February 12–19, 1998

critic pick

Cover Art

Art Chantry, the 43-year-old graphic designer who's been called the "monarch of messy" and the "master of grunge," always wanted to be an archaeologist. He even majored in it briefly in college.

And though graphic design and digging in the dirt may seem like apples and oranges, Chantry—whose aesthetic appropriates a myriad of pre-existing design elements, from punk and psychedelia to '50s trade mag ads—sees little difference between the two.

"I spend a lot of time researching past graphic vernacular styles, rummaging through junk stores, looking at weird shit," he said on the phone from his Seattle office. Chantry's posters and record covers in the early '90s for a then-fledgling Sub Pop label and, more recently, for garage-rock label Estrus Records, are adding up to a vernacular of his own: a glorification of middle-American "low art" sensibilities which has been called "unslick" by fans and "ugly" by detractors.

In town to speak at the American Institute of Graphic Arts' Sound Off: The Top 100 CDs (a one-day exhibition showcasing the best in CD design from the past five years), Chantry knows a thing or two about the importance of packaging, in the music industry and beyond. "Record covers become part of our popular consciousness; in a lot of cases, the record cover is more important to the myth-making process than the music itself.

"I don't think graphic designers realize their power… Ideally you become part of the aesthetic process and help a band better see themselves… but marketing is really about playing with people's heads. We try to use all the power of this invisible language of form, color, line and shape to get people to think differently about things—concepts as simple as 'buy this product' or as complicated as 'support this cause.' Record covers are fairly benign, but look at all the controversy stirred up by the Abbey Road cover."

While none of Chantry's work appears in the exhibition ("I'm kind of the voice of the loyal opposition"), he believes that mainstream design owes lots to the underground. "This show represents moneyed projects. I come from the other end of the extreme where people are more involved with the art form and subversive politics. A lot of the mainstream stuff is imitating that. For every piece [in the show], I can point to a precedent that happened in the underground world five, 10 years ago."

AIGA Sound Off: The Top 100 CDs, Thu., Feb. 12, reception and exhibition, 6 p.m., Art Chantry lecture, 7:30 p.m., The Great Hall at University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad St., 885-9906.

-Brian Howard