Macabre Works by Wilhelm Staehle
347 West 36th Street, Suite 603
212-633-8943
through January 29, 2010 (make sure to call first)
* Staehle did give a lecture/presentation at the TDC in December, at the opening of this show, and presumably gave those attending background on both Will and Wilhelm. If you're a walk-in to the exhibit however, you are on your own.
Type Directors Club, New York
347 West 36th Street, Suite 603
212-633-8943
through January 29, 2010 (make sure to call first)
Los Angeles designer Will Staehle is having an exhibit and sale of work at the Type Directors’ Club, that redoubt of typographic excellence tucked up in the wilds of the Garment District. Actually, it's Staehle’s alter ego Wilhelm who is displaying and purveying color and black-and-white prints, escapist serial fiction, light boxes, cut-paper tableaux under bell jars, note cards, T-shirts, buttons, printed pillow cases, and even hand-made soap. Some of the work is available through Staehle’s Bazaarium (a conflation of bazaar, bizarre and emporium), which offers his “Victorian-inspired goods” and casts him in the role of behind-the-scenes Master of Ceremonies, magician and salesman.
Unfortunately, little can be learned about Staehle the designer — his inspirations, biography, or practice — in the exhibition*. A 2002 graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he is a talented graphic designer, typographer and illustrator. Steahle’s professional role is design director at JibJab media but he is also a well-known book jacket designer, having been an art director at HarperCollins in New York City. At the TDC, Staehle hides himself behind the heavy curtains and good-natured hokum of the nineteenth century and cloaks his alter ego in the trappings of a tragic gentleman; Wilhelm is a “horribly disfigured artist, writer and prolific papercutter…. who often frightens small children when he emerges from the seclusion of his sprawling estate.”
Staehle has a knack for marketing and a fondness for ephemeral novelties — and the Bazaarium, et al. is but one of his pseudonymous undertakings. He doesn’t seem to sleep much, judging from the variety and quantity of his work and the number of websites he orchestrates — and all items in the exhibit appear to be personal projects, not commercial commissions.
He has a penchant for nineteenth-century complexity. Wilhelm’s Dollar Dreadful adventure serials, pure tribute to nineteenth-century expeditionary melodrama, are publications Staehle writes with collaborators and produces with covers that are densely-crafted homages to nineteenth-century illustrated journals. But he can hold back as well, as seen in the simplicity of the all-caps typography in his prints and the elegant elision of his Silhouette Masterpiece Theater framed items and cards. While some of the wit stumbles, the look is nearly always perfectly poised.
The large framed prints are perhaps the strongest work in the show. As small prints or T-shirts, the silhouette illustrations (such as the “Hi” and “Bye” exchange between a boy and the bear that eats him) can lose impact; poster-sized, they become Art Objects, deliberately mysterious, Ruscha-like haiku. Their prices also suggest entry into the art category, as the large prints sell for $2000 to $3000.
“Ha! You Got Steampunk’d!” declares one of Staehle’s prints. The Bazaarium — Wilhelm — embraces the steampunk interpretation of the nineteenth century as a time of adventure and mad experimentation. It embraces that style’s mix of handicraft and technology, Victorian propriety and the Gothic and macabre. Staehle’s title wall, for instance, deftly suggests that scissors might snip heads as well as paper. Throughout the show, we see evil flowers, ravens, cartoonishly “dead” animals with Xs for eyes, and bears that swallow children. Staehle’s work can be design-insidery (his humorous typographical references, and “kerning pair” broadside for example) without alienating the regular folks; it is cheeky rather than overtly edgy, nostalgic without hiding from the present.
With a twinkle in his horribly disfigured eye Wilhelm brings us a design “exhibit” of irresistible, expertly-executed, nineteenth-century-style what-nots that make us want to part with our twenty-first-century currency. Maybe that is what it means to be steampunk’d.
