A Chantry Poster Can Redefine Its Setting

Art review Art Chantry, a "Documents Northwest" exhibit, on view through Nov. 21. "Danish and Flemish 17th-Century Paintings: The Samuel Collection," continues through July 25. The Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St. 654-3100. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, until 9 p.m. Thursday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Rarely has an artist been more profoundly uncomfortable at having his work in a museum. Art Chantry darts his eyes around a gallery filled with punk posters he designed and says, "They wanted to hang them straight around the walls. Can you imagine?"

Instead, many are stapled to rolling scaffolding, and thickly plastered onto a telephone pole that had to be fumigated before it was erected in the gallery. As the newest "Documents Northwest" show, Chantry's work could essentially redefine what the Seattle Art Museum will show, and whom it represents.

A suitable groundbreaker

Highly articulate and savvy, Chantry is a perfect choice to break new ground at the museum. He has been profiled in national design publications, and his funky, cheaply produced posters have received more than 150 national and international awards.

But Chantry isn't buying into mainstream acceptance easily. "This isn't art, it's artifact," he says, waving his arm to indicate his posters. "These are oranges in a building designed to hold apples. It's an entirely different dialogue from the fine-art world that's involved with galleries and critics. That's not my world. My world has its own public, and its own history and critics. We borrow from fine art, and they borrow from us.

"An artist is a one-man factory who produces objects of desire. In fine art, the iconography is personalized. I'm drawing out things from a shared existence. I feel like an honorary apple."

Chantry grew up poor, in Tacoma. He studied anthropology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, supporting himself by doing posters. He graduated in art history, and moved to Seattle, where he became immersed in creating posters for rock concerts and fringe theater. He generated type by Xeroxing it out of books, pasting it on letter by letter with a glue stick. He became famous for doing things cheap and fast.

He has won typography awards for lettering pecked out of a labelmaker. His imagery tends to be big, and blurred as if seen through a snow of static. Many get their impact from faces in distress; features eroded, heads flying off, eyes widened in fear or grief, mouths and eyes covered with obliterating strips, faces flayed to skulls or transmogrified to monsters.

They are the poster equivalent of violent TV. There's a reason for their use.

"There has to be a hook that drags people in to look at the poster," Chantry says. "Distorting the human face is a jolt."

He uses whatever will work. A charred photograph of his grandfather found its way onto a poster for a production of "Macbeth," with bloodstains taking the place of the original burn marks.

Playful images also find a place in his work. Witness the high-camp corsets of "Rocky Horror Show," and the smiling head of Ronald Reagan on the full-skirted, high-stepping female body of a Western swing dancer, on a poster for a "Give Peace a Dance" event.

A `poster city'

Chantry calls himself "a folk artist for a merchant/technical culture." He says Seattle is "one of the best poster cities in the world," but poster activity is at a low ebb in the present recession. "Even at its peak, if you did every poster job in town, you'd starve," said Chantry, who sometimes gets $50 to design a poster, and sometimes works free for causes he believes in.

His posters have layers of meaning that continue long after their advertising function is past, meaning that Chantry says most museum visitors won't understand. He points as an example to peace symbols and happy faces, which mean peace and love to many. To others he knows, the happy face is a symbol for the drug Ecstasy, and the peace symbol stands for LSD.

`Clank-buzz effect'

Patterson Sims, SAM's curator of contemporary art, who curated the show, clearly counts Chantry as a gifted graphic designer. Other designers are often appalled at devices such as Chantry's use of clashing typefaces to get what he calls a "clank-buzz effect." But his work undeniably documents the style of a strata of Northwest life the museum world usually ignores.

A few years back, when Sims first came to Seattle, Chantry approached Sims as he had curators of other museums, trying to persuade someone in the museum world to buy a flat file, to store samples of local posters and just forget them for a few years.

It's a pity no institution listened. Now they're paying attention to Chantry in a different way.

His work has generated controversy on the street. It could well do the same in a museum setting, particularly since it will be there for four months - twice as long as the last "Documents Northwest" show in the same gallery.