Rotodesign | Art Chantry Interview

Art Chantry, a Western Washington University design graduate from Tacoma, came to Seattle in 1978 and started producing a series of posters that were simultaneously chaotic and clear, with big type (often photocopied out of sample books or found documents) juxtaposed with startling pictures (often cut up from existing images, especially from old ad art, exploitation magazines and hot-rod cartoons). Some of his first work was for the UW student film series, run by future Rocket film critic Jim Emerson. Chantry went from there to design ephemeral art for bands, theatre companies and political benefits, always on a low-budget, fast-turnaround basis.
—from the book Loser, The Real Seattle Music Story, by Clark Humphrey . . . I've been an admirer of Mr. Chantry's work for many years, and a few years back (1998, to be exact) when planning a trip to Seattle, I wrote him a note to see if he'd be up for an interview. He phoned me back, and we chatted for about an hour on subjects from graphic design to punk rock to technology, before he invited me to come down to his studio. As one of the few graphic designers who doesn't use a computer to put together his artwork, Art is very passionate about the hostile takeover of the design profession by digital technology. Besides that, he's funny, smart, gracious, and an all-around good guy. Many thanks are due to Mr. Chantry for making the time to talk to me on a busy Sunday afternoon, and letting me hang out in his Seattle studio (next door to the Twinkie factory) and drink his coffee while he met with two clients, did an interview with Julie Lasky (formerly Managing Editor of Print magazine) for the book Some People Can't Surf, as well as taking a telephone call from Jello Biafra. He even gave me a ride back to my hotel! Thanks, Art! This interview was conducted May 31, 1998 while listening to rare Rolling Stones bootlegs, while a bird chirped in the background and a dog trod on a pile of rare and beautiful posters that Art tossed casually onto the floor. Art's partner and studio mate Jamie Sheehan joined in at the beginning of the interview. We start with a discussion about computers and disk-to-plate technology.
Sheehan:		What cracks me up is the process isn't being done to benefit people in the [design] industry, it's to benefit big business. I mean, as soon as you cut out the middleman they think they don't have to pay any more. "We don't pay that now, that's great! Cutting out pressmen, that's great. Now we don't have strippers, that's great. That's less, that's less." They're getting more and more and more for less and less.
Chantry:		Why did designers take on all these extra responsibilities without even expecting to get paid more?
Sheehan:		Exactly. We have really taken it on. "Yeah, sure, I'll load all those up and re-sample them lower so you can use them on the web, then I'll e-mail em to you, sure."
Chantry:		I'm talking even more basically than that. All of a sudden designers are now typesetters and typographers, all of a sudden typesetters are now stripping departments and color separators, all of a sudden designers are gonna be going straight to plate, that means we're gonna be pressmen, half the time we're copywriters, too.
Roto:		And by the time it's on the plate, it's too late to fix!
Chantry:		Yeah! Think about the expensive mistakes! And now with Photoshop and all these stock houses we're illustrators and photographers too. We're all one-stop shopping —
Sheehan:		We're all Wal-Marts! Design Wal-Marts.
Chantry:		— and because everybody has got a computer now, and everybody can buy a design disk, prices are dropping and we have to buy $20,000 worth of equipment just to maintain the lowest level of competency, and at the same time we're expected to take on all these additional skills at no extra charge. I mean, how long are we gonna put up with this shit? That's ridiculous. That's just absurd. But everybody in the design industry just embraces it as "it's progress, it's wonderful," but it's not when you think about it, we're just getting screwed.
Sheehan:		Well, it's not wonderful for us. It is wonderful for clients who are getting more and more, even though they're getting less quality, 'cause they didn't know what the difference was anyway. Now they're getting more and more and more... for less and less and less.
Chantry:		There's also the problem of non-designers doing design. Now I'm a big fan of amateurism, and I think amateurism is where all new ideas come from, the do-it-yourself syndrome, but at the same time, every time there's an introduction of new technology like this, there's an enormous drop in quality while the system and the culture assimilates it. The result is, the design is getting really shitty.
Sheehan:		[lifting boxed printer] She says as she lifts up her new HP color printer.
Chantry:		There used to be a time when designers were trained in the history of design and art concepts, composition, all these issues you have deal with on a daily basis with design, and now you're not. Now you just buy a fuckin' piece of software and now you're a designer.
Roto:		I think it's opened it up to people who don't necessarily care about design one way or another, they see it as an easy way to pay off the computer.
Chantry:		Yeah, that's true too, you've got technicians doing design, and of course corporations and business people are going in-house and designers are used as technicians — design is not a skill any more, it's now a technical knowledge base. Which I think is also a dangerous precedent, because people had worked really long and hard to set design apart as a real art form, as something to contend with, finally being defined as a language separate from the written language, as a visual language, and all of a sudden it's being dumped in the hands of non-linguists! Amateurs! So I'm at this weird crossroads in my life, where if I continue to work this way I'm going to be eliminated by the process.
Sheehan:		But there again you wouldn't have zines. Zines wouldn't be able to afford to publish.
Chantry:		If I don't participate in getting a computer, I'm going to be eliminated. Which, kinda means a decision I might have to make. There's a part of me says so be it. There's another part of me that thinks I'm going to starve. So I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm just gonna continue the way I am. Until I am eliminated, or I starve. [laughs]
Roto:		Have you found yourself losing work because you don't use a computer?
Chantry:		Oh, constantly. And the problems I run into because people don't understand how design is done without a computer at this point. Clients.
Roto:		Is it because they want to come in and see you change the colors onscreen?
Chantry:		Well, they don't, it's just the fact that I can't provide them with a full color proof. I have to give them marker comps. Right there, they're shocked. They have no idea. They've never seen— I'm dealing with printers who've never seen mechanicals.
Roto:		[laughs]
Chantry:		You laugh, but it's not funny, because all of a sudden the whole system breaks down, because I present something in a way that is all of a sudden so different that everything goes to hell. But it's the way that it has been done for hundreds of years. [laughs] It's really weird. It's just really weird. The reason why we're so computer crazy in this country is because we have this tech fascination in America. It's like we're can-do, Henry Ford's build your own vehicles kind of thing, you know? It's just obsessive. And one of my favorite examples of that is our obsession with nuclear energy twenty years ago. You know, all a nuclear reactor does is boil water. I used to think it was some magic process, it was sold to us as magic -- take an atom, turn it into electricity. But all it does is use the heat from the breakdown, the nuclear breakdown, to boil water to create steam to run steam generators to give us electricity, which is like hitting a thumbtack with a sledgehammer. It's ridiculous, and that's kind of the approach we've taken with this technology. We've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, just 'cause we have this solid gold hammer, and that's all the computer is, is a tool—it's a really great tool, but just cause we have a solid gold hammer doesn't mean we're architects, you know? There's a hell of a lot more to architecture than a fuckin' gold hammer. [pause] And that's kind of my position on what you do for a living. [laughs]
Roto:		So is it hard to find places to actually get the work stripped?
Chantry:		Oh, damn straight! I mean, I can't get it stripped. I have to deal with printers who have stripping departments, and most of them have eliminated that. And it's really annoying to have my design work go through somebody who ends up scanning it in, because my work doesn't scan very well.
Roto:		Do they tell you ahead of time that that's the way they're gonna do it?
Chantry:		No, they surprise me with it.
Roto:		So you don't know until you see a proof?
Chantry:		If I see a proof. Usually my clients are so low-budget that—"Proofs? That costs money. We just have to go without a proof." It's kind of scary, because you're flying by the seat of your pants. I end up designing things that can go so far wrong this way and so far wrong that way, and I shoot for the middle. Once in a while I'll have clients that can actually pay for decent reproduction. All these things that you're looking at are reproduced on the cheapest possible printing systems, because that's what my clientele—I mean, you don't see any fuckin' Warner Brothers, you don't see any IBMs in here. Probably the most corporate you're looking at is Sub Pop. I haven't worked for Sub Pop in years, when I was working for Sub Pop they couldn't pay their bills. They were on the verge of bankruptcy. I was one of the few people who'd work with them. I would extend credit. All of the other graphic designers in town they burned out. "No, they owe me money, I'm not working for those assholes any more." And as soon as they got the money, they just skittered away and never hired me again. [laughs] Which is kind of the history of working cheap. That's the way this stuff always seems to go. But the kind of clientele I work for just doesn't have any money. I kind of work for poor people. [laughs] And I do my damnedest to try and help them stop being poor. I do look at what I do as part of a service industry, and that's kinda where that kind of thing starts to come from. God, look at all this stuff [Art shuts drawer, uncovering stereo cabinet] Here's this great stereo I found. Check this out. It's a Girard turntable. At the time, this was the state of the art. This belonged to some classical buff. So you know this was, like —
Roto:		Dusted every day...
Chantry:		Yeah. This was the late 50s, early 60s, it was just — precision, and it's got component stereo units, it's even got a VU meter on it. They're gorgeous little units. Look at these things. [fingers dent on face] I can fix that dent. Hamlin's was actually a local — see, back in the 50s and 60s there were a lot of high fidelity buffs that would actually do work locally. This was custom built here in Seattle by a small company that was called Hamlin's that built stereos. Kinda like you'd hire a — what do you call a person who builds guitars?
Roto:		A luthier.
Chantry:		A luthier, yeah. Where you'd have somebody build a custom amp or something, that's the way they approached it. And this was actually a really good make, a friend of mine found it at a garage sale for fifty bucks, and they sold it to me for fifty bucks. And it's like — [gasps] "I've been looking for one of these for 10 or 12 years!"
Roto:		Well, it's kind of the same thing that you were talking about with computers. Anything that plays vinyl now, goes for nothing, because people assume that the technology is old...
Chantry:		Yeah! At the same time, the records — have you been to a used vinyl store? It's made the shift into collectability in a big way. You go in there to buy a record, and something that you might've sold for fifty cents a couple years ago now fetches 25 bucks. It kinda makes your head do a little funny twitch. I'm a vinyl collector, I love old records, but I'm not an obsessive collector. I play them on a needle I haven't changed for 25 years, and when I get bored with them I give them away to people. I play scuffed, beat up copies, I don't really care, I just like the music.
Roto:		Pretty much everything old has its own collector's market and price guides now.
Chantry:		Yeah, it's kind of weird, that collector mentality pisses me off. At Estrus we spend a lot of time trying to fuck with collectors' heads. We do things that are designed to break the hearts of collectors.
Roto:		[laughs] Such as?
Chantry:		Well, for instance, there's a Galaxy Trio record, a 10-inch. Not that they have a big collector's market around that band, but we put a sticker on the cover, and you know, a lot of collectors can't stand stickers, you know, because it covers up part of the cover. We used a super-adhesive material, so you can't peel it off without ripping off the cover. So the cover doesn't exist without the sticker, and there's two versions of the sticker. So completists will want two versions, and they'll constantly be seeking that un-stickered version, which only exists in about ten copies, that are samples we got before the print job.
Roto:		And there's probably a third market, because the stickers are all gonna have notches in the corners where people tried to peel them up!
Chantry:		Exactly! And there's another example. This one we didn't get to do because the band broke up, but there's this band called Jack O'Fire, which is a great band, I mean, just a wonderful band, one of Tim Kerr's creations, which unfortunately broke up in the middle of a bunch of anger, which a lot of bands do.
Roto:		[laughs] That's how it works.
Chantry:		Yeah. Which I think is really sad, because they were just so wonderful. We were gonna do a record that was a 10 inch, vinyl, and we were gonna get that extra thick vinyl — we're not talking that extra thick [holds fingers about an eighth of an inch apart], we're talking half inch thick. We were gonna press it at 78rpms, so virtually nobody could play it anyway. It's hard to even find a good 78 player anymore. Then we were going to print the record cover on sandpaper, silkscreen it, but we were gonna put the sandpaper on the inside! So every time you slip that record in and out, you'd scratch the shit out of it. It'd be a self-destructing record. The interesting thing about a 78 is that it can be scratched to shit, but it'll still play just great, because it's such a fast rpm that it just misses. And all those little pops and skips are part of what make it look old, and sound old. So you'd be improving the sound quality by the scratching process, but of course that would just drive collectors nuts!
Roto:		Somebody else did a record cover with sandpaper on the outside...
Chantry:		Yeah, but that's not the same thing. That's an old Situationist idea. There was a book produced by... I think it was Guy Debord, he was a Situationist, he was active in Situationism and all that shit in the 50s. You know about Situationism, and how it became...?
Roto:		A little bit.
Chantry:		Situationism was a major influence on English punk. A very big influence. If you do your research — there's a book by Greil Marcus called Lipstick Traces —
Roto:		Yeah, I've read that.
Chantry:		[incredulous] You've read that? God damn, that was a tough read! He's got such a convoluted and archaic writing style, it's just like, "oh, fuck!" I've had correspondence with Greil Marcus off and on over the years, and I actually helped contribute to one of his books, which I'm quite proud of, but Jesus Christ, he actually talks like that.
Roto:		That would be even harder for me to follow, at least a book you can go back and check what you've read.
Chantry:		[laughs] Yeah! But Guy Debord actually did a book that had a sandpaper cover, and the idea was would it would destroy culture on either side of it on the bookshelf. [phone rings] I've gotta answer the phone.
[The call turns out to be from ex-Dead Kennedy Jello Biafra, who is calling looking for videos of the Screamers. After the call, Art introduces me to Julie Lasky, who is graciously letting me cut into her interview time, and my interview resumes.]