PF Collection:
Street Art, Part 2

01/04/08

Marian Kester's essay on the punk poster and it's success in the bay area in particular talks about a history of poster making in San Francisco from '60s concert posters to political flyers as well as the relationship between punk and technology. This DEVO quote sums up the latter quite well: "The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be. With synthesizers you can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brain waves, blood flow." The last line of her essay is particularly amusing to me, an SF native: "So—elsewhere, money talks, nobody walks—and the weather stinks." I love it. Leave it to a bay area person to insult the weather in the rest of the country. Hee. But she does have a point, especially back in 1981 when she wrote it: Most cities are car cities and there just isn't enough foot traffic to justify flyering. Plus it's just too damn cold in the winter to walk around wheat-pasting.

Here, in installment two of my post on Street Art: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981, I will show you 9 more posters and give you any information I can find on their makers. See installment one for more history and posters!

Atomic Time, Winston Smith, 1980. Winston Smith is a crazy collage artist guy who made tons of stuff including a zine called Fallout, lots of record covers for The Dead Kennedys and the Alternative Tentacles label, and several books.

Vote. Pepe Moreno. 1980. Pepe is a comic book artist from Spain who co-founded a zine/art-making group in SF called NART.

What Shall I Wear Tonight. Carole Alter. 1979. I can't find Ms/Mr Alter anywhere. If you are she or you know her, let me know what she's doing now.

IRAN I ROCK I ROLL. A Flyer for Target Video. Designed by Raleigh Pardum. 1980. Target Video supplied visuals for bands and hosted a bunch of fun after hours parties until a police raid shut 'em down in 1980. The Man is such a jerk! Anyway, Raleigh Pardum, where are you now? There is, however, a blog about Target Video stuff. Go look!

Two Dead Kennedys flyers here. The left one by Eddie Troia. From a few mentions on the internet, I've managed to hypothesize that Mr. Troia is/was a gay dude, photographer, and resident of SF. The right flyer documents Dead Kennedys' singer Jello Biafra's run for mayor of SF in 1979. He managed to get 3% of the vote on a platform that called for legalized squatting, a ban on downtown auto use, making businessmen wear clown suits from the hours of 9 to 5, and the rehiring of laid-off city workers as panhandlers to restore funds cut from the city budget. The flyer was designed by Bruce Slesinger.

Flying Saws. Artbreakers. 1979. Design by Richard Stutting. Richard Stutting/Artbreakers made a lot of posters and record covers.

Today a Part of Me Died. Will Shatter. 1979. I love this one. It's by Will Shatter from Flipper. Sadly, the rest of him died of a heroin overdose in 1987, two years after his great band broke up. :(

X-ILES. 1980. Another good one by Pepe Moreno.

The Blowdryers. James Stark (photo also by him). 1979. James Stark was a photographer who hung around the punk scene in SF and took pictures. His site is sort of a mess but there're some good quotes and some pixelly photos to check out.