Unstuck: Band Posters from the Christchurch City Libraries Archives (1980 - 89) [student research project]

Abstract

The posters in this collection in the Christchurch City Libraries Archives come from a specific place (Christchurch) and time (the archives say 1980–89, but the posters we’ve looked at were all done prior to 1984). A place and time in which fairly radical new attitudes and approaches emerged in respect to the performance, production, and reproduction of local music. Imaginative new forms of music have often come hand-in-hand with equally inventive visual responses—correlatives in the form of album covers, music videos, and posters. In fact I’d argue that a decent amount of the more important graphic design of the later part of the 20th Century occurred in specifically these formats. Music has been, and still often is, a driver of new developments in visual language.2 This project was set to encourage students to consider this generative and dynamic disciplinary relationship in a specifically local context.