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Grist for the Mill: Providence poster art's fight for Olneyville
On September 1, 1977 , the Western Morning News of Great Britain reported that “Mysterious posters…have appeared all over Plymouth in the hope that punk fans will read between the lines.” 1Punk rock was just starting to establish itself, but with its irreverent, loud, and energetic bursts of public display, it was attracting the attention of not only the media but the law. As punks began recruiting an increasing number of dissatisfied youths, the whole scene was pushed even further underground by hostile, conservative social values — and the local police force. Not to be stamped out, the punks in Plymouth took to making homemade, photocopied posters that blanketed the city with black and white collages, declarations of a new social order, and harsh invectives that excited the youth and disturbed the champions of decent morals. Posters put punk on display, inhabiting a privileged space as both the town crier and barometer for the burgeoning subculture. Nearly thirty years later, not much has changed; what began as an easy and effective method for public display has evolved into an entire culture of poster art. With utility poles, street lamps, and record store windows as the preferred exhibition space, however, little to no physical record exists aside from the occasional punk archivist's collection. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum's recent exhibition “Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the present” tries to address this problem by providing a comprehensive collection of posters in “Providence Poster Art: 1995-2005.” Over the past decade, Providence has experienced a strange and wonderful cultural renaissance unlike any other in recent history. 1995 saw the founding of Fort Thunder by RISD dropouts Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, art students with highly unconventional and free-minded styles that clashed with the structured RISD curriculum. The collective provided a safehouse for like-minded artists operating outside of the conventional art scene, building a new avant-garde on a punk rock foundation. Fort Thunder turned one of the abandoned, historic mills of the Olneyville neighborhood into an infinitely multifunctional space, serving as a concert hall, artist's workshop, living quarters, wrestling arena, gallery, and any other venue thought up by its denizens. The walls were coated in paintings, drawings, signs, and sprawling sculptures while an ever growing amount of stuff amassed in all corners of the mill. It served as the staging area for Providence's hyperkinetic counterculture, a kind of depository filled to the brim with the artifacts of an alternative history. Art and reality came to inhabit the same space, Chippendale explains; “The drawings creep off the page; they have to, if you believe in liberation.” 2The collective flourished, and soon other Olneyville mills were quickly taken over by similarly inspired youths, turning the once lifeless area into a weird new utopia buzzing with creative energy. Olneyville's unique counterculture is one obsessed with extremes. It is a world of music and art possessed by ecstatic movement and a complete disregard for the mainstream and traditional barriers. Bands like Lightning Bolt push music to its noisiest limits, creating frantic compositions of an intensity nearly matched by the band's raucous live shows. Chippendale, who is also drummer for the band, produces drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures that replicate the glorious mess of Fort Thunder, creating a chaotic heaping of colorful imagery that is fantastical and playful, embracing what curator Judith Tannenbaum has called the principle of “more is more.” The zaniness is hardly Chippendale's own, however, and despite the varied styles and media employed by Olneyville artists, the same measure of controlled chaos is present in nearly all of their work. While Olneyville's fresh and exciting style is certainly interesting enough, what makes Providence poster art so interesting is its profound focus on community. The punk counterculture that has blossomed in Olneyville revels in the environment in which it was born, possessing a fierce loyalty to its own provinciality, a vital aspect of romanticized punk ideals. Gary Panter exalts Providence's salvation of punk in the city in his foreword to the exhibition:
The punks were kind of grey ironic insincere killers of Pepperland, too. Energetic, but sometimes lacking color. Then punk, which predicted NO FUTURE, lasted thirty years, and then finally, but not lastly, when you least expected it, along comes FORT THUNDER!!! SPACE HIPPIES IN ARCHIGRAM CRAWLING CITIES once again.
One look at the enormous amount of posters reveals just how much crawling the Olneyville artists did. Community events became the occasion for art; the posters reveal a total convergence of the informational flyer and the painterly print. Posters would be on display around the city, stapled and wheat-pasted along sidewalks, piquing the interest of some, but asking the truly interested to “read between the lines” in a similar fashion to the Plymouth punks of thirty years ago. Encountered on the street, there is randomness to the viewing experience that also asks the viewer to do some detective work; the poster is clearly on display for a reason. Some posters are more easily decipherable, such as Chippendale's “Julian's” (1998) and Brinkman's “Fast Forward” (1994), both of which feature exuberant, fantastic creatures racing off to the local eatery and record store, respectively, asking the viewer to come along as well. While visually crowded and clearly the product of Olneyville, however, the posters became even more hectic when promoting more illicit causes, such as illegal music shows and wrestling matches. Jim Drain's “Barnyard Critters” (n.d.) is an electrifying poster filled with neon spray paints and crowded stencils, but a closer look reveals the words to be more than just decorative, providing then when and where for a punk rock show. Ostensibly no more than an art object, the vigilant are truly rewarded when they dive past the surface of the poster. The important role the poster plays in the community makes “poster art” a reductive term that does not address the social and physical environment in which such art is created. In fact, one of the major failings of the RISD exhibition is its inability to properly replicate the original viewing experience associated with poster art. Sara Agniel of the local Gallery Agniel writes in “Only in Lonelyville” that the posters are “proof not of a movement, but of an attempt—through art—to build and then occupy an alternate reality…a better version of the disappointing world we live in today.” 3Posters became the ultimate conflation of art and reality; Olneyville artists not only put themselves on display, but were constantly building a new social climate in their own image. The announcement of the poster came to be almost as important as the event itself for which it was made. The community has been shaped by the artistic output of its residents just as much as the artists have been shaped by their local surroundings. This entwining of neighborhood and artist does much to explain the high level of political activism currently taking place in Olneyville. As Olneyville became rejuvenated by the influx of artists, musicians, and punks that rallied around Fort Thunder, it naturally became much more appealing for real estate developers. Gentrification very quickly became the greatest threat to the Olneyville neighborhood, even more so than the police. The historic mill district has quickly become the victim of well-endowed developers and corporations looking to cash in on the valuable land that is barely – in their minds - being used. The most prominent victim has been Fort Thunder itself, demolished to make room for a parking lot. The loss of Olneyville means more than just the displacement of its current residents; it also results in the demise of a vibrant, productive subculture particular to Providence . In the face of glossy advertisements for high rise condominiums that seem to flaunt the mortality of the Olneyville neighborhood, artists have engaged in a guerrilla culture war to preserve their community. Posters now become vehicles for activism, simultaneously seeking to preserve the character of the area even as they enrich the visual environment. Confrontation is everywhere in the posters, with one large cloth screen print emblazoned with just the phrase “Olneyville Needs a Library, Not Luxury Lofts.” Chippendale's “Eagle Square” (2000) employs his trademark clutter, but this time to create a massive, ominous tower of strange figures and objects, accompanied by text reading: 13 acres of historic mill complex to be destroyed to make way for strip mall. Support the mills and the art community within them by coming to the public hearing in city hall at 5:45 PM on Tuesday November 21. This may be our only chance. Chippendale's earnestness is only magnified by the juxtaposition between Agniel's “alternative reality” inherent in the images and the call for action within the existing political system. More than that, however, is the inevitable feeling of doom generated by Chippendale's message, for how can a community that exists on the fringe find salvation in the system that marginalizes it? “Shangri-la-laland,” the second part of the “Wunderground” exhibition, provides an answer that is every bit as irreverent and wild as one would expect. Abandoning the eerily elegiac aura of the poster art halls, Shangri-la-la-land provides an iconoclastic portrayal of future Providence. The alternative reality Agniel writes about is fully realized in a bizarre World's Fair that serves as a site for confrontation between the viewer and the artists' utopian ideal. Traditional economic and political forces have no weight in Shangri-la-land; the edifices ask you to take something for free or to interact with them while a twenty foot tall ogre stands guard at the entrance, club raised, poised to strike - thus rendering traditional law enforcement useless. The otherworld inside presents a wholly original geography complete with fantastic castles, tubular volcanoes, and an overwhelming amount of light and sound emanating from all around the room. The visual and musical aesthetics of the Olneyville artists are intrinsic properties of the Shangri-la-la-land environment, creating a new rule of law based on the jubilant chaos of the artists' imaginations. Wunderground addresses the chief existential crisis Providence artists are currently facing by examining the intersection of the exhibition space and living space. The extensive documentation of Olneyville's history provides a unique perspective on an alternative lifestyle that has developed more than just an alternative consumptive culture. The art produced by Olneyville residents is not commercially driven; it is a natural outgrowth of the individuals who make up the community. What makes the destruction of Fort Thunder and the threat to Olneyville even more tragic is the importance the neighborhood played in the development of the Wunderground artists. When the physical community is destroyed, the personal community is obliterated as well. Agniel best captures the dilemma facing Olneyville and those that actively endanger its existence:
How can we agree as a society to confer value on these acts of defiance within the confines of the fine-art world and not within our city's neighborhoods? Why is the incredible live-in installation environment privileged as brilliant by art experts and disparaged as murderously dangerous by government officials?4 1 See the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “punk” for other notable early usages. 2 Stosuy, Brandon. “Interview: Brian Chippendale.” <http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/37421-interview-brian-chippendale>, March 5, 2006. Accessed April 1, 2007 . 3 Agniel, Sara. “Only in Lonelyville.” Wunderground: Providnce, 1995 to the Present. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence: 2006, p.74. 4 Agniel, 75.
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