Have I Told You Abou Together, we can be written about! Just between the two of us, I know a guy who knows a guy who...As if the work itself weren't enough. Now, with an insider's seat and a soft-self pitch, we can write our passports into the history books. It's your word against mine. That's press for you...and that's team work. Celebrity sightings, "bitch magnets," Scratch and Sniff Finger Tip Scented Pillow Cases:" The flaming dog shit bag men always ring twice. Push the button, buddy. But wait, this just in...Le chimp sportif toxique found crossing "twofold runt stilts" with "powder blue forest ranger dress slacks" per our conversation. Sincerely, Dorf. TOXIC SPORTS CMTZWIT3Po Copyright 1983 PE+0 Subvertising,lnc. A division of Supply&demanD. "Omniscient Giraffe Broth" + "Aboriginal Dry Hump" are registered trademarks of PE+O Subvertising. ® kg Dis O Left and top right: Ed Fella: Double-Blind illustrations Above: Jeffery Plansken Double-Blind "Toxic Sports Chimp" subvertisement 2 4 Right: Frames from "Candy Everybody Wants," a Fella/Plansker/ Makela video collaboration for 10,000 Maniacs
FettalSUBVERSIVEPlansker Though they have collaborated just once, Jeffery Plansker and Ed Fella -q have a shared interest: both like to make pointless aavertise ments. Plansker, a director of commercials and music videos, pursues a sideline in what he calls "subvertising"— absurd ads that sell nothing, but mimic and parody the language of mainstream advertising. Fella, a design professor at California Institute of the Arts, spends his spare time making posters advertising lectures that have long since passed. That the director and designer have an affinity for subversive advertising is probably due to overexposure. Both grew up with the Michigan advertising business, Fella working for 30 years with a Detroit design studio turning out collateral for the automotive industry, and Plansker, as the son of an art direc- tor, attending his first shoot (a Plymouth Road Runner commercial) at the im- pressionable age of two. Subvertising, says Plansker, "creates a necessary form of commentary in a complacent society. It's being able to look at the general landscape of America and say `this is f***ed: I initially did it because I had a resentment of the simple nature of mass media that speaks to everyone in such simple terms:' Fella attended art school after retiring from commercial art, and introduced the vernacular of his "low end" profession into the "high design" context of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. By reviving and upend- ing the rules and tools of his former trade in his highly idiosyncratic compositions, and by teaching students how to deconstruct the visual language of commerce around them, Fella helped instigate a movement against the prevalent Swiss Modernist approach to design. The movement spawned a series of design rebellions and inspired the typographic antics of RAY GUN and typefaces like the ubiqui- tous Template Gothic—designed by one of Fella's students, Barry Deck. Fella's posters for CalArts and the Detroit Focus Gallery ("an ideal collaboration") are playgrounds littered with the lettering styles and dingbats of his days as a "layout man;' but with labyrinthine messages, mischievous wordplay and an irregular spacing easily mistaken as naiveté. "The irregularity is rigorously thought out," he said to colleague Jeff Keedy in an EMIGRE interview in 1989. "If deconstruction is a way of exposing the glue that holds together Western cul- ture, I thought, 'What is it that holds together typography? It's space:" The convergence of Fella and Plansker's paths was inevitable. Plansker's commercial and music video work is a showcase of layered sound, image and experimental design featuring collaborations with musicians and designers from the Cranbrook and CalArts scene; including Deck, P. Scott Makela and Reverb. "Most of the designers I work with are thinkers; they're putting their heads into a job and suggesting things that inform me," says Plansker. 2 5 Fella, who incidentally knew Plansker's father, was a natural choice for Plansker's "Candy Everybody Wants" video with the band 10,000 Maniacs, a song based on a Noam Chomsky analysis of consumerism in a "spectator democracy:' "His work is playful and the song was playful;' says Plansker, who asked both Fella and Makela to work around the theme of candy and media criticism. Fella, preferring these days to avoid commercial work, instead handed over a stack of his sketchbooks. "He had these things that are now referred to as Fellaparts [an Emigre font], which looked like disfigured, melted choco- lates;' says Plansker, and this visual candy makes an appearance in the video along with Makela's typobytes and Plansker's subvertisements, flashing onscreen like subliminal messages. A good collaboration, says Fella, results in something that is "more than the sum of its parts. When two people get together and come up with a third thing that neither would have done His collaboration with Plansker, he admits, was more a successful noncollaboration. But he sees a similarity of approach in their respective creations. "My stuff is filled with debris, just like his work. He must have found some kind of affinity with it, just as when I saw his work I said, 'Wow, that's what I would do if I were doing film:" The two also share a reluctance to dilute their work for mass media. Fella's posters are eccentric to the point of being impos- sible to imitate. And Plansker's revel in absurdity to the point of being obtuse. A print subvertise- ment of a man tied to a tilting armchair is matched with the copyline "the perfect combination of power and luxury." An image of chocolate sauce being poured over a tube amplifier is set with the tagline "the bland leading the bland." But experimentation beyond the confines of a design brief is, as Fella has observed, a way of moving design forward. "You either have to become the most facile professional of them all or chip away at it somehow," he said to Keedy. "Chip away at that conceit of the slick profes- sion that gets ever and ever tighter:' As Plansker observes, the more obtuse the work, the less likely it will be caught and gutted by the mainstream media. "Everything 'revolutionary' and 'alternative' gets instantly sucked into the media machinery" he says. "This takes a form that hopefully has a built-in sab- otaging device, which I think is absurdityf PETER HALL, A GONTAIONTING EDITOR Of U&t.C. IS SENIOR WRITER AT 1.0. MAGAZINE. SUBHEAD: ITC JELLYBABY, ITC CONDUIT BOLD, BOLD ITALIC WO/BYLINE: ITC FLORINDA TUT/CAPTION: ITC EASTWOOD, ITC CONDUIT LIGHT, LIGHT ITAUC
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