Posters, the old New Deal, and LADOT’s unofficial ‘Artist in Residence'

Work With Care, by Robert Muchley, 1937,

On last month’s DnA, we talked to Shep Fairey and Robbie Conal about their protest posters. What should arrive on my desk a few days later but a new book, Posters For The People: Art of the WPA. In view of the growing calls for nationbuilding at home, for investment in infrastructure and for a “New, New Deal”, what could be more timely, and inspirational! The book, by Ennis Carter and Christopher Noon, features almost 500 posters produced by the government-sponsored Works Progress Adminstration (WPA), the program -- doubtless deemed “socialist” by critics of “big government” -- that produced many of the marvels of American architecture and graphic design. Bold silkscreen prints, including 100 never published before, and many bearing the influences of graphic design experimentation in Russia and Europe, advertize everything from parenting skills to jobs programs to the nation’s landmarks.

And while on the topic of political art, Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), and the accompanying blog, http://www.howwedrive.com, heard Robbie Conal on last month’s DnA, and had this to say:

I was listening last night to Frances Anderton’s interview with agit-prop artist Robbie Conal on KCRW’s Design and Architecture and was quite surprised to hear, out of nowhere, a discussion of traffic lights.

Photo by Jason Eppink

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Why? Because, Conal noted, at every intersection in L.A. there are controller boxes for the traffic signals — “virulent spawn of HAL” — I think he said. These, it turns out, make perfect surfaces for displaying things like posters. So Conal, when he was starting up, went out and actually measured the dimensions of these boxes, and created appropriately sized posters (also using Helvetica Bold so that it could be read by drivers). He noted that if a driver missed one at a certain intersection, he could serially repeat them at a number of intersections so he’d be guaranteed a viewing (depending on the cycle timing!)

This makes Conal, I suppose, LADOT’s unofficial ‘artist in residence.’

http://www.howwedrive.com/2008/10/30/art-that-stops-traffic-or-traffic-that-stops-at-art/