| As a part of popular culture, the art of illustration has always been fashion-driven. Art directors try to forge a "look" that will distinguish their magazine or advert campaign from the rest of the pack. Artists are looking for a way to get noticed, and may spend years creating a signature style in obscurity, suddenly to find themselves under great demand and with imitators. The shift in fashion signifies that an artist or a group has something fresh to contribute. In the 1970s, there was a shift to a new visual vocabulary that emphasized smooth, streamlined hyper-reality. A batch of artists began to render photographically (using a three-hair brush) things that couldn't be photographed, like John Wayne with wings. But the paradigm-shifting new tool was the airbrush.
The airbrush wasn't really new at all, it originated as a technical tool used to retouch photographs but was noticed by illustrators in the 1920s and 30s. Used as an artistic tool in combination with stencils and masks this became one facet of Art Deco, but the tool was a high-maintenance noisy contraption and fell out of general use for decades. It began to be used again by artists in the 1970s who were breaking away from the arty, brushy, scratchy look that predominated in mainstream illustration during the 1960s in everything from movie posters to women's magazines. The airbrush provided the polar opposite surface: clean, mechanical, and smooth -- the visual equivalent of the synthesizer. It now seems strange that Robert Grossman was one of the early proponents of the new/old medium. He wasn't a slick technician but a cartoonist whose style defined the casual, funky, underground ethos of the 1970s. For him, the airbrush was a controllable version of the graffiti artist's spray can. Not that the other artists featured in this show were copycats of Grossman. In England, and on the West Coast, different factions of artists embraced the new medium; Dave Willardson was an early pioneer. At the same time there were several new magazines cropping up that were hungry to break new ground: Rolling Stone, West magazine, New York magazine, National Lampoon. Once rock 'n roll bands took notice and adopted the look for record album covers, the style took off, and when the book Air Powered (by Elyce Wakerman et al., Random House) came out in 1979 -- it all coalesced into an art movement. The later artists grew more sophisticated in handling the equipment, and tended to be fascinated with textured surfaces. Peter Palombi's work epitomized the period: everything he did was smart, slick, and sensual. By the mid-1980s we had all seen too much hyper-realistically rendered reflections off of chrome. Suddenly the look seemed like cocaine, a temptation to be avoided. And the fashion wheel turned again. Looking again at these images fixes the 1970s in my grip of nostalgia -- if it's really been long enough to call it that. Enjoy. Roger T. Reed |
