by Perry Vasquez
I started my collection of landscaping flyers a few years ago when I moved to the suburbs. They started showing up periodically on my driveway neatly folded and tucked inside plastic sandwich bags with a few pieces of gravel tossed in for ballast.
They reminded me of the handmade flyers I designed in college as art director for a student humor magazine. Seeing them takes me back to a time before digital publishing when “cut and paste” was the production order of the day and a graphic designer’s best friend was an Xacto knife, and a supply of Letraset products. Their old school look gave them instant standing with me and so I began to collect. At last count I have twenty-eight flyers.
Aesthetically, they recall Mike Kelley’s flyers of lost pets and their artless, beautiful loser charm. These landscaping flyers evoke similar responses, but their purpose is not to recover something lost, but rather to find something else new - employment. Thus, they evoke the underground economy of migrant laborers fanning out across the city in search of work in a market that’s continually expanding and contracting.
I see these flyers within a frame of production and aesthetic value that would be familiar to Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playwright. Brecht continually surveyed the cultural and political landscape for clues, artifacts and technologies that would help him understand and connect to his audience of working men and women.
Brecht emphasized the necessity of experimentation in the arts, and the necessary freedom of the artist to make mistakes, while failing forward, as the price for inventing art that is true to its historical moment. Next to Brecht’s standard, these landscaping flyers seem to fall short. They are distinctly retro-looking and formula-like in their visual effect and means of production. They have no pretense to being artful. Perhaps that’s why I love them so much.
The reality of these posters is best appreciated as pieces in a pirate marketing campaign. In terms of style, they share many graphic elements. Empty space is scarce while lists and clip art dominate their typographical design style. This is a game of copy-cat where distinctions and details finally reveal themselves when seen in a group. Their individuality is revealed, but not too much.
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Perry Vásquez is an artist and educator living in San Diego. He is known for his series of palm tree paintings that depict their metaphorical and symbolic meanings as icons of the American Southwest.