Manchester. It may also have had something to do with the uncompromisingly uncommercial nature of their music or with the austere and militaristic way in which the band presented itself on stage. But undoubtedly it had a great deal to do with the perception of Crass as the kind of old-school commune-dwelling hippies that punk was reacting against. Indeed, it is a disservice to Crass to describe them as merely a band rather than a ‘radical anarcho-pacifist, anarcho-feminist, vegetarian collective’ (McKay, 1996, p. 75). And in this sense the hippy antecedents of Crass are undeniable in that they were based at Dial House, a historic farmhouse in South West Essex, which had operated as an anarchist/ pacifist free house since 1967. Furthermore, the band’s Jeremy Ratter, better known as Penny Rimbaud, had been a co-founder of the Stonehenge Free Festival, which ran from 1972 to 1984. However, fronted by the much younger Clash fan Steve Ignorant, Crass served as the catalyst for a politically dedicated anarcho-punk movement which rose

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Above: Gee Vaucher: Feeding of the 5000 by Crass, cover, Gouache, 1978.

Above: Gee Vaucher: Penis Envy by Crass, inner illustration, collage and ink, 1981.

Above: Gee Vaucher: Best Before: 1984 by Crass, inner illustration, collage and tinted photograph of original painting, 1989.

to prominence in the early 1980s and which effectively rejuvenated the anti-nuclear, environmentalist and peace movements in the UK which had ossified since the early 1970s. As much as Crass were more than merely a band, Crass records served less as records and more as multimedia communiqués in which the packaging was equally as important as that which it packaged. The band’s vinyl output came sandwiched in stark black-and-white sleeves featuring the iconic ‘uroboros’ logo created by graphic designer Dave King,12 which folded out to reveal the caustic and darkly surrealistic post-apocalyptic photo-realistic paintings and collaged images of Gee Vaucher on one side and lyrics as well as writings relating to anarchist issues on the other. Having previously been involved with Penny Rimbaud as part of a neo-Dadaist performance group called EXIT, which existed from 1968 to 1972, Gee Vaucher took on the undesignated role of art director for Crass in 1978. Prior to that, she had been working as a commercial illustrator in New York, but she had also created an outlet for the kind of politically charged work she would eventually bring to Crass, in the form of her selfpublished ‘nihilist newspaper for the living’, International Anthem.13 Imbued with ‘a sense of the conflict that existed between the ugliness and beauty of life’ (Vaucher, 1999, p. 1), Gee’s artwork succeeds in being, by turns, shocking, irreverent, grotesque and beautiful – but always deeply humanistic in its intent. And in spite of the fact that the political potency of some of her art for Crass may now be diminished as a result of some visual reference points used in her work having been consigned to the dustbin of history (Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev), it still retains its power to astound in its startling surreality and sheer technical brilliance. In the US, Gee Vaucher’s hyperrealistic and politically surreal montage imagery finds its equivalence in the art of Winston Smith.14 Indeed, aside from the fact that both artists work with collage, there are other parallels between Vaucher and Smith in that, just as Vaucher’s most recognisable work is that which she produced for Crass, Smith’s most immediately recognisable work is still that which he produced for the leftist San Franciscan hardcore punk band, Dead Kennedys and the associated independent record label, Alternative Tentacles.15 For someone commonly Opposite: Winston Smith: Force Fed War, 1982.

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associated with the US West Coast punk rock scene, it may come as a surprise to learn that Smith studied Renaissance art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Florence, Italy. Having left the US for Florence in 1969, Smith

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Above: Winston Smith: Laughing on the Outside, 2008. Opposite: Winston Smith: Welcome to the World, 1987.

returned to San Francisco in 1976 where he was shocked to discover just how the radicalism of the late 1960s had fizzled out into compliant apathy. Yet, energised by the emerging punk rock scene in the Bay Area of the city, Smith became active in that milieu, firstly designing posters and flyers for punk rock bands and concerts that did not actually exist, before graduating on to ones for bands that did. Meanwhile, Smith’s long association with the Dead Kennedys came about after frontman Jello Biafra saw one of Smith’s 3D art pieces called IDOL, which depicted Jesus crucified on a cross of dollar bills. And this controversial comment on the nature of Christianity in the US would later become the central image on the Kennedys’ 1981 mini‑album, In God We Trust. In comparison to the punk rock scenes based around New York and London, the American West Coast version of punk (centred around

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Right: Winston Smith: In God We Trust by Dead Kennedys, cover, 1981. Below: Winston Smith: Dead Kennedys flyer.

Above: Winston Smith: Saturday Night Holocaust, 1982.

Above: Raymond Pettibon: No title (I Should Tell), 2010.

Los Angeles and San Francisco) resolutely distanced itself from mixing it with the avant-garde (as UK punk had done, for instance, with COUM Transmissions’ aforementioned ‘Prostitution’ show). Instead it chose ‘low culture, graffiti, underground comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, Blaxploitation, bondage and pornography, surf culture, 50s industrial films, Mad magazine, and the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores’ (McKenna, 1999) as a source of visual inspiration for lyrics, record sleeves, posters etc. However, if Californian punk was all about recycling the detritus of American culture then, to quote Ralph Steadman, ‘collage is the greatest recycling tool of the 20th century’ (Smith, 2005, Foreword). And

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it just so happened that ‘hand-carved collage’, was very much Winston Smith’s stock in trade. What’s more, Smith’s source material for his ‘punk art surrealist’ output is the hyperrealistic illustration work which graced the populist consumer press of the Eisenhower-era America, and which presented its readers with an idealised, unequivocally WASPish representation of a post-war consumerist idyll. So, through his use of collage, described by Steadman as the ‘common vernacular of protest art’ (Smith, 2005, Foreword), Smith’s subversion of the ‘lies inherent in these exalted images of the American way, produced, proliferated and discretely manipulated by corporate shills, aesthetic apologists, consumer illusionists and governmental hacks’ (Smith, 2005, Introduction) would perfectly complement a punk scene populated by bands such as the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and Minutemen who at the height of Below: Raymond Pettibon: Black Flag flyer.

Reaganism, ‘took the more dysfunctional and hypocritical of aspects of the government and other institutional representatives of authority as their target’ (Molon, 2007).

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Above: Raymond Pettibon: No title (It Sure Helps), ink and watercolour on paper, 2002. Opposite: Raymond Pettibon: Cars, TV, Rockets, H-bomb – You Name It, cover, 1985.

Another Golden State artist to subvert religious iconography was Raymond Pettibon. However, whereas Smith’s placement of Christ on a cross of dollar bills was intended as hard-hitting political satire, Pettibon’s depiction of Charles Manson on a crucifix, for a flyer distributed around the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, was perhaps even more troubling to residents of a city in which, during the late summer of 1969, a gruesome series of murders had been committed by followers of the demonic Manson. Of all the artists covered in this particular chapter, Pettibon is arguably the one who has found greatest favour within the fine art world, being the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and prizes. Notably, in 2004 he was bestowed with the Bucksbaum Award by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Worth $100,000, the Bucksbaum is the world’s largest award for an individual artist and is given biannually to an artist ‘who possesses the potential to have a lasting impact on the history of American art’.16 Quite an achievement for someone who never went to art school! Born Raymond Ginn in 1957 and raised in Hermosa Beach in the south of Los Angeles County, Raymond Pettibon is a self-taught artist whose early work is closely associated with the Californian hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag, formed in 1976 (and originally called Panic) by Pettibon’s brother, Gregg Ginn. Pettibon produced the band’s distinctive logo: a simple ideogram featuring four vertical black rectangles, each out of alignment with the others, and representative of a fluttering black flag. The artist’s stark, often blackly humorous and frequently violent pen and ink drawings also adorned the band’s flyers, recordings and T-shirts, lending the band an immediately recognisable visual dimension. Crucially, for the most part Pettibon’s involvement with Black Flag and the SST record label, also founded by his brother, was not that of a graphic designer charged with crafting promotional material for the band and others on the label (such as Minutemen, Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü). Instead, the single-minded and amazingly prolific Pettibon would sell his drawings in the form of self-produced artists’ books bearing titles such as Tripping Corpse, Other Christs and Jane’s Book of Fighting, and many of the images that he produced would become adapted for flyers, posters and record covers. Indeed, though visually complementary in being both immediate in terms of visual impact and suitably confrontational in style, the Pettibon drawings that adorned Black Flag records – with the odd Opposite: Savage Pencil: Goatlord of the Flies, ink on trace, 2005.

notable exception – bore little relation to song titles and lyrical themes within the music. Instead, in Pettibon’s words, ‘These drawings just represented what I was thinking’ (Spitz and Mullen, 2001, pp. 198–99).

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Above: Savage Pencil: ‘Wrong Eye’ by Coil, record cover, 1990.

This lack of a commercial imperative in Pettibon’s work has no doubt contributed to its enthusiastic embracement by the art mainstream. Though associated with the punk subculture but never having been encumbered by the need for his work to sell shows or product, Pettibon has succeeded in pursuing a singular artistic vision which, in its constancy of style and the recurring themes, characters and icons, presents ‘a highly personal and evolving commentary on American culture and its often violent sexual and criminal transgressions’ (Ohrt, 2000). In contrast to the focus on trash culture by much of the Los Angeles punk scene, Pettibon’s work is a dark and beguiling fusion of high and low culture which is as likely to draw visually upon the likes of film noir and the classic comic art of Milton Caniff and Jack Kirby as it is visionary artists such as Goya and William Blake. In it, depictions of suicide and sadomasochistic sex, as well as trains, baseball players and superheroes, are juxtaposed against fragments of text drawn from the works of Henry James, Ruskin, Emily Dickinson, Mickey Spillane or the artist’s own imagination. And again, just as his graphics for Black Flag can be characterised by an absence of any tangible relationship between them and the music they package, much of the power of Pettibon’s work lies in the disjuncture in the relationship between image and text, thus leaving space for the exploration of the kinds of gap between meaning and non-meaning that might best be summarised by the title of a recent

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Above: Savage Pencil: Destroy All Monsters poster, 2010.

Above: Savage Pencil: I Am the Mallard King CD cover, 1999. Opposite: Savage Pencil: Sonic Youth poster, 2009.

Above: Gary Panter: Jimbo, mixed media on board, 1981.

Pettibon monograph, Whatever It Is You’re Looking for, You Won’t Find It Here (Pettibon, 2006). In spite of the fact that he worked with image and text and drew upon classic comic books for inspiration, Raymond Pettibon neither creates comic strips nor sees himself as an influence on contemporary comic artists (O’Connor, 2004/2005). Nevertheless, just as the hippy culture of the 1960s spawned the underground comix movement, the explosion of creativity that was punk’s immediate and lasting legacy certainly did spill over into the realm of comics, very directly so in the case of Alan Moore’s Fashion Beast graphic novel, which was originally commissioned as a screenplay in 1985 by former Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren. Admittedly, the influence of punk in comics didn’t come close to attaining the ‘phenomenon’ status that the undergrounds had attained nearly a decade earlier. Instead, punk (both in terms of style and content) comic strips created by the likes Gary Panter, Savage Pencil and John Holmstrom and many other lesser known (and even unknown) creators, tended to find exposure in music magazines and fanzines such as Sounds in the UK and Slash and Punk in the US. Nevertheless, the spirit of punk in comic form (and in musical form) was embraced by 1960s underground comix pioneers such as Robert Crumb and Robert Williams, who saw it as offering a continuation of at least some of the spirit of nihilistic excess and anti-authoritarian attitude that had previously found expression in underground comix. In fact, comics offer yet another example of a direct link between punk culture and the hippy culture that it professed to despise. For example, cartoonist John Holmstrom had co-founded his influential Punk magazine after having been encouraged to publish his own comic by the American underground comix veteran Bill Griffith. And Punk went on to feature interviews with Robert Crumb, as well as Harvey Kurtzman whose Mad magazine had been so influential to the late 1960s underground comix generation. By way of reciprocation, the work of Gary Panter, Savage Pencil and others would appear in comics and comic anthologies such as Anarchy Comics, Raw and Weirdo, overseen by stalwarts of the sixties scene: Jay Kinney (Bijou Funnies), Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, respectively.

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Above: Gary Panter: Screamers poster, 1977. Opposite: Gary Panter: Springtime, ink on paper, 1995.

Above: Gary Panter: Red Hot Chili Peppers, eponymous LP cover, 1984.

Savage Pencil, the nom de plume of Edwin Pouncey, further makes explicit this connection between punk visuals and the underground. Born in the 1950s, Pouncey immersed himself in the kind of American underground culture that is the focus of much of this book (Ed Roth monster model kits, Mad magazine etc.) and made it his goal to become an underground cartoonist after having been made aware of the sixties scene via a feature on it he had seen in a magazine which had passed through his parents’ newsagents shop.17 Beginning with the publication in February 1977 of a weekly comic strip about the punk rock scene, entitled Rock ’n’ Roll Zoo, in the now defunct Sounds, Pouncey has since continued to contribute strips to various publications, including the New Musical Express and The Wire. He has also self-published comics such as Corpsemeat and Dead Duck and produced record covers and posters for The Fall, Sonic Youth and most recently the Seattle-based drone metal band, Sunn O))). Like his US contemporary Gary Panter, with whom he has collaborated, Pouncey’s cartoons are rendered

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Above: Gary Panter: Germs flyer, 1979. Above right: Gary Panter: Slash magazine cover, 1979.

in a seemingly untutored, rough-hewn style which immediately evokes the energy and primacy of expression over precision that is characteristic of punk but which also ‘privileges the raw, gestural qualities of a drawing’ (Hatfield, 2005, p. 61) over and above clean figuration. Widely known as ‘the father of punk comics’ (though he describes himself primarily as a painter who sometimes produces comics), Gary Panter began his association with the Los Angeles punk scene by producing posters for the art punk band The Screamers, as well as The Germs, before going on to contribute comics to the punk zine Slash. However, having been producing comic artwork some years before punk hit the streets of Los Angeles, Panter had been directly influenced by the ‘abstract approach to comic conventions’ (Nadel, 2008, p. 316) purveyed by the psychedelic artists Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin to the extent that Panter’s stated intent with his own comic work was to create ‘ratty picture stories, trying to link drawing and comics in a non traditional way’ (Nadel, 2008, p. 316). And the revolutionary nature of his impact upon the world

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of comics is related by Mike Kelley, the late artist and one-time member of the Detroit proto-punk band, Destroy All Monsters: There was, seemingly, no skill, just channelled lines of a most complex sort, sometimes forming stories, sometimes congealing into wad and broken grids. (Kelley, 2008) In the classic spirit of the punk DIY attitude, Panter self-published his first comic, Hup, in 1977. Around this time he developed a close friendship with The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, who was also producing punk comics such as Life in Hell. The two would subsequently collaborate on strips which were published in various fanzines under such punkish pseudonyms as ‘The Fuk Boys’ and ‘The Shit Generation’. And like Groening with The Simpsons, Panter would go on to enjoy success in the world of TV as a set designer for the 1980s US children’s show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, for which he would win three Emmy awards. Panter also notably produced a colourful series of record covers for various rock bands, as well as for Ralph Records, the label of the eyeballheaded avant-garde art/musical collective The Residents. However, his chief contribution to the comic canon is undoubtedly the proto-cyberpunk Jimbo character. Jimbo is a kind of loincloth-clad primitivist everyman who exists in a Ballardian, dystopian near future which is set on Mars but which resembles Los Angeles crossed with Tokyo by way of the plains of Texas. The resultant mix is ‘a ragged cartoon surrealism, often narrative in only the loosest sense, fusing the iconography of comics and animation with a painterly, fine-arts sensibility and the aggressive energy of punk’ (Hatfield, 2005, p. 61). Meanwhile, though Panter’s ‘ratty line’ comic work encapsulates the aforementioned ‘aggressive energy of punk’, the Los Angeles punk scene itself would eventually be depicted graphically through the comic art of two Mexican American brothers, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. Having, like many of the artists featured here, begun by designing flyers and posters for punk shows, they self-published the first of their highly successful Love and Rockets comics in 1981. The series, which would eventually weave a highly complex narrative over the course of fifty issues, followed the adventures of two bisexual Chicano females, Maggie and Hopey, taking place within the immediate milieu of the hardcore punk clubs of south Los Angeles. Love and Rockets would go on to have a direct influence on the British cartoonist and Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett, whose own late 1980s Tank Girl strip depicted the misadventures of a female punk. And as one of the first in a new wave of alternative comics, it would pave the way for the success in the 1980s of work by a whole new generation of – largely but not exclusively American – comic creators such as Peter Bagge (Hate), Charles Burns (Black Hole), Dan Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World), Lynda Barry (The Good Times Are Killing Me) and Julie Doucet (Dirty Plotte), many of whom, it can be argued, exhibit a punk sensibility to greater or lesser degree.

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Opposite: Jamie Reid: The Cat That Ate the World, 1974.

1. Richard Strange was then the vocalist of the post-prog/proto-punk band Doctors of Madness who once granted the Sex Pistols a support. Nevertheless, Strange credits the ascendency of punk as the primary reason for the disbanding of the Doctors of Madness in October 1978. 2. Quoted from the Punk Britannia page on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p00s81jw (accessed 14 February 2014). 3. The tour company subsequently sued the Sex Pistols record company, Virgin, forcing Reid to destroy the original artwork in front of solicitors. 4. Created by the likes of the Hipgnosis design collective and Roger Dean for bands such as Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and Gentle Giant. 5. The Comet was first published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club of Chicago; Futuria Fantasia was published in 1939 by the sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. 6. Crawdaddy! was first published in 1966 by New York college student Paul Williams. Bam Balam was written and published by Brian Hogg in East Lothian, Scotland, from 1974. 7. The CBGB club on the Bowery, NYC, ran from 1973 to 2008 and was the epicentre of the NY punk scene.

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8. A number of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s pornographic photo spreads, or ‘magazine actions’, were exhibited as part of the ‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’ exhibition at the Tate Modern between 1 October 2009 and 17 January 2010. 9. Quoted from the original ICA press release for the ‘Prostitution’ exhibition. 10. ‘Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of society. These people are the wreckers of civilisation’ (Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn) Daily Mail, 19 October, 1976. 11. Front-page headline from the Daily Mirror, 2 December, 1976. 12. Dave King was a longstanding friend of Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher who at the time resided at Dial House. 13. Vaucher produced three issues of International Anthem between 1977 and 1980. 14. Named after the central character in George Orwell’s novel 1984, Smith’s real name is James Morey. 15. Smith’s work has also appeared as illustration in a plethora of magazines such as The New Yorker, Playboy and Wired and adorned record sleeves by the likes of Green Day and Ben Harper. 16. Quoted from the press release, Raymond Pettibon Receives 2004 Bucksbaum Award, issued by the Whitney Museum of American Art. 17. For a full account of this, see ‘Inferno Rising: Origins and Influence in the Art of Savage Pencil by Glenn Bray’, published on the artist’s website, www. savagepencil.com

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the weird and wonderful world of lowbrow art and pop surrealism

4

Lowbrow art – along with pop surrealism – is a movement which is as accessible and immediate as the pop art explosion of the 1960s, if not more so. What started out in the US as an irreverent antidote to the fine art world has developed into an increasingly popular art movement, which, in spite of the fact that some practitioners have since found acceptance within the art establishment, continues to flourish outside of the mainstream with its own network of practitioners, galleries and publications worldwide. It’s a complex and quickly evolving phenomenon which is full of contradictions and complications, not least the name it should be given. But the undeniable fact is that for the past two decades lowbrow art, pop surrealism and their antecedents have formed a substantial subcultural alternative to fine art for thousands of artists, as well as for a whole host of observers who have been frustrated and alienated by the dictates of the fine art world. To begin to make sense of this tangled and fluid movement, it’s important to define what lowbrow and/or pop surrealism actually are and to do that we need to understand their history. Although the ‘original’ lowbrow’s origins are firmly rooted in the underground comix, punk and Kustom Kulture/hot rod scenes, among many others that we’ve already

Opposite: Tara Mcpherson: Melvins, Unsane poster, 2012, screen print on paper.

discussed, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s the American West Coast alternative art scene was disparate and unfocused, with no identifiable movement or support network for individual ‘non-fine’ artists to attach

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Above: Juxtapoz magazine: issue 24, Jan/Feb 2000, cover image by Joe Coleman.

Above left: Steve Carsella: Veruca Salt poster, 2000, offset. Above right: Mark Arminski: Blues Traveler with God Street Wine poster, 1995, silk screen.

themselves to. Without any framework, reference points or movement to be attached to, Robert Williams struggled at this time to find anyone to take notice of his work; he considers that ‘I didn’t have an audience until punk’ (Dukes Jordan, 2005). The punk movement held many of lowbrow’s sensibilities, but unlike lowbrow was an easily identifiable, largely selfcontained and ultimately short-lived movement. So throughout the 1980s, artists that we would now regard as lowbrow were finding that they had almost nowhere to go to exhibit their work, and therefore very few people were actually getting to see it. There were few galleries that existed with a leftfield bias, and some of those that did were showing graffiti art. Graffiti was of course springing up all over the world, with the streets and outdoor spaces providing a huge, albeit problematic and illegal, blank canvas for a whole

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Above: Hi Fructose Vol 13, cover image by Lori Earley.

Below: Juxtapoz magazine, issue 37, Mar/Apr 2002, cover image by Kenny Scharf.

Above: Juxtapoz magazine, issue 131, December 2011, cover image by Mark Ryden.

heap of young graffiti writers, beginning firstly in downtown Philadelphia, and then famously exploding all over the New York subway. Also in New York, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf were creating work which was heavily influenced by graffiti, but with their art school training, they gained acceptance from the fine art world. At that point, graffiti and its close relations was considered more ‘in’ than any inklings of early lowbrow art. A key moment for lowbrow came in 1986, when the La Luz de Jesus Gallery was opened by Billy Shire in Hollywood. Shire is widely considered to be the first dealer to fully appreciate the importance of artists such as Robert Williams, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Coop, Von Dutch and Todd Schorr. His gallery was then, and remains now, a pivotal part of the movement. However, initially this gallery was very much alone in its enthusiasms. Then, in 1993, the Laguna Art Museum hosted a Kustom Kulture exhibition. This highlighted the work of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Robert Williams and Von Dutch, acknowledging their rightful place in the pantheon of subculture, as well as connecting their work with that of other artists, such as Judy Chicago, Anthony Ausgang, Mike Kelley, Rick Griffin and Alan Forbes. The show highlighted the artworks, vehicles, fashions and attitudes of those involved in the uniquely Californian custom car subculture, and

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Above: Hi Fructose magazine, Vol 23, cover image by Junko Mizuno.

Above: Ron English: Cereal Boxes on Shelf at a Ralph’s in Venice, CA.

Above: Ron English: Raising the Brow.

Above: Marion Peck: Peasant Dance, 2008, oil on canvas, 36 x 46 inches.

each artist in the show could legitimately lay claim to having played a role in shaping the phenomenon of Kustom Kulture, and later lowbrow art, throughout the decades. The exhibition toured to Baltimore and Seattle and was enthusiastically received on each stop of its journey, with recordbreaking attendance figures throughout (Anderson, 2005). The crowd was made up of an eclectic group of those who had been there the first time around, mixed with a younger generation of enthusiasts, all of whom were attracted by the ‘lowbrow’ nature of the work. As well as resonating with the baby boomers (the young adults of the 1950s and 1960s), this show turned out to be an enormous influence on the future generation of lowbrow artists, who were attracted by the irreverent, rebellious nature of the show’s content. Its galvanising effect on this emerging generation of representational artists who would come to be known as ‘lowbrow’ cannot be overstated. Hence the early days of the lowbrow movement were populated by imagery which heavily featured hot rods, cartoonish images, flames, devil girls and so on. Ultimately, the show tapped into the prevailing zeitgeist in that it came at a time of growing disillusionment with the dominance of

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Above: Marion Peck: Li Li Riding through the Garden of Eden, 2002, oil on panel, 32 x 48 inches.

abstraction and conceptualism in art and a renewed interest in more tangible and immediately representational forms. Throughout the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, many artists and also the public were becoming increasingly alienated by the established fine art world. As Larry Reid explained it in 2004, ‘Following decades of inaccessible conceptual art and the opaque dialogue that accompanied it, a disconnected public was eager to embrace a movement that left behind the condescension and pretension of previous developments in the arena of fine art’ (Reid, 2005). This was also a time when popular culture was well and truly locked in the process of consuming itself through the systematic mining of the past to rediscover semi-forgotten subcultures and cultural figures from earlier decades. It was a process which not only introduced new enthusiasts to the worlds of Kustom Kulture, tiki and burlesque, but also created fresh appreciation for the likes of 1950s fetish model Bettie Page and the sexploitation films of Russ Meyer.

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Above: Derek Yaniger: Tiki Oasis South of the Border, 2011, silk-screened serigraph.

Below: Derek Yaniger: Name Your Poison, 2010, silk-screened mini serigraph.

Above: Grégoire Guillemin: Captain Soap, giclee print on archival paper.

Above: Grégoire Guillemin: Cat Pacifier, digital print on card.

Above: Bob Dob: Hodad’s, 2009.

Encouraged by the success of this show, some galleries at least became a little braver about showing ‘low’ art rather than fine art. And so a loose, but still undefined, network started to spring up in the 1990s, including Roq la Rue in Seattle, the Outre Gallery in Melbourne and The Last Chance Saloon in London (co-owned by author Suzy Prince). However, for the most part during the 1980s and early 1990s, artists who would go on to be considered lowbrow continued to work outside of the established system, with many overcoming their lack of visibility by turning to commercial art. One of the most effective ways for many artists and illustrators to have their work seen by a great number of like-minded people, as well as earning some money, was by designing gig posters and flyers. Following in the tradition of both the psychedelic and punk eras, the 1990s saw a huge explosion in graphics that were especially created for touring bands, largely because of the advent of the grunge scene, which famously started out in Seattle then swiftly made its way around the world. Often these posters were specific to certain cities and particular dates on the

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Above: Alex Gross: Original Sin, 2011, oil on canvas.

tour, meaning that while they were ‘throwaway’ artefacts in one sense, in another they were also actually very exclusive and therefore collectible. When artists such as Kozik, Steve Carsella, Alan Forbes, Mark Arminski and many others started to produce posters with higher production values in specified limited editions, which were sometimes signed, an important element of early lowbrow art was born. These artists saw the appeal of creating multiple editions that they could sell for a lower price which would collectively generate more income than a one-off work would; but as they were generally produced in limited editions, they also retained a sense of exclusivity. Limited-run band and gig posters, as well as non-band art

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Above: Billy Chainsaw: X-tasy?, acrylic and decal on canvas.

Above: Isabel Samaras: Cloud Nine.

Above: Emma Mount: Ruby the Jewel. Painting of a Blythe doll that was originally customised by G-Baby.

posters, were the most identifiable early strand of the collection of visual graphics which became lowbrow art. This practice is still thriving today, and the principles behind it also run through to the designer toy explosion which is examined in chapter five. In 1994 Robert Williams, along with a group of artists and collectors including Fausto Vitello, C.R. Stecyk III (aka Craig Stecyk) and Greg Escalante, founded Juxtapoz magazine, and for many people this act was what finally brought the art and artists featured in the publication together as a recognisable movement. Juxtapoz provided a crucial sea change in that it connected several seemingly unrelated and distinct strands of visual arts. Whether it was lowbrow art, pop surrealism, street art, poster art or illustration, if it fit with the lowbrow ethos, it was in. While the magazine

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Above: Emma Mount: Magnolia the Inimitable. Painting of a Blythe doll that was originally customised by G-Baby.

has been based from the outset in San Francisco, and there remains a heavy US West Coast bias – and, perhaps understandably, the early issues largely reflected the founders’ personal passions, with issue one featuring Von Dutch and Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth and a cover by Robert Williams – generally it has always sourced content from all corners of America, and increasingly from all over the world. At that time Juxtapoz was the only notable regular publication which dealt at all with these subcultural genres, giving them both respect and gravity. As a publication which was free from the constraints, limitations and expectations of the fine art world, Juxtapoz was able to run fast and free with its choice of content, and Robert

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Above: Robert Williams: Diamond in a Goats Ass: A Lyrically Poetic Euphemism for Pretension, 2009.

Below: Robert Williams: In the Land of Retinal Delights, oil on canvas, 1968.

Above: Alex Gross: The Bends, 2012, oil on panel.

Williams, along with Jamie O’Shea, the editor from 1996 to 2006, ensured that it did just that. As the magazine’s founder and editorial writer, Robert Williams was a highly visible, albeit unofficial, spokesperson for the entire movement. In his first editorial for Juxtapoz, he set the scene thus: ‘in the graphic tradition of EC comic books, psychedelic rock posters, side show freak banners and Zap Comix, here is Juxtapoz, a magazine that intends to stay below everyone’s dignity’ (Thatcher, 1994, Editorial). The magazine fast gained commercial success and went on to become one of the biggest selling art magazines in the US, later becoming widely available all over the world, thereby introducing the new movement of lowbrow art to a Below: Mark Ryden: Just the Girls, 1998, oil on panel, 21 x 21 inches.

global audience. New publications, such as Hi Fructose, Tokion and Giant

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Robot, covering similar topics, sprang up over the next decade. Each publication had a different main focus – Giant Robot highlighting designer

Above: Mark Ryden: The Meat Magi, 1997, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches.

toys and Tokion on American/Asian artists – but they all served to further the cause of a non-fine art kind of art. So, where did the name ‘lowbrow’ come from? Once again, Robert Williams is responsible for this. In 1979 Gilbert Shelton, the creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic strip, decided to publish a book of Williams’ bright, provocative, cartoon-influenced paintings. No formal art institutions at that time were prepared to recognise this art, so Williams decided to call his book The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams. Although he has since stated that ‘There was never any intention to make the title of my book the name of a fledging art movement’1 that was in fact exactly what happened. Williams has distanced himself from the title, explaining that ‘the term “Lowbrow” was always unsettling to me because it made light of how seriously I took my art’.2 Indeed debate has raged about its usage ever since, with many artists, including Williams himself, stating that the name is inappropriate and damagingly self-deprecating. While for the sake of simplicity in this chapter we’ll stick with the catch-all term ‘lowbrow’, some artists prefer terms such as ‘no-brow’, ‘newbrow’, ‘underground’, ‘cartoon expressionism’, ‘new contemporary’, and ‘pop surrealism’, along with others.

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Above: Isabel Samaras: Castaway (Ginger), 2012, oil on panel.

Below: Robert Palacios: Hueso Family, acrylic on panel.

Above: Mark Ryden: Balloon Boy, 2000, oil on canvas, 16 x 16 inches.

Because it is used as an umbrella term for so many different styles, one of the biggest problems for lowbrow art, and later pop surrealism, as a movement is that it has always suffered from an identity crisis. The artists themselves disagree about what lowbrow actually is, with many artists on the pop surrealism end of the scale actively seeking to distance themselves from what they regard as the old school, more traditionally lowbrow hot‑rod and comix-influenced artists. A commercial illustrator who designs a simple car sticker in a certain style, which he then turns into a poster, might be accorded lowbrow status by some people, as might a tattoo artist who produces art prints or paintings. At the same time, an artist who creates a complex, romantic, surreal painting might be given the same accolade. As well as being a term which reflects the art form’s rejection by the ‘highbrow’ fine art mainstream, ‘lowbrow’ also reflects the movement’s heavy referencing of ‘low’ consumer culture. The cultural forces that shaped it are varied and disparate, with references and influences including the likes of underground comix and cartoon art, punk, pop art, psychedelia, erotica, surfing and skateboarding, soft porn, B-movies,

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Above: Kathie Olivas: The Narcissist, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

Above: Lisa Petrucci: Lil’ Ladies of Pink Flamingos, 2011, liquid acrylic and envirotex on wood, 10 x 15 inches.

horror films, manga, carnival and fairground signage, kitsch, tattoos, tiki, retro advertising graphics, pulp fiction, and importantly the hot rod and Kustom Kulture discussed in chapter one. With such a wide set of influences it’s unsurprising that the art and artists which are considered to be lowbrow are very disparate. So, on the one hand we have artists such as Vince Ray, Mitch O’Connell, Coop and The Pizz creating work which is very traditionally lowbrow, with tattoo-type imagery, devil girls, fast cars, women with exaggerated, cartoon figures and so on. Then Shag and Derek Yaniger do things slightly differently, with much of their work being more influenced by advertising imagery and lounge culture. Ron English is one of the longest serving lowbrow artists, and his work deals largely with the subverting of advertising, while Greg Guillemin’s work blends cartoon imagery with pop art techniques. The work is almost always both figurative and narrative. While there is some sculpture and printing involved, the main emphasis is on painting, and this is increasingly the case with pop surrealism – discussed shortly – which set it in direct opposition to the fine art world of the 1980s and 1990s, which concentrated primarily on conceptual art. Lowbrow

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Above: Lisa Petrucci: Coney Island Cutie, 2005, liquid acrylic and envirotex on wood, 8.5 x 10 inches.

art hasn’t stood still over the years; as one of the earlier (and ongoing) practitioners The Pizz pointed out, ‘Lowbrow started out being much ruder. Now it’s gentrifying and chasing out the guys who made it viable. What’s nice is that it’s gotten more complicated. In the 80s it was endless regurgitations of devil girls and hot rods. Now there’s a lot more going on’ (Dukes Jordan, 2005). Lowbrow artists have always demonstrated considerable technical skill. Many lowbrow artists have either been through the art school system or worked as commercial illustrators in some capacity. Whereas punk imparted the message that you could captivate the world with no practice required (although one must hasten to add that most of the punk artists whose work has entered into the pantheons of punk lore and is still respected today were in fact highly technically gifted and skilled) and some felt that classical training was elitist and bourgeois, when it comes to lowbrow art, technical ability is a prerequisite.

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Above: Mitch O’Connell: Lucky Harm, matted print on velvet fine art paper.

Above: Mitch O’Connell: Peace, Love and Harmony, matted print on velvet fine art paper.

Above: Shag: Among the Gods, 2004, acrylic and vinyl paint on panel.

Lowbrow art is accessible to all, and this is one of the reasons that so much snobbery, as well as so little critical writing, exists around this popular subcultural movement. As ever, both Robert Williams and Kenny Scharf were way ahead of their time, with Williams from the 1970s and Scharf since the 1980s creating work which could later be considered as direct ascendants of lowbrow. In a video which was made for the Whitney Museum of American Art to accompany his painting When the Worlds Collide, Scharf explains his early rationale: One of the themes in art that still runs true for me today is an art that’s let’s say an anti-elitist art. Art that can not only relate to an art educated person, but someone on the street. . . . I always felt very strongly about having fun in creating art. And including the viewer in on it. I was told by various teachers and some students that art is not supposed to be fun. And I tried to explain to them that I’m very serious about fun, and one thing that I always felt strongly against is what I would call a kind of pretentiousness in art, and I don’t want to take myself too seriously. Even though I am dead serious about art in general and about making art I want to keep that sense of fun and joy that I believe applies not only to the art making but to life itself.3

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Above: Shag: The Cat Carrier, 2012, acrylic paint on panel.

This attitude of anti-elitism, enjoyment and rebellion sums up much of the rationale behind lowbrow art (although Scharf himself is not on record as regarding himself as a lowbrow artist). The firm distinction between fine and low art is very much a Western preoccupation, although there have also always been lowbrow artists who have been very happy to be accepted by the fine art establishment, increasingly more so since the advent of pop surrealism, and vice versa. In Japan the rules are considerably less rigid. Fine artists routinely work in both commercial fields and with artist multiples, and this has led to a situation where the work of artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, which deals often in cartoon-like imagery and is sometimes influenced by ‘low’ forms of culture such as popular music, has been accepted by the fine art world not only in Japan but globally. It is important to Takashi Murakami that people don’t have to set foot in a gallery to encounter his work. He states that: One thing I notice about the western art world is although the discourse and history of western art is highly evolved, it remains extremely exclusive and revolved around those who are privileged with money and education. In Japan there is more artistic enterprise

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Above: Tara McPherson: The Dull Sound, silk screen.

Above: Tara McPherson: The Forget-me-not Trance, oil on linen.

on a commonly accessible level. I have been inspired by this and hope to make my work accessible on this same level. (Phoenix, 2006) However, back in the West, a line has always been drawn between high and low art, and this can be difficult to cross. This distinction is not a new phenomenon: consider the pop artists of the 1960s, or the Dadaists, way back in 1916 (up to about 1923), in which artists such as Marcel Duchamp questioned the rigid distinctions between high or fine art and low or folk art. In some senses lowbrow art is concerned with exploring those distinctions, albeit in a different vein to Dadaism, which also led to the creation of conceptual art or the belief that great art is more about the idea and that a paint brush and the skills to use it aren’t needed to create great art, which many lowbrow artists are dead against. However, for the most part, the lowbrow art movement is more concerned with creating its own visual universe, and certainly the early lowbrow art movement largely ignored the fine art establishment every bit as much as the establishment turned its back on lowbrow art. Having said that, there are, and have been since the start, mainstream contemporary artists who use artistic strategies similar to those employed by lowbrow artists; Jeff Koons’ work is heavily preoccupied with low culture, and Edward Hopper’s paintings of ‘low class’ hangouts such as diners and gas stations have similar preoccupations with grit and reality, but neither artist could truly be classed as lowbrow. Also, in the 1980s a strand of extreme social realism was instituted by the photographer Nan Goldin, with real-life situations being documented and presented with no smoke and mirrors – just harshly lit, often technically imperfect photographs which frequently made for uncomfortably intimate viewing. One of the major differences between these earlier works and those of the lowbrow art movement which came to fruition in the 1990s is the influence of comic art on the latter artists’ output. Comic art can make everything larger than life, brighter, more colourful and less ‘real’ than actual reality, and this practice has been adopted by lowbrow artists from the outset. In fact, Robert Williams created some of the earliest lowbrow paintings, in the sense that we understand lowbrow today, with devilishly politically incorrect harsh imagery and heavily contrasting colours painted within an enhanced reality. In a 2006 interview Williams stated his work in the 1970s: Opposite: Alex Gross: Obedience, 2010, oil on canvas.

had so much energy, it was just devil-may-care vulgarity, it was wonderful and I just don’t see that anymore. . . . I look back at my early work I did and say ‘God how did I ever have the guts to

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Above: Femke Hiemstra: Der Huter, 2009, 10 x 14 inches.

do something like that?’ Jesus, what kind of environment could I have functioned in to make such bitchin artwork? Tits and ass and open wounds and hot rods and pirates and flying saucers and people tearing other people’s heads off and spitting down their tracheas and just great stuff y’know?4 While most later lowbrow art isn’t as directly confrontational as Williams’s earlier works, it generally shares the cartoon-like attitude of both heightened reality and unreality. The established art world in general has largely ignored lowbrow art; by ignoring its existence, the message has been firmly imparted that this work is not worthy of the attention of the intelligentsia. The lowbrow scene has flourished quite happily within its own cocoon of galleries, publications Below: Femke Hiemstra: The Serious Gardener, 2009, 7.1 inches.

and collectors. Many art critics believe that lowbrow is not a legitimate movement – the absence of scholarly writing about the movement has not assisted lowbrow’s position with regard to it being taken seriously.

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Above: Bob Dob: The Last Ride.

Also the fact that lowbrow artists are influenced by factors which have no place in the fine art world has traditionally placed lowbrow artists firmly apart from their high-art cousins. This gap has now been bridged, at least to some extent, by a more recent addition to the lowbrow stable. The term ‘lowbrow’ is still widely used to define this movement which initially sprung up in the 1990s, and much of the art which falls under this term is as disparate as ever. However, one identifiable change is that the artists who are dealing in traditional hot rod and Kustom Kulture imagery are still going strong; they are very much in the ‘old school’ of the new lowbrow. Since then there has been a notable shift in the movement towards what, for the purposes of simplicity (although once again things are not in fact that simple), we’ll call pop surrealism. ‘Pop surrealism’ was a term initially used by the artist Kenny Scharf in relation to his own work. The term was also used by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for the title of an exhibition in 1998. This featured work by over seventy artists; many of whom would not fit comfortably into the now established pop surrealist stable, such as Cindy Sherman, Mariko Mori and Art Spiegelman. The New York Times said of the exhibition: At first, Surrealism and popular culture would seem to be oil and water. Surrealism mines dreams and the unconscious, while popular culture is concerned with surface and commonplaces. But in recent years they have been brought together in exhibitions concerned with proving that High and Low are related. (Zimmer, 1998) The following year, the owner of the Roq la Rue Gallery (one of the increasing network of galleries to specialise in lowbrow art), Kirsten Anderson, decide to write a book on the lowbrow art movement. She explained: when I decided to do the book Pop Surrealism – I was going to originally call it Lowbrow, but several key artists in the book didn’t want to be in a book called that. So I had to come up with a name and that was the one. It was a term that had been loosely floating around and everyone could get behind it.5 And so, pop surrealism was born.

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Above: Eric White: Encuentro, 2007 oil on panel.

Below: Eric White, Portal, 2010, oil on canvas.

Above: Laurie Lipton: ON.

Above: Laurie Lipton: Offspring, 2010, pencil, 51 x 62 cm.

Above: Camille Rose Garcia: O.N.S. Escape Vehicle.

Mark Ryden is the catalyst whose work sparked pop surrealism off as a defined part of the movement. In the 1990s Ryden began to create beautiful, skilful paintings which had similar countercultural influences to older lowbrow works, but which also tipped a hat to ancient painting traditions and fine art. This combination of techniques of high art with lowbrow sensibilities and low subject matter such as kitsch and childhood toys led to him being widely regarded as the creator of the pop surrealism genre as it exists today. He has remained the best known pop surrealist artist throughout, and the reception of his work has combined commercial success with both fine art world acclaim and the admiration of lowbrow

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Above: Camille Rose Garcia: Distraction Disorder.

stalwarts. It’s important to note that he considers himself to be part of the lowbrow movement, as well as that of pop surrealism: Artists and the public are sick and tired of the elitist art world dominated by art inspired by ‘goals’. For a long time I have questioned just what my art has in common with hot-rod, tattoo artists. I believe that we lowbrow artists are artists who make art inspired from the soul rather than intellect. This is very general, but it is what we share, and it is what unites us as artists belonging to an art movement. (Dukes Jordan, 2005)

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Ryden’s way of doing things was swiftly adopted by a new wave of artists, and what has been described as ‘the pretty side of lowbrow’6 has been growing and thriving ever since: there are now literally hundreds, if not thousands of pop surrealist artists working today. The work is still accessible to anyone who is untrained in fine art, but it’s polished, technically incredibly proficient and generally attractive to the eye. Kirsten Anderson explained the move towards pop surrealism thus: Lowbrow is work inspired by people like Williams, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Coop, and Von Dutch, and is grittier, more dangerous, more offensive and provocative, and less understandable to art academia. Pop Surrealism is what this movement has now become as more artists, many former professional illustrators and animators, have expanded the visual vocabulary. Pop Surrealism is mainly technical craftsmanship combined with an imaginative pop sensibility and usually a dose of wry humor.7 Many of the lowbrow pointers remain, particularly many of the reference points, but this new strand is often more Gothic, or certainly a little darker in nature, although as with lowbrow there is generally little challenging or directly menacing content and little overt political statement. The landscape is certainly surreal, yet at the same time it retains lowbrow’s immediacy and cartoon aspects. All of the artists featured in this chapter are now achieving real longevity and respect. Because pop surrealism is more accessible to the fine art world, a number of artists who started out by showing their work in dedicated lowbrow galleries have now gone on to achieve mainstream acclaim and opportunities to work in larger, fine art galleries. So what of lowbrow art and pop surrealism today? Although many pop surrealist artists assert that their work has little or nothing to do with the ‘original’ lowbrow movement, others feel that pop surrealism is a direct descendant of lowbrow. It is an undeniable fact that these two strands of art have often been championed by the same galleries and publications (nowadays often jostling for space with street artists). The movement is continuing to grow and evolve, although as lowbrow stalwart Anthony Ausgang pointed out: Low Brow was kicked to the gutter rather rudely by ‘Street Art’ I’m still impressed by the number of people that hold the lowbrow ethic dear. Years ago I thought that lowbrow would lead to Graffiti, which Left: Camille Rose Garcia: Disguises of Empire.

it did, but the orphan grew into a monster. Over here Low Brow exists alongside Street Art. . . . It’s like Psychedelic Rock and Punk, uneasy cousins.8

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Left: Catharyne Ward: Transcension to Liberty Realm.

Above: Jeff Soto: Softskull, 2009, acrylic on wood, 12 x 12 inches.

Below: Jeff Soto: False Revolutionary, 2006, acrylic on wood, 21.5 x 20 inches.

Above: Eric White: 1961 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner (Pierrot le Fou), 2010, oil on canvas.

Below: Mitch O’Connell: 9 Lives, giclee print.

There is no question that in recent years more gallery space and column inches have been given over to the behemoth that is street art than there has to lowbrow art or pop surrealism; it’s difficult to imagine an artist from this movement becoming quite as widely known as Banksy. However, lowbrow and pop surrealism are still a force to be reckoned with. The galleries throughout the world which promote lowbrow and pop surrealist art are still going strong, as are a least some of the original publications such as Juxtapoz and Hi Fructose. Artists are continuing to go from strength to strength, with many producing work which merits considerably more examination than it receives now. Larry Reid’s prediction back in 2004 that ‘the established order is in imminent danger of becoming irrelevant as this new art style experiences exponential growth and unprecedented popularity’ (Anderson, 2005), while an understandable assertion at the time, has proved to be wide of the mark. The truth is that for now the fine art scene and the lowbrow art/pop surrealist scene exist quite comfortably alongside each other, and there are no signs that anything’s about to change any time soon.

1. Essay entitled ‘Lowbrow Art’ by Robert Williams on www.beinart.org (accessed 1 September 2012). 2. Ibid. 3. Film for the Whitney Museum (www.whitney.org) to accompany Scharf’s painting When the Worlds Collide which is housed there. 4. Robert Williams film 1989, available at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYR-gR2Vn-o#t=20 (accessed 17 February 2014). 5. Interview by James Callan (2 November 2005), available at http://seattlest.com/2005/11/02/ seattlest_interview_kirsten_anderson_founder_ and_owner_of_roq_la_rue_gallery.php (accessed 17 February 2014). 6. Essay ‘About Pop Surrealism’ on www.spacejunk.tv. 7. Interview by James Callan. 8. In an email to Suzy Prince.

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SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

designer toys and indie crafting

5

Designer toys are a relatively recent phenomenon which have been enthusiastically adopted as a medium for artistic expression by artists and illustrators all over the world, particularly street artists as well as many of the lowbrow artists discussed in chapter four. As with lowbrow art, this movement has never had one official name, with titles such as 'urban vinyl' and 'artist toys' being used; but for the purposes of simplicity we’ll stick with calling it the designer toy movement. As British pioneer James Jarvis explained, ‘It seems like an honest name because like a designer label it’s a product with a name attached to it, which is what helps it sell and gives it its value’ (Nude, 2006). ‘Designer toys’ is a term used to describe toys (although they are generally intended to be treated more as a sculpture or ornament rather than to be played with) and other collectibles that are created by artists and designers and manufactured in limited multiples. While some designer toys exist because artists are commissioned to produce a toy for advertising purposes, many are produced purely as artist multiples, and they are sold and marketed as such. As Kidrobot – now one of the world’s largest producers and retailers of these toys – founder Paul Budnitz explains, ‘The walls between product and art crumbled when Andy Warhol began selling

Right: Pete Fowler, Monsterism toys.

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his own wallpaper. . . . Designer toys are serious works of art; they are also plastic mass-produced products that sit on store shelves. Adults put them behind glass while kids play with them’ (Budnitz, 2010, p. 7).

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Above: Bounty Hunter: Kid Hunter, based on a design by Skatething.

Designer toys are created in a variety of materials, with ABS plastic and vinyl being the most common, although other materials such as wood, metal or resin are also occasionally used. The term also encompasses certain plush and cloth dolls. Plastic and vinyl toys have been around for a long time, with Japan having been a keen producer and exporter of toys from the outset, particularly since the 1960s. That decade saw large economic growth in toys based on Japanese comics, films and television shows – such as Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu), launched in 1963, and Godzilla – as well as consumer product-related merchandise, both from Japan and the US (think of the Pillsbury Doughboy: an advertising icon who became a symbol of American life). Many of these toys were manufactured in Japan, often by toy company Kaiyodo, which was formed in 1964.

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Above: Margaret Kilgallen: doll produced by Tokion magazine for their Neo Graffiti project.

In one sense, back in 1974 the Hello Kitty character, created by the company Sanrio, is a front-runner of the designer toy movement, as she was created as a character in her own right and not as a promotion for an already-existing film, comic, TV show or product. In that respect she has become a model for the thousands of artist characters which exist purely through the vision of the artist themselves. The difference is that Hello Kitty was created entirely for the purpose of merchandising thousands of different consumer products, from hairclips to clothing to bicycles, which she continues to do very successfully to this day. Significantly, Frank Kozik, one of the longest-standing practitioners working in the designer toy movement, describes what he and other artists are doing as ‘Hello KittyAmerican Style’ (Budnitz, 2010).

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Above: James Jarvis and Russell Waterman: Vortigern’s Machine, book cover (image: James Jarvis).

The primary factor which defines designer toys is that they are initiated by the artists themselves purely from their own imaginations, either to create a sculpture of existing artwork or as entirely new entities. They are often, although by no means always, 3D versions of the artists’ existing work, while sometimes they are an entirely new creation. This current incarnation of artist toys is both fascinating and countercultural on several levels. With its roots in Japanese street fashion and many of the artists involved with designer toys coming from the worlds of graffiti, lowbrow art, commercial illustration as well as fine art, the designer toy movement draws from all of these to create a sensibility and consumer who stands apart from the mainstream. As pioneer toymaker Jeremyville explains, ‘the designer toy collector, I think, is a whole other breed of customer: more pop, more ironic, more into sneakers and graf culture, more Dan Clowes than Tolkien’ (Nude, 2004b).1 Few would dispute this: with designers such as Eric So’s toys, for example, displaying an appearance and attitude that represents a realistic urban and gritty lifestyle; although the creations of artists such as Camille Rose Garcia or Lisa Petrucci are entirely fantastical, they all share an ‘alternative’ sensibility.

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Above: James Jarvis: Rusty and Dworkin Dog.

When delving into the world of the designer toy, it’s important to understand the distinction between these and other toys which are produced in a similar way – often in literally the same factories. If we consider character toys such as Star Wars or Disney figures, then these are forms of merchandise which are linked to, and must be made closely in the image of, the existing product. There is little space for artistic interpretation and the toys are created to be mass-produced and marketed as widely as possible. Designer toys can be developed without many of the commercial constraints placed upon other toy-related merchandise: artists use existing technology and factories which were set up by large corporations to produce cheap toys in their millions. Designer toys are relatively cheap to produce in small quantities, with the relatively low cost of rotocast PVC production,

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where figures are hollow rather than solid providing an inexpensive method. Designing a toy which is only ever going to be sold in an edition of maybe five hundred means little financial risk for the artist. In turn, because the toys are usually produced in small quantities and limited editions, they command a higher price and are regarded by the purchaser as a more prized and valuable item. The result is that they are produced with less pressure than more costly ventures, leading to experimentation and freedom, which is rarely encountered to the same level in any other area of commercial Below: Michael Leavitt: Jeff Koons doll.

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product design and retail. The results are unpredictable, intriguing and constantly evolving, with the unusually high levels of connection between Eastern and Western artists adding to the appeal.

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Above: Michael Leavitt: Takashi Murakami doll.

As well as the artists themselves, one of the key factors which connects the designer toy movement with the worlds of graffiti, fashion, illustration and lowbrow art is where the toys are sold. In the 1980s, as hip hop and also skate culture made its way around the world, in many major cities globally a network of independent shops began to emerge, all of which specialised in various elements of urban art and design such as clothes, music, T-shirts, magazines and design. The fact that these outlets already existed meant that when designer toys hit the scene there was an existing network for selling them, as well as a readymade audience who were already frequenting those shops. The toys slotted in perfectly and the rest is history.

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Above: Ron English: Fat Tony toy.

Above: Kaws: Sepia toy.

With that in mind, it is little surprise that the designer toy movement actually originated in one of these very boutiques. Unlike so many of the countercultural movements discussed in this book, which so often began in North America, this one started out in Japan and Hong Kong. In 1995 cult emporium Bounty Hunter was opened in Tokyo by Hikaru Iwanaga and his business partner Taka Suzuki, with further branches opening in Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. Specialising in urban iconography, the owners increasingly encouraged colleagues and artists to contribute their own designs for T-shirts to sell in the shops. One of these was the Japanese designer Skate Thing, best known at that time

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Above: Nathan Jurevicius: Bunniguru produced by Flying Cat.

for his work with Bathing Ape, who created a character for a T-shirt which led to Iwanaga producing the first designer toy in 1997: a cheeky young boy in a sailor’s hat and striped T-shirt called Kid Hunter. He describes his motivation thus: Nobody else was making the toys that I wanted to see, so I decided to make them myself. . . . I wanted to make something original that nobody had seen before. I wanted to have the cereal box style. I wasn’t thinking of the customers at all. I just wanted it for myself. (Phoenix, 2006)

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Viewing Kid Hunter in the context of some of the increasingly bizarre toys which have been created since by various artists, he is a fairly conventional character, clearly influenced by cartoon characters and cereal toys. But he was a strong starting point. A second figure was swiftly released: Skull Lun, this time designed by Iwanaga. But just as importantly, three essential collaborations followed which broadened out the movement and took it around the world: with Brit James Jarvis, along with KAWS and Frank Kozik, who was at that time based in both Japan and the US. Their work with Bounty Hunter introduced them to the possibilities of designing and manufacturing their own toys. Almost simultaneously with the first designer toys being produced by Bounty Hunter, over in Hong Kong in 1998 at the Hong Kong Toycon (Toy convention), artists Michael Lau and Eric So customised standard GI Joe action figures, with Lau creating a cartoonish hip hop-inspired group and So turning his into Bruce Lee figures. Both were an immediate smash hit and are also largely credited as one of the major initial inspirations behind the designer toy movement. Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara were among the first fine artists to produce art toys to be sold in limited editions which were based on their original paintings and sculptures. One of the most overt examples of Murakami’s desire to mix high and low art came in 2003 when he collaborated with the toy manufacturers Kaiyodo and Takara and figure sculptor Bome to create the Takashi Murakami Superflat Museum: a range of plastic figures made to emulate the free gifts that were given away with chewing gum. He maintains: While it is not meant as a blow at the art world per se, it is a political statement. Art does not have to be in a gallery. It does not have to cost thousands of dollars. It does not have to be elitist. It can be entertaining and available. (Phoenix, 2006) To this end he created the Kaikai Kiki studio, which not only produces his individual artworks but also items such as posters, T-shirts and designer toys. To date it continues to give other artists the opportunity to do the same. Yoshitomo Nara has embraced the designer toy movement somewhat less enthusiastically, having previously admitted that if he had not been approached and asked to make toys, then he probably wouldn’t have gone down that road. It was never his intention to be closely

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Above: Pete Fowler: 'Welcome to Monsterism Island' poster.

associated with a mass-produced commercial object. He believes that ‘There can only be one original work of art. When you make multiples it’s a bit like doing woodblock printing. You’re just rolling them out one after the other. It’s repetitive’ (Phoenix, 2006). Unlike Murakami, Nara draws a line between his gallery art and his toys, regarding toys such as the Little Wanderer and the PupCup, and items such as snow globes and T-shirts, as souvenirs of his work rather than actual representations of his art. This distinction doesn’t appear to have deterred his army of fans, with Nara’s mass-produced multiples and designer toys remaining in high demand. The vinyl toy as a work of art was taken up with enthusiasm by many of the West Coast artists. This is partly for geographical reasons: California is of course geographically close to Japan (this is arguably also one of the reasons that with the early exceptions of James Jarvis and then Pete Fowler, the UK has been relatively slow to catch on; it is a long way from Britain to the Far East), and also California has a large East Asian population. This connection has been most obviously reported in the Asian-American urban arts magazines Giant Robot and Tokion. Both of these magazines were massively influential in promoting designer toys to an American and worldwide audience. Indeed, in 1999 Tokion actually

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Above: Pete Fowler: Monsterism, Vol 2 toys. Opposite: Pete Fowler, Van Orlax.

released a series of five vinyl figures by five street artists, including Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen and Shepard Fairey, which was comparatively early in the designer toy movement. Giant Robot went on to open a series of boutiques selling designer toys, prints and other artists’ ephemera. Japan’s Medicom – the world’s largest producer of designer toys – created Be@rbrick characters, closely followed by Kubricks; both are ‘platform’ toys, which shared their fundamental physical design but which were sold ready-customised by different artists. One popular marketing strategy was to sell the toys in ‘blind’ boxes which could not be opened until after they were purchased, meaning that the buyer didn’t know which artist’s work they were investing in until after parting with their cash. Meanwhile, over in New York an initially small company known as Kidrobot, founded by Paul Budnitz, was emerging. With shops in New York and San Francisco, it was perfectly placed to ride the crest of the vinyl wave as it hit American shores. In 2004 Kidrobot collaborated with Tristan Eaton to design the Dunny. This toy was effectively a blank canvas: a blank designer toy in the style of a rabbit which could be customised in many different ways by different artist or individuals, each of whom had entirely distinct styles. This was followed in 2005 by the Munny, which resembles a kind of bald, floppy eared bear. The Qee is the Eastern equivalent of this, created by Hong Kong toy company Toy2r, which was founded by Raymond Choy in 1995. The original Qees share a body, but there are different blank heads available. All of these toys started out with designer toy sensibilities, targeted to those ‘in the know’; although since then they have become too widely distributed to remain genuinely subcultural. As the possibility of manufacturing self-designed toys in small quantities became more widely known about, artists and illustrators

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Above: James Marshall (Dalek): Space Monkey, action figure, produced by CerealArt Multiples.

such as Dalek, TADO, Tokidoki, Jon Burgerman and Jeremyville began

Opposite: Jon Burgerman: Pizzarati.

alternatively sometimes working with the larger established companies.

to produce their own designs. The movement has exploded in recent years, with practitioners either going down the road of designing, arranging production, distribution and sales entirely by themselves, or Whilst the designer toy movement has spread around the world, it has waned slightly in the Far East and in particular Hong Kong, probably due to a combination of economic downturn and ‘copycat’ bootlegging. Despite this slight shift, activity is still buoyant in Japan, with much of the production still taking place in China. However, it’s fair to say that much of the focus has now shifted to America, with artists too numerous to mention creating their own designer toys, with Kozik still going strong alongside the likes of Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman and Camille Rose Garcia – although she is believed to have stopped designing these toys because of environmental concerns (most of these toys aren’t biodegradable). There are also increasingly practitioners spread all over the world, such as Australia’s Nathan Jurevicius and Jeremyville, Rolito in France, Britain’s TADO and mr clement (who was raised in Hong Kong, but is now London-based). The latter regards his graphic novels, animation and toys as ‘friendly artwork’, which is created to ‘soften traditionally highbrow fine art by mixing it with popular subculture’.2 Then there is Pete Fowler

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Above: Lisa Petrucci: Lil’ Leona Leopard, 2007, produced by Dark Horse Deluxe, Dark Horse comics.

who has delighted in creating a parallel universe for his characters, who according to Fowler, inhabit ‘Monsterism Island’, which he describes as ‘A psychedelic parallel universe which is on planet earth but undiscovered because of a complex weather system’.3 Not only has he created a series of comics about Monsterism Island and its inhabitants, which featured in the hipster magazine Vice, but he also created a soundtrack, with two ‘Monsterism’ CDs, featuring a mix of psychedelic music from the 1960s and contemporary electronic psychedelia.

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Above: Jon Burgerman: Apparitions.

Meanwhile, as somebody who attained swift commercial success with his figures (his Juvenile Delinquents series, produced for Sony’s Time Capsule Toys project, sold upwards of 70,000 characters), British artist James Jarvis regards himself as distinct to designer toy makers who are operating on a smaller scale. He stated in 2006: To me going through all that industrial process just to make a few hundred of something seems a waste. . . I know that for Pete Fowler, Nathan Jurevicius and myself, we have all come from drawing cartoons and that’s the bedrock of what we do. The toys are just one facet of that, whereas with other people the toys aren’t a facet of that vision: they are the vision and in itself that’s not necessarily a terribly interesting thing. (Nude, 2006) He also believes that: When the craze element to it drops off I think that 70% of the people making toys at the moment won’t be doing it any more, because they’re making toys solely for this slightly obsessive toy collector market and if that market goes they’ll go too. (Nude, 2006) The bubble doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to bursting yet, but that will inevitably be the case at some point, as there comes a tipping

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Above: mr clement.

Opposite top: Lisa Petrucci: Custom Honey B vinyl figures, 2006, produced by Metago Toys, Hong Kong.

Above: Jon Burgerman: 3 Bears Dunny, produced by Kidrobot.

point where designer toys become too mainstream and are therefore not considered countercultural anymore by their potential audience. Bounty Hunter’s Iwanaga thinks the scene ‘has to be kept small. When it gets too big it’s not pop culture anymore. It’s become too big now’ (Phoenix, 2006, p. 54). But for now designer toys are still generally regarded as something outside the mainstream, and rapid changes in technology are keeping interest afloat and producing possibilities for further experimentation. There is the recent innovation of 3D printing: a process in which a threedimensional solid object is produced from a digital model – literally a 3D physical object which is ‘printed’ out – opening up the possibility that designer toys can be printed in single quantities, thereby adding potential to make them even more limited and niche. The costs related to this process are coming down, but for now it remains relatively primitive and expensive. But early practitioners such as London’s MakieLab have taken Below: Nathan Jurevicius: Scary Girl, produced by Flying Cat.

up the challenge of turning this into a viable way of producing designer

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toys, so whether this strand of production catches on widely among artists remains to be seen.

Above: TADO: Piggle.

A subcategory within the designer toy world is plush toys: soft, stuffed dolls which are once again created in limited quantities by artists and designers in the same vein as vinyl designer toys. Some artists, such as Camille Rose Garcia, produce work in both mediums, usually in conjunction with their ongoing artwork. Others, such as Felt Mistress, who trained in fashion design and millinery, specialise entirely in plush designer toys. Even when manufactured in large quantities plush toys often – although by no means always – have a deliberate home-made, sometimes rough aesthetic, which emphasises both the handmade, post-punk DIY ethos and a lo-fi sensibility. And because they are usually individually sewn, it is

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also possible for people to create one-off, handcrafted products as well as multiples. Which brings us neatly on to the indie crafting movement, which plush toys are also a part of. Once derided by feminists as being little more than a set of skills born out of ‘second sex servitude’,4 crafting is currently enjoying a remarkable renaissance. For many post-punk individuals, crafting perfectly encapsulates the homespun DIY ethos of indie culture as well as representing the reclamation and positive reassessment of what have been termed ‘the domestic arts’. Crafting itself has never gone away, of course, with skills being handed down through generations and taught in schools and apprenticeships. But it’s safe to say that in recent years, the notion of ‘craft’ has been largely associated with either the hippy movement or with an older, and more stuffy, women’s institute and village hall crowd. The indie crafting movement, which grew throughout the first decade of the twentyfirst century and is thriving right now, is coming from a very different place. The focus is firmly on the do-it-yourself, punk ethos and indie culture. Today’s indie crafters, or makers (once again, there is much disagreement about what this scene should be called), have a modern, hip aesthetic and are more likely to be influenced by Patti Smith or Sonic Youth than Martha Stewart. This new craft generation eschews the cosy homespun qualities traditionally associated with crafting in favour of creating work with a distinctly contemporary urban edge. This can be seen, for example, in the work of Erin M. Riley, with her embroidered depictions of boozeaddled young adult life (see page 253 for a woman splayed out, drunk and unconscious in the back of a car, with the title Fun); Naomi Ryder, who has produced embroidered portraits of the indie musician Thurston Moore; or Jenny Hart, who has created depictions of Iggy Pop and Dolly Parton. The practitioners of the new craft movement use a vast array of traditional skills, including cross-stitching, knitting, embroidery, quilting, paper-cutting, rug-making, screen printing and weaving. Indie crafting is a vast and sometimes unpredictable visual culture, and the fact that it is so disparate can make it difficult to pin down; just as with lowbrow art, this is a catch-all term to describe many different visual styles. So Nikki McWilliams’ Tunnock’s Teacake cushions are somehow connected to Rob Ryan’s exquisite paper-cuttings, as are the increasing amount of Left: Felt Mistress: Tabitha.

‘yarnbombers’ who adorn the streets illicitly with knitted decorations. The main connecting factor is that the individuals (the vast majority of whom are women, although men aren’t consciously excluded from the scene) who

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Opposite: Felt Mistress: Amphibian. Above left: Felt Mistress: Elspeth. Above right: Jon Burgerman: Sprouthead.

sell their handcrafted wares at fairs, and increasingly on the Internet both through their own sites and targeted sites such as Etsy (more of that later), as well as the buyers or consumers of such, have a distinctly contemporary, urban edge. Although it’s not always immediately obvious, the work that they produce, as well as the wider scene that surrounds it, is steeped in the lessons handed down by punk, pop culture and the Riot Grrrl Movement of the early 1990s. So, how exactly has a knitted cactus, a crocheted hairband or a screen-printed tote bag become a countercultural object? Take an article from the feminist, alternative Mookychick website, which at first glance looks to be about old-fashioned flower arranging. It’s difficult to think of much that’s less obviously countercultural than flower arranging. However, Mookychick explains that in this case the subject of the article is ‘taking a DIY punk ethic to alternative flower arranging. Basic flower arranging that’s high on creativity and low on budget’.5 Suddenly an old-fashioned art has been brought bang up to date. Debbie Stoller, editor of feminist

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Above: James Ward, Jimbob Art: Coffee cups.

Above: Zara Wood: Forest Child brooch.

Below: Nikki McWilliams: Tunnocks Teacake Cushions – featuring registered trademark of Thomas Tunnock Ltd.

magazine Bust and the author of a series of knitting books called Stitch ’n Bitch, is quoted as saying that ‘Knitting is part of the same do-it-yourself ethos that spawned zines and mixtapes’ (Walker, 2007) and which also of course spawned punk bands, fashion designers, artists and a huge creative explosion which is still rippling underneath the world of corporate homogeneity today. Likewise, founder of the Get Crafty website Jean Railla has stated that ‘I really came to it from more of an indie-rock, do-it-yourself kind of political place. Sort of married with making peace with feminism’ (Walker, 2007). Get Crafty was arguably the website which started to pull indie crafting together as a movement: its forums provided one of the first structured ‘meeting points’ specifically dedicated to crafts where individuals could exchange ideas and contacts, show off their skills and encourage other wannabe crafters to join in. The site was shortly joined by others such as Craftster, and these websites, along with the growing number of physical fairs which were springing up, created a genuine global community. In addition to indie crafting’s punk sensibilities, what sets these makers apart from their more traditional cousins and ensures their status as one of the very few genuinely countercultural visual grassroots movements of recent years is the complex and interconnected reasons for indie crafting’s existence in its current form. It’s no accident that the indie crafting counterculture sprang up in the late 1990s and has been growing ever since. In this age of mass consumerism and the perceived homogeneity of the high street, as well as the elitism of the fine art world, creative alternatives to these will always be created and sought. This conscious move away from the mass-produced is echoed in the words of Giorgio Armani: ‘The defining change in luxury has been a move towards personalisation and customisation, and a growing desire for true exclusivity’ (Britten, 2007). And while much of the indie crafting movement cares little for the type of high-fashion, expensive luxury that Armani is known for, there’s certainly a shared desire for personalisation, customisation and exclusivity, with some designers such as Felt Mistress producing undoubtedly high-end, perfectly crafted dolls. And there can be little that’s more personal or exclusive than purchasing an item directly from the person who created it, either by hand or in single or tiny quantities, therefore creating a direct connection which is lost in so many Left: Camille Rose Garcia: Winchester Hoot.

impersonal retail transactions. People come to indie or new crafting for various reasons. Some want the main focus to be all about the skill involved and to use the movement

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Above: Erin M. Riley: Three Strikes.

to show off their crafting skills. For others it’s all about the ethos and political drive to create an atmosphere of ‘otherness’ and an alternative, more ethical form of consumerism which allows for individuals to run their own unique businesses. Makers are a diverse but connected crowd, often carrying out much of their work alone but being keen to share skills and exchange knowledge, with a similar camaraderie and companionship to the quilting circles of yore. The difference is of course that these days indie crafters are spread out all over the world, and the quilting circle has been largely replaced by online forums and e-commerce websites. Practitioners are generally disinterested in, or even dismissive of, the hierarchies and elitism of the art world and gallery scene. As such a disparate scene, it’s impossible to give a generic visual description of the work produced. The wider indie crafting aesthetic has never been clearly defined, but generally speaking the attitude is often more ‘thrift store’ or charity shop than designer. Indie crafters are often preoccupied with environmental and social issues, such as recycling

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Above: Erin M. Riley: Fun, 2012.

or ‘upcycling’ – reusing existing materials to create something new or improved. The values of crafting are also perfectly suited to a time in which greater ecological awareness has instilled in people the need to recycle, and the stark economic climate has brought about a return to a make-doand-mend mentality after many years of consumer excess. There’s also often a definite vintage feel to the work, albeit a form of ‘modern vintage’, as well as nostalgia for comforting, non-threatening pastimes such as British seaside holidays. Then there’s feminism. Most, if not all, makers would identify themselves as feminists. But earlier feminism rejected traditional crafts, along with housework, as a tedious practice which existed largely in a gender ghetto. The new craft movement acknowledges the debt owed to early feminists, but practitioners now feel that it’s time to move on and reclaim traditional skills. There’s a certain amount of humour and irony used – it wouldn’t be unusual to see a seller at an indie craft fair wearing a reworked 1950s housewives’ apron for example – but largely the new

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215

Left: Jenny Hart, Sublime Stitching: PJ Harvey. Below: Naomi Ryder: The Lovely Eggs, embroidered illustration band poster for Idle Fret Records.

movement is regarded as a feminist one, with people often using these skills to create their own businesses and an alternative method of buying and selling. The current crafting incarnation is a close relation of the early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts Movement, started up by principled men such as John Ruskin and William Morris, which responded to the Industrial Revolution and called for more skilled labour and the teaching of craft skills to counter the emergence of mass production. Then there was the hippy counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which embraced handmade goods as a response to the culture of mass production. Looking back at this period now, it appears that the quality of the goods produced by members of the hippy scene was often not considered a particularly important aspect of the movement. At that point for most people it was literally all about the ethos, politics and ‘message’ of the scene, rather than using finely honed crafting skills. Partly as a reaction to this, and partly because of the increasing consumerism and ‘have it all’ culture of the 1980s and 1990s, the craft world split up, with some practitioners heading back into the rural village halls and specialist shops, which have always been a mainstay of crafting, and others turning to galleries and museums and a general ‘higher end’ craft market. The effect of this was that many people were left feeling alienated by the state of craft. They enjoyed the process of creating items and using the skills that were still often handed down by older family or community members, but they didn’t fit in to either the village hall with its fairs stuffed with lavender-scented drawer fresheners or the more ‘fine art’ end of the scale. People were starting to get together in informal groups to swap skills, give and receive encouragement and generally start up a nurturing community. At first, the new indie crafting movement was still a fractured and disparate scene centred around various major US cities and then later crossing over to the UK and the rest of Europe. This was first brought to the attention of the wider public with the advent of ‘hipster’ knitting clubs – urban gatherings in which attendees sat around in a circle knitting and chatting in venues such as the bars in art-house cinemas or independent cafes. So, indie crafting was forming and taking shape by the millennium. But it took the creation of the first indie craft fairs to take it to the next level. In the 1990s, as people continued to search for viable purchasing alternatives to the high street, craft fairs steadily grew and expanded. But it Right: Jenny Hart, Sublime Stitching: Iggy Pop.

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wasn’t until early in the twenty-first century that the likes of the Renegade Craft Fair came along and blew a refreshing breeze through the stuffiness of more conventional craft fairs. The first Renegade Craft Fair was held

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Above: Jenny Hart, Sublime Stitching: Dolly Parton.

Above: Erin M. Riley: Thigh Highs.

in Chicago in 2003, and since then it has expanded to other cities and been joined by the likes of the Bust Craftacular fair (first held in New York in 2005) and dozens of others all over the world. Along with the fairs and websites, the countercultural craft movement has also been sustained and championed by publications such as Bust magazine and later Mollie Makes, which exist alongside literally hundreds of more traditional crafting magazines. While the craft fairs have proved invaluable as a place for makers to meet buyers and to show off their work, there was still a sense of frustration among some people who wanted to turn their crafting activities into a full-time business venture. Then along came Etsy, a commercial website which describes itself as ‘your place to buy and sell all things handmade’,6 and where each seller has their own Etsy ‘store’. While it’s also now open to vintage sellers the focus is still very much on the handmade. It’s open to anyone with no strict rules other than that items must be handmade or vintage, which has led to some complaints about quality control. But generally Etsy is undeniably regarded as the most important online marketplace for indie crafting, aside from makers’ own websites. The buyers of this work are the final, vital part of the jigsaw. The crafting scene is an attractive one for many people who want to find an alternative to both the high street and also to the fine art world. But the reality is that many people have neither the time, inclination or the skills to carry out crafting activities themselves. Purchasing an item of indie crafting work can make people feel as much a part of the scene as the person who produced it. Most people in this crafting scene work alone, and much of the appeal of the work to the consumer comes from the fact that goods have been hand-produced by the people who initially created them and whom the buyer can often meet at craft fairs or interact with directly on the Internet via email or forums. One of the biggest problems faced by crafters as their business grows is that of scale. A single person can only produce so much work before they need to take on additional help, and when they do that then their output becomes much less appealing to many of the scene’s consumers. For the most part, indie crafting is one of very few countercultural movements which has remained true to its ideals and is largely unaffected by happenings in the rest of the art world, or indeed the craft world. It’s also received relatively little media attention outside its own publications and spokespeople. Author and director of Handmade Nation (both a book and a film in 2008 and 2009, respectively, which examined the indie crafting movement), Faythe Levine stated that ‘Without really being conscious of it we were creating an independent economy free from corporate ties’ (Levine, 2008). It could be argued that alongside Opposite: Lauren O’Farrell, Whodunnknit: Plarchie the Squid residing on Darwin statue.

this economy, the new crafters have created an independent and new subcultural visual movement. And one of the stand out factors about indie crafting is that unlike other countercultural movements, because of its handcrafting, slow-moving nature, it is less appealing to corporate

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Above: Kate Jenkins, Cardigan: Woolboro, 2008. Opposite: Knit the City: Phonebox Cosy.

Left: Rob Ryan: Tree Heart paper-cutting, for the 'Museum of Us' exhibition at the Horse Hospital, 2004. Below: Naomi Ryder: Cat Guitar [Cat Power], embroidered illustration on yellow wool, for Foggy Notions magazine, Dublin.

Above: Naomi Ryder: Molly Bloom Soliloquy, embroidered illustration.

entities who may be looking to make a fast buck; so it is pretty much left alone to develop organically. Of course, like any other visual movement, both subcultural and mainstream, indie crafting may well either implode or dissipate at some point, but at the time of writing it is a strong and healthy movement, which is showing every sign of continuing in the same subcultural vein for some years to come.

1. Jeremyville was interviewed as part of a wider article on designer toy culture by Suzy Prince. Nude, issue 5, December 2004. 2. Artist statement on own website www.mrclement. com/about/artist-statement (accessed 1 September 2012). 3. Profile of Pete Fowler in Computer Arts magazine, 30 October 2007. 4. Paraphrase of a term first used by Simone de Beauvoir. 5. Article by Magda Knight from Mookychick.co.uk entitled ‘A floral revolution: Basic flower arranging tips for alternative tastes’. 6. www.etsy.com/uk slogan.

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267

INDEX

1961 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner, White, 218f 3 Bears Dunny, Burgerman, 241f 3D printing, 242 48 Thrills (fanzine), 122 9 Lives, O’Connell, 219f Academy of Fine Arts, 136 Actuel (Paris), 80 The Adverts, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, 109 Adventures of Fritz the Cat, Crumb, 84 aerospace industry, 15 Albers, Josef, 73 Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 205 Alexander, Peter, 12 Alternative Press Syndicate, 80 Alternative Tentacles, 136 Among the Gods, Shag, 196f Amphibian, Felt Mistress, 246f Anarchy (fanzine), 102 Anarchy Comics, 153 Anderson, Jim, 66 Anderson, Kirsten, 205, 213 Another Music in a Different Kitchen, Buzzcocks, 110, 119f Antonioni, Michelangelo, 63 Apparitions, Burgerman, 239f Armani, Giorgio, 251 Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Bubbles, 105f, 106 Arminski, Mark, 163f, 177 Art, fine vs. low, 197, 201 artistic freedom, comic artists, 90 art nouveau, 54, 68, 70 Arts and Crafts Movement, 256 Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, Hawkwind, 107f Astro Boy (film), 222 Ausgang, Anthony, 12, 166, 213 The Close Call, 30f Ninth Life, 30f automobiles, mass production, 18 Avalon Ballroom, 74, 79 Bachs, J. L., 42f, 43f Bagge, Peter, 158 Balloon Boy, Ryden, 190f Bam Balam (fanzine), 118 Banksy, 219 Barris, George, 18, 20, 21, 23, 28 Barry, Lynda, 158 Baseman, Gary, 237 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 166 Bathing Ape, 231 Batman (television), 18 Batmobile, Barris, 18 Bazooka Graphics, 106 Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, 53 Beardsley, Aubrey, 51, 52f, 53, 68 The Beatles, 34, 53, 63 Beatnik Bandit Car Craft (magazine), 24f Mattel, 34 Roth, 20f, 29, 37 Bell, Larry, 12 The Bends, Gross, 184f, 185f Berkeley Barb (magazine), 80 Berkeley Tribe (magazine), 80

268

Best Before: 1984 by Crass, Vaucher, 134f, 135f ‘Beyond the Counterculture’ lectures, 7 Biafra, Jello, 139 Big Ass Comics, Crumb, 90, 93 Big Brother and the Holding Company, 74, 88 Bijou Funnies (comics), 90, 153 The Birthday Party, Junkyard, 26f, 37 Biskup, Tim, 237 Black Beauty, Jeffries, 20 Black Flag, 143, 147, 148 Black Shadow, Ray, 45f Blake, Peter, 53, 54 Blake, William, 54, 148 Blaxploitation, 142 ‘Blowin’ in the Mind’ poster, Sharp, 50f, 66 Blues Traveler with God Street Wine poster, Arminski, 163f Bode, Vaughn, 90 Bome, 232 Boneshaker Baby, Ray, 46f Boon, Richard, 110, 124 Boshier, Derek, 109, 112f, 113f Bounty Hunter, 222f, 230, 232, 242 Boyd, Joe, 56, 63 Brinsley Schwarz (band), 106 British Electric Foundation (B.E.F) band, 114 Brody, Neville, 109–10 Brophy, Philip, 106 Brown, Ben, Mudhoney, Rocket from the Crypt, 14f Bubbles, Barney, 66, 104, 109 Armed Forces by Elvis Costello, 105f, 106 Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind, 107f Get Happy poster, 108f Ian Dury Songbook, 113f Music for Pleasure by The Damned, 104f, 106 Bucksbaum Award, 147, 159n.16 Budnitz, Paul, 220, 234 Buffalo Springfield poster, Conklin, 76f Bukowski, Charles, 84 Bunniguru, Jurevicius, 231f Burgerman, Jon, 237 3 Bears Dunny, 241f Apparitions, 239f Pizzarati, 236f Sprouthead, 247f Burns, Charles, 158 Burroughs, William S., 53 Bust (magazine), 251, 261 Bust Craftacular, 261 Buzzcocks, 110, 114, 127 ‘Love You More/Noise Annoys’, 116f, 117f ‘Orgasm Addict’ by Garrett, 118f poster by Garrett, 117f songbook by Garrett, 119f ‘Spiral Scratch’, 124 The Byrds poster, Wilson, 71f ‘California: A State of Excitement,’ Time magazine, 12 Callan, James, 219n.5

Caniff, Milton, 148 Canned Heat poster, Conklin, 77f Captain Soap, Guillemin, 174f Car Craft (magazine), 24f, 48 caricaturing, pinstriping, 43 cars, Detroit, 18 Cars, TV, Rockets, H-bomb - You Name It, Pettibon, 145f Carsella, Steve, 163f, 177 Cassel, Michael, 47 Castaway (Ginger), Samaras, 188f The Cat Carrier, Shag, 197f Cat Guitar, Ryder, 266f Cat Pacifier, Guillemin, 175f The Cat That Ate the World, Reid, 159f Cauty, James, Nude cover, 8f Cavalier (magazine), 84 Cecil Beaton Silver Jubilee, 103 Central Saint Martins, 98 cereal boxes, 168f Chainsaw, Billy, X-tasy?, 178f Chantry, Art Cramps poster, 33f ‘Kustom Kulture’ poster, 16f Charlatans, 74 Cheap Thrills, Joplin, 88, 90 Chicago, Judy, 166 The Chicago Seed (newspaper), 80 Choy, Raymond, 234 Christianity, 79 Christopherson, Peter ‘Sleazy’, 128 Clapton, Eric, 66 Clash Songbook Boshier, 112f, 113f Marchbank, 110f The Close Call, Ausgang, 30f Cloud Nine, Samaras, 179f Clowes, Dan, 158, 224 coffee cups, Jimbob Art, 248f Coil, ‘Wrong Eye’ record cover, Savage Pencil, 148f Coleman, Joe, Juxtapoz cover, 162f The Comet (magazine), 118, 159n.5 comic art, 201 comic industry, 90, 93 Comics Code Authority, 90 Comics Magazine Association of America, 90 Coney Island Cutie, Petrucci, 193f Conklin, Lee, 74, 79 Buffalo Springfield poster, 76f Canned Heat poster, 77f consumerism, 251 Coop, 10n.2, 11f, 166, 192, 213 Cornerhouse cinema and gallery, 7, 10 Corpsemeat (comic), 156 Cosma Ray, Starbird, 18 ‘Cosmic Art Nouveau’, Bubbles, 106 Cosmic Colours, 63 COUM Transmissions, 128, 129f, 142 crafting, 245. See also indie crafting Craftster website, 251 Cramps poster, Chantry, 33f Crass, 130, 136 Best Before: 1984 by Vaucher, 134f, 135f

Feeding of the 5000 cover, 132f logo by King, 130f Penis Envy by Vaucher, 133f Crawdaddy (fanzine), 118, 159n.6 Crazy Painters, 32 Cream, 55, 62f, 66 Crime Suspense Stories, EC Comics, 90 Crowley, Aleister, 53 Croydon Art School, 101 Crozier, Bud ‘The Baron’, 32 Crumb, Robert, 48, 84, 87, 88, 90, 153 Footsy, 96f San Francisco Comic Book, 95f Zap Comix, 91f Cushenberry, Bill, 18, 23 custom car, 166 culture, 12, 15, 28, 29 phenomenon, 15, 17 pinstriping, 40 Von Dutch, 43–44 Dadaism, 201 Dada movement, 119, 127 Dalek, 237 The Damned, 104f, 109 Daniels, Tom, 29 Dead Duck (comic), 156 Dead Kennedys, 136, 139, 140f, 143 Dean, James, 21 Dean, Roger, 159n.4 Deitch, Kim, 48, 90 The Del Emma’s poster, Brown, 14f Der Huter, Heimstra, 202f designer toys, 9, 220–42 Destroy All Monsters, 158 poster by Savage Pencil, 149f Detroit, cars, 18 Devil Babe’s Big Book of Fun!, Samaras, 32f de Ville, Nicholas, 109 Devoto, Howard, 124f, 127 Diamond in a Goats Ass, Williams, 182f Dickinson, Emily, 148 Didion, Joan, 21 Dindisc, 114. See also Factory Records Disguises of Empire, Garcia, 212f Disney figures, 225 Disraeli Gears by Cream, Sharp, 62f, 66 Distraction Disorder, Garcia, 211f Dob, Bob Hodad’s, 176f The Last Ride, 204f Doctors of Madness, 159n.1 Dolly Parton, Hart, 258f Donovan, 55 Dorey, Véronique, Nude cover, 9f Doucet, Julie, 158 drag racing, 15 Dragstrip Girl (film), 15 Dragstrip Riot (film), 15 Drayton, Tony, Ripped and Torn covers, 120f, 121f Duchamp, Marcel, 201 The Dull Sound, McPherson, 198f Dunny, 234 Duran Duran, 114 Dylan, Bob, 55, 66

THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

Earley, Lori, Hi Fructose cover, 164f East Village Other (magazine), 80, 84, 115 Eaton, Tristan, 234 Ed “Big Daddy” Roth: His Life, Times, Cars, and Art, Ganahl, 29 Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth Comics, 48 ‘Edwardian Ball’ poster, Mouse and Kelley, 75f Edwards, Dudley, ‘Jazz at the Roundhouse’, 57f El Diablo design, 41f El-Droubie, Yak, 40 Elektra, 60 Elspeth, Felt Mistress, 247f Elvis Costello, Get Happy poster, 108f Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Armed Forces, 105f, 106 Encuentro, White, 206f England’s Dreaming, Savage, 127 English, Michael, 54, 56, 60, 63, 97n.2 English, Ron, 192 cereal boxes on shelf, 168f Fat Tony toy, 228f, 229f Raising the Brow, 169f environmental issues, 252–53 Eric Burdon and The Animals poster, MacLean, 83f Escalante, Greg, 180 Esquire (magazine), 20 Etsy website, 261, 267n.6 EXIT, 136 The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (comic), Shelton, 187 The Face (magazine), 114 FAC factory poster, 115f Factory Records, 110, 114 Fairbairn, Nicholas, 128 Fairey, Shepard, 234 Faithful, Marianne, 63 The Fall, 156 False Revolutionary, Soto, 217f Family Dog Collective, 74, 79 Fashion Beast, Moore, 153 Fat Tony toy, English, 228f, 229f Feds ‘n’ Heads, Shelton, 90 Feeding of the 5000 by Crass, cover by Vaucher, 132f Felt Mistress, 243, 251 Amphibian, 246f Elspeth, 247f Tabitha, 244f ‘Feminine Is Beautiful,’ Manic Street Preachers, 127 feminism, 253, 256 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 51 fibreglass, 15 Fifth Estate (newspaper), 80 Fillmore Auditorium, 74 finish fetish, 12 First Amendment, 90 flake paint, 15 flaming, 29, 39f Flying Cat Bunniguru, 231f Scary Girl, 242f Footsy, Crumb, 96f Forbes, Alan, 166, 177 Force Fed War, Smith, 137f Ford, Henry T., 29 Ford Custom Car Caravan, 23 Forest Child brooch, Wood, 248f The Forget-me-not Trance, McPherson, 199f Fowler, Pete, 233, 237, 267n.3 Monsterism toys, 221f, 234f Van Orlax, 235f ‘Welcome to Monsterism Island’ poster, 233f Fox, Howard N., 15 Friends (magazine), 64f, 68 ‘Fuck Forever,’ Reid, 99f Fulcher, Colin. See Bubbles, Barney Fun, Riley, 253f

INDEX

Futuria Fantasia (magazine), 118, 159n.5

Heimstra, Femke, The Serious Gardener, 203f Hello Kitty, Sanrio, 223 Helms, Chet, 74 Hernandez, Gilbert, 158 Hernandez, Jaime, 158 Hewlett, Jamie, 158 Hiemstra, Femke, Der Huter, 202f Hi Fructose (magazine), 186, 219 cover by Earley, 164f cover by Mizuno, 167f High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster, Medeiros, 70 Hodad’s, Dob, 176f Holmstrom, John, 119, 153 Honey B vinyl figures, Petrucci, 240f Hong Kong Toycon (convention), 232 Hopkins, John ‘Hoppy’, 56 Hopper, Edward, 201 Horowitz, Michael, 51 Hot Rod (magazine), 23, 48 hot rod culture, 7, 34 Hot Rod Gang (film), 15 Hot Rod Rumble (film), 15 Howard, Kenneth ‘Von Dutch’, 28, 37, 40, 42, 43, 47. See also Von Dutch Howard Devoto in Lingerie Mask, Sterling, 124f Hrones, Tommy, 40 Hueso Family, Palacios, 189f ‘Human Be-In’, 79 Human League, 114 Hup (comic), 158 Hurford, John, 56, 68 Gandalf’s Garden, 56f ‘Show Your Head (Legalise Pot Rally)’ poster, 58f Hüsker Dü, 147 Huxley, Aldous, 53 Hydrogen Bomb and Biochemical Warfare Funnies (comics), 90

Ganahl, Pat, 29 Gandalf’s Garden (magazine), 56f, 68 Garcia, Camille Rose, 224, 237, 243 Disguises of Empire, 212f Distraction Disorder, 211f O.N.S. Escape Vehicle, 210f Winchester Hoot, 250f Garcia, Jerry, 88 Garrett, Malcolm, 109–10, 127 Buzzcocks poster, 117f Buzzcocks songbook, 119f ‘Love You More/Noise Annoys’ by Buzzcocks, 116f, 117f ‘Orgasm Addict’ by Buzzcocks, 118f ‘Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In’ poster, Mouse, 78f Generation X, 109 Genesis P-Orridge, 128 The Germs, 157 Germs flyer, Panter, 157f Get Crafty website, 251 Get Happy poster, Bubbles, 108f Giant Robot (magazine), 186, 233, 234 gig posters and flyers, 176–77, 180 Gilliam, Terry, 94 Ginn, Gregg, 147 Ginn, Raymond, 147. See also Pettibon, Raymond Ginsberg, Allen, 51, 84 Glaser, Milton, 80 Goatlord of the Flies, Savage Pencil, 146f God Save the Queen, Reid, 100f Godzilla (film), 222 Goldin, Nan, 201 Good-Bye Cruel World, Von Dutch, 42 Good ‘n’ Plenty, Coop, 11f Gothic, 213 Goya, 148 graffiti art, 163, 166 Graham, Bill, 74 Grateful Dead, 79, 88 poster by Tuten, 87f poster by Wilson, 69f Gray, Christopher, 101 Green Hornet (television), 20 Greer, Germaine, 84 Griffin, Rick, 63, 74, 79, 88, 157, 166 Iron Butterfly poster, 86f Jimi Hendrix Experience poster, 81f Griffith, Bill, 88, 90, 153 Grimshaw, Gary, 79–80 Groening, Matt, 158 Gross, Alex The Bends, 184f, 185f Obedience, 200f Original Sin, 177f Grundy, Bill, 128 The Guardian (newspaper), 94, 97n.6 Guillemin, Grégoire, 192 Captain Soap, 174f Cat Pacifier, 175f Guttersnipe (fanzine), 122

I Am Rabbit Too, Von Dutch, 36f I Am the Mallard King, Savage Pencil, 151f Ian Dury Songbook, Bubbles, 113f IDOL, Smith, 139 Iggy Pop, 245 Iggy Pop, Hart, 257f Ignorant, Steve, 130 indie crafting, 245, 247, 251–53, 256, 261, 267 Industrial Revolution, 256 In God We Trust, Dead Kennedys, 139, 140f Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 128 Interaction of Color, Albers, 73 International Anthem (newspaper), 131f, 136 International Poetry Incarnation, 51 International Times (magazine), 60, 60f, 61f, 68, 80, 121f In the Lake of Retinal Delights, Williams, 183f Iron Butterfly poster, Griffin and Moscoso, 86f Irwin, Robert, 12 IT (magazine), 115 Iwanaga, Hikaru, 230–32, 242

Handmade Nation, Levine, 267 Hannett, Martin, 114 Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, 54f, 55f, 56, 63 Haring, Keith, 166 Hart, Jenny, 245 Dolly Parton, 258f Iggy Pop, 257f PJ Harvey, 254f Hawkwind, Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, 106, 107f Haworth, Jann, 53 Hayes, Rory, 90

Jacob and the Coloured Coat, 63 James, Henry, 148 Jane’s Book of Fighting, Pettibon, 147 Jarvis, James, 232 Rusty and Dworkin Dog, 225f Vortigern’s Machine cover, 224f ‘Jazz at the Roundhouse,’ McInnerney and Edwards, 57f Jeff Koons doll, Leavitt, 226f Jeffries, Dean, 18, 20, 21, 28 Jenkins, Kate, Woolboro, 262f

Jeremyville, 237, 267n.1 Jimbo, Panter, 152f Jimbob Art, Ward, 248f Jimi Hendrix Experience poster, 81f Jimi Hendrix Explosion poster, 66 Jimmy C, pinstriping, 40 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware, 97 Jizz (comics), 93 ‘Job’ lithograph, Mucha, 70f Johnny Rotten, 97 Joplin, Janis, 74, 88 Jugendstil, 68 Jugendstil & Expressionism in German Posters, 68, 73 Junkyard, Roth, 26f, 37 Jurevicius, Nathan, 237 Bunniguru, 231f Scary Girl, 242f Just the Girls, Ryden, 186f Juxtapoz (magazine), 180, 181, 186, 219 cover by Coleman, 162f cover by Ryden, 166f cover by Scharf, 165f Kaikai Kiki studio, 232 Kaiyodo toy company, 222, 232 Kandinsky, Wassily, 106 ‘The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby,’ Wolfe, 20, 48 Kauffman, Craig, 12, 15 Kaws, 230f, 232 Kelley, Alton, 63, 74, 75f, 79, 88 Kelley, Mike, 158, 166 Kelly, Tom, 32 Kid Hunter, 222f, 231, 232 Kidrobot, 220, 234 Kilgallen, Margaret, 223f, 234 King, Dave, 130f, 136, 159n.12 Kinney, Jay, 153 Kirby, Jack, 148 Klee, Paul, 106 Klimt, Gustav, 68 Knave (magazine), 128 Knight, Magda, 267n.5 Knit the City, Phonebox Cosy, 263f Koons, Jeff, 201 Kozik, Frank, 10n.2, 177, 223, 232 Kubricks, 234 Kurtzman, Harvey, 153 Kustom Graphics, 37, 47 Kustom Kulture, 7, 8, 9, 161, 166, 170, 171, 192, 205 ‘Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and others’ exhibition, 12 Kustom Kulture Movement, 33, 37 ‘Kustom Kulture’ poster, Chantry, 16f Laguna Art Museum, 12, 48n.1, 166 ‘La Luz de Jesus’ Gallery, 166 Last Chance Saloon, 7, 10n.2, 11, 176 The Last Ride, Dob, 204f Lau, Michael, 232 Laughing on the Outside, Smith, 139f Leavitt, Michael Jeff Koons doll, 226f Takashi Murakami doll, 227f ‘Legalise Pot Rally’ poster, 59f, 68 Levine, Faythe, 267 Liberace, 20 Life (magazine), 88 Life in Hell (comic), 158 Li Li Riding through the Garden of Eden, Peck, 171f Lil’ Ladies of Pink Flamingos, Petrucci, 192f Lil’ Leona Leopard, Petrucci, 238f Lipton, Laurie Offspring, 209f ON, 208f

269

Los Angeles Free Press (magazine), 80 Love and Rockets (comic), 158 The Lovely Eggs, Ryder, 255f ‘Love’ poster, Max, 80 ‘Love You More/Noise Annoys,’ Buzzcocks, 116f, 117f lowbrow art, 161, 163, 166, 170, 176–77, 180, 187, 190, 193, 196–97, 201, 203, 205, 210–11, 213, 219 The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams, Williams, 187 LSD, 70, 73, 98 Lucky Harm, O’Connell, 194f Lydon, John, 114 McCartney, Linda, 66 McCartney, Paul, 63 McGee, Barry, 234 McInnerney, Michael, 68 ‘Jazz at the Roundhouse,’ 57f ‘Legalise Pot Rally’ poster, 59f Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 68 McLaren, Malcolm, 101, 153 MacLean, Bonnie, 74 Eric Burdon and The Animals poster, 83f Martha and the Vandellas poster, 82f Yardbirds/Doors poster, 85f McPherson, Tara The Dull Sound, 198f The Forget-me-not Trance, 199f Melvins, Unsane poster, 160f McSpade, Angelfood, 94 McWilliams, Nikki, Tunnock’s Teacake cushions, 245, 249f Mad (magazine), 142, 153, 156 Madonna, 114 Magazine, Devoto’s band, 127 Magnolia the Inimitable, Mount, 181f Mailer, Norman, 21 MakieLab, London, 242 Makoto, pinstriping, 40 Manic Street Preachers, 127 manifest destiny, doctrine of, 15 Mansfield, Jayne, 20 Manson, Charles, 147 manufacturing, cars, 18 Marchbank, Pearce, 56, 66, 68, 109 Clash Songbook, 110f Friends cover, 64f OZ cover, 65f OZ inside page, 67f Time Out cover, 65f Marsh, Ian Craig, 114 Marshall, James, Space Monkey action figure, 237f Martha and the Vandellas poster, MacLean, 82f Marx, Karl, 53 Mattel, Beatnik Bandit, 34 Maus, Spiegelman, 97 Mavrides, Paul, 90 Max, Peter, 80 The Meat Magi, Ryden, 187f Meat Puppets, 147 Medeiros, Walter, 70–71 Medicom, 234 Melly, George, 51, 53, 55, 97n.1 Melvins, Unsane poster, McPherson, 160f Menstrual Egg-Timer, Sterling, 114 Meyer, Russ, 171 Middle Earth, 106 Miles, Barry, 56 Miller, Stanley, 34, 72, 74. See also Mouse, Stanley Minutemen, 143, 147 Mizuno, Junko, Hi Fructose cover, 167f Moby Grape poster Tepper, 89f Wilson, 72f Molly Bloom Soliloquy, Ryder, 265f Molly Makes (magazine), 261 Mondrian, 106

270

Monkeemobile, Barris, 18 The Monkees (television), 18 ‘Monsterism Island,’ Fowler, 238 Monsterism toys, Fowler, 221f, 234f Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 94 Mookychick, 247, 267n.5 Moore, Alan, 153 Moore, Thurston, 245 Mori, Mariko, 205 Mormonism, Roth, 29, 37 Morris, William, 256 Morrissey, Stephen Patrick, 127 Moscoso, Victor, 48, 63, 73, 74, 79, 86f, 88, 157 Motor City Comics, Crumb, 90 motorcycles, pinstriping, 39, 43 Mount, Emma Magnolia the Inimitable, 181f Ruby the Jewel, 180f Mouse, Stanley, 34, 63, 72, 74, 79, 88 ‘Edwardian Ball’ poster, 75f ‘Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In’ poster, 78f Screamin’ 40, 28f Warthead, 27f Mouse Studios, 79 Movieworld: Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame Museum, 37 mr clement, 237, 240f Mucha, Alphonse, 68, 70f, 71 Mudhoney, Rocket from the Crypt, Brown, 14f Munny, 234 Munster Koach, Barris, 18 Murakami, Takashi, 197, 232 Music for Pleasure, LP cover by Bubbles, 104f, 106 Mysterion, Roth, 25f, 29 Name Your Poison, Yaniger, 173f Nara, Yoshitomo, 197, 232–33 The Narcissist, Olivas, 191f National Hot Rod Association, 23 Native American mysticism, 79 Nefarious, pinstriping, 40 Neo Graffiti project, doll by Kilgallen, 223f Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Reid, 104 Neville, Richard, 66 New Adventures of Jesus (comics), 90 New Order, Fact. 15, Movement, 116f Newton, Ed, 29 Niagara, Nude cover, 9f Ninth Life, Ausgang, 30f No Feelings, Reid, 111f Nowhere Buses, Reid, 102f Nude (magazine), 7, 8f, 9f, 10n.1 ‘Nutty Mads,’ 34, 48n.3 Obedience, Gross, 200f The Observer (newspaper), 51 O’Connell, Mitch, 192 9 Lives, 219f Lucky Harm, 194f Peace, Love and Harmony, 195f O’Farrell, Lauren, 260f Offspring, Lipton, 209f Olivas, Kathie, The Narcissist, 191f Oliver, Vaughan, 109–10 ON, Lipton, 208f O.N.S. Escape Vehicle, Garcia, 210f Orbitron, Roth, 18, 24f, 29 ‘Orgasm Addict,’ Buzzcocks, 118f Original Sin, Gross, 177f O’Shea, Jamie, 186 Osiris Visions poster publishing, 63 Other Christs, Pettibon, 147 Outlaw, Roth, 29 Outrage (fanzine), 124 Outre Gallery, 176 OZ (magazine), 63, 65f, 66, 67f, 68, 80, 84, 115

packaging design, Roth, 22f Page, Bettie, 171 Palacios, Robert, Hueso Family, 189f Panic. See Black Flag Panter, Gary, 153, 156, 158 Germs flyer, 157f Jimbo, 152f Red Hot Chili Peppers, 156f Screamers poster, 155f Slash cover, 157f Springtime, 154f paper cutting, Ryan, 245, 264f Parton, Dolly, 245 Peace, Love and Harmony, O’Connell, 195f Peasant Dance, Peck, 170f Peck, Marion Li Li Riding through the Garden of Eden, 171f Peasant Dance, 170f Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (television), 158 Penis Envy by Crass, Vaucher, 133f Perry, Mark, Sniffin’ Glue, 121f, 122 Petrucci, Lisa, 224 Coney Island Cutie, 193f Custom Honey B vinyl figures, 240f Lil’ Ladies of Pink Flamingos, 192f Pet Sounds, Beach Boys, 53 Pettibon, Raymond, 147–48, 153 Black Flag flyer, 143f Bucksbaum Award, 147, 159n.16 Cars, TV, Rockets, H-bomb You Name It cover, 145f No title (I Should Tell), 142f No title (It Sure Helps), 144f Phonebox Cosy, Knit the City, 263f Picasso, 42 Piggle, TADO, 243f Pillsbury Doughboy, 222 Pink Floyd, 55, 60 Pinstripe Planet: Fine Lines from the World’s Best, ElDroubie, 40 pinstriping, 29 custom car, 40 El Diablo design, 41f motorcycles, 39, 43 Roth, 29, 32 Von Dutch, 39f The Pizz, 192, 193 Pizzarati, Burgerman, 236f PJ Harvey, Hart, 254f Plarchie the Squid residing on Darwin statue, O’Farrell, 260f Playbirds (magazine), 128 Plymell, Charles, 84, 90 Point Blank, 102 Pollock, Jackson, 106 pop culture, 53 pop surrealism, 161, 190, 192, 205, 210, 211, 213, 219 Pop Surrealism, Anderson, 205 pornography, 127–28 Portal, White, 207f Pouncey, Edward, 153, 156. See also Savage Pencil Presley, Elvis, 20 Prince, Suzy, 176, 267n.1 ‘Prostitution’ exhibition, COUM Transmissions, 129f psychedelic art Big Five, 79–80 concert posters, 55–56, 60, 63 gig posters and flyers, 176–77, 180 Punk (fanzine), 119, 122, 153 Punk Britannica (documentary), 98 Push Pin Studios, 80

The Qee, 234 Quintessence, 106 ‘Race with the Devil,’ Watson, 40f Radar Records, 106 Railla, Jean, 251 Raising the Brow, English, 169f Ralph Records, 158 Rapid Eye Movement (fanzine), 122 Rat Fink, Roth, 13f, 23, 33, 34, 37 Rat Fink Reunion, 37, 48n.4 Rat Scabies, 97 Raw and Weirdo (comics), 153 Ray, Vince, 10n.2, 192 Black Shadow, 45f Boneshaker Baby, 46f Reverend Horton Heat, 49f The Sound Effect of Sex and Horror, 6f Rebel Without a Cause (film), 21 recycling, 252–53 Red Hot Chili Peppers, Panter, 156f Reid, Jamie, 101 The Cat That Ate the World, 159f ‘Fuck Forever’, 99f God Save the Queen, 100f No Feelings, 111f Nowhere Buses, 102f Nude cover, 8f Sex Pistols, 101–4 Suburban Press, 101, 103f, 119 Reid, Larry, 171, 219 religious iconography, 147 Renegade Craft Fair, 256, 261 The Residents, 158 Reverend Horton Heat, Ray, 49f Revolver, Beatles, 53 Rhoplex, 15 Riley, Erin M., 245 Fun, 253f Thigh Highs, 259f Three Strikes, 252f Rimbaud, Penny, 130, 136, 159n.12 Riot Grrrl Movement, 10, 247 Ripped and Torn (magazine), 120f, 121f, 122 Road Agent, Roth, 15, 29 Rockers, Watson, 17f rock ‘n’ roll craze, 15 Rock ‘n’ Roll Zoo (comic), 156 Rod & Custom (magazine), 25f Rodriguez, Spain, 48, 90 Rolito, 237 Roller, Alfred, 68, 71, 73 romanticism, 63 Roq la Rue Gallery, 176, 205 Rotar, Roth, 29 Roth, Ed ‘Big Daddy’, 7, 16f, 18, 23, 28, 40, 47, 72, 153, 166, 181, 213 Beatnik Bandit, 20f illustrated envelopes, 42f, 43f Junkyard, 26f, 37 legendary status, 23, 28 Orbitron, 24f Outlaw, 29 packaging design, 22f Rat Fink, 13f Road Agent, 15 Tweedy Pie, 21f Roth Studios, 33, 34, 37, 48 Rough Trade Records, 122 Roundhouse, London, 60 Roxy Music, 109 Royal Albert Hall, 51 Royer Brands International, 47 Rubber Soul, Beatles, 53 Ruby the Jewel, Mount, 180f Ruskin, John, 148, 256 Rusty and Dworkin Dog, Jarvis, 225f Ryan, Rob, 245, 264f

THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY

Ryden, Mark, 210, 213 Balloon Boy, 190f Just the Girls, 186f Juxtapoz cover, 166f The Meat Magi, 187f Ryder, Naomi, 245 Cat Guitar, 266f The Lovely Eggs, 255f Molly Bloom Soliloquy, 265f Saint Martins School of Art, 98 Samaras, Isabel Castaway (Ginger), 188f Cloud Nine, 179f Devil Babe’s Big Book of Fun!, 32f San Francisco Comic Book, Crumb, 95f San Francisco Express Times (newspaper), 80 San Francisco Oracle (newspaper), 80 Sanrio, Hello Kitty, 223 Saturday Night Holocaust, Smith, 141f Savage, Jon, 122, 127 Savage Pencil, 153, 159n.17 ‘Wrong Eye’ by Coil, 148f Destroy All Monsters poster, 149f Goatlord of the Flies, 146f I Am the Mallard King, 151f Sonic Youth poster, 150f Saville, Peter, 7, 109–10, 114 FAC 1, Factory poster, 115f Fact. 15, Movement by New Order, 116f Scary Girl, Jurevicius, 242f Scharf, Kenny, 165f, 166, 196, 205, 219n.3 Schnepf, Bob, 79 Schorr, Todd, 166 The Screamers, 155f, 157 Screamin’ 40, Mouse, 28f screen-printing, Roth, 32–33 The Secret Public (fanzine), 124, 127 cover by Sterling/Savage, 122f creation of, 127–28 Self Montage with Cling-film, Sterling, 123f Sepia toy, Kaws, 230f The Serious Gardener, Heimstra, 203f sex comics, Crumb, 93–94 Sex Pistols, 98, 99f, 101, 128, 153, 159n.3 ‘Holidays in the Sun’, 102–3 Reid, 101–4 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, 53 Shag, 192 Among the Gods, 196f The Cat Carrier, 197f Sharp, Martin, 55, 56, 63, 66, 84 ‘Blowin’ in the Mind’ poster, 50f Disraeli Gears by Cream, 62f, 66 ‘Show Your Head (Legalise Pot Rally)’ poster, 58f Shelton, Gilbert, 90, 187 Sherman, Cindy, 205 Shire, Billy, 166 ‘Show Your Head (Legalise Pot Rally)’ poster, Hurford and Sharp, 58f Sid Vicious, 97 Simple Minds, 114 The Simpsons, Groening, 158 Singer, David, 79 Situationist International, 101, 102 Skate Thing, 222f, 230 Skratch, pinstriping, 40 Skull Lun, 232 Slash (magazine), 153, 157f Smith, Patti, 245 Smith, Winston, 136, 139, 143, 159n.15 Force Fed War, 137f

INDEX

In God We Trust by Dead Kennedys, 139, 140f Laughing on the Outside, 139f Saturday Night Holocaust, 141f Welcome to the World, 138f Snatch (comics), 93 Sniffin’ Glue (fanzine), 121f, 122, 124 Snuff Fink, Williams, 18f So, Eric, 224, 232 social issues, 252–53 Soft Machine, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, 54f Soft Machine and The Incredible String Band, 60 Softskull, Soto, 216f Sonic Youth, 156 Sonic Youth poster, Savage Pencil, 150f Sonny and Cher, 20 Soto, Jeff False Revolutionary, 217f Softskull, 216f The Sound Effect of Sex and Horror, Ray, 6f Sounds (magazine), 153, 156 Space Gasser, Yaniger, 31f Space Monkey action figure, Marshall, 237f Speakeasy Club, 66 Spears, Britney, 47 Spiegelman, Art, 90, 94, 97, 153, 205 Spillane, Mickey, 148 Springtime, Panter, 154f Sprouthead, Burgerman, 247f Starbird, Darryl, 18, 23 Star Wars toys, 225 Steadman, Ralph, 142, 143 Stecyk, C. R., 40, 43, 180 Sterling, Linder, 122, 125f, 126f, 127 Howard Devoto in Lingerie Mask, 124f Menstrual Egg-Timer, 114 The Secret Public cover, 122f Self Montage with Cling-film, 123f Steve Miller Band, 88 Stewart, Martha, 245 Stitch ‘n Bitch, Stroller, 251 Stonehenge Free Festival, 130 Strange, Richard, 98, 101, 159n.1 Stroller, Debbie, 247 Sublime Stitching, Hart, 254f, 257f, 258f Suburban Press, 101, 102, 103f, 119 Sunn O))), 156 Surfer (magazine), 79

Van Orlax, Fowler, 235f Vaucher, Gee, 136, 159n.12 Best Before: 1984 by Crass, 134f, 135f Feeding of the 5000 by Crass, 132f International Anthem, 131f Penis Envy by Crass, 133f Veruca Salt poster, Carsella, 163f Vice (magazine), 238 Victoria and Albert Museum, 51 Aubrey Beardsley exhibition, 51, 68 poster, 52f Vietnam, 68 Vietnam War, 34, 98 Vitello, Fausto, 180 Von Dutch, 16f, 35f, 38f, 166, 181, 213. See also Howard, Kenneth ‘Von Dutch’ anti-materialist lifestyle, 44, 47 flaming and pinstriping, 39f I Am Rabbit Too, 36f illustrated envelopes, 42f, 43f Von Dutch Originals, 47 Von Sven, pinstriping, 40 Vortigern’s Machine, Jarvis and Waterman, 224f

Tabitha, Felt Mistress, 244f TADO, 237, 243f Takara toy company, 232 Takashi Murakami doll, Leavitt, 227f Takashi Murakami Superflat Museum, 232 Tales From the Crypt, EC Comics, 90 ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses,’ Clapton, 66 Tank Girl (comic), 158 Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Savage, 127 Tepper, Mari, Moby Grape poster, 89f Thigh Highs, Riley, 259f Thompson, Hunter S., 21 Three Strikes, Riley, 252f Throbbing Gristle, 128 Tiki Oasis South of the Border, Yaniger, 172f Timberlake, Justin, 47 Time (magazine), 12 Time Capsule Toys, Sony, 239 Time Out (magazine), 10n.2, 65f, 68 Tokidoki, 237

Walsh, Richard, 66 Ward, Catharyne, Transcension to Liberty Realm, 214f, 215f Ward, James, Jimbob Art, 248f Ware, Chris, 97 Ware, Martyn, 114 Warhol, Andy, 220 Warthead, Mouse, 27f Waterman, Russell, Vortigern’s Machine cover, 224f Watson, Chris ‘Race with the Devil,’ 40f Rockers, 17f Waymouth, Nigel, 54, 56, 63, 97n.2 Wayne, John, 20 Weird-Oh’s, 34, 48n.3 ‘Welcome to Monsterism Island’ poster, Fowler, 233f Welcome to the World, Smith, 138f West Coast alternative art scene, 161 Western Flier (album), 63 Wheels of Fire (album), Cream, 66 When the Worlds Collide, Scharf, 196, 219n.3

Tokion (magazine), 186, 187, 223f, 233 Tolkien’, 224 Tommy the Greek, 40. See also Hrones, Tommy Tottenham Court Road, 60 Toy2r, 234 Transcension to Liberty Realm, Ward, 214f, 215f Tree Heart paper-cutting, Ryan, 264f Tripping Corpse, Pettibon, 147 T-shirt, screen-printing, 32–33 Tunnock’s Teacake cushions, McWilliams, 245, 249f Turbo-Sonic, Barris, 18 Tuten, Randy, 72, 74, 80, 87f Tutti, Cosey Fanni, 128, 159n.8 Tweedy Pie, Roth, 21f, 29 Twickenham College of Technology, 106 UFO (Unlimited Freak Out), 56, 60, 106 ‘UFO Presents Night Tripper’, 63 Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), 80, 83 Uneeda, Crumb, 90 University Art Gallery, 97n.4 Uno, Aquirax, 80 upcycling, 253

White, Eric 1961 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner, 218f Encuentro, 206f Portal, 207f Whitney Museum of American Art, 196, 219n.3 Whodunnknit, O’Farrell, 260f The Wild One (film), 17 William Grant and Sons, 47 Williams, Robert, 12, 16f, 29, 47–48, 87, 90, 93, 153, 163, 166, 180, 181, 186, 187, 196, 201, 213, 219n.1 Diamond in a Goats Ass, 182f In the Land of Retinal Delights, 183f Snuff Fink, 18f Zap Comix, 92f Wilson, S. Clay, 48, 88, 90, 93 Wilson, Wes, 63, 70, 74, 79, 88, 97n.5 The Byrds poster, 71f Grateful Dead poster, 69f Moby Grape poster, 72f Winchester Hoot, Garcia, 250f Wolfe, Tom, 20, 21, 23, 29, 48 Wood, Zara, Forest Child brooch, 248f Woolboro, Jenkins, 262f World War I, 39 World War II, 16 X-tasy?, Chainsaw, 178f Yale University, 73 Yaniger, Derek, 192 Name Your Poison, 173f Space Gasser, 31f Tiki Oasis South of the Border, 172f Yardbirds/Doors poster, MacLean, 85f Yarrowstalks (magazine), 84 Yellow Accompaniment, Kandinsky, 106 Yellow Dog anthology, 90 Yokoo, Tadanori, 80 Zap 1, 90 Zap Collective, 87, 88 Zap Comix, 84, 87, 88, 90, 186 collective, 79 Crumb, 91f Williams, 92f Zippy the Pinhead, Griffith, 88

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, thank you to all of the artists whose groundbreaking, subcultural work has appeared in this book. Thanks to everyone who has helped us to track down sometimes elusive artists or their estates. Trying to locate the whereabouts of an artist, to request permission to use their work, often from several decades ago, is no mean feat and we’ve picked the brains of many people over the past year. You are too many to name individually but you know who you are. To everyone at Bloomsbury for commissioning us to work on this book, and for patiently answering endless questions about legalities and so on. We’d like to especially thank Simon Keane-Cowell for paying attention to us when we sent the initial proposal along, Rebecca Barden for her ongoing support throughout, as well as Abbie Sharman and Simon Longman. A special big thanks to Bren O’Callaghan for employing our services to teach an ‘Introduction to the Art of Counterculture’ course at the Cornerhouse in Manchester in 2012: a course which has gone on to form the basis of this book. To the library at Manchester Metropolitan University, which has unwittingly provided many of the reference books for this book, via Ian’s ‘MA student’ library card, as well as a quiet place to work. And finally, thanks to our families and friends, who have provided endless cups of tea, and sympathetic ears for more than a year as we worked on this book.

IMAGE CREDITS Introduction p. 6  Poster for solo show at The Last Chance Saloon. Chapter 1 p. 18: © Robert Williams. Courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, NY. pp. 20, 21, 24 (bottom), 25, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43: Collection of Pat Ganahl. p. 26: Courtesy Keith Glass, Mobile Records. p. 30: Images courtesy Anthony Ausgang, ausgangart.com Chapter 1 p. 50: ©Martin Sharp. p. 52: Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. pp. 54, 55: Images courtesy of Nigel Waymouth and Jaki English (estate of Michael English). pp. 56, 58: © John Hurford. pp. 57, 59: © www.mikemcinnerney.com pp. 60, 61: Courtesy of John “Hoppy” Hopkins. p. 62 © Martin Sharp. pp. 64, 65, 67: © Pearce Marchbank Studio. pp. 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89: Courtesy of Wolfgang’s Vault. p. 91: ©Robert Crumb, 2014 & 1968. p. 92: © Robert Williams. p. 95: ©Robert Crumb, 2014 & 1970. p. 96: ©Robert Crumb, 2014 & 1994. Chapter 3 pp. 99, 100, 102, 103, 111, 159: ©Jamie Reid. Courtesy Isis Gallery, UK. pp. 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 113 (top): Courtesy of Barney Bubbles Estate. p. 110:  ©Pearce Marchbank studio. pp. 112, 113 (bottom): Courtesy of River Music and Derek Boshier. pp. 115, 116 (top): ©Peter Saville Studio, London.

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pp. 116 (bottom), 117 (top), 117 (bottom): Courtesy of Malcolm Garrett/ Images&co. p. 118: Courtesy of Malcolm Garrett/Images&co & Linder Sterling. p. 119: Courtesy Music Sales & Malcolm Garrett/Images&Co. pp. 120, 121 (bottom): Courtesy of Tony Drayton. p. 121 (top right): Courtesy of John “Hoppy” Hopkins. pp. 122, 123, 124, 125, 126: Courtesy of Stuart Shave Modern Art, London. p. 129 © Cosey Fanni Tutti. pp. 130, 131, 132, 133, 134/5 Courtesy of Gee Vaucher. pp. 137, 138, 139, 140 (top and bottom) 141: © Winston Smith. pp. 142, 143, 144, 145: Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. pp. 146, 148, 149, 150, 151: © Copyright: Savage Pencil. pp. 152, 154, 155, 156, 157 (Left & right): Courtesy of Picturebox Inc, NY. Chapter 4 pp. 162, 165, 166 Courtesy High Speed Production Inc. pp. 182, 183: ©Robert Williams. Images courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, NY. pp. 186, 187, 190 ©Mark Ryden. Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery, NY. p. 191 Courtesy of circusposterus.com. pp. 192, 193 Courtesy of Lisa Petrucci. Private collection. Chapter 5 p. 237 Courtesy of Cerealart. pp. 260, 263 Reprinted by permission of United Agents on behalf of Lauren O’Farrell.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book..

THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE UNDERGROUND: A COUNTERCULTURAL HISTORY