Broadside
October 24 –
November 14, 2014
An exhibition based
on modern reinterpretations of the one-sheet broadside. This body of work finds
its place between the ephemeral, commercialized object and something more
lasting, tactile, and intimate or conceptual. The artists investigate a range
of interests including aesthetics, politics, humor, cartoons, poetics, and
social issues.
Of
its many variations there are several elements of the broadside that have
remained constant throughout its history. Whether manifested in an 18th
century ballad or a notice for a public hanging, a 1960’s social activist
leaflet or today’s illustrated poem, the broadside’s consistent traits are that
it is a portable, accessible, and affordable form of communication. It is not surprising that these pieces of
street literature have been a useful tool for artists and artist activists
looking to reach the larger public without limits placed by editors, curators,
and other art market gatekeepers.
Yet
long before these modern uses, broadsheets were a popular form of advertising
in emerging market economies. From the
16th century to the early 19th century broadsides promoted
business, shared news, and decreed laws.
Intended for posting in public places, such as town markets, or to be
read aloud, such sheets paid little attention to visual details. The ephemeral nature of the broadside meant
that most of its history has gone un-archived or otherwise documented. The ones
that survived are typically authorless and align themselves in some ways with oral storytelling traditions, where
information would get lost and altered as it moved from place to place.
Although the printed sheet attempted to nail down facts, it was not until the advent
of newspapers and the novel that one could read the exact same thing as someone
living in another country. Here we can see another constant in the broadside,
that of having space within a given community.
Although an instrument for mass communication, the broadside until the
Industrial Revolution was essentially a local form of expression, contained
within a particular community, social network, and cultural discourse.
In
the early 20th century the significant transformation of mass media
technologies reduced the traditional value of broadside communications. Instead of being products of the industrial print
shop, artists used broadsides as a form of self-publication. They became a favorite medium for the artistic
avant-gardes of the time, in particular
the Dadaists, Futurists, and Russian Constructivists. These artists looked to
advertise their performances, publish their poetry and make known their
manifestos for a new art. The broadside gave the avant-gardes a means to
exchange information outside the scrutinizing eye of established schools of art
and their supporters. While providing a platform for the subversive and sometimes
illegal acts of artists, broadsides also became a platform for the respective
groups’ sense of design aesthetics. The
avant-gardes pushed the broadside far away from its popular and commercial
distribution of prior centuries. Their
community of followers remained small, but their networks became global. Now an
entire “ism” might be communicated in a letter with a broadside enclosure,
uniting avant-garde communities in Poland, for example, with comparable
communities in Japan.
In
the hands of the avant-gardes the broadside was a highly aesthetic object, even
if it remained firmly within the realm of ephemera. These sheets were props for the artists’ messages,
but few considered them works of art in themselves. Only with conceptual art did street ephemera
acquire the cachet of high art object, as in the work of Jenny Holzer in the
1980’s.
Conscious
of the power of advertisement and frustrated with Reagan-era politics, artists/activists like Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robert
Indiana, collectives like the Guerilla Girls and Gran Fury, to name a few,
looked for new ways to tackle such issues. They utilized the broadside as a
text-based image outside and inside the gallery to infiltrate mass media’s
langfuage with their own messages. For these artists the word becomes the material, the line of text the composition. The
result would often be that the look of the message became more important than
the message itself. With this new preciousness applied to the text, they caught
the eye of the art world and began a process of popular canonization; which
included a retrospective reevaluation of works such as those produced by the
Surrealists.
Sign painting and hand lettering by street artists working outside the gallery
circuit also began during the time that conceptual text-based work was gaining
momentum. The advent of the copy machine made it possible for artists to acquire
the now antiquated letterpress printer for cheap and combine letterpress typefaces
with their illustrations and cartoons. This direction, as expressed by groups
such as the Mission School artists in San Francisco, marks a definitive
interest in work that could be easily produced and exchanged. Here the idea of
a gift economy within artist
communities is important to consider in our contemporary, and now multifaceted,
perception of what a broadside can be.
For
artists throughout the past century, “broadside” may not have been a frequently
used term, however, today we can see its influences on self-published sheets
made by artists, activists, and poets. It is a combination of avant-garde
propaganda, social activism, and interest in the material qualities of text
that make up our contemporary definition. All of this, coming together in our
now completely digitalized age, marks
a continued interest artists have in the tactile and immediate nature of the
broadside. Currently other types of self-published material like chapbooks,
zines, and artist books are enjoying a renaissance of sorts. This can be read
as a need to react to our visual-heavy Internet culture. In essence the
ephemeral nature of early broadsides has been replaced with the fast-paced
scroll of a social media or news webpage, and the object fills a desire for a
lasting product that can still be produced cheaply.
The
broadside’s “object-hood” has been exaggerated since its early days, but it
remains a way to establish one’s community through printed
material that can be shared and posted. In that sense contemporary broadsides
are reactions to the universal connectivity of our digital culture. We are
constantly sharing and performing versions of ourselves online yet caught in a
strange web of anonymity that occurs with an overwhelming flow of users.
Perhaps the allure of the self-published object comes from the immediate
declaration of self resulting from the act of its physical exchange.
- Maggie Jensen
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