Oz 12: Existence is unhappiness
Image courtesy of Rick Poynor
Oz 12, the Tax-dodge special, a co-operatively designed multi-media poster.
Co-operatively* designed by Barney Bubbles and myself in 1967. (I was credited as ‘Eric Stodge’. Wikipedia is wrong when it says A1GG Roy Burge was one of the designers, maybe someone could change the reference.)
When I was cross examined over the credit ‘rights’ on Oz12 I was asked “who was the art diector? ” Which, on this job at least, was the wrong question big time, since both Barney and I were working as communards, and avoided the term with contempt, considering it an irrelevant name of commerce.
Barney or Muggeridge (?) drew the ruled rapidograph art. Barney and I Cow-gummed the collage. Faces in the boxes come from a history of the cinema and a Picture Post (?) history of technology, both from the fifties.
This sheet is is a dart board – one throws a projectile, or uses a blow pipe with a needle in a fletched cork perhaps, at Donald Duck, then reads off the appropriate codes and learns ones fate. I invented the game and wrote the instructions amongst other things. With post cards by various artists including John Dove’s quartet of breasts (lower left, top row, far left).
The wheels on left are the landing gear of the TSR2 bomber that my dad worked on, Barney put them in, said, “Here’s something for your dad.”. As others have pointed out the poster is influenced by Paolozzi. But my original drawing, spotted by Barney, was derived from a Paul Klee watercolour of a figure in a skirt, which in turn could be similar to a portrait of St. James(?) in the Book of Kells. Oz 12 also has references to Zen Buddhist art.
That’s my photograph up top of Twickenham student Dave Palmer, later of JWT in Birmingham, grinning at the world. He knew the Great Train Robber, Mr Biggs, before he escaped. While Biggs was doing time, Palmer ran errands for him, so he said. Palmer one-time commissioned me to design an ocean going pod-boat, based on a water-spider and made of moulded plastic with eight out-rigger floats, for ICI plastics. It sank as a project.
*Irrelevant fact, 1137084, was my family Co-op store member number back in the days when you got a rebate for shopping there. I’m amused that I still recall the number.
Quotes from Rick Poynor’s masterful summation of the Bubbles’ genius:
succinct words about the Fulcher, known as Barney B, and his ways at: http//designobserver.com
Rick Poynor: “The intricately reflexive nature of his work made Bubbles a true original in his day. No previous Britishdesigner had produced mass-market graphic communications this playful, personal, freighted with allusion, or tricksy. Bubbles was a postmodernist before this new category of graphic design had been identified and defined, and he is as significant an innovator as his American contemporary April Greiman. His designs refer to art history (Mucha, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg, Kandinsky, Picabia, Mondrian, Pollock); to popular culture and kitsch (the wallpaper on Ian Dury’s Do It Yourself, the shagpile rug on the Attractions’ Mad About the Wrong Boy); to graphic processes and the nature of the printed medium (the color bars on Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, the scuff marks on Get Happy!!); and — never letting us forget his “anonymous” authorship — to the designer himself. Two of these oblique self-portraits, showing Bubbles’ large nose, are well known (Costello’s Armed Forces and Dr Feelgood’s Fast Women & Slow Horses), but there are other graphic faces placed where you wouldn’t expect to find them, such as the image on the copyright page of the “Lives” exhibition catalogue (1979) designed for the Arts Council, and the monumental (block)head in Brian Griffin’s book Power: British Management in Focus (1981), which could be intended as cheeky substitutes for Bubbles’ inevitably absent design credit. When The Face asked to photograph him, he made them a picture out of fragments instead.
Barney Bubbles by Barney Bubbles, 1981
