And now Experience Music Project has chosen close to 250 of the posters advertising band appearances to mount its exhibit "Paper Scissors ROCK: 25 years of Northwest Punk Poster Design." The posters - which represent the work of almost 60 artists - came from individual collections and from EMP's collection of 30,000 to 40,000 poster "artifacts," said exhibit curator Jacob McMurray. "I've worked at EMP since 1994, and I was in charge of getting a lot of these artifacts." McMurray's job included retrieving posters from telephone poles and making arrangements to get posters from record stores after the bands appeared, he said. "I was trying to get a good representation across the spectrum," McMurray said of the different styles of poster art. McMurray added that he also wanted to achieve a balance between the music scenes in Seattle and Portland, Ore. Including Portland in the mix was important, he said, because that city and Seattle were part of an Interstate 5 band circuit that stretched from Los Angeles to Vancouver, Canada. Struggling bands without a lot of money 25 years ago were hard-pressed to get the word out that they were playing gigs. For one thing, advertising options were limited. "Back in the early days, there wasn't a [now-defunct] Rocket or a Stranger," McMurray noted. "The only free way was putting posters on telephone poles." Bands and musicians featured in the EMP exhibit include Vomit Launch, Soundgarden, Butthole Surfers, John Lee Hooker, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Cheep Trick, among many, many others. The show includes a large collage of posters and individual examples of the genre. Sometimes band members designed their own posters, including the exhibit's poster designed by Kurt Cobain to advertise a Nirvana booking in the late 1980s. Other well-known poster artists featured in the exhibit include Jeff Kleinsmith, Jacob Cobey, Art Chantry, cartoonist Linda Barry and Portland-based Mike King. Photocopied posters on telephone poles appealed to a punk audience, McMurray said. "But in 1994, an interesting thing happened," he added. Sub Pop hit the music scene, punk rock emerged as a genre, and the Seattle City Council instituted a telephone-pole poster ban. The poster ban left stores as one the few remaining venues for self-promotion, but there was a problem. "Most stores wouldn't hang up crappy 11-by-17s, but they would hang up silk screens," McMurray said. "Portland never had the [poster] ban, so 11-by-17s became the norm." The shift from gritty photocopies to slick, multicolored, silk-screened versions meant that, for the first time, band posters in Seattle became a commodity in the art world, he said. "That really spurred the silk-screen revolution in Seattle." Still, poster artists didn't take themselves too seriously. "The grunge thing and punk rock in general was sort of tongue-in-cheek," according to McMurray. "To a certain extent, it was making fun of itself." While some of the bands and poster artists may have taken a light-hearted approach to themselves, the exhibit at EMP takes a critical look at an art form that deserves closer examination.
"Paper Scissors ROCK: 25 years of Northwest Punk Poster Design" continues at the Experience Music Project, 2901 Third Ave., through Sunday, Sept. 7. Tickets/information: 770-2702, www.emplive.com.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com [[In-content Ad]]
