Poster-ity

An art collector's conceit

I had a dream. My dog was helping me collect event posters. I collect posters in real life so that part wasn’t unusual but in the dream my dog had developed a knack for it, an eye. We were in my hometown at the top of the main street in front of a long-gone bargain department store, Sandy’s, a bobble-headed Scot in a tartan kilt and tam peering down at us from his sign. I spotted a poster to the right. Weatherbeaten. Ripe. The picture was of a collection of tall buildings, the view from below looking up. Life imitated art on the spot, the dog and I straining our necks to see it. It was too high. I couldn’t reach. We carried on. The dog spotted another one, also good. Minimalist. Line drawing. Black on white. Red accents. It was too high as well but more importantly it advertised an event that had yet to happen. Off limits, I said. I was trying to teach him responsible poster-thieving. And then I woke up.

I started to collect posters when my adopted hometown experienced an explosion in silkscreen printing back at the turn of the century. All at once they were everywhere. Art. To my way of thinking they were art. Everyman’s art. I’d fallen in love with silkscreened posters even further back in part because I’d fallen in love with a silkscreen printer; I married him. Had he been a welder I may have fallen in love with metal fabrications, butt, spot, lap, edge, and tee joints, my devotion knowing no bounds.

In screenprinting each colour is squeegeed through a succession of fine mesh screens, each bearing its own piece of a final image. Alignment of the pieces into a single, unified whole, a picture, is the trick. For me, however, the tiny misses in alignment, the inkless and double-inked spots, the imperfections, become the perfection, each poster unique.

Silkscreened posters were everywhere when I started collecting them, telephone poles between my house in the north end and the fine arts university downtown, a student ghetto, slathered with them. They mostly looked like dashed-off homework assignments, routinely amateurish and crude, but they got the job done, their messages conveyed. Many were on recycled paper: foil-lined cardboard takeout container lids, cardboard box inserts, file folders, wallpaper, newsprint; anything that lay flat and was available in quantity and for free. The things the posters promoted gave the impression the maker was a bandmember or impresario by night. This was the golden age of screenprinting. First there were none, then they were everywhere for the space of a bachelor's degree, honours maybe, possibly masters, and then they were gone, the age of silkscreening over as quickly as it had begun, replaced by the less golden age of machine printing and photocopying. But it turns out I’m a sucker for posters regardless. It’s about colour and composition and texture and form and line and space and what an ordinary person does with them. I now collect them for my great niece, a wall in her bedroom a thousand miles away dedicated to their display. 

I have my own shrine to posters, the indoor equivalent of a telephone pole. I staple, tack, tape, and sticky tack them to my chosen wall, a floor to ceiling patchwork, thatched, two and three deep. I give them the rough handling to which they’re accustomed, the neglect for which they’re made, exposed to air and light, bodies brushing past, their edges curling, tearing, just like in the wilds. This is part of their charm: their deterioration. They have holes around the edges where I lost out to the staples that fastened them to their pole. I could water them to mimic the effect of precipitation but that would ruin the floor. 

My actual scruples around leaving posters alone until after their advertised date are not as scrupulous as they could be. I may be above nothing when it comes to a poster I like and want. I think there might be other people like me out there who also lurk the poles. Competitors. I can’t be the only one. When I steal preemptively I tell the dog it’s for posterity. I’m not depostering, I’m repostering.

My dog is typically with me when I collect them. Contrary to being interested he is in fact indifferent. He’s already peed on the poles I stop at and finds my delays irksome. But up at my height the poles keep changing, the poster pee fresh. He tugs. I tug back. I plant my feet and hold firm and dig away at the staples with a key in my free hand. He once resisted so vehemently, gave his head such a sudden parry and reverse thrust, that he slipped his collar and shot across the street before I could stop him. A cat. He’d seen a cat. He loves cats in all the wrong ways. We all have our fixations. He didn’t catch his cat. I didn’t get my poster. I reattached his leash and we carried on home, both of us empty handed and unspeaking.