Jessica Herman

Jay Ryan thumbs through a pocketsize version of "Art of Modern Rock." Though underwhelmed by the devilish cartoon bimbo on the front cover, Ryan flips through the anthology like it's the Oxford English Dictionary of American poster makers. Everyone who's anyone appears in the sequel to Paul Grushkin's "The Art of Rock," including Ryan himself. Names of poster-making superstars such as Frank Kozik and Art Chantry mean nothing to most folk but represent the harbingers of a modern art movement that's unraveling right under our wind-chapped noses.

Last Friday "Preparations, Multiples, & Outcomes," an informal retrospective of Ryan's work since 1995, opened at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts. Sharing wall space with Sof' Boy's illustrator Archer Prewitt, it's the largest body of work that Ryan has shown at one time, with a grand total of 214 posters, forty-three original drawings, eleven monoprints, books and album covers. The show also coincides with the native Chicagoan's big break; fans will recognize the signature illustration on the "new release" bookshelves as the cover of Michael Chabon's "The Final Solution: A Story of Detection." Ryan and his print-making cohorts at The Bird Machine have been posting around Chicago for six years now, and they're finally getting due recognition.

Their work is omnipresent in this city: whimsical images in unpredictable color combinations scrawled across the interior of places like The Empty Bottle, Schubas Tavern, Reckless Records--wherever rock posters are found. They tread the fine line that distinguishes fine art from artisan craft, art posters versus advertisements. Yet while you often see their paint-smeared posters advertising a concert by your favorite local band, the designers themselves remain strangers to us city-dwellers.

Arriving at the loading dock outside of The Bird Machine warehouse is like tracing the scattered pages of a book back to its source. Inside the studio the mystery comes undone. 32-year-old Ryan, his assistant and fellow poster-maker Mat Daly and the new "office dude" Kevin Duneman have collected themselves into a row of chairs, poised to discuss the jobs that they all "fucking love." "If we were each making exactly double what we make, our jobs would be perfect," Daly and Ryan both say. Ryan, a self-described "tall, clean-shaven Sasquatch" has wispy brown hair, and Daly's "a fireplug" in a fitted sweater and black jeans with hipsterfied dark hair swept barely above his brow. Duneman starts off, "Jay's the provocateur and Matt is the workhorse," and lets his coworkers do the rest of the talking while he becomes mesmerized by the computer's screensaver. When the conversation drags, Ryan coughs up insults like "Boring!" intended only for his buddies' ears.

"Why posters?" Ryan asks himself aloud, explaining his choice of artistic medium. "Because printing on elephants is not practical. All three of us are involved in music, and we all come from backgrounds in art. Nobody saw any of our bands play until we started making posters," laughs the bass player for Dianogah. Daly currently plays in Taking Pictures, and Duneman's in The Race, a group recently featured in Newcity as a "band on the verge."

"There's a degree of looseness and low expectations that go into making rock posters rather than something overworked," Daly adds, describing his work as "minor-produced." "It's a way to make some money making art [that's] more immediate than making paintings for a gallery." As The Bird Machine founder, Ryan simultaneously commandeers the conversation with input from Daly, squeezes Duneman's nose and messes with his greyhound, Seth. Lucy and Fozzy also join the huddle, chewing on printmaking scraps, which Ryan calls the dogs' "sticks."

Around them, the second-floor studio explodes from the center out--the worktables and file cabinets are covered in stacks of posters, a handful of which have made it into frames on the wall. Above them, disjointed elements, from a cane to a broken record, are adhered to the plaster and paint is splattered on the floor below. Dividing the territory that The Bird Machine shares with Punk Planet, a retractable doggie fence is hinged to the entry way below a paper tacked to the wall that reads: "Rules for Messing with Telemarketers." Signs of shows that were and will be reflect the overwhelming theme here.

Residing in a warehouse that backs up to the El on Honore, The Bird Machine contributes to a mishmash of unaffiliated businesses--Punk Planet, a yarn-dying workspace, and furniture refinishers, among others--that each care for their own unusual animals, including a mysterious roomful of birdcages. The Bird Machine seems literally and figuratively off the map: The studio is nestled on a street that looks more like an alley than a place of business. And in a time of computer-generated everything, their homemade craft is somewhat anachronistic. But The Bird Machine slides into a decades-long trajectory of poster-making, one that "Art of Modern Rock" attempts to trace. Pioneering a second wave of music poster-making in the States, today's artists follow up guys like Randy Tuten and Alton Kelley who had their heyday in Haight-Ashbury making psychedelic posters for concerts at the Fillmore for The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. While the subsequent lapse of poster making was followed by an "age of mechanical reproduction," the second generation of poster makers resurrected the tradition of handmade poster art in the mid-nineties.

Ryan came on the scene at that time when he started working for Steve Walters' Screwball Press on Western. Walters, who is now known as Chicago's grandfather of poster making, has been producing posters for Chicago concerts for years. "I had no musical talent, and so this was a way I could fit into [the music scene], like being a rock critic," says Walters, hanging out in Screwball Press' current home in a crowded basement below the T-shirt shop Propaganda on Milwaukee. Walters attracted regular business from Red Red Meat (since evolved into Califone) and Wilco with a style that incorporated cut-and-paste clip art. By 1998, Ryan had mastered the art of silk screening, gathered his own client base and endeavored to make a business of his own. He called it The Bird Machine.

"I like how it's kind of vague, that it's a little nonsensical but refers in a backhanded way to a lot of different things," Ryan offers as an explanation for the company name.

Back in the studio, Daly has retreated to the corner with a crouching, monster-size electric printing press that grumbles when provoked. "That's the first poster that Jay made for my band," Daly says, pointing to the other side of the room at a framed image above Ryan's desk. Ryan and Daly met on tour with their respective bands. Much like Ryan, Daly had started making flyers for his and his friends' groups. "People who play music, except for us and Jon Langford, are bad designers," Daly says, unable to hide his dimples. When Daly decided to move to Chicago, he asked Ryan for a job, more or less a modern-day apprenticeship. Lying atop a file cabinet sits the last poster that Ryan made for his former band before Daly started printing his own. Ryan excitedly recalls receiving the image that depicts a cast of Shel Silverstein-looking musicians floating in space with their instruments.

With business growing by word-of-mouth faster than Ryan can produce orders, Daly has the of task of printing Ryan's designs; he produces his own fine art and concert prints in his spare time. When Daly and Ryan are not printing, illustrator Diana Sudyka and local artists Dan Grzeca and Nick Butcher use the equipment for their own work. The Bird Machine résumé has inflated from a list of advertisements for local rock bands to a lineup of posters for nationally recognized performers such as Built to Spill, Shellac, Neko Case, Andrew Bird, Hum, June of 44 and Stereolab. Ryan has exhibited at poster festivals across the country and was recently featured at galleries in Germany and Great Britain. "It's kind of like Friendster: friends of yours introducing you to friends of theirs," Daly says. "It was nice for me to find out that the print art world works the same way that the music scene I'm used to works."

Daly leans into the machine's open mouth, pushing the squeegee with the first layer of paint for Ryan's art show promo. The blue ink spreads onto the thick stock paper except in the places where there are pieces of Rubylith, a transparent red plastic. The negative space outlines Prewitt's character opposite Ryan's signature squirrel.

Having burned out on fine art as a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign art student, Ryan hedges against calling himself an artist, or even an illustrator. He lists his influences as Shel Silverstein, Chris Ware, Horst Janssen and Art Chantry. "One of the most important things I learned in my senior year of college was to lower my standards," he says. "I was very intent on having things look realistic and sharp and clean." While his drawings show varying degrees of "sharpness," his corral of illustrated animals--from squirrels that mess with computers to leaning towers of horses and cows--are anything but realistic. "I always thought that drawing animals was pretty funny because there's always a shocked or confused expression on their face. It only occurred to me recently [why I draw squirrels a lot]. I was living in a big old rotten house in college and the place was infested with squirrels." Some images look a little twisted, such as a boy with chunks of his body hollowed like a Tinkertoy, but a loose and imaginative quality connects his work from 1995 to the present.

Daly turns behind him and gestures to a few examples of his own style. From a monochromatic dark purple concert poster for Califone to abstract fine-art prints, his work reflects the heavy influence of Mark Rothko. At some point, Ryan sidles up to the print machine to describe his take on Daly's art: "He's given up on outlining and ends up with a bold poster, but it's bold because it's muted and subtle. He approaches the screen-printing process in the same way he approaches oil painting." Behind him hangs Daly's confetti of pink, green and yellow squares that has the translucent effect of a watercolor painting.

Daly attempts to distinguish where The Bird Machine fits into the scope of Chicago artists' styles: "There seems to be a comic-book school of poster art and a graphic-design school." Ryan finishes, "I think we come from something else entirely, the idiotic children's books school of posters." More than anything, the common thread linking the artists' work is that none of them use technology. While every few papers fly off the machine, picking up dirt or Daly's faint thumbprints, he reminisces about the time that Ryan got blood on a full series of images.

Ironically, new technology has facilitated an international awareness, if not growth, of this old-fashioned form of art making. The website Gigposters.com provides a forum for thousands of international poster makers to critique one another's work. As an active participant in the Gigposters community, Daly says he can stay in the homes of poster makers across the country.

A few days after the first meeting at The Bird Machine, boxes full of cardboard poster containers crowd the entryway, ready to be shipped to Ryan's forty subscribers. This is the third of three yearly shipments that include one poster of every print Ryan makes. The subscribers range from poster collectors to friends and fellow printmakers, who know Ryan's work through Gigposters or through The Bird Machine website.

The boys gather around, feasting on fresh cookies and coddling the pooches on the couch. Ryan's giddy about having just received his copy of Chabon's book as well as the opening of his Columbia show just 48 hours away. Daly sits in his paint-smattered smock, waving his treat in attempt to disrupt the conversation. They explain the unspoken code of poster-making ethics by which The Bird Machine abides; their posters are available for sale only after concerts have taken place so it's not like they're selling advertising. "The idea is that there are multiples, they're accessible to people we know, and we fully support people tearing them down and taking them home [afterwards]," Ryan articulates. But as The Bird Machine continues to pick up fans in the city, some groups are finding it difficult to keep their advertisements taped to store windows before their shows run.

"Our posters serve a purpose, trying to advertise something, until a point. After that they lose their purpose as far as advertising and become memorabilia," Daly says and immediately starts riffing on the "danger" of using that word. "Well, we're not in the business of making memorabilia. We're actually making the dream, or actually fondling the dream." Applauding his choice of words, the guys contemplate making the phrase a motto for their team T-shirts.

(2004-11-09)

Also by Jessica Herman

Political circus
"See this? This is what I mean by `conspiracy theory one-upmanship'"...
(2004-10-27)

Brand jam
How real is Mr. Toast, the 84-year-old guy who hand-makes every piece Sharp As Toast "wearable drama"?
(2004-10-27)

Monkey business
Modeling the wares that she's constructed for the costume show at the upcoming Halloween affair at Munki Haus...
(2004-10-20)

Romance of the nerds
"My name is Rebecca, and I'm a big flirt," says the class instructor. "And I'm a nerd."
(2004-10-20)

Costume ball
(2004-10-20)

Really easy riders
(2004-10-13)

Hiccup to the chief
(2004-10-13)

Material girls
(2004-10-06)

Custom couture
(2004-09-29)

Ziggy lives
(2004-09-29)

Dialogue by design
(2004-09-23)

Spin Control
(2004-09-14)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment