#vernacularprint

[criticalsuperbeast-blog]

Wrestling with Vernacular Print

By Anthony Easton

Wrestling showcard from Hatch Show Print. Photo courtesy of the author.

I spent most of this month throughout the American South. It included a stop in Nashville. I write about, and love country music of all varieties, and so going to the Country Music Hall of Fame was a must. The Hall of Fame includes Hatch Show Print, and for an extra twelve dollars, you can have a tour of the print shop.

Hatch has been around for more than a hundred years. It is still a going concern, printing posters for clients, large and small. It’s also surprisingly affordable. The smallest run is 100 prints, maximum three colours, for about 400 dollars. The tradition of a jobbing print shop is something Hatch exemplifies. Hatch argues for a continued tradition of hand printing, and that they are doing work now that is similar to work they were doing a century ago. Being in the Hall of Fame, and even how they make prints, suggests a more rarified atmosphere. This might not be the case.

They still make gig posters for most of the big acts that come through Nashville, and they make posters for clients ranging from fried chicken restaurants to politicians. The posters they make have a continuity of aesthetics, and a form that is familiar. Walking around Broadway, the tourist neighbourhood of Nashville, Hatch prints are framed in most of the honky tonks and bbq joints. The fonts, photo-reproductions, and a retro style from the 1950s is immediately recognizable. They are made with care, and have a gorgeous, hand-hewn look. But, we cannot argue that they are making museum pieces, and that the hand-hewn look continues the tradition, but the look often does not move past the 1950s. Traditions renew, but these seem a deliberate simulacra of a historical form. The posters they make are intended as collector’s pieces, hocked at merch tables. The fried chicken restaurants are Kentucky Fried Chicken more than the small shacks dotting East Nashville. The posters of politicians are as likely to be Anderson Cooper than Roy Acuff, a ready symbol for the representation occurring over the real.

Elect Roy Acuff Governor Poster (reproduction), Hatch Show Print, 13 1/2" x 21 1/2". Image found on the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum online store.

The tension between the local and the international, or between actual Nashville and the idea of Nashville, can be seen in their Roy Acuff posters. Acuff was a country music star from the 1930s to the 1950s. When he attempted to run for governor, he commissioned a poster from Hatch Print. Those printings kept the company in business. The failure of Acuff’s campaigns were successes for the print shop. It is a ready metaphor for Nashville (or at least Music Row) being thought of as a one industry town. It didn’t matter much if Acuff was successful as a politician or a musician, as long as he was commissioning work from Hatch. Commissioned work required a constant churning, it was work that rested on both an immediacy and an ephemerality, literally a business model that thought of itself as trash. The print shop tour told stories of old printing blocks being used for drawers, that the hand-carved blocks were repurposed after having lost their use.

When Hatch moved from Broadway to the Hall of Fame, a model which rested on this churn of ephemeral product ended. It was replaced with a model which prioritized making the ephemeral archival. So, they would break apart the shelves, returning the blocks to printing, and by extension prioritizing a historical form. For example, when a concert poster would be discarded after a show, now it was carefully framed. This move to an archival understanding, is useful—a gorgeous print of FDR from his first presidential run is now reprinted. I am glad that we have that FDR form, but I am conflicted in the ongoing problem of the ephemeral.

It would also talk with some amount of shame, about how in the 1970s, the shop would print wrestling posters for regional promotions. But, those posters are sold in the gift shop, so the shame cannot be that deep. I am not quite arguing against preserving that which has been thought to be disposable, but recognizing that a tension exists in this recreation of historical forms. Buying a twelve dollar reproduction of a 1970s poster, in one way helps Hatch keep printing, but they print material that is either historic, or retains enough of the aura of the hand printed that an authenticity loop retains like a perpetual motion machine. It begs the question: How does Hatch prevent doing museum work in a literal museum?

The problem of this authenticity loop comes not only from the product, but from the material culture in which they are produced. The machines at the Hatch Show Print are at a minimum fifty years old. They have to be cared for, and one of the ways to care for them, is to make sure that they continue to be used, otherwise they will decay. But in this act of preserving, and renewing, means de facto, that they are historical work. It is one of the central paradoxes of contemporary craft, imbued with a century of modernism. Looking at Hatch, one is confronted by the problems of preservation, of the cult of the new, of the difference between making work for jobs and making work for art, but also, about how to keep traditions and tools alive. It is a vexed place.

The wrestling posters is a good example of this vexation, or the posters they make of clowns. These are beautiful posters—well designed, and carefully thought out. But, the rings of wrestlers and circuses are intended to be torn down, to move on a circuit from one small city to another. I don’t want to dispute the nature of these posters, to take anything away from Hatch, or other legacy printers. I think that the nature of jobbing work means you take the clients you take in order to preserve something that is worth preserving. The work-a-day, intensely practical nature of these histories is not preserved when they are formally aestheticised. This is not the collection of folk work, and it is not the curating of ready mades—it is making a new product.

But it is a product whose creation depends on a historical memory of people who are dying or close to dead. But, it is not a rarefied form either. No matter how highly aestheticized the new posters coming out of these places are, they still advertise concerts, and fried chicken, and new records. But, in order to make these new posters, they also reprint old posters. To commission a “new” poster from Hatch, is to commission not only the use of historical machines, but the cultural heritage of these old machines. After almost a century of arguing over Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the weight of the aura here depends on the refusal of the mechanical. But, the power of that refusal occurs with the ubiquity of digital forms. The tension between the ongoing problems of that which is saved and that which is discarded is a central problem of how we remember that which we reproduce.

Thinking about this, I wonder if I am being a bit of a hypocrite. Not because I bought the posters, not because I was profoundly happy in that space, not because I think that Hatch should be preserved, and vernacular history must be kept. I collected ephemera on my trip for a friend who is a graphic designer—and the ephemera I chose were mostly pricey examples of well-considered, expensive, slightly blank work. Work whose design was foregrounded as art, and not merely as a function of craft. I wonder what happens if we think of writers and designers more like plumbers or welders, if we will retain that ephemeral sense by refusing to be precious about form.

Sometimes when I walk around Hamilton, considering how to make these forms less precious, I wonder what we will keep. Not what we will find beautiful, but what will maintain the sheen of aesthetics after the use function seeps out. What does craft look like in the digital age? Part of the reason Hatch continues to function is because people buy into the idea that the hand-made is more genuine, more real, than the digital realm. It is the place where aesthetics has a moral component. It is the reason why high-end coffee shop staff wear Carhartt aprons, one of the reasons for the farm-to-table movement, why an international chain like KFC thinks it can sell a local product (Nashville Hot Chicken) to local people using local methods (the poster but also how this chicken is made), when it is not local (this has existed for a long time, though--see the Colonel).

Immortal Kombat 5 Poster, www.alpha-1wrestling.com

Hamilton has a wrestling league. The posters are printed full colour on printer paper, and taped to light standards around town, about a month before the shows. The shows are held at halls and high school auditoriums, just as they were in the 70s. The posters are made in Photoshop, and I often see them curled in the wind, or rain-soaked to the point of illegibility. They are garish, with bright colours, odd type choices, crowded with people, sometimes difficult to read. I wonder what will happen in the next few decades, to make them in good taste. Hatch is important because it preserves blue-collar aesthetics. But, that preserving requires a significant staff and capital outlay. It even did when they were producing the original posters. Alpha-1 posters require less outlay. the shift to digital forms and digital aesthetics means it can be done not in a formal shop, but by one person, in their bedroom. The working class aesthetic has gotten more intimate, and smaller.

But that doesn’t mean that regional wrestling in Tennessee, and Alpha-1 wrestling in Hamilton do not need to have their own space, their own aesthetic, and their own histories. The presence of Hatch, should not be in opposition to a more digitized aesthetic, but a recognition of the tension between ephemerality and institutional memory; between the desire to preserve, and the refusal to allow this preserving to be nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

That tension might be a productive one, and and this set of questions needs to be carefully considered. I will do this considering under the watchful eye of my two wrestling posters—one taken from a light post near Barton, and one bought for 20 dollars at the end of that Hatch tour.

Anthony Easton is a writer, artist, and theologian. They are interested in class, sex, gender and the west. They have been published in Spin, The Atlantic, Pitchfork, Globe and Mail, and others. They have presented at conferences throughout North America, and in Europe. Their art has been shown in Toronto, New York, Chicago, and is in the collection of the library of the National Gallery of Canada. They will start a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in 2017.