Wunderground at the RISD Museum
by Matt Obert
Providence has a love/hate relationship with underground art spaces, unlicensed show venues, and unauthorized posters wheatpasted in public areas. On the one hand, you have the official story, and on the other hand, you have the true state of affairs. Sometimes, it seems that one hand doesn’t know what the other one is doing. On the one hand, we love to boast that our city is “friendly to artists,” and often cite success stories from the grubby underbelly of the Renaissance City to prop up this point. Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the present, showing at the RISD Museum now through January 7 of next year, fairly bursts with examples of this kind of success story. Eight established and respected local artists (alphabetically: Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Jungil Hong, Xander Marro, Erin Rosenthal and Pippi Zornoza) were courted by RISD Contemporary Art Curator Judith Tennenbaum to co-curate these exhibits. After the shows come down, the museum is slated to close for extensive renovations — which affords the museum a rare opportunity to give these rowdy young artists temporary free rein without worrying too much about the cleanup afterward.
ON DISPLAY: Sealed off from the streets, placed in a museum’s climate-controlled environment, patrolled by guards. Wunderground contains two distinct exhibits, one documenting a decade of history and another imagining a fantasy future. The curators contacted dozens of collectors and unearthed thousands of prints, from no fewer than 200 artists, for Providence Poster Art, 1995 - 2005. These flyers — silkscreened and spraypainted in a psychedelic array of bright colors, and densely packed with adventurous typography which often tests the boundaries of legibility — cover the gallery walls from floor to ceiling in a kinetic blur. This watershed retrospective also serves as an encyclopedic overview of show venues in the past decade. AS220 and Lupo’s share the walls with defunct nightspots like the Met Café and the Call. Underground spaces (like Fort Thunder, the Pink Rabbit, the Box of Knives, Milhous, Munch House and Valhalla — all now evicted, some demolished) are heavily emphasized. Other posters in the show demonstrate a more political bent, as Feldco’s purchase of Eagle Square sealed Fort Thunder’s demise, and other developers smelled blood in the Olneyville water. The Shangri-la-la-land exhibit, a sculptural installation specially conceived by the eight hand-picked artists for the museum’s soaring main gallery, translates the architectural elements of wildly decorated lofts in mill spaces into a fantasy-land, with the unstated implication that this must be the sort of environment that Providence’s underground artists inhabit — a whimsical, colorful and friendly Smurf Village, presumably located somewhere in Olneyville. Perhaps, if it still exists, they live there today. On the other hand, Providence’s actions speak more loudly than its words. The “artist-friendly” city continues to aggressively promote multi-million-dollar developments which often force the relocation of artists and the working class from formerly affordable neighborhoods destined to become shiny new yuppie theme parks. Condominium ad infinitum, and the beat goes on. The words used in the advertising campaigns of many new developments in Providence, and in fact across the nation, promote themselves to their buyer demographic as “artist lofts” (or “loft spaces” — the two almost synonymous with each other at this point). The buying and selling of this “artistic lifestyle” now threatens with extinction the community who created the allure. The RISD Museum show looks back at a glorious decade of Providence poster art, but the city does not value the type of communication these artworks convey. Stapled, taped or pasted on lampposts, fences, and blank walls, posters broadcast information — spreading dates, times, and locations for events, but also the beauty and the process of the craft itself. The “Clean Team” of the Downtown Improvement District now removes our beautiful prints from public property, in order to keep Providence safe for property owners and business interests. Somehow, the stated rhetoric of friendliness to artists seems increasingly out of step with the sanitized future the city has set its sails for. Shows must happen in officially sanctioned venues, posters must be ensconced on museum walls, and art must have value as commerce in order to gain approval from the powers that be. Providence’s underground art spaces, unlicensed show venues, and unauthorized poster wheatpasters have a love/hate relationship with the type of validation they receive from City Hall and the RISD Museum. Shangri-la-la-land epitomizes the interiors of art spaces rapidly vanishing from our city. The posters of Wunderground originally encoded advertisements for events, inviting participation from those in the subculture: “There’s a show at the secret fort! You’re invited to join the club!” They were never intended to be sealed off from the streets, placed in a museum’s climate-controlled environment, patrolled by guards because their supposed monetary value trumps their community-oriented origins. [Full disclosure: the 151 posters the RISD Museum borrowed from my personal collection, including a few of my own design, have been valued at $15,735 — but I’m not sure how I feel about that.] None of this grousing should reflect poorly on the spectacular Wunderground exhibit, which by all means is worth a visit. It’s an attempt to place the art show in a larger context. The RISD Museum does not create or enforce public policy, but they do grant an aura of legitimacy to the subculture’s illicit art. If these posters have intrinsic value, not only as artistic and cultural artifacts but also as commodities, then why do we pay people to take them down and throw them in the garbage — and why are those caught posting them likely to be charged with vandalism, even fined? If this type of art deserves to be celebrated, then why is Providence trying so hard to extinguish it?
