Made in L.A.

With bold, black typography floated above washes of Day-Glo color, the Colby poster evinces a thrifty pragmatism: it is designed to catch the eye of those who pass by, in car or by foot, and then deliver its contents to them as directly as possible. Typically employed to promote neighborhood events such as street fairs, gun shows, small-scale musical concerts and so on, the Colby Poster Printing Company has also served as an important resource to a broad range of Los Angeles-based artists, from Allen Ruppersberg (who transcribed Allan Ginsberg’s Howl onto Colby posters in his work, The Singing Posters, 2003) to Eve Fowler (who subjected Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons to a similar treatment in her work, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, [2011–12]).¹Perhaps most significantly, the Colby company has enabled artists easily marooned within the space of the studio or the “white cube” to engage the life of the street. As such, their posters must be considered a form of public art, and one perfectly suited to the Los Angeles context in its inherent transience and disposability.

The Colby poster is by now a regional emblem, as the curators of the Hammer Museum’s first biennial, Made in L.A. (summer 2012), acknowledged by branding the entire show with the Colby aesthetic. The familiar graphics of the event’s Colby-designed posters found their way onto the cover of the exhibition catalog and a range of promotional items such as T-shirts, tote bags, and coffee mugs. This made perfect sense: These graphics have come to stand for Los Angeles, the city as such, and more specifically, Los Angeles art.

On the most basic level, the representative status of the Colby poster stems from its ubiquity. Since the founding of the printing company in the years immediately after World War II, its products have become an integral part of the local landscape, right alongside the likewise unavoidable palm trees, customized cars, and beach wear. All these various signs and clichés of the city share a capacity to be read at a distance; it is perhaps the most crucial condition of survival in Los Angeles, and it has been Colby’s mandate from the start. Above all, the company has served as a means for broadcasting messages, and in this respect it shares something with the city’s information and entertainment industries as well, even while operating at a much shorter range.

Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye

The above title of the Ferus Gallery’s 1957 inaugural exhibition provides an apt description of the Colby posters, and of the way that they work in concert with their context. As noted, they are made to stand out from the landscape and to attract our attention, but at the same time they are also made to fit in to the landscape, and to define it as “new.” These “objects” are “demanding of the eye” because they have a message to communicate, and they exploit the givens of their environment for purposes of communication. Whether the posters are mounted to chain-link fences, construction site walls, or trees and electrical poles, they inevitably treat their surroundings as an extension of the typeset page, thereby transforming the space of the city itself into a massive text to be read. Places where one must either stop moving, such as traffic signals, or at least slow down, such as freeway on-ramps and off-ramps, are especially opportune in this regard. Even so, motion, momentum, velocity, and the at once distracted and searching states of mind that these inspire, are essential to the posters’ function. They affect our experience of the city precisely because they are so adept at turning its own working conditions to their own ends.

The new-ness of the “new landscape” of Los Angeles was noted early on by Ed Ruscha, whose seminal bookwork Every Building on the Sunset Strip(1966) unfolds as a visual essay on this city’s architecture of mobility. If, aside from the title on its cover, this proto-Conceptual publication dispenses with any accompanying text, it is simply because the two-and-a–half-mile stretch of street that Ruscha subjects to photographic scrutiny is already replete with language. Words on street signs, storefronts, bus benches, posters, and billboards infiltrate every view as a matter of course. Ruscha chose to document the Sunset Strip with a motorized camera while passing through it by car, in response to the presumption, implicit in his subject matter, of a mobilized viewer. According to the artist, then, the experience of the “new landscape” is one of reading, or better yet, a scanning of signs, in which not only the eye and mind but also one’s entire body and being are engaged.

When, in 1968, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, along with a group of their students from Yale, headed westward to research the critically maligned or simply ignored form of what they would term the “autoscape” of Las Vegas, they began their fact-finding mission with a visit to Ruscha’s Los Angeles studio. Learning from Las Vegas, the book that resulted from their efforts, is very much a theoretical elaboration on the heuristic lessons of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, for here as well the “new landscape” is assigned a communicative function above all. Moreover, as an emerging model for their own architectural practices, this vernacular construct is characteristically postmodern in its indifference to space as the central concern of their discipline. “This architecture of styles and signs is anti-spatial,” they write; “it is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and the landscape.”²

The “autoscape” unfolds before the auto-borne beholder as a succession of signs, registering on the eye somewhat like a length of film and a line of text. To see it is to read it, and vice versa, and from the confusion of iconic and symbolic codes that marks the design of both the Sunset and Las Vegas strips, a new kind of literacy develops, at once superficial and immersive. Deep reading is thwarted by the “anti-spatial” character of the “new landscape,” which appears as a strictly surface-level “store-front plane,” in the words of Ruscha, a row of self-advertising fronts that solicit our attention from either side of the street. “A store-front plane of a Western town is just paper,” states Ruscha in an often quoted 1972 interview with David Bourdon, “and everything behind it is just nothing.”³Or, put another way, whatever exists in back—and obviously there is something there—is cancelled by these paper-thin faÇades, which push out, press in, and enfold the viewer in a perspectival chute of semiosis.

In a “store-front plane,” then, the Colby poster is perfectly at home: paper on paper, signs on signs. It fits snugly into the “new landscape” because it is comprised of exactly the same stuff, and yet, as noted, the first rule of this occupancy is to stand out. It is a condition the poster shares with every other constituent part of its surroundings, and with which it must therefore compete. This might seem contradictory, but contradiction is no less inherent in the “new landscape” than confusion.

The Novel That Writes Itself

The motorist glides past a succession of messages aligned on either side of the street. These are both iconically viewed and symbolically read, but without adding up to any coherent meaning, for just as they manage to cancel any sense of the real spatial depth of the built and natural landscape behind them, so too do they seek to cancel out one another. In order to shine, the competition must be eclipsed. However, what becomes evident in the absence of a narrative through-line is a signifying ecology. If we were to compare the message-lined street to a novel, for example, it is one that continuously corrects and recomposes itself, and again, not in single-minded pursuit of a higher unity, but as the mindless outcome of the now symbiotic, now antagonistic interaction of its elementary particles. Whole sections fall away like vestigial tails when they can no longer adapt to the changing demands of the totality, only to be replaced by newer, more resilient textual mutations. No doubt, Allen Ruppersberg derived his idea for The Novel That Writes Itself, an ongoing project begun in 1978, from observation of just such “street life.” Conceived as a partly autobiographical book about the life of the artist with the supporting roles (of colleague, collector, critic, etc.) put up for sale, it was later executed in the form of Colby posters and thereby returned to its source. Even when this artist’s work is encountered inside the space of the gallery, as it generally is, it remains on speaking terms with the language of the street.

It is worth noting, in this regard, that Ruppersberg’s aforementioned transcription of the poem Howl is phonetic. The words that appear on his Colby poster version of Allan Ginsberg’s paean to a lost generation are printed in such a way as to elicit their sounding, and here, alongside the already noted confusion of image and text that is endemic to the “new landscape” of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, we may add the confusion of written and spoken language. Accordingly, the reversal of the historical progression from an oral culture to one of literacy—that once foundational insight of media studies—is at once acknowledged and enacted by this work. Ruppersberg’s posters hold their place as transitional objects, segues between two modes of information processing and, by extension, two orders of being.

As is made evident from the earliest days of our linguistic training, to speak back the word that is spoken to you is to commit it to memory. And from the example of the nursery rhyme, we may further deduce that the meter and rhyme schemes of poetic structure covertly serve as a memory aid, to inculcate whole sequences of words in the mind of their recipient so that they may in turn be repeated. In this way, phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically, the poem points to an archaic stage of communications, whereas the novel is entirely a product of the so-called “Gutenberg Galaxy.” As Walter Benjamin suggests in “The Storyteller,” “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn,” but in the age of print media, this one-to-one connection of speaker and listener is severed.⁴ “The birthplace of the novel is the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion…”⁵ The novelist’s essential solitude is reproduced by that of the reader, who likewise withdraws from the world with his books. Where does this leave the poster, itself a product of the age of print, but one that calls for collective reception, out in the open? Early on, at least, it was thought to possess revolutionary powers of reconnection, enabling the return of communicated experience and knowledge to the social sphere. To wit, this statement from El Lissitzky:

The traditional book was torn into separate pages, enlarged a hundredfold, colored for greater intensity, and brought into the street…⁶

The advent of the poster heralded the destruction of the book, and with it a whole bourgeois culture of interiority. In 1926, when El Lissitzky proclaimed the onset of his new order, Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” abuzz with the technologies of “secondary orality,” was still a ways off, but already it was taking shape on the horizon.⁷

Ruppersberg’s “novel that writes itself” concerns the multitude rather than the isolated subject; it is written, read, and then rewritten en masse. In the gallery, this “novel” is displayed all at once in a dense grid of posters hung side-to-side and floor-to-ceiling, a democratic profusion that is greeted much like the “store-front plane”: distractedly, in passing, and with an eye that skims along instead of probing. Still, here and there, something—a statement, a slogan, a saying—stands out. To read it is to speak it, and in turn to memorize it. A text that comes apart in this way into a collection of brief attention-begging phrases inevitably turns concrete, poetic.

Concrete Poetry

However, artists in America today do not as a rule command a broad public, and very few would imagine, as El Lissitzky once did, that their work could possibly serve the cause of revolution. Especially in Los Angeles, it would seem that the principal affect of the street poster is profound alienation. It is one thing to draw from the public at large a potential buyer for one’s goods—as most Colby posters are designed to do—but it is quite another to aspire to generalized understanding. Judging from the evidence on hand in the Colby company files, their artistic clientele has flatly renounced any such hopes from the outset. Their works are for the most part complex and cryptic, wholly accessible to only a small group of like-minded individuals, and mostly baffling, or at least challenging, to the rest. For starters, the poster that has nothing to sell but the words it is made of constitutes a troubling infraction of the economic order, and when these words are themselves troubling, that doubly exacerbates the problem. Problematic is exactly what most of these artist-designed posters want to be, however. What they seek to communicate across the board is a question that becomes lodged in memory in order to disturb: “What is this?”

As with Ruppersberg’s Howl, Eve Fowler’s recent series of Colby posters proceed from a torn-apart book. Here, the source is Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, from which the artist has culled a series of stand-alone quotes such as “a difference of very little difference” and “the difference is spreading.” When their context is known, such statements may perhaps be understood as a comment on gay identity and the way it is processed within the straight world. Further, one may assume that Fowler’s appropriation of Stein reflects critically on Ruppersberg’s appropriation of Ginsberg, which, on Ruppersberg’s part, occurs without much concern for sexual politics. The works of both of these artists conduct a sensitive dialogue with literature, and with each other, but because they take the form of street posters, both also implicitly address a much larger field of operations where the various intricacies of their interactions will simply be vaporized. For an audience unfamiliar with either Stein or Ginsberg, Ruppersberg or Fowler, or their respective sexual orientations, whatever remains to be read on these posters—that is, the questions or problems they pose—will be instantly dismissed from thought, or else gain an insidious purchase.

Other works are less equivocal, aiming for a direct hit to the psyche. The relentlessly antagonistic exclamations committed to print by Cali Thornhill DeWitt, for instance, openly aspire to traumatize or incite their viewer/reader. “Burn It Down” reads one text from 2012 against a color field that transitions from green at the bottom to yellow and then red at the top. Behind the words, these colors summon up the vision of a burning landscape, a grassy plain in flames that turn the sky above a hellish hue. At the same time, these colors relate to those of so many African flags, and thereby place the destructive command of the foregrounded words squarely in the context of racial uprising. One thinks of Los Angeles’s long history of racial inequity and turmoil, from the Watts riots to the events that followed the police beating of Rodney King, but even as these readings are insistently prompted, they cannot be assigned to the poster itself, which remains to the end strategically noncommittal. Who exactly is being incited to do the burning, and what exactly is “it” that is to be burned? Significantly, the color palette of DeWitt’s work has not been composed by the artist, but rather pulled from the standardized menu of the Colby company as an option more generally reserved for the promoters of reggae festivals and the like. In their artistic repurposing, such transparent attempts to address one’s social constituency are rendered conspicuous, and in the process, problematized.

Even when the message appears to be straightforward, benign, ingratiating, or emotionally generous, as with a poster by Emilie Halpern that reads “I Love You” (Valentine, 2012), doubts immediately arise as to an underlying motive. Again, one can only wonder who is addressing whom, who this “I” and “You” might in fact be. And if these terms are to remain essentially empty, then why are they being so intimately related? At first glance, the words might recall a past moment of hippie communion, but in their resolutely non-psychedelic treatment—Halpern bypassed Colby’s Day-Glo spectrum in favor of sober black on white—they also suggest the ensuing corporate takeover of a countercultural cachet. Aside from these desultory observations, however, what this poster provokes above all is a structural take. It is a two-sided work, with the letters that comprise its message evenly divided between recto and verso, so that neither side can be read without help from the other. If any real “love” is being celebrated here, then it is that of ink for paper and paper for ink.

Adios

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message,” would read very differently on a Colby poster than the printed page on which it was composed.⁸When it is bound between the covers of a book, the paper ground tends to disappear behind the words, allowing their meaning to pass swiftly through matter and into thought. On the poster, by contrast, the medium is this medium, and the message is this message. And in order to receive this message, one must be physically there, in the presence of the poster itself. This seemingly obvious point bears repeating today, when so much of the information that we receive arrives, dematerialized, through the electronic ether. In the wake of the so-called “digital turn,” the insistent thing-ness of the Colby print stands out that much more sharply. One will notice, for instance, that it is endowed with a remarkably substantial cardboard ground, no doubt to withstand the corrosive elements that it must contend with outside, on the street. Moreover, observed more closely—as on the walls of a gallery, let’s say—it is revealed that this underlying thickness serves to support, without buckling, the generous coats of colored ink deposited atop. These layers of pigment—screened, sprayed, and letter-pressed onto the ground—constitute a richly textured surface, a patina recording the hands-on process of the poster’s production, a palimpsest.

In the increasingly dematerialized “autoscape,” where advertising is applied to buses and buildings in thin coats of adhesive film and billboards are animated with computer screen pixels, the Colby poster has become a bulky artifact of a prior age of communications. This state of being constitutes its final communiqué, and it is one that fulfills the promise with which it emerged: the promise of aesthetic redemption. More than ever before, these “objects on the landscape demanding of the eye” assume in and of themselves the quality of art, and it is this very condition of aestheticized thing-ness that presently threatens their continued occupation of the sphere of everyday life. To a greater or lesser extent, the artists that collaborated with Colby all saw it coming, and, right from the start, all were instrumental in taking it there. In the world of art, as opposed to everyday life, it comes as no surprise that what is most essential to the thing itself will pass largely unnoticed and will not be fully revealed until the end. A foundational insight of the aesthetic theory passed down from Romanticism is that radiant beauty is only attained in the shadow of death. “Adios” reads the very last poster that C. R. Stecyk III produced with the Colby Poster Printing Company, which closed its doors to the public on January 1, 2013. This stoic salute from the artist to a medium that, throughout his career, he had identified as his own, is effectively returned by the poster itself. “Adios” it says back to the artist and to whoever else happens across it, secure in the knowledge that when it has disappeared from our sight it will be finally recognized: “So that’s what that was!”

Jan Tumlir is an art writer who lives in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor of X-TRA; his articles appear regularly in Artforum, Aperture, Flash Art, and occasionally in Art Review and Frieze. He has written catalog essays for such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Jorge Pardo, Pae White, and most recently, Cyprien Gaillard. Tumlir teaches art history and critical theory at Art Center College of Design. His book on the artist Matthew Brannon, Hyenas Are…, was published by Mousse in 2011.

Tumlir co-curated, with Christopher Michlig and Brian Roettinger, In the Good Name of the Company, an exhibition of artworks and ephemera produced by or with the Colby Poster Printing Company. The exhibition took place at ForYourArt gallery, Los Angeles, from February 23 to March 23, 2013.