from the Novem­ber 18–24, 1999 issue of Metro, Sil­i­con Valley’s Weekly Newspaper

Apoc­a­lypse Wow

Artist Win­ston Smith cel­e­brates the last gasp of the 20th cen­tury with a Year 2000 calendar

by Jim Rendon

IF THE WORLD bursts into chaos at the stroke of mid­night on Jan. 1, 2000, Win­ston Smith will hardly be sur­prised. Smith may not even notice the difference.

The 47-year-old col­lage artist can’t help but see the world as a mess–a the­ater of hypocrisy per­formed against a back­drop of chaotic brawl­ing. For the last 25 years, Smith has brought that vision to life with sim­ple child­like tools: a util­ity knife and an UHU glue stick. Now, he’s col­lected 12 of those col­lages in hopes of milk­ing a lit­tle cash from the wan­ing days of the Y2K mar­ket­ing glut. Smith is enter­ing the glad­i­a­tor pit with his “I sur­vived the 20th Cen­tury Year 2000 Calendar.”

It’s a cash-in that suits Smith perfectly.

Flip­ping through a copy of the cal­en­dar in his San Fran­cisco home and stu­dio, Smith’s blue eyes fun­nel to a beam of inten­sity as he turns to an image of mon­keys and baboons laugh­ing. One stands on a roller-skate, singing into a micro­phone, another holds a chain­saw over a fallen pri­mate clutch­ing a beer. Over­head, a fresh-scrubbed ‘50s cou­ple zips by in their fly­ing car. A space­ship hov­ers over the hill in the dis­tance. “Another Day at the Office,” the cap­tion reads.

“Some peo­ple say this is extreme, that the world isn’t like this,” Smith says, grip­ping the image. “But for some peo­ple in other coun­tries, this really is what life is like.”

Smith’s con­ver­sa­tions never get too far before he’s talk­ing pol­i­tics and injus­tice. A con­ver­sa­tion about the opti­mistic qual­ity of post­war illus­tra­tion inevitably ends in a laun­dry list of polit­i­cal deceit rang­ing from the sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia to secret Navy test­ing of bio­log­i­cal weapons of war. Smith is quick to point out that he’s a pro­gres­sive, a running-dog lefty, as he calls it. And he’s acutely aware of the inequities between Amer­i­can soci­ety and the Third World, and between rich and the poor on the street one story below him.

Smith’s apoc­a­lyp­tic vision and his finely honed sense of social com­men­tary were a per­fect fit for San Francisco’s punk move­ment in the early 1970s. Appalled by the ter­ri­bly qual­ity of most punk fliers, Smith began mak­ing his own posters for imag­i­nary bands. He even listed shows, includ­ing the addresses of empty lots. He was amused to find out that peo­ple actu­ally showed up.

Smith’s best-known image hangs from a nail over his bed. The cross, wrapped in dol­lar bills, adorned with a golden cru­ci­fied Jesus, caused an uproar when it appeared on the Dead Kennedys album Idol. It made the band a house­hold name and launched Smith’s career.

His cut-and-paste col­lages helped to spawn an entire genre of punk poster art.

And Smith went on to do count­less posters and album cov­ers for the Dead Kennedys and Jello Biafra’s solo projects. Just as punk became more accept­able to mid­dle Amer­ica, Smith’s work also has found a broader audi­ence. He’s since done col­lages for Green Day and art for mag­a­zines like Play­boy, The New Yorker and Metro.

Smith turns out his work from the bed­room of a flat in North Beach. His work­place has the order of a stack of papers dropped from a plane. Fifty-year-old issues of mag­a­zines like Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics tower over his desk. Grab­bing one, Smith points out the cover art. A happy fam­ily zips along in their futur­is­tic steam-powered car.

“I could really use one of those in North Beach,” he says. “I’d park any­where I want to.”

Smith grew up on images like these in Okla­homa in the 1950s. Liv­ing there was like liv­ing any­where else–only 10 years ear­lier, he says. In his mod­est home, this cherry-cheeked Boys Life vision of the world was cut and pasted together with the finest of art. His mother, an artist her­self, col­lected books filled with the works of the great mas­ters, Leonardo DaVinci, Michelan­gelo, Jan van Eyck, Jan Ver­meer, painters whose works still make their way into Smith’s creations.

Smith is a vora­cious col­lec­tor of cheery illus­tra­tions. An entire room in his home is devoted solely to stor­ing the pages that cap­ture America’s inno­cent opti­mism and unflinch­ing faith in tech­nol­ogy. But the real lure for him is not so much that the world envi­sioned in the pages of Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics never came to pass; instead, it’s that the oppo­site has crawled up from the sewer and taken root.

“It’s ironic,” he says, look­ing at the sleek steam-powered dream. “They thought in the future we would go 185 miles an hour. Instead we go 55 mph–that’s not even as fast as we used to go. There are no fly­ing cars, and instead we are liv­ing out of dumpsters.”

And while he keeps a sense of humor about it, he doesn’t expect much bet­ter for the next mil­len­nium. In an unti­tled 1983 col­lage that I found par­tic­u­larly prophetic in my own high school angst years, Smith makes his own pre­dic­tion. Mag­a­zine cut-out let­ters over a head about to be stomped on by a boot read, “If you want a pic­ture of the future, imag­ine a boot stomp­ing a human face forever.”