Another Planet 1984-91
Another Planet Posters began life as the Community Access Screenprinting Project in 1983, and became incorporated in 1984. The Screenprinting Project was funded by the Commonwealth Employment Project scheme. It was based on a proposal developed by Julia Church and Kath Walters (members of Bloody Good Graffix, a Melbourne University-based access and print service) to establish a community access screenprinting workshop in St Kilda. The project was so successful (producing about 20,000 posters) that it attracted further funding in 1984 from the Australia Council, with accommodation assistance from the Victorian Ministry for the Arts. The incorporated entity known as Another Planet was officially launched in April 1985.
Another Planet's artists were ideologically committed to working collaboratively with the community. Like Redletter, their services included commercial services and open access for the community. In 1986, facing a reduction in funding, Another Planet decided to seek cheaper accommodation and moved from 1-3 Inkerman Grove, St Kilda, to The Stables at 19 Duke Street, Richmond. For a peppercorn rental of $20 per annum to Richmond City Council, and with an Australia Council grant to install ventilation and prepare the ground floor, the 100 year-old National Trust-listed building was converted into a printing workshop. It was to be the location spolitical posters.
1986 was also the year of the Australian Way of Life Project. This project was, according to Julia Church, 'for all those groups that are left out of all the publicity of what the Australian identity is. Julia Church and Kath Walters worked with Aboriginal groups, the Young Women’s Photographic Collective, the Trade Union Migrants Workers Centre, the Prostitute Workers Collective, the Women’s Council for Homelessness and Addiction, and the Tenants Union to produce 13 posters and two billboards. The project was ambitious in scope and aspiration. Over 15 years later the posters serve as documents to remind us of the diverse make-up of our society, and the efforts made by this group of artists to provide various community groups with a voice and a means by which they can define and present themselves.
The Billboard component of the Australian Way of Life Project evolved from a desire to expose larger and more diverse audiences to community arts. A key challenge faced by Another Planet was how to find the wide audience that it sought for its alternative voice. The high fines for illegal poster billing combined with the corporate sector's monopoly of expensive public space, meant that poster co-operatives had to think of new ways to get their messages out in the streets. Political posters had high circulation, but it tended to be in cafes, bookshops or on people’s fridges at home. Essentially, these posters were preaching to the converted. The biggest cost of the project was hiring the billboard sites. Venturing into new funding territory, Another Planet sought funds from the private sector. Levingston Posters were able to subsidise the cost of the sites. They also formed Community Billboard Promotions, a joint venture between Another Planet Posters, the Operative Painters' and Decorators' Union, the Building Workers' Industrial Union and Moomba Festivals Ltd., which established semi-permanent billboards for community access on construction sites in the city.
The first billboard was The Australian Dream? Australia Needs Public Housing. Relatively small, it was to be hung on community billboards. The artists themselves posed for the photographs which were used as the artwork. The second billboard, And the American Warship Sailed into the Sunset & Never Returned - Australia Nuclear Free and Non-Aligned, measured 3 x 6 metres and was produced for the Anti-Bases Campaign, Melbourne, a community organisation affiliated to the Australian Anti-Bases Coalition. The Coalition had 150 affiliates, including church, trade union, environmental, student and Aboriginal organizations.
Another Planet produced other billboards in 1989 and 1991. Plastic's got us, Hook Line and Sinker, by Carole Wilson, Peter Curtis and the Friends of the Earth, (originally produced as a poster in 1988) was displayed on 100 sites around metropolitan Melbourne and country Victoria. The sites were donated by Australian Posters, a major billboard company, after negotiations with the Outdoor Advertising Association of Australia (OAAA). This image won the prestigious Special Jury Prize at the 1992 3rd Chaumant Poster Festival in France. It was offered for sale to galleries and museums, and reprinted as a poster by Carol Porter in November of 1992.
The workshop also produced ‘house posters’. These works usually had lasting artistic merit, and served as a means to gain fame and enhance the reputation of the workshops for poster design excellence around Australia and the world. Another Planet’s artist-in-residence program began in 1987 allowing artworkers to produce work that extended their style and gave them the freedom to move away from the standard range of designs produced under time constraints with clients or community groups. It was decided that the posters for 1987 would address Aboriginal issues, given that 1988 was approaching with its Bicentennial Celebrations.
The artist-in-residence posters from 1987 and 1988 stand, arguably, as the workshop’s best work. The artists understood that the audiences of the day had a sophisticated visual vocabulary and any designs they created, either in the form of house posters or commissioned work, had to be engaging and powerful.
Collectivism: the tyrannies of structure and structurelessness
How odd it seems to compare these poster workshops at their beginning and then ten years on. They began as democratic collectives where staff participated in all activities, high and low. Artworkers were printers, designers, camera operators, as well as managers and administrators. They were driven by shared principles and a common vision, mostly originating from their leftist leanings, which motivated them to devote much unpaid time to their work. Ten years on, they had, by necessity, developed business plans and marketing plans, defining their visions, missions and performance indicators, and measuring their success in terms of 'outputs'. But collectivism does not necessarily sit in opposition to modern management processes, even though at first glance they seem to be worlds apart. The workshops were principle-driven, they had a flat structure, they worked collectively and collaboratively; they were non-hierarchical. These are valuable organisational characteristics according to some modern management theorists.
Collectivism did have its disadvantages, though. As Bob Clutterbuck put it: 'We all became conversant with the tyrannies of structure and structurelessness'. Undefined job roles and the need to participate in all areas of fund-raising and fund applications, left the artworkers exhausted and with less and less time to create art and work on community projects. Artist burnout was a common phenomenon in the community arts, and the poster workshops were no exception. Redletter and Another Planet knew they had to develop management structures and forward planning mechanisms, not only for their organisation’s survival (the Australia Council was starting to demand this of them), but also for the survival of their staff.
Amalgamation
In May 1990 Another Planet had to cease its on-site printing due to health hazards. This, combined with the resignation of four staff members, precipitated its amalgamation with Redletter. Discussions for amalgamation had begun some time before, and the staff had already begun to work cooperatively and co-dependently. Each had representatives from the other on their management committees, and staff had collaborated on projects. The idea of amalgamation was inspired by a ‘grand vision’ of a new organisation which would keep the Redletter and Another Planet sites and take on the Textile Workshop at the Meat Market Craft Centre in North Melbourne. The plan was to develop an umbrella organisation working in various arts media, in a range of locations around Melbourne. For this vision to work, the organization would need to employ more administrative staff, but the two core funding agencies of the Australia Council were not willing to fund this.
Two factors led to the decision to hasten the amalgamation. Firstly, both Redletter and Another Planet occupied premises conducive to unsafe or hazardous working conditions. Writing in 1986, Bob Clutterbuck gives this moving description:
We printed, in those days [late 1970s and early 1980s] in blissful ignorance of the considerable health hazards endemic to the process, spurred on by political idealism and the pure passion we had for the medium itself – the magic of printing colour so flatly, so intensely and so cleanly!
Many artists left Another Planet and Redletter due to respiratory problems caused by the fumes of the solvents used in printing, or skin reactions to the chemicals. Julia Church pioneered work in the field, and in 1990 she produced a kit highlighting hazards in ceramics, painting, photography, sculpture and printmaking. Another Planet led the way for other poster workshops and changed to water-based inks in November of 1989 (eliminating the need for solvents) and Redletter followed in 1991.
The second factor contributing to amalgamation was the loss of funding. Both organisations had had their grant applications rejected by the VACB; and the CCDU, deciding that they did not fit the major criteria for future funding, had made a decision to phase out funding over a three-year period.
The workshops appealed to have this decision reversed on the basis of the amalgamation. With the financial assistance of the Victorian Ministry for the Arts and the CCDU, a consultant was employed to review operations. The ‘grand vision’ was discarded, and the result was the merging of the two salso resolved to concentrate their work in three broad areas of social justice: women’s issues, the environment, and the needs of groups from non-English speaking backgrounds. At a special general meeting on 17 December 1991 the membership voted to adopt the name RedPlanet Inc. The CCDU and Arts Victoria removed the ‘on notice’ status that had been with them in 1990 and 1991, confirming that RedPlanet was developing in a direction to their liking. The new organisation was officially launched on 1 January 1992. Armed with a new focus, and a new vote of confidence from the Australia Council, RedPlanet launched itself into the future, audacious and irreverent.
RedPlanet Inc.
The CCDB was increasingly concerned with the question of aesthetics and standards of excellence. Awards like the Chaumont Special Jury Prize for Plastic’s Got Us, were enormously influential in raising RedPlanet’s credibility with the Australia Council. The newly formed organisation was determined to face the future with a positive approach, striving for excellence and more self-sufficiency. As well as providing its access programs, commercial services and community work, it re-introduced a rigorous artist-in-residence program, and marketed its posters more aggressively. Combined with the move to the spacious ‘Broom Factory’ at 144 George Street, Fitzroy in February of 1993, the strategy paid off. In 1992 and 1993 the artists produced 24 house posters, and were invited to participate in a number of exhibitions including at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Melbourne Arts Centre, the Lahti X Poster Biennale (Finland), - here Carol Porter’s Beautifully Slim was short listed for a prize from 2582 posters from 50 countries – the Prohe Kunstandwer Museum in Frankfurt, and at the National Gallery of Australia. The statistics and odds speak for themselves: from a field of 917 Australian posters submitted for inclusion in the International Chaumant Graphic Exhibition in Paris, 12 were chosen, and of these, six came from the RedPlanet folio.
The aesthetic lineage of Australia’s political posters can be traced back along two branches. Firstly, to the radical work of the European Dadaists and Surrealists of the early twentieth century, whose irreverence for the art world displayed itself in their use of non-traditional media and anti-elitist attitudes. And secondly, to the posters of the Atelier Populaire produced in Paris by students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts during the 1968 general strike. These posters were of single colour, produced quickly and pasted up on the streets overnight. They functioned as counter-propaganda, contesting hostile reports designed to discredit the students and the trade unions, in the government-run media. Symbols and designs popularised during this time, like the raised fist, the fascist rat, and the dominating slogan, have been used over and again by political poster workshops around the world.
As well as drawing from Dada and the Atelier Populaire, the aesthetics of the political posters of the 1980s and 1990s can be analysed in terms of their ‘popist’ references, elements and origins. The use of fluoro colour, the combination of photo and hand-cut stencils, the use of mock film or news scenes as visual quotation, the dominating text panel or thought bubble, (as in comics) all have their origins in the traditions of Pop Art which saw a revival in the 1980s. The flatness of colour achieved by silk screen printing gave an impersonal style and left no evidence of the artist’s hand. This suited the poster makers, who often chose anonymity, making the message rather than self expression their main goal.
Pop Art owed a great deal to the Dadaists as did Punk, the other major aesthetic influence on Australian political poster design in the 1980s. The ‘trash aesthetic’ of punk, also reminiscent of Warhol’s pop art, used photocopies, cut-outs, and sampling, appropriation and artistic quotation, to create an instant art based on a do-it-yourself mentality. But while the New Wave music, graphics and fashion (mostly a rough, street version of 1960s revival) gave a critique of culture, it often had nihilistic tendencies, not really offering a vision of an alternative future. The political posters of RedPlanet and its predecessors were never nihilistic and only borrowed the graphic style of Punk, not the sentiment of alienation.
The end of RedPlanet, Melbourne's last political poster workshop
By 1997 RedPlanet was receiving 42% of its funding from government sources. Arts Victoria provided 19% (or $34,000 per annum) and the Australia Council 24% (or $43,000). The total income was around $180,000. When the Australia Council made its decision to stop funding as of 1998, RedPlanet found itself in a position where it had to make the difficult decision to take out a loan of $50,000 secured against the trading stock of posters, other merchandise produced by the workshop and its precious poster archive.
Efforts to increase their income by selling off parts of the collection, such as the Street Poster Art auction in 1998, proved fruitful, but not enough to service the loan and maintain solvency. On 23 December 1999 RedPlanet ended the employment of its remaining two staff and suspended trading. The posters would be offered for sale to large collecting institutions like the State Library of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia - both institutions had expressed interest in the collection - as a last resort to raise money to service the loan and resume operations. But before this could eventuate receivers were appointed by the creditors, and the archive, including business records, trading stock and equipment, was formally sold to the State Library of Victoria in January of 2001.
Conclusion: the art of revolution
The catch phrases of the counter-culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s was ‘Think globally act locally’. Groups like the Nuclear Free Zones Secretariat, saw solutions beginning at home and broadening on a global scale. But the late 1980s and 1990s saw the insidious devolution of global thinking. The struggle for equality for women had seen Western women fight for and gain rights at home, then turn their attentions to developing countries which had oppressive class and religious structures, only to have to refocus on local issues again with the increase in problems related to body image and corporate ‘glass ceilings’. The fight for equal access to health services focused on the starving populations of the Third World, and then ‘came home’ to deal with the AIDS crisis and indigenous Australian’s health problems. Solidarity movements reached far and wide, with Australians visiting and sending aid to newly liberated countries like Nicaragua. However, with what was seen as the eroding of civil liberties by various state governments, energies were re-directed to local fronts.
By the mid-1990s social idealism seemed a luxury, to be indulged in by university students and ageing hippies. Government funding bodies were stressing the need for arts organisations to be accountable financially rather than culturally. The challenge for RedPlanet was to serve the community while maintaining a profile which happily co-existed with Government agendas. Many artists have commented on the impact the onerous task of making grant applications to government bodies had. Grant applications were detailed, complicated and labour intensive, and the artists had to stay abreast of all Government policy.
The British community artist and writer, Owen Kelly, argues that to link community arts with the never ending and onerous demands of grants is to take it away from the dangerous fields that it was heading -revolution - and to keep it under the control of the State. The question therefore arises: Did the pursuit of state funding compromise the radical activism of these artist groups? At this point it is important to distinguish between two separate yet related concepts. On the one hand there is the concept of the poster as an art form and on the other, the wider concept of community art. In a political context, the power of the poster lies in its use as a tool of revolution, to express the views of the counter culture and avant-garde. Some historians have commented that the political revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe of 1989-1991 marked the swan song of the poster. The poster served the underground movement, then was put back into retirement by democracy. But this is to assume that there is no scope in a democracy for revolutionary activity. Does a poster have to be the voice of the underground to be revolutionary? And does the poster have a role in revolutionary activity?
In Victoria RedPlanet proved that the production of hard-hitting, satirical and intelligent political posters went a long way toward expressing the voice of radicalism and the counter-culture. In 1999 RedPlanet invited the Guerrilla Girls to Melbourne to run a series of screenprinting workshops and lectures. The Guerrilla Girls is a New York women’s collaborative established in 1985. Its members have remained anonymous by wearing gorilla masks and assuming the names of dead women artists. They have developed a strong voice – always with a sense of humour - on all aspects of inequality that affect women around the world. The Melbourne Guerrilla Girls Workshops resulted in a series 13 hard-hitting and witty posters by various artists on themes like body image, the art world and Kennett’s Victoria, and proved to be a morale booster for RedPlanet, which was nearing its end.
Perhaps the most revolutionary achievement of RedPlanet is its achievements in the community arts. As a community arts provider, it helped create social capital. Social capital is the term used to denote the bonding and trust that develops amongst disparate members of a community when they co-operate and collaborate on projects for mutual benefit. While working together on a project, people experience what it is to be 'divinely human', striving for a common goal, and not burdened by individualistic concerns. To create social capital is to lead rather than to simply reflect social development, and in this sense it can be regarded as avant-garde, and to some degree revolutionary.
While RedPlanet, the last of Melbourne’s alternative poster workshops, has gone, its legacy remains. Today, home-spun handbills, produced on personal computers reveal their design heritage which can be traced back to the ground-breaking designs of the mid-1980s, and silkscreened posters are still the medium of choice for political campaigns run by cash-strapped student union bodies.
Illustrations
Top left: Marina Strocchi, Greenhouse Effect, 1989
Top centre: Mark Denton, Backstreet visions, 1986
Top right: Chris Reidy, Peace the only safe fallout shelter, 1982
Middle: Carole Wilson, Plastic's got us, hook, line and sinker - recycle now, 1988
Bottom left: Colin Russell, White Australia has a black history, 1987
Bottom centre: Artist unknown, Rally against Thatcher, 1988
Bottom right: Carol Porter, Brrm Brrm, 1995
