American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art

The titans of rock poster art may not be household names, but within their subculture, guys (and they are mostly guys) like Frank Kozik, Emek and Rick Griffin are legend. Becker’s journey through the history of rock poster art basically falls into three parts. First, there is the 1960s scene, with Wes Wilson’s wild flowing typography that, as one artist explains, worked as a test of whether you were cool or not. If you could read the poster, you were part of the scene. Act two comes from the punk scene of the early 1980s, with cut-and-paste posters made on photocopiers. Act three brings the 1990s revival of silk-screening combined with irreverent appropriation of images from commercial and pop culture.

Becker makes an unsteady start, foregrounding her own struggles to make the film. Late in the film, she makes an effort to link this to the shoestring DIY feeling of much rock poster art, but it feels forced. The strength of this doc is not in her journey; it’s in the sheer number of posters we get to see and in hearing artists talking about their own work and that of others. We wish Becker had more of that and fewer “we were so edgy” recollections. If the posters deserve, as Becker argues, to be treated like art, then they deserve the deeper aesthetic analysis of which we get hints.

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