In Memory of Two Kings of Graphic Design

The Two Kings of Graphic Design: David King (1943 - 2016)

and David A. King (1948 - 2019) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

When I was informed that the next SIG meeting would be on the graphic designer Dave King, I assumed we were going to be speaking about the British artist who assembled a huge collection of old school Soviet imagery and propaganda; photographs, posters, and other materials commemorating and celebrating the Russian Revolution (1917) [2].

 

King, a self-confessed communist with Trotskyist leanings, was particularly keen to insert his hero back into the picture after Leon's name and image were comprehensively erased by Stalin from Soviet history and after Trotsky was physically eliminated by a Spanish-born NKVD agent who used an ice pick to make his ears burn [3], in an operation known as Operation Duck (August 1940).    

 

Despite his political leanings, King worked for many years at The Sunday Times Magazine as a designer and art editor and designed book covers for mainstream publishers, such as Penguin, alongside more radical presses.

 

But King is perhaps best remembered as the man who designed many famous album covers - including the controversial cover for Electric Ladyland (1968) by Jimi Hendrix, featuring a photo of 19 naked women by David Montgomery [4] - as well as his graphics in support of the political causes he supported, such as the Anti-Nazi League's red arrow logo on a yellow background (see figure 1 below). 

 

King died, aged, 73, in 2016.  

 

In 2020, Yale University Press published Rick Poynor's book David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian. Poynor, in collaboration with the editorial designer and art director Simon Esterson, also set up a website featuring designs by King from his private archives.

 

 

II.

 

My assumption, however, was mistaken: the Subcultures Interest Group is, rather, going to be discussing the work of David Anthony King; an English American artist and another key figure in the history of graphic design, famously creating the cross and serpent symbol by which the anarcho-hippie band Crass are recognised around the world. 

 

An Essex boy born and bred, King fell in with Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher in 1964, when studying graphic design at a technical college in Dagenham. Later, in the 1970s, he would move into Dial House, the commune set up by the above in rural North Weald and it was here he came up with the iconic emblem (see figure 2 below).

 

In 1977, King moved to NYC and became part of the punk scene there, both as a designer and a musician. Later, he relocated to San Francisco and, in 1990, enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and poetry, producing a substantial body of work in numerous mediums over the next four decades.

 

King's graphics are now a regular feature of exhibitions showcasing punk visual art in galleries worldwide and several collections of his work have been published, including, most recently, David King Publications 1977 - 2019 (Colpa Press, 2024), which comes with an interesting introduction by Matt Borruso as well as plenty of images to enjoy [5].

 

King died, aged 71, in 2019. 

 

He is fondly remembered, however, by those who have long championed scrapbooks, photocopied fanzines, print-on-demand books, mail art, etc. For if anything was at the heart of the punk ethos it was surely the notion of DIY and not caring about anything other than putting one's ideas and images into the world (often at great personal cost and with no thought of financial reward or commercial success).   

 

Fig. 1: David King Anti-Nazi League logo (1977)

Fig. 2: David A. King Crass symbol (1977)

    

Notes

 

[1] The photo of David King is by Anthony Oliver for Eye magazine, issue 48, (2003). The photo of David A. King is by Sean Clark (2016).

 

[2] King assembled more than 250,000 items in a collection which has formed the basis for a series of exhibitions and a special gallery in the Tate Modern. 

      Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies, described King's work as 'a one-man archaeological expedition into the lost world, the destroyed world, of the original Soviet leadership. He was determined to unearth everything that Stalin had buried so deeply and so bloodily.'

 

[3] Technically, Trotsky was killed with an ice axe and not an ice pick, but I'm referring here to the lyric of the song 'No More Heroes' by the English rock band the Stranglers. The track was released as a single from an album of the same title in September 1977 (United Artists) and reached number 8 in the UK Singles Chart. Click here to play.

 

[4] King attempted to justify his design for the Hendrix album, Electric Ladyland (1968), by arguing it contrasted with the unrealistic and often airbrushed images of nude women found in magazines such as Playboy. Montgomery's photo, however, was deemed too risqué for the US edition of the album and was replaced by a picture of Hendrix. 

[5] This book was published in conjunction with an exhibition of King's work held at the San Francisco Center for the Book, from 25 October until 22 December, 2024. Matt Borruso explains in his introduction: 

      "The exhibition and book collect a chronological sampling of the publishing work that King made over his lifetime, in addition to flyers, photographs, and graphic design projects. But neither the show nor the book are in any way complete. We are still digging through King's archive, consistently finding new things that he made, and piecing together a better picture of his life and work." 

      Click here for more details and to purchase a copy.

 

 

Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas (2024)

I. 

 

Regular readers will recall that back in April of this year, I went along to the Horse Hospital to view the overtly political artwork of Gee Vaucher and hear what she had to say about her time working with Crass (an anarcho-hippie collective based at Dial House in Essex and masquerading as punks during the period 1977-1984): click here.  

And they might also recall that in September of this year, I visited the Richard Saltoun Gallery, in Mayfair, to view a solo exhibition by Penny Slinger; another British-born artist who likes to combine elements of surrealism with (feminist-informed sexual) politics and another woman now aged in her seventies (at 77, she's just two years younger than Vaucher): click here. 

 

Anyway, completing this trio of septuagenarian female artists is Marlene Dumas (71), whose solo exhibition of sixteen new(ish) works at the Frith Street Gallery - including the large (100 x 30 cm) canvas pictured here entitled Mourning Marsyas - I went to see earlier this week ... [1] 

 

II.

 

For those, like me, whose knowledge of ancient mythology is patchy at best (but who aren't fortunate enough to have the Little Greek on hand to fill in the gaps), Marsyas was the satyr who - skilled as he was on the double pipe (αὐλός) - mistakenly challenged Apollo to a contest to determine who was the best musician. 

 

All-too-predictably, the Muses found in favour of the latter, and Apollo, proving that the only thing worse than a bad loser is a vindictive winner, punished Marsyas by skinning him alive [2].  

 

There are, I suppose, numerous ways we might interpret this story. But Dumas - who was born and grew up in South Africa during apartheid - always likes to side with the victim, be that Christ hanging on his Cross or a dead member of the Red Army Faction.

 

Thus, for Dumas, Apollo is the villain and Marsyas symbolises not hubris, but the right of the individual to freely express themselves artistically. And so she mourns Marsyas and all others who have died in their attempt to challenge those wielding power and authority. 

 

I've seen it suggested that there's a certain tenderness in Dumas's canvas which is missing from the savage beauty of Titian's Flaying Marsyas painted 470 years earlier. And that might be the case: or it might be pity which is on display here, which is an altogether different thing (often confused with compassion) [3]. 

 

It's a shame that Iris Murdoch isn't around to consult on this question [4]. 

 

 

III. 

 

All in all, I like Dumas's paintings; created, according to the gallery press release, 'through a mixture of chance and intention [...] combining very fast and focused actions with reflective pauses'. 

 

What that means is that Dumas often pours paint directly onto the canvas and then goes from there, teasing out a central figure or a face. Sometimes these figures and faces appear in an instant, whilst at other times they require careful consideration [5].

 

Strangely, despite Dumas openly confessing that her works are "'heavy with the weight of a bad conscience, deceased lovers, past failures and present atrocities'" [6], I found the exhibition quite refreshing; perhaps Nietzsche was right after all and cruelty is indeed one of the oldest festive joys of mankind [7].       

 

Apart from the central work after which the exhibition took its name, there were several other works that caught my eye, including a phallic picture consisting of a pair of big black cocks and a smaller canvas commemorating the 69 people killed at a summer camp on the island of Utøya in July 2011 by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik (what this tells us about her and/or me readers can decide).

 

 

Marlene Dumas: Two Gods (2021) Oil on canvas (150 x 140 cm) 

and Utøya (2018-2023) Oil on canvas (40 x 50 cm) 

Photos by Peter Cox courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

   

 

Notes

 

[1] Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas opened at the Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square) on 20 September and finishes on 16 November 2024. Full details can be found by clicking here. 

 

[2] For those readers keen to know further details, the story of Marsyas can be found in Book VI (lines 382-400) of Ovid's Metamorphoses: click here for a translation by A. S. Kline (2000) on poetryintranslation.com 

 

[3] Nietzsche famously viewed pity as a dangerous pathological condition that weakens the pitier and degrades the pitied. It is thus a form of practical nihilism disguised as a moral virtue. Compassion, on the other hand, is a feeling with the one who suffers; not a feeling for and is born of a true love for others as well as a love of fate. 

      Readers who wish to know more on this might like to see the essay by Suzanne Obdrzalek, 'On the Contrast between Pity and Compassion in Nietzsche', in Aporia, Vol. 7 ( BYU, 1997), pp. 59-72. It can be downloaded and read as a pdf by clicking here.

 

[4] The Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was a huge fan of Titian's late masterpiece (painted c. 1570-76), once describing it as the greatest of all works of art in the Western tradition in that it manages to touch on life in all its ambiguity, horror, and misery whilst, at the same time, being a beautiful work that invests the human story with something divine. 

 

[5] It's not surprising to discover that Dumas often refers to the concept of pareidolia when discussing her work; i.e., the psychological phenomenon by which the brain is given to perceive meaningful images (such as faces) in random visual stimuli. I have written on this phenomenon in a post dated 4 June 2015: click here. 

 

[6] Dumas writing in an introductory essay to the Mourning Marsyas exhibition and cited by Adrian Searle in his interview with her in The Guardian (23 September 2023): click here. 

 

[7] See Nietzsche, Morgenröthe (1881), I. 18. Translated into English by R. J. Hollingdale as Daybreak (Cambridge University Press, 1982).  

 

Marlene Dumas

marlenedumas.nl 

frithstreetgallery.com

Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses!

Horses, horses, horses, horses! [1]

I.

 

Yesterday morning, I was in a central London café sipping a mint tea when, suddenly, from the other end of the street, a commotion was generating ... 

 

I looked at my companion, who wanted to run. But we stayed sitting as a pair of terrified horses - including a white horse drenched in blood - galloped past, causing chaos as they collided with vehicles and shocked observers [2].

 

And not only did I hear Patti Smith singing from out of the remote past, but I remembered also something D. H. Lawrence once wrote: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived." [3]

 

 

II.

 

Today, still upset at seeing such noble beasts in obvious distress, I ironically went with a friend to the Horse Hospital, to take another look at the artwork of Gee Vaucher, which, to be fair, is better than I first thought (even if the overtly political nature of the work does get a bit tiring).

  

However, the thing that really caught my attention was a nude female mannequin, posing provocatively, wearing a horse's head mask and standing before a large red plastic bin at the top of the ramp that leads to the first floor ... 

 

As my friend, a longtime member of the kink community who was distinctly unimpressed by Vaucher's work amusingly remarked: I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Fig. 1: Patti Smith photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover of her album Horses (Arista Records, 1975): click here to listen to the three-part track 'Land' (part one: "Horses" / part two: "Land of a Thousand Dances" / part three: "La Mer(de)"). 

      Fig. 2: A mannequin with a horse's head was one I took at the Horse Hospital earlier today.

     Fig. 3: Quaker (the dark horse in the foreground) and Vida (the white horse bleeding profusely), taken in central London yesterday.  

 

[2] This sounds as if I'm recounting a nightmare, but it actually happened. Apparently, five military horses were spooked and bolted when building materials were dropped from height at a construction site in Belgravia, next to where they were on a training exercise. For a BBC news report, click here.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 102. 

 

 

Crass By Name ...

Penny Rimbaud peering out from behind the Crass logo

I.

 

The Horse Hospital is a Grade II listed building in Bloomsbury, built by James Burton, in 1797, as a place of rest for sick and tired horses, notable for its unique stone tiled floor.

 

Since 1992, however, it has been an independent arts venue exhibiting work by those who like to think of themselves as being underground, countercultural, or avant garde. The kind of place that boasts about not only championing the outsider, but, by rejecting professionalism and the market, refuses to sell out:

 

'We are alternative, celebrating individualism, anti-conformism, sincerity and integrity ... Embracing the romantic and the life affirming.'

 

But then, having said that, it prides itself also on the fact that it is 'firmly established in the London arts and fashion industries' and has worked in conjunction with many prestigious organisations: 'giving the Horse Hospital international recognition'.

 

It also isn't shy about asking for financial donations from would-be supporters and selling 'Everything from original Artworks, Posters, DVDs, Books, Magazines, CDs and T-shirts to just mad shit we think you'll like' (the latter including an official Horse Hospital pin badge for £10, which works wonderfully on any lapel).   

 

Readers can make up their own minds about this, but, needless to say, it's not really my kind of place and it seems to me that in the transition from purpose-built stable to progressive arts venue the honest smell of 19th-century horseshit has been replaced with an odour of sanctimonious bullshit.    

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly in light of what I say above, three members of the anarcho-hippie art collective Crass [1] - Gee Vaucher, Steve Ignorant, and Penny Rimbaud - chose the Horse Hospital last night to launch their new book, CRASS: A Pictorial History 621984 - 4022024 (Exitestencil Press, 2024) [2].

 

Whilst I have time for Vaucher and her artwork - and would recommend the recent study by Rebecca Binns; Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2022) - I am less sympathetic to Messrs. Ignorant and Rimbaud. 

 

Ignorant - a young Clash fan who fell under the influence of Vaucher and Rimbaud when staying at Dial House [3] - was the Crass vocalist who provided the group with a certain working-class credibility. And he still seems to happily play this role now; a kind of punk court jester wearing his cor blimey trousers and effing and blinding like a trooper. 

 

The perfect comic foil, in fact, to Rimbaud's philosopher-king, and, despite all the pretence that Crass operated as a community of equals, I think it was pretty clear that Rimbaud - or Pen, as his friends and devoted followers like to call him - is the first among equals. 

 

If I was interested in what Vaucher had to say and vaguely amused by Ignorant, I was taken aback by the ramblings of Rimbaud who, it seems, has learnt absolutely nothing in the last 40 years, still maintaining his belief in revolution and still aching like Walt Whitman with his love for universal humanity (born of his romantic idealism rather than any true feeling for others).

 

There was something senile and self-regarding about Rimbaud that I really didn't like and so I'm glad that I didn't have to pay the £5 entrance fee, as I wouldn't wish to have given even a penny for his thoughts [4].

 

 

Gee Vaucher and Steve Ignorant

 

Notes

 

[1] I know some people will insist that Crass are first and foremost an anarcho-punk band, but I always felt they were rooted more in the Summer of Love than the Summer of Hate; just because hippies wear black that doesn't mean they stop being hippies. Steve Ignorant may belong to the punk generation and have something of the punk attitude, but Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher clearly have a very different background and perspective and are often dismissive of punk (and youth culture in general). 

 

[2] The numbers are dates: though keen-eyed readers will note that they have either missed out a zero in the first date or mistakenly added a zero in the second.

 

[3] Dial House is the large, Grade II listed, 16th-century farm cottage on the outskirts of Epping Forest, Essex, where Penny Rimbaud and his partner Gee Vaucher established an open-house and creative arts centre in the 1960s. It remains an anarcho-hippie haven to this day.   

 

[4] Nor would I pay the £50 asking price for the book being promoted, though plenty did; they even waited patiently in line to have the book signed by their heroes (bless).