By PHIL PATTON Novelists, screenwriters and the makers of dictionaries study slang. Should not graphic designers look at visual slang--the commercial and vernacular images and styles we tend to call kitsch? Kitsch admits of many definitions, phenomenological, philosophical, esthetic. But you know it when you see it. Kitsch is a reflection of the obsessions at the heart of any culture, a cartoon shadow on the wall. It's the dumb duck, the funny bunny you make with your fingers in front of the slide projector. Looking at changes in kitsch shows changes in mainstream culture in caricature. Kitsch is the darkness on the edge of the respectable town. It's the long shadows cast by small things in the mainstream culture, the tabloid headline dreams and nightmares of design. It is to be found in flea markets, in Wal-marts and Caldors, in malls and at craft fairs. American culture includes many kit systems, from balloon framing to Snap On Tools to Truetype font software: we built this country on Tinkertoy thinking. It may be a useful working hypothesis, a revealing definition for investigation and experiment, to consider that kitsch may be the mixing of kits--a form of commercial surrealistm that is also a kind of cultural successor to the jackalope. There may be such a thing as (near) perfect kitsch. It can send a trill down your spine like such surrealist art as Meret Oppenheim's fur covered teacup. Examples are the popular Nashville image of Hank Williams standing at the top of the stairway to heaven, welcoming Elvis, or the classic clay Mexican ashtray in the shape of a sombrero. But while there might be "classic kitsch," there are also fashions in kitsch, as in art or design. To keep up with them, you must visit mall and K-mart, beach boardwalk and flea market. There you may find not only today's kitsch, but a kind of advanced alert system for mainstream cultural trends. On the outskirts of town, the sentries of kitschwatchers first make contact with new invaders. Kitsch, we argue, is important because, like the supermarket tabloids, it is the product of a powerful set of organizations, from the garage T-shirt printer to Warner Licensing, that works to mine the hopes and fears of Americans as reflected in visual form. Today, four types of kitsch are in the ascendency: High Tech Kitsch: It's the surface effects without the meaning--technology misapplied. One of the kitschiest objects I ever saw was a toilet paper holder with built in transistor radio. Another was a set of false firelogs, heated by gas with stereo speakers incorporated into them. The holograph, someone recently remarked, is just about as old as the laser. But while we've found all sorts of applications for the laser, from playing music to repairing retinas, the hologram remains largely a novelty. Yes, holograms are used to help defeat credit card fraud and software piracy, but they are largely ornamental. Like "digital" type faces, inspired first by IBM cards, check code readers and liquid crystal displays, these are cheap ways to suggest the futuristic and high tech. The kitchy mix here is "high tech" and hand tech. Thus we get holographic jewelry, and the shimmer of titanium and niobium, an element which can plate cheap metals with a kind of rainbow, oil spill refractance, which is now a staple of craft shows. Politically Correct Kitsch: Propaganda, whether for benign or malignant goals, lends itself easily to kitschification. From Stalinist social realistic art and posters to the graphics of Churchillian Britain (whose "eat less meat" posters inspired Orwell's 1984, according to Paul Fussell) the politically correct can easily become inane. Consider: · A poster of a blond, rosy cheeked child with a tear in his eye, kissing a dolphin. · On the wall of an elementary school, a wall full of fifty colored in images of former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. · In the frame and print department of a discount store chain, a successor to the cliché Sixties velvet painting of JFK, Bobby and Martin Luther King is the Breck ad style soft focus painting of King looking at Nelson Mandela. · McDonald's Kente designs cups: " originally designed for the royal families of Ghana, the colorful cloth patterns of the 17th century still have social,cultural and spiritual meaning today." Red neck, Black T-shirt Kitsch: Military meets motorcycle meets heavy metal in a genre of T-shirt. Observed at a flea market outside of Jacksonville, Florida, black T-shirts swirl together grinning skulls and angry screaming eagles, Harleys and M-16's, eighteen wheelers and Green Berets. They tie Vietnam to the Confederacy, and provide disquieting links between ZZ Top and the SS. "You wear your X and I'lll wear mine," is the legend on one shirt showing the Confederate flag. "It's a white thing you wouldn't understand." The common theme is an anger and militance darkly shadowed behind forms, or honed to metallic highlights on letters and shapes, sharp, bitter and biting. The resurgence of militaristic confidence that followed the Gulf War is reflected in shirts from such cataloguers as U.S. Cavalry and Quartermaster. "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out," is the legend on a shirt with a military beret on a Totentanz skull. The lettering is the dripping gothic of Grateful Dead shirts. A centerpiece of the black T shirt is a whole world of Harley graphics, licensed or unlicensed. Harley Davidson has become a kind of graphic virus, loose in the commercial world. From boots and jackets, it's moved to telephones and boom boxes that look like miniature, cannibalized Harley bodies. Harley's can be subtle--as in the licensing of the brand for Japanese cigarettes--or crude, as in the skeleton riding a Harley. Cross licensing kitsch: "Cross licensing"--the marketing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Trolls or Harley and Tazmanian devil shirts--was all the talk at the recent licensing conference in New York. Barbie touts Mcdonald's Happy Meals while Speed Racer, the imported Japanese cartoon characters, teams up with NASCAR, the red neck, red dirt stock racing organization. Fred Flintstone plays with the Yankees now. McDonald's Flintstone tie in, Roc Donald's, visually puns the Golden Arches into lashed mastodon tusks. At McDonald's, you can buy mugs with stone age swelling shapes and puckers: the Flintstone era crudity is a mocking reflection of the precision of the present and future. If Marshall McLuhan predicted "re-primitivization," cross licensing is a complex form of "re-totemization." Now that human figures can dance on screen with cartoons and logotypes, Marvin Martian is as much a character as Michael Jordan, and Michael Jordan as much a cartoon as Bugs Bunny. The odd thing is the way previously minor characters in the Looney Tunes stable, licensed on everything from bath towels to fruit snacks, have taken center stage. Consider Tazmanian Devil: Taz has moved from the periphery to consort with sports figures and team logos. Jointly licensed to the Miami Marlins or Colorado Rockies, he can now hit the major league fastball. Sometimes, as in the cartoons, he's on a Harley--a neat piece of cross licensing that wraps together all of the strange sorts of overtones at work in kitsch making today.
Books ·
Recent Stories ·
Euroland ·
Webcams ·
Design |
