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ART CHANTRY WORKS IN AN INDUSTRIAL SECTION OF Seattle, across the street from a Hostess factory blasting the scent of chocolate on Mondays. His studio is a neatly organized room that opens onto a motel-like terrace linking offices belonging to other designers and artists. When clients arrive, they find the street door locked, but they know to shout up to Chantry to let them in. If he’s expecting a visitor, he turns down the music – usually something old that he’s chosen from his shelves of vinyl, a collection so big and obscure that Jello Biafra, of the now-defunct punk band the Dead Kennedys, sometimes calls looking for an album. Or he interrupts a conversation – he’s a liquid, hyperbolic, intensely engaging talker – to cock an ear, waiting for the sound of his name to float up from the parking lot.

“graphic design is a folk art whose best practitioners are often anonymous and whose best examples may be deceptively rough or naive”

The building, a former hat factory, houses the School of Visual Concepts. Since 1985, Chantry has taught poster design here to aspiring graphic designers. His students know him as a legend – a guy who even when he was young (he’s forty-six now) was internationally famous and a curmudgeon. Chantry tells the story of waiting for people to come to his very first class. He was sitting in a chair facing the lectern with his portfolio propped up next to him. The first student, Jesse Reyes, settled into an adjacent seat and, figuring that he was talking to a classmate, began chatting about Chantry’s reputation for crankiness. Chantry was impressed. Reyes became his protégé and good friend. And like many of Chantry’s protégés and friends, Reyes ultimately left Seattle for new opportunities, while Chantry remained behind, hugging the city as if it were a rancid security blanket that he both loves and wishes someone would pry out of his hands and burn.

Chantry’s world is colored by paradox. This is probably why he has earned his other reputation – as one of the most gifted graphic designers in America – through collage, the art of taking things that don’t go together and combining them seamlessly. He uses design to conquer incompatitbilities that engage him in life, though one senses that his daily division of the world into neat hemispheres of good and evil, attraction and repulsion, is a kind of artifice in its own right.

This, for instance, is how he described Dallas, where he gave a lecture several years ago: “That place is God and Devil. That was where it became obvious that all the guys with the suits and ties hate me and all the guys dressed casually like me. It’s that simple.” Once, after speaking at a design conference in California, he was shown his audience’s written responses. The pages formed two piles, he insists, “exactly the same height. One pile said, ‘Best I’ve ever seen. Fucking fantastic. The guy’s a genius.’ The other said, ‘I want my money back. What a fucking waste of time. This guy should be killed.’”

For Chantry, graphic design is a folk art whose best practitioners are often anonymous and whose best examples may be deceptively rough or naive. Packed with meaning that is fully transparent only to a discrete slice of culture, such work nevertheless has an energy and directness that slicker souls find irresistible. Who makes it? Hot-rod pinstripers, layout artists at obscure trade magazines, printers wrestling with technology, and untrained sign painters. It might emanate from cultural niches where surfers bob over waves or punk rockers build and smash instruments. Often its creators are unconscious that their split-fountain rainbows of ink and gaudily painted notices have anything potent to contribute to the world. They’re just doing their day jobs, or scratching an itch to be expressive, while their graphic forms mutate across the landscape, from tattoos to vans rusting in vacant lots to video arcades to rows of drugstore greeting cards. Often such forms make their way to the bastions of corporate design culture: magazine ads, book jackets, VH-1. Shedding their origins, they gain greater authenticity for seeming to spring out of nowhere. They are born, Chantry says, of popular culture itself.

“it’s individuals striving against really oppressive odds who make graphics interesting, not guys in universities. ”

And yet they have a provenance. Chantry likes to trace the roots of graphic pop icons, from the peace sign to the happy face, to demonstrate that real people are behind images that seem to well up from such indistinct places as “the fringe” and “the zeitgeist.” In the meantime, he charges, a few creative geniuses unfairly get the credit for inventing contemporary design language. He strongly opposes the Great Man Theory of history, an offshoot of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that “all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” Rather than credit innovations in contemporary design to dwarves standing on the shoulders of graphic giants like Herbert Bayer or Paul Rand, he prefers to think of conventional design heroes as Gullivers propped up by, and taking credit from, hordes of obscure Lilliputians. This is not to say that he dismisses the contributions of revered designers and artists – Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Lester Beall are a few who reside in his personal pantheon – but that he is more interested in people whom history has overlooked.

Take Harley Earl, for instance. Though not a folk artist by any measure, Earl did put the tail fin on the Cadillac when he was design director of General Motors in the fifties – in Chantry’s view a triumphant conflation of science, industry, and art. It galls Chantry that historians slight Earl, who also introduced “chrome-laden behemoths, two-tone paint schemes, wraparound windshields, [and] the hardtop,” while sanctifying designers at institutions like Bauhaus, Ulm, and Cranbrook: “They try to credit Wolfgang Weingart with new wave punk graphics,” Chantry says, “but it’s individuals striving against really oppressive odds who make graphics interesting, not guys in universities. They sit around and talk about stuff that other people have done and think they have discovered it.” His reverence for the insufficiently acknowledged is not just theoretical but a central feature of his work. It therefore represents the starting point from which his own story must be told.

Chantry has achieved prominence and spawned dozens of imitators by producing riffs on history – in graphics that show a special affection for obscure or outmoded forms. These designs speak on several levels. They contain inside references to Seattle’s culture, where for twenty years they have helped to galvanize and document the city’s music, theater, and art scenes. (“Chantry isn’t just a figure in the development of what is known as the Seattle style, he’s the reason there is such a thing,” the Seattle art critic Regina Hackett wrote in 1993.) And they pay homage to old, neglected masters of popular culture in a style that would be too hastily labeled retro. Challenged by the low budgets typical of his clients – garage-band record labels, local clubs, nonprofit social groups, small theater companies – he has explored and exploited low technology’s creative potential. Because his goal is to self-consciously perpetutate forms from the past, he is an archaeologist as well as an artist, preserving as well as reinventing artifacts of design, especially ephemera that others would not consider worth keeping: comic books, pornography, carnival graphics, ads found in the backs of old trade magazines, pictures of hucksters and long-forgotten politicos.

“He uses the word subculture to refer to tribal creative groups that share a language, a set of heroes, and a body of historical knowledge...Skateboarders are an example, so are drag queens and drag racers”

Chantry’s main source of collage materials is subcultures. He uses the word subculture to refer to tribal creative groups that share a language, a set of heroes, and a body of historical knowledge considered arcane to outsiders. Skateboarders are an example. So are drag queens and drag racers. Once upon a time letterpress printers and typographers formed subcultures too, he says, before digital technology wiped out most of their businesses. These fraternal orders (they are in fact composed primarily of men) tend, moreover, to be blue collar with little hope of upward mobility, and their members practice tricks of economy that sometimes indirectly produce novel aesthetic effects. Whether their instrument is a car engine, a guitar, or a letterpress, members of subcultures know its mechanics; to take apart and rebuild – to customize – is a form of expression as well as the low-budget key to greater speed and precision.

Although Chantry has made no formal study of subcultures, his characterizations resemble those offered by cultural studies experts. In her introduction to The Subcultures Reader, coeditor Sarah Thornton distinguishes subcultural groups in general terms: they are perceived as “oppositional.” They are “envisaged as disenfranchised, disaffected and unofficial. Their shadowy, subterranean activities contrast dramatically with the ‘enlightened’ civil decencies of the ‘public.’” They are “generally seen as informal and organic.” They are defined by what they are not: “The emphasis is on variance from a larger collectivity who are invariably, but not unproblematically, positioned as normal, average, and dominant. Subcultures, in other words, are condemned to and/or enjoy a consciousness of ‘otherness’ or difference.”

Chantry’s observation that the members of subcultures demonstrate a mastery over materials and tools echoes writings by the scholars John Clarke and Dick Hebdige, who perceive a link between subcultures and bricolage, or the practice of building with whatever materials come to hand. (The terms derives from the French word bricoler, “to putter about,” and won its theoretical status in the writings of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who used it to describe the way in which “primitive man” made sense of the physical world.”)4 One can see why Chantry dwells on this aspect of subcultures. Constructing from mongrel parts or improvising with found objects is effectively a style of collage, but not collage as it is mostly practiced in the computer age. Computers allow designers to manipulate information in countless ways, yet the final results are rarely translated exactly as they are viewed on the monitor. Computers are instruments of hypothetical desire, whereas the subcultures that Chantry admires often come from a precomputer era of observable moving parts with an obvious relationship to the sounds and images they generate in the physical world. By assimilating the methods as well as the products of old subcultures, he helps to promote them to a younger generation of cultural outlaws – nineties garage bands, say, whose members are infatuated with the campy pop graphics of sixties surfers. His work is more than homage in that he inserts himself into a tradition, which he furthermore mediates, exaggerating and redefining the antiquated styles and images he resurrects.

“Chantry doesn’t work on a computer. His tools are the printing press and the photocopier (a kind of press, after all, in its power to manufacture multiple images), and he knows how to use them.”

I learned about printing technology by doing it: just going to press checks, talking to those guys, watching or thinking. It’s pretty logical. The press puts down one layer of color at a time. That’s all you basically need to know. The rest of it is how you manipulate the way the ink hits the paper, and everything I do is aimed at that process. Nothing really exists until it comes off the press. That’s your palette and brush and pigment right there.

His results would be nearly impossible to achieve with more sophisticated technology, for he aims to reproduce the look of erosion and haphazardness. For all its flexibility, the computer allows only the most skillful graphic designers to represent accidents digitally as unpremeditated gestures. Just as the writer who works on-screen never reveals the inked-out lines that indicate the tussle of finding the mot juste, so the designer confined to digital tools can’t help covering up a succession of revisions. But printing is full of accidents that one cannot erase, and the degradation achieved by alternately reducing and blowing up type on a photocopier (a standard Chantry technique) produces an otherwise hard-won texture of decay. Chantry, like the Dada artists, prizes the paradox of carefully controlled spontaneity to match the exuberance of the original designs he puts in his collages, and he captures ephemeral states in part to blend old and new material. Spontaneous messes are desirable if they can be harnessed into precise form. Here, for instance, is how he created a promotional poster for the Philadelphia-based clothing chain Urban Outfitters: “We took all the paper and we threw it on the ground in the silk-screen shop. Then we took it out and threw it onto the street and let cars run over it. Then we silk-screened onto it”).

Chantry developed a mastery of his tools also for budgetary reasons. Because he couldn’t afford professional typesetting early in his career, he learned typography by cutting out printed letterforms and pasting them down one by one with a glue stick. He continues to be famous among his peers for his vast collection of old press type – the stick-down letters amateurs once relied on for professional-looking text. Chantry still uses the stuff, especially when it’s dried up and chunks of the letters have broken off. He refined his color sense by creating his own separations, preparing the color plates to be combined on press, a step normally left to experts. He knows design to its bones. Though he rarely illustrates from scratch, he is a skillful draftsman, and his cleverly elaborate music packaging reveals that he is as comfortable working in three dimensions as in two.

“I have this theory about the continental U.S., Chantry explains, the corners are where people who don’t fit in go to find new life, and they keep piling up in the corners because there’s no place farther they can go.”

Marginality is a large theme for him. Subcultures are defined by words like alternative and underground, evoking both sideways tributaries from an American mainstream and immersion into unsettling, even dangerous, below-grade activities. One of his clients, a compiler and producer of small local bands, even assume the name Subterranean Pop, later Sub Pop, to signal its interest in alternative music. His hometown breeds extremism, Chantry believes, the most recent evidence being the protests that disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization talks in Seattle and the city’s decision to cancel its 2000 New Year’s festivities out of the fear or terrorism. As in other lovely, low-density western regions, this one has attracted utopians from both ends of the political spectrum, activists and isolationists, communitarians and libertarians. “I have this theory about the continental U.S.,” Chantry explains. “The corners are where people who don’t fit in go to find new life, and they keep piling up in the corners because there’s no place farther they can go.”

Nonetheless, Chantry believes that Seattle’s underground culture has been in decline over the past twenty-five years, and he blames the erosion partly on another migration pattern: the exodus of creative spirits in search of better opportunities. “A lot of famous people in the punk and psychedelic scenes came from the Northwest. They couldn’t make a living so they migrated south. For talent, south is the only place to go unless you go east to Chicago or New York.” In fact, many of his circle of culturally minded designers, including a large number who worked with him on the monthly music magazine The Rocket, the site of some of his most innovative work, abandoned Seattle for bigger cities. He views himself as a holdout in an alien environment.

“after years of trying, (conservatives) finally curtailed the display of street posters in 1994, on the unconvincing pretext that they were dangerous to workers climbing utility poles”

Chantry blames another part of the counterculture’s demise on Seattle’s transformation into a high-tech capital attracting straightlaced entrepreneurs. When, in 1999, software company Adobe’s regional headquarters moved into a large complex in the liberal neighborhood of Fremont, the new building signaled yet one more triumph of the corporate drone (however youthful) over the free-spirited artist (however grizzled). Of Fremont’s landmark statue of Lenin, Chantry quotes the designer Frank Zepponi as suggesting that someone should “put a cash machine in its butt” to comment on its transmutation of neighborhood values. Not that Seattle, the home of defense giant Boeing, ever lacked for traditionalists. But Chantry judged it an ominous blow to the underground when local conservatives, after years of trying, finally curtailed the display of street posters in 1994, on the unconvincing pretext that they were dangerous to workers climbing utility poles, and thereby cut off an important advertising medium for small theaters and clubs.

Much can be learned about the self-image of Seattle’s cultural purists from the titles of a documentary film and book devoted to the city’s music scene. The 1996 movie Hype, directed by Doug Pary, is about the grunge phenomenon of the late eighties and early nineties, when a few bands found their way to the national stage and attention was suddenly turned not just to every scruffy teenager in the region who strummed an electric guitar but also to the teenager’s attire and speech habits. Eventually flannel shirts and work boots appeared on the pages of Vanity Fair, modeled by the likes of Joan Rivers. Meanwhile, the New York Times published a lexicon of grunge terms that had been handily invented on the spot by a sales rep at Sub Pop.

Complementing the dismissively titled Hype, the 1995 book Loser, by Clark Humphrey, chronicles Seattle’s music scene back to the fifties, when Northwest bands like the Sonics and the Wailers fueled early rock and roll, and culminates in the decline of grunge. Like Hype, Loser is a story of original talents that were misappropriated, canned, puffed up, adulterated with weaker substances, and finally killed off. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t existed to inflict a fatal gunshot on himself after reaching international celebrity, both Hype and Loser would have had to invent him, for the ultimate lesson of each history is that authentic talent cannot bloom far beyond its native soil; transplanted, it mutates into a weed or is choked to death.

“The loser is the existential hero of the 90’s”

Given his prominent role in Seattle’s underground, it is no coincidence that Art Chantry is featured early and repeatedly in Hype, where we first see him shredding punk posters with a paper cutter and joyfully recounting episodes of Northwest luridness, the “dark side” captured most famously by David Lynch in his 1980s television series Twin Peaks. And Chantry not only designed Loser’s cover and pages, but also suggested the book’s title (he borrowed it from Kurt Danielson of the Seattle band TAD, who proclaimed, “The loser is the existential hero of the 90’s”). Still, it would be too much to credit the self-deprecation of both Hype and Loser to Chantry’s influence, just as it would be inaccurate to suggest that Chantry is merely a representative of a city suffering from an inferiority complex: In some ways, he embodies a frontier town that is aware, with a mixture of pride, humility, and disdain, of its place on the edge, but ultimately, like anyone else, he is his own unique product. Genes, pranks, barflies, heroes, gray skies, conifers, countless sitcoms, yellowing newsprint, and the stain of printer’s ink are all melded into the collage of Art Chantry. This book represents an effort to disassemble some of its intricate components and to show how they are reconfigured in the work.