Wild Plakken, following in the footsteps of Heartfield and Staeck

Wild Plakken, following in the footsteps of Heartfield and Staeck

Activism, resistance, protest, disrupting the system: these are all descriptions of standing up for what is important to you. Artists and graphic designers are uniquely capable of giving activism a face, of getting the message across clearly by using the medium of the poster. The beauty of posters is that they speak for themselves so eloquently. Their raison d'être is to grab your attention and communicate often complex messages in the blink of an eye. Their visual imagery is generally very expressive and extroverted, evoking emotions and stimulating reflection. This imagery is always a child of its time and cultural context, summarizing the spirit of the age in a highly concentrated form. A successful activist-inspired poster is also transformative. At its most effective, the image becomes an emblem, the viewer an activist, the text a battle cry. At its most powerful, it embeds itself in the cultural zeitgeist and ultimately moves from the clenched fists of protesters to the pages of history books.

In the Arti et Amicitiae clubhouse in Amsterdam, a small but visually striking presentation of posters created by the Wild Plakken design collective is now on display on a prominent wall; a wall that pours out the activist spirit of the 1980s in bright colors, with fierce gestures and wild photomontages about the artist members. Wild Plakken's work evokes associations with that of John Heartfield and Klaus Staeck, two illustrious predecessors in artistic protest. Insofar as the world still struggles with the same problems, the works of both artists and Wild Plakken are unfortunately still relevant today; think of inequality, the threat of war, and racism. Heartfield rebels, angry and contemptuous, against the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, and Staeck conveys his message with laconic harshness and irony, exposing the manipulated freedom in Germany as treacherous inhumanity. Wild Plakken's work stands on the shoulders of these greats and is in no way inferior.

The Wild Plakken archive, made accessible by NAGO, is housed at the IISG.

Images: Heartfield, Klaus Staeck, Wild Plakken