But “Died Young, Stayed Pretty,’’ whose title paraphrases a Blondie song and sums up the art form’s history, put me in a sour mood. The men Yaghoobian finds, in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Chapel Hill, N.C., Seattle, and Portland, Ore., don’t seem to care about anything. One exception is Brian Chippendale, a soft-spoken Providence artist and musician who blends abstraction, sexual perversion, and darkness in a way that evokes Henry Darger. But for every Chippendale there’s an Art Chantry, whose jaded views on his craft, its history, and his own work undermine what a dynamic and inspired designer he is. (A poster he made for the Portland band Dead Moon overlays the Lumière brothers’ famous film image of a space capsule jammed in the moon’s eye atop a vinyl record.) Repeatedly, the film turns to him, presumably because his jolly negativity sounds authoritative.
Poster art has survived all these decades on a troublemaker’s impulse to, as one guy puts it, destroy other art. That’s fine, but such a provocative sentiment feels like an ideological affectation, not a committed artistic stance. (If ever there was a movie made for South by Southwest, the American culture festival ruled by righteous cool, this is it.)
To experience this work on its own terms is one thing. Encountered at a construction site, say, you’re allowed to reckon with its sense of disturbance, its determination to criticize mainstream culture, its obsession, in many cases, with pornography. And in that reckoning, you’re free to decry the unimaginative sexuality, or admire the artist’s disgust over corporatization - and then remove the poster from its spot and mount it somewhere in your home. Either way, ideally, the conversation is between you and the poster.
