When you visit an exhibition, you might take home a poster, catalog or t-shirt. When you visit this exhibition online, you can download a souvenier in the innovative form of an After Dark screen saver module! The UAM/PFA worked with Dow & Frossini, and Berkeley Systems, makers of the popular After Dark screen saver software, to create these custom screen saver modules using images of art from this exhibition. You can download them freely online, and order posters as well if you wish from our Museum Store. Screen Saver instructions are contained in a readme file, and in order to use the modules you must have After Dark 3.0+ software installed in your computer.
Artist's statement:
Why I Do What I Do
A lot of art is out there competing for your attention, and I create some of it. I make posters and book jackets, wine labels and wedding announcements. I'm a graphic designer, writer and printer. My clients want you to eat dinner at their restaurant or drink their wine or go to their wedding. You might or might not, but you certainly won't if you don't know about it. My job is to get your attention and keep it long enough for the message to get across. This is what I do for a living. I want people to know about my work and hire me to do more, so every piece of work that I do is also an advertisement for myself. In addition, I want to provide the viewer with something fun to look at. You don't need to be interested in the product or service to enjoy looking at the picture. Not only am I trying to get you to go to Chez Panisse for dinner, and in the process persuade Chez Panisse or somebody else to ask me to do another poster for them later on, but I'm making an attractive picture for you to put on your wall, even if you live in New Zealand and will never ask me to design a poster for you, or will never go to Chez Panisse in your life.
All of this would be much simpler if I were the only artist in the world, but I'm not. So, I have to make things that you will look at in preference to other artists' work, or at least look at them until you get bored and go on to something else. But I'll have your attention for a while, which is all I can ask.
I set a task for the viewer, which I hope will be performed correctly. The task is to look at my design and do what it suggests. If the task is too difficult, the viewer will simply turn away. Therefore, I make my designs easy to look at, operating on the theory that what is easier to look at will be preferred to something that is difficult to look at. Rough lines and soft colors are more pleasing for longer intervals than hard lines and bright colors. If I were trying to get your attention and hold it for a short time, or had something exceedingly important to say, I would do things differently. There is a place in the world for sirens and flashing red lights, but there is a much larger place in the world for things that don't make as much racket.
Graphic work is different from fine art. I expect to be treated a bit roughly. Book jackets get shopworn and tattered; posters get bent, torn, put up on a wall with thumbtacks, and after a while become faded and flyspecked and dirty. My inclination is to work with this reality rather than pretend it isn't there. Things that don't have to be perfect to look good, look good longer. Think of my work as a pair of blue jeans. They're meant for everyday use. If they get dirty it's okay; the dirt probably won't show anyhow. As they fade or get frayed or torn, they might even look better than when they were new. The older they get, the more comfortable they get. Of course, you can't wear blue jeans to the opera, but I'll let somebody else design evening wear.
David Lance Goines
July 25, 1994
Each of the small poster images shown below is a clickable link to a larger version of the same poster. The large images average about 50 kilobytes each. At a modem speed of 14.4 kbs, the large images will download in about 40 seconds.
DER BLAUE ENGEL: First printing, 190 copies, 25 are signed.
1972
Four colors
16-3/4" x 24"
The theme is light and heavy. Here Emil Jannings' egg is balanced precariously on Marlene Deitrich's unforgiving anvil. What is going to happen to that egg? Whatever it is, it won't be good for Janning's lacerated spirit, while the innocent catalyst of his destruction will scarcely feel a thing. He brought it on himself, you might say, and there's no fool like an old fool. But if we were each of us punished in proportion to our mistakes, especially those of the heart, there'd be no room to spare in Purgatory. They'd have to cut loose the real bad actors to make space, and even then we'd be stacked like cordwood and spill into the less savory antechambers of Hell. So, when the sober citizen goes schoolboy-lovesick over a nightclub nightingale, runs off the rails and loses everything, reputation, worldly goods, self-esteem and all, consider that naughty Cupid could have done the same for you. And might yet.
If you're going to steal, steal big. If you're going to lie, tell a lie so big that, often enough repeated, it will come to be the truth. Do not pilfer, or tell fibs. You'll just get caught and you'll be sorry afterwards. About the biggest thing you can steal is a man's life. That takes everything he has. It doesn't leave you with much, of course, except his dead flesh. Slavery steals his life also, except that the use of his days becomes the possession, for so long as he hangs on, of another person. The fratricidal war this film celebrates was about stealing, both big and small, and changing the rules about what was stealing and what it wasn't. Compared to stealing lives, and stealing days, stealing a locomotive scarcely seems worth discussion.
I'd done nineteen posters and a lot of other design work and I hadn't signed any of it because I felt that my work was so derivative of the work of others that it would be presumptuous to claim any of it as my own. One day I walked past Dow and Frosini and there was a poster in the window that I really liked. It obviously had been done recently, but it wasn't signed, and so I couldn't find out who had done it. This annoyed me greatly, and as I stood there being annoyed I realized that I was doing the exact same thing myself, and that there were probably plenty of people out there who were annoyed because I wasn't signing my posters. So I started signing them. I liked the pattern of four squares arranged into a larger square, and had used that as a sort of signature before, so when I designed a signature I kept that basic idea and made it a square. This movie always makes me cry.