Philadelphia Introductions: Eric Joselyn

Eric Joselyn

Philadelphia Introductions:
Eric Joselyn

by
Andrea Kirsh

September 1, 2006

Most people who have seen Eric Joselyn’s flyers, posters, or banners or worn t-shirts with his designs have no idea of the artist behind them. This is because Joselyn’s primary concern is how his art works and for whom; he aims to make art that is cheap and/or free, useable, and accessible. *

Some of his work was commissioned; friends in his network of political and social organizing called when they had a need. Joselyn offered other pieces where he thought they could be useful; for the Columbus Quincentenary he put together a packet of designs filled with information on the history of exploitation of the indigenous populations and lands and mailed them to individuals and groups that he thought could use them. He contributed to the “Stop the Name Change” coalition against renaming Delaware Avenue (1992) and the successful “No Stadium in Chinatown” campaign in 2000.

He has also addressed abortion rights, police abuse, workers’ rights to unionize, objections to the war in Iraq, anti nuclear bombing, queer liberation, and violence against Asians, among other issues. He says it is more good looking stuff for our side!

Joselyn designs the work for reproduction: via xerox, silkscreen, or whatever method suits the end users. They are not fine prints. He was trained in ceramics, but got tired of producing pots. For what? He served me water out of a canning jar. Joselyn loves the populist implications of these cheap methods of reproduction. He knows that American artists first learned screen-printing under the auspices of the WPA, in projects dedicated to the common good. He is happy when his work is adapted or co-opted; one of his posters protesting the first Iraq war appeared on the cover of Public Culture, an interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies published by Duke University Press. No one had asked his permission; rather they had photographed it affixed to an ATM. It was the best possible criticism, and vindicated his work. Another of his images appeared on a t-shirt someone else had produced, in different colors and with the design modified. His art gets around.

While some of Joselyn’s work combines images and text many of them are purely typographic and the bulk of Joselyn’s ideas are conveyed through his very personal approach to lettering. It’s a subject he never studied and he does not attempt to standardize. Rather he draws with type. His letters pulse with personality and energy. Those of Report Police Crimes suggest blunt scissors and construction paper. The fine handwriting of Why do you think they call them programs? speaks with a lilt that recalls Ben Shahn’s (Joselyn was pleased by the comparison with his illustrious predecessor in political posters). The text of Peace with Iraq is compressed into a block whose white letters and black background move back and forth in a syncopated rhythm. As we talked his hands were always busy; he was cutting and pasting cardboard for the labels of his upcoming exhibition at the Philadelphia Folklore Project. He showed me the introductory text: four feet tall, stacked rows of lettering made of cut, corrugated board. Some of the letters move back and forth like a string of cut-paper-dolls, others cant forward at one corner as if to peel off the backing.

An anti-war design shows Joselyn at his most sophisticated in merging image and text: a block of type that reads "we have nothing to gain from a war which’ll kill many thousands more and burn billions and create joy in corporate boardrooms" forms the body of a gas pump, while planes dropping bombs appear in the window where we’d expect to find the gallon and price tally. It is clear, succinct, bitter.

Joselyn consciously creates his work for the broadest possible audiences, but viewers with art backgrounds may have special appreciation of U.S. War Dance, which recycles the diagram of dance steps that Andy Warhol had used in a series of paintings in 1962. Warhol was turning the instructional conventions of middle-class leisure into art that mocked its viewers and their aspirations to self-improvement. Joselyn found the easily-recognized diagram useful to help carry a message for social change.

The term agit-prop (agitational propaganda) originated in the USSR, and Rodchenko, Lissitsky, and other artists of the revolutionary period produced posters, handbills, and other ephemera as well as the paintings, sculptures, and photographs that have survived to represent their work in museums. While the term agit-prop is used to describe state propaganda across a number of regimes (of various persuasions), it has been welcomed as self-description by artists on the left whose work is intended to move their audiences to action. Joselyn is allied with artists such as Sue Coe, Peter Kuper, and Art Spiegelman who are using current methods of distribution, from xerox to the web, street theater, adult comics, and graphic novels to agitate for their ideas about a better world and how to get there. Much of this work can be found on www.graphicwitness.org/. Joselyn admires these artists. He would love to have time to study drawing and develop his imagery; he’s a teacher, has a family and his political activities, and his life doesn’t allow it. But he continues to produce his text-rich designs. And they can be found on the streets of Philadelphia, Berkeley, Toronto, and Johannesburg, and on the backs (or fronts) of t-shirt wearers everywhere who share his sympathies.

An exhibition of Joselyn’s work, What You Got to Say? is open at the Philadelphia Folklore Project, 735 S. 50th Street, through February 10, 2007. 215-726-1106 / pfp@folkloreproject.org

*Citations are from Joselyn’s article “Cooking up a mess of agit-prop,” Works in Progress, Magazine of the Philadelphia Folklore Project, Vol. 17, 1-2 (summer/fall 2003):18-23

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