The numbers don’t lie: While CD sales continue their slide into oblivion, vinyl albums are coming back in a big way, with influential acts like Radiohead, Wilco and The Decemberists all issuing their new recordings in premium-quality (and premium-price) vinyl pressings aimed at audiophiles and collectors.
Some listeners prefer the sound of vinyl, of course, but the larger physical dimensions of the long-player album are a big part of its appeal, too. For the two decades between the rise of the LP and the rise of MTV, album covers were the primary visual medium through which listeners formed an impression of the favorite bands and musicians.
But not the only visual medium. The rock poster was once a major avenue of concert advertising. Though posters haven’t surrendered their promotional role entirely in the blog era, nowadays silkscreened, limited-edition, show-specific gig posters are both a vibrant artist’s medium and a cool souvenir for a band’s fans.
Which brings us to Anthony Dihle, who makes some of the D.C. area’s most arresting showbills under his nom-du-poster Dirty Pictures. Dihle has assembled work by more than two dozen Mid-Atlantic poster artists for “Paper Jam,” a new exhibit he has curated for the Penn Quarter’s Civilian Art Projects gallery.
“It’s a cross-section of established and emerging artists and design companies,” Dihle says, adding that the bands for which these posters were made run across the notoriety scale. The visual tone of the posters is as varied as the music represented. “Some of them are sharp and slick. Others are rough, organic, chaotic, schiziophrenic in its look,” Dihle says. “The basic requirement is that it’s interesting. It’s what’s going on that’s good.”
Despite the abundance of out-of-town talent, the District’s thriving homegrown poster scene is well-represented by contributions from John Foster, Tim Gibbon (who posters as Dynamite Printworks), Nick Pimentel (Planaria Design) and Jeffrey Everett (El Jefe Design), among others.
But one of Dihle’s favorite posters in the show comes from the Philadelphia artist James Heimer. The poster promotes a band called The Wonder Years, and it’s probably a little — or a lot — too risqué to be shown here. Suffice it to say that there’s a side to a Cap’N Crunch lookalike’s relationship with a Kool-Aid Man lookalike that may never have occurred to you during the long hours you’ve doubtless spent contemplating Cap’N Crunch’s relationship with Kool-Aid Man.
Dihle says he likes the humorous way Heimer appropriates the iconography of the TV ads to which most children of the 1980s were exposed ad nauseum.
“It also has a handmade look to it that I’m very much a fan of,” Dihle says. “It’s not dignified, but it’s fun.”
Dihle began making his own posters five years ago, soon after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design.
“Providence has a great poster scene,” he says.
He began by creating posters for fake bands and venues, then advertising his services on Craigslist. Real acts soon came calling. Dihle enjoys the process of listening to an unfamiliar band’s music and thinking about how to represent it in a visually compelling way. Ideally, the result is a happy marriage of the band’s sensibility with own.
“It feels like a really sincere compliment if somebody buys a poster and they have no idea who the band is,” he says.
