‘Public Notice’ Lets Viewers Surf the World of Posters

In size alone, “Public Notice: Art & Activist Posters, 1951-1997” appears to have something for everyone. Although announcements for exhibitions in New York galleries make up more than 80% of the nearly 400 posters displayed at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery, advertisements for underground movies, performances, festivals, fund-raisers, bookstores and politicians share the crowded walls with emblems of consciousness-raising, graffiti-like expressions of urban angst and provocative political messages.

Surprisingly, the sprawling survey’s initial cacophony and rambunctiousness too quickly become repetitive, even monotonous. As organized by curators Jeanette Ingerberman, Papo Colo and Cesar Trosabares for Exit Art/the First World (a nonprofit New York venue), “Public Notice” offers something for everyone only in the same sense that the Internet does.

On the Web, users must patiently sift through loads of superfluous information and spurious data before finding much that is interesting. At the exhibition, visitors are presented with a similarly overwhelming overload of unprocessed information.

No wall text explains the curators’ intentions. No catalog or brochure was published to guide visitors through the time-devouring accumulation of printed images. Nor are the posters grouped thematically, stylistically or by the purposes they originally served.

The loose chronological order, the show’s only attempt to provide some kind of organizational structure, breaks down on three large walls hung salon style. Here, individual labels are so far from the posters to which they refer that it’s extremely difficult to figure out what you’re looking at. On one wall, the number of labels does not even correspond to the number of posters.

As a whole, “Public Notice” combines the worst of both worlds: the frustrating randomness of the seemingly endless lists provided by Internet search engines and the plodding, one-work-at-a-time monotony of old-fashioned art exhibitions. Odd as it may seem in a show more concerned with general cultural studies than aesthetic particulars, the posters are presented as if they were autonomous art objects--self-sufficient entities that transcend their contexts, making supplemental information unnecessary.

Not even die-hard Modernists believe that art stands apart from the rest of the world, so it’s strange to see a Postmodern exhibition make such claims.

The biggest problem, however, is that the survey fails to make a persuasive argument about the relationship between posters announcing art exhibitions and those with more pointed political purposes.

The general story goes something like this: In the 1950s, exhibition posters were straightforward affairs that conveyed information in as classy a manner as possible. In the 1960s, graphics got flashier, Pop Art borrowed elements from commercial advertising and art’s definition broadened to include Happenings and other quasi-spontaneous embraces of disorder.

In the ‘70s, protest posters appeared alongside the simplified typefaces favored by Minimalists and first-generation Conceptualists. Finally, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, incitement to activism occurred with greater frequency, nearly equaling the number of exhibition posters, which, for their part, got bigger, bolder and glossier than before.

The strongest works in the show scrutinize art-world politics. Made by the Guerrilla Girls and other collectives, they provide the only direct link between posters advertising exhibitions and those staking out political issues.

Likewise, artist Jenny Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays” mark the intersection between the throwaway poster and museum art. Posted in the street, these angry hit-and-run warnings are ominous because of the anonymity of their makers. Hung on gallery walls, they convey little more than an artist’s nostalgia for direct communication.

The arbitrariness of the pairing between art posters and activist posters becomes clear as soon as a viewer thinks of the types of posters excluded from the exhibition. Concert posters and Hollywood movie posters would not only add significant visual impact to “Public Notice.” They would also undermine its implicit argument--that activist posters are an offshoot of art posters, which eventually became an art form of its own.

As it is, the sheer numerical disparity between exhibition announcements and political entreaties makes the latter stand out as edgy and ambitious. Adding other types of posters would make politics look less like an art world invention and more like the uncontainable, often inartistic activity that it is.

* “Public Notice: Art & Activist Posters, 1951-1997,” Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (626) 396-2244, through July 3. Closed Mondays.