|
|
| moy |
Posted on Fri, Feb. 06, 2004
OFF THE WALL
A music fan's decades-old passion for rock posters has resulted in a museum exhibition.
By Dan DeLuca
Inquirer Music Critic
Big name bands, among them the Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, are immortalized in “Rock On! The Art of the Music Poster from the 60s and 70s.” The display will open Saturday at Doylestown’s James A. Michener Art Museum.
When Mark del Costello was carefully taking his Mick Jagger poster down at the end of his freshman year at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa., in 1968, he noticed that his roommate had tossed a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster into the trash.
Del Costello thought that foolish, and not only scooped up the Hendrix, but went down the hall to see whether other students had left any Grateful Dead or 13th Floor Elevators posters behind.
Thus was born the collector's sensibility that led the Burlington native and resident to accumulate the rock posters that tell a counter-cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, starting Saturday and running through May 23.
The excellent exhibition, "Rock On! The Art of the Music Poster from the 60s and 70s," gathers more than 100 vintage lithographs, ranging from psychedelic '60s acts such as Moby Grape to punk-era posters for the Ramones and the Clash. It's loaded with iconic images that, in the words of Michener marketing director Amy Lent, "are burned in people's brains, one way or another."
Highlights include: Milton Glaser's Islamic-influenced Bob Dylan poster, which shows the singer's blacked-out face in profile and hair in multicolored curls, originally included in the 1967 album Greatest Hits, Vol. 1; a whole series of Family Dog advertisements for shows in San Francisco done by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, including the "Skeleton and Roses" Dead poster; Beatles portraits by photographer Richard Avedon originally published in Look magazine; and the 1978 Jamie Reid punk placard that put Queen Elizabeth II's face at the center of a Union Jack, with blacked-out eyes and mouth announcing the Sex Pistols' nihilistic intentions.
Del Costello, 53, who teaches film and television production at the Art Institute of Philadelphia in Center City, says he started building his collection at South Jersey haunts such as the Ginza Head Shop in Moorestown Mall and Danny's High Record Shop in Burlington. He'd do the store owners a favor by buying the promotional posters for 25 cents each, before long realizing that his dorm room eye candy would someday be recognized as Art with a capital A.
In the early 1970s, del Costello was a Philadelphia photographer working for Electric Factory Concerts. Later he worked as the film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, then spent three years as director Martin Scorsese's assistant.
The "Rock On!" exhibition is drawn from St. Francis' Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Del Costello gave the museum his music-poster collection in part because "it's 30 feet away from my old dorm, and I wanted kids to be able to see what life was like at a different time."
The show does a good job of covering the three principle periods of rock-poster development in the pre-MTV era, starting with the mind-expanding graphics of the '60s, with the pop art-inspired work Glaser and others, and the work of San Francisco-based artists such as Kelley, Mouse, Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso. In Kelley and Mouse's "Big Brother and the Holding Company," for instance, the acid-tested imagery melds the art nouveau style of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha with Summer of Love psychedelics. "[San Francisco] was like Paris of the 1920s, with Hemingway and Fitzgerald," del Costello says. "All the greatest artists were in the same place."
In the early 1970s, as the music industry grew more corporate, artists went to work on album sleeves and on posters to advertise the arrival of new LPs. "Rock On!" includes Brian Duffy's cover for David Bowie's Aladdin Sane and Gerald Scarfe's Ralph Steadman-esque poster from Pink Floyd's The Wall, not to mention ads for Bruce Springsteen, Kiss and The Who.
And the cultural history continues through the punk era, when rebellion turned graphic arts upside down, as cut-and-paste techniques attacked prog-rock excess in the visual realm much as the Clash, Pistols and Ramones did with their deliberately unpretty music.
The punk-era art, such as a series of CBGBs posters for the obscure bands Bloodless Pharaohs, or Student Teachers and the like, are among the collector's fondest finds. "Those are the ones I'd like to have back, because I lived at CBGBs for a couple of years," del Costello says of the famous New York punk club. "That's the thing with this stuff: There's a cultural history and a lot of the graphics are really cool. But my favorites are the ones I have an emotional attachment to." |
|
|
| MarthaMyDear |
Thank you for this article, moy!!!  I would go to this!!! An old friend of mine, Alan Forbes, is a rock poster artist, etc., and I love this kind of art!!! Anyways, thank you again!!!  PEACE!!!
*** Martha *** |
|
CHAT
ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]
