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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Plaster the Town @ Back Alley Gallery
Wednesday 07 January @ 12:54:17 |
 by Doc Pop
Enter the glass door, head straight ‘til you reach the stairway door, spiral down one floor, go through another door, take a right and walk down the hallway until you get to the Back Alley Gallery.
The place is packed on opening night, maneuvering from display to display is difficult, and don’t even think about getting to the keg anytime soon. Luckily they keep the devilled eggs up front.
Looking around the room, you may see plenty of familiar names: Ween, Kool Keith, Grandaddy, Guided by Voices, they’re all here. Welcome to Plaster the Town: Twin Cities Poster Exhibition 2004. Not that you had to go all the way to the B.A.G. to see these posters. This is the art that is all around us, at clubs, record and comic shops, on the sides of mailboxes. Even the hallways and doors to the B.A.G. are lined with flyers for upcoming shows.
Band posters on display @ Plaster the Town: Twin Cities Poster Exhibition 2004
The catalyst for this poster boom could be traced back to when design group Aesthetic Apparatus moved to Minneapolis. Until then, most poster artists were designing posters for practically nothing, sometimes even losing money just to make a cool two- or three-color flyer for a friend’s band.
“What Aesthetic did was create a business model for small poster companies,” says Wes Winship, member of Burlesque Design. “They started working with clubs and creating ways of keeping themselves constantly producing.”
Keep in mind that clubs don’t spend much on promotion, they just want the date, band names, and venue on a flyer. In order to produce at a profit, groups like Aesthetic Apparatus make extra posters and sell them at the shows and on their websites. Through this method local artists could sometimes hope that if they made a poster cool enough they might be able to recoup their costs.
So why put together a show of flyers for gigs we’ve already missed?
“There’s been an explosion in the poster scene in the cities,” says show organizer David Witt. “We’ve just come together to show what we’ve done as a community. We are showing the poster scene has arrived.”
With the model that Aesthetic Apparatus put forth, artists started learning from each other, not just locally but on a national level through sites like gigposters.com and punk/art websites. Witt, who signs as DWITT, says he got started making poster art for one of his earlier bands, then started getting asked to do posters for friends’ bands and got hooked.
“I might have even enjoyed making posters more than actually playing the shows.” Now Witt does most of the flyers for the Triple Rock, one of his favorite clients.
Looking around the gallery I notice a common trend. The more I like the band on the flyer, the more I like the flyer itself. It even seems upon further inspection that it’s just not possible to make a bad flyer for a really good band. And vice versa, the few bands I wouldn’t care to see seem to make terrible inspiration for posters. Next to pirate radio DJs and record store clerks, flyer artists might be the most obsessive music nerds on the planet. After all there are certainly easier ways to make money as a designer than making obscure posters.
“I’ve never made a flyer for a band I didn’t like,” Wes tells me.
In this sense, the modern poster designer is not just the creator of Mass Art, but also a sort of representative. For instance, if you liked the Andrew Broder show and noticed that the poster for that looks similar to the King and I Thai posters, maybe music nights at King and I Thai is right up your alley.
Plaster the Town: Twin Cities Poster Exhibition 2004 runs through Jan. 31. Hours: Fri. 4–8 p.m. and Sat. Noon – 5 p.m. Back Alley Gallery, 262 4th St., Lowertown St. Paul.
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