dark side of our culture

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com):

I miss matchbooks. since the advent of the cheap-o butane lighter, and the slow death of smoking, matches have disappeared as an advertising medium. granted, they have become incredibly expensive things to have made and just “give away”, but they represent a cornerstone of american culture, the dark side of our culture.

I don’t think i’ve ever read a hardboiled detective novel or spy thriller or even a horror story that didn’t have somebody using a matchbook in some way during the story. and how many times did you collect a phone number on a matchbook, eh? be honest. think of all the marriages, all the children spawned, because of matches. makes you shudder to think.

Matches also were one of the sources of illustration work that kept commercial art and advertising alive for decades. one of the many stupid and cool things i collect are old matchbook catalogs. these were used by both neighborhood print shops and traveling salesmen as ordering books for matches printed all over the country. i think i’ve got around a dozen of them, different companies and different decades.

AC:in the bathroom! that's great. did you ever see those "scented" matches that had some sort of fizz-crap on the stick below the match heads? you light them as a 'courtesy' and then hold them in the air until they scented crap all burns up. classy matches, eh? that gasoline matchbook turned out rather well, i thought. i lifted the lettering directly off a an old rusty gas can in my '68 dodge pickup. it bounced around in the bed and was he most beautiful rusty can! i thought matches that said 'gasoline' on them was petty funny. that was dave's idea.

They’re full of the most amazing advertising clip art and samples and the wonderful hand lettered cornball advertising tag lines in american history. the companies tended to steal each others designs (often redrawn by their own artists, but sometimes not.) so, collecting different company catalogs reveals different takes on the same theme, over and over.

The match companies also would ‘update’ the artwork they kept as ‘stock images’ to be applied to “your matchbook ad”. so, you literally will see exactly the some images suddenly change fashion or hair styles about once every decade. out-of-style tag lines would make way for new corny tags lines. discontinued car makes would be replaced with something more recent (it’s fun to watch tail fins suddenly emerge on matches). these old catalogs were like a visual history of acceptable mainstream style throughout the 20th century.

Another interesting change to look for is the way our “morals’ and “pruient interests” clash and change throughout the decades. a great example is the ‘nudie’ image. naked ladies have been a fixture on matchbooks since the beginning of the last century. as each decade went by, you would see hemlines extend and recede, garter and nylons appear and disappear, lingerie go in and out of fashion. it’s almost funny, if it weren’t so telling about the repression of the women in our culture.

But, the actual “nudie” images of naked ladies sitting in martini glasses or nude women dancing in a spotlight drifted on and off of matchbooks depending on the ‘mores’ of each era. the 1920′s, flappers and strippers, the 1930′s, hard times and cover-up., the 1940′s naked ladies for the soldiers (so they’ll know what they’re fighting for!) the 1950′s, both nudies (considered dirty and adult and hidden in a ghetto section) and non-nudes (slight coverings on the same images reproduced among the regular images.) the 1960′s anything goes. you can literally watch the careers of guys like petty and vargas wax and wane, over and over.

Read More: http://demianrepucci.com/2009/10/21/restaurant-matchbooks-branding-and-culture-collide/ ---All of this then led me to think about matches as the great little graphic design projects that they can be. Some are very well thought out and beautifully designed. Others are just fun or clever. But either way there are some gems out there. I, myself, have only held onto a few matchbooks which I thought were of superior design quality or somehow captured the concept of the restaurant in a way that I wanted to remember. My two favorites are pictured above. The matchbook on the left is from the famed, and now closed, Restaurant Florent. What a great place that was. The restaurants graphics, including the matches, were designed by the legendary Tibor Kalman and M&Co. Kalman’s graphic design for Florent was brilliant in it’s ability to not only capture the ethos of the restaurant but to also reinforce it. A superb example of restaurant branding. The matches on the right are from super-star artist Damien Hirst’s brief foray into the restaurant world which was Pharmacy in London. Graphically the blue dots are nice but a bit simple compared to his famous multi-colored dot paintings. What is genius about these matches is that Hirst treats them from the beginning as collector’s items. The other side of this matchbook says “(09) in a series of 60″ on it. The medium that Hirst is most adept at using as an artist is his b

. And he is true to that right down to the little matchbooks in his restaurant.---

Another very funny change was the cheezy tag line, “the gayest spot in town!” it was a staple tag line for ‘happening’ night spots. suddenly, in the late 1950′s, it vanishes, never to be seen again. i wonder why?

Then there are the unfortunate racial and assorted ethnic images that slowly fade away from view over time. the ‘darkie’ material disappears around ww2 – very abruptly, too. but, the hillbilly humor and ‘chinese’ stereotyping (perpetuated by embarrassing images used by asian restaurants to this day) took much much longer to fade. and the derogatory hispanic images used by mexican eateries still persist on match book clip art even now.

I’ve never understood why a minority group would make fun of themselves this way. i can ‘get’ the idea of humor as a way to de-fuse a bad situation, but it also makes it ‘ok’ to continue with the racial derision. it’s like the ‘n-word’ and it’s use among the very group it suppressed for so long. usurping the iconography of the enemy as weapon (to hit them over the head) is a long standing propagandistic tool. but enough’s enough, in my opinion. let’s get rid of this stuff. (but maybe not until i get to use it in some sort of parody one last time, ok?)

The thing i miss most about the loss of the matchbook in our popular culture is, frankly, all the wonderful printing configurations that emerged from the industry. it was such a competitive business for such a big, but narrow, market, that companies had to constantly offer new gimmicks and looks to keep the customer from switching manufacturers.

The result was printing in every color of the rainbow on every imaginable surface of the matchbook in just about any size matchbook with just about any sort of material. you name, it was done. collecting matchbooks (i have boxes and boxes of them. i hope they don’t spontaneously combust!). looking through them is like reading a history of lithography over the last century. it is truly a rich dialog, too.

This matchbook i show you here is sort a spiffy little number that i really enjoy. to begin with it’s a very elaborate and fancy cover (for a manufacturer of loudspeaker systems). the design is very very period rich. it’s printed all over – every surface has stuff (even the ‘spine’). best of all, the matchsticks themselves are printed on!

A number of years ago, dave crider and i at estrus records decided we wanted to do some promo matches for the label and we wanted to print on the matchsticks like this. we searched and searched all over the world. nobody did that work any more. not even the japanese. we were told that if you wanted to spend a bazillion dollars on some promo matches, you can find people who will figure out how to do it. but, expect it to be EXPENSIVE.

We ended with extremely simple cheap matches printed black ink on ‘house’ colors, thin paper stock, printed on only one side. the printing quality was crap, the bindery worse. the matches barely lit up. basically, we had great designs and big ideas but we couldn’t do them and ended up with third rate manufacturing. it’s the sad story of amercian swag in a nutshell.

I miss cool matches.