Stacey Brook is a Writer, Blogger, Author

The world of rock concert poster art has its own definitive language, silent and spoken, written and unwritten, overt and implied. Like with many other microcultures, knowing this community’s unusual codes, insider terminology and culturally specific social etiquette is the difference between surface appreciation and full understanding. The masters of poster art twist pop culture imagery, repurpose age-old Americana icons and ink out slick illustrations in the name of ephemeral, music-related events. Using techniques and equipment that in the age of computers is all-but antiquated, they construct limited edition, handmade artifacts that not only mark a single day in history, but are reflective of the cultural surroundings at large. The community that produces these vibrant runs of ink on paper is insular and eccentric, full of brilliant, quirky, often introverted personalities, whose bombastic mode of expression is balanced by the under-the-radar status of their craft.

After years of existing away from the scrutiny and examination of outsiders, not one, but two filmmakers crafted documentaries about this underground coalition of ink on paper; Eileen Yaghoobian, with her punk-rock pastiche, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, and Merle Becker with her historical examination of the artform, American Artifact. Each filmmaker’s choice of location, interview subjects, tone and editing are deliberate attempts to impart this new language of poster art to an audience that hasn’t been exposed—for a lifetime, a decade, or even the few years it took to weave together each of these films—to the nuances and iconography of this cloistered culture. Both directors furnish the viewer with tools to process this foreign dialect, and the questions their films answer directly parallel the inquiries innate to the understanding and acquisition of a second language. What is the terminology people use here? How is it applied? What are the cultural references necessary to establish real connections with the material? What words and concepts don’t translate to the language I already know?

In a total immersion method of foreign language instruction, a student receives all of his/her instruction in the target language, without explanation or bridges to a first, native language for guidance. In order to learn French, for example, one would be placed in an environment in which everything heard and spoken was only in French.

This is the same principle by which Died Young, Stayed Pretty exposes the viewer to the world of underground poster art. Yaghoobian’s gritty homage plunges its audience into the solitary, culture of imagery/imagery of culture world inhabited by modern poster artists. The film is shot, produced, directed and edited by the first-time filmmaker from Vancouver, who discovered rock posters through the modern archival website and forum, Gigposters.com. A photographer with her MFA, Yaghoobian found herself impacted by the artwork on a visceral level, and approached the filmmaking process with a keen eye and a fine-artists’ appreciation for the mechanics of the movement. She documents how posters of the punk rock era are reflected in the posters of today, focusing her attention more on the current expression of the culture and its visual expression than its historical roots.

“It’s about the dialogue that happens in the posters and the community that exists,” she says.

As far as location and process, Yaghoobian had a distinct vision going in. She didn’t want to shoot artists, as she says, “pimping their artwork.” She wanted to capture them in their natural environs. Her filming process involved staying with her subjects for weeks, sleeping on couches and always keeping the camera rolling. She captures the routines that reveal a person’s character, catching her artists in off-guard moments that show the true nature/color of their personalities. Interview subjects are chosen for their conversational fluency and hometown environmental intrigue, not their individual impact on the scene.

Yaghoobian encourages extended musing from her subjects. She wrenches politically incorrect admissions from them. Most of the men (there is only one female poster maker in the whole film—a pretty accurate representation on gender breakdown in the field) on the scene are huge culture, science and history geeks, and Yaghoobian lets them ramble, exposing their roots. Like Rob Jones, expert illustrator of the perverse, who recounts the paranoid legend of the death of Elvis’ secret twin on-screen for a full five minutes. The story he tells has nothing to do with posters, really. It doesn’t even have a lot to do with rock music. But it does give the audience majestic insight into the workings of a mind that spews out hilarious, warped images of famous figures, like Mick Jagger wielding an eel stemming from his crotch; or Teddy Roosevelt, fang-bearing and vampiric; or a homoerotic, gun-slinging Elvis (of course), pinching his own nipple.

It is these deliberate tangential indulgences of character through conversation that create the immersive experience. In a movie about a microculture, Yaghoobian understands that to know a foreign place, you must be allowed to converse with its people about the things they love.

Yaghoobian’s portrait of the modern community is further fleshed out by the frenetic paces of her cuts from poster imagery to interview tidbits from artists who are identified only for flashes of a second. She arranges her interviews in a non-linear fashion overlapping patches of related musings, so they feel almost wheatpasted together. Yaghoobian’s film is intentionally plotless and dizzying.

“Punk is anti-narrative,” she says. “Of course I’m going to a make a film that’s anti-narrative, because I’m going to serve the form.

Yaghoobian also illuminates subjects that are actually of issue if you participate in the community. She juxtaposes footage of designers and illustrators expressing their fervent opinions on design—contradicting each other in ways that mimic the activity on poster message boards and in chat rooms. One minute you see a design-centric artist is claiming he’d be bored to pieces illustrating posters, and the next minute the screen flashes to an illustrator complaining about the lack of imagination in recycling found imagery. The values and perspectives of artists are both represented and respected, but never fully explained. The audience is left with the feeling that it is impossible to label an opinion in this universe as right or wrong, but that all is permissible when expressing opinions about music or pop culture or aesthetics or politics through your artwork. As the frantic conversational wave crashes down, the lesson is imparted. Creativity is god. Art is the only truth.

Died Young, Stayed Pretty requires fortitude; and likely you have to be a native speaker to understand what Yaghoobain is saying. Even with thousands of hours of trolling Gigposters.com under my belt and a flat file of collected screenprints under my bed I understood Died Young, Stayed Pretty better after my second viewing.

But as Yaghoobian says, “It’s punk rock. It’s messy.” That first viewing still awoke something visceral within me—something tied to the excitement of secrecy and rebellion. The film forces you to commit or perhaps more accurately, submit to powerful sensory provocation. Like a non-Spanish speaker feeling inspired enough by the Cathedral of Seville to utter her first “muy gracias,” one simply has to let the immersion work its wonder.

Yaghoobian says, “When you’re making a movie about community, the individual dissipates.” And in the case of Died Young, Stayed Pretty, this principle includes the audience/viewer as an absorbed individual, too.

Immersion is a proven effective method of language learning, but it certainly isn’t the only way to impart a language unknown. The Language As Subject (LAS) system of language learning, for example, is a traditional way of teaching language in which it is treated as the object of instruction. In LAS, the teacher is responsible for explanation, and deciding what will be learned and how to exchange that knowledge. In her film American Artifact, Merle Becker aims to translate the language of the poster underground into relatable terms for her audience, ordering an examination of poster art from its rock and roll and psychedelic roots through the present. Becker introduces the audience to the scene’s key players through the ages. She uses clear points of organization, the innate visual appeal of the scene’s artwork, and a literal approach to context and setting to engage and anchor the viewers. The film even kicks off with Becker as the narrator, a device used intermittently throughout the film, making Becker, quite literally, our guide.

“I definitely wanted people to walk away from the film feeling like they learned something, and feeling like it was an enlightening hour and a half,” she says.

Becker serves up her content in linear, easily digestible chunks, and American Artifact has a clear beginning, middle and end. The film kicks off with a review of posters of the 50’s and 60’s, taking us on a quick tour the art’s birth in boxing poster form. We move on to the 60’s where the major signposts are hit. Bill Graham at The Fillmore? Check. Stanley Mouse, whose Grateful Dead posters eventually spawned the most recognizable band logo on the planet? Check. It is clear from the outset, that this is intended to be a historical journey through the art form.

Becker’s artistic choices are a reflection of the intended audience. Where Yaghoobian samples current artists for their commitment to obscurity, Becker focuses heavily on the “Big Five” (Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Alton Kelley), and then moves on to sample an array of keystone artists from the 60’s and beyond. She uses two books—1949’s The Art of Rock, and 2003’s updated, The Art of Modern Rock—two 25-pound tomes—as her bibles, selecting the most pivotal and popular figures for probing and extolling. She takes us through time, and the country, to record what she—and some others in the film—seems to believe is a vanishing industry.

Becker hails from the world of mass media, working for MTV in the former “corporate gig” she refers to in much of the film’s narration. More specifically, she worked for TRL, MTV’s gooey, pop sales vehicle, and her experience in making trends approachable for the masses clearly informs her storytelling approach.

She squeezes more recognizable personalities into her film, executing their identification with clear labeling, giving prime screen time to people like Frank Kozik, known by many to be the godfather of modern poster art. Becker lets Kozik tell his story, the tale of how screenprinting was revived; of how in a time when the black and white flier was the default, he strived to make prints so large and so complex they would make people think, “How can that exist?”

These are the pillars of the community. The figures worthy of flashcards. One by one, Becker isolates these personas that have defined the scene over time, asking you to commit them to memory.

Like Art Chantry, often known as the design yin to Kozik’s illustrative yang, who has the most compelling lines in the film. (Chantry is a major voice in DYSP as well.) Proving his worth as modern day poster art’s Confucius, he unintentionally synthesizes the intent of the entire film, while telling the story of his own work saying, “If you document, you create history.”

While synthesizing the chain of events that brought poster art to its modern state, Becker makes use of archival footage (an old Bill Graham interview, for example), and places her new interview subjects in environments that are directly connected to their occupations, achievements and/or topic of conversation. Music writers talk in front of their libraries. Artists are interviewed in their studios. Her context is literal. The soundtrack is comprised of bands whose music has been represented in posters for decades. She provides her audience with the building blocks of understanding by presenting exactly what she wants you to absorb.

Becker is also unafraid to explore the more commercial side of the poster world, a reality that Died Young, Stayed Pretty for the most part, leaves untouched. In the years since the golden age of poster art, the functionality of a five-color screenprinted poster has changed. For bands that are no longer making money off record sales, limited edition screenprints are expensive to produce, and not especially effective as a means of promotion now that shows are advertised on the internet.

As Chantry brings up, maybe now more than ever, posters are artifacts. It’s important to Becker to give context for how poster art fits in the modern world. She knows in an audience of music lovers, people want to know where and how posters are used. She anticipates that in a crowd of rent and mortgage payers, people will be wondering, “How do these folks make a living?” Her inclination towards didacticism serves the audience’s curiosities regarding the practicality of a seemingly impractical artistic existence. The film is information-stuffed, thoughtfully organized, and imbued with the vibrant spirit of the scene it magnifies.

After viewing American Artifact, you know the historical figures of importance. The generals of war. You have sampled the souvenirs and you can list the key facts. You could pass a test on the vocabulary and phrases. In Died Young, Stayed Pretty, you acquire your native accent. You may not have fully understood the dialogue, but you’re left with the feeling of having spent months in a far away place. You don’t remember the name of the wine you drank while you were there, but you remember what it tasted like.

Some people want to live abroad. Others like the guided tour. How filmgoers respond to each film will ultimately depend on what kind of learners they are, and how they like to travel through worlds unknown.

In the paper-and-ink universe of Brooklyn poster artists Kayrock and Wolfy, of Kayrock Screenprinting, the indie rock band Oneida sounds like two yellow chickens pecking their way through a hypnotic funhouse background. Or like double monkey gargoyle heads floating against a honeycomb pattern of primary colors. Or serpentine dragons and medieval beasts worthy of fairy tales, slinking through a sea of blood red around a light-blue Care Bear. Basically, the band sounds like anything Kayrock and Wolfy’s prolific imaginations squeeze through their aluminum screens.

Oneida’s lead singer, Bobby Matador, who describes his band as “loud, fast, and repetitive,” says, “One of my favorite posters that Kayrock and Wolfy ever made for us was just a bunch of shit that Kayrock took from Tin Tin comics and a Hawkwind album cover. You really don’t ever know where it’s gonna come from.”

Since they began working together in 2000, the Kayrock duo have spent their days designing and hand-pulling promotional posters in a two-story, graffiti-ensconced warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, precisely saturating archival paper with ink from plastic quart containers, swapping out screens while aligning print registers, and tweaking last-minute designs. On machines cobbled together from old printer parts, Kayrock Screenprinting gives hundreds of bands identity on paper, churning out designs for such groups as Tall Firs, Les Savy Fav, Deerhoof, and Tiger Mountain. This isn’t a matter of glossy, label-sanctioned photos slapped with crass and impersonal “Fill in the Date” footers. Kayrock and Wolfy create original posters for tours and know the bands they are hired to represent on paper, often intimately. The work is always informed by the music, and lovers of both music and art are drawn to them. Their creations are a far cry from the flimsy promotional one-sheets that propagate modern-day music venues and construction site walls. In a world of pummeling advertising, they are rare promotional artifacts that make you slow down and stare.

Matthew Caws, guitarist and lead singer for Nada Surf, recalls how he first came upon the team’s work. “I worked at Earwax, a record store in Williamsburg, for a couple years. More often than not, there was a poster for an upcoming show hanging in the store. I began to notice that the really great ones were all made by Kayrock and Wolfy.”

Kayrock and Wolfy’s reputation has put them at the vanguard of their industry. But that industry is in upheaval. New York poster art is going through a period of remission. Though New York City is spilling into its outer boroughs with artists and musicians, high quality, thoughtfully designed, rock-concert poster art has become less visible than it has been in the past years. A combination of the impractical cost of living and setting up shop in New York, limited venues for public posting of grassroots artwork, and the rise of internet promotions has resulted in diminished exposure for this art form.

“You don’t see a lot of homegrown poster art in New York,” says Matador. “That’s just a fact.”

The earliest American concert posters date back to the 1940s and ‘50s, and were mainly straightforward designs, bold and purposely simple, dominated by negative space. But by the ‘60s, San Francisco had become the Mecca of poster art, thanks mainly to the ongoing poster series commissioned by legendary promoter Bill Graham for the Fillmore Auditorium. The expansive catalog of concert posters created for bands like the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Led Zeppelin gave rise to the first legendary rock poster artists like Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and Stanley Mouse. Their psychedelic designs defined the look of a generation and served as a visual translation of the ideals of ‘60s hippie rock.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that New York developed a signature poster style, and when it finally came around it was connected to punk. Unsurprisingly, it was raw, rich and full of rebellion. New York artist Arturo Vega, who designed the Ramones’ iconic eagle seal, says the punk era was “a fresh start. Like, let’s get rid of all the unnecessary adornments and decorations, and do it the best you can any which way you know how.” The posters from this period embody this gritty DIY attitude with scrawled text and low-res images on smudged, disposable sheets of cheap copy paper in black, white, and shades of gray. Vega recalls that his first poster for the Ramones came from a photo-booth photo. He says, “I just blew up an image I had taken for twenty-five cents.”

Raymond Pettibon’s cartoon-centric, politically charged, anti-authoritarian illustrations for Black Flag carried forward the punk aesthetic into the 1980s. Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore says, “Hardcore flier art culture comes out of Black Flag fliers: The way it was done. The attitude that it had. What it was saying. Pettibon started that. The artists were always so important because they conveyed the vibe of the music and the vibe of the scene.”

In the 1990s, artists began experimenting with screenprinting, injecting craftsmanship and vivid color into an art form that for almost two decades had been defined by the absence of these elements. What was formerly produced by and for the everyman began to take on an air of exclusivity. “Guys like Frank Kozik and Coop and the whole era of ‘90s high-color artists made great posters, but they’re really only made for collection,” Blush says. “The intent of it is not as a mode of communication. It’s lowbrow, but it’s high art.”

The current climate of New York’s art world has only helped to propel posters further in the highbrow direction. They have become less affordable to produce, more difficult to post publicly, and less practical and effective as an event’s sole form of promotion. “When I moved to New York in ’74, people could get a loft for 90 bucks and stay forever,” says Bob George, founder and curator of the Archive of Contemporary Music. Now “you’re competing with every rich person in the world who wants to live in a major city. Your competition for space is the whole world and that makes a big difference.”

With Manhattan open only to the world’s wealthiest, the spirit that propelled poster movements in the past has, as Blush points out, “moved across the bridges.” When it costs $4,500 a month for 900 square feet of city studio space and your screen-printing operation requires a full-scale printing press, 10-foot-tall drying racks, multiple computers, reams of poster-sized paper, and an endless number of screens, you’re simply forced to set up shop out where space is cheaper. Garrison Buxton, co-owner of Peripheral Media Projects—six stops out of Manhattan on the L train—says, “If Peripheral really wanted to ramp up the production end, we probably wouldn’t be doing it in New York, or we would be moving it a little bit further out so we could have more space to get an additional press, and additional racks.”

But even if you cross over the East River, there’s no guarantee you’ll find the space you’re looking for. Standard Motion Design’s Jon Setzen, a graphic designer and poster artist who creates art for Southpaw, a club in Park Slope, Brooklyn, specializes in posters with a worn-in, vintage flavor. His inability to secure sufficient studio space has directly impacted his production methods. Setzen foregoes screen-printing altogether, producing instead high-quality offset prints that he has printed out of state. The outsourcing makes operations like Kayrock Screenprinting all the more valuable, as Kayrock and Wolfy often print runs out of their large Williamsburg studio for artists who aren’t lucky enough to have as much space.

The struggles of the music industry haven’t helped poster art either. With the continuing struggle of major labels, the responsibility for procuring creative promotional materials has shifted to the musicians themselves. But can a New York area band that is paying $50 an hour for rehearsal time, saving money for recording sessions, and wrestling with skyrocketing rent, afford to commission limited-edition silk-screened posters for individual gigs?

It depends. Kayrock quotes a hundred-print run for a standard-size 13-by-20-inch, two-color screenprint at $350, including both design and printing costs, but stresses their willingness to work with in bands’ budgets. Most poster artists, perhaps hoping that their efforts will drum up more future business from the acts their work will promote, are willing to do the same. Jeff Sheinkopf, a poster artist in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, says, “Usually it comes down to about a dollar or two per poster, but if a band says, ‘We’ve got 100 bucks to do this,’ I’ll make it work. I know the posters are gonna be used, I know they’re gonna be up somewhere.”

Even if the financial hurdles are cleared, poster art still faces the problem of finding places to be hung. The New York City Department of Sanitation’s Digest of Codes forbids the posting of stickers, posters, or any other promotional materials on public or privately owned property—that means no posters on lampposts, phone booths, or trash receptacles. And it’s not a smart idea to test your luck. Bands have many cautionary tales of tickets, high fines, and arrests to share. Sheinkopf, who also plays drums for Brooklyn-based band Tigers and Monkeys, says, “I have had police and sanitation workers threaten. Luckily I’ve never actually been ticketed or arrested, but plenty of times I’ve been standing while they watch me pull down every poster that was put up.” Mikey Palms, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Southpaw, tells of an artist who was arrested for putting a sticker up on Second Avenue. “In New York, every inch matters,” he says. “Somebody owns every inch of everything.”

The colonization of Manhattan by chains has converted former poster-friendly blocks like St. Marks Place from a hub of independently owned businesses into an string of low-fat yogurt outlets and chain fast-food joints. As Manhattan becomes shinier and more sanitized, space that was once prime for posting becomes taboo. Starbucks certainly isn’t jumping to tape up screenprints for shows at the Mercury Lounge. George notes, “When you have corporate stores, nicer stores, they have an image to protect, so they are less likely to put up a poster.”

Posting laws in other boroughs reflect the rules in Manhattan, and bands and artists looking to display works that were once part of a guerrilla marketing spirit, now find themselves knocking for permission on the doors of Brooklyn record stores, bookstores, coffee shops and cafes.

Some artists aren’t bothered by the shift in posting etiquette, arguing that the expense and craftsmanship that goes into the posters demands that they be hung in controlled environments. Peter McGouran, founder of East Williamsburg screenprinting studio Polluted Eyeball, says, “When I started to put up fliers I began to think more along the lines of, it’s gotta last longer. I don’t necessarily believe that you have to do as many, just get them to good locations.”

But artists who long for the days they were able to attack the city with one-sheets and a staple gun have had to find new ways to distribute their work. Kayrock and Wolfy, for example, have been experimenting with a system in which they print one or two-color screenprints on medium to light paper stock, and fold these 11-by-17-inch sheets into eighths for distribution around town. With this unique delivery system, Kayrock has created something that is far less disposable than the average flier giveaway. If it ends up being left out on the kitchen table in a Brooklyn apartment and catches the eye of a random visitor, it has accomplished it’s mission. “Everyone who comes to that house will see that poster. It has a role even after advertising a specific event, for us as artists,” Kayrock says.

The obvious place for rock posters is on the walls of the rock clubs. Unfortunately, venue support of the independently produced gig posters has flagged. As the New York rock club scene is slowly consumed by entities like Clear Channel and Bowery Presents, bulletin boards and glass showcases that once boasted bold, event-specific, silkscreens now display too-slick, label-supplied glossies that blend in with other mass-produced visual noise. Venues don’t want to spend the cash to produce materials they can get from the labels for free. Peripheral’s Buxton says, “As long as profit is the sole motivator and it’s just about kind of appealing to mass audiences, the clubs are not a good incubator for really cool, hands-on creativity.”

Even the Knitting Factory, which once actively encouraged original artwork to promote shows, now tends to have a skeletal bulletin board instead. “The people that felt really adamant about posters at the Knit are no longer there,” Wolfy says.

Southpaw is a rare exception. It continues to commission original show posters. “I feel like people want to associate the music with something else,” Palms says. “If it’s either for identification or to function as a reminder or if it’s just an aesthetic, it’s nice to put a poster outside that advertises an evening for your band.” In that spirit,  Southpaw has transformed itself into a veritable rock-art museum, with entire walls given over to posters for previous gigs, for such band as Clinic, OXES and the Beatnuts.

But Palms knows he is in the minority as far as club owners go. “In New York especially, we spend so much time trying to keep our places floating that it’s hard for us to rely on entrepreneurs to actually do something and follow through with it,” he says. “Maybe we feel it isn’t necessary.”

His last point is probably closest to the truth, thanks to the internet. With venue websites that list full concert schedules weeks, and sometimes months in advance, it is hard for a club to justify spending extra money on seemingly inefficient guerrilla marketing tactics. Bands have MySpace pages and newsletters, while blogs like Brooklyn Vegan track the status of popular shows right up to the on-sale date. Often, posters won’t even be ready until long after tickets are sold out.

Lately, concert promoters have shifted toward distributing thumbnail-size images to announce upcoming events. The Village Voice’s “Sounds of the City” blog routinely features jpegs of intricately illustrated and brilliantly Photoshopped New York-based show posters and fliers, many of which will never actually be printed. That these images are still referred to as “posters” and “fliers” suggests the strength of the art form’s roots even as it is swallowed by new technology.

Though Kayrock and Wolfy don’t mind supplying their design jpegs to bands after printing, they never take jobs that aren’t destined for paper. But aspiring poster artists whose names aren’t so intrinsically connected to screenprinting who hope to make money have no such scruples. Sheinkopf, who also designs interactive e-cards for major label acts, says, “You’re not really getting the full picture when you see a poster as a three-inch image, but if I’m going to get an email from a band, I’d rather see a cool, really interesting thing that they’ve had designed than just a text thing saying ‘Tickets on sale tomorrow.’”

Still, three years after a thumbnail image is blasted to an email list, it is long lost in cyberspace. Yet a Kayrock-designed Oneida print, the band’s name in doughnuty yellow letters above a crumbling castle on the edge of a dark gray sea cliff, currently hangs in Brooklyn’s Earwax records and has been hanging in the store since 2005. Taking into account this kind of longevity, the posters being produced now are often commissioned more for their commercial value than their promotional use. “The way our business is going, posters become merchandise,” says Wolfy. “You’re buying into the branding. Like Radiohead—it’s a corporation, not much different.”

The demand from fans for these kinds of tokens is apparent. “Music is such a passionate thing for so many people. To have something visually that you like, that has a name of a band you like from a show you went to that was a good night—it’s a great token of the evening,” says Setzen. As Wolfy says, “Posters are the physical representation of an ephemeral experience.”

Fittingly, poster art has been carving a place for itself on the museum world’s white walls over the past few years. At last year’s “Summer of Love” exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, an entire wall of classic ‘60s psychedelic posters greeted visitors as they entered. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds in its permanent collection posters for bands like the Grateful Dead by such poster artist legends as Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso. And both Raymond Pettibon and Tara McPherson –innovators concert poster design—showed in private galleries in Manhattan in the past year.

But poster artists are driven by more than the chance at art-world stardom. “I like the feeling of having something in my hand,” says Buxton, a sentiment echoed by many of the artists who long for simple tactile pleasures and physical proof of their artistry and hard work in an increasingly digital age. Ultimately, it is the expression of these intangibles that make poster art such a potent and necessary form. As Bob George points out, “I bet in any era, at any time, in any year, you could probably put together a great collection of really nice, classic posters.”