Reviewed by Alasdair Morton
Stars Art Chantry, Rob Jones, Print Mafia, Uncle Charlie, Ames Brothers, Brian Chippendale, Clayton Hayes, Tom Hazelmyer,
Bryce Mccloud, Jay Ryan
Produced by Eileen Yaghoobian
Certification Unrated
Runtime 94 minutes
Directed by Eileen Yaghoobian
The one thing Yaghoobian’s documentary has going for it is its subject matter – poster art and the underground artists who create them. A motley bunch of recluses and counter-cultural characters with their own takes on the world and those in it, not to mention wildly contradictory positions regarding both themselves and their creations, they are intriguing and fascinating, their work primed to shock and provoke. Grotesque, blasphemous, explicit and garish, poster art is many things but forgettable it is not, which makes it is a shame that this documentary is exactly that.
Offering a history of posters and their creators and analysing their place within popular and counter-culture, Yaghoobian seeks to understand this particular art form and to gain some kind of insight into its future, and that of those that make and admire it. With the counter culture dying out, or at least transforming into something else (‘the underground is a recruiting zone for the overground’ one artist laments), and posters banned in the US in cities from the East coast to West, it would seem a prime moment for reflection but her film, compiled largely from extensive interviews, is rambling and unfocussed, lacking direction and cohesion; it concerns itself more with the makers of the posters than the posters themselves, which is no bad thing, but tragically fails to dig beneath their skin, never offering up any explanation or reason as to what really fuels them and drives them to shock.
Some artists listlessly bemoan the apathy of today’s kids and the ease with which they embrace the culture before them rather than questioning or challenging it, one citing Seventies and early Eighties punk as the last great movement to truly challenge the status quo. Yet simultaneously, they explain that poster art has always been about looking forward, about pushing boundaries and challenging ideals. This double-standard and hypocrisy lies at the core of this particular art form though, as it is one that has existed despite there never really being any commercial drive or requirement for it.
‘The language form we’re using to manipulate the viewer to buy this product, to vote for this candidate, to go to this concert - it is the purest form of art that our culture has,’ Seattle-based poster creator and visual artist provocateur Art Chantry, who has worked on posters for the likes of Nirvana, Hole and The Sonics, comments, before pulling off an about-face and continuing: “Is it [gig posters] a piece of art? No, it is just an ad!”
There is a delightfully frustrating paradox at the heart of gig posters and shock art, not to mention those that make it, but it is one that is never really embraced or captured in this film, which offers little insight for the pre-informed poster-consumer out there, and which has even less for poster-art-virgins. Whether it be an Uzi-toting Jesus Christ or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in Alice Cooper make-up, there is a unarguably wildfire originality and energy to the posters themselves, but Yaghoobian’s film is humdrum and tame and, most of all, totally uncontroversial in comparison. There is nothing to shock here.