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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.
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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.
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