Kozik’s taste for ’50s ads, pulp fiction and girly mags has worked well for him. Now 32 and living in San Francisco, he designs a hundred posters a year, most of them promoting concerts by the bands he loves: Killdozer, Sonic Youth, the Melvins. Maybe promote’s not the right word. Kozik makes garish collages that dump pop-culture icons in mildly disturbed settings – the Archies on a pie-faced bender, Fred Flintstone dressed for bondage. Along with about two dozen other artists who make meager livings off concert posters, he provides the visuals for mid-1990s rock and roll consumed with anger and irreverence. Their posters hang on telephone poles and bedroom walls and in CD shops in the big cities and college towns where bands play. Now galleries, too, are in on the act, brokering deals between concert promoters and artists, then keeping a share of the posters to sell for profit. The rarest Koziks are going for $250.
Others are at least as sophisticated. Derek Hess, 29, a Cleveland artist, uses a scratching technique borrowed from lithography to give his posters an edgy, sketched immediacy uncommon in conventional silk-screen and offset printing. Years of art-school anatomy classes shine through in the kinetic, often menacing central figures. T.A.Z., a Los Angeles design team, prints with thick enamel inks that give their trademark wagging tongues an almost 3-D look. By laying down several layers of ink, they ““embed’’ details – say, underneath the pantsuit of a Japanese-style superhero – that become visible only when viewed from an angle.
The new talent represents the second coming of the rock poster. In the ’60s, artists working for impresarios like Bill Graham of San Francisco created the psychedelic poster school. Its mystic figures and swirling, fluid type recruited for the counterculture as much as sold tickets. Today’s posters are more anabolic steroid than LSD, with muscled antiheroes and full-figured vixens tattooed in neon clarity. Unlike the giant offset print runs of the late 1960s, production now is typically a seat-of-the-pants operation in which posters, drawn with the generous help of Macintosh computers, are silk-screened by hand in the garage.
Which is where some people think they should stay. For many, the posters are simply loud and obnoxious. To spruce up for a summit of Asian heads of state last fall, the city of Seattle stripped bare every affixable surface. Local business people found they didn’t miss the posters a bit. This Tuesday police begin enforcing a new ban on public postering, an ordinance hotly contested by the huge local band scene. Seattle’s utility poles might just shrink back to their natural circumference, but those of plenty of other cities will stay nice and plump. You can’t expect the sick artists who once put a hypodermic in the Easter Bunny’s hand to respect a sign saying post no bills.
