Wish You Were Her

Matt Dillon's earliest movie, Over the Edge (1979), was on TV the other night. It's all about teenage rebellion in nowheresville during the late 70s. Over the course of the movie which ends in death, destruction and new beginnings a teen intermittently storms off to his room, lies on his bed and broods, listens to Cheap Trick on his headphones and stares at his poster-covered walls. It wasn't clear which posters they were, but it wasn't exactly hard to guess. They were images of escape.

The film took me back. In the mid 80s, I was a reconstructed, if perennially broody, Cheap Trick fan who worked in a poster shop called Frame-Up. Situated on a soporific, dead-end street in an industrial waste-land, it didn't sell much. Some days no-one came in and I would fall asleep at the counter. On the rare occasions when customers did appear, they usually wanted to buy a poster either to match their furniture or give themselves a little glimpse of somewhere else, another life, another state of mind. I felt a mixture of youthful empathy and scorn at their choices sympathising with their problem without relating to their solution it was a confusing job. I had somehow become responsible for pushing elusive images of happiness, but considered myself a realist. Books might provide escape, or a win on the lottery or an affair with a wayward boy, but posters? Nonetheless, these passports to paradise came in many guises: 'abstracts' (usually blue); photographs of New York or Paris in the 40s and 50s people running hand in hand down foggy streets full of promise, or kissing with abandon in the kind of dim-but-golden bars you never found in Australian suburbs; nature, in the form of waves or lightening: animals, either 'spiritual' (dolphins) or absurd (monkeys); saccharine re-workings of 19th-century flower paintings; reproductions of Matisse, Chagall or Rothko; 'erotica' like Herb Ritts' best-seller of nude super-models dished up like a mixed grill; and, of course, sci-fi the ultimate escape. The mounts and the frames always cost more than the posters. The shop also sold framed details of wine labels and greeting cards. I wasn't allowed to mention the provenance of these images, only to say that they were 'reproductions'. It didn't bother me they were still pictures that had been seen a billion times, like everything else in the shop. On the bus home, I always felt morose. Despite the fact that I was selling pictures, none of it seemed to have anything to do with either art or with my life.

After I quit and got a new job in a chemist's shop, I still, despite the narcoleptic associations, found it hard to pass a poster shop without looking in the window, comparing prices and checking out what was new. It's amazing how quickly poster trends come and go. Remember Tennis Girl from the 70s? Like David Hamilton's fuzzy photographs of dreamy, emaciated girls in flower-strewn fields, she was on every wall of every older brother of every friend I had. She's impossible to find now I know, I've tried. But everyone can recall her instantly, which gives me a sneaking suspicion that deep down, we might even miss her but why? Or The Boulevard of Broken Dreams? Edward Hopper has always been a popular guy to borrow from combining him with Jimmy Dean and Marilyn was inspired. Or how about the early 90s Magic Eye posters? They were everywhere, and for a moment the world became divided into those who could and those who couldn't see the secrets that lay embedded in their psychedelic patterns.

Now when I go into poster shops, despite some familiar friends Norman Parkinson's New York, New York and Robert Doisneau's (The Kiss) Hotel de Ville are still going strong ­ there are a lot of new faces on the walls. One of the most popular at the moment is causing a bit of a fuss. Professor Duncan Macmillan, author of Scottish Art 1460-2000 has devoted only a small, dismissive paragraph to Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, creator of Britain's best-selling 'art' poster The Singing Butler, which depicts a couple dancing on a rainy beach beneath umbrellas held high by servants. Mad Dogs, also by Vettriano, is Britain's number two in the poster top ten. Both looks like products of the 20s, filtered through a kind of flat, high-toned palette and varnished with a contemporary nostalgia for a Britain comfortable with conservative delineations of class and gender. No wonder they're popular. Headlines about Professor Macmillan's travesty tend to be hyperbolic. A recent one in the Daily Telegraph read: 'Jack Nicholson loves him. The public adores him. His erotic art has made him millions and his posters outsell Van Gogh and Star Wars. So why is Jack Vettriano bitter?' If he's so popular, why isn't he considered good? Well, because his pictures, even the more risqué ones, are like illustrations from the kind of romance novels you find with faded, curling pages in down-at-heel hotels by the sea. They're the kind of pictures that make you long for the sunshine and health and teenage libidinousness of Tennis Girl.

But fantasy, which is really what Vettriano's pictures are about, is along with the necessity of matching the economic demands of the advertiser with those of the public's imagination a current which runs through the history of the poster. Estella Canziani's The Piper of Dreams (1914), for example, started out as a watercolour of an elf-like creature in a feather cap playing a flute beneath a tree. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1915, its reproduction rights were immediately sold and it became the most popular poster of the First World War, selling 250,000 copies in its first year and inspiring a piece for piano with the same name by Daisy Wilson-Gunn. It became something of a talisman for the troops and if you want an image of the ubiquitous vulnerability of the men in the trenches, then think of that image pinned to the muddy walls. Even the earliest posters, circus or theatre poster woodcuts, transformed what is essentially an abstraction an often inarticulate desire for something or somewhere else into popular images which succeeded within the confines of commerce. Although lithography was invented by Aloys Senefelder in 1796, it wasn't until high speed printing machines were invented in the 1870s that mass-produced posters really hit the streets. Huge, wonderfully imaginative and well designed, they transformed the walls of towns and cities as if competing with the scale of salon painting. Gradually, in homes of limited means, images which had started out life as advertisements began to be bought as substitute paintings. Which makes sense after all, most of them were at least as interesting and good-looking as contemporary painting.

Posters have always had a rather confused relationship both to art and to their own self-worth. Many things to many periods, like photography, they have had to struggle against being limited by their reproducibility and popular appeal. Even the parameters of the word 'poster' have become a little bewildering not unlike, I suppose, the word 'art'. The best posters take advantage of their hybrid origins propaganda, advertising, design and have fun with them, like the kids of sales executives who decide to make good-looking underground films, without forgetting the lessons their parents taught them about selling an idea. The Hippy poster, for example: in November 1965, an exhibition of Jugendstil and Expressionist posters was held at the University Art Gallery in Berkeley at UCLA and, after a kind of conceptual merger between Art Nouveau and Symbolist designs from the turn of the century, it became an immediately identifiable look. Quasi-mystical, historically curious, idealistic and achingly Romantic, it brought elements of the past that were applicable, in a very vital way, to the present in order to advertise bands, politics, clothes and books. These posters from the 60s and 70s are so unlike the worst contemporary posters, symptoms of a culture which doesn't mind flattening ideas and strangling aesthetics in the name of commerce. I don't mean contemporary posters that continue the 19th century tradition of wall-plastering many of these, especially band posters, are great but the ones which sell an image of a picture in a medium it wasn't born to: paintings reduced in size, squeezed through a reproduction process and sweetened up with inappropriate frames. Accessibility is an obvious factor posters have made it possible to own a 'great' work of art for practically nothing. (I remember once feeling particularly bleak in the poster shop of my youth, thinking 'but Matisse was radical. Rothko killed himself' and then trying to reconcile their achievements with the saccharine greeting cards I saw before me like hearing a muzak version of a Jimi Hendrix song.) It's depressing that so many big, public galleries are perpetuating this very same response to thinking about art the temporary, unavoidable shops you have to walk through to get out of block-buster shows like Rembrandt or Ingres that practically beg you ­ even after presenting the work in hushed and reverential tones to buy a drawing pad, a carry bag, a mug or a pair of shoes bearing the poor, dead, artist's signature or a detail of a painting.

There's a little Picasso painting called the Blue Room (1901). It's a portrait of the room the artist shared with friends, and on the wall is Toulouse Lautrec's poster May Milton plethora of lousy posters, advertisements and confused visual messages that are part and parcel of 20th-century culture is somehow reassuring. The Blue Room is a painting that includes an image of a poster which was meant to sell something, but which, however inadvertently, ends up selling the image of something else all together. It's the image of a look, an idea run amok, the dignity of a popular idiom, the impulse people have to put images on their walls to facilitate dreams. In other words, once again and forever more, the idea of escape made tangible.