I came up with a new movement yesterday while over at Duncan’s, Woodcut exploitation. Line-art tramps in skirts like tiered bandages and hands full of guns. Seventies trash with Edwardian aesthetics. Wondermark meets Grindhouse. Lowbrow graphic poster art as intricately executed as comics from the turn-of-the-century Strand Magazine.
I’m wondering if I’m really the first to think of it. Currently, the hip uchronia is Steampunk, (Jules Verne punk-tech, the appealing, ironic union of Industrial Revolution and Victorian-era engineering re-mixed with post-internet technology), with the occasional dash of Raygun Gothic, (think Metropolis meets Buck Rogers, meals as pills, flying cars), or Space Cowboy, (Farscape, Firefly) – I haven’t been seeing much else making the rounds.
Is there already a Woodcut Exploitation movement out there? Have I just been spending time in all the wrong places?
Actually – while I’m at it, I desperately want to know the name of the current design movement that’s all wickedly baroque curlique in elaborately juxtoposed layers with vines, text, skulls, and absurd machinery. It’s been all over clothing for almost a year and a half and yet I still haven’t found anyone able to tell me what it’s called.
Here’s a good example – The music video Jonas Odell created for The Hours, (download here):