ArtPunk Club: A Year in Theater
2019 was a weird one. We were seeing a lot of theater. How much is “a lot”? Two to three shows a week, just an insane amount of theater. When you immerse yourself in a subculture like that, you start to notice patterns and practices which don’t occur to more casual audience members. Also, you start to feel a kinship, even a responsibility, to the art and artists you’re enjoying. My partner suggested we do something to formally acknowledge our love of live performance, and my first response was typical: “let’s do a magazine!” Brilliant.
Years earlier I noticed the lack of an alternative magazine in Reno, Nevada, where I was living at the time, so I simply created one. I wrote all the articles using pseudonyms and different authorial voices, called around to printers, and boom—that was that, and The Chimpanzee was born (probably that deserves it’s own blog post). Why not do that again here in Portland, but with a focus on performance art?
Well, it turns out there are LOTS of reasons not to do that, beginning with the skyrocketing price of print. OK, a magazine is out. How about a consolidated arts calendar which gathers all the schedules from all the various black box theaters and theater groups? One-stop shopping for the intrepid theater-goer who wasn’t content with the better-funded west-side establishment art, showcasing all the work without marketing budgets? And so ArtPunk Club became our little secret, an anonymous theater site and Instagram page which—GET THIS—would create guerilla marketing campaigns for theaters and shows. This consisted of bespoke photographs, collages, downloadable masks, shadow puppets, booklets, videos… all available as free downloads from the site, which also had an up-to-date calendar guiding visitors to all the upcoming theater, dance, and improv shows we could locate.
We acted as a creative agency with unpaid and in fact involuntary clients. We agreed to stop when it became unfun or after one year, whichever came first. It never became unfun, so the project ran for calendar 2019, culminating in Portland Theater Monopoly, a downloadable PDF board designed to be printed and glued atop the ordinary boring Monopoly board you can find at any Goodwill (or in the back of your closet). This Monopoly board was crafted with love, and the theater groups and theaters represented correspond as closely as possible to their Parker Brothers’ counterparts. Yes, of course we also created Portland Theater-specific Chance and Community Chest cards, as you’ll see in the “new media” section of the site. The result was a fun and dynamic yearlong marketing project with dozens and dozens of “clients” who never knew who was behind the work, as we did it completely anonymously.
Please have a look, the IG page is now an archive of that project: https://www.instagram.com/artpunkclub/
