By Ward Sutton
SuttonImpactStudio.com
Art Chantry's work can be seen on telephone poles, art museums, and everywhere in between. Based in Seattle and Tacoma, he has created hundreds, or likely thousands of band posters, LP and CD covers, and designs for magazines, newspapers, and zines. One could argue his visual style had as much to do with the Northwest music movement of the 80s and 90s as the music itself. As art director of The Rocket (a publication that chronicled the music scene of that era), Art gave me my first break when I moved to Seattle in 1991. I recently got the chance to ask him about his approach to art directing publications, his inspirations, and what magazine he would redesign if he could.
WARD SUTTON: To my eye, your design work on The Rocket seemed like one bold experiment after another. I especially remember a series of issues where you rotated the logo on the cover a little bit more each issue, with the logo eventually appearing vertical, upside-down, etc. How do you reflect on your approach to designing The Rocket?
ART CHANTRY: The Rocket was such a chaotic "fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants" affair that every layout and every decision WAS a bold experiment. We had no money, no budget, no technology, no nothing except the ambitions and imaginations of the people who slammed it together every month. As art director, i would desperately try to get things planned in advance--particularly when it came to hiring freelancers, who were always working on the core of every issue. We would have been lost without them. Every freelance illustrator/photographer/designer/etc. I solicited brought their own eye and their own opinion to each project. The only way we could get these people to work for nothing (we paid them so little it was a mere token of appreciation and little else) was to offer them the freedom to invent and create. That alone made a certain level of chance and chaos to each issue that it virtually became the trademark style of the magazine--no matter how hard I tried to prevent it.
I eventually began to design the pacing and dynamics of the interior
structure of the magazine to become a classic "clothes rack" (like you'd
see in a department store). It would be solid, well-built, reliable and
consistent. Then we'd hang all the frilly ideas and styles and images
on that rack to display and attract the reader. It still looked chaotic
and experimental, but the foundation of the overall structure was solid
as rock.
The specific mention you make of the rotating masthead was a project I'd
been wanting to try on The Rocket for years and years, but nobody would
let me try it. You see, the only reason that a magazine's masthead was
always at the top of the magazine cover was simply because of the
physics of the newsstand display--the only visible part of the cover
was the top edge. But The Rocket was never displayed on a newsstand. It
was always dropped on the floor in a bundle at the hipster boutiques,
music stores, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. It would usually become a
messy pile, spread out on the floor. The whole cover was always on
display. So I immediately wanted to have the freedom to place the
masthead anywhere i wanted to. But even The Rocket editorship couldn't
handle that idea. So I never got to try it. The experiment you mention
was actually conducted over the last six months that I worked at The
Rocket. I gave my notice and then simply DID IT. Every issue, I'd rotate
the masthead clockwise around the cover (it ended upside down at the
bottom of the cover panel). I continued it up and around back to the
top. My last issue, it was plastered back up on top and then I was gone.
I did a full 360 degree circle! Very proud of that. No one noticed.
WARD SUTTON: One stand-out issue featured the coup of getting Ed "Big Daddy" Roth to illustrate the cover. How did that come about?
ART CHANTRY: That
Roth cover was back in the mid-1980s (1985, to be exact). It was our
annual "holiday" issue (made in the December of the year before, but
released on January 1, 1986, to allow a month off for the crew). Every
year we hired "somebody famous" to do that holiday cover. We had Lynda
Barry, Charles Burns, Matt Groening, Milton Glaser, Von Dutch, Nathan
Gluck, Ed Fotheringham, Gary Panter, Drew Friedman, and a host of others
do our holiday cover over the years.
I decided I wanted to try
to snag Ed "Big Daddy" Roth to do a Rat Fink cover for us. I looked him
up and managed to find him living in Utah (he'd converted to Mormonism).
Talking to him on the phone was a trip. He had retired (he had been
working as a sign painter at Knotts Berry Farm for the last 20 years).
He was recently hired to do a record cover for a band called The
Birthday Party. When he listened to the record (only after it was
released with his artwork), he was appalled. He still thought of rock
'n' roll as Chuck Berry. The Birthday Party (Nick Cave's first band) was
the antithesis of what he considered "moral." In fact, he had recently
attempted to re-birth Rat Fink as a crusader against environmental waste
and damage.
So Roth immediately said he'd never do another rock 'n'
roll piece--period. But I finally convinced him that The Rocket was
different and cool and he'd like it. I sent him a stack of back issues
and got back in touch and he LOVED it. He immediately set out to do a
cover image for us (I think we paid him $400). What he sent was a
dirty, sweat-stained T-shirt with a black and white, airbrushed line
drawing (with the original pencil sketch still visible underneath the
ink) of Rat Fink wishing everybody happy holidays riding a huge,
phallic, rocket hotrod. Actually, the T-shirt had two sides; the back
side was more of a standard portrait of all his characters wishing
everybody Merry Xmas.
I basically took the two images, photocopied them
and collaged the best parts of both into one image. Then I had to add
all the color mechanically (this was before computers) by cutting
overlays. Since we couldn't afford a real color separation, I used that
old "zipatone" dot screen adhesive stuff to create my own color builds
(using rosettes created by moving the dot patterns physically until the
moires disappeared). The resulting cover was a big hit. It was one of
those "OH YEAH! I REMEMBER THAT GUY" moments. In fact, later on, Roth
personally told me that The Rocket cover was responsible for the whole
rebirth of his otherwise forgotten career. After that, he came out of
retirement and became a national figure in the underground hipster scene
again. He had a tear in his eye when he told me that. That was really
touching to hear from an old hero.
WARD SUTTON: I
saw legendary illustrator Jack Davis speak a few years back and someone
asked him, with regard to the movie posters and album covers he'd
illustrated, if he liked all those films and all that music. He said he
often didn't see the movies or listen to the music, and if he did he
often didn't care for it anyway. When you were working on The Rocket, or
at Sub Pop, etc., did you feel it was important that you, yourself,
like the music or other content you were designing for?
ART CHANTRY: Unlike
Jack Davis, I made it a point to research each and every client/project I
had to work on. How do you design anything for a client without knowing
WHO and WHAT that client was? I listen to every record I've ever done a
cover for. I read every play I ever did a poster for. I tried to see
live performances of every band I ever did work for. There really was no
other way to SPEAK for a client unless you understood that client's
language and idea.
Of course, there were exceptions to that.
Some of the bands I already knew by reputation or media branding. Others
I had no access to and had to rely upon their management input (always
really bad). Basically, the less I knew about a project, the worse and
more "decorative" (rather than "designed") the piece would become. Some
were so bad and so altered by the client after it left my hands that I
had to pull my name from the project. Other times the people involved
were such assholes and crooks that it was impossible to get decent work
through the process because of the way they were treating you. But
overall, almost all of the work I did for all of these small,
independent businesses I'm very proud of. Of course, the casual viewer
would never understand how well they worked, because they never knew the
backstory. But that's the way it is with virtually every design
project. The best design so supports the project that it becomes
invisible. This is how the language of design works. The best designers
are virtuoso authors and grand manipulators of this shared visual
language of design. But we never know who they are.
WARD SUTTON: You
are a master of finding obscure imagery, sampling it, reworking it, and
making it something uniquely your own. Given the changing definitions
of what an "illustrator" is these days, do you consider yourself an
illustrator?
ART CHANTRY: No, i don't consider myself an "illustrator" in the
classic definition of the term. However, I am a "commercial artist" in
the classic sense of that term. I can fake illustration - make an image -
of course. And my design work is often so stylized that it virtually
becomes an illustration as a whole. But when people hire me to do an
illustration, I DESIGN IT (I don't draw it). That's a distinction that
even the very best art directors can't quite understand. They think in
terms of picture and type. I think in terms of the whole piece. It's
like a forest and the trees, situation. I always think in terms of the
forest. That's because I'm a designer, not an illustrator.
It's
also complicated by the basic methodology of how i approach my work. I
do montage/collage/assemblage. I take type and photos and drawings and
words and colors and meanings and I put them together to say something.
It's very much like something Frank Zappa said in an interview. He was
asked, "Frank, what exactly is it that you do?" he replied, "I'm a
conductor. I take stuff and make it interesting. It might be my stuff,
it might be your stuff, it might be some stuff I found in the garbage.
Then I arrange it in new and unexpected interesting ways. I'm a
conductor." Well, you could say the same thing about a designer. We do
the same thing. This is a post-modernist era. The benchmark approach to
concept work in such an era is appropriation of past ideas. We, as
postmodernists, put these old ideas into new contexts and juxtapositions
to create new ideas. Imagine it was words and not images. We don't
invent the words we use. We access the same words that Hemingway or
Dickens used. But we arrange those words to create new sentences,
paragraphs and meanings. It's as primitive and innate as any creative
process. That's what I do. And that's not illustration at all.
WARD SUTTON: If you could redesign one magazine, what would it be?
ART CHANTRY: Wow.
That's a tough one. I've always had the juvenile fantasy of redesigning
Rolling Stone magazine (just like I've always had the silly dream of
designing a record cover for the Rolling Stones). It'll never happen, of
course. And what would I do? I have no idea. I'd have to study the
problem like any other design problem I'm presented with. Sometimes the
best redesign is to leave it alone. But being such a big "stylist" in my
work, it will still look very different from how it does now. (Thus
directly contradicting the idea that in the best design, the designer's
hand is invisible. I believe that. Therefore, by my own definition, it
means I do bad design work intentionally. That's often the case, too.)
Magazines are in such a sad state design-wise that just about any old
classic magazine that still exists (and there are so few left) would be a
real pleasure to recreate. I would definitely trend backward and
attempt to go back to a lot of text and much less graphic imagery. We so
horribly over-design magazines these days (I can't tell the editorial
spreads form the advertisements any more). We design very, very
ignorantly. Computer design means fast design and minimal research.
Ideas can't be generated that fast, unless the designer is a great
ad-libber. I'm a great ad-libber, but that's still too fast to have any
depth. The more thought that goes into the magazine design, the better
it becomes. That's obvious.
Yeah, I'd try to make everything look
like Esquire or look like Holiday or Harper's Bazaar from about 75
years ago. A big oversized awkward OBJECT full of interesting ideas that
you can't find elsewhere in our contemporary capsule form. Real
writing, real design, real text to READ. But this is impossible now.
Those days are really gone. A magazine like I envision would fail
immediately.
WARD SUTTON: When the Seattle Art Museum held a retrospective of
your work in the mid-90s, you gave a lecture where you highlighted
designers and design objects that inspire you. One of the things you
talked about was Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (pictured above). What about that magazine
appeals to you, and how does it connect to some of the punk rock
sensibility that appears in your own work?
ART CHANTRY: I don't look at
contemporary design for inspiration anymore. I don't think there are
very many good designers out there (at least in the "fine design world" I
so long aspired to belong to). And there are precious few new or
interesting ideas presented in "fine design" anymore. When I look at
design, I go back to different eras with different cultures and
different voices and ideas to think about. I try to apply their thinking
to what I am doing. I compare it to learning languages--subcultural
language forms. The slang and accents and isolated thinking that creates
a subcultural visual voice becomes unique when applied to a mainstream
project. It introduces the old classical languages of the past to the
bereft language of the moment. It expands and forces thinking.
I've
always been a sort-of conduit between these subcultures and the
mainstream cultures. I've straddled that fence with one foot firmly
planted on either side. The result is that I've never been fully
accepted by either--both sides of that fence treat me as a pariah,
renegade thinker. I'm too mainstream for the subculture and and too wild
for the mainstream. I get labeled as a rebel, a contrarian, and
iconoclast, etc. etc. That's all fine and dandy, because as long as they
are trashing ME personally, they notice my ideas and copycat them.
That's how we learn, we copycat. Children don't invent walking, they
watch adults walk and try to copy them. That's how the human mind works.
I'm able to expose both sides of that fence to these "other" ideas and I
then get to watch them flower into new paradigms. It's the best part of
what I do.
As for Famous Monsters specifically, it was
designed by a guy named Harry Chester. His monster type is unsurpassed
by anyone else ever. His design thinking appears primitive and staid,
but he was a clever and sneaky fella. He introduced so much to our
general population by sneaking his ideas through his friend's (clients)
projects and through our child minds. Did you know that Harry Chester
also designed Mad magazine? He also design Help!, Humbug and Trump. He
did all of the Warren publications, too (FM, Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella,
Screen Thrills, Wild Westerns, Spacemen, etc.). He touched so many
fabled careers and styles and primal cultural ideas that he virtually
created the entire design style of the underground we have today. My
incorporating of his ideas and re-presenting them to the mainstream
design world in my own work was one of the myriad ways this came to
pass. I'm not taking credit for it; entire generations of his viewership
did the most work. But I certainly helped. Because that is what I do. I
design culture.
WARD SUTTON: You
were doing some amazing things with xerox machines and stat cameras
before Photoshop existed. Do you think the ubiquitous digital technology
we have now has helped or hurt design?
ART CHANTRY: I have to admit that I'm
real tired of responding to this question. I get asked it by virtually
every design student in America at one point or another. The digital
world has branded me a dinosaur, a luddite and a noncomformist. They
generally find much amusement in me and love to tease me about my "old
school" ways. All because I think the computer is a terrible design
tool. It shields the designer from what he is actually supposed to be
doing. I still work with my mind, my hands, my ideas, and the technology
of printing processes. I think in black and white; I think like a
printing press. That doesn't translate to a digital format. When was the
last time you printed on anything but coated #2 white paper? When was
the last time you did anything round? When was the last time you used
tinted varnishes? When was the last time you stacked solid inks to build
a rainbow of colors? So many parts of the physical printing process has
been tossed out that it's quickly getting lost.
Because so
much of my career was built around nothing (no budget, no nothing), I
had to work with whatever I had to use. I became a master of really
shitty printing. I can make bad printing look like a million bucks. I
can make lettering with a potato. I can dig into a garbage can and
create an award-winning, important design. That's simply because I know
the processes involved. Most computer designers most definitely DO NOT. I
once gave a workshop at one of America's premiere design
schools/programs. The graduating students had put in 8+ years to get the
degree they were to receive in a month. The first (and only) question
they asked me was "can you explain the difference between silkscreen and
offset to us?" That's not a design education, that's a crime. It was
embarrassing.
So I insist, with my students over the years, that
they stop faking design (substituting "decoration") and really learn
about the process they are involved in. Go work at a print shop for six
months. And then watch a lot of television. After that, they will have
an extremely well-rounded graphic design education. I know that sounds
like a joke. But it's not.
[All the posters, CDs, and magazine covers in this story were designed by Art Chantry except for the two samples from Famous Monsters of Filmland.]
Resources:
Art Chantry Facebook page
Art Chantry posters at Gigposters
Related Stories:
When Cartoonists Illustrate: Part 1: Kate Beaton
Alt Week: Guest Editor Cartoonist-Illustrator Ward Sutton