Propaganda
Art ChantryWhen Art Chantry (b. 1954 ) started
designing posters in the late 1970 s, a time
when corporate design budgets were high and
slickness was the vogue, he appropriated
found art and printed his work on cheap
paper. The untutored look was a preference
born of a youthful interest in surfer and hot
rod culture, psychedelia, comic books, and
monster magazines. As an adult, Chantry
revisited these pop culture influences as the
basis for his personal iconography. Sampling
vernacular imagery was an old idea, dating
back to 1920 s dada and 1960 s psychedelia, but
Chantry was not being nostalgic. He distilled
the salient points and developed a cut-and-
paste style that reveled in quirky typography,
silly lettering, and absurd collage. “I’m
basically an artist masquerading as a graphic
designer,” he explained. “I have a degree in
painting, though my teacher used to scream
because I put type on my paintings.” When
he left school in 1978 the punk scene was in full pitch, and scores of posters
by seasoned unprofessionals were plastered everywhere. “I thought, well,
here is someplace I can fit in,” he continued.
Chantry defines commercial art as America’s true folk art, not so
much the work of individuals as the work of culture itself. “This seems to
be kind of an aberrant idea to the design community, because it rejects the
‘great man’ theory of history,” he said. “Although certain individuals are
great practitioners, the things I tend to champion are subculture design
styles that have been lost or forgotten.” He found a fresh vein of vernacular
gold in a lost industrial graphic design style that was prevalent from 1945 to
1955 in tool catalogs and trade journals for the steel, nuclear, and other
heavy industries. He designed advertisements and catalogs for an
alternative Seattle arts group by lifting entire pages from old precision
machine and tool catalogs and adding only new type. Like the 1960 s pop
artists, Chantry paid homage to commercial and industrial art, but unlike382