dedicated to performing Shakespeare in public spaces presumably as the
Bard had originally intended. The payment involved was negligible, but
Victore was given carte blanche with the posters, which he rendered
without a hint of Shakespearean pastiche. Instead, as for Henryk
Tomaszewski’s theater posters, Victore rendered everything from image to
type by hand to give a mood of immediacy and serendipity. At the same
time that he did posters for Macbeth,Twelfth Night,Taming of the Shrew,
and Romeo and Juliet, he produced Racismand had copies of them sniped
around town together.Racismmade an indelible impact on some, but
Victore claims that the poster had much more recognition in professional
competitions and design annuals (to which he submitted the work to give it
added visibility) than on the street. Nevertheless, he was not deterred.
The first two posters were done on his own, but, accepting the
adage about strength in numbers, Victore helped found a small alternative
graphics collective along the lines of the Atelier Popular, the graphics arm
of the 1968 French student uprising. Victore and five other young New
York designers joined together to fund, conceive, and produce critical
street graphics.Traditional Family Valueswas the first project done under
the auspices of the group (although entirely his own concept) and his
third poster. Designed to coincide with the 1994 Republican National
Convention, it was an attack on right-wing U.S. Senator Jesse Helms’s call
for a return to so-called family values as a euphemism for his stands on
antihomosexual and antiabortion rights. The image was an appropriated
1950 s-era framed photograph of a real family of Ku Klux Klan members—
Mom, Dad, the kids, and the Imperial Dragon—which, down South, when
it was taken, was as natural as depriving “niggras” of their rights. But in the
1990 s it served as a dark satiric commentary on these new objects of
prejudice, not just in the South but all across America.
The second group project,The Baby Bottle, showed a typical bottle
with measuring markings down the side that read “Whitey,” “Towel Head,”
“Kike,” “Gook,” and other bigoted aspersions about race and ethnicity; it
was not done for a special occasion but, rather, as a reminder in the
tradition of cautionary and instructive schoolroom posters. As Victore
notes, the message was “not to hand down to our children prejudice and
hatred through casual remarks.” Using a baby bottle was an apt symbol to
suggest the matter-of-fact feeding of healthy and unhealthy ideas to
children who accept any and all nourishment. The poster, however, did not
have the splash the group had hoped for. Nor did it grab proverbial hearts
and minds.
Victore admits that although the group was able to get more
posters onto the street, “the collaborative didn’t work as well as I had
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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